Welcome

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– 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).

W.A. Ismay, Ladi Kwali, photograph. Image courtesy of York Museums Trust (York Art Gallery).

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.

Mark Hallett Director