The Exchange Perspective from “la Montréalaise”, by Chia-Yi Lin

When I found out that I was nominated for student exchange in the UK, I was ecstatic. As an art historian studying at McGill University in Montreal, I believe there is nothing more exciting than studying an artefact in its original state. That said, Montreal, despite being the second oldest city in all of North America, is still young in terms of its history and the production of art. I felt as if I needed to immerse myself in the seat of Western art and explore its provenance.

The Barber- an impressive exterior

I arrived at the University of Birmingham in the mild British winter of January armed with a luggage full of hope and expectations. I was pleasantly surprised to see how quaint the campus was.

The peaceful river parallel to the train tracks in Birmingham

A very British house!

Let’s not forget the central tower!

I was staying at the Vale which was beautiful but to me seemed slightly out of the way: the twenty minute walk each way to campus was something I was not accustomed to back at home. However, this walk allowed me to catch a glimpse of the neighbourhood and other facilities which the University of Birmingham boasts such as Winterbourne House.

The gorgeous swan of the Vale lake

Shackleton of the Vale

Needless to say, all aspects of this exchange have contributed to my overall experience. So, even before the course lecturer walked in the room on the first day of my course, I had learnt something from my peers. Forgive my bias but I’ve always thought art history students dressed better than those from other departments and it was no different here! Basking in the different sense of fashion and the array of accents, I quickly processed how the small number of students matched the equally small Barber Photograph Room where our lectures and seminars were to be held. This would, however, prove to be advantageous. The large hall back at home suddenly seemed too formal when compared to this intimate setting. In a short period of time, I have reassessed my presentation skills, developed a group friendly work ethic and engaged in this peer-learning environment.

Inside the Barber

Lady Barber’s portrait settled in the foyer to remind us of the purpose of her gift

Let’s rewind to that moment when the course lecturer walked in the room. I immediately felt the difference of approachability in that she prefers to be called by her first name instead of referring to her status of a doctor. I soon realized that all my lecturers were not only specialized in their fields in regards to the artefacts being studied and their histories, but are also fluent in the languages of their context. Their hands-on experience with objects led to the ‘hands on art’ teaching that I was soon pleasantly faced with. The three courses I took were Inside the Gallery, Introduction to Art and Architecture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, and Power, Society, Politics: Religious Art in Northern Europe, c. 1400-1600. These three courses were all very different to each other and at the same time all reflected a different teaching style to Art History at McGill. Inside the Gallery was a practical course where we were evaluated on an exhibition we had to curate. Power, Society, Politics gave me a good survey on English and North European religious art. Lastly, modernism, which was never my forte, was simplified and enriched through Fin-de-Siècle Vienna.

La Montréalaise

Compared to the mediated experience of artefacts on projections and screens, my interior exploded with joy when centuries old manuscripts and documents from an extensive archive were plopped onto my lap during seminars. The fact that I was touching original materials and could actually feel the texture of manuscript pages would not have been possible at home where the closest proximity anyone could get was a nose inch away… from the thick glass encasing. This was not exclusive to the resources of the University’s Barber Institute, but seems to be a feature of the way galleries across Britain present their art objects. It is obvious that the UK is a country that cherishes and preserves its own history. There is no doubt that as an art history student, I am soaking up every inch of this wonderful opportunity.

Journal of Art Historiography, Conference 2013: Negotiating Boundaries – The Plural Fields of Art History

The 2013 conference of the Journal of Art Historiography (which is published by the Art History, Film and Visual Studies Department, University of Birmingham) Negotiating Boundaries – The Plural Fields of Art History is to be held at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham, on 1-2 July 2013.

Keynote Speakers:
Robert Bagley (Princeton University), Styles, Periods and the Life Cycle of the Goblin
Alice Donohue (Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania), History and the Historian of Ancient Art

Speakers: Laura Camille Agoston (Trinity University, San Antonio ), Priyanka Basu (St Norbert College, Wisconsin), Colleen Becker (Columbia University), Laura Breen (University of Westminster), Lesley Brubaker (University of Birmingham), Antoinette Friedenthal (Independent Scholar), Jannis Galanopoulos and Georgia Metaxa (University of Crete and Athens School of Fine Art), Jack Hartnell (The Courtauld Institute of Art, London), Sandy Heslop and Joanne Clarke (Sainsbury Institute for Art, East Anglia), Stefan Muthesius (University of East Anglia), Meredith Nelson-Berry (Brad Graduate Centre, New York), Heike Neumeister (Birmingham City University), Amalia Papaioannou  (Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University).

The formation of art history as a discipline was underpinned by the claim to a special area of expertise which, in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was accompanied by the development of particular concepts and methods, from the formal and spatial analysis of Wölfflin, Riegl or Schmarsow to the iconology of Panofsky. Linked to the emergence of the concept of autonomous art, the establishment of the discipline was achieved by means of certain exclusions; a rigid line of demarcation was drawn between art history and archaeology, aesthetic judgments were deemed irrelevant and, in a mirroring of Kantian thought, the decorative and applied arts became the objects of a separate, less prestigious, domain of inquiry.

For all the recent talk of interdisciplinarity, these exclusions still shape the terrain of scholarship, producing numerous incongruities. Art historians still seldom discuss the applied arts, while in the Anglophone world architectural history remains a separate subject (with its own professional and discursive institutions). Prehistoric art and the art of the classical worlds are still topics mostly of interest for archaeologists rather than art historians, while the division between fine art and the applied arts has produced a caesura between the ‘traditional’ and the ‘modern’ in the historiography of, for example, the art of the Islamic world or China.

This conference is not concerned with calling for a renewed embrace of interdisciplinary thinking, but rather with considering the implications of the status quo. Why are certain art historical topics still the domain of researchers in other disciplines? What are the consequences? Given the contemporary skepticism towards totalizing forms of thought, should it be even seen as a problem that discourse on art is so plural?

Click here for the full programme details.

Fee:
Daily rate: £30 Full conference: £50
Students and unwaged: £10 daily rate
There is no fee for University of Birmingham students

To book your place please visit our secure online shop http://shop.bham.ac.uk/ and follow the link to the College of Arts and Law conference and events page

Iconoclasts R Us! By Lauren Dudley, M.Phil student

Since 2011 I have been lucky enough to be a member of an AHRC-funded Iconoclasms network, led by Dr Richard Clay and Professor Leslie Brubaker in collaboration with Tate. The network is made up of academics, museum professionals and postgraduate researchers. Members are based in Europe and the United States and have a wide range of subject specialisms, but we have a shared research interest in iconoclasm. Between us we cover a history of iconoclasm from the pre-historic period to the present day.

The project involves three workshops; the first was held in London at Tate Britain and Tate Modern (October 2011), the second was at Notre Dame University, South Bend, USA (September 2012) and the final session will be in the UK in September 2013. The network was initially set up as an advisory board for an upcoming exhibition about British Iconoclasm at Tate Britain which is opening in September 2013. The members of the network have each contributed an essay to a forthcoming Ashgate publication, due to be released around the time of the exhibition. I was invited to the network by Richard Clay, who is my MPhil supervisor. He also supervised my undergraduate dissertation which was about the painting Allegorical Tomb of Lord Somers (c.1726, V&A, London) and was when I first started to think about iconoclasm in relation to my research. When choosing a painting to study for my final year dissertation back in 2009 I never would have imagined that I would still be writing about it four years later, let alone having an essay published!

Before the first workshop in London I was really nervous about working alongside senior academics and discussing a subject that was relatively new to me. However, the group was very welcoming and interested to hear everyone’s contribution. The workshop involved presenting images and talking about them in relation to iconoclasm, so I showed some eighteenth-century ruin paintings by Hubert Robert, whose work is the focus of my current research. The workshop format worked really well as there was lots of discussion around iconoclasm as a whole, which also provided new ideas for our individual research, so the sessions were very productive. It helped that our discussions were based on ideas for the Iconoclasm exhibition as it gave us a clear focus. At that stage we were talking about the rationale behind the exhibition and looking at potential objects and themes. We left London feeling excited about the exhibition and were geared up to write our chapters for the book.

Nearly a year later we re-convened at Notre Dame, this time we had a draft of our chapters prepared for the Iconoclasm book and we each had to study and comment on someone else’s essay, ideal for the long flight to Chicago! I think we were all amazed to see that there were so many recurrent themes throughout our essays. Of course they were all linked by iconoclasm, but each essay expanded the subject and at the same time had clear links with at least one other essay in the volume. At this workshop the plans for the exhibition had significantly developed. Tabitha Barber and Dr Stacy Boldrick (the lead curators) presented the chronological and thematic parameters of the exhibition and went through the loan list. It was fascinating to hear their stories about tracking down objects and in some cases debating whether or not an object could be considered as an example of iconoclasm! The exhibition will present a history of British iconoclasm through a diverse range of images and objects from the Middle Ages to the present day, each with a fascinating story. The discussions around the exhibition showed that iconoclasm is an integral part of British history, I just wonder whether Tate’s gift shop would accept Professor James Simpson’s idea to print the slogan ‘Iconoclasts R Us’ on some merchandise!

George Catlin – the NPG videos with our very own JH student, Sophie Edwards!

In February, second year Joint Honours History and History of Art student Sophie Edwards told us about her experience curating an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery on the American artist, George Catlin.

Now you can see Sophie talking about it in the new videos on the NPG’s website!

The exhibition runs from 7 March until 23 June at the National Portrait Gallery in London (admission free).

A pop-up event makes Lauren Dudley, MPhil student, happy.

After hearing that the Municipal Bank on Broad Street was opening its doors for a 3-day contemporary art exhibition I was really keen to see inside a historic building that is normally locked up and is often used as an extension of the bus stop! PhD student, Carly and I dashed through the rain into the very chilly former bank. It was a fantastic experience and was certainly worth the numb hands and feet!

 

The exhibition ‘Thrift Radiates Happiness’ – organised by the contemporary art gallery, TROVE and international design practice, Aedas - was a response to the grand architecture of this empty, former bank. All of the exhibits related to money and were quirky and thought-provoking. The displays and installations would only really have meaning in this particular setting. By entering an abandoned space that was once a financial hub which but had become derelict, there seemed to be an underlying comment about the current state of the economy. The works that filled the empty office spaces questioned the value of art and the relationship between culture and commerce.

 

In the vaults we were offered the opportunity to make an investment of £2. We would find in our deposit box either a photograph of the bank from the archives or an original work of art, and the idea was that our investment would immediately go up in value. It was very exciting… Carly had two photographs of the vaults and I opened my box to find a print by Sparrow+Castice.

 

As part of the project, oral histories from former bank employees were recorded and available to listen to in the grand hall of the bank. This was a brilliant way of using the space; let’s hope that the bank re-opens its doors for more exciting pop-up events!

Four History of Art Students on curating The Art of Clay at the RBSA

The Young Curators: Alice Watkins, Olivia Weightman, Hannah Lawson, Polly Adams-Felton

The RBSA’s Young Curators’ project gives young people a fantastic opportunity to gain first-hand experience in the process of putting on an exhibition. In October 2012 the four of us were chosen to curate a show of studio ceramics. With guidance from RBSA staff and ceramics specialist David Whiting, we have worked really hard to create The Art of Clay (24 April to 4 May 2013).

Hannah, Polly and Alice installing exhibition

Olivia and Hannah during a research trip with David Whiting to Oxford ceramics Gallery

Through our exhibition, we aim to show the range of ceramics being created in Britain and to expand perceived notions of clay as an art medium. We selected pieces to represent four categories in clay; abstract, figurative, vessel-based and purely functional ceramics. Within these themes, each artist we chose deals with clay in a variety of styles, technique and subject matter. The pieces embody the diversity of ceramic work that artists are able to create using clay, and are made by a range of exhibitors, many of whom have international reputations, while others are still establishing names for themselves.

Polly unpacking a delivery of ceramics by Nic Collins

‘Bull’ by Emma Rogers

We made our initial selection after an intense period of research into the medium, and we consulted catalogues, books and websites. We also made use of the contacts passed on to us by David Whiting and the RBSA. After composing our request letters to the artists, writing about the Young Curators’ project and the aims of the exhibition, we were pleased that we had successful responses from almost all of those invited. From this group we refined our selection, choosing the exact number and type of works we wished to exhibit within the space available. We were also involved in the installation, interpretation and marketing of the show – we even arranged delivery dates, wrote catalogue essays and made a press release!

Ceramic forms by James Robson and ceramic panels by Michelle Arieu

The Art of Clay has taken a lot of planning and preparation alongside our academic studies. We had no previous experience of ceramics – our academic course being focused on the fine arts – and  so we found the project to be a steep learning curve…! However, it has provided us with insights into ceramics, the structure of an art gallery, how to deliver an exhibition and the business elements of the art world. We have gained a great deal of work experience and hope visitors feel that we have created an interesting and high-quality show.

For more information, visit the Art of Clay website: http://www.rbsa.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/the-art-of-clay-exhibition/

We would like to express our sincerest thanks to RBSA staff for their guidance, patience and commitment to the project, particularly Natalie Osborne, Learning and Project Coordinator (and a former History of Art student at the University of Birmingham). Additional thanks are also in order for David Whiting for his expertise and guidance, and to all of the artists for their support for the project. We are also very grateful to the Behrens Foundation, the John Feeney Charitable Trust, and donors to the Directors Appeal. Without their funding this project would not have been possible.

Hieronymus Cock: The Renaissance in Print

I’m just back from a couple of days in Leuven. I was in Belgium to see a couple of things, but the main purpose of my trip was to see the new show recently opened at M van Museum Leuven called Hieronymus Cock: The Renaissance in Print.

This exhibition focuses on the activities of Hieronymus Cock and Volcxken Dierix, who, together as man and wife, established the hugely successful print shop “Aux Quatre Vents” (At the sign of the Four Winds) in Antwerp in 1549. This exhibition is the first in over 25 years to be devoted to their publishing house. Its relevance to me is that although Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1526-69), whose art forms the focus of my PhD, is famous mostly to us because of his paintings, it seems to be the case that the fame Bruegel enjoyed during his own lifetime depended largely on the prints that he designed for the open market. Of these, the lion’s share came out from Aux Quatre Vents.

The show is arranged thematically, each theme exploring one particular aspect of Cock’s and Volcxken’s broad and far reaching interests. The first three rooms (“Roman Ruins and the Allure of Antiquity”, “Italy on the Banks of the Scheldt”, and “Hieronymus Cock and the Italianists”), however, are dedicated to show’s main aim: to consider how Aux Quatre Vents functioned as a conduit for the spread of the Italian “High Renaissance” into the North.

By the mid-1500s when Aux Quatre Vents opened, it had become quite customary for Netherlandish artists to go off on their own travels to Italy. Artists headed specifically for Rome, to study its plentiful antiquities and modern artistic monuments like Michelangelo’s Sistine ceiling. Bruegel is here no exception, since he spent a number of years travelling around Italy between 1552 and ’55. The output of Aux Quatre Vents, however, satisfied the desires of those northerners who couldn’t cross the Alps for themselves, had no obvious need to go, or, indeed, desire, given the well-known dangers posed by such an arduous schlep southwards.

The first three rooms really do testify to the vogue for all things Italian, old and new, in Antwerp at the time. Highlights include the monumental monograph published in 1551 on the Baths of Diocletian, the very first published architectural monograph of its kind, which is staggering for both its physical size and its visual richness. Another is the engraved reproduction of Raphael’s frescoed School of Athens inside the Vatican Palace, which Raphael painted between 1509 and ’11. This engraving was done by the Italian Giogrio Ghisi and was published by Cock and Volcxken in 1550, the very year that they managed to persuade Ghisi to move to Antwerp and work for them, reproducing contemporary Italian art like Raphael’s and revolutionising engraving techniques in Antwerp at the same time.

Ghisi (engraver) and Cock (publisher) after Raphael, School of Athens

This endeavouring to make available notable contemporary Italian art by utilising the skills of the best engravers like Ghisi demonstrates Cock’s and Volxcken’s dedication to both furthering local art according to the Italian example, and their unwavering concern for the supreme quality of their prints. The proliferation of Italian art from the publishing house bears witness to the great interest among Netherlandish artists, critics and patrons alike for innovations happening in art south of the Alps. One manifestation of this was the development of so-called Antwerp Romanism that is the focus of the the room “Hieronymus Cock and the Italianists”. Here, art by northern artists like Frans Floris is showcased, whose art was fundamentally affected by the Italian example, which it emulated, and was likewise disseminated in print from Aux Quatre Vents. Thus it’s clear from the first couple of rooms the extent to which Cock’s and Volxcken’s house functioned as both an agent and a symptom of the vogue for Italy in the Netherlands in mid-century.

The show’s definition of “Renaissance”, however, encompasses more than just the Italian and the Italianate. A particularly successful part of the exhibition is the way it makes clear the extent to which Aux Quatre Vents also played a hugely important role in the development of a native, “Netherlandish Renaissance”. Cock and Volcxken were obviously keen to champion local art from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Aux Quatre Vents published reproductions of many famous pictures by notable Netherlanders, such as Rogier van der Weyden’s hugely-famous Descent from the Cross, of around 1435, which came out as a print in 1565 and is on display in the room “Bosch, Bruegel and the Netherlandish Tradition”. At some point, Cock also dreamed-up his “Book of Painters”‘: a collection of portraits of famous northern artists including Rogier and Jan van Eyck that were appended with eulogies written by the humanist Domenicus Lampsonius. This project was actually realised and published in 1572 by Volcxken following the death of Cock in 1570 and some of these laudatory pages, including the one on Bruegel, are displayed.

Cornelis Cort and Hieronymus Cock (pub.) (after Rogier van der Weyden), Descent from the Cross, 1565,

Johannes Wiericx (attr. to) and Volcxken Dierckx (pub.), Petro Brvegel, Pictori, engraving from Domenicus Lampsonius, Pictorum aliquot celebrium Germaniae inferioris effigies, 1572

The due prominence that the show gives to Volcxken is commendable. The lives and activities of successful women from this period have too-often remained obscure. In art historical discourse in particular, it’s only over the last couple of decades or so that women artists and entrepreneurs have been recuperated from gender-based oblivion. This show’s emphasis on Volcxken is a manifestation of this shift, and rightly so, she did after all continue to oversee Aux Quatre Vents for some 30 successful years following her husband’s death.

Bruegel comes into his own in the previously mentioned room “Bosch, Bruegel and the Netherlandish Tradition” as well as “Vice and Virtue” and “Visualising the World”. In “Vice and Virtue”, Bruegel’s famed Seven Deadly Sins series, published 1558, and the Seven Virtues, of about the same time, are exhibited. Conceived entirely in the idiom of Bosch and intended to provide moral instruction, both these demonstrate how the visual vocabulary used by fifteenth-century artists and its attendant didactic purchase didn’t simply die-out with the onslaught of the Italianate. Some of Bruegel’s preparatory drawings for the Sins and Virtues are also on display, such as the drawing for Gluttony from the Seven Sins. Examination of this in the real shows how Bruegel put every effort into his designs, giving the engraver little or no scope to deviate from his supremely-detailed drawings. The ball, however, was not always in Bruegel’s court. In “Bosch, Bruegel and the Netherlandish Tradition” the famous Big Fish Eat the Little Ones is exhibited, published by Aux Quatre Vents in 1558 and signed ‘Hieronijmus Bos inuentor’, which is to say “Bosch designed this image”. Curiously, however, we know this to be a false claim, since the preparatory drawing for this engraving has survived, which is signed “brueghel” (which is how Bruegel spelled his name until about 1559 when he dropped the “h“) and is dated 1556. By substituting Bruegel’s name for Bosch’s, Cock and Volcxken clearly intended to profit from the kudos afforded by Bosch’s Europe-wide fame at a time when Bruegel’s own reputation was still in its ascendancy. As such, this print represents not only the fashion for Bosch on the art market in Antwerp in the 1550s, but also points clearly to Cock’s and Volcxken’s commercial savvy and wily market strategies, attaching a famous name to their prints to ensure saleability.

Pieter van der Heyden (engraver), Cock (pub.), after Bruegel, Big Fish Eat the Little Ones, 1557

“Visualising the World” is given over to landscape,which was emerging as a legitimate category in art, in and of itself, at exactly the time of Aux Quatre Vents’s establishment. Here, Bruegel’s idiosyncratic response to the Italian sojourn is given due recognition. Most artists went-off to Italy and absorbed the Italian style, which subsequently suffuses their art (do a Google image search for Frans Floris’s Rebel Angels!). Bruegel, however, took away something different. Sure, he must have seen a lot of things from Antiquity when in Rome, ditto the art of Michelangelo, Raphael etc. But he was clearly most taken with the Alpine landscape that he probably saw, and drew, on his way back up to the Netherlands in 1554-55. On his return, he invented several large-scale Alpine-inspired compositions that were published by Cock immediately upon Bruegel’s return in 1555 as the Large Landscapes. The impact these had on Netherlandish art and the development of landscape as an independent genre in art cannot be overestimated.

Overall, this exhibition gives a comprehensive account of the output of Aux Quatre Vents and its impact in the course of Netherlandish art from the mid-1500s on. Navigating the exhibition is easy. You’re guided along the way by blurbs on the wall that explain each of these themes under consideration. These are also reproduced in the handy (and free!) walking guide, which also contains captions to each of the exhibits. The handbook also tops and tails the exhibition by giving some introductory remarks about the establishment of Aux Quatre Vents, the cultural and economic ferment that Antwerp was in the 1550s, as well as explaining relevant issues including what kinds of copyright laws did, or rather, didn’t, exist in the sixteenth century. All this and more is examined to greater depth in the accompanying catalogue edited by Joris Van Grieken, Ger Luijten and Jan Van der Stock, which, although a bit of a tome, is sumptuously illustrated and available for a discounted price from the Museum shop.

Hieronymus Cock: The Renaissance in Print is on at Leuven until the 9th June before travelling to Paris’s Institut Néerlandais where it will be on show from 18th September to 15th December.