Call for papers AAH Conference 2012

Call for papers
AAH Annual Conference 2012
The Open University,
Milton Keynes 29-31 March 2012
‘Conflicting Art Histories: Dialogues of Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism in Eighteenth-Century British Culture’. Session Convenors: Freya Gowrley and Viccy Coltman, University of Edinburgh, f.l.gowrley@gmail.com, viccy.coltman@ed.ac.uk
William Hogarth’s traditional position as the stalwart of English nationalism in the arts was drastically re-evaluated in 2007 with the publication of Robin Simon’s Hogarth, France & British Art. Published to coincide with the Tate’s major Hogarth exhibition of 2007, Simon’s text situates Hogarth, a renowned anglophile, within a firmly European context of artistic theory and practice. How does the idea that Hogarth gleefully propagated his anti-Gallic public image, but was in fact greatly indebted to French art and theory, affect our understanding of apparently critical 18th-century works of art such as his Marriage A-la-Mode (1743-5)? While historians Linda Colley and Gerald Newman prioritised national identity as an evaluative tool for the examination of aspects of eighteenth-century British culture, is it appropriate to apply this label to broad cultural manifestations, notably the consumptive behavioural patterns of the
aristocracy and the middling classes alike? This session will consider this intriguing dichotomy of 18th-century British art – the underwritten and unresolved conflict between nationalism and cosmopolitanism – and its relation to the artistic practice, material culture and intellectual history of the period.
Topics for discussion could include, but are not limited to: artistic response to the luxury debates; landscape and nation; the connoisseur and the Grand Tour; the usefulness of labels (exotic, chinoiserie, rococo); the reception of Italy; the creation of a British national school; consumption & the meaning of goods; the local and the global/the provincial and the metropolitan; the issue of Englishness, Britishness, Scottishness.

Copyright… and non-copyright

Editorial in The British Art Journal, XII, 1


Setting scholarship – and shower-curtain design – free
http://britishart.yale.edu/collections/search

The Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, has placed digital images of its collections online. So far, so familiar. What is extraordinary is that all the images have been made available for reproduction free of charge, in superb high-resolution format, with no restrictions over use. Indeed, this applies to all the collections of Yale University. Other institutions in the USA are now considering whether to follow. The British Museum is the major institution that had already taken the same step in the UK. Otherwise the outlook in Britain is depressingly outdated, with museums and galleries, as this journal has frequently pointed out, obstructing not only scholarship but also wider familiarity with their collections through the imposition of restrictive conditions on use and punitive fees. What makes it worse, much worse, are the outrageous claims to ‘copyright’ that are attached to the use of images, preposterously applied to the mechanical reproduction of original works of art long out of copyright. This loathsome practice must stop.
The Yale Center found that the cost of collecting the fees was greater than the ‘pitiful’ sums it managed to accumulate under the old system, and that must be the case with the many museums and galleries in the UK that still adhere to the restrictive practices of the past. The Royal Collection, which has probably more objects of desire than almost anywhere else, certainly found that to be the case. Alas, having closed down its own fee collection ‘service’, the Royal Collection has taken the fateful step of placing its reproduction arrangements in the hands of none other than the Bridgeman Art Library, an agency much given to the issuing of the most restrictive and tendentious terms and conditions, and the charging of high fees. Now that digital image-making of the highest quality can be achieved by a toddler with the right equipment, any continuing attempts to create a pseudo-copyright in the UK by ‘licensing’ the use of images of out-of copyright works of art is outrageous, but it is also foolish.
Come on, Tate, National Portrait Gallery, National Gallery, Victoria & Albert Museum! Some of you (OK, not the Tate) have made a bit of an effort to make scholarly publication a little less expensive, although the whole process is still needlessly complicated, involving hordes of staff who could be better deployed on more frutiful exercises. But it is time to grow up, enter the twenty-first century, embrace the digital age, make it all free, and, like the Yale Center, discover the excitement of a host of new visitors across the globe poring over your collections. And by that we don’t mean attempting to decipher those mingy, mean, little, blurry, low-resolution, watermarked, restricted access, tantalising glimpses of great paintings you so reluctantly allow, and that merely drive people away. No. They must be like the Yale and BM images, available to be studied in the greatest detail on screen and – crucially – retained. So listen up, bring on the high-res download! Bring on the Leonardo shower-curtain and the Van Gogh bathmat! Free! That way people get to know the works of art you care for. After all, though it sometimes seems to be forgotten, that is your job.

So farewell then, Lucian Freud ((born 8 December 1922, died 21 July 2011). The Tate had a good oil (a little portrait of Francis Bacon) but it was stolen. Prejudices there against figurative painting being what they are, it bought very few of his oils, and then prices went through the roof. Not that you can see most of the Tate’s holdings on its website owing to ‘copyright restrictions’: genuine, but stupid, and not the Tate’s fault.
And no, we made no attempt to negotiate the ‘right’ to illustrate one of them on the cover.
Life, as Freud may now be lamenting in that great studio in the sky, is too short.

Berger Prize Winner 2011

William MB Berger Prize for British Art History 2011

The annual prize for best book in the history of British art, worth £5000, was won by Charlotte Gere and Judy Rudoe for Jewellery in the Age of Queen Victoria: A Mirror to the World published by British Museum Press. The prize was presented by A.N. Wilson at an evening reception held at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 16 Bedford Square, Bloomsbury, London, on Tuesday 5 July 2011

Berger Prize 2011 Short List

William MB Berger Prize for British Art History 2011

[books published 1 January-31 December 2010]

Short List

Celina Fox

The Arts of Industry In the Age of Enlightenment

Yale University Press

ISBN 978 0 300 16042 0, £50, pp576, 200 bw, 60 col

Cherry Ann Knott

George Vernon 1636-1702 ‘Who built this House’. Sudbury Hall Derbyshire

Tun House Publishing

ISBN 978 0 9565240 0 3, £75 (signed limited edition of 500), pp782, illus bw & col

Cecilia Powell & Stephen Hebron

Savage Grandeur & Noblest Thoughts. Discovering the Lake District 1750-1820

Exhibition catalogue Wordsworth Trust

ISBN 978 1 905256 42 6, £19.95, many illus in colour

Charlotte Gere & Judy Rudoe

Jewellery in the Age of Queen Victoria: A Mirror to the World

British Museum Press

ISBN 978-0714128191, £50, pp552, 100 bw, 400 col

Malcolm Jones

The Print in Early Modern England: An Historical Oversight

Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

ISBN 978 0300136975, £45, pp352, 270 bw, 20 col

Ilaria Bignamini and Clare Hornsby

Digging and Dealing in Eighteenth-century Rome

Yale University Press

ISBN 978-0300160437, £45, 2 vols, pp630, 200 bw, 50 col

The award of the William MB Berger Prize for British Art History worth £5000 to the winner will be made by A.N. Wilson at a ceremony in London UK on the evening of 5 July 2011

Assessors Timothy J. Standring, Gates Foundation Curator of Painting & Sculpture, Denver Art Museum; Robin Simon, Editor, The British Art Journal; Katharine Eustace, Editor, Sculpture Journal; Rosemary Hill, Fellow, All Souls’ College, Oxford; Desmond Shawe-Taylor, Surveyor of The Queen’s Pictures; Angus Trumble, Senior Curator of Paintings and Sculpture, Yale Center for British Art

Berger Prize 2011

Berger Prize 2011 Long List

[books published 1 January-31 December 2010]

The Short List of six will be announced in mid-June 2011 and the Award of the William MB Berger Prize for British Art History (worth £5000 to the winner) will be awarded by A.N. Wilson at a ceremony in London UK on the evening of 5 July 2011.

Assessors Timothy J. Standring, Gates Foundation Curator of Painting & Sculpture, Denver Art Museum; Robin Simon, Editor, The British Art Journal; Katharine Eustace, Editor, Sculpture Journal; Rosemary Hill, Fellow, All Souls’ College, Oxford; Desmond Shawe-Taylor, Surveyor of The Queen’s Pictures; Angus Trumble, Senior Curator of Paintings and Sculpture, Yale Center for British Art

Adrian Clark, British and Irish Art 1945-1951. From War to Festival

2010 Hogarth Arts/Paul Holberton

ISBN 978 0 95554063 4 8, £30, pp272, 24 bw

David Nolan and Carolyn Starren, On Public View – A Journey around the Sculptures in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea

NOTE published online. Please visit

www.rbkc.gov.uk/onpublicview

Chapters download as pdfs with a video introduction to watch on the site

Celina Fox, The Arts of Industry In the Age of Enlightenment

[2009] 18 February 2010, YUP

ISBN 978 0 300 16042 0, £50, pp576, 200 bw, 60 col

Cherry Ann Knott, George Vernon 1636-1702 ‘Who built this House’. Sudbury Hall Derbyshire

1 June 2010 Tun House Publishing

ISBN 978 0 9565240 0 3, £75 (signed limited edition of 500), pp782, illus bw & col

Katharine Baetjer, British Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1575-1875

30 March 2010 Metropolitan Museum/YUP

ISBN 978 1 58839 348 7 (Met Mus)

ISBN 978 0 300 15509 9 (YUP)

£55, pp308, 215 bw, 140 col

Kevin Sharpe, Image Wars: Promoting Kings & Commonwealth in England

4 May 2010 YUP

ISBN 9780300162004, £35, pp512, 90 bw

John Ingamells, National Portrait Gallery. Later Stuart Portraits 1685-1714

8 February 2010 National Portrait Gallery

ISBN 978-185514 410 1, £125, pp460, 358 bw, 305 col

John McAleer, Representing Africa. Landscape, exploration and empire in southern Africa, 1780-1870

1 March 2010 Manchester University Press

ISBN 978 0 7190 8104 0, £60pp, 241, 16 bw, 9 col

Cassandra Albinson, Peter Funnell & Lucy Peltz, eds, Thomas Lawrence: Regency Power and Brilliance

Exh cat. 21 October 10 YUP

ISBN 978 0 300 16718 4, £40, pp280, 20 bw, 160 col

Cecilia Powell & Stephen Hebron, Savage Grandeur & Noblest Thoughts. Discovering the Lake District 1750-1820

Exh cat. 2010 Wordsworth Trust

ISBN 978 1 905256 42 6, £19.95, many illus in colour

Mary Bryan H Curd, Flemish & Dutch Artists in Early Modern England. Collaboration and Competition, 1460-1680

1 May 2010 Ashgate Publishing

 ISBN 9780754667124, £65, pp236, ills bw

Barbara Bryant, GF Watts In Kensington. Little Holland House and Gallery

[2009] March 2010 Watts Gallery

ISBN 9780956102232, £10, pp92, 81 bw

Mireille Galinou, Cottages & Villas: The Birth of the Garden Suburb

19 October 2010 YUP

ISBN 978 0 300 16726 9, £40, pp480, 55 bw, col 250

Christiana Payne, John Brett, Pre-Raphaelite Landscape Painter

14 May 2010 YUP

ISBN 9780300165753, £40, pp256, 150 bw, 120 col

Charlotte Yeldham, Maria Spilsbury (1776-1820), Artist and Evangelical

1 February 2010 Ashgate

ISBN 978 0 7546 6991 3, £65, pp230, 73 bw,

Mark Bills, Watts Chapel: A Gude to the Symbols of Mary Watts’s Art and Crafts Masterpiece

1 July 2010 Philip Wilson

ISBN 978 0 85667 692 5, £18.99, pp80, 187 bw/col

Bernd W Krysmanski, Hogarth’s Hidden Parts

Georg Holms Verlag, Hildesheim

ISBN 978-3-487-14471-9, Euros 48, pp514, 304 bw

Elisabeth Soulier Detis, Guess at the Rest. Cracking the Hogarth Code

27 May 2010 James Clarke & Co Ltd

ISBN 139780718892159, £35, 183 bw, pp233

Douglas Fordham, British Art and the Seven Years’ War. Allegiance and Autonomy

2010 University of Pennysylvannia Press

ISBN 9780812242430, £42.50, pp334, 87 bw

Tim Barringer, Before and After Modernism, Byam Shaw, Rex Vicat Cole, Yinka Shonibare, MBE

Exh cat. November  2010 Central St Martin’s

ISBN 978 0 946282 00 5, £15pp,132, 151 bw/col

Jason Kelly, The Society of Dilettanti: Archaeology and Identity in the British Enlightenment

[2009] 28 January 2010 YUP

ISBN 978 0 300 15219 7, £40, pp366, 100 bw, 20 col

Julian Mitchell, The Wye Tour and its Artists

Exh cat. 2010 Logaston Press

ISBN 978 1906663 32 2, £12.95, pp168, illus bw & col

Max Browne, Theodor von Holst. His art and the Pre-Raphaelites

Exh cat. 2010 Holst Birthplace Museum, Cheltenham

ISBN 13 978 0 9563769 0 9, pp64, illus colour & bw

Leonée Ormond, Linley Sambourne: Illustrator and Punch Cartoonist

2010 Paul Holberton

ISBN 978-1907372032, £30, pp312, 120 bw

Jennifer Scott, The Royal Portrait. Image and Impact

2010 Royal Collection Enterprises

ISBN 978 1 905686 13 1, £19.95, pp200, 157 col

Philip Brookman, Eadweard Muybridge

Exh cat. 2010 Tate Publishing

 ISBN 9781854378378, £29.99, illus bw & col

Charlotte Gere & Judy Rudoe, British Museum – Jewellery in the Age of Queen Victoria

1 April 2010 British Museum Press

ISBN 978-0714128191, £50, pp552, 100 bw, 400 col

David Fraser Jenkins

Paul Nash. The Elements

Exh cat. February 2010 Dulwich Picture Gallery (Scala)

ISBN 978 1 85759 619 9 £25, illus in colour

Jessica Feather, British Watercolour & Drawings. Lord Leverhulme’s Collection in the Lady Lever Art Gallery

1 October 2010 Liverpool University Press

ISBN 978-1846311550 £35, pp400, 370 bw/col

Mary Bennett, Ford Madox Brown: A Catalogue Raisonné

10 September 10 YUP

ISBN 978-0300165913, £125, 2 vols, pp686, 522 bw, 458 col

Ilaria Bignamini and Clare Hornsby, Digging and Dealing in Eighteenth-century Rome

25 February 2010 YUP

ISBN 978-0300160437, £45, 2 vols, pp630, 200 bw, 50 col

Robert Hewison, Ruskin on Venice

14 January 2010 YUP

ISBN 978-0300121780, £45, pp500, 105 bw, 25 col

Malcolm Jones, The Print in Early Modern England: An Historical Oversight

8 June 2010 YUP for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art

ISBN 978 0300136975, £45, pp352, 270 bw, 20 col

Richard Ormond & Elain Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent: Figures & Landscapes 1883-1899

The Complete Paintings Vol 5

7 September 2010 YUP

ISBN 978-0300161113, £50, pp392, B&W 127 bw, 311 col

Grace Brockington, Above the Battlefield: Modernism and the Peace Movement in Britain

1 October 2010 YUP

 ISBN 9780300151954, £35, pp244, 100 bw, 40 col

Morna O’Neill, Walter Crane: The Arts & Crafts, Paintings & Politics 1875-1890

30 November 2010 YUP

 ISBN 978-0300167689, £35, pp320, 100 bw, 20 col

Tara Hamling, Decorating the Godly Household. Religious Art in Post-Reformation Britain

25 November 2010 YUP for the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art

ISBN 978-0300162820, £45, pp256, 80 bw, 40 col

Anthony Vidler, James Frazer Stirling: Notes from the Archive

15 October 2010 YUP

ISBN 978-0300167238, £35, pp300, 330 col