PMC Notes No. 21
Patrons and Picturemakers Page 35
The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art is an educational charity committed to promoting original research into the history of British art and architecture. It is a part of Yale University and its activities and resources include research events, public lectures, publications, fellowships, grants programmes, and a library and archive. PMC Notes, the Centre’s newsletter, is published three times per year.
11
Interview: Curating Postwar
Modern 19
Surveying East London 28
Tudor Portraits in the Archive 35
Welcome 3
New Books 5
PMC Notes No. 21
Global Britain? A Medieval Perspective
W.A. Ismay, Ladi Kwali, photograph. Image courtesy of York Museums Trust (York Art Gallery).
It is a delight to introduce you to this issue of PMC Notes. The contents will, I hope, give you a good sense of the breadth and historical range of the research on British art being supported, hosted and shared by the Paul Mellon Centre. Tom Nickson, one of the contributors to our series of public lectures this spring, entitled ‘Britain and the World in the Middle Ages: Image and Reality’, has written a vivid account of the astonishing variety of luxury goods that were imported into medieval Britain, from silver-mounted ostrich eggs to carved ivories of the Virgin Mary originating from sub-Saharan West Africa. In their feature, Charlotte Bolland and Edward Town write about an ambitious project, funded in part by the Centre, which uses the rich resource of the Heinz photographic archive at the National Portrait Gallery to help recover the world of Tudor portraiture. Peter Guillery, meanwhile, gives us an insider’s view into the history – stretching back nearly 130 years – of the monumental Survey of London, the publication of which is underwritten by the Centre. Finally, in an interview with my colleague Sria Chatterjee, the curator Jane Alison describes the gestation of her revelatory exhibition, Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain 1945–
3
Mark Hallett Director
4
Welcome
1965. This exhibition runs at the Barbican Centre in London until 26 June, and has inspired us to organise a set of research events on the art of this same period (for more details, please see our wrap-around summer events listing). While these features, and our listings of new books published by the Centre, provide a flavour of our current activities, another of our initiatives has been launched with an eye to the future. We are keenly aware of the need for far greater diversity in our field of scholarship, both in terms of those who pursue study and research on British art and in terms of the subjects being explored and interpreted. Our annual New Narratives awards, which cover tuition and living costs in full for one MA/MPhil student, one doctoral student and one early career fellow, are designed to help address this issue, and to promote research that challenges the received histories of British art. Having launched the scheme in January, we have recently made our first awards. Jareh Das, awarded the early career fellowship, will pursue a project entitled ‘Ladi Kwali: Tracing post-colonial perspectives in Nigerian and British studio pottery’. Das will explore Kwali’s artistic interactions with the potter Michael Cardew, and investigate her participation in demonstration tours and exhibitions in the UK across the 1960s and 1970s. Nicholas Brown will be embarking on a PhD that analyses the role of visual arts magazines in promoting the work of Black British artists between 1960 and 2000. Peter Miller, our MA/MPhil awardee, proposes to work on a dissertation entitled ‘“Ours is a beautiful landscape”: Aubrey Williams, Ronald Moody, and Transnational Caribbean Ecology’. I am sure you will join me in congratulating Jareh, Nicholas and Peter, all of whom we look forward to seeing regularly at the Centre in the coming months and years.
6
English Garden Eccentrics: Three Hundred Years of Extraordinary Groves, Burrowings, Mountains and Menageries Todd Longstaffe-Gowan
Publication date April 2022 Dimensions 240 × 165mm Pages 400 Illustrations 198
New Books
In his new book, English Garden Eccentrics, renowned landscape architect and historian Todd LongstaffeGowan reveals a series of obscure and eccentric English garden makers who, between the early seventeenth and the early twentieth centuries, created intensely personal and idiosyncratic gardens. They include fascinating characters such as the celebrated master of Vauxhall Gardens, Jonathan Tyers, who created at his home at Denbies one of the gloomiest and most perverse anti-pleasure gardens in Georgian England. Others built miniature mountains, shaped topiaries, displayed exotic animals, excavated caves and assembled architectural fragments and fossils to realise their gardens. With quirky and compelling illustrations, English Garden Eccentrics brings together garden and landscape history with cultural history and biography. The book engagingly reveals what it is about the gardener and his or her creation that can be seen as eccentric and focusses on gardens as expressions of the singular character of their makers, functioning, in effect, as a form of autobiography.
The Victorian artist Edward BurneJones has often been considered an escapist who withdrew from the modern world into imaginary realms of his own creation. This groundbreaking book challenges that perception, arguing instead that he was engaged in a fundamentally radical defiance of the age. Embracing the revolutionary possibility of embodied aesthetic encounters, Burne-Jones drew inspiration from the medieval concept of dreams as visionary states of transformation. Burne-Jones’s art functioned not as a retreat, but as a vehicle for awakening. Frequently described primarily as a painter, this book re-centres Burne-Jones’s practice in the decorative arts. The first scholarly monograph solely devoted to BurneJones since 1973, this book illuminates how Burne-Jones’s art offered a protest against imperial aggression, capitalist economic inequality and environmental destruction in the wake of the industrial revolution in nineteenth-century Britain.
7
The Radical Vision of Edward Burne-Jones Andrea Wolk Rager
Publication date May 2022 Dimensions 256 × 190mm Pages 336 Illustrations 165
8
Grafted Arts: Art Making and Taking in the Struggle for Western India, 1760–1910 Holly Shaffer
Publication date May 2022 Dimensions 270 × 216mm Pages 320 Illustrations 150
New Books
Grafted Arts focuses on Maratha military rulers and British East India Company officials who used the arts to engage in diplomacy, wage war, compete for prestige and generate devotion as they allied with (or fought against) each other to control western India in the eighteenth century. This book conceptualises the artistic combinations that resulted as ones of ‘graft’ – a term that acknowledges the violent and creative processes of suturing arts, and losing and gaining goods, as well as the shifting dynamics among agents who assembled such materials. By tracing grafted arts from multiple perspectives – Maratha and British, artist and patron, soldier and collector – this book charts the methods of empire building that recast artistic production and collection in western India and, from there, across India and in Britain. This mercenary method of artistry propagated mixed, fractured and plundered arts. Indeed, these ‘grafted arts’ – disseminated to aid in consolidating empire or revolting against it entirely – remain instigators of nationalist agitation today.
In these volumes, the Survey of London returns to the East End to chronicle Whitechapel, covering Aldgate to Mile End Green, and Brick Lane to Wellclose Square. The name Whitechapel – one of London’s best known – is highly evocative, carrying dark, even mythic associations. These are set aside to present new histories of all the area’s sites and buildings, those standing and many that have gone, in districts that have been repeatedly rebuilt. Abutting the City of London, Whitechapel has, since medieval times, housed commerce and many varied industries. Enriched by centuries of immigration, this area has been ‘global’ for as long as that word has denoted the world and, amidst widespread poverty, some of London’s great institutions have been founded here. In the midst of these landmarks, Whitechapel has seen recent transformation. These volumes bear historical witness with hundreds of superb new photographs and meticulous architectural drawings illustrating detailed accounts of topographical development in accessible prose.
9
Survey of London: Whitechapel Peter Guillery
Publication date June 2022 Dimensions 286 × 222mm Pages 960, 2 vols Illustrations 835
10
A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760–1830 Paris A. Spies-Gans
Publication date June 2022 Dimensions 270 × 210mm Pages 336 Illustrations 157
New Books
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, hundreds of women in London and Paris became professional artists, exhibiting and selling their work in unprecedented numbers. Many rose to the top of their nations’ artistic spheres and earned substantial incomes from their work, regularly navigating institutional inequalities expressly designed to exclude members of their sex. In the first collective, critical history of women artists in Britain and France during the Revolutionary era, Paris Spies-Gans explores how they engaged with and influenced the mainstream cultural currents of their societies at pivotal moments of revolutionary change. Through an interdisciplinary analysis of the experiences of these narrative painters, portraitists, sculptors, and draughtswomen, this book challenges longstanding assumptions about women in the history of art. Where traditional histories have left a void, this generously illustrated book illuminates a lively world of artistic production.
Global Britain? A Medieval Perspective
This spring, the PMC’s Public Lecture Course – a series of free public talks, each given by a different expert – looked at the theme ‘Britain and the World in the Middle Ages’. The series explored how the medieval ‘British Isles’ were places of exchange, where art, ideas and rare materials came together from all over the world. In this feature, Tom Nickson, Senior Lecturer in Medieval Art and Architecture at the Courtauld Institute of Art, shares insights from his lecture, which examined five objects and their biographies to trace Britain’s connections across the medieval globe. Recordings of the full six-part series are now available on the PMC’s YouTube channel.
11
What was ‘global’ about Britain in the Middle Ages? To recover the ways in which the wider world was imagined in medieval Britain, we can turn to the tales of hostile lands and monstrous races found in the British Library’s Marvels of the East; or the stories of the legendary Christian ruler Prester John; or John Mandeville’s fictitious fourteenth-century travel memoirs. Or we can look to maps: Matthew Paris’s itineraries to the Holy Land, created in the mid-thirteenth century and now also in the British Library, links London to Jerusalem via a chain of cities stretching across Europe and the Mediterranean. Medieval mappaemundi, in contrast, commonly centre on Jerusalem, with Britain near the edge and monsters beyond. Such maps served as tools of the imagination and contemplation, offering – from the security of the cloister – opportunities for ‘virtual’ pilgrimage, or a God’s-eye view of the world, its past and its future. Britain’s ‘globality’ can also be traced through the movement of luxury goods. Already in the mid-twelfth century, laws for London traders refer to pepper, cumin, ginger, alum, brazilwood, resin and incense, many of which originated from the Indian Ocean region. It can also be tracked through material culture. It was a common medieval trope that great patrons could summon artists and materials from afar, and we see this realised at the very centre of power in medieval England, Westminster Abbey. Construction of the abbey began in 1245 based on designs that fused French and English architectural traditions. By 1269, its eastern parts were complete and the great Westminster retable – England’s oldest surviving altarpiece, painted on panel – was set on the high altar. At the retable’s centre, Christ holds the orb of the world. His robes are painted with blue lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, while those of St Peter, to the left, are fringed with pseudo-Kufic embroidery. The retable’s architectural frame is inspired by the western portals of Amiens Cathedral, and is ornamented with Roman cameos and with gold, much of which probably originated in sub-Saharan Africa. Before the high altar, Westminster’s sanctuary pavement was laid by Italian Cosmati craftsmen, who employed marble sourced from across the Mediterranean, including porphyry from Egypt. Behind the high altar was the chapel of St Edward the Confessor, his body wrapped in silk from al-Andalus or Byzantium, and enshrined in yet more Cosmati marble. Among gifts to the shrine, recorded in Henry III’s accounts, were: rubies, probably sourced from India; a cameo set with emeralds, perhaps from Russia, Afghanistan or southern Africa;
13
and a great sapphire, originally from Sri Lanka or Madagascar. An ostrich egg – almost certainly from the Arabian ostrich, now extinct – was mounted in silver and also given to the shrine. By the fifteenth century, if not earlier, St Edward’s chapel also housed a number of books, precious goods and relics. Among these were various horns, likely from European buffalo, aurochs, bisons or ibex, all but the latter already extinct by the Middle Ages. In addition, there were two images of the Virgin Mary, carved from ivory that had been carried from western sub-Saharan Africa; ‘a round balle of crystal’, perhaps rock crystal from Madagascar; and numerous textiles of unknown but distant origin. Such objects were prized for their rarity, but the origins of most would have been a mystery to all. It was no obstacle that some came from non-Christian contexts. Indeed, in many cases, associations between Arabic culture, science and magic seem to have enhanced the near-magical, apotropaic power of objects from Islamic lands. It did not matter if no one could read the pseudo-Arabic inscriptions on the bead at the centre of the eighth- or ninth-century Ballycotton Cross, found near Cork in Ireland, or on the coins of King Offa of Mercia (r. 757–796). Their ‘co-efficient of weirdness’ (to borrow Bronislaw Malinowski’s memorable phrase) only made such texts more powerful, such as ‘abracadabra’ or the now-nonsensical charms found on medieval swords, rings and talismans. We cannot be sure why monks at Canterbury, in the thirteenth-century, wrapped their wax seals in soft silks from al-Andalus, Sicily and Byzantium, but the Arabic blessings on the heart case of Roger de Norton, Abbot of St Albans (1263–1290), were probably thought to provide some kind of protection. In the fifteenth century, a new leather case was made in England for the ‘Luck of Edenhall’, an enamelled glass beaker originally created in Syria or Egypt in the thirteenth or fourteenth century. The delicate beaker was presumably prized because nothing like it could be produced in England at this date, but its name – which dates back to at least the late eighteenth century – attests to the magical legends that commonly accrued around such rare and marvellous objects. The accumulation of such examples helps to correct prejudices about Britain’s insularity, but cannot do justice to the histories of labour and exploitation that inevitably accompany the extraction, transportation and transformation of precious goods and materials. Nor should it be forgotten that the everyday materiality of most
14
15
16
people in the Middle Ages was much more local than it is today. The objects described above were available only to the elite, and suggest a geography – Europe, Africa and Asia – that closely matches that of the mappaemundi. Britain’s position in the trading networks that enabled the movement of such goods and materials was certainly peripheral when compared to the great trading states of the medieval Mediterranean, but the British Isles were also a contact zone for a ‘global North’ that included Iceland, Scandinavia, Russia, Greenland and even North America. The most striking evidence for this comes from carved walrus and narwhal teeth, of which numerous examples survive. The Lewis Chessmen, for example, were carved from walrus ivory (and, in a few cases, whale teeth) in the twelfth century, and were found in 1831 on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. Now in the collections of the British Museum and the National Museum of Scotland, they indicate the wide reach of chess, a game that probably originated in central Asia. Walrus colonies may have been present in the Scottish isles in the Middles Ages, but narwhals lived only in the Arctic Circle. The carving on two long, twisting narwhal teeth in the Victoria and Albert Museum and in Liverpool’s World Museum, has been compared to that on the twelfth-century western portals of Lincoln cathedral, so the teeth were almost certainly carved in England. By the fourteenth century, narwhal teeth were commonly associated with unicorn horns, but these earlier examples may have served as an elaborate form of candlestick. The silk roads, the Red Sea, and trans-Saharan trade routes had long connected Europe to Asia and sub-Saharan Africa but, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, new advances in navigation and shipbuilding meant that exploration, trade and conquest could occur over far greater distances. For example, Chinese porcelain only rarely travelled to Europe before the fifteenth century, but dozens of such bowls and jugs survive in sixteenth-century London mounts. They probably arrived there having been seized by English pirates from ships from Portugal, which by then traded directly with West Africa and South-East Asia. The late sixteenth century also marks a period of colonial expansion under Elizabeth I, attested by maps and travel accounts of Cathay and the West Indies. Inventories, or such paintings as Holbein’s Ambassadors (1533) and The Paston Treasure (circa 1670), hint at the cosmopolitanism of many great collections in England by the sixteenth century, but it is the coconut that deserves
17
pride of place in the story of global Britain in the Middle Ages. As Kathleen Kennedy has shown, coconuts feature surprisingly often in wills and inventories from the 1250s onwards, often described as a ‘black nut’ or ‘nut of India’. Transported from India to Alexandria, Venice and then England’s ports, coconuts were chiefly valued for medicinal purposes, but once the milk and flesh had been used, their husks were commonly polished and repurposed as cups. They were owned by men and women, fishmongers, merchants, clergy, nobles and wealthy institutions. Only a tiny proportion of those recorded still survive, many of them in Oxbridge colleges or other educational establishments. New College Oxford had seven, of which three survive. Eton College had at least three in the 1530s; one that still survives preserves an inscription recording that it was donated by John Edmonds, who was elected a fellow at Eton in 1491 and died in about 1526. Such objects once jostled for attention on high table with all kinds of precious metalwork, but the wine, salt, sugar, cocoa and spices contained within them tell their own troubled stories of global Britain in the Middle Ages and after.
Page 12 Detail of Mappamundi from the ‘Map Psalter’, after 1262, perhaps copied from a wall painting in Westminster Palace. The British Library (Add. Ms. 28681, fol. 9r). Image courtesy of The British Library Board. Page 15 (clockwise from top) The ‘Luck of Edenhall’, 13th- to 14th-century, enamelled gilded glass beaker made in Syria or Egypt and 15th-century English tooled leather case, height 15.8 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London (C.1 to B-1959). Image courtesy of Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Ming dynasty Kinrande bowl, made in Jianjing, China, with silver-gilt mounts by the London goldsmith Affabel Partridge, circa 1565, metalwork and silver, height 18.7 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (68.141.125a, b). Image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Irwin Untermyer, 1968.
18
Coconut shell with silver-gilt mounts, circa 1500-20, height 20.3 cm. Eton College, Berkshire (ECS-S.1.2014). Image reproduced by permission of the Provost and Fellows of Eton College. Page 16 Ceremonial staff or candleholder, carved in 12thcentury England from a narwhal tooth, length 117 cm. Victoria and Albert Museum, London (A.791936). Image courtesy of Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
In this interview, Jane Alison, Head of Visual Arts at the Barbican Centre, London, tells Sria Chatterjee, Head of Research and Learning at the PMC, about curating the major exhibition Postwar Modern (3 March – 26 June). The PMC is supporting a one-day conference, taking place this June at the Barbican, that will consider how art making and the art world were remade after the Second World War. This summer, the PMC’s own Summer Research Seminars will also have the theme “Liquid Crystal Concrete: The Arts in Postwar Britain 1945–65”.
Interview Curating Postwar
Modern: New Art in Britain 1945–1965 19
Sria: I was wondering if you could start by telling us a bit about what prompted Postwar Modern. In other words, why stage this show now? Jane: It seemed to me that the time was ripe to reassess the period. More of an intuition than anything else – certainly in the first place. I knew that there hadn’t been any shows of ambition on the postwar years in Britain for a long time, if at all, and I had a very strong sense that I could make an exhibition that presented it afresh, showing that the work produced was not as predictable or second rate as tends to be discussed. I was very aware of the Haus der Kunst’s iconic exhibition, Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–65, which opened in 2016 and was curated by Okwui Enwezor, Ulrich Wilmes and Katy Siegel. So, I thought, how interesting it would be to look specifically at Britain. I am also a postwar baby – well, just! And for that reason alone, on a personal level, the subject and period fascinates me. I felt strongly that not enough attention had been given in art-historical terms to the impact of a cataclysmic, traumatic war, as well as the Cold War and migration after the demise of the British Empire – on the art being made; and how the art, in turn, would reveal something of the moment. Another reason the exhibition sprang to mind was as a result of working in the Barbican, an iconic piece of postwar architecture if ever there was one – emerging from this vast bombsite void in the heart of the City – a twisted beacon, a symbol of postwar reconstruction laced with anxiety. Brutalism is of course at the core of the period, so the exhibition presented this incredible opportunity to show a range of postwar work in an iconic postwar edifice. It was not until the exhibition was under development that the resonances with our current plight – what Abbas Zahedi, our Associate Artist to the exhibition, is calling an ‘age of many posts’ – became ever more pronounced. Nothing compares with the horror and magnitude of the Second World War, but there is no doubt that we are now living through multiple crises and having to find new meanings and ways of healing, and to shape a new kind of world. There is a comparable sense of being at sea, a discombobulation – what our exhibition advisor, Ben Highmore, has called a ‘thrown-ness’ – that you find in so much of the work in Postwar Modern. Sria: Do you see the show as updating histories of British art? Jane: Absolutely. It springs from this idea that the art scene may have been
21
small in Britain, but artists, faced with crisis, produced work that is endlessly fascinating, vital, moving and revealing. I wanted to tell that story. Too much attention is given to questions around figuration versus abstraction, or negatively comparing work in Britain to Abstract Expressionism in America, or seeing the work made between1945 and 1965 as just a prelude to Pop, when Britain really, it is often argued, began to shine. Scale misses the point. And yes, sure, there was an interest in consumerism and a levelling out of so-called ‘high’ culture and popular culture during this period – but this misses the impact of the war, and tends to a reading of the period as entirely forward looking or just in conversation with America. The ‘Festival of Britain’ was staged as a salve and needed to be set to one side. The Independent Group was of course massively significant, but I wanted to avoid going down well-worn paths that resulted in an overemphasis on their output at the expense of others, and the inability to see artists in the Independent Group as individuals. Magda Cordell is a classic case in point. I think Ben Highmore is right in arguing for this period to be seen as utterly distinctive – marked by both shadow and horizon. This is what the exhibition seeks to capture. It comes from a desire on my part of really wanting to look at the art of this period and find out what it tells us. I believe that artists were uniquely placed to reveal something of the moment – in the midst of a society that was in denial. Reconstruction was a means to divert attention away from what had happened and the ongoing trauma. Modernisms were undoubtedly multiple. So, an early decision was made to think about what constitutes ‘the new’ in the postwar period, to look at art made by those people who had experienced the war and its global aftershocks – again to borrow Ben Highmore’s expression, ‘up close and personal’. I certainly love the work of figures like Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland… but they were the establishment. I was interested in the vanguard. And there were lots of artists who simply had been overlooked or marginalised in this period. So much great recent research has been done into artists who came to Britain as migrants in the wake of the Second World War: Avinash Chandra, Anwar Jalal Shemza, Francis Newton Souza and Aubrey Williams, among others – the figures that Stuart Hall called ‘the first wave’ of artists who came from the colonies with hope and optimism. And, equally, there were a number of women artists whose work needed to be foregrounded: Gillian Ayres, Prunella Clough, Magda Cordell, Kim Lim, Mary Martin and Franciszka Themerson, among others. Equally, I was convinced that not nearly enough
22
23
emphasis had been given to the contribution of those who arrived in Britain as refugees fleeing Nazism – their work lends a very particular quality to this period, a sensibility informed by their experiences. Of the forty-eight artists in the exhibition, twenty-one came to Britain from abroad either just before, during or after the war. So, the emphasis is on a transnational Britain, as opposed to ‘British Art’ – it is an important distinction. Sria: Could you describe your curatorial approach to laying out and presenting these histories? Jane: I employ an intuitive curating practice that always begins with the work – and a belief that the staging of work will reveal new insights. So, the task then became about exploring universal ‘postwar’ preoccupations and to group artists thematically according to those. All kinds of new, generative juxtapositions came to light – for instance: Lucian Freud, Bill Brandt and Sylvia Sleigh in a section that explores intimacy and the gaze; or a room that brings together the paintings of Eva Frankfurther and the photography of Shirley Baker to highlight community, friendship and human dignity. At the heart of the exhibition is its largest section, entitled ‘Strange Universe’, which explores the fantastical postwar body. It includes paintings by Avinash Chandra, Magda Cordell, Franciszka Themerson, Alan Davie and Aubrey Williams; as well as sculptures by Peter King, Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull. Disassembled and reassembled, I love the fact that we have here a motley crew of cyborgs, hybrids and mutant body parts; disfiguration is their strength. This is the realm of the survivor body extraordinaire. The period is announced, in my telling, by the incredible photograph that Lee Miller staged, along with David Sherman, of herself in Hitler’s bath at the close of the war. I think this was an extraordinarily brave and audacious work, that can be understood as the first work of performative art of significance by a woman in the postwar period. Sria: What do you think will surprise visitors about this show? Jane: I think, first and foremost, they will be surprised by the selection and the groupings of work. There are household names to savour, like Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, David Hockney and Eduardo Paolozzi, but also figures almost entirely unknown, such as Robert Adams, Eva Frankfurther and Peter King. I hope visitors will be moved by the works chosen and that the installation will allow the works to really speak. I think
24
they will be surprised by the amount of figurative work in the show – for me, the body, and more specifically the injured and resilient survivor body, is the most significant subject in postwar art. The body could be annihilated in conflict, but recuperated by artists. That is not to say that abstraction or the move to abstraction isn’t important here – we have some wonderful nonfigurative works in the exhibition – but somehow the body is always present, as an undercurrent of sensuousness or anxiety that reveals the maker of the work as an active agent in its making. There is also a prevalence of ambiguous forms, hybridity, a sublime feeling for the inherent expressive qualities of materials to denote form and an embrace of imperfection. A wary vigilance pervades this figurative art, as though artists are seeing the world for the first time. These are all signs of a defining postwar sensibility. Sria: Did the show end up taking any directions you had not expected? Jane: Everything changed when I fully understood the extraordinary contribution of those artists who came to Britain from the colonies and how there hadn’t been an exhibition of this ambition that included their work in an integrated way. That dictated the direction of the exhibition. Right at the beginning, I thought I might make a show about the intersection of art and design. But, ultimately, you need to make choices. And for me, by far the most exciting, timely story was the one I am telling. An obvious and massively exciting start would have been Bacon and Souza together, but the Bacon show at the Royal Academy being pushed back to this spring and Tate’s own plans to re-hang their collection, meant moving to a Plan B. I also always had this idea of a black or shadow room at the beginning, which is what I returned to, and I think the juxtaposition of works by John Latham, Eduardo Paolozzi and Souza that resulted is massively exciting and surprising. For me, there is this beautiful connection between the first room and the last. Latham’s Full Stop (1962) in the opening room is suggestive of a monumental cosmic horizon – a new beginning – and that is also how I read Gustav Metzger’s Liquid Crystal Environment (1965) that ends the exhibition. As bookends for the exhibition, these two works are both surprising, exhilarating and poetic – which broadly is how I view the art of this period.
25
Page 20 Installation view, Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain 1945 – 1965, Barbican Art Gallery, 3 March – 26 June 2022 © Tim Whitby / Getty Images. Page 23 Franciszka Themerson, Eleven Persons and One Donkey Moving Forwards, 1947. Collection of the Themerson Estate © Themerson Estate 2021.
26
Shirley Baker, Hulme, 1965. Shirley Baker Photography © Nan Levy for the Estate of Shirley Baker. Page 26 Gustav Metzger, Liquid Crystal Environment, 1965. Installation view, Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain 1945 – 1965, Barbican Art Gallery, 3 March – 26 June 2022 © Tim Whitby / Getty Images.
Surveying East London
The next two volumes of the monumental Survey of London, focusing on Whitechapel, will be published this summer. Reflecting on a long history of engagement with London’s East End and the innovative community research conducted for the Whitechapel project, Peter Guillery, its Principal Investigator at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, explains how recent developments reflect the Survey of London’s romantic-socialist roots. The Survey of London: Whitechapel is published for the Bartlett by the Paul Mellon Centre. The Survey of London is a unique series of books, each volume giving a detailed historical analysis of the streets and buildings of a particular area of the city. With archival images, architectural drawings, maps, and written and oral accounts of how London’s built environment has developed, the books present authoritative histories. At the same time, the Survey’s origins – almost 130 years ago – lay in an attempt to represent alternative and anti-hegemonic points of view regarding London’s development. The most recent pair of volumes, Survey of London: Whitechapel, aims to revive that original ethos by integrating community-based research to bridge ‘official history’ and ‘unofficial history’, to use terms coined by the historian Raphael Samuel.
28
The Survey began in East London in the 1890s, founded by Charles Robert Ashbee, an Arts and Crafts architect, designer and co-operativist entrepreneur. Following John Ruskin and William Morris, Ashbee had a romantic-socialist commitment to the advancement of equality through shared understandings of a common built environment. From 1886, when he left university, Ashbee lived at Toynbee Hall, a ‘Settlement of University men’ that had recently been established in Whitechapel, bringing Christian Socialist ideals to educational and social work in an impoverished quarter. While at Toynbee Hall, Ashbee set up the Guild and School of Handicraft, a co-operative of local working men, to produce metalwork and furniture, moving in 1891 to workshops on the Mile End Road. The first monograph by what was initially known as the Committee for the Survey of the Memorials of Greater London, researched and written by Ashbee, was undertaken in 1894. It was devoted to Trinity Hospital, a group of late seventeenth-century almshouses also on the Mile End Road just east of Whitechapel. The hospital was threatened with demolition and the publication was part of a campaign for its preservation. Subtitled ‘An Object Lesson in National History’, it interwove architectural and social history with highly varied illustrations. There were careful architectural drawings, which have remained a hallmark of the Survey, such as an engraved view that emphasised context, including neighbouring terraces (often deemed ‘slums’) and pavement costermongers; along with sketches of social life, such as of retired sea captains playing draughts. Emphasis on people and the life of the institution reflected Ashbee’s view of Trinity Hospital as an expression of charity and communality, in contrast to the financial forces that he saw dominating his time. The campaign and the publication in 1896 helped prevent demolition of the hospital – one of London’s first conservation victories. Trinity Hospital is still there today, lately threatened by the shadow of a 28-storey tower. To advance the Survey’s work, Ashbee initiated a London-wide register of buildings of interest to bring together photographs, drawings and historical notes. It was not only the loss of London’s everyday historic fabric that distressed him, but also its degeneration into a commodity, without meaning for ordinary people. He saw old buildings through a philosophy of social enlightenment; they had the potential to educate and thus to enhance the lives of Londoners, like libraries or museums. Ashbee understood that surveying is partisan,
29
not neutral. It is an act of bearing witness, or providing evidence, and may not have immediate utility. One of its virtues is that the results can be laid down for posterity. With his emphasis on the social value of architecture, Ashbee continued to focus on the East End. The first Survey volume dedicated to an area or parish was an account of Bromley-by-Bow, published in 1900, and three more East London monographs followed before Ashbee departed in 1907. By 1900, the Survey had already benefitted from the auspices of the London County Council (LCC), the first London-wide municipal authority, formed in 1889 and controlled by the Progressive party. In 1910, the Council undertook to research and write every second Survey volume, and conferred a kind of informal official status on them. The LCC’s patronage was a legacy of its Progressive administration’s determination to raise historical consciousness as a counter to the interests of private property. Its municipal political philosophy, principally articulated by George Laurence Gomme, who, incidentally, was a leading folklorist, emphasised the historical origins of what might now be termed the commons. The LCC kept the series going, and in the early 1950s made the whole project professional, imposing a change of focus under a new editor, Francis Sheppard. It had been realised that the devastation of London by enemy action was being compounded by developers. The first fruit of a re-engagement with destruction and development was volume 27 in the series, published in 1957, addressing the Spitalfields area. Sheppard brought greater urban historical rigour to the Survey, and recording under his leadership extended to nineteenth- and even twentieth-century buildings. In 1986, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Government abolished the LCC’s once-again progressive successor, the Greater London Council. The Survey was transferred to carry on from the Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, which, despite its name, was actually another bastion of counter-discourses, a haven for vernacularists. The Survey returned to East London from 1986 to 1994 for two volumes (43 and 44) on Poplar, Blackwall and the Isle of Dogs, newly branded Docklands, documenting industrial sheds and council housing. Institutional upheavals continued, first through a merger in 1999 into English Heritage, the national body for oversight of the historic environment. Then in 2013, after the Government cut 35 per cent of English Heritage’s budget, the Survey fortunately found a home
30
in the Bartlett School of Architecture. Based in a university for the first time, Survey staff took on teaching responsibilities. However, given the Survey’s long commitment to public history, there was a determination – and encouragement – to be in but not of academia. The Survey soon headed back to East London, to Whitechapel, another district under development pressure, pushing out from both the City of London and, at the eastern end, a Crossrail (Elizabeth Line) station. Whitechapel has a long and fascinating history, notably of immigration, with strong architectural expressions. Working with UCL’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, the Survey secured a major Arts and Humanities Research Council grant that funded the creation in 2016 of an innovative map-based website for the Whitechapel project, to enable public participation. Entitled ‘Survey of London Histories of Whitechapel’ (http://surveyoflondon.org), this website broke new methodological ground through public engagement. By 2021, it had more than 600 enormously varied contributions. The website map interactively represents several hundred buildings, each given at minimum a basic description and a photograph, with historic map layers underneath. Tabs allow visitors to see and contribute different sorts of additional content: research, descriptions, memories, notes, images, audio and video. Commissioned works included a suite of photographs of people in private domestic spaces, a film about Bengali restaurants, and drawings of outdoor life in a market, park and playground. Oral history is a component, with more than fifty interviews. The Survey collaborated with a range of local institutions including schools, Tower Hamlets Borough Council, the Whitechapel Gallery, Wilton’s Music Hall and the East London Mosque (London’s largest mosque by attendance). Ashbee might not have imagined such partnerships, though co-production or citizen history does seem in keeping with his ideals. Whitechapel is in many respects contested ground. Processes that are lumped together as gentrification mean that locally the politics of history is alive and kicking. There are numberless new tall residential towers, in which nugatory percentages of the apartments are even nominally ‘affordable’. Opposite Toynbee Hall, a new block called Kensington Apartments is topographically misleading, seemingly intended to attract overseas investors with wanton disregard for particularity of place.
31
32
Major historic sites have been given a full traditional treatment, such as the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, a remarkable place where the manufacturing of bells continued from the 1740s up to its closure in 2017 (followed, controversially, by a plan to convert it into a bell-themed boutique hotel). This is a well-known site of major historic importance, but the Survey’s account was the first history of the foundry’s buildings principally based on primary documentary research. There are also interviews with the master bell founder who closed the foundry and his manager, who opposed closure. The plural ‘Histories’ in the website project’s title reflects a desire to avoid a hierarchy between professionally researched content and other contributors’ submissions; to integrate scholarly work with community and individual narratives without worrying about overlap or even contradiction. At the same time, the website fostered an online environment that secured many independently researched contributions, including material from a number of expert amateur historians. Architects made images available, and family historians, current residents of Whitechapel and diasporic descendants submitted research, sometimes pseudonymously. Influencing change through this kind of research and educational practice is harder now than it was in Ashbee’s day. Romantic-socialist roots notwithstanding, there can be no illusions about the Survey’s ability to bend the capitalist forces shaping London. That said, bearing witness is an important task. Through its latest volumes on Whitechapel, the Survey has striven to retrieve an aspect of Ashbee’s founding ethos – that of the craft workshop – to widen the definition of who is responsible for the authorship of narratives about London, and bring those histories to a broader audience.
Page 27 Derek Kendall, View to Whitechapel High Street from Altab Ali Park, the City of London beyond, 2021. Photograph courtesy of the Survey of London. Page 32 Trinity Hospital, bird’s-eye view from the south, from C. R. Ashbee, The Trinity Hospital in Mile End, 1896. Image courtesy of the Survey of London.
34
Rehan Jamil, View to the City of London across the roof terrace of Mosque Tower, Whitechapel Road, 2016, photograph. Photograph courtesy of the Survey of London. Page 33 Derek Kendall, Whitechapel Bell Foundry, pouring a bell, 2011, photograph © Historic England Archive.
Tudor Portraits in the Archive
36
Over one million photographs of portraits painted in Britain, and of British sitters, are stored in the Heinz Archive at the National Portrait Gallery, London. The project ‘Patrons and Picturemakers: 1485–1636’, which ran between 2019 and 2021 and was supported by the PMC, began a survey of these photographs, with the ambition of making the images and their associated data accessible and searchable. Dr Charlotte Bolland, National Portrait Gallery, and Dr Edward Town, Yale Center for British Art, describe how this project is leading to the rediscovery of forgotten painters and a re-evaluation of the canon of artists in Tudor England. The faces of the Tudor dynasty are some of the most familiar from English history. The power of their portraiture has shaped the perception of these monarchs for centuries, from the threat embodied in Henry VIII’s imposing physicality; to the tragedy of Edward VI, frozen forever in his teenage years; the religious fundamentalism read into Mary I’s solemnity; and, finally, the multiplicity of Elizabeth I’s identities: potential wife, virgin queen, mother to the nation, empress and ultimately goddess. All these monarchs are brought together in
37
an allegorical painting in the collection of National Museum Wales that celebrates the Protestant succession. This work exemplifies the challenge facing art historians, for while the sitters may be recognisable to generations born nearly half a millennium after the painting was made, the hand of the artist is harder to identify. It is obscured both by the condition of the work and the fact that the artist’s life likely slipped through the cracks of early art-historical interest, overlooked by the biographers who might have captured first- or secondhand accounts, as authors such as John Evelyn and George Vertue did for artists of the mid- to late seventeenth century. Vertue was certainly aware of the work of some important artistic figures in the Tudor and early Stuart period, such as Hans Holbein the Younger, John Bettes, Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger and Isaac Oliver, and, after unsuccessfully searching for an inscription to identify the artist who painted The Family of Henry VIII, wondered whether it might be in the ‘manner of Lucas de Heere’. However, by the time Vertue was writing, the memory of the lives and works of major artists such Hans Eworth, George Gower, Robert Peake the Elder and William Larkin had been totally lost. The result was a conception of the period that was not only limited but also heavily distorted, with no real sense of the lives of the artists who had shaped the aesthetic world of Tudor and early Stuart England. It was only in the twentieth century that scholars such as Lionel Cust and Erna Auerbach began to draw
some of these artists out from the shadows. Little by little, as archives were combed for payments and paintings scoured for signatures and inscriptions, the oeuvres of painters such as Hans Eworth came slowly into view. In recent years, surviving works have been subjected to ever more detailed scrutiny, using scientific analysis to uncover new information about the materials and techniques used in their construction, and to understand their condition. In both these methodologies the digital shift has been transformative, opening access to archival documents at an unprecedented scale and capturing
38
increasingly sophisticated images that have provided previously imperceptible insights into the working methods of these painters. It has also facilitated collaboration across collections, building a more comprehensive and cohesive picture. However, the resource that can perhaps give the clearest sense of artistic production across the sixteenth century, and therefore the scope of the field, has remained relatively untapped at scale: the holdings of photographic archives, particularly the Heinz Archive at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG). In the green, red and brown ‘sitter’, ‘artist’ and ‘costume’ boxes of the Public Study Room in the NPG’s Orange Street building, lie over a million images of portraits produced in Britain and of British sitters. It was these images that the ‘Patrons and Picturemakers’ project team sought to survey, going in search not only of paintings, but also the accumulated knowledge of provenance and attribution scribbled on the backs of the photographs by generations of scholars and curators. What could the capture and analysis of such a dataset reveal about art in Tudor England? The ephemeral nature of much of court art, the deliberate destruction of images during the Reformation, and the risk of accidental damage or destruction over time through neglect, fire or flood, has long been thought to mean that today’s scholars are working to construct a picture of artistic practice from only a tiny fragment of works.
However, even at a preliminary stage, and with the project curtailed by the pandemic, it is evident that a far larger proportion of works survive than was previously feared. For decades, Roy Strong’s monograph The English Icon (1969), with its ordered presentation of approximately 350 works, has shaped the parameters of sixteenthcentury English art history. However, the project’s dataset, drawn from a survey of one third of the ‘sitter’ boxes in the Heinz Archive, and building on research in the Yale Center for British Art’s photographic archive, now stands at over 5,000 works dating from the Tudor and early Stuart period. Examining these images, working remotely at our transatlantic screens in 2020 and 2021 with the project’s Postdoctoral Research Associate, Dr Hannah Lee, trends began to emerge. For example, taking the number of extant paintings with inscribed dates as an index of productivity on behalf of painters in England, there was clearly a steady rise in demand for paintings, with a significant increase in the 1560s and 1570s, suggesting that the influx of skilled Netherlandish painters provided a fillip to the production of painting in England. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the data also indicated that there were both many more painters active than previously thought and that the oeuvres of the names well known to scholarship could be greatly expanded. It was in this direction that our thoughts turned as The Family of Henry
39
VIII flashed up on our screens. Unlike many of the images that we looked at, the painting was familiar. It was acquired by National Museum Wales in 1991 through the acceptance in lieu scheme, and is on regular display at Sudeley Castle; a later version of the composition is held in the YCBA’s collection. It is attributed to Lucas de Heere, based upon Roy Strong’s comparison with later drawings made by de Heere when in France. However, saturated with images during our afternoon sessions trawling the dataset, the artist who first leapt to mind was instead Hans Eworth, who in 1569 had cast Queen Elizabeth in an allegorical retelling of the story of the Judgement of Paris. The paint handling has the hallmarks of Eworth’s approach to textiles, jewellery and flesh: the latter a readily recognisable combination of a peachy skin tone over a cool brown underpaint, creating a ‘turbid’ effect except on passages of the deepest brown, which were left exposed and formed the shadows of the flesh. The draughtsmanship involved in the composition of the details of the figures, for example in the hands, resonated with the images that we could readily recall of the small portrait of Mary I by Eworth in the NPG’s collection. However, our satisfaction at building a case for Eworth was quickly undercut when the review of the additional information from the Heinz Archive revealed that Lionel Cust had beaten us to it by a century. Moreover, squinting at our
40
computers, it became clear that the artist himself had left us a note, which Vertue had not known to look for: both the inscription on the original frame and the single line at the base of the support, ‘THE QUENE TO WALSINGHAM THIS TABLET SENTE MARKE OF HER PEOPLES AND HER OWNE CONTENTE’, bear the ‘H.E.’ monogram which Eworth used to claim authorship of his work. A small crumb, perhaps, but with each clarification across the dataset, opportunities to deepen our understanding of artistic practice arise. Hans Eworth, we are sure, will not be the last artist to speak to us from the archive.
Pages 35-36 Detail of Lucas de Heere, The Family of Henry VIII: An Allegory of the Tudor Succession, circa 1572, oil on panel, 131.2 × 184 cm. Collection of the National Museum Wales (NMW A 564). Image courtesy of the National Museum Wales (all rights reserved). Page 38 Detail of an X-ray of Elizabeth I by an unknown artist, oil on panel, 1580s-1590s. Collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London (NPG 200). Image courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London (all rights reserved). Page 40 (clockwise from top) Hans Eworth, Elizabeth I and the Three Goddesses, 1569, oil on panel, 62.9 × 84.4 cm. Royal Collection Trust (RCIN 403446). Image courtesy of the Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2022. Detail of Lucas de Heere, The Family of Henry VIII: an Allegory of the Tudor Succession, circa 1572, oil on panel, 131.2 × 184 cm. Collection of the National Museum Wales (NMW A 564). Image courtesy of the National Museum Wales (all rights reserved). Detail Hans Eworth, Mary I, 1554, oil on panel, 21.6 × 16.9 cm. Collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London (NPG 4861). Image courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London (all rights reserved).
41
PMC Staff Director Mark Hallett Deputy Director Sarah Victoria Turner Chief Financial Officer Sarah Ruddick Head of Research and Learning Sria Chatterjee Librarian Emma Floyd Archivist and Records & Data Protection Manager Charlotte Brunskill Assistant Archivist Morwenna Roche Assistant Librarian Lucy Kelsall Archives & Library Cataloguer Mary Peskett Smith Senior Editor Baillie Card Senior Editor Emily Lees Editorial Assistant Tom Powell Picture Researcher Maisoon Rehani Digital Lead Tom Scutt Digital Producer Alice Read Events Manager Ella Fleming Events Manager (Parental Leave) Shauna Blanchfield Events Assistant Danielle Convey Fellowships, Grants and Communications Manager Harriet Sweet Learning Programme Manager Nermin Abdulla Operations Manager Suzannah Pearson Operations Coordinator Stephanie Jorgensen PMC Networks Coordinator and Director’s Assistant Bryony Botwright-Rance
Human Resources Manager Barbara Waugh Finance and Administration Officer Barbara Ruddick Finance Officer Marianette Violeta Convenor, British Art Network Martin Myrone British Art Network Administrator and Deputy Director’s Assistant Danielle Goulé Senior Research Fellow Hammad Nasar
Governors
Template Design
Peter Salovey President, Yale University
Strick&Williams
Scott Strobel Provost, Yale University
Editing and Layout Baillie Card and Harriet Sweet
Susan Gibbons Chief of Staff to the President, Vice Provost for Collections and Scholarly Communication, Yale University
Printed by Blackmore
Stephen Murphy Vice President for Finance and Chief Financial Officer, Yale University
Fedrigoni Arena Natural Smooth
Fonts Saol Text and Galaxie Polaris Paper
Contact us
Senior Research Fellow Martin Postle
Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art 16 Bedford Square London, WC1B 3JA United Kingdom
Advisory Council
T: 020 7580 0311
Jo Applin Courtauld Institute of Art
www.paul-melloncentre.ac.uk
Tarnya Cooper National Trust Elena Crippa Tate Britain Caroline Dakers University of the Arts London David Dibosa Chelsea College of Arts John Goodall Country Life Julian Luxford University of St Andrews Lynda Nead Birkbeck Dorothy Price Courtauld Institute of Art Christine Riding National Gallery Mark Sealy Autograph Nicholas Tromans Independent Art Historian
