British art Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

The publication of the 'First Report of the National Advisory Council on Art Education' (1960), otherwise known as the first ‘Coldstream Report’, is a graspable moment of displacement in the British art world. It represents a shift between an educational system based on disciplined studies of techniques and crafts to one based on conceptual thinking and design. Its legacy is marked by trauma and confusion that deepened as the decade matured, spilling over into creative outbursts and political revolt. It has become a symbol of oppressive, narrowly defined rigour and prejudiced artistic values. As such, both the report and the painter and educator who leant it his name, William Coldstream, have been blamed and demonised. This paper approaches the report as an image, for it is not only invested with symbolic, representational meaning, but it also is among those victims of iconoclasm – works of art, signs, inscriptions or pictures – that act in the words of theorist Bruno Latour “as a mediation to access something else”. The Report is a window to a set of values for education, but also for the perception of the artist’s relationship to society. Half a century later, it is important to carefully weigh the document itself against the politics and motivations of the diverse committee members who authored it. Using ministerial archival records opened in the late 1990s, this paper reflects on how such a document presents a methodological conundrum in tracing intention and effect, as well as the dangers of conflating it with any one participant.

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- Art History, British History, Modern British History, Drawing

This is the first refereed article that presents the life and work of JP Hully, a British modernist that worked with Gane furniture manufacturers in Bristol. His design life and tenure at Gane overlapped with that of Marcel Breuer. Both historical and historiographal, this article probes the remaining historical shards of JP Hully’s work, career and life, while making wider historiographical statements about the gaps, absences and silences of history.

- by Tara Brabazon
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- Design, Art, Furniture Design, British art
- by Richard Johns
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- Napoleonic Wars, British art, Landscape, Seascape

Essay published together with the artist's book presented at his exhibition João Penalva at Trondheim Kunstmuseum in 2014. The text refers to his works Sleeping men (installation, 2014), Museum of Stands, Yuteval (installation, 2012),... more

Hogarth’s “Industry and Idleness” series (1747) is arguably one of the most ambiguous of what he called his 'Modern Moral Subjects'. Although widely presented, particularly by eighteenth century criticism, as a moralistic commentary with a didactic intent, the series’s compositional and narrative strategies problematise such reading. This paper addresses the ambiguities and contradictions of “Industry and Idleness” to eventually present it as a subtle yet effective satirical portrayal of work and industriousness. It does so by paying close attention to Hogarth’s compositional choices as well as his depiction of the apparent positive hero, Goodchild, and his problematic conduct. Finally, the paper discusses the series as a satirical commentary on Britain’s social constructions at a time when the emerging Industrial Revolution was beginning to shape an ideology of work.

- by Bowdoin Journal of Art
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- Art History, British art
- by Karolina Kolenda
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- Art History, Identity (Culture), British art

Fancy in the eighteenth century was part of a rich semantic network, connecting wit, whimsicality, erotic desire, spontaneity, deviation from norms and triviality. It was also a contentious term, signifying excess, oddness and irrationality, liable to offend taste, reason and morals. This chapter on fancy in drawing manuals is part of the Voltaire Foundation - Liverpool University Press - Oxford University Studies in The Enlightenment book Fancy in Eighteenth-Century European Visual Culture edited by Melissa Percival and Muriel Adrien

- by Bénédicte Miyamoto
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- Art History, Reception Studies, British History, Book History

Mapping the history of the London-based art agency Artangel immediately comes with a catch, as the organisation officially dates back its genesis to 1991, when curators Michael Morris and James Lingwood started on a journey to deliver 'extraordinary art in unexpected places'. However, they, at the time, had inherited an existing eponymous Trust, founded in 1985 by the art historian Roger Took and co-directed with curator John Carson till 1991. There are good reasons why the new directors might have wanted to dissociate themselves from the early years of Artangel, and it is also indubitable that Morris and Lingwood had a decisive impact on the orientation and subsequent successes of the agency's model and achievements. Nonetheless, the re- inscription of the 1980s as part of the organisation's history is crucial for two reasons: first, because there is a strategical continuity between the two historical phases of Artangel, despite their singularity, in the production of works that are 'issue-based' as well as designed for the public sphere;; and secondly, as this meticulous historical study particularly emphasises, in the structural model of a 'contemporary art production company', whose inception and subsequent development were intrinsically bound to the paradigmatic change in the political and cultural landscape that marked the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Hence the focus on the specific case-study of Artangel enables the author to approach metonymically the significant and cohesive transformations that have shaped the British art world in the past forty years. The attention to financial mechanisms reflects Gould's long-standing interests in the relation between art and patronage, as exemplified by previous and ongoing research on the young British artists and the British art market. In referring at the outset to Howard S. Becker, and an approach of artistic production where the artist and the artwork are to be understood as operating within chains of cooperation, the historical reflection stresses its goal to place Artangel's innovative artistic contributions firmly within the framework and determinations of a changing socio-political landscape. The 1980s in Britain were a 'radical' decade, characterised by the progressive implantation of 'Thatcherism', a cocktail of neoliberal policies advocating the rule of the market, and nationalist postures in the aftermath of imperial dissolution. These led to a rupture of the post-war order in cultural matters-which New Labour did not reverse after its election victory

- by Gabriel Neil Gee
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- British History, Contemporary Art, British art, Twentieth Century British Art

Many years after queer and queer-of-color theories made such a binary indefensible, art history and film studies remain committed to a distinction between criticality and pleasure. The former remains a desirable activist strategy and the atter is deemed banal, complicit, and expendable. Many have troubled these reductive categories. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, for instance, proposes reparative reading and the ongoing necessity for marginalized subjects to connect meaning- fully and perhaps unexpectedly with problematic cultural phenomena. In a similar vein, C. Namwali Serpell has suggested the numerous (and pleasurable) critical possibilities in something as debased and thrilling as the cliché.

- by William J Simmons
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- Art History, Film Studies, Film Theory, Contemporary Art

Paper placing the drawings within 'The Elemental Force of Charcoal: Drawing at the Borough' in a wider context, with reference to seismic shifts that occurred in arts education and drawing practices of the 20th century, as well as the historical use of charcoal as a medium. It is a written version of a tour presented on 29 January 2016 at the Borough Road Gallery as part of SLAM Fridays .

- by Kate Aspinall
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- Art History, Drawing, Drawings (Architecture), British art
- by Simon Abrahams
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- Art History, Contemporary Art, Modern Art, History of Art
- by Alpesh Kantilal Patel
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- Contemporary Art, British art, Young British Artists

An introduction to the concept and practice of the Artist Placement Group in England during the 1960s and 1970s.

In 1663 Mary Beale recorded her thoughts on how to paint apricots. Beale’s statement, ‘Observations by MB in her painting of Apricots in August 1663’, is the first known text in English about the act of painting written by a female artist. It is all the more remarkable for having been written at a time when convention expected married gentlewomen to be deferential, modest and virtually silent. This monogrammed manifesto is anything but modest: it is an authoritative exemplar for others to follow, and it represents Mary’s implicit acceptance of her place in a shared artistic inheritance and a stake in her own legacy for the future. Observations - here taken together with Beale’s other texts and with self-portraits spanning the years 1659 to 1681 - forms part of an oblique autobiography and is read as an statement of intent encoded in what appears to be innocuous technical information.

- by Helen Draper
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- History, Cultural History, Art History, Self and Identity

Zetischrift fur Kunstgeschichte (2004)

- by Andrew Graciano
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- History of Medicine, History of Science, British art, Jean Jaques Rousseau
- by Andrew Graciano
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- Art History, British History, History of Art, British art

In the late 1980’s, young British artists, ‘yBas’, conceived as a group both within Britain and for export, were understood to be provocative from a number of angles. By the time of their mass exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 1999, Sensation, the yBas could be taken as an avant garde working either on the corpse of British manufacturing or within the efflorescent virtual economy of the City, to produce some kind of commentary on capitalism; or, alternatively, they could be seen as faking Thatcherite enterprise, while evading any responsibility by locating their work in the ‘real’ and everyday where it could have no political purchase and was inaccessible to critical analysis; or, they could be understood as so provocative as to be a parody of critique.Throughout the various adjustments of Britain’s economic and political position – decline -- British art has often been taken as a whimsical or estheticized or etoliated or wilfully obtuse version of an American product. Knowingly missing the mark – while signalling knowingness -- brings obscure or high intellectual claims into the range of the accessible, a marketable ‘attempt to market failure’.

Bahçeler farklı bitki,çiçek,hayvan ve böcek türlerinin bir arada bulunarak
insanoğluna çeşitli amaçlarla hizmet eden tamamlayıcı unsurlardandır.Dünya var
olduğundan beri bahçeler de var olmuştur. Antik kültürlerden günümüz modern kültürlerinde
bahçelerde değişik coğrafyaların ve kültürlerin izlerine rastlanmaktadır.
Ayrıca,bahçelerin pek çok şekli bulunmaktadır.Huzur,sakinlik ile vahşi doğa
yaşantısını da toprağın ekilip biçilmesinin bir tür canlandırılması ya da tarımsal
kaynakların geliştirildiği yerler olarak karşımıza cıkmaktadırlar.Küresel olarak bahçeler
tüm yaşayan insanların varlıklarını sürdürmelerine, rahatlatmalarına yardımcı olmuştur.Ek
olarak, önemli sanatçılara,şairlere müzisyenlere ve yazarlara ilham kaynağı olmuşlardır.
Bahçeler sanatın hemen hemen her dalında kullanılmışlardır.Bahçe sanatı gerçek
ve hayali birer bahçe örneği olarak incelenip sembolik anlamlarıyla yansıtılmıştır. Resim
sanatında ise bahçelerin sayısız örnekleri sıklıkla görülmektedir.
Bu çalışmada diğer bahçeler arasında önemli bir yere sahip olan İngiliz bahçe
sanatı ele alınmıştır. Bahçenin tanımlamasından ve tarihi geçmişinden de bahsedilerek
konu ile ilgili genel bilgilerden bahsedilmiştir. İngiliz bahçelerinin resim sanatında özellikle
manzara resim sanatı gelişimi üzerindeki etkisi de incelenmiştir.Sanatsal açıdan bu bahçe
planının önemi irdelenmiştir.Ayrıca diğer bahçe türleri ve sanat eserleri üzerindeki etkisi de
aktarılmaya çalışılmıştır.
Anahtar kelimeler: Bahçe,Sanat,İngiliz bahçeleri,Manzara,Resim

- by Assoc.Prof.Dr.Ufuk Çetin
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- British art

In dem Artikel geht es um Maßstäblichkeit von Architektur und deren Beschreibung. Chronisten geben die Größe von Architektur an und analysieren deren Maßstäblichkeit im Vergleich zur Großarchitektur (Makroarchitektur). Daraus folgt, so meine abschließende These, dass diese sogenannte und generell in der Forschung abgewertete „dekorative Regellosigkeit“ keinesfalls sinnlos oder zufällig ist, sondern eine reflektierte Wahrnehmung von Architektur und Raum widerspiegelt, die besonders in der Kleinarchitektur zum Tragen kam. Wenn auch ein neuer Gattungsbegriff „Mikroarchitektur“ meines Erachtens nicht wirklich unabdingbar ist, um dieses Phänomen einzuordnen, so hilft er doch, es wahrzunehmen und zu beschreiben.

- by Antje Fehrmann
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- Architecture, Medieval History, Architectural History, British art

In 1998 John Roberts argued that the recent ‘history of photography in Britain… is a history of dispersed and embattled counterhegemonic practices breaking out of the ideological confines of Modernism’. However, the contributions of... more

- by Alice Correia
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- Art History, South Asia, Diaspora, British art

In the summer of 1990, a four-storey tenement of council flats in the Castlemilk district of Glasgow was home to an unusual work in progress. A group of artists, led by three graduates of the Glasgow School of Art, created installations in the rooms of these flats as well as holding workshops free workshops for women. In an area described by the city council as a priority for urban regeneration, it was peripheral to the circuit of event venues for Glasgow’s much-publicised status as European City of Culture in 1990. This ambitious collaborative undertaking was Castlemilk Womanhouse. The initiative was to exist, in various forms, for a further five years.
My aim in this study is firstly to excavate this overlooked example of feminist artistic collectivity and write Castlemilk Womanhouse into art history. Secondly, I wish to evaluate Castlemilk Womanhouse’s legacy on a wider geographical scale than was possible for House Work Castle Milk Woman House , and to consider it in relation to a feminist art intervention that not only influenced Castlemilk Womanhouse’s own emergence, but has a canonical status within feminist art history: namely, Womanhouse, Los Angeles (1971– 2).
Until now, there has been no sustained art-historical consideration of Castlemilk Womanhouse. However, in autumn 2014 there will be an exhibition ‘House Work Castle Milk Woman House’ on the project and its legacy at Glasgow Women’s Library, including a newly commissioned work by Glasgow-based artist Kate Davis. This Masters dissertation has been produced concurrently with preparation for this exhibition, and I have provided curatorial assistance to the organisers.

- by Hannah Hamblin
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- Art History, Contemporary Art, Feminism, British art

Every year, a member of the YCBA curatorial team guides a select group of Yale undergraduates through the process of creating an exhibition. I conceptualized and curated the exhibition, The British Castle: A Symbol in Stone, as part of the Art in Focus program. The text of this booklet was written by student curators Irene Chung BR ’17, Zoe Dobuler TC ‘17, Julia Fleming-Dresser TD ’19, Claire Goldsmith ES ‘18, Caroline Kanner JE ‘18, Daniel Leibovic TC ’17, Catherine Liu ES ’18, and Nicholas Stewart JE ‘18.

- by David F Lewis
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- Museums and Exhibition Design, British art, Museums, Medieval castles

Clement Greenberg’s animosity to Herbert Read’s art criticism manifested itself in his review of Read’s 1956 'The Art of Sculpture'. Focusing on this interchange and on the two critics’ priorities for modern sculpture, this article compares Read’s emphasis on touch and carving with Greenberg’s on sight and construction. Both critics mobilized their theories of sculpture around artists who exemplified their views: for Read it was Henry Moore and for Greenberg David Smith. I discuss the long-running debate between the critics and the ways in which nationalist aspirations underwrote their advocacy of these artists.

- by David J Getsy
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- Art History, Public Art, Modern Art, History of Sculpture

This paper was sparked by an encounter with the British landscape artist Paul Nash's painting 'We Are Making a New World' (1918) amid the tumult of Brexit in 2016. Much as the UK might like to withdraw from the outside world, I argue, it is inescapably implicated in world-making projects. It cannot choose to withdraw, it can only decide whether to engage consciously and reflectively or not. The world-making projects that began as World War One ended - projects evoked by Nash in his painting - are still in train today. Just as Nash's painting draws us into the churning mud of his ambivalent image of world-making, so we are always already engaged - for good and ill - in world-making work.

- by Isobel Roele
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- International Law, International organizations, British art, Art and the Law
- by Gary Werskey
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- British art, War art, Settler colonialism, Australian art history

This article centres on the work of Vong Phaophanit (b. 1961, Laos) and his collaborations with Claire Oboussier (b. 1963, UK). It first examines the problematic politics of identification made apparent by the media controversy surrounding Phaophanit’s nomination for the 1993 Turner Prize, when theartist’s ethnicity was targeted in queries surrounding his eligibility for the prize.I further suggest that the historicisation of Phaophanit as a British black artist reveals limitations in the ways that his work has been interpreted within identity-based discourses. A deeper consideration of Phaophanit’s practice and his collaborations undertaken with Claire Oboussier reveals a deliberate and poetic obfuscation of such identificatory processes within the artwork itself, particularly through the artists’ blurring of the boundaries of visual and sonic images at the very level of perception. To that end, I emphasise the role of vocality in their work as it is implicated through various sonic modalities, including ventriloquial exchange, the sounding of things, and horizonal perception. This scrutiny of materials provides a basis from which we might understand the artists’ presentation of a different kind of voice: one suggestively and productively opaque in relation to representation as well as the often contentious metaphorisation of art as voice, too often construed through biography and identity.

- by Pamela N Corey
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- Contemporary Art, Southeast Asia, Sound studies, Historiography (in Art History)

This is the first of two articles for the Brill journal Images, no.13, an issue on "Kabbalah and Art," of which I am Guest Editor. Jonathan Leaman (b. 1954, London) is a British painter who is represented in the Tate Collection. This article, the result of 15 years of his correspondence with art historian and museum curator Batsheva Goldman-Ida, focuses on a group of works by the artist from the last two decades. Leaman’s familiarity with major Kabbalah scholarship, combined with his wide knowledge of poetry and philosophy, enable him to engage in concepts related to Kabbalah and art in a discursive manner that is unparalleled in modern scholarship. This article showcases Leaman’s remarks with source material for the benefit of the reader. Leaman is one of the most important contemporary artists in the area of mystical art. His introduction to the public is long overdue. His paintings are an authentic, creative expression of the considered material filtered through the artist’s own self-awareness. Leaman’s keen interest in haecceity, hypostatization, and reification is juxtaposed with Goldman-Ida’s interest in object history and linguistic mysticism, and with key Hasidic and kabbalistic concepts such as worship through corporeality, divine contraction, and rectification.

- by Batsheva Goldman-Ida
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- Painting, Spirituality & Mysticism, British art, Kabbalah
- by Julia Lum
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- Landscape Ecology, Fire Ecology, British Empire, British art

TO CONSIDer JONAThAN MONK AS A CONCePTuAL ArTIST IS NOT eNOuGh. In fact, his work is not only a simple appropriation of past methods, but benefits from a distinct, self-referencing component. Processes of conceptual and minimal art are present in all of Monk's work. he takes ideas from the vast artistic panorama of the past and uses the structural confines typical of 1990s artists to produce pieces with the same mental framework but

- by Valentina Rossi
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- Art History, Contemporary Art, British art, Conceptual Art
- by Wei Yu
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- Art History, Museum Studies, Installation Art, Cosmopolitanism

This thesis investigates the creation, early history and development of the permanent collection of the Laing Art Gallery - the first public art museum in Newcastle upon Tyne - between its opening in 1904 and the death of its first and perhaps most emblematic curator, C. Bernard Stevenson (1874-1957). The Laing arrived late in comparison to the Victorian boom of 'civic pride' which motivated the creation of most regional art galleries in Britain during that period. Besides this belated opening, the gallery faced additional problems: it was built on an inadequate and awkward site which constrained its ability to function properly and to expand its permanent collection, and it carried a starting debt. Moreover, it possessed no nucleus collection, nor funds to purchase one. This thesis analyses the way in which Stevenson succeeded in overcoming these adverse opening conditions, managing to put together three quarters of the Laing's current collection and undertaking 'the work of two lives' to build up a comprehensive and diverse display of British painting. The thesis also reveals the impact of the main historical events of the first half of the twentieth century upon the early history of the gallery and in the creation of its collections. It studies the relationship of the Laing with collectors and dealers, artists, and other regional art galleries, as well as management details such as financing, acquisition policies, and the connexion established with its audiences and with public powers. Beyond the local relevance of the Laing as the flagship venue of Tyneside museums, the significant contribution to scholarship of this thesis is the light it sheds on the unique way in which this permanent collection was formed. Moreover, the investigation enhances knowledge of British provincial art galleries at a more general level: because the Laing's history mirrors the evolution of other local authority museums at the time, this thesis provides an extensive case study which helps to establish the singular importance of regional art galleries to British cultural history during the first half of the twentieth century.

- by Laia Anguix-Vilches
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- Cultural History, History of Museums, History of Collections, British art
- by Eleni Tziourtzia
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- Art History, Museum Studies, British History, Museums and Exhibition Design

J.M.W. Turner studied nature from a scientific perspective to achieve a comprehensive perception of natural occurrences. Such approach defines the exploration of celestial phenomena in the watercolours of his Skies sketchbook. The pictorial journal records a rare event of an otherwise unreported planetary occultation and documents changes in weather conditions and atmospheric illumination during the aftermath of a volcano eruption. This sketchbook exemplifies the visualization of scientific knowledge in art of Turner's time.

- by Natalia Bosko
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- Art History, History of Science, British Romanticism, History of Astronomy
- by james hall
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- Art Theory, History of Dress, Portraiture, British art
- by Jennifer S . Griffiths
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- Fashion Theory, Futurism, Fashion History, British art

New documentary discoveries and technical analysis reveal that a portrait of Lady Margaret Beaufort, founder of St John's College, Cambridge, was painted c. 1510 by the Netherlandish immigrant artist Meynnart Wewyck. It may be the... more

- by Andrew Chen
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- Tudor England, Tudor History, Portraiture, 16th Century Netherlandish Art
- by Lilly Markaki
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- Aesthetics, Visual Studies, Art History, Art Theory