Manual
2012
20112011
Winter
Newsletter
Historians of British Art
Table of Contents
Letter from the President 3
HBA AWARDS 5
Book Prize
Publication Award
Travel Award
HBA at CAA 6
Los Angeles 2012
HBA member news 7
HBA membership 8
HBA Membership Inquiries
HBA Online and Facebook!
HBA Board 9
Officers
Board Members At-Large
Ex-Officio Board Members
HBA and Ashgate 12
Reviews of recent publications and exhibitions
Above the Battlefield: Modernism and the Peace Movement in Britain, 1900-1918
Reviewed by Peter Stansky 13
The Art of Anglo –Saxon England
Reviewed by George Neal 16
The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England
Reviewed by William L. Coleman 18
Grayson Perry: The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman
Reviewed by Roberto C. Ferrari 21
Inigo Jones: The Architect of Kings
Reviewed by Jason LaFountain 26
The New Painting of the 1860s: Between the Pre-Raphaelites and
the Aesthetic Movement
Reviewed by Antoine Capet 30
The Print in Early Modern England
Reviewed by Agnes Haigh Widder 33
Queen Elizabeth II: Portraits by
Cecil Beaton
Reviewed by Marina Vaizey 36
The Sacred Image in the Age of Art
Reviewed by Anne Proctor 39
Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World
Reviewed by Antoine Capet 42
Calls: conferences, fellowships, publications 47
Exhibitions 100
HBA calls for reviews 106
Keep in touch 107
Letter from the President
Dear Fellow HBA Members,
I hope that 2011 treated you well, and that you are feeling ready for 2012.
At this time of year, the minds of most HBA members turn to the College Art Association’s annual conference. Its next edition is set for February 22-25 in Los Angeles, and I look forward to seeing you at HBA’s activities, all of which are described on page 6.
Today I want to thank the many HBA members who got in touch with me last summer to share their ideas about how this organization can better serve its field. Most comments had to do with increasing the number of opportunities for us to be together, and also to engage with graduate students in art history, whether or not they have already chosen to specialize in British art. With this in mind, we unleashed a series of events in the autumn, all of which went well.
This initiative started on October 22 with a customized walk around the International Fine Art & Antique Dealers Show in New York City, where we visited three London-based dealers and then enjoyed informal conversation over champagne. Just six days later, HBA hosted the reception that closed the symposium organized by the Freer and Sackler Galleries in Washington, DC, “Palaces of Art: Whistler and the Art Worlds of Aestheticism.” It was great to see so many colleagues in the lobby bar of the W Hotel, all inspired by the fascinating papers we had just heard (or, in a few cases, read). On November 3, a group of colleagues (including some who work on French art!) gathered in Providence at the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design. There, after looking at British works on paper in the print room with curator Jan Howard, we joined her and co-curator Judith Tannenbaum to explore their exhibition Made in the UK: Contemporary Art from the Richard Brown Baker Collection. After a jolly meal nearby, we all attended an intriguing panel discussion on contemporary art collecting moderated by Yale Center for British Art curator Gillian Forrester. And finally, on November 18, independent scholar Lee MacCormick Edwards, NYU Grey Art Gallery curator Lucy Oakley, and I headed to the Yale Center for British Art to experience its marvelous Johann Zoffany exhibition, followed by lunch with several staff members who brought us up to date on the Center’s exciting plans for 2012.
These are just the sort of informal and inspiring events we envisioned last summer, and our only wish now is that the turnout might grow still larger.
Looking forward to the spring, we are finalizing a unique day in San Francisco focused on a private collection and the exhibition The Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant-Garde, 1860–1900, along with several other programs around North America. We will email you those details as soon as they are finalized. In the meantime, please keep the good ideas coming, and see you in Los Angeles soon!
Kind regards,
Peter Trippi
President
HBA AWARDS
HBA Book Prize
The Committee Chair is Elizabeth Honig eahonig@berkeley.edu
HBA Publication Award
The application deadline is January 15, 2012.
The Historians of British Art invites applications for its 2012 publication grant. The society will award up to $750 to offset publication costs for a book manuscript in the field of British art or visual culture that has been accepted by a publisher. Applicants must be current members of HBA.
To apply, send a 500-word project description, publication information (name of journal or press and projected publication date), budget, and CV to Renate Dohmen, Prize Committee Chair, HBA, brd4231@louisiana.edu.
HBA Travel Award
The Travel Award has been increased to $350, and its application deadline has been extended to January 15, 2012.
Please contact Committee Chair Renate Dohmen Brd4231@louisiana.edu
HBA at CAA
Los Angeles, 2012
Please join your fellow HBA members for the following activities at the College Art Association’s annual conference.
Thursday, February 23
2.30-5 pm, HBA session “Future Directions in the History of British Art,” Concourse
Meeting Room 403B
Chair: Peter Trippi, Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine
Discussant: Kimberly Rhodes, Drew University
• Reconsidering John Gibson, Remolding British Sculpture, Roberto C. Ferrari, Graduate Center, City University of New York
• Legal Thinking: The Rise of Eighteenth-Century British Art, Cristina S. Martinez, University of Toronto
• Doing the Thing and the Thing Done: The Social World of the British Sporting Print, 1750-1850, Corey Piper, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts
• From the "Well-Laid Table" to the "Market Place": The Architectural Association Unit System, Irene Sunwoo, Princeton University School of Architecture
• Art Within Reach: The Popular Origins of Art History in Victorian Britain, Amy M. Von Lintel, West Texas A&M University
Friday, February 24
7.30-9 am, HBA business meeting, Concourse Meeting Room 404B
After the business meeting agenda is concluded, First Vice President Colette Crossman will introduce the following short papers:
• ‘Black Beauties, or, Tit Bits in the West Indies': Sex, Humour and Slavery in English Satirical Prints (1780 – 1807), Temi Odumosu, University of Cambridge
• The Craftsman’s Club: Collaboration, Camaraderie, and the Birmingham Arts and Crafts Movement, Abbie Sprague, Independent Scholar
• Winifred Knights and Interwar Artists at the British School at Rome, Lyrica Taylor, University of Maryland
You will soon receive an e-mail containing details about HBA’s offsite visit to a collection of British art in Los Angeles.
HBA member news
Elise Smith, Professor of Art History and the Sanderson Chair in Arts and Sciences at Millsaps College, has published
Judith W. Page and Elise L. Smith, Women, Literature, and the Domesticated Landscape: England's Disciples of Flora, 1780-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011)
The book is part of Cambridge University Press’s Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture. Here is a link to the page in the online catalog for Cambridge University Press:
Lyrica Taylor has organized the exhibition “Twentieth-Century British Art from the Ahmanson Collection” at Biola University in La Mirada, California. The exhibition explores the role of Christianity in visual art throughout the twentieth century in Great Britain. A major goal of the exhibition is to focus on deepening an understanding of the vital role the visual arts and beauty played in shaping human experience and awareness of the sacred in this landmark century. The exhibition includes major paintings, drawings, prints, and sculpture by some of the most important and beloved twentieth-century British artists, including Stanley Spencer, Eric Gill, Jacob Epstein, Barbara Hepworth, Edward Burra and Graham Sutherland. It will be on view from January 31 through March 9, 2012. Additional information and directions to the university may be found at .
HBA members are warmly invited to attend the exhibition’s opening reception on Saturday, February 18, 2012, from 5:30 - 7:30 p.m.
Please send your newsletter items to
Jennifer Way, JWay@unt.edu
HBA Membership
For inquiries about HBA Membership, Renewals, Address Changes, or Emails, please contact:
Jongwoo Jeremy Kim, Assistant Professor of Art History
Hite Art Institute at the University of Louisville
Department of Fine Arts
Lutz Hall, Room 147
Louisville, KY 40292
Office: 502.852.0444
jongwoo.kim@louisville.edu
HBA online and facebook
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Join our Facebook group by searching Historians of British Art or find us at group.php?gid=59663381317
HBA Officers
July 2011-July 2013
President
Peter Trippi
Editor, Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine (and)
President, Projects in 19th-Century Art, Inc.
780 Riverside Drive, Suite 10F
New York, NY 10032
Mobile 917.968.4476
ptrippi@
First Vice-President
Colette Crossman
Administrator of Art & Programs
Blanton Museum of Art
The University of Texas at Austin
MLK at Congress
Austin, TX 78701
Office: 512.471.7175
colettecrossman@
Second Vice-President
Craig Hanson
Associate Professor of Art History
Calvin College
3201 Burton Street SE
Grand Rapids, MI 49546
Office: 616.526.7544
chanson@calvin.edu
Treasurer/Membership Chair
Jongwoo Jeremy Kim
Assistant Professor of Art History
Hite Art Institute at the University of Louisville
Department of Fine Arts
Lutz Hall, Room 147
Louisville, KY 40292
Office: 502.852.0444
jongwoo.kim@louisville.edu
HBA Board Members At-Large
July 2011-July 2013
Juilee Decker
Associate Professor of Art History
Chair, Art Department
Georgetown College
Georgetown, KY
Renate Dohmen
Chair, Travel & Publication Grants Committee
Assistant Professor in Art History Visual Arts Department
University of Louisiana at Lafayette
Lafayette, LA
Margaretta Frederick
Past President (2009-2011)
Chief Curator & Curator, Bancroft Collection
Delaware Art Museum
Wilmington, DE
David Getsy
Goldabelle McComb Finn Distinguished Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Chicago, IL
Elizabeth Honig
Book Prize Committee Chair
Associate Professor, European Art, 1400-1700
History of Art Department
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, CA
Richard Hutton
Past President (2007-2009)
Washington, DC
Dianne Sachko MacLeod
Professor of Art History Emerita
University of California-Davis
Oakland, CA
Morna O’Neill
Assistant Professor of Art History
Wake Forest University
Winston-Salem, NC
Gayle Seymour
Professor of Art History
Associate Dean, College of Fine Arts and Communication
University of Central Arkansas
Conway, AR
Emily M. Talbot
PhD Candidate
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI
Jennifer Way
Newsletter Editor
Associate Professor of Art History
College of Visual Arts and Design
University of North Texas
P.O. Box 305100
Denton, TX 76203-5100
jway@unt.edu
HBA Ex-Officio Board Members
July 2011-July 2013
Association of Art Historians Representative
Evelyn Welch
Professor of Renaissance Studies
Queen Mary, University of London
London
Student Representative
Brittany Hudak
Case Western Reserve University
brittanyhudak@
Paul Mellon Centre Representative
Martin Postle
Assistant Director for Academic Activities
The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
London
Yale Centre for British Art Representative
Lisa Ford
Associate Head of Research
Yale Center for British Art
New Haven, CT
HBA and Ashgate
Historians of British Art has agreed to a partnership with Ashgate (), the publishing firm that puts into print so many titles of significance to our field.
To view the special offers available to HBA members, please visit HBA.
When checking out, please use your HBA Discount Code, which is available only inside the password-protected area of .
And please, do not share this code with non-HBA members. After all, HBA membership has its privileges!
Reviews of recent publications and exhibitions
Above the Battlefield: Modernism and the Peace Movement in Britain, 1900-1918 by Grace Brockington. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-300-15195-4. 264 pages.
Reviewed by Peter Stansky
There would appear to be at present a growing interest in the relationship in Britain between war and art. Perhaps it is intensified by the extraordinary amount of fighting at present, even though in theory we are a world that would consider itself to be at peace. We are not being destroyed as of yet by atomic bombs nor is there a world war going on. By coincidence I just reviewed in the Journal of British Studies a collection of essays, London, Modernism, and 1914. Most of its authors argued that “modernism” in art in Britain had begun just before the First World War but that certainly the violence associated with the war intensified its development; perhaps the leading examples of this would be the Vorticists. The argument doesn’t seem as convincing when one broadens it to the European context, and thinks of Matisse and Picasso and in the world of literature, Proust, Mann and Joyce. Is Grace Brockington correct in contending that the standard argument made is that modernism and the avant-garde are generally assumed to be associated with militarism and violence? I am not sure. She has dedicated her study to making the case for the role of pacifism in the development of modernism in Britain from 1900 to 1918. This is what she discusses rather than any formal peace movement, as her subtitle might suggest.
To my mind, the case she makes is not convincing but in arguing it she has written a study of considerable interest. The difficulty, I believe, is that those whom she discusses may not have been given sufficient credit for their positions but nevertheless one is not persuaded that they were in fact as influential as she claims. Her major figures in the first part of her study are the Bloomsbury artists, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. To what degree can they even be considered modernists? (Perhaps a case is being made for that in the exhibition “Radical Bloomsbury” of their 1905-1925 paintings at the Brighton Museum which I hope to have a chance to see.) Under the influence of the great Manet and Post-Impressionists exhibition of 1910 and through participating in the second Fry exhibition of 1912 they went through a modernist phrase. Brockington discusses Grant’s abstract In Memoriam: Rupert Brooke of 1915 and the striking image verging towards the abstract in Roger Fry German General Staff of the same year. In order to bolster her claim that Bloomsbury was actively engaged in supporting pacifism she devotes a great deal of attention to Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, a great friend of Fry and E.M. Forster but hardly a central Bloomsbury figure. So too much is made of Forster’s war work with the Red Cross in Alexandria. She might have discussed somewhat more how Bloomsbury continued to attest to the importance of the private and sexual life during the war. It was in Alexandria that Forster had his first affair. Duncan Grant’s beautiful Interior of 1918 is rather less a political statement than a celebration of the two figures represented in it, his lovers David Garnett and Vanessa Bell who was to give birth on Christmas Day that year to Angelica, her and Duncan’s child. True, through agricultural work, Grant and Garnett were making a statement against the war. But Brockington may exaggerate when she claims that the members of the Bloomsbury group were much reviled at the time for their pacifist position. Duncan Grant’s father, Major Grant, who managed the farm where they first worked, did refer to Garnett as “Garbage.” Clive Bell’s pamphlet, Peace at Once, did have the distinction of being burnt by the London hangman but the absolute secular pacifist position held by him in both World Wars was not shared by other members of Bloomsbury, except Frances Partridge. (And paradoxically Bell, with his huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ background was probably personally the member of Bloomsbury who had the greatest familiarity with violent pursuits.) At the beginning of the war the painters were the best known members of the group. Yet they were hardly sufficiently well-known at the time to become worthy targets of abuse. As in her discussion of Dickinson and Forster she has not limited herself to artists, it is perhaps surprising that she pays no attention to John Maynard Keynes. He was deeply involved with the economic aspects of the war effort. After the war he would famously turn against the Treaty of Versailles in his The Economic Consequences of the Peace. And there is no discussion of Virginia Woolf who was fighting her personal demons and would publish her first novel, The Voyage Out in 1915, a work not lacking in violent elements. Nevertheless, Brockington has put us in our debt in the Bloomsbury section of her study. She reminds us that in effect Bell and Grant were making a political statement by continuing their lives as artists both in more abstract works, their still-lives and scenes of domesticity. But to call their impetus “evangelical” during the war is something of an exaggeration. They continued their lives as best they could under wartime conditions.
In part because of the Group and in part for their innate quality, Grant and Bell have remained well known artists. Much of the rest of the book is devoted to less well known figures, the artist Maxwell Armfield and his wife the writer Constance Smedley. Here the story moves from Sussex to Chelsea. The couple maintained a modernist cultural life not at all involved with the war. It was comparatively brief as they left Britain in 1916 for the United States where they remained for six years. It is quite fascinating to read of Smedley’s establishment, with the financial backing of her father, of an international group of clubs, the Lyceum, for women artists and writers. I would have like to have known far more about the exhibition before the war, in 1906, that she organized, sponsored by the Lyceum, of modern German artists. We are not told any of their names—the history of modern art in Britain might have been very different if it had an impact similar to the Fry exhibition of 1910. The most important part of the second part of the book is the discussion of Vernon Lee’s anti-war work, The Ballet of the Nations of 1915, in its publication profusely illustrated by Armfield. We may in fact have more illustrations of it than we need, as well as a few too many similar photographs of women in attitudes from Armfield’s play, The Minstrel, of the same year. Interestingly, quite a few of his plays were published by Duckworth, the firm founded by Virginia Woolf’s disliked half-brother, Gerald, who was nevertheless the publisher of her first two novels. Armfield’s activities were deeply aesthetic in a rather fey “arts for art’s sake” way. They did prefigure stylistically what was to come in the 1920s but hardly in a powerful modernist way. One wishes more attention had been paid here to Mark Gertler’s The Merry-Go-Round of 1916. It is briefly discussed and provides the splendid dust-jacket for the book. One would also have liked to have known more about the modern dancer Margaret Morris and her husband the Scottish Colourist, J.D. Fergusson. Her theater on the King’s Road in Chelsea provided the venue for Armfield’s company. It is valuable and interesting to have these somewhat forgotten figures brought back into consciousness. In a war that was allegedly being fought for civilization, it was easy enough to forget civilization itself. During the war, the artists discussed here were forwarding the cause of modernism but on the whole in a rather gentle, domestic, English way. One is glad that they weren’t on the side of violence but they might have had greater effect if their work had demonstrated a little more power.
Peter Stansky is the Frances and Charles Field Professor of History, Emeritus, at Stanford University. He is the co-author of the just published Julian Bell: From Bloomsbury to the Spanish Civil War (Stanford University Press). stansky@stanford.edu
The Art of Anglo-Saxon England by Catherine E. Karkov. Woodbridge, Boydell Press, 2011. ISBN 978-1-843-83628-5. 348 pages.
Reviewed by George Neal
Karkov’s intention as expressed in the introduction to her new survey The Art of Anglo-Saxon England is to provide a postcolonial examination of Anglo-Saxon art. The author’s plan includes an examination of the function and meaning of various works of art and architecture, and an exploration of how the art produced in Anglo-Saxon England creates a narrative of the process of a culture establishing itself. Her final intent is perhaps problematic. Karkov wants to establish that Anglo-Saxon art can be seen as “art” in that is has a kind of “aesthetic and emotional value and visual language of its own.” She makes the assumption that this tact does not conflict with her postcolonial methodology. While it is admirable that she is trying to understand the kinds of aesthetic and emotional responses to Anglo-Saxon objects from the perspective of their intended audience, the author often utilizes an approach that relies heavily on liturgical readings or from connections to the work of Bede or other prominent Anglo-Saxon voices.
By framing works using this kind of geographically localized method of analysis, the author frames the object in a way that puts it in a discreet bubble separate from the world at large. Postcolonial theory is predicated on the concepts of cultural influence and hybridity, and Karkov’s methods sometimes isolate the object from the larger geo-political influences that are important in postcolonial methodologies. Fortunately, this is not always the case. The author’s attempt at framing Anglo-Saxon art in a postcolonial context is often successful, however. Karkov excels when she moves beyond interpretation of specific objects and creates a sweeping survey of Anglo-Saxon art that exposes the minute dynamics of a culture assembling its own identity in relation to its Roman past and its Christian present.
The first two chapters of The Art of Anglo-Saxon England, after a quick discussion of Anglo-Saxon burial mounds, deal with mostly liturgical art in which Karkov formally analyzes several objects to discuss the importance of sacred space and illumination. Much of the former draws heavily from Michelle Brown’s work on the Lindisfarne Gospels and the relationship between illuminating as a good work and the creation of Christ as creating word. The central thrust in this section can be traced as far back as David Brown in Karkov’s discussion between the Romanized stylings of Wearmouth-Jarrow and the more Anglo-Irish Lindisfarne. It is in her examination of how style reflects narrative, especially in her examination of the Copenhagen Gospels as emphasizing the act of oral transmission, as opposed to textual transmission in the previously mentioned manuscripts that Karkov reveals the complex hybridity expressed in her introduction.
The book's third chapter on “Art, Status and Authority” again brings Karkov’s methodology to a more comfortable zone. She discusses the relationship between Carolingian influence on clothing and jewelry styles as a way of expressing royal patronage. Karkov also explores Mercian coinage under the un-titled “queen” Aethelflaed as not simply a means of identifying the source of mint, but as establishing a Mercian identity that is closely associated with the design and motifs of the coinage. Karkov’s exploration of material culture as a means to substantiate the use of objects as nationalistic symbols demonstrates an understanding of the interconnectedness of objects and culture. This moves her ideas past some of the wrote conclusions drawn upon in the author’s discussion of illuminations and their relationship to site-specific specific ideology, as explored in the earlier chapters, and into a complicated discussion of the relationship between cultural identification and object.
Karkov’s fourth chapter “Object and Voice” begins problematically with a reading of the Ruthwell cross whose iconographic meaning and message is based upon a viewer who is never specified. This creates a kind of semiotic no-man’s-land where meaning is not derived from the viewer, but from iconographical precepts that Karkov assumes would have been read by anyone viewing the cross. While Karkov acknowledges that certain objects had intended audiences, she is vague on that subject in her discussion of the Ruthwell. Karkov’s reading is problematic in that it removes itself from the kind of culture-based discussion she maps out in the introduction.
The last two chapters are where Karkov’s postcolonial methodology becomes strongest. The chapters Book, Words and Bodies and Art and Conquest explore in a much deeper way the relationship between viewer, object and patronage within a culture context that includes gender, ethnic and political identity. One fine example is Karkov’s discussion on funerary hogback monuments, whose design and narrative is a combination of Insular and Viking motifs.
Karkov’s survey of Anglo-Saxon art is a strong introduction to the field that brings together many recent discoveries and theories that make it a much welcomed text to Anglo-Saxon scholarship. The scope of the book is broad and thorough. This in itself makes the book a welcome addition. However, Karkov’s framing of her survey as postcolonial is problematic in that her analysis often falls out of the scope of that methodology. A broad survey such as the one Karkov has produced is much too large to be shoehorned into one particular analytical method. In many ways her introduction did more of a disservice to the following text than not. However, taken as a sweeping survey of Anglo-Saxon art, Karkov has produced a book that is solid and informative and brings together a wide body of scholarship.
George Neal received his MA in Art History from the University of North Texas where he studied insular manuscripts and wrote a thesis entitled “God in the Making: Christological Manifestation in Hiberno-Saxon Gospel Books.” He has presented his research at the University of Pennsylvania, Yale University, and the International Congress on Medieval Studies, University of Western Michigan. Currently, George serves as a full-time instructor of art history at North Central Texas College in Gainesville, Texas. georgeneal99@
The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England by David Porter. Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-521-19299-6. 242 pages.
Reviewed by William L. Coleman
David Porter has produced a highly original contribution to the growing body of work on early modern globalization. Far more than a new interpretation of chinoiserie, the author studies a complex moment in the history of China’s place in England’s collective imagination, drawing deftly on a range of sources, including texts, ceramics, gardens, prints, and paintings. Art historians will be relieved to discover that this is truly a work of transdisciplinary scholarship. Porter’s affiliations with departments of English and Comparative Literature make the clarity and insight of his discussions of the writings of Horace Walpole and Thomas Percy not unexpected, but it is a pleasant surprise to find his use of visual evidence is often just as thoughtful and convincing.
Porter argues that the refusal of Chinese art and literature either to conform to European norms or to tolerate being cast as barbarism caused it to be received with a distinctly gendered ambivalence in the eighteenth century. He asks what the reasons were for the widespread embrace of Chinese or pseudo-Chinese goods despite the hostility of critical language, concluding that these objects fundamentally changed the culture that received them. He offers a compelling account of the stylistic catholicity of the period, challenging forever our conception of “Gothic” and “Chinese” as autonomous ideological productions. His is a revisionist challenge to Eurocentric approaches and, explicitly, an effort to understand the eighteenth century in relation to twenty-first-century circumstances. The case Porter makes that the period of his study saw England looking to China with a mix of awe and concern, much as it does today, is intriguing.
The book is built in large part from previously published essays and it shows in the slightly unwieldy structure and residual addresses to the uninitiated journal reader. For example, one could have done without the basic definition of chinoiserie that comes at the start of chapter six (116), by which time his terms have long since been established, and the assertion at the start of chapter eight that “Prodigious quantities of imported tea, silks, and porcelain had given the luxury marketplace of early eighteenth-century England a decidedly Chinese cast” (155) after the author has just spent the previous 154 pages convincing his reader of this point. Some form of conclusion or epilogue would have been helpful instead of the rather abrupt way the book terminates after the final chapter. However, occasional untidy moments are, perhaps, only appropriate for a study that strives to restore nuance to the consideration of an untidy instance of cultural contact. The additional labor required of the reader is amply rewarded by the many startling insights that lie within.
The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England is divided into four parts with two chapters in each. The first part, “China and the aesthetics of exoticism,” considers the sources of a taste for the exotic across class lines and lays a historical foundation for the book. He suggests that chinoiserie offered a tempting alternative to the reigning classicism because it could claim access to an equally long aesthetic tradition seemingly without requiring erudition on the part of the viewer. The case could have been strengthened here and elsewhere by more rigorous attention to the materiality of porcelain, including how the vitrified surface enabled by kaolin clay differed from that of stone and earthenware both in representational possibilities and durability. He rightly devotes significant attention to the case of William Chambers, a rare example of an early visitor to China who put what he saw there into practice in gardens and writings. (Porter’s attentions are largely devoted to the latter.) He rejects the notion that Chinese garden style was chiefly meaningful to Chambers as a means of protesting the work of Capability Brown and suggests that Chambers’ work is better understood as a complex process of translation and accommodation.
The second part, “What do women want,” foregrounds the reception of chinoiserie by women collectors. Porter calls attention to the stark difference between the representation of the female form in European painting and in Chinese porcelain, suggesting that images of decorous and fully-clothed women enjoying each other’s company made them ripe for female consumption in England. The author could do a better job of justifying his claim that these images were not made for the male gaze by studying their Chinese contexts. (His citation of a circa 1920 advertising poster with a pair of alluring women carrying flowers (64) as an example of the afterlife of this subject matter only seems to rebut the claim that there was no thought of male possession in these objects.) A more successful effort is his suggestion of surprising and important links between eighteenth-century women’s writing and porcelain. Hogarth comes into play for the unexpected ferocity of his denunciation of Chinese art in his 1753 Analysis of Beauty despite his own ownership of a number of pieces of chinoiserie. Porter argues that Hogarth perceived a threat in these goods both to English artistic autonomy and to male aesthetic authority.
The third part, “Of rocks, gardens, and goldfish,” begins with a case study of the garden ornaments known as “scholars’ stones.” The representation of these stones was, according to Porter, the source of the supremacy of landscape over figure in Chinese art, an observation with broad implications for the study of the reception of these objects in England. He draws a fascinating and challenging link between the appreciation of the irregularity of scholars’ stones in China and the pleasures of the gossip that took place around Chinese wares in English tea parties. A chapter here on Horace Walpole’s conflicted relationship with Chinese forms is one of the strongest in the book. Porter documents the co-existence of Chinese and Gothic as parallel exoticisms in the mid-eighteenth century and traces Walpole’s path to the embrace of the latter and rejection of the former as a part of his nationalist aesthetic project
The final part, “China and the invention of Englishness,” studies the role China and its wares played in the formation of English national identity and gender roles. The imagery of intact and shattered porcelain in domestic interiors in poetry, plays, prints, and paintings offers a rich forum for Porter to trace the evolution of the trope from emblem of unchecked female power to the domestic ideal, later in the century, in which a mother presides over the tea ritual. A chapter on the complex links between Thomas Percy’s collection of early English verse and his heavily annotated edition of the Chinese novel known as The Pleasing History is particularly insightful in its suggestions of the ways in which Chinese writings formed the aesthetic categories that he would apply later to bardic verse.
The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-Century England joins with the work of Stacey Sloboda and others in marking a vital direction in the study of the British receptions of China by means of art. Although not without its problems, this is an important contribution, rich in ideas and insights, engaging to read and productive to think with.
William L. Coleman is a Ph.D. Candidate in History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley and Robert R. Wark Fellow at The Huntington Library. His dissertation studies Anglo-American paintings of domestic architecture, from country houses to cottages, in the early nineteenth century, asking how this widespread trope participated in changing ideas about wilderness, progress, leisure, and social class in the period. wcoleman@berkeley.edu
Grayson Perry: The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman by Grayson Perry. Published on the occasion of the exhibition at The British Museum, 6 October 2011 - 19 February 2012. London, The British Museum Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-714-11820-8. 204 pages.
Reviewed by Roberto C. Ferrari
Juxtaposing contemporary art with art of the past in a major museum is no longer a new concept, but it is still unusual enough that the results can be refreshing. The British Museum has done this a number of times. In 1994 Andy Goldsworthy was one of twelve artists invited to respond to the Egyptian collection; his serpentine Sandwork wove around pharaohs and sarcophagi. In 2008 Antony Gormley’s Case for an Angel I dominated the main entrance as part of another group exhibition, but it was Marc Quinn’s gold statue of Kate Moss that stole the show. Other artists who have worked with the BM include Henry Moore, Eduardo Paolozzi, Julian Opie, and Hoshino Yukinobu. Currently the BM has given Grayson Perry the opportunity to play the role of artist-as-curator, showing his own work along with a selection of pieces from the collection. The superb result is Grayson Perry: The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman (October 6, 2011-February 19, 2012).
Perry is still relatively unknown outside his native Britain. This may in part have to do with his choice of media, for he is not a painter, sculptor, or conceptual artist, but an artist who makes pots, prints, tapestries, textiles, statuettes, and other objects in the broadly defined categories of design and decorative arts. He won the Turner Prize in 2003 and was elected a member of the Royal Academy in 2011 as a printmaker. He is also known by his transvestite persona, Claire, and has described himself as the “tranny potter” of the art world. [1] Indeed, Claire suggests that Perry is also a performance artist, showing up for events like the annual RA dinner dressed in elaborate frocks he himself designed. It is doubtful Sir Joshua Reynolds ever imagined a transvestite among his coterie of academic followers, but there is something about Perry’s cross-dressing that is innately British. Claire fits comfortably into the long history of theatricality from Shakespeare to Little Britain. Indeed, Perry sees his art as part of history, and thus Claire is not just a put-on role but an important aspect of his creative sensibility.
Clearly it is the transvestism that has made Perry a difficult sell in the United States, where only The Andy Warhol Museum has given him a solo exhibition. Indeed, Americans in general are uncomfortable with “trans”-anything, and in the ongoing fight for social equality in marriage and the military even many gays and lesbians are uncomfortable with "trans"-culture, preferring that their own supposed transgressive behavior not challenge too much the easy-to-identify gay/straight sexual binary. Perry is a queer artist. He blurs the boundaries of gender and sexuality, but then also pushes definitions of art, craft, religion, and so on, ultimately pointing out the foibles of personal identity as well. What makes Perry and this current exhibition so palatable is that his work is accessible, unlike the esoteric, commercial sensationalism of Damien Hirst and his ilk.
Neil MacGregor, Director of the BM, has described Perry’s show as “eccentrically personal yet infinitely universal in its sense of humanity and commonality.” [2] Given the opportunity to rummage through millions of objects, Perry has inverted the artist’s experience of them. Rather than respond to them as others have done, he has them respond to his work. Perhaps more accurately, he unites them, demonstrating their historic commonalities. Perry has crafted himself as his own imaginary civilization, but he astutely notes that “no civilisation is an island and there’s always an interplay with other civilisations.” [3] In this spirit, he has brought together two hundred objects from the BM's collection representing Africa, Native America, China, Anglo-Saxon England, and many other cultures, showcasing objects as diverse as a wooden Kongo power figure, a Maori shell pubic ornament with painted figures, and a Japanese portable shrine made of gold and lacquer. These works accompany thirty-five of Perry’s pieces, many being shown for the first time.
Like most civilizations, Perry’s has a religion, and he announces to the visitor upon entering the exhibition that his chief god is Alan Measles, a fifty-year-old teddy bear who has come to represent Claire's alter-ego. In fact, Alan so dominates this show that, sadly, Claire seemingly disappears. Perry documents a pilgrimage he made to Germany with Alan, who sat in his own “popemobile” on the back of Perry’s motorcycle. Because Alan had fought the Germans in many imaginary battles, it was time to make peace with them. As a god, Alan does take advantage of modern technology to spread his teachings. He has his own blog, on which he declares 2011 as the year he reveals himself, following the examples of Christ, Buddha, and Mohamed before him. [4] A self-declared “God of doubt,” Alan tells his followers, “I feel the world has enough zealots and people attached to being right already.” His message to them is “to hold their beliefs lightly.” All hail the wise Alan Measles!
Now, if you the reader have not laughed, then you have missed Perry’s point. He knows the idea of his childhood toy as a deity is absurd, but he also notes how this transformed him:
The idea of Alan as a god, like so many of my ideas, began as a joke. But now I see him as a kind of test bed on which to run the idea of inventing a cult.... In the course of visiting a psychotherapist I was to discover that Alan … was my surrogate father. Onto him I projected all the positive male characteristics that I found lacking in my real world. As a child when playing I took on the role of his bodyguard, so precious was he as a spiritual receptacle of a significant part of my own personality. [5]
In presenting Alan as a god, Perry queers our expectations about religion and civilization as we (think we) understand them. Furthermore, he does this using one of the most basic of human emotions: humor. Throughout this exhibition, you cannot help but laugh aloud, although it is surprising that few people can do this, so ingrained are they in the experience of “art” and “the museum” that they have missed Perry’s invitation to see things through his eyes. But the exhibition is not all fun and games. His unique curatorial eye helps you rediscover these artifacts of past civilizations and see them as if for the first time. They are not just apotheosized objects from the past. They are a reflection of us here and now.
The exhibition opens with Perry’s vase You Are Here, 2011, in which he envisions different visitors to the show, suggesting in bubbles over their heads the many reasons why they are there. One has a free ticket, while another needs to write a school report. The social critic declares: “I need to have my negative prejudices confirmed.” With this very first object, Perry undermines the museum-going experience using humor as a form of self-referentialism. Caught off-guard, their motivations exposed, visitors can now listen without prejudice to Perry as he goes on to explain that he is not an art historian, just a craftsman. He introduces his imaginary world and Alan Measles, and then invites the viewer to follow him on a pilgrimage of civilization.
The exhibition is arranged thematically, with sections on Shrines, Magick, Maps, Souvenirs of Pilgrimages, Sexuality and Gender, and so on. On the theme of Cultural Conversations, Perry writes:
Few civilizations spring up spontaneously or develop in isolation. Cultures borrow and adapt. I enjoy artefacts where this give and take is more obvious and dissonant. New religions try to recruit by using the sites and symbols of the belief system they are trying to replace. Craftsmen make artefacts they think will appeal to visitors from abroad. Sometimes they get it wrong in a charming way. Creativity is often just mistakes. [6]
In wall texts such as these, the visitor encounters succinct and lucid explorations for how the craftsman over time has participated in the making of the visual identifiers of civilizations for different purposes. Indeed, craftsmen have superimposed themselves on these identifiers because their handiwork is all that survives. People may be able to name great leaders from the past, but it is the work of the Unknown Craftsman that remains. Perry invites us to ponder who these craftsmen were, but of course we will never know, and that is Perry’s point. [7]
Walking through the exhibition is a pilgrimage, with the BM both a tomb holding artifacts from the past and a temple to their cultural significance. The objects inside vitrines and raised on pedestals are representations of long-dead peoples, but now they also mirror who we are as well. Perry represents this experience with a dazzling tapestry called Map of Truths and Beliefs, 2011, a work woven in wool and cotton and measuring 290 x 690 cm. Filled with his own personal icons, including a bear (raw emotion) and a woman in a folk costume (tradition), the tapestry shows religious and secular pilgrimage sites around the world. At the center, mandala-like, are the many names for the afterlife arranged in a plan of the BM itself.
Perry’s works of art are beautifully crafted objects. His ceramic pots in particular draw you in with their color and sheen, and then grab your attention with their frequently transgressive messages addressing sexuality, politics, and religion. His Shrine to Alan Measles, 2007, might pass for a Tang Dynasty tomb sculpture, were it not for the dangling pictures of Princess Diana and the Twin Towers. His cast-iron sculptures are exquisite, signifying strength, age, and beauty with a rust patina. Some are charming, like the heroic Alan Measles on Horseback, 2007, a primitivist Napoleon-meets-Don Quixote statuette. Others are inspiring, such as the pathos-driven pair Our Father, 2007, and Our Mother, 2009, who willingly carry the weight of all civilizations in baskets and satchels on their broken bodies. The tour de force of the exhibition is the final eponymous piece, The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman. The sculpture is a rusty cast-iron funerary barque is decorated with casts taken from BM objects seen throughout the exhibition, from African figure heads to Asian shrines. At the heart of the work is a piece of 250,000-year-old flint, the tool that allowed an unknown craftsman to make the first object of civilization.
The catalogue that accompanies the exhibition provides the reader with an opportunity to revisit many of the works on display in greater detail, but it is basically a coffee table book with little value for the scholar. The text within the book is a repetition of the wall labels in the exhibition. Perry’s introduction is worth reading, however, as he describes his background and inspirations for the artistic crafting of his own imaginary world, and thus provides a greater understanding of Perry’s ideas behind the exhibition. Other than a foreword by MacGregor, there is no voice from the BM staff. As a result, we lose any sense of what the BM objects mean. It would have been interesting to have curators write a few sentences about some of these objects. Their interpretations could have added a degree of tension to the artist-curator relationship and allow one to understand more clearly how Perry’s personal vision of these objects related to that of the museum world.
The reproductions in the catalogue are high-quality, with a number of excellent details of Perry’s pots and other works, as well as a fold-out of the tapestry Map of Truths and Beliefs. Documentary images of the “popemobile” pilgrimage to Germany are interesting, but they lead to more questions than answers. For instance, the Oberbürgermeister of Backnang and his wife smile for the camera beside Alan (with Perry off to the side), suggesting their full compliance in this art pilgrimage, but when Perry visits the Isenheim Altarpiece as Claire, he is shown alone, suggesting a sense of isolation and rejection about this same pilgrimage. The exhibition catalogue is more a book by and about Perry then it is a book about craftsmen and civilizations. That said, it is also a souvenir visitors can purchase to remember their pilgrimage.
Much the same way the catalogue fails to contextualize the BM objects, the show does lose meaning at times. The linking of the BM objects to Perry’s work may make sense in his mind—he notes that the associations vary from aesthetics to function and form—but there are moments when one is uncertain why something is there. For instance, in a video on the BM’s website, Perry noted the cultural sensitivity of including an ancient Egyptian earring still attached to a human earlobe, but the object now sits in a vitrine without an explanation as to why he needed to include it in the show. [8] As noted above, the other noteworthy absence is Claire. While her presence is apparent in the section on sexuality, most notably in the Orientalist High Priestess Cape, 2007, with appliqués of ejaculating winged phalli, her suppression here seems like a missed opportunity for one to better appreciate the dual Alan/Claire sides of Perry’s imaginary civilization.
There is a £10 entrance fee for the exhibition, which arguably reinforces all the trappings of contemporary art consumer culture that Perry claims to reject. Nevertheless, the entrance fee is worth paying. Despite the concerns mentioned, The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman is brilliant. Perry cautions the visitor not to think about the show too much, but it is impossible not to stop thinking about the associations he has made, and noting over and over how his own work relates to the artifacts. At the same time, the theatricality of Alan/Claire teaches the visitor to take it all in stride, to laugh in fact, because it is funny, but also because we are laughing at our own preconceived expectations. Perry is not so intellectual about his art that he wants you to forgo enjoying it. On the contrary, he would rather you enjoy it first, and perhaps never think about it at all. That, however, is impossible because his ideas are so well orchestrated.
Roberto C. Ferrari is a Ph.D. Candidate in Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, where he is writing his dissertation on the sculptor John Gibson (1790-1866). He is an Associate Museum Librarian at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the creator and co--manager of the Simeon Solomon Research Archive (). robertocferrari@
Inigo Jones: The Architect of Kings by Vaughan Hart. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-300-14149-8. 308 pages.
Reviewed by Jason LaFountain
Vaughan Hart’s new book constitutes a forceful reconsideration of the life and work of Inigo Jones (1573-1652), widely regarded as one of England’s greatest architects and its most important before Christopher Wren. “Concentration on Italy as the all too obvious source for Jones’s work has left it divorced from its national context,” writes Hart. “For this reason the book sets out to describe how Jones attempted to reconcile the Orders to English tastes and sensibilities via his sensitivity to native themes and conventions” (xvii). What emerges is a much fuller cultural-historical contextualization of Inigo Jones’s classicism. The volume is densely and beautifully illustrated, and it contains a concise Preface, a lengthy Introduction, eight main chapters, a Conclusion, and two appendices.
Hart calls on an impressive array of historical materials in constructing his arguments—from Jones’s extant architecture to traces of buildings now destroyed, plans for structures built and unbuilt, Jones’s “Roman Sketchbook,” his designs for catafalques and funerary sculpture, gateways and triumphal arches, as well as paintings, stained glass, prints, drawings, maps, emblematic frontispieces, and architectural treatises. Hart deals with ancient and modern philosophy, ethics, rhetoric, legal and political theory, propaganda, theology, sermons, poetry, drama, antiquarianism, and history writing. Jones’s many stage designs for masques are especially important to Hart, who makes the case that Jones used masque “to introduce to the court audience the still-novel all’antica architectural principles of harmony and proportion long before he was able to express the same ideas more publicly in stone” (4-5). Hart relates Jones’s architecture and his masque designs throughout the book. The remaining volumes of Jones’s library (often heavily annotated), now mainly at Worcester College in Oxford, are crucial evidence here, too. And the author engages computer modeling and reconstructions to flesh out his interpretations. Appendix 2, for instance, incorporates a model of the perspectival stage scenery for Jones’s 1640 masque, Salmacida Spolia.
Although documented as a Catholic, Jones was “culturally a Protestant” (132), and his “religious ambivalence” (228) enabled him to work on projects for a diverse patronage, from the “Protestant militancy” of King James I’s son, Henry, Prince of Wales, to the “milder Protestantism of James himself,” to the “Catholic toleration of Charles I and open Catholic allegiance of his queen, Henrietta Maria” (xvi). His stylistic and ornamental choices were carefully attuned to a building’s purpose, setting, whether façades or spaces were more public or private, the religiosity and class status of patrons, and what was happening politically and culturally at a given time. His output ranges, therefore, from the splendor of the Banqueting House at Whitehall (1619-23) to the “temperate classicism” (144) of St. Paul’s church at Covent Garden (1631-33) to the austerity of the north façade of the Queen’s House at Greenwich (1632-38). Hart argues that Jones’s attitude toward modern Italian architecture was conflicted. He was a noted follower of Palladio, but he also disdained “the Mannerist excesses of the Counter-Reformation in Rome” (xiii). Based on his study of “decorum” in works of rhetoric and architectural theory, Jones preferred “masculine and unaffected” exteriors, with interiors reserved for “imaginative” “feminine” embellishment. His understanding of decorum was flexible, though. His approaches varied from project to project, and the “feminine façade” (189) of the Banqueting House stands as the key example of this adaptability. Whereas the Orders were highly symbolic in Jones’s England—with Tuscan and Doric connoting simplicity and masculine Protestant uprightness, Ionic and Corinthian verging toward luxury, the foreign, or Catholic, and more feminine, and Composite as outright “licentious” (132)—Jones’s uses of the Orders both obeyed and disobeyed this codification (again, the Banqueting House is interesting in this regard). He employed all of the Orders at one time or another, and even the wicked Composite Order could be turned—in a negative exemplary fashion—to moralizing purposes (see 140-141).
Hart spends more than half of the volume demonstrating that there were, in fact, many native sources of cultural interest in the Orders. “[T]he Stuart cultivation of ‘British’ mythology” is one of these (xvii). During the reign of James I (beginning 1603) “ancient columns came to be understood as expressing…British Protestant antiquity when they were used in the service of the crown by Jones as its Surveyor” (41). The “simplest of the Orders, the Tuscan” “was identified most in court propaganda and art with Britain’s antiquity” (ibid.). Jones’s plan to “restore” Stonehenge as a Tuscan temple is indicative of his embeddedness in the peculiar and nationalistically infused Trojano- and Romano-Christian myth-making of the Stuarts. Antique columns were utilized in the pageants and processions of the Stuart monarchy “long before Jones’s first buildings” (57). The temporary triumphal arches built in London for the processions of James I prompted the development by Jones of many all’antica façade designs along the Strand, which was the city’s triumphal route, as well as his design for a permanent triumphal arch at Temple Bar.
Hart remarks, “As with the Triumph, the early use of the columns in royal images and heraldic events can be seen to have paved the way for Jones’s use of the Orders for the crown” (91). He writes that heraldry “was considered to be the only art to have survived from antiquity in unbroken craft practices” (104). From the middle of the sixteenth century and culminating in the “flamboyant Elizabethan ‘prodigy’ houses” (91), the association of the antique column with heraldry, a more palatable form of ancient English (as well as modern Protestant) iconography, helped to ease the transition toward all’antica style building. In the fourth chapter, which explains how the bodies of antique columns came to be related to the bodies of the Stuart kings, Hart establishes that longstanding British legal conceptualizations of order, scale, and proportion intersected with ideas about the Orders. Chapter 5 indicates that “the traditional art and practice of geometry also assisted in the task of introducing into England the Vitruvian ideals of symmetry and order” (151). Thus, as Hart puts it, “Jones the medieval mason, not just the ‘British Vitruvius’” (ibid.).
The majority of The Architect of Kings is just plain brilliant, expertly researched and creatively executed in its organization and argumentation. Hart’s textured treatment throughout the volume of the interrelation of gender and architecture is commendable. Chapter 3 on the Orders and heraldry and Chapter 4 on the Orders and English legal tradition are also outstanding—truly eye-opening. The author’s point that heraldry was connected to, even “a branch of” geometry (100), and his later assertion that the “denominational neutrality of geometry” (146) was a bridge enabling early modern Protestants and Catholics to overcome differences and share things culturally, registered as profound indeed. There is a wonderful discussion of “solar civic virtue” in the processions of London’s Lord Mayors and “the solar progress” of the Stuart monarchs (84-89). I admired, too, that Hart takes Jones’s early architectural eclecticism seriously, rather than simply dismissing his mixing of Gothic and all’antica ornament as immature (159). Chapter 7 contains a remarkable reading of the Banqueting House at Whitehall, including Peter Paul Rubens’s important ceiling paintings, in connection with Aristotelian ethics—particularly Aristotle’s writing on the “mean.” In the Conclusion the analysis of anti-royalist and anti-Laudian Civil-War-era pillar and column iconoclasm is also very enlightening.
The book does have some shortcomings. The almost complete segregation of the discussion of architectural labor within an appendix (Appendix 1) is an aspect of the volume that is difficult to swallow. And this appendix only addresses labor-related documentation for a very specific project—the refacing and repair of London’s old St. Paul’s Cathedral. Hart says from the beginning that the book will focus on the “symbolic and eloquent matter of decoration” rather than “functional matters” (xviii-xix). But the disentangling of these two topics—which are not mutually exclusive, but interdependent—is hardly unproblematic. I am curious to know more about how the spaces within and around Jones’s buildings were used through time, and how the reception of their forms and decoration conformed to or diverged from what the architect or his patrons may have intended.
Hart might have probed further into what it means that some of Jones’s most significant projects depended upon the demolition of existing architecture (see 214, 229). Who lived and worked in these buildings? How did this destruction and displacement shape attitudes toward all’antica construction? The author makes a good case that the Orders were symbolic, that Tuscan and Doric were regarded as humble compared to Corinthian and Composite, which were associated with wealth because more decoratively elaborate (102). But he also points out that achieving ornamental restraint in architecture was not necessarily cheap, and that buildings such as St. Paul’s church at Covent Garden—with its Tuscan portico—were still quite costly (182). This leads one to suspect that for comparatively poor people (some of whom may even have had their residences or workplaces destroyed to make way for Jones’s public squares at Lincoln’s Inn Fields and Covent Garden), together with devoted anti-materialists, the “symbolic and eloquent matter of decoration” signified—beyond the finer symbolic distinctions that interest Hart and above all else—money, showiness, privilege, and power.
The author is perhaps too insistent that decorative cherubim were coded Catholic in Britain in the period in question (see 176, 222-224). The historical reality was more complicated. The iconography of Solomon’s Temple, including its cherubim, has often served iconoclastic peoples (radical Protestants among them) as a stand-in for other, more objectionable, kinds of imagery (e.g. images of God, Christ, the Madonna, saints). Extremists such as William Dowsing may have destroyed cherubim ornamenting Laudian churches, but in other situations the same type of decoration proved serviceable to Puritans both moderate and radical.
Although Hart discusses Puritanism in detail, and for the most part accurately, his assertions that Calvinism “disregard[ed]” “good works as a contribution to salvation” and that Calvinists rejected “building” as “good work” are misleading (216-217). His thinking about this subject and about Jones’s architecture in relation to the Puritans could have been strengthened by looking at how the anti-materialistic and anti-formalistic theology of edification—arguably Puritanism’s most important contribution to architecture and architectural theory—functioned in the contexts under examination (John S. Coolidge’s study of edification in Chapter 2 of The Pauline Renaissance in England: Puritanism and the Bible (Clarendon, 1970) remains the standard on this topic). It is within this body of writing that we find the most robust Puritan statements about godly living as (the good work of) building and about godly (virtuous interior) vs. worldly (sinful exterior) ornaments. If, as Hart claims, his book is largely a book about ornament (38), and if he believes that the fluctuation of Puritan aesthetic sensitivities in this period and theoretical distinctions between interior and exterior ornamentation were critical to Jones’s architectural thought and practice, this material is indispensable to his account.
All in all, The Architect of Kings is an absorbing read, consistently provocative, and—despite its omissions or any faults—among the most informative studies I have encountered concerning architecture and culture in early modern England.
Jason LaFountain is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. His dissertation, “The Puritan Art World,” analyzes the discourse of life as a work of art in the literature of English and American Puritan practical divinity dating between 1560 and 1730. jdlafoun@fas.harvard.edu
The New Painting of the 1860s: Between the Pre-Raphaelites and the Aesthetic Movement by Allen Staley. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-300-17567-7. 438 pages.
Reviewed by Antoine Capet
Historians of British Art will be familiar with Professor Staley’s previous books on the Pre-Raphaelites, notably The Pre-Raphaelite Landscape (2001, with the same publishers), ultimately derived from his 1965 Ph.D. thesis at Yale. All this is to say that The New Painting of the 1860s is literally based on the work of a lifetime, and one is constantly impressed by his admirable knowledge not only of the British painters whom he discusses, but of the contemporary French scene, let alone the Greek, Italian and Biblical background which inspired or illuminates so many of the works featured both in the copious text and the reproductions (most in full color) in this magnificently produced, large-size volume. His self-imposed remit is both simple and complex. The simplicity is in the sub-title: the author undertakes to examine “the 1860s” – the period “between the Pre-Raphaelites and the Aesthetic Movement”. This commendable precision in the periodization, however, is largely annihilated by what Staley has to say in his Preface and Introduction: the period, which he first called “Post-Pre-Raphaelitism” (first as a joke, but now deserving serious consideration, he argues) imperceptibly merges into that elusive element, the Aesthetic Movement – and here is the rub (and the complexity), since many of his chosen names are usually associated with the Pre-Raphaelites or the Aesthetic Movement. This is in fact one of the major sources of confusion in the large Aesthetic Movement Exhibition currently traveling from London to San Francisco via Paris: the Morris Sussex straw chair (c. 1860) is shown next to Alma-Tadema’s opulently upholstered armchair (c. 1884/86), making visitors lose their bearings. [9]
Now, the pace of exhibitions on the Pre-Raphaelites and late-Victorian painters seems to be accelerating, with The Cult of Beauty already mentioned, The Pre-Raphaelite Lens: British Photography and Painting, 1848-1875 [10] and Ford Madox Brown: Pre-Raphaelite Pioneer [11] shown in 2011 and Pre-Raphaelites : Victorian Avant-Garde announced by Tate Britain for September 2012. Likewise, on top of the often excellent catalogues to which they give birth, we have a constantly increasing output of books on the subject. In the Fall of 2011 alone, we had Fiona MacCarthy’s The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination (Faber & Faber), a reissue of Alicia Craig Faxon’s Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Abbeville Press. First Edition: Oxford: Phaidon, 1989) and two new books on him, J.B. Bullen’s Rossetti: Painter and Poet (Frances Lincoln) and Dinah Roe’s The Rossettis in Wonderland: A Victorian Family History (Haus Publishing).
In The New Painting of the 1860s, which constitutes a welcome addition to these recent publications, three prominent members of the original Brotherhood have their own chapters: Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Chap. 2), William Holman Hunt (Postscript 2), John Everett Millais (Postscript 3). The examination of the work of the last two is restricted to 1860-1869 for Hunt and 1856-1869 for Millais – hence the fact that they do not benefit from “proper” chapters. This reduction to “mere” Postscripts does not make them any the less interesting for that. In fact the opening paragraph of that on Millais explains the difficulty of any attempt at a hard-and-fast periodization in the field:
[In a previous chapter] I made a claim for Rossetti’s Bocca Baciata [1859] as prophetic of the new interests of the 1860s. An analogous claim can be made for Millais’s Autumn Leaves, but Autumn Leaves was painted mainly in the autumn of 1855 and exhibited in 1856, some four years before Bocca Baciata, and is usually seen as one of the masterpieces of the Pre-Raphaelitism of the 1850s rather than a precursor of what would come next decade. Nevertheless, it did mark major departures in content and in style from Millais’s earlier Pre-Raphaelites works such as Christ in the House of his Parents or Ophelia. (375)
What Staley is driving at is the argument that what he calls “the new painting of the 1860s” was already germinating in paintings like Autumn Leaves, in the sense that Millais was already abandoning high-flying purposes (Ford Madox Brown criticized the picture precisely for that reason, Staley observes) by the mid-1850s. Indeed, this was not an isolated case but the first manifestation of Millais’s adoption of a new, less lofty outlook because, Staley continues, “Millais followed Autumn Leaves with several subsequent non-narrative ‘mood-pictures,’ of which the most obvious sequel is a picture begun in 1856 and exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1859 under the title Spring” (374).
The other full chapters are devoted to Frederick Sandys, Simeon Solomon, Albert Moore, James McNeill Whistler, Edward Poynter, Frederic Leighton, George Frederic Watts and Edward Burne-Jones. Staley in fact makes a point of emphasizing “the significance for their art of friendships between Rossetti and Burne-Jones, Rossetti and Whistler, Solomon and Moore, Whistler and Moore, Leighton and Watts, Watts and Burne-Jones” (343). Once again, however, the periodization is fraught with difficulties, with a lot of the works overlapping with what is conventionally called the aesthetic movement – the best proof of that being that these artists feature – sometimes prominently – in the current The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement, 1860-1900 Exhibition. Bocca Baciata, for instance, is part of it, while Leighton’s Pavonia, extensively discussed (and reproduced) by Staley, provided the image for the official exhibition poster and the dustcover of the Catalogue. Much the same could be said of Whistler (the Symphony in White trilogy), Sandys (Danaë, Gentle Spring), Watts (Choosing), Burne-Jones (Laus Veneris), Moore (A Venus) and of course Rossetti. Two artists however benefit from more attention in The New Painting of the 1860s: Poynter and Solomon.
The chapter on Poynter will remind readers of the recent Gérôme Exhibition, [12] especially his Pollice Verso (“Thumbs Down”, 1872), now at the Phoenix Art Museum, which was featured on the cover of the Catalogue. Staley, who begins the chapter by observing that “[Poynter’s] reputation has still not recovered” (183), does his best to present him in a favourable light but in The Catapult (1868), or even more so in Israel in Egypt (1867), the children of the 20th century that we are find it extremely difficult not to try to identify Charlton Heston flexing his muscles somewhere in some corner of the Technicolor CinemaScope composition.
Salomon’s artistic life was ruined when he was arrested for attempted sodomy at a public urinal in 1873. Because of this, most of Salomon’s seminal work belongs with the 1860s, Staley’s chosen period, and the book naturally gives it extensive treatment, notably in the context of the “running nineteenth-century battle between prudish conservatives and progressive artists” (117). The complexity of some of Salomon’s paintings possibly culminates in Sacramentum Amoris (1868) which, after describing it as “an emblematic image packed with arcane symbolism, partly pagan, partly Christian, partly Jewish, put to the service of what seems like a new, private religion” (113), Staley excellently analyzes in the light of the numerous comments which Salomon himself made of it to his patron Leyland. Staley’s reader is left in no doubt that Simeon Solomon is a major figure of the 1860s scene, if only for his participation in the “classical revival of the 1860s” (176) “following on the heels of Pre-Raphaelites medievalism in the preceding decade” (110).
This provides an apt guiding thread for following Staley’s undertaking: the 1860s could be seen a sort of crucible which saw the fusion of two sources of inspiration. As he convincingly puts it in his Conclusion, “A bit later, as the Pre-Raphaelites began to move away from their overweening attention to detail, their attitude toward subject also changed” (341). In other words, what we see in the 1860s is not so much the birth of the first elements of what was to become the Aesthetic Movement as the death of Pre-Raphaelitism in its initial, “pure” form. A sad, but alas probably true reflection, of course, for all admirers of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement.
This short review cannot do full justice to this remarkable volume, full of insightful connections between artists, techniques, sources and periods, and a delight to read for anyone, as it is written in exemplary jargon-free language, with no prior knowledge of the subject required. The strictly-focused Bibliography includes articles, which is always very helpful, and the detailed Index makes the book a convenient tool for finding information on the works and their authors quickly. There is no doubt that it should be found in all Art College and University Libraries and recommended to undergraduates and doctoral students alike.
Antoine Capet is a Professor of British Studies at the University of Rouen. In addition to his other publications, including that he is the 'Britain since 1914' Section Editor of the Royal Historical Society Bibliography and sits on the Editorial Committee of Twentieth Century British History, he has written many reviews for the Historians of British Art Newsletter and he publishes reviews regularly in Cercles and for both the H-Museum and H-Albion sections of H-Net. antoine.capet@univ-rouen.fr
The Print in Early Modern England by Malcolm Jones. Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-300-13697-5. 452 pages.
Reviewed by Agnes Haigh Widder
The Print in Early Modern England is an iconographic survey and synthesis of single-sheet prints produced in England from 1500-1700. The author is, or was, senior lecturer at University of Sheffield, Department of English Language and Linguistics. He has published on: folklore; folklore and popular culture; prints; popular poems; broadsides; marvels, monsters and miracles in the imagination; engravings; non-religious prints; cats in prints; playing cards with proverbs on them; metal cut border ornaments in Parisian books of hours as design sources for the English; and the folkloric imagery and influences of Northern European iconography on the misericords in Beverly Minster, near Hull. From 2006-2009 he contributed the “Print of the Month” feature to dpi1700: British Printed Images to 1700, a freely available online database of English prints (). The book has been reviewed by: Choice (Feb., 2011); Print Quarterly (June, 2011), Times Literary Supplement (July 8, 2011), and Art Newspaper (Sept. 2010).
The book’s strengths are primarily organization, description, and synthesis, rather than startling conclusions. One of the author’s specialties is teasing out Continental, especially German and Dutch, influences on English art. He shows that England was not as artistically insular as previously thought, brings to light many more single-sheet prints than known heretofore, shows us the Continental influences; and organizes the English print oeuvre by topic and date, to make them easier for future scholars to draw upon for their own work. He means the book to be a reference work. His bibliography is enormous. He mentions the work of other recent scholars of prints frequently, expanding on and sometimes gently correcting their interpretations. Just since 2000, many have written on English prints, including: Anja Muller, Michael Hunter, Joseph Monteyne; Martha Driver, Sheila O’Connell, J.N. King; J.A. Knapp, Helen Pierce, and Kevin Sharpe.
To qualify for his study the print must be English in origin (primarily London), datable to 1500-1700, issued as a single-sheet, and predominantly pictorial. He infringes upon his own criteria for inclusion frequently, to our benefit, by including prints published on title pages of books, as book frontispieces, as book illustrations, on playing cards, and as game boards. He does not cover print portraits, bookplates, lining papers, wallpapers, handbills, or trade cards. Occasionally, images on ceramics or wooden dishes or what might be hung on a wall as a decorative object emerge. He approaches his material as a historian for whom iconography is key to understanding the significance of art within culture; yet, there is no theory here. He does not discuss the technical processes used to produce the images much, which would have been nice. He speaks not at all about the stylistic, aesthetic aspects of the prints unless these affect dating or provenance. How competent or elegant the execution of the prints is not his concern. His goals are provision of description of the image, dating, provenance, cultural influence underpinning, and fitting each item into his organizational structure and theme. It is as though the reader is being told in a narrative where each print fits in the author’s own online database or filing system, along with its “biographical” details.
The organization is superb and the touches of historical background provided make the book accessible to relative non-specialists of English history of this period. There are four parts, plus several appendices. The parts, each with a number of subject-themed chapters, are: Structured World: Series and Schemata, treating prints in numbered series or emblematic diagrams or schemes; Body Politic, treating prints most usefully considered politically or religiously, covering the Tudors, the Stuarts, and the Civil War, and anti-Catholic, anti-Protestant, and anti-sectarian images; The Moral Order, covering images of Godly life, the sinful pleasures of folly and lust, portents and prodigies, death and judgment; The Social Order, covering images of inversions of the natural world, abuses of the social order, the place of women and men in society, men’s expectations of marriage, the marital state as it is, reversals of gender roles, shrews, viragos, cuckolds, fumblers; and a picture of society, with images of society as a whole at work, at play, and occupations. The appendices contain: narrative texts of selected prints; lists of prints depending on German or Netherlands origins; biblical prints; and a long advertising bill of Humphrey Bromley, an English quack-doctor working in Germany in 1613, in both German and English (Jones’ translation).
Yale University Press is known for its finely illustrated works; there are 378 plates, all black and white. By no means all the images discussed are shown. And there are images discussed that are not now extant, so cannot be represented, but are known from the Stationers’ Office Registers to have existed. Jones’ information includes whatever he can find about the images, such as: authorship, date of creation, when registered with the Stationers’ Office, who owned the work, whom it was made for at the time, ownership since, how advertised for sale (for example, in catalogs), description of the contents (what is it a picture of?), how used or displayed, its connections to literature or language of the time in poetry, drama, etc., earliest surviving copy if the original is no longer extant, what copies are extant and where they are now located, earlier art works it resembles or draws upon, other art works of the same period and how it is similar or different, what books first had illustrations of it, commentary on interpretive work done on particular images by other scholars, and things he sees that he thinks others have missed or have misinterpreted. His sources include Oxford English Dictionary, visual imagery in the literature of the period, Stationers’ Office Registers (extensive lists of government approved printed matter published from the late 16th century to around 1700), catalogs of various print sellers (Peter Stent, John Overton, Dicey family), ESTC (English Short-Title Catalogue), EEBO (Early English Books Online), and other secondary authors who have worked on these prints ever since.
There is little to criticize and much to applaud. A lot of financial resources have gone into this book: so many images, heavy paper, and large size format. It would be nice to know the original sizes of the images, to have a complete list of them, and for all of them to be large, because it is in seeing the details that delight and edification happens in a book like this. There are no summaries or transitions, odd for a modern history monograph, but not so unusual in the art history field. The type faces and fonts used for delineating sub-sections of chapters could be more different from each other in style and size; this would assist the reader in grasping the author’s sub-organization within the chapters. The combination of the author’s knowledge of the literature and words of the period, his experience working with Continental influences on English art, his abilities with visual and bibliographic details, his organizational abilities, and his nice way of incorporating other scholars’ efforts with his own discoveries have led to a very fine book.
Agnes Haigh Widder is Humanities Bibliographer at Michigan State University Libraries, East Lansing, Michigan. She became interested in British art while working in the Fine Arts Library. She is the bibliographer/subject selector for the British Isles, France, medieval studies, and religious studies. widder@mail.lib.msu.edu
Queen Elizabeth II: Portraits by Cecil Beaton by Susanna Brown. Foreword by Sir Roy Strong and Afterword by Mario Testino. London, Victoria and Albert Publishing, 2011. ISBN 978-1-851-77654-2. 128 pages.
Reviewed by Marina Vaizey
This fascinating book has been published to accompany an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert (London 8 February - 22 April 2012) and also marks the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee (60 years on the throne). It closely examines the very specific contribution of Sir Cecil Beaton (1904-1980) to royal iconography.
It is particularly fitting for the V & A, home as the collection is to one of the earliest, if not perhaps the very earliest, collections of photography anywhere in the world. Henry Cole, its first and great founding director, was a photographer himself, and the Museum collected from 1852, the year of its foundation at the South Kensington Museum. The entirety now numbers over 500,000 photographs and counting, in the widest definition of the medium. The Cecil Beaton archive of his royal portraits was bequeathed to the Victoria and Albert Museum in1987, and contains 18,000 vintage prints, negatives and transparencies, and is one of the largest holdings devoted to a single photographer in the museum.
In recent years there have not only been major photography exhibitions but a series of major publications on photography and the opening of new galleries devoted to the art; moreover the exemplary Prints and Drawings Study Room mean that interested members of the public (you do not have to have scholarly credentials) can make appointments to see photographs not on display. The V &A also contains the national collection of fashion, and vast theatre collections, and indeed Beaton himself curated a groundbreaking exhibition of fashion for the museum in 1971. It is in this context that both publication and exhibition are set. It is partly Beaton as the polymath, a designer of theatrical sets and costumes - and a prolific diarist and gossip - that makes his subtly dramatic and overtly romantic depictions of the royal family in general - he had a particular affinity with the Queen Mother - and the Queen in particular. After all, the Queen has spent all her life when in the public eye in costume of one sort or another; whether in uniform as a young woman in World War II, or sitting on her throne, crowned in her coronation robes and holding orb and scepter in 1953, then televised to the nation, to opening the sessions of Parliament with the Queen’s Speech to the fascinating peculiarities the wardrobe for public visits -- suits, and dresses with accompanying and large colour co-ordinated hats, styled as cloth crowns which frame rather than obscure her face -- to the ballgowns worn for state banquets, replete with jewels and tiaras. Sir Roy Strong, director of the National Portrait Gallery and initiator of a Cecil Beaton exhibition there which put both the photographer and the NPG prominently into the public eye, and subsequently director of the Victoria and Albert, and a clear eyed friend of Beaton, states in his introduction that Beaton saved the monarchy after the debacle of the abdication of Edward VIII, with his enchanted imagery. It is also chronologically true that his royal photographs coincided with the last period that the monarchy was nearly untouchable in its secure place in both the public’s respect and affection. Beaton’s photographs we are told are not only among the most widely published of any 20th century photographs, but indeed were “intrinsic to shaping the monarchy’s image from the 1930s to the 1960s.” (9) He began by photographing the Queen, later the Queen Mother, in 1939. His unexpected and superb rapport with this Queen Elizabeth, the Royal Consort to George VI, was the springboard for Beaton’s royal career; he transformed his first royal subject from a charming matron to “a glamorous fairy queen.” (22) and went on to photograph almost 30 members of the extended Royal Family (and was often quite rude in his diaries which eventually have emerged in nearly unexpurgated versions. [13] Beaton first photographed the present Queen in 1942, when she was 16.
The sheer accumulation of images of Queen Elizabeth II is unprecedented, for two reasons: the length of her reign, and the proliferation of the mass media. The painted portrait has not served Her Majesty anything like as well as the photograph Paintings have mostly been excruciatingly dull, even barely competent, commissioned by endless military regiments and civil organizations, the hundreds of charities of which the Queen is patron and the like. But they have included the surprisingly memorable full length of a cloaked and melancholy Queen by Pietro Annigoni, although Beaton’s photographs of the Queen in related poses are in fact even more powerful, and an oddly disagreeable and tiny recent portrait by Lucian Freud.
The Beaton photographs, carefully retouched, are indeed from an enchanted realm. Even those which cleverly almost seem like family portraiture, inducing both sympathy and empathy, such as the that of the Queen holding the baby Prince Andrew close, almost hugging, require a slight suspension of disbelief: most mothers even half a century ago are not fully made up and bejeweled without a hair out of place in such intimate circumstances. But there is many a photograph which simply make the Queen look both friendly and approachable in an upper class way, as well as romanticized set tableaux in which costume and sweetly solemn gaze come together to enhance an unthreatening but dignified view of queenship. There are other casts of characters: the four children, the Duke of Edinburgh, the matronly Queen Mother, and various attendants from pages to Maids of Honour. What amplifies the publication beyond just a picture book is a succinct biography which elegantly sets out Beaton’s social aspirations, wit, social climbing, and the milieu of the bright young things in which he initially flourished; his vanity, his ambition, his hard work, and even his stage fright before each royal commission are frankly revealed. Beaton became the successful society photographer that Society employed and society admired. What is also of interest in the pre digital age are the reproductions of contact sheets, the results of hours of posing on the part of the royal subjects, with hard and intelligent choices to be made of the ‘right’ image.
The author describes Beaton’s intelligent and appreciative deployment of atmosphere and actual poses used in the portraits of such painters as Gainsborough and Winterhalter, and finally the growing informality again carefully controlled, through the 1960s. Props and painted backdrops were utilized, settings constantly rearranged. He consciously also sought originality. Beatons became recognizable, as recognizable in their way as their painted predecessors.
The result, as the author reminds us is a corpus of royal photography which is a powerful combination of humanity and splendor, which defined royalty successfully for decades. And it was extraordinarily important in World War II, reaching out as newspapers remarked, to the Great British Family worldwide.
We are given some sense of how the photographs were used, given as gifts to family, heads of state, sent to official buildings, published in newspapers: Princess Elizabeth in uniform as the Colonel of the Grenadier Guards graced the cover of Life in 1943.
Like so many photography books, this a hybrid, in part a scholarly investigation, and in part a picture album, but Susannah Brown’s stimulating essay reminds us of the intensely hard work and imagination that goes into the creation of memorable and emotionally telling imagery. Photographs, like painting to paraphrase Delacroix’ resonant aphorism, also lie to tell the truth. Beaton may well have been the most successful practitioner of public relations that the 20th century Royals ever employed.
2012 is Cecil Beaton’s year as Cecil Beaton: the War Years when he was an official war photographer, and a surprisingly gritty practitioner too, for the Ministry of Information will be on view at the Imperial War Museum (6 September 2012-5 May 2013) accompanied by a major publication.
Marina Vaizey, based in London, was an art critic for The Financial Times, and subsequently the art critic for The Sunday Times. She edited The Art Quarterly and Review for The Art Fund and for some years administered The Mitchell Prize. Her books include The Artist as Photographer, and she has written for a variety of publications, most recently, The Burlington. marina@vaizey.demon.co.uk
The Sacred Image in the Age of Art by Marcia B. Hall. New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-300-16967-6. 352 pages.
Reviewed by Anne Proctor
In her beautifully illustrated book The Sacred Image in the Age of Art, Marcia B. Hall continues her important work on the relationship between sixteenth-century artistic production and contemporaneous calls for reform within the Catholic Church. While the text focuses on painting in Italy and Spain, it poses questions about artistic practice adaptable to the sixteenth-century painting practice in Britain and throughout Europe. Hall points to the coinciding dates of the establishment of the Florentine Accademia del Disegno and the conclusion of the Council of Trent as a potential source of tension for painters. Just as artists sought to raise their intellectual status through membership in an academy, the Council of Trent required them to meet potentially confining standards for devotional paintings. The book addresses the stylistic innovations of five painters who created sacred images that conformed to these new requirements: Titian, Tintoretto, Barocci, El Greco, and Caravaggio. It asserts that these painters did not respond directly to Trent. Rather, their emotionally engaging styles met goals for devotional painting set by the Tridentine council and clarified at the end of the sixteenth century. Although the text focuses specifically on Catholic territories, its discussion of style as an affective tool and concise summary of the dialogue about the reform of art frame important questions for historians of sixteenth-century European and British art.
The Sacred Image in the Age of Art traces the development of affective sacred paintings within the broader context of the Church’s evolving expectations of sacred images. As early as the 1540s, Catholic treatise writers and theologians described certain images, such as Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, as indecorous and inappropriate for devotional purposes. The text suggests that painters over-compensated in response to these critiques, creating images that were didactically clear but emotionally uninspiring. In its last meetings of 1563, the Council of Trent established the purpose of devotional images as both didactic and affective, emphasizing the importance of narrative clarity to guide but not mislead the uneducated. Exactly what this meant in terms of painting practice and the responsibilities of painters, patrons, and clergy, however, continued to shift through the remainder of the sixteenth century. Only in the 1580s did tension about appropriate imagery ease into a more codified set of expectations as Catholic treatises increasingly emphasized emotional resonance over polemical or pedagogical content.
In the first half of the book, Hall presents the development of Italian devotional painting from the early fifteenth century through the mid-sixteenth century. As she discusses painters’ strategies to maintain distance between the viewing audience and sacred subject matter, Hall introduces the concept of “making strange,” drawn from the literature of contemporary theorists Viktor Shklovsky and, more recently, Carlo Ginsburg. She argues that artists marked the boundaries between earthly and divine realms by calling viewers’ attention to the strange and the surprising, such as the idealization of figures by Leonardo and Raphael, or the unexpected color choices of Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino. The text pairs this survey of devotional painting with a discussion of doctrinal reform throughout Europe in the wake of the Reformation, and presents a wide array of sixteenth-century writings about images to outline the major points of contention argued by both Catholic clergy and Protestant reformers. The breadth of this evidence leads to brief discussions of complicated theological debates, yet Chapter 3, “Interpreting and Narrating the Sacred Image,” presents a useful summary of dissenting voices on both sides of the Alps. These theories of the image’s role, fervently contested in Britain as well, shaped painting production in all genres and shifted painters’ practice throughout Europe. The text best negotiates these divergent theories in its focused treatment of the conception, execution, and shifting reaction to Michelangelo’s fresco of the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel.
The second half of the book consists of five monographic studies of painters whose styles were particularly suited to late-sixteenth century calls for affective devotional images. As the text acknowledges, all four successive painters owe certain aspects of their stylistic innovation and modes of “making strange” to Titian, the first artist she discusses. Hall approaches each painter by treating their material practice as key to their success and the text covers the qualities of their oil paint, their preparation of the canvas, their brushwork, and their changing interpretations of naturalism. Through material practice, she argues, these artists achieved individual styles to enthrall their viewers and to encourage devotional looking. Titian’s painterly brushwork requires an engaged viewer and his depiction of emotion evokes emotional response. Tintoretto’s theatrically foreshortened spaces and “transcendent” application of paint overwhelm the viewer. Barocci’s luminous color and sfumato spiritually elevate viewers, encouraging their eyes to “scan and fixate” across the canvas as an entry to spiritual meditation. After working in Rome and Florence, El Greco painted scenes of the miraculous, full of acute angles, abstraction, and emotional immediacy for the clergy of Toledo. Hall’s history of the affective altarpiece culminates in Caravaggio’s theatrically lit compositions, populated with the popolo, citizens pulled into his paintings from the streets of contemporary Rome. The book argues that each of these ways of “making strange” engages viewers through emotional connection to the subject matter. To engage her own audience, Hall draws connections to twentieth-century artists through terminology about visual experience such as “scan versus fixate,” which she relates to the experience of viewing Jackson Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm.
The affective altarpiece captivates Hall’s imagination, and she encourages readers to share her fascination with some of her favorite objects. The book suggests that the tension between intellectually independent artists and the post-Tridentine requirements for devotional painting were resolved through stylistic individualism. By focusing on exceptional artists, the second half of the text crafts a narrative of unusual responses to Tridentine reforms rather than a comprehensive survey of late-sixteenth century devotional painting. The questions posed by The Sacred Image in the Age of Art are significant, weighty, and worth considering for all areas of Europe engaged in religious reform during the sixteenth century.
Historians of British art will find little in this text that relates geographically to the practice of painting in the British Isles. However, as evident in contemporaneous English publications on the lives of the Medici and the popes, translations of Machiavelli, and William Thomas’s Historie of Italie, sixteenth-century Britain paid close attention to the political, cultural, and religious changes in continental Europe and particularly to those in Italy. Beyond mere interest in the affairs of Italy, the role of images in religious reform and the impact of reform on the practice of painting are questions to be posed of art produced throughout Europe. While Hall’s book focuses on artists whose practice was shaped by reform in Catholic areas, artists in Britain experienced drastic changes in their practice due both to Protestant iconoclasm and the increasing celebration of portraiture. Addressing the larger European context falls beyond the goals that Hall has set for her text, but The Sacred Image in the Age of Art nonetheless contributes to the larger European project of reconstructing patterns of painters’ responses to reform.
Anne Proctor is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas at Austin, studying with Louis A. Waldman. She focuses on the ways artists constructed, performed, and made visible their professional identities during the Italian Renaissance. Her dissertation, “Vincenzo Danti at the Medici Court: Constructing Professional Identity in Late Renaissance Florence,” brings attention to this under-studied artist while using his career as an opportunity to examine his social, intellectual, and professional networks. anne.e.proctor@
The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World edited by Mark Antcliffe and Vivien Greene. Published on the occasion of the exhibition organized by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, 30 September 2010 - 2 Jan. 2011, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 29 January - 15 May 2011, and Tate Britain, London, 14 June - 4 September 2011. London, Tate Publishing, 2010; New York, distributed in the United States and Canada by Harry N. Abrams, 2010. ISBN 978-1-854-37885-9. 192 pages.
Reviewed by Antoine Capet
Although this was no doubt a most valuable exhibition, we will start with a negative comment. Even in Britain the word ‘Vorticists’ has to be explained, for outside the narrow circle of specialists of the movement few people must know where it actually comes from, apart from the fact that it is attributed to the poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972) – and above all what he had in mind when forging it.
Now, whether in the Press release, in the small booklet given to visitors or in the introductory wall text in the first room of the exhibition, we were only given inadequate, fragmentary information (‘The term Vorticism was first coined by the American poet Ezra Pound in early 1914’). It is only when one was plunged in the Exhibition, in one of its central rooms, that one discovered in a showcase an open copy of Blast in which Pound writes: ‘The vortex is the point of maximum energy. [...] The vorticist relies on this alone; on the primary pigment of his art, nothing else’. [14] Admittedly part of this quotation is also given in the catalogue – but I did not see anyone with it in the rooms.
In other words, a large part of the interest of the visit was lost in the first rooms, since one did not bear in mind this crucial idea of the concentration of an energy which the art of the Vorticists wanted to circumscribe, domesticate, liberate by making it burst out – in this early 20th century one could not help thinking of nuclear energy (Sir Ernest Rutherford discovered the atomic nucleus in 1911, as a mural Chronology reminds us in the entrance hall). The invaluable catalogue, in its “Introduction” by Philip Rylands, [15] specifies why precisely this ambition defined the Vorticist movement vis-à-vis its British contemporaries: [16]
This degree of conceptual grounding in the spirit of a new age, comparable to but radically different from the Futurists’ campaign, distinguishes Vorticism both from the elitist aestheticism of Bloomsbury and from the lower-middle-class realism of the Camden Town painters. [17]
The curators, Mark Antliff of the Nasher Museum of Art and Vivien Greene, of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of New York, had the excellent idea of hanging in the entrance hall, before one entered the first room, an ‘anachronic’ painting (since it was produced in 1961-1962) – but by an original member of the Vorticist movement, William Roberts (1895-1980): The Vorticists at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel: Spring, 1915, [18] an excellent piece of collective portraiture in which one can see famous (Wyndham Lewis, [19] Ezra Pound, William Roberts, Edward Wadsworth) or less well known members (Jessica Dismorr, Frederick Etchells, Cuthbert Hamilton, Helen Saunders) of the movement, which as always had gravitating around it a number of artists who, though not officially part of it, very largely shared its views.
The best example is that of Jacob Epstein, whose impressive work of 1913-1915 (now lost but reconstructed in 1973), Rock Drill, [20] immediately confronted the visitor who passed the entrance door. When one only sees photographs of it, one might think that the lower metal part is the flared end of the barrel of a heavy machine-gun. It becomes clear that this is not the case when one closely examines the whole construction: it is a solid steel rod whose end forms four thick blades designed to break the coal face. Of course the trompe l’oeil effect, the confusion with a weapon of war, are more than deliberate on Epstein’s part – just like the phallic analogy, which must not have failed, as was his intention, to shock the bourgeois of the time. Further into the exhibition, little remained of this outlandish coal-miner: he had lost the fine machine which multiplied his macho manly power – and even worse, as an adumbration of the mutilation in the trenches, he had lost an arm and both legs. Only a Torso remained: this is the name of the new work. [21] His progeny was still visible in his open entrails, but one wondered what future it could expect.
In the next room, the visitor’s gaze was also directly attracted to the prominent piece, a large bust of Ezra Pound in marble, Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound (1914), [22] by a Frenchman who had joined the movement in a circuitous way, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891-1915). This famous sculpture has a peculiarity which can only be appreciated when actually seen in its three dimensions: the work is ‘reversible’ in that viewed from the back it represents a perfect erect phallus. Not unexpectedly prudish critics of the time denounced it as ‘entirely pornographic’. Ezra Pound had apparently asked him for a ‘virile’ treatment of the commission – and he was therefore heard beyond expectation.
Gaudier-Brzeska was also featured elsewhere in the Exhibition on two accounts: with his Red Stone Dancer (c. 1913), [23] whose ‘primitive’ inspiration is obvious, and in the showcase devoted to Blast no.2, which contained both gung-ho patriotic pages written by this former draft-dodger under the title ‘Vortex Great Britain – Written from the trenches’ and an announcement by the editors entitled in French ‘Mort pour la patrie’, with a very short obituary of him in English: ‘Killed in a charge at Neuville St. Vaast, on June 5th 1915’.
Gaudier-Brzeska’s conversion to the militarist cause was not discussed in the Exhibition – neither was the later pro-Fascist orientation of Wyndham Lewis (1882-1957), who had more works featured than any other Vorticist or sympathizer. The mechanist cult of energy is not far from that of force. One immediately perceives one of the causes for the dislocation of the movement as early as 1915, with Epstein quickly and unambiguously turning away from that form of worship, while Wyndham Lewis embraced it with increasing gusto until the late 1930s, going as far as to write a book in admiration of Hitler (which was not mentioned in the Tate’s wall notices, though many visitors must not have been aware of this).
Two major paintings by Wyndham Lewis were shown: Workshop (c. 1914-1915) [24] and The Crowd (same period) [25] which, the Catalogue tells us, was probably exhibited initially under the title Democratic Composition – not an indifferent choice when the future evolution of its author is borne in mind. In that picture, the French tricolor flag is understood to express the manipulation of the masses by the Republic, while the red flag remarkably anticipates their revolt two years later in Russia. In the last room, devoted to the Vorticist Exhibition at the New York Penguin Club inaugurated in January 1917 (the second and last collective exhibition of the movement) thanks to the efforts of the collector and sponsor John Quinn, there was also an excellent display of works on paper by Wyndham Lewis. We will only mention one: Composition (1913) [26] which, though preceding the official foundation of the movement (generally associated with the first exhibition, in June-July 1915 at the London Doré Gallery), nevertheless possesses all the characteristics which were to be found in it.
Of course, it is the cover designed for Blast no.2 (issued in June 1915) which probably remains Wyndham Lewis’s best known paper picture. [27] It is interesting to note in this connection that the Vorticists’ drawings which stood out in the Exhibition were those which have no added color – gouache or watercolor. This held especially true for the attractive set of small woodcuts (1913-1916) by Edward Wadsworth (1889-1949) displayed in the Penguin Club room – of which one could single out Typhoon, Newcastle, [28] Yorkshire Village and View of a Town. [29] But it was also the case for artists whose color works leave the viewer cold, while they come into their own in black and white: Frederick Etchells (1886-1973) excels himself in The (English) Comedian of 1914-1915, Helen Saunders (1885-1963) in Island of Laputa (inspired by Gulliver’s Travels).
It is clear that the Exhibition was dominated by three of the major figures in the British art world of these years: Wyndham Lewis, who remains in most people’s minds as the unofficial leader of the movement; Gaudier-Brzeska, who left us too early – at 23 – to enable us to extrapolate on what he might have had in store for us; and Epstein, on the margins of the movement, whose triple set of 1913 Female Figure, [30] Female Figure in Flenite, [31] Flenite Relief , [32] along with Birth (1913-1914), were reunited in the exhibition.
On top of the Vorticists’ works shown at the New York Penguin Club in 1917, the last (large) room also allowed the visitor to discover (which must have been the case for the vast majority of the public) or rediscover the ‘vortographs’ of the American Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882-1966), a pioneer of ‘abstract’ experiments with photography. His technique of the diffraction of the image by means of his ‘Vortoscope’ had an uncanny appeal for the visitors of 2011: it is clear however from the wall texts which give indications on his works that they produced little enthusiasm among his contemporaries, except his friend Ezra Pound, whose portrait [33] he tackled with his ‘Vortoscope’ on several occasions in 1917.
Bibliophiles and amateurs of ephemera were not forgotten, with naturally numerous copies of Blast opened to show the pages which the curators believed to be the most representative, but also a wide and very interesting selection of pamphlets, books, press articles, exhibition announcements, invitations and posters connected with the movement.
All in all we had to do with a very attractive exhibition of manageable size (just over one hundred exhibits) which no doubt opened the visitors’ eyes to many little-explored facets of its chosen theme, on which it commendably concentrated.
Antoine Capet is a Professor of British Studies at the University of Rouen. In addition to his other publications, including that he is the ‘Britain since 1914’ Section Editor of the Royal Historical Society Bibliography and sits on the Editorial Committee of Twentieth Century British History, he has written many reviews for the Historians of British Art Newsletter and he publishes reviews regularly in Cercles and for both the H-Museum and H-Albion sections of H-Net. antoine.capet@univ-rouen.fr
Calls: conferences, fellowships, publications
Compiled by Jessica Ingle
Abstracts due December 30, 2011 'Representations of Scottish Authority to 1603: Intentions & Use'
What use is it to be given authority over man and land if others don’t know about it? Furthermore, what use is that authority if those who know about it do not respect it? These questions have been crucial since regulations for governance entered society. In the years prior to 1603 Scotland developed a unique relationship between the people and its manifests of authority. Whether it be crown or noble, government or church, burgh or merchant; these individuals and groups all created their own methods and modes of projecting authority designed to speak to, and subconsciously tailored by, their intended audience. Following our first successful workshop, which opened the discourse primarily from a noble and royal aspect, the aim of this second workshop is to continue and widen this debate on the purposes and methods used to present authority by these key individuals and institutions in Scotland before the union of the crowns in 1603.
Key-note Speaker: Professor Richard Fawcett, University of St. Andrews
We would welcome 200 word proposals for 20 minute papers, from any discipline and any research level, considering the above topic to reach us by FRIDAY 30h Dec 2011.
This is a postgraduate organised event and, with the assistance of the Strathmartine Trust, we hope to offer a number of small travel bursaries to Postgraduate students who speak at this event. Please contact Kate Buchanan katherine.buchanan@stir.ac.uk OR Lucy Dean l.h.dean@stir.ac.uk for further information and/or to submit proposals.
Abstracts due December 31, 2011 Call for book proposals for British Art: Global Contexts series
Ashgate Publishing Company
Book proposals are welcomed for Ashgate's British Art: Global Contexts series, edited by Jason Edwards, University of York; Sarah Monks, University of East Anglia; and Sarah Victoria Turner, University of York. The series provides a forum for the study of British art, design, and visual culture in the global context from 1700 to the present. Books to be published will include monographs, thematic studies, and edited collections of essays, specializing in studies of British Art within comparative and interdisciplinary frameworks. For more information, please visit Default.aspx?page=3503.
Please send letters of inquiry or full proposals to Meredith Norwich, Commissioning Editor for Visual Studies, mnorwich@, AND Jason Edwards, je7@york.ac.uk; Sarah Monks, s.monks@uea.ac.uk; and Sarah Victoria Turner, svt500@york.ac.uk.
Dr. C. Clausius, Ph.D Dr. John W. Cordes Ph.D.
Managing Editor: KronoScope: Assistant Professor
Associate Professor Communication Department
Department of Modern Languages Cabrini College
King's University College Radnor, PA 19087 U.S.A.
The University of Western Ontario Tel.610-902-8344
Tel. (519) 433-0041, ext. 4425 cordesj51@
Fax. (519) 433-0353
Applications due January 1, 2012 American Society for 18th Century Studies Graduate Student Research Paper Award
Recognizes the pioneering research contributions of the next generation of scholars of eighteenth-century studies, this $200 award will recognize an outstanding research essay of 15-30 pages, which has not been previously published.
Four (4) copies of the submission as well as a letter of endorsement from a mentoring professor, which outlines the originality and contributions that the essay makes to the field of eighteenth-century studies. The deadline for applications is January 1, 2012 and the announcement of the winner will be made at the annual meeting.
Proposals due January 1, 2012 Audience in the Middle Ages
29th Annual New England Medieval Studies Consortium Graduate Student Conference:
“Audience in the Middle Ages”
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Yale University
Abstracts from graduate students are now being accepted for the 29th annual New England Medieval Studies Consortium Graduate Student Conference, to be held at
Yale University on Saturday, March 31st, 2012. The theme will be “Audience in the Middle Ages.” The organizers hope that this broad heading will elicit proposals for papers from all disciplines of medieval studies. Among many potential areas of focus are performance; orality; spectacle and spectatorship; transmission and circulation; decrees, bulls, charters, and other public documents; drama; liturgy and sacred music; sermons, lectures, and disputation; reception history; and coteries. Further, we look forward to receiving proposals that take more theoretical approaches to ideas of audience in the medieval period. We also welcome investigations of the post-medieval reception of medieval life and thought. The conference will feature a plenary lecture by Elaine Treharne, Professor of English at Florida State University. Professor Treharne is the author of Living Through Conquest: The Politics of Early English, 1020-1220 (Oxford, forthcoming), Rewriting Old English in the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, 2006) and Textual Cultures: Cultural Texts (Boydell and Brewer, 2010), among many others.
Papers are to be no more than twenty minutes in length and read in English. Abstracts of up to 250 words should be sent by e-mail to audience.yale@, or a hard copy may be mailed to:
Audience in the Middle Ages
c/o Joseph Stadolnik, Department of English
Yale University
P.O. Box 208302
New Haven, CT 06520-8302
The deadline for submissions is January 1, 2012. Graduate students whose abstracts are selected for the conference will have the opportunity to submit their paper in its entirety for consideration for the Alison Goddard Elliott Award.
Proposals due January 1, 2012 E. A. Freeman: The Life and Times of a Victorian Intellectual
E. A. Freeman: The Life and Times of a Victorian Intellectual
21 June 2012 - 23 June 2012
'History is past politics, politics is present history'.
Edward Augustus Freeman's activities as a scholar are widely acknowledged for having helped establish the study of medieval history on a professional footing. As his most cited remark indicates, however, for Freeman past and present were interlaced. The past afforded antecedents, but it also awoke analogies that caused "then" and "now" to collapse into a single impulse or moment. Freeman's frequent interventions in the current affairs of his day did not represent so many digressions from "scientific" research into history; they were implicit in that endeavour.
The convenors have joined forces with the John Rylands Library, keepers of Freeman's archive, to organize a three-day conference based at Gladstone's Library, Hawarden - a shrine to another eminent Victorian, one with whom Freeman tussled on questions of foreign and imperial policy. Freeman considered becoming an architect and wrote the first history of world architecture published in English before he turned his attentions to medieval history. It is appropriate, therefore, that this conference should take place in two fine Gothic Revival institutions, and include architectural history within its remit.
The overall aim is to bring medieval historians, architectural historians as well as historians of Victorian politics and culture together, to consider Freeman and his legacy as a whole and to place his life and work in the context of High Victorian ideas of empire, race and science (in its broadest sense, from the science of Ecclesiology to the science of evolution). In addition to enjoying lively discussion in a collegiate setting delegates will have the opportunity to view displays of archival material, including material relating to Freeman, Gladstone and Sir Stephen Glynne (1807-1874), this last a pillar of the Ecclesiological Society. The convenors are eager to hear from scholars interested in delivering a paper. Among the topics which suggest themselves are:
▪ Interpretations of the Norman Conquest
▪ The Cambridge Camden and Oxford Architectural Societies
▪ The Gothic Revival
▪ Constitutional theory and federalism
▪ Race and empire
▪ Freeman and his contemporaries
▪ The "Eastern Question" in High Victorian Britain
▪ Ideas of "development" and evolutionary change
Organiser(s): Dr Alex Bremner (University of Edinburgh) and Dr Jonathan Conlin (University of Southampton)
Event Location: The Gladstone Library, Church Lane, Hawarden CH5 3DF UK
Dr Jonathan Conlin
j.conlin@soton.ac.uk
School of Humanities (History) Avenue Campus 65/2073
University of Southampton
Highfield Southampton SO17 1BF
Dr Alex Bremner
alex.bremner@ed.ac.uk
University of Edinburgh Room 4.09, Minto House
20 Chambers Street, Edinburgh EH1 1JZ
Abstracts due January 2, 2012 International Conference on Welsh Studies
The NAASWCH Program Committee seeks diverse perspectives on Wales and Welsh culture – as well as proposals focused on the Welsh in North America – from many disciplines including history, literature, languages, art, social sciences, political science, philosophy, music, and religion.
NAASWCH invites participation from academics, postgraduate/graduate students and independent scholars from North America, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere. Those wishing to present a paper suitable for a 20-minute reading may submit an abstract (maximum one-page). Proposals for thematic sessions, panel presentations, or other formats are also welcome.
Please include a brief (one-page) c.v. with your abstract submission. The abstract-proposal deadline is 2 January 2012 but early proposals are encouraged. Participants will be notified by mid-February. E-mail submissions are welcome and will be acknowledged promptly. If you have not received confirmation of your electronic submission within one week, please resend the document.
NAASWCH (The North American Association for the Study of Welsh Culture and History) works to promote scholarship on all aspects of Welsh culture and history; to develop connections between teachers and scholars in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom who are committed to the study of Welsh culture and society, history, language, and literature; to provide an intellectual forum in which scholars and teachers of Welsh culture may share their research and teaching experience, and to provide support for the study of Welsh-North American history and culture.
Professor Tony Brown, School of English, Bangor University, Bangor, LL57 2DG els015@bangor.ac.uk. Dr Andrew Edwards, School of History and Welsh History, Bangor University a.c.edwards@bangor.ac.uk. Email: a.c.edwards@bangor.ac.uk Visit the website at
Abstracts due January 6, 2012
British Art As International Art, 1851-1960
University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK, April 20 - 21, 2012
This graduate conference will address the extent to which the concepts of 'Britishness' and 'the international' overlap in British art between 1851 and 1960, not only in terms of British artists working abroad and non-British artists adopting Britain as a base, but also in less tangible or previously unconsidered ways. We welcome papers from graduate students working in any field who engage with and reflect upon British art as international art. Please send an abstract of up to 300 words to britartinternational@ by 5pm on Friday 6th January. Papers should be no longer than 20 minutes.
More details can be found at
Abstracts due January 7, 2011 Shakespeare on Film and Television
The Shakespeare on Film and Television Area of the Popular Culture Association/ American Culture Association is calling for papers for its national conference. This year the PCA/ACA will meet in Boston, Massachusetts, on Wednesday April 11 through Saturday, April 14, 2012 (after Easter but before the Boston Marathon) at the Boston Marriott Copley Place, 110 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02116. For further information, contact the conference website
We have previously had panels on the following topics and invite new ideas all the time.
▪ What is a Shakespeare Adaptation?
▪ The Future of Shakespeare Adaptations
▪ Translating Shakespeare into Film: Additions and Omissions
▪ Shakespeare and the Genre Film
▪ Shakespearean Auteurs
▪ Shakespeare in Silent Film
▪ Shakespeare biopics (including Anonymous)
▪ Shakespeare in the Global Marketplace
▪ Bollywood Shakespeare
▪ Latino Shakespeare
▪ Sitcom Shakespeare
▪ Animated and cartoon Shakespeares
▪ Shakespeare Retold on British Television
▪ The BBC Television Productions
▪ Slings and Arrows, Shakespeare on Canadian Television
▪ Apocalyptic/Millennial Shakespeare
▪ Twenty-First Century Shakespeare
▪ Metatheatrical Shakespeare: Putting on the Plays
▪ Transgressive Shakespeare
▪ Shakespeare and Technology: does the DVD change everything?
▪ Acting Shakespeare
▪ Shakespeare and Sexuality
▪ Shakespeare’s Families
▪ Shakespeare for the Classroom
Please submit a 250 word proposal and a brief CV by December 22, 2011 to the PCAACA conference website at .
Or through January 7, 2012, you may send your email directly to:
Richard Vela richard.vela@uncp.edu
Area Chair, Shakespeare on Film and Television
English and Theatre Department
The University of North Carolina, Pembroke
Pembroke, NC 28372
Graduate students, faculty who are early in their career and those who are travelling internationally are especially encouraged to check the travel grants section of the conference website as soon as possible,
Abstracts due January 8, 2012 Irish agrarian radicals, c. 1850-1930
Irish agrarian radicals, c. 1850-1930.
Conference at the National Library of Ireland, 22 and 23 March 2012.
22 March 2012 - 23 March 2012
Agrarian issues and the land question have always seemed to dominate discourse in Ireland and the Land movement of the 1870s onwards saw the land and national questions becoming inextricably linked. While there has been an outpouring of works regarding these themes, scant attention has been paid to the role of individuals that made substantive contributions to agrarian radicalism in Ireland. There have been substantial biographical accounts on the likes of James Daly, Charles Stewart Parnell and Michael Davitt, men that played important roles in the land movement from the late 1870s on; but there has been a distinct marginalisation of significant regional personalities that made significant contributions to agrarian issues outside of the metropolis.
As a result of such marginalisation and the need to explore the lives of such individuals, the National Library of Ireland will be hosting a two day conference exploring agrarian radicals in Ireland between 1850 and 1930 on 22 and 23 March 2012. The term 'radical' is loosely defined and papers of twenty minutes duration are especially welcome on various regional and local personalities that may not feature in historiography. Papers are especially welcome from post-graduate students and practitioners of local history and women's history and it is envisaged that a selection of the papers will eventually be published.
Abstracts of 300 words and short author profile should be emailed to Brian Casey at briancasey03@ no later than 8 January 2012
Organiser(s): Brian Casey
Event Location: National Library of Ireland
Kildare Street, Dublin, Ireland
Abstracts due January 9, 2012 81st Anglo-American Conference of Historians: Ancients and Moderns
81st Anglo-American Conference of Historians: Ancients and Moderns
Thursday 5th and Friday 6th July 2012
Senate House, London
With the Olympics upon us in the UK it seems an appropriate moment to think more broadly about the ways in which the classical world resonates in our own times, and how successive epochs of modernity since the Renaissance have situated themselves in relation to the various ancient civilisations. From political theory to aesthetics, across the arts of war and of peace, to concepts of education, family, gender, race and slavery, it is hard to think of a facet of the last millennium which has not been informed by the ancient past and through a range of media, including museums, painting, poetry, film and the built environment. The Institute’s 81st Anglo-American conference seeks to represent the full extent of work on classical receptions, welcoming not only those scholars who work on Roman, Greek and Judaeo-Christian legacies and influences, but also historians of the ancient kingdoms and empires of Asia and pre-Colombian America. Our plenary lecturers include: Paul Cartledge (Cambridge), Constanze Güthenke (Princeton), Mark Lewis (Stanford), Sanjay Subrahmanyam (UCLA) and David Womersley (Oxford).
Proposals for individual papers, panels (of up to three papers and a session chair) and roundtables are invited. Please send a half-page abstract to the IHR Events Officer at AncientsandModerns@lon.ac.uk by 9th January 2012. Acceptance of proposals will be confirmed by 20th January 2012 and the full conference programme published at the end of January. Registrations open on 1st February 2012. For any queries, please contact the IHR Events Office at IHR.Events@sas.ac.uk.
Applications due January 9, 2012 Henry Moore Institute Research Fellowships (2012-2013)
The Henry Moore Institute is a world recognized centre for the study of sculpture in the heart of Leeds. An award-winning exhibitions venue, research centre, library and sculpture archive, the Institute hosts a year-round program of exhibitions, conferences and lectures, as well as developing research and publications, to expand the understanding and scholarship of historical and contemporary sculpture.
The Institute is a part of The Henry Moore Foundation, set up by the sculptor Henry Moore (1898-1986) in 1977 to encourage appreciation of the visual arts, especially sculpture.
Research is central to the activities of the Institute. Through it, we aim to encourage research into sculpture both within our walls and without, acting as a hub to develop communities of research. Each year we offer a number of fellowships, enabling researchers of different backgrounds and disciplines to develop their work at the Institute.
The Henry Moore Institute invites applications for the following fellowship programmes in 2012-2013:
Research Fellowships are intended for artists, scholars and curators, working on historic and contemporary sculpture using the Institute’s library, archive of sculptors’ papers and the collection of Leeds Art Gallery. Up to four fellows will be given the opportunity to spend a month in Leeds to develop their own research. With access to our resources and an on-going dialogue with the Institute staff, fellows are free to pursue their own interests in a supportive and stimulating environment.
Senior Fellowships are intended to give established scholars (working on any aspect of sculpture) time and space to develop a research project free from their usual work commitments. Up to two senior fellowships, for periods of between four to six weeks will be offered.
Both fellowships provide accommodation, travel expenses and a per diem. The Institute offers the possibility of presenting finished research in published form, as a seminar, or as a small exhibition.
For more information on the Henry Moore Institute research fellowships visit:
For further information or to apply for a fellowship contact:
Kirstie Gregory – Research Programme Assistant
Henry Moore Institute, The Headrow, Leeds LS1 3AH.
T: + 44 (0) 113 246 7467
E: kirstie@henry-
To apply for either fellowship send a letter of application, a proposal and a CV by 9 January 2012
Abstracts due January 12, 2012 Land and Sea in the Early Middle Ages
Australian Early Medieval Association Eighth Conference
Friday 27 to Saturday 28 April 2012
School of History, Philosophy, Religion, and Classics - University of Queensland
This conference addresses the theme of LAND and SEA in the Early Medieval World, ca. 300-1100. Papers are invited which explore the persistence of contact by sea across coastal and riverine landscapes from Late Antiquity into the Middle Ages, in areas ranging from Ireland to the Levant, Scandinavia to the shores of North Africa.
The early Middle Ages were a dynamic era of seaborne travel which enabled important advances in technology, distributed new religious ideas and laid the foundations of the modern globalized world. Loss of some communications routes and cohesive aspects of ancient civilization happened alongside the expansion of the Vikings or the establishment of the Islamic hajj. Around the shores of the Mediterranean and Black Seas, along the English Channel and down the Red Sea, coastal communities built boats, imported and exported raw materials, manufactured and traded in goods and services and interacted with people across the waters.
Papers on any aspect of the continuing historical, cultural and social impact of trade and travel networks throughout Late Antiquity and into the Middle Ages are invited. Topics of focus could include, for example, travel literature, shipwreck archaeology, piracy, trade routes, fishing or pilgrimage.
Dr Amelia Brown, Email: conference@.au
Visit the website at
Proposals due January 9, 2012 The Reading Early Modern Conference
Early Modern Research Centre, University of Reading Conference in Early Modern Studies, 12-14 July 2012
The Reading Early Modern Conference continues to establish itself as the place where early modernists meet each July for stimulation, conversation and debate. As in previous years, proposals of individual papers and panels are invited on research in any aspect of early modern studies relating to Britain, Europe and the wider world. This year, the plenary speakers are Professor Paul Yachnin (McGill), director of the ‘Making Publics’ project, and Professor John Morrill (Cambridge).
We would welcome proposals for individual papers and panels on any aspect of early modern literature, history, art, music and culture. Panels have been proposed on the following themes and further panels or individual papers are also invited on these topics or any other aspect of early modern studies:
▪ Making publics
▪ Gathered texts: print and manuscript
▪ Politics and Biblical Interpretation
▪ Negotiating early modern women’s writing
▪ Passionate bodies, passionate minds
▪ Prince Henry: role, rite, and rhetoric
Proposals for panels should consist of a minimum of two and a maximum of four papers. Each panel proposal should contain the names of the session chair, the names and affiliations of the speakers and short abstracts (200 word abstracts) of the papers together with email contacts for all participants. A proposal for an individual paper should consist of a 200 word abstract of the paper with brief details of affiliation and career.
Proposals for either papers or panels should be sent by email to the chairman of the Conference Committee, Dr. Chloë Houston, by 9 January 2012,c.houston@reading.ac.uk. Proposals are especially welcome from postgraduates. The conference hopes to make some money available for postgraduate bursaries. Anyone for whom some financial assistance is a sine qua non for their attendance should mention this when submitting their proposal.
Chloe Houston, c.houston@reading.ac.uk
Visit the website at
Applications due January 15, 2012 The Historians of British Art Publication Grant
The Historians of British Art invites applications for its 2012 publication grant. The society will award up to $750 to offset publication costs for a book manuscript in the field of British art or visual culture that has been accepted by a publisher. Applicants must be current members of HBA.
To apply, send a 500-word project description, publication information (name of journal or press and projected publication date), budget, and CV to Renate Dohmen, Prize Committee Chair, HBA, brd4231@louisiana.edu.
Applications due January 15, 2012 The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
Senior Fellowships:
For established scholars in the field of British art to complete a manuscript or book for immediate publication (up to twelve months)
The Paul Mellon Centre Rome Fellowship:
Based at the British School at Rome for scholars working on aspects of the Grand Tour or on Anglo-Italian visual culture (up to four months)
Postdoctoral Fellowships:
To transform doctoral research into publishable form (up to six months)
Junior Fellowships:
For scholars in the advanced stages of doctoral research to pursue further study in the UK (based at The Paul Mellon Centre) or in the USA (based at the Yale Center for British Art) (up to three months)
Educational Programme Grants:
For lectures, symposia, seminars or conferences on British art and architecture download full details and application form
Research Support Grants:
To contribute towards travel and subsistence expenses for scholars engaged in research on the history of British art or architecture
For full details and application forms visit
Proposals due January 20, 2012 Mid-Atlantic Conference on British Studies
Annual Meeting
Plenary Speaker: Seth Koven, Rutgers University
Plenary Book Session on Paul Halliday’s Habeas Corpus: From England to Empire
Pennsylvania State University at Abington
Saturday and Sunday, April 21-22, 2012
The MACBS, an affiliate of the NACBS, the main organization for British Studies in Canada and the United States, seeks participation by scholars in all areas of British Studies. We solicit proposals for panels on Britain, the British Atlantic World, and the British Empire broadly defined. Our interests range from the ancient to the contemporary and we welcome participation by scholars of history, anthropology, literature, art, politics, economics and related fields. Senior faculty, junior faculty, and graduate students are all encouraged to participate.
We will accept complete panel proposals (comment, chair, and three papers) as well as individual paper proposals if they can be integrated into a viable panel. We encourage independent submitters to advertise for additional panelists on H-Net (e.g. H-Albion) or to email the program committee for other suggestions. No participant will be permitted to take part in more than one session, and no more than one proposal will be considered from each applicant.
Proposals should include a brief (no more than 250 words) abstract of the paper and a curriculum vita. Full panel proposals should also include a concise description of the panel’s overall aim and indicate which panel member will serve as the organizer and primary contact.
Please submit proposals via email to:
Kathrin Levitan, Department of History, College of William and Mary, khlevi@wm.edu
and Dan Beaver, Department of History, Pennsylvania State University, dxb28@psu.edu
Applications due January 22, 2012 EVA London 2012
Electronic Visualization and the Arts London 2012
Tuesday 10th July – Thursday 12th July 2012
Venue: British Computer Society, Covent Garden, London WC2E 7HA
eva-
Visualising ideas and concepts in culture, heritage the arts and sciences: digital arts, sound, music, film and animation, 2D and 3D imaging, European projects, archaeology, architecture, social media for museums, heritage and fine art photography, medical visualisation and more
Offers of papers, demonstrations and workshops by 22nd January 2012
A feature of EVA London is its varied session types. We invite proposals of papers, demonstrations, short performances, workshops or panel discussions. Demonstrations and performances will be an important part of this year’s conference. We especially invite papers or presentations on topical subjects, and the newest and cutting edge technologies and applications.
Only a summary of the proposal, on up to one page, is required for selection. This must be submitted electronically according to the instructions on the EVA London website. Proposals may be on any aspect of EVA London's focus on visualisation for arts and culture, heritage and medical science, broadly interpreted. Papers are peer reviewed and may be edited for publication as hard copy and online. Other presentations may be published as summaries or as papers.
If your proposal is a case study, we will be looking for discussions of wider principles or applications using the case study as an example. A few bursaries for EVA London registration fees will again be available if you don't have access to grants.
EVA London's Conference themes will particularly include new and emerging technologies and applications, including but not limited to:
▪ Visualising ideas and concepts
▪ Imaging and images in museums and galleries
▪ Digital performance
▪ Music, sound, film and animation
▪ Medical humanities
▪ Reconstructive archaeology and architecture
▪ Digital and computational art and photography
▪ Visualisation in museums, historic sites and buildings
▪ Immersive environments
▪ Technologies of digitisation
▪ 2D, 3D and high definition imaging
▪ Virtual and augmented worlds
▪ Web 2.0 and 3.0 technologies in art and culture
▪ Digital visualisation of performance and music
Join our mailing list to receive EVA London announcements (only) directly.
Send an email to: listserv@jiscmail.ac.uk.
Subject: leave blank.
Message: SUBSCRIBE EVA-LONDON
EVA London 2012 will be co-sponsored by the Computer Arts Society, a Special Interest Group of the British Computer Society, and by the BCS .
Applications due January 23, 2012 The Lewis Walpole Library Fellowships and Travel Grants for Eighteenth-Century Studies
Fellowships and Travel Grants for Eighteenth-Century Studies
Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, Connecticut
The Lewis Walpole Library, a department of Yale University Library, invites applications to its 2012-2013 fellowship and travel grant program. Scholars undertaking post-doctoral or equivalent research, and doctoral candidates at work on a dissertation, are encouraged to apply.
The deadline for applications is January 23, 2012. For further information, consult:
Abstracts due January 30, 2012 Bedtime Stories - Beds and Bedding in Britain, 1650-1850
This conference is being held as part of a year long celebratory exhibition of beds at bedrooms at Temple Newsam House, following the restoration of the Queen Anne State Bed from Hinton House. The conference brings together both museum professionals and scholars to share insights on historic beds and bedrooms in order to further understanding and inform the interpretation of beds and bedroom interiors.
Leeds Museums and Galleries and the Museum Studies Department of the University of Leeds are issuing a call for papers exploring these areas within a broad date range of 1650 -1850. Topics to consider are:
▪ Conservation or restoration projects related to beds and bedroom interiors
▪ Material culture of the bedroom; waking up, going to sleep, making and cleaning beds and other rituals and practices associated with the bedroom
▪ Interpretation of beds and bedrooms to different audiences within museums and other heritage settings
▪ Upholstery and textiles of the bedroom
▪ Types of beds, nomenclature, materials and construction
▪ The bedroom and its place in relation to other domestic spaces.
Deadline for titles and abstracts (no more than 300 words): 30th January 2012. Please email abstracts to polly.putnam@.uk
Abstracts due January 31, 2012 The London-Irish in the Long Eighteenth Century (1680-1830)
The London-Irish in the Long Eighteenth Century (1680-1830) University of Warwick, 13-14 April 2012 The Irish became an intrinsic part of the London population through the course of the eighteenth century. Whether Catholic and Protestant, professional or plebeian, London provided opportunities for waves of Irish migrants. Irish migrants can of course be found throughout Britain (and Europe) at this time but London offered a burgeoning world capital that embraced all tiers of Irish society. The Irish, from both sides of the religious divide, could be found almost anywhere in London: in its kitchens, drawing rooms, legal chambers, banking houses, theatres, newspaper offices, and courts. Nevertheless robust systematic historical data on these migrants is scarce – such accounts that exist of the Irish Diaspora in pre-1815 London (Denvir, Akenson, and Jackson) are useful but fragmentary and Irish historiography on the Diaspora has generally tended to concentrate on the famine years.
There is work on Irish Catholics in Europe but only recently have more focused accounts of Irish networks operating in London in the eighteenth century begun to emerge. Yet despite the sparse accounts of their activities, there was certainly a strong Irish – Catholic as well as Protestant – presence in London throughout this period. Archbishop King warned that Irish visitors in London ‘converse only in a very sneaking private way with one another’ and this observation suggests a metropolitan space within which the Irish Diaspora could form themselves into tight social and professional networks. The study of such networks would provide a fresh perspective on London in the long eighteenth century. How did such networks form? How did they evolve? To what degree were they inclusive/ exclusive? How did they represent ‘Irishness’ and/or Ireland to London? And how were they received?
This interdisciplinary conference is being organized by David O’Shaughnessy and will be hosted by the Department of English & Comparative Literature, University of Warwick. Papers will be welcomed in all disciplines and from scholars at all stages of their careers. The deadline for 300-word abstracts is 31 January 2011 (londonirish@warwick.ac.uk). Suggested topics might include but are not limited to:
▪ Quantifying the Irish Diaspora (population, migration patterns/routes, births, deaths, baptisms, funerals)
▪ Defining an Irish community/network
▪ Catholic and Protestant communities/networks
▪ Professional Irish (lawyers, bankers, merchants, tutors, physicians, booksellers)
▪ Literary and artistic Irish (theatre, newspapers, literary clubs, artists, Society of Antiquaries, Royal Academy, bookshops)
▪ Laboring Irish (military, servants, sailors, shipwrights, builders)
▪ Religious Irish (places of worship, priests)
▪ Political Irish (clubs, societies, parliament, lobbyists, spies, petitioners, the Irish at court)
▪ Anti-Irish sentiment
▪ Irish language
▪ Riots
▪ Sport
▪ Irish societies and charitable organizations
▪ The Irish on trial (lawyers and criminals)
▪ The rise of the Irish pub (taverns/coffee houses patronised by the Irish)
▪ The Irish ‘ghetto’ (geography of the Irish in London)
▪ Irish elites and their circles (Burke, Goldsmith, Sheridan)
Abstracts due January 31, 2012
Mid-Size City: The Dual Nature of Urban Imagery in Europe during the Long 20th Century
Ghent University, 19-21 April 2012
Urban life and the imageries surrounding it come in many shades and colors. The full spectrum, however, is little explored. Discussions in urban studies over the past two decades have been animated by the polarized attention to metropolitan urbanity, on the one hand, and to urban sprawl, on the other. As yet, the mid-size city seems to be overlooked. Although the mid-size city represents the bulk of cities on the finely grained network of cities on the European continent, its middle of the road urbanity rarely stirs the imagination of the urban commentator.
The upcoming colloquium will address the question of the mid-size city in greater depth by defining it not so much in terms of size, but by focusing on the specificity of the imagery surrounding it, in urbanism as well as in the arts, photography, and literature. We are particularly interested in the ambiguous nature of this imagery, portraying cities that are not metropolitan, and yet, seem to present some of the typically metropolitan functions and qualities. This dual imagery will be approached from a material, a functional, and an experiential angle. This colloquium is organized by the Ghent Urban Studies Team [GUST], an interdisciplinary research team studying the contemporary city and its literary and artistic representations in Western Europe and North America.
Dr. Bruno Notteboom
Ghent University, Faculty of Engineering and Architecture
Phone: + 32 9 264 39 07
Email: bruno.notteboom@ugent.be
Abstracts due January 31, 2012 Political Violence in Interwar Europe
Cardiff University, 19th-21st September 2012
From confrontations during strikes to the street battles of extremist groups, violence was a feature of interwar European politics. As countries entered an age of mass politics, governments searched for ways to integrate their peoples into the political system. Yet violence as a means of political expression and engagement persisted, even in democratic nations. Violent political conflict preceded the establishment of fascist regimes in Italy and Germany, and civil war in Spain. In Eastern Europe, the collapse of empire and the founding of new nation-states gave rise to violent political struggle. In France and Britain, street fighting and rioting raised fears over the breakdown of order in the western democracies. State authorities could respond with force themselves, or implicit approval directed at enemies. Groups that resorted to violence, while embedded in particular national environments, were often part of broader international political phenomenon and organizations such as Communism and Fascism. The development of the ideas and practices of such groups was subject to transfers across national boundaries. Yet most existing histories tend to focus on particular national contexts or countries where extremist governments came to power. Furthermore, accounts take either the left or the right as their subject, but say little about common practices and attitudes.
This conference will examine multiple aspects of interwar European political violence, broadly defined. Were understandings of acceptable conduct common to the left and the right? What rules, explicit and unspoken, governed behavior during violence? What significance did violence have in the daily life of contemporaries? What role did political violence play in democratic societies? Was violence a component of political competition in interwar democratic societies? How was it viewed as a means of political competition? What role did the State play in setting the parameters of political violence? How did violent groups interpret the action of their foreign counterparts? Were aspects of violent cultures transferred across national boundaries?
We invite the submission of twenty-minute papers that explore these questions and others in any European country during the interwar years. Please send a 300 word abstract and one-page CV by email to Chris Millington: millingtoncd@cardiff.ac.uk. The deadline for submissions is 31st January 2012.
Abstracts due February 1, 2012 Between Subaltern and Sahib: Equivocal Encounters across the British World
The British Empire, we are told, was founded on difference – between metropole and periphery, citizen and subject, self and other. This conference aims to contest and complicate these Manichean divides. By embracing the intermediate and indeterminate, we aim to excavate scenarios, stories and forms of subjectivity located in the spaces in between the now well worn binaries of colonizer and colonized, oppressor and oppressed. By seeking out places, people and realms of possibility outside conventional frames of reference, the intention is to instigate fresh conversations around the human encounter with empire – and the manner by which it is told.
Topics to be addressed include the history of specific groups whose race, class or gender inflected their encounter with the colonial mainstream. These might include people of ‘mixed race’, those who have been socially or discursively marginalized and those who encountered the colonial ‘self’ and ‘other’ in ways that diverged from the prescribed colonial ‘norm’ – the deviant, the renegade, the mentally ill. They might also include people who, while cast as members of ‘subject races’, engaged with empire in more complex ways than the binary of victim or resistor suggests – as well as those who moved between categories and locales – the journeyman, the migrant, the imposter.
With its accent on the counter-narrative, the conference also seeks to probe at the ways in which encounters with empire have been constructed and re-told and we encourage proposals that help to displace the ordered trajectory of expansion and contraction, rise and fall. Historians working on all regions of the British imperial world from 1815 to the present day are welcome – as well as those that investigate those oceanic and littoral spaces perhaps most irresistibly ‘in-between’.
Speakers already confirmed include: Harald Fischer-Tiné (Zurich), Kirsten McKenzie (Sydney), Malcolm Campbell (Auckland), Margot Finn (Warwick), Nigel Penn (Cape Town) and Norman Etherington (Western Australia).
To submit a proposal, please email an abstract of up to 300 words and a 1-page CV to equivocal.encounters@ by 1 February 2012. Proposals from postgraduates and early career scholars are particularly welcome. To encourage their participation the registration fee will be waived for post-graduate presenters.
Applications due February 1, 2012 Clark-Huntington Joint Bibliographical Fellowship
Clark-Huntington Joint Bibliographical Fellowship
Eligibility: PhD or equivalent.
Tenure of fellowship: Two months (one month at the William Andrews Clark Library; one month at The Huntington).
Amount of award: $5,000.
For details and application instructions regarding this fellowship only, please contact Dr. Gerald Cloud at gwcloud@humnet.ucla.edu or visit Clark-Huntington Fellowship application.
Applications due February 1, 2012 Daimler Graduate Dissertation Research and Writing Fellowships
The Daimler Graduate Dissertation Research and Writing Fellowships will fund graduate students whose dissertations focus on topics related to Sustainable Transportation, the European Debt Crisis, Western Europe and the EU. Topics should focus on political, historical, economic, social, cultural, and intellectual issues or public policy surrounding these topics. Recipients must be advanced to candidacy and preference will be given to applicants who have finished the bulk of their fieldwork. IES will award fellowships in the amount of $10,000 per annum.
Applications due February 1, 2012 Gerald D. and Norma Feldman Graduate Student Dissertation Fellowship
To honor the memory of history Professor Gerald D. Feldman — particularly his dedication to graduate students, the Institute for European Studies has established the Gerald D. and Norma Feldman Graduate Student Fellowship. In 1994, Gerald Feldman took over the UC Center for German and European Studies, a research center that served the ten campuses of the University of California; in 2000 the Center became part of the newly formed Institute of European Studies. Under his leadership from 1994 to 2006, both the Center and the Institute provided generous funding for students and faculty whose research focused on Europe. The creation of this Fellowship will help sustain the formidable legacy left by the Institute’s former Director.
This fellowship is in the amount of $3,500 and is open to students writing their dissertations on topics related to Europe and the European Union. Topics should focus on political, historical, economic, social, cultural, and intellectual issues, or public policy in contemporary Europe. Recipients must be advanced to candidacy. The fellowship may be used to supplement external grants.
Requirements: Dissertation prospectus including a two-page summary of the prospectus, graduate transcripts, and three letters of recommendation.
Applications due February 1, 2012 The Harry Ransom Center Research Fellowships, 2012-2013
The Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin, annually awards over 50 fellowships to support projects that require substantial on-site use of its collections. The fellowships support research in all areas of the humanities, including literature, photography, film, art, the performing arts, music, and cultural history.
The fellowships range from one to three months, with stipends of $3,000 per month. Also available are $1,200 to $1,700 travel stipends and dissertation fellowships with a $1,500 stipend. The stipends are funded by individual donors and organizations, including the Ransom Center, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Hobby Family Foundation, the Dorot Foundation, the Schusterman Center for Jewish Studies at The University of Texas at Austin, the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and The University of Texas at Austin Office of Graduate Studies.
For further information, consult:
Submissions due February 1, 2012 International Review of Scottish Studies
The editorial team of the International Review of Scottish Studies is now accepting article submissions for our 2012 volume. Submissions may cover any range of topics pertaining to Scottish Studies, including, but not limited to, history, literature, religion, and the Diaspora. Articles should not exceed 8,000 words in length and should conform to the conventions of the Chicago Manual of Style, 16th Edition, with endnotes. Authors should also include a cover letter indicating his/her name, institutional affiliation, contact information (including email address and phone number), and a brief bio. All articles will be peer-reviewed.
Students enrolled in a masters or doctoral program in any discipline of Scottish Studies are encouraged to submit articles for our first annual Scottish Studies Foundation Graduate Publication Award, with a prize of $250 awarded to the graduate student with the best article. All submissions will also be considered for publication in the 2012 volume of the IRSS.
Submissions for the upcoming issue should be submitted electronically as MS Word documents to Jodi Campbell and Caitlin Holton at scottish@uoguelph.ca no later than February 1, 2012.
REQUEST FOR BOOK REVIEWERS
The editorial team is currently expanding our panel of book reviewers. If interested, please send us your name, institutional affiliation, and areas of study. We will contact you when an appropriate book becomes available or you may request a book to review.
Book review information should be sent to scottish@uoguelph.ca.
Jodi Campbell and Caitlin Holton
Assistant Editors, IRSS
Centre for Scottish Studies
University of Guelph
Guelph, ON N1G 2W1
(519)824-4120 ext. 53209
Email: scottish@uoguelph.ca; Visit the website at
Abstracts due February 1, 2012 North American British Music Studies Association (NABMSA) 2012 Conference
NABMSA's fifth conference will once again bring together scholars and lovers of British music from various academic fields and locales for three days of papers, discussions, and musical performances. The 2012 conference will take place from July 25-28 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
The theme of the conference is Anglo-American music and musical relationships, and we are especially interested in papers that explore these connections, such as those on British brass bands in America, British-American folk traditions, and other transatlantic collaborations and influences. We also welcome papers on any topic related to British music and musical life, in all geographical regions of Britain, the Empire, and beyond Britain. Papers that draw upon interdisciplinary or broader cultural contexts are particularly welcome, as are papers on figures or works celebrating important anniversary years in 2012 (e.g., Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Frederick Delius, Tippett’s King Priam).
We also encourage graduate students to submit papers; the best student paper presented at the NABMSA conference will be awarded the Temperley Prize. Abstracts of up to 500 words for 20 minute individual papers, for paper sessions of up to four papers or for lecture recitals lasting 40-50 minutes should be sent by February 1, 2012, to Kendra Leonard, preferably by e-mail to kendraprestonleonard@ or by postal mail to 5216 Oleander Road, Drexel Hill PA 19026, USA. For additional information about the conference, see .
Kendra Preston Leonard, kendraprestonleonard@
Visit the website at
Panel proposals due February 3, 2012
Australia and New Zealand Art Association Annual Conference
“Together Apart”
Sydney Australia, July 12 - 14, 2012
Call for Panel Proposals
Held in the third week of the Biennale of Sydney, TogetherApart will address major debates and issues raised by this year's biennale theme "all our relations." The conference will focus on the very broad idea of relations and relationships as well as allied terms such as collaborations, networks and partnerships. Potential session convenors please send a 300-word session proposal to be sent out to contributors, pre-organised session proposals are also welcome of 3-4 papers.
Email: conf@
The keynote speakers are: Professor Thierry de Duve and Dr Helen Molesworth
Abstracts due February 3, 2012 The Dis-Appearing Non-West
The Dis-Appearing Non-West, a conference at Columbia GSAPP (Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation
May 4th-5th, 2012
Made effective in the Fall of 2006, the National Architecture Accrediting Board (NAAB) put into effect a small but significant revision to the “non-Western studies” requirement. The change asked that students develop an understanding of non-Western cultures as opposed to merely acquiring an awareness of them (as required by the 1998 accreditation conditions). In 2009 the NAAB again revamped the student performance criteria consolidating all history requirements under a single heading. As a requirement originally negatively defined against the “Western” tradition, to which the NAAB and the schools it accredits ostensibly belong, the “non-West” was conceived as sometimes parallel, sometimes divergent, but always other to the “West.” The new requirements, yet to take effect, re-conceive these once separate realms as a single “Global Culture,” though one composed of various historical traditions and national settings from the East, West, North and South.
Is this total re-conception of history in the context of a ‘globalized’ architectural praxis an overdue recognition of marginalized architectural cultures as equally valid, or is it simply an erasure of distinct cultural differences? What new problems does the rubric of “Global Culture” present to the teaching of architecture history in professional schools? For, though the binary distinction of the west/non-west was over-simplified, it did have the potential to produce, however problematically an alternate subjectivity from which the non-west could position itself against the hegemonic cultural practices of the ‘West’. It is precisely at the moment of the disappearance of the “non-West” that we require, more than ever, its critical redress.
If we shift our gaze to a larger institutional setting, “area studies” have developed in various universities in Euro-American countries (the US and the Great Britain in particular) since the beginning of the Cold War, often for politically and economically strategic purposes. Consequently, various programs were established, such as South Asian Studies, Middle Eastern Studies and so on, turning national as well as imposed geopolitical boundaries into seemingly hermetic disciplinary categories. Through this institutional framework, the knowledge of the non-West was tactically built into the “western” discourse. How can we situate the growing zeal of architectural discipline for understanding Non-Western otherness in this historical context?
On the other hand, this conference also seeks out the potentiality of the non-West. If the non-West is already-always imbedded in the western discourse, can this conceptual, geopolitical and pedagogical category of the other in turn provide an immanent critique of (non-) West from within? If so, can we, finally, overcome the West/Non-West binary?
300 word abstracts and a one page CV are due by February 3, 2012 selected papers will be notified by the end of February participants will be expected to submit their completed 2500 word paper by April 13, 2012. Send abstracts and questions to: disappearingnonwest@
Abstracts due February 6, 2012 Writing the West
A conference organised by The Regional History Centre at the University of the West of England, Bristol,
M Shed, Bristol, & The Bristol Festival of Ideas
11 & 12 May 2012
Venue: M-Shed, Prince’s Rd, Bristol
How should we assess the contribution made by the written word to the making of the West Country as an English (or English/Welsh) regional entity? This conference assesses the impact of writing and writers associated with the South West from the earliest records to the twentieth century – sometimes by insiders looking out, and sometimes by outsiders looking in.
The cultural and historical identity of the region has been shaped over the centuries both by imaginative geographies and geographies of record. Early urban histories made much of the historical longevity of the region’s most politically and economically important towns, as evidenced by Toulmin’s Taunton, Ledwich’s Salisbury, Hooker’s Exeter, Barrett’s Bristol or Warner’s Bath. How did historical and antiquarian narratives like these, or those of the region’s earlier ecclesiastical establishments – its great abbeys and other places of learning - contribute to the building of both civic and regional identity in the wider South West? Of course, it might be argued that South Western geographies of the imagination have been more influential in the construction of place than writings of empirical record. Certainly, the written word has played a large part in the historical and literary creation of Alfredian landscapes of national becoming, of the Arthurian landscape in which Leland's 16th century identification of a Somerset Camelot played such a central role, but also in the construction of Hardy's 19th century Wessex.
The South West, we might argue, has not one common regional and literary identity, but many, often perceived in parallel. Through the antiquarian writings of Aubrey and Stukeley, the West became a nexus of the 17th and 18th century revival of interest in Druids, megaliths, and the birth of 'Albion'. Yet it had an equally key role to play in the construction of both the Picturesque and the Romantic, most famously through the literary activities of William Gilpin, Thomas Chatterton, and the Coleridge circle, but also through the work of numerous lesser known poets, dramatists, folklorists, tourists and novelists. And we might consider writers of music as well as of poetry and prose – from worksong, folksong and street music in past centuries to the vibrant regional music scene of the present day.
We invite proposals for 20 minute papers and/or three-paper panel proposals that broadly address the subject of West Country writing, from the Anglo-Saxon period to the modern age, and whether a product of South Western culture or a record of it. Possible areas to consider might include the following, but any other relevant proposals will be equally welcome:
• Writing in medieval Glastonbury and the politics of mythic construction
• The rise of the book, newspaper and print trade
• Writings of forgery and imagination
• West country women writers
• Travel and the West Country Tour
• Chroniclers and annalists
• West Country songs, ballads and music
• The West Country Romantics
• Labouring class writing – from pauper letters to chalked graffiti, working class poetry and the radical press
• The literary West of Hardy, Austen or Jefferies
• West Country diarists and letter writers
• The old West Country in the modern historical novel
Please send 2-300 word proposals, by e-mail attachment, to hc@uwe.ac.uk to arrive not later than Monday February 6th 2012. For further advice and information about the conference, please contact the Director of the Regional History Centre, steve.poole@uwe.ac.uk
Conference to attend on February 11, 2012 Shared Visions: Art, Theatre and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century
Plenary Speaker: Professor Shearer West, Head of Humanities Division, University of Oxford
This one-day conference, held in conjunction with Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, will explore the connections between art, theatre, and visual culture in the nineteenth century. During this period, the ‘art of seeing’ challenged the traditional dominance of the written word. Vision, previously denigrated as deceptive, became considered as a universal language, accessible to all, and more authentic than text. Popular theatre, especially melodrama, led the way in exploring the possibilities of the new visuality. This conference will explore the visual culture of theatre and exchanges between theatre and the visual arts.
Panels will include: Stage Spectacle, History and Narrative, Dramatizing the Environment, Adaptation, The Image of the Actress, The Iconography of Dance, Religion and Ritual, and Violence.
Saturday 11th February 2012
9.30am to 6pm
School of Theatre, Performance and Cultural Policy Studies, Millburn House, Warwick University
For further information on the conference, please contact Patricia Smyth: patricia.smyth@nottingham.ac.uk.
Patricia Smyth
Email: patricia.smyth@nottingham.ac.uk
Visit the website at
Proposals due February 15, 2012 Bodies, Systems, Structures: Masculinities in the UK and the US, 1945 to the Present
Bodies - Systems – Structures: Masculinities in the UK and the US, 1945 to the Present
International Conference at Dresden University
June 13-15, 2012
Organized by Prof. Dr. Stefan Horlacher (Dresden) and Prof. Kevin Floyd (Kent State)
Masculinities are routinely studied in one of two potentially incompatible ways: as exemplifying abstract systems such as patriarchy or kinship; or as concrete, corporeal phenomena. The very term masculinity has hitherto been examined in such a broad range of contexts that it can sometimes appear as a pure abstract form, some kind of configuration or ‘relation‘ practically devoid of any concrete, defining content. We might say the same thing about crisis, a term that seems as persistent as it is exhausted. And even concepts that have become staples of masculinity studies, like hegemony or performativity, seem to be wavering between concrete specificity and theoretical abstraction. This conference will explore masculinity as an idea or a concept that operates across, or at least in relation to, a distance/difference that may or may not be bridgeable: between the systemic and the corporeal, the abstract and the concrete. Thus, this conference will not only encourage scholarly movement in a direction that both builds on recent work in the field of masculinity studies and moves past it toward more comparative kinds of analysis, but it will also explore the relations between different abstract and corporeal, metaphorical and metonymical manifestations of masculinity. With these dilemmas in mind, we invite theoretical, cultural, or literary analyses of masculinities in the US and/or the UK since World War II – a period in which differentiated masculinities proliferate for specifically national and transnational reasons, including global waves of decolonization, changing patterns of migration, the emergence of ‘new‘ subaltern subjects demanding social, cultural, and political recognition, as well as conservative reactions against these developments. We especially encourage papers with comparative and/or transnational emphases. Possible topics might involve (but need not be limited to) any of the following:
▪ Masculinities and/as Systems (which systems – military, symbolic, technological, post- or neocolonial, liberal or neoliberal, political or bio-political – can masculinity embody, exemplify, or perform?)
▪ Masculinities as Bodies – Bodies as Systems – Systems as Bodies
▪ Masculinities and/as Structures (structures of feeling, experience, possibility)
▪ Masculinities and/as Concepts (textual/narrative/discursive, historical/temporal, ethnic/social)
▪ Masculinities and/as Power (hegemony/kinship/relation to the symbolic order)
▪ Masculinities and/as ‘Crises‘ (an exhausted abstraction?)
Please send an abstract of no more than 500 words by February 15th, 2012 to both
Prof. Dr. Stefan Horlacher (stefan.horlacher@mailbox.tu-dresden.de) and Prof. Kevin Floyd (kfloyd@kent.edu).
Proposals due February 15, 2012 British and American Studies 22nd Annual International Conference
22nd Conference on British and American Studies
University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, 20-23 June 2012
Timişoara, Romania, May 17-19, 2012
The English Department of the Faculty of Letters, University of Timisoara, is pleased to announce its 22nd international conference on British and American Studies, which will be held in May 17 - 19, 2012.
Confirmed plenary speakers:
Professor David Crystal, Fellow of the British Academy, honorary professor of linguistics at University of Wales, Bangor and Professor José Igor Prieto Arranz, University of the Balearic Islands
Presentations (20 min) and workshops (60 min) are invited in the following sections:
▪ Language Studies
▪ Translation Studies
▪ Semiotics
▪ British and Commonwealth Literature
▪ American Literature
▪ Cultural Studies
▪ Gender Studies
▪ English Language Teaching
Please submit 60-word abstracts which will be included in the conference programme, to our website: litere.uvt.ro/formular_bas.php or to dr. Reghina Dascăl reghina_dascal@yahoo.co.uk. The deadline for abstracts is February 15, 2012. A selection of papers will be published after the conference in our MLA indexed journals.
Proposals due February 15, 2012 Cultures and Contexts in Ireland’s Diasporas
University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, 20-23 June 2012
The transposed and rediscovered aspects of Irish culture continue to thrive and renew themselves throughout the New World and elsewhere. The interaction of such cultures within a wider spectrum provides the opportunity to discover and celebrate a wider definition of those directions towards which Irish culture overseas is developing. The growing body of literature produced by writers of Irish origin or heritage helps focus attention on the many Irish communities outside of Ireland. In the same way, the social and political history of the Irish in North America provides ample material for our understanding of transposed and renewed ethnicity. For the conference Cultures and Contexts in Ireland’s Diasporas, we invite proposals for papers concerning as widely as possible the various Irish diasporas as reflected in literature, language, history, folk culture, life-writing, gender studies, contemporary popular culture, and new media. We particularly welcome papers that will address aspects of Irish culture in the Francophone communities of Canada, as well as the rich heritage of the Canadian-Irish experience in general. Although all papers reflecting the Irish diasporas of North America are welcome, we also encourage the submission of proposals concerning the Irish in South America and beyond the Anglophone world. The Organizing Committee also welcomes proposals on other Irish-related topics as well as proposals for special panels.
Contact: Paul W. Birt, PhD, Chair of Celtic Studies, Arts Hall,
70, Laurier Avenue East. Room 134
Ottawa, ON Canada K1N 6N5
pwbirt@uottawa.ca
Abstracts due February 15, 2012 Encountering the ‘Exotic’: the collecting, trade and exchange of exotic goods between Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, from the 16th century to 21st century
The encounter between travelers, merchants and explorers and the exchange of the ‘exotic’ acted as a diverse catalyst for cultural practices, innovation, technological change and economic generation. This session will explore the circulation, assimilation and appropriation of exotic and foreign goods as they are transported, translated, collected and exchanged between diverse cultures from the 16th century to the present day. Thinking about ‘exotic’ goods invites us to pay attention to the role and function of the ‘exotic’ in different scales – across national boundaries, countries and cities; and in different spaces – in the public and the private domain – as well as the relationships between the places of consumption and the places of origin. This session aims to explore the influence of the encounter with all kinds of ‘exotic’ goods, from ritual objects, to artworks, from objects for the domestic interior, to technological, scientific and military objects; both newly made objects as well the old and the rare. By taking a broad time frame we hope to better understand the mutations of the exchange, collection, trade, display and production and consumption of ‘exotic’ goods and how these encounters influenced broader transnational and transcultural economic change.
The session aims to explore these exchanges both in terms of the perspective of the Western encounter with the ‘Other’ (the West’s appropriation, adaption and translation of the ‘exotic’), and from the perspective of the ‘Other’s’ encounter with the West (how the encounter impacted upon and stimulated economic activities in Asia, Africa and the Americas). The nature and status of ‘exotic’ goods are multiple and complex, as is the nature and status of the ‘exotic’ as it changed through time and space. In our increasingly complex world of exchange, tourism, and migration, the encounter with ‘exotic’ goods may be decreasing, but as a catalyst for the imagination the ‘exotic’ still has a profound impact upon economic activity and practices. We invite papers to explore these themes and relationships from a wide range of perspectives:
▪ On the marketplace actors – the travelers, explorers, merchants, scientists, artists, curiosity dealers, collectors, soldiers.
▪ On the biographies of the ‘exotic’ objects themselves – ritual objects, domestic and luxury goods such as porcelain and lacquer, new technologies such as clocks and maps.
▪ On the spaces of exchange – market places, auctions, shops.
▪ On the spaces of exhibition and display – institutions such as museums, public exhibitions and galleries, to the display in the domestic interior.
Please send abstracts of no more than 400 words to the session organizers:
Dr Manuel Charpy (CNRS France/University of Lille IRHIS) manuel.charpy@wanadoo.fr and Dr Mark Westgarth (School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, University of Leeds) m.w.westgarth@leeds.ac.uk
Dr Manuel Charpy
IRHIS / CNRS
Université de Lille 3
BP 60 149 - Rue du Barreau
59653 Villeneuve d'Ascq Cedex
manuel.charpy@wanadoo.fr
Dr Mark Westgarth
Lecturer Museum Studies
Programme Director BA Art History with Museum Studies
School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies
University of Leeds LS2 9JT
Email: manuel.charpy@wanadoo.fr
Abstracts due February 15, 2012 Irish History Students' Association Annual Conference
An Cumann Staire and the School of History at NUI Galway are delighted to announce that the 2012 Irish History Students Association (IHSA) Annual Conference will be held at NUI Galway from Friday March 2nd 2012- Sunday March 4th 2012.
This year’s conference will be looking for paper submissions from both undergraduate and postgraduate students on any historical topic or period. Papers may be submitted and presented in Irish or English.
The call for papers will be officially opened on the 15th January 2012. A 200 word abstract and short bio (100 words) will be required.
Please check our website for more up to date information. Information is also available on the IHSA website Here.
E-Mail: 2012ihsa@
Proposals due February 15, 2012 Space and Place in Middlebrow: 1900-1950
Institute of English Studies, University of London, 13-14 September 2012
The parameters and interiors of British middlebrow writing and reading have increasingly received scholarly attention in recent years. Middlebrow writing, in fiction in particular, has been identified in terms of a particular kind of novel, produced by a combination of particular conditions: the writer, the market, the reader, the publisher, the critics, the period, the theme, the setting, and the message. Middlebrow is now understood as a highly complex sociological phenomenon, with boundaries that are almost too flexible. It is getting harder to be able to say: 'this, and not this, is middlebrow', since in a certain sense, middlebrow can be demonstrated to permeate all aspects of creative production and consumption from the early twentieth century. While accepting that definitions are useful, it is important to recognize that a precise definition of the boundaries of 'the middlebrow' may in reality be unhelpful for its exploration. By focusing too fixedly on the interfaces between middlebrow and that which is clearly, or not so clearly, not middlebrow, we lose sight of the fluid nature of the middlebrow state of mind, and of the social and literary contributory conditions that enabled such texts to evolve.
This conference aims to investigate the complex relationship between middlebrow writing and categories of space and place. For the exploration of this topic we seek to encourage discussion along two main trajectories: firstly, we would like to invite participants to consider the spaces and places where middlebrow writing was supported. This includes the social geographies of middlebrow as well as the topography and archaeology of middlebrow production and consumption. We are interested in hearing about research on middlebrow culture that encompasses spaces of refuge, spaces of social power, and spaces of industry and production. We want to hear about loci for writing: areas in a country, a county, a town, a village, even of a building. Where did middlebrow happen?
Secondly, we invite papers that explore the literary representation of place and space in middlebrow writing. Participants are invited to discuss contribution of middlebrow writers to the spatial discourses that harbour the collective's sense of national, cultural and social identity. How do middlebrow writers image the places of gender, ethnicity, and class? What are their strategies for the appropriation of space and place for generating cultural meaning? We are particularly interested to learn about the experience of Empire in the first half of the twentieth century and middlebrow conceptions of home and exile, the country and city, the centre and the margins. How does middlebrow reflect and negotiate the spatial practices of society?
The conference will be organized by Professor Christoph Ehland of the University of Paderborn, Germany, and Dr Kate Macdonald, Ghent University, Belgium. Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be sent to kate.macdonald@skynet.be and cornelia.waechter@uni-padeborn.de by 15 February 2012. Those abstracts selected for presentation will be announced not later than 5 March 2012.
The School of Advanced Study is part of the central University of London. The School takes its responsibility to visitors with special needs very seriously and will endeavour to make reasonable adjustments to its facilities in order to accommodate the needs of such visitors. If you have a particular requirement, please feel free to discuss it confidentially with the organizer in advance of the event taking place.
Enquiries: Jon Millington, Events Officer, Institute of English Studies, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU; tel +44 (0) 207 664 4859; Email jon.millington@sas.ac.uk.
Proposals due February 15, 2012 The Southern Conference on British Studies
The Southern Conference on British Studies
2012 Meeting
Mobile, Alabama
The Southern Conference on British Studies solicits proposals for its 2012 meeting to be held November 2-3, 2012 in Mobile, Alabama. The SCBS will meet in conjunction with the Southern Historical Association at the Renaissance Riverview Plaza Hotel.
The SCBS construes British Studies widely and invites participation by scholars in all areas of British history and culture, including the Empire or Commonwealth and the British Isles. Interdisciplinary approaches and proposals that focus broadly on teaching British studies are especially welcome.
Proposals may consist of individual papers or of papers grouped for a session. For session proposals, two, or, preferably, three papers should relate to a common theme, not necessarily bound by the usual chronological framework.
For each paper proposed, please submit an abstract of 200 to 300 words, indicating the thesis of the paper, the sources and methodology employed in research, and how it enhances or expands knowledge of its subject. Papers should have a reading time of twenty to twenty-five minutes. Also, please submit curriculum vitae for each participant.
Proposals should be postmarked by February 15, 2011 and mailed to:
Dr. William Anthony Hay, Department of History, P.O. Box H, Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, MS 39762. Inquiries are welcome at wilhay6248@ ................
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