Conference Proceedings: Photography and Britishness

Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, 2015

Special issue of Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide. With essays by Julie Codell, Jason Edwards, Sarah V. Turner, Adrianne Rubin, Dana Garvey, Imogen Hart, Colette Crossman, Lene Østermark-Johansen, Jane Hawkes, Anthony Burton, and Amy Von Lintel

Convenors: Claire Jones, University of Birmingham and Imogen Hart, University of California, Berkeley. The history of sculpture has largely been written with an emphasis on free-standing, monumental, figurative, single-authored works created by named sculptors, primarily in bronze, marble and plaster. Decorative arts scholarship has been predominantly concerned with works created by named manufacturers, and with the impact of industrialisation on craft and related issues around mass production, taste, labour and commerce. Yet cross-fertilisations between sculpture and the decorative have played a vital role in the formal practices and aesthetics of art production, bringing sculptors into contact with diverse makers, materials, techniques, forms, colours, ornament, scales, styles, patrons, audiences and subject matter, to produce composite, multi-material, quasi-functional and multi-authored objects. This session will explore the decorative as a historically fertile, parallel and contested field of sculptural production. We invite proposals that address affinities between sculpture and the decorative in any culture or period from the Middle Ages to the present day, and which explore the cross-disciplinary connections between the institutional, biographical, conceptual, visual, material and professional histories of the two fields. Topics might include artistic autonomy and creativity; the fragment and the composite work; figuration and relief; the hierarchy of the arts; copyright and authorship; originality and reproduction; and the languages and histories of making and materials. We also welcome papers that examine sculpture and the decorative in relation to the racialization, nationalisation and gendering of the practices of art, craft and manufacturing. Click here to download a .pdf of this session's paper abstracts Martina Droth (Yale Center for British Art) Common Grounds of Making: Modelling for sculpture and decorative art in 19th-century Britain Amy F Ogata (University of Southern California) Aluminium Orfèvrerie and Second Empire France Margit Thøfner (University of East Anglia) Resonant Tendrils and Furtive Grimaces: The role of ornament in Abel Schrøder’s altarpiece for the church of Skt Morten, Næstved Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen (Metropolitan Museum of Art) Beethoven’s Farewell: Klinger’s Beethoven-Denkmal ’in the claws of the Secession’ Conor Lucey (Trinity College Dublin) 18th-Century Property Speculation and the Sculptural Interior Anna Ferrari (Victoria and Albert Museum) Beyond the Studio in Interwar Paris: Henri Laurens with Robert Mallet-Stevens, Le Corbusier and Jean-Michel Frank Nina Lübbren (Anglia Ruskin University) Renée Sintenis, Milly Steger and German Sculpture, 1910–33 Angela Hesson (University of Melbourne/National Gallery of Victoria) Sirens on the Sideboard: Fantasy and function in Art Nouveau

Beginning in the last decades of the nineteenth century, Britain experienced a renewed interest in the art of sculpture. Sculpture and the Pursuit of a Modern Ideal in Britain is the first anthology of its kind to discuss the developments in three-dimensional art in this period. Sculptors and critics put forth competing ideals for a new, modern view of sculpture, either adapting or rejecting tradition. The eleven essays in this volume discuss a wide range of styles and approaches, examining the cultural, political, and artistic debates surrounding the place and function of sculpture. With new studies of high-profile monuments such as the Piccadilly Eros, as well as examinations of under-acknowledged sculptors, this volume presents a series of case studies essential to an understanding of why and how sculpture played a central role in the emergence of modern art in Britain.

2018

The Routledge Companion to Photography and Visual Culture is a seminal reference source for the ever-changing field of photography. Comprising an impressive range of essays and interviews by experts and scholars from across the globe, this book examines the medium’s history, its central issues and emerging trends, and its much-discussed future. The collected essays and interviews explore the current debates surrounding the photograph as object, art, document, propaganda, truth, selling tool, and universal language; the perception of photography archives as burdens, rather than treasures; the continual technological development reshaping the field; photography as a tool of representation and control, and more. One of the most comprehensive volumes of its kind, this companion is essential reading for photographers and historians alike.

History of Photography, Volume 40, 2016 - Issue 3, Photography, Antiquity, Scholarship. Guest Editors: Mirjam Brusius and Theodor Dunkelgrün This article investigates the relationship between ancient objects and their visual depiction in British archaeological expeditions in the Middle East in the mid- nineteenth century. The article focuses on the exploration of Ancient Mesopotamia initiated by the British adventurer Austen Henry Layard. Modern scholarship on Layard’s excavations and their reception in Europe has mostly presented them as well-organised, purposive, and logical enterprises in which finding objects and depicting them had a clear, well-defined purpose. Little attention has been paid to the fact that the excavated items were initially objects without a clear status, even after they had arrived in Europe. This article examines how the application of visual media – whether used for scholarship or for publicity – in the field and the museum reflected this uncertainty. In this context, photography as a new medium entered the chaos of the field and the museum as one among several media that brought along its own insecurities rather than a tool ready and able to solve a problem.

19, 2016

Stepping out of the elevator onto the second floor, the trio demand attention immediately, and thereby recalibrate our (stereotyped) relationship to Victorian sculpture at a stroke. They are impossible to ignore, or walk past. Yet they are a difficult grouping, with the darkly coloured, male, full-length statue of James Sherwood Westmacott's Saher de Quincy, Earl of Winchester of 1848-53 in uncertain relation to the two very different yet equally captivating busts of Victoria positioned to his left (Fig. 1). Francis Leggatt Chantrey's rendering from 1840 makes the nineteen-year-old queen sexy: the animated mouth and nostrils, bare neck and shoulders, and subtle folding of the tiara into the plaits of hair reinforcing an exemplary demonstration of the sensuality of marble. Yet, Alfred Gilbert's monumental three-foot bust made between 1887 and 1889 for the Army & Navy Club in London looms over the shoulder of Chantrey's young queen; the multiple textures, deep undercutting, and surface detail present an ageing Victoria at her most imposing. So what is Westmacott's piece doing here as an adjunct to this pairing of sculptural portraits? The curators were perhaps keen to show off the first of their many coups by immediately presenting to us a novel sculptural encounter: Westmacott's Earl is normally removed from close scrutiny, looking down on the chamber of the House of Lords from a niche twenty-five feet above the floor, alongside statues of seventeen other barons and prelates who in 1215 helped to secure the signing of the Magna Carta. As such, this first experience delivers one of the exhibition's primary concerns: to make our interaction with Victorian sculpture surprising again, and one of the techniques used to achieve this is through offering opportunities for close proximity while at the same time gesturing to the dizzying range of viewing spaces, contexts, and conditions in which Victorian sculpture experienced its unprecedented 'efflorescence'. 1 But another reason is because it is made of zinc electrotyped with copper, and thus the 'invention' of the exhibition's subtitle, and indeed the paradox of modernity and medievalism near the heart of Victorian art, are promptly realized (Droth, Edwards, and Hatt, p. 154).

2011

An Introduction to the Exhibition for Teachers and Students