From left: Nancy, Sue, Eleanor, Helaine
Eleanor: This book comes out of our twenty-year collaboration and is the third in a series of books about women artists. Sue, you lit the spark that got us started...
Sue: I began my career as a curator outside of New York and prior to the internet and Google, I was dependent on compendium types of art books that offered a broad look at the contemporary art world. Years later, when I attended an ArtTable luncheon honoring Linda Nochlin -- Nancy and Helaine were also there -- I came up with a similar compendium idea for a book on women artists by women writers. I contacted the women writers and curators that I admired the most. It was you three. At the time we didn't know each other that well but you were all interested in the idea.
Helaine: If my memory is right, we met for a year and a half before we wrote anything. We started by drawing up a really long list of artists and narrowed them down through many sessions. We eventually worked with Chris Lyon at Prestel and he encouraged us to winnow the list to twelve artists for that first book.
Nancy: I remember a meeting in Helaine’s loft where we put a lot of images on the floor. It was sort of like a police procedural TV show where they pin photos of suspects on the wall to sort out the crime. But we had prints of works by artists on the floor and we were moving them around, shuffling and reshuffling them, trying to decide: who was important? Who is unsung? Who did we personally care about? It was hugely challenging, but fun. I think we did that for the second book too.
Eleanor: Each of the earlier books had a long gestation. That was true for this book too. One important event for Mothers of Invention was a 2018 panel we participated in at Christies Education called Celebrating Female Agency in the Arts. We had already started thinking about a third book and it really helped us put our thoughts together.
Helaine: We had been thinking about themes, but after the panel I changed my subject from Identity to Performance.
Sue: I had an idea about my essay. After the panel an artist came up to me with some other observations that helped me expand the idea of feminism and abstraction.
Helaine: We put together a proposal, and then Trump got elected. And it threw us into this crisis. We had to reevaluate it and ask, what should we really be writing about?
Nancy: Yes. The Women's March in Washington was organized as soon as Trump was inaugurated. And then just a couple of years later, the world changed again with COVID. All this feminist energy had come up around Trump and Harvey Weinstein, and it was followed very quickly by the impossibility of being out in the street protesting. Then there was George Floyd. Suddenly people realized no, it's not impossible. One of the first things that brought people out of their homes during COVID was the racial and social justice protests. All that made us think about the relationship between feminism and about other drives for social and also racial justice. I think that really fed into this book.
Sue: I was looking at the art on Instagram and there was a lot of discussion of what is art for a time of crisis. But we had already covered a lot of very political feminist artists in our previous books. And we thought maybe we weren’t the ones to write that book.
Eleanor: So, what we ended up doing was going back to the 70s, a time of very similar turmoil, and seeing how artists dealt with it. It seemed important to return to those roots and find models for action. All this came out of our weekly zooms, which initially were really about giving each other moral support during the isolation of the pandemic.
Sue: Since we were talking weekly, we thought, why don't we rewrite our proposal?
Nancy: We did so much of the work on this book while we were isolated. That allowed for a different kind of focus, but also really reframed the work we were writing about. We began sorting through ideas for this book, thinking on one hand, we have to deal with the politics of the moment, and on the other about making this book much more personal and telling our own stories. In the end, we pulled away from that, but I think both of those impulses are still there, because the late 70s were a pivotal moment for feminist art and also the time when we all began as workers in the art world. And we should acknowledge that Lund Humphries gave us two years to write the book, which allowed us to reach more deeply into our four subjects.
Eleanor: I think it's important to say how much we've all learned from each other. That's an important part of what has kept this collaboration going for twenty years.
Nancy: Part of what’s good is that we're very different. If you're working by yourself, you tend to double down on your own opinions.
Sue: And you might not follow something through because you feel too insecure about it. But we very much encourage each other to write about what interests us.
Helaine: It’s also sometimes very specific. When I was writing about performance, Nancy or Eleanor recommended specific books which were extremely helpful. And we suggested artists to each other.
Sue: It’s also significant that two of us are critics and two are writers. Early on, Helaine and I would talk about how easy it is for writers who can just sit down and knock these things out. But we also would wonder, can I really say that? And Eleanor and Nancy said of course, you are allowed to have your own opinion!
Helaine: That opened up a lot of things for me.
Nancy: And as writers we thought, you curators get to do all this work with the real objects in institutions!
Eleanor: In a way we all kind of envy each other.
Sue: I would say we’ve come to respect the different kinds of choices critics and curators have to make.
Eleanor: It has certainly broadened my life and my thinking to be involved with you guys. I want to thank you all for this collaboration. Let’s keep it going for another twenty years!
MOTHERS OF INVENTION: THE FEMINIST ROOTS OF CONTEMPORARY ART by Eleanor Heartney, Helaine Posner, Nancy Princenthal and Sue Scott is available to order now.
Preview image credit: Suzanne McClelland, Diptych: Falling Sky (North), 2022, Falling Sky (South), 2022, Signed, titled, dated and inscribed in ink (verso), Mixed media on linen, Each 102 x 75 inches (259.1 x 190.5 cm). Courtesy of the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York and Aspen, Colorado © Suzanne McClelland. Photo credit: Lance Brewer
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Georgina Adam (author of The Rise and Rise of the Private Art Museum) and Series Editor Jeffrey Boloten discuss the Hot Topics in the Art World series in a panel at the Art Business Conference, London in September 2021. Photograph: David Owen.
The first volumes in our Hot Topics in the Art World series were conceived in the anxious early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, as we already sensed that nothing would ever be quite the same again. It was in many ways a fertile time to plan a new series on the urgent art-world issues of the day, although there were too many Hot Topics and we didn’t yet know how they would end.
The series took its first steps into the world in the optimistic months of Autumn 2021, as we ventured out into offices and galleries again. We published three excellent volumes, on Private Art Museums (by Georgina Adam), Restitution (by Alexander Herman) and Art Fairs (by Melanie Gerlis), and launched them with a mix of online and in-person events. While the topics themselves have continued to develop in interesting and occasionally unpredictable ways since 2021, the bigger picture drawn by each of the writers remains as relevant as ever.
As the series celebrates its 2nd birthday, we’ve just published on Commercial Galleries (by Henry Little), Philanthropy in the Arts (by Leslie Ramos) and Art in Saudi Arabia (by Rebecca Anne Proctor with Alia Al-Senussi). The series has covered Curating, Censored Art and How not to Exclude Artist Mothers in small-format, brightly coloured books which are instructive, engaging and sometimes polemical. Many of the books are being translated into other languages; all are available as ebooks. While the reverberations from the Covid-19 pandemic are present in all of the books, we’re now able to see the pandemic as just one strand in an ongoing, longer-term process of transformation of art-world structures and trends.
Hot Regions of the Art Market
Rebecca Anne Proctor (left) and Alia Al-Senussi (right) at the launch of their book Art in Saudi Arabia: A New Creative Economy? at the Goodman Gallery, London, December 2023
Over the next year we will have published books on two regions of the world whose art worlds are both at an interesting stage of development: Saudi Arabia (Art in Saudi Arabia by Rebecca Anne Proctor with Alia Al-Senussi, just out), where a huge investment is being made into contemporary art as part of the Kingdom’s Vision 2030 initiative; and Hong Kong (Art in the New Hong Kong by Enid Tsui, Autumn 2024), whose art market is at something of a crossroads. Both books are written by art-market journalists with many years of experience of writing about their respective regions.
Coming up in the Hot Topics Series
There is no shortage of new Hot Topics to cover. Coming up next Spring are The Art Institution of Tomorrow by curator Fatoş Üstek, a fascinating manifesto for a new kind of art institution, and Art Auctions by Kathryn Brown, which traces the extraordinary trajectory of the auction house from bastion of conservatism to 21st-century global trend-setter.
In Autumn 2024 we’re due to publish on a topic which certainly wasn’t on our radar in 2020 and yet now is amongst the hottest of them all: AI and the Art Market. If you’re interested in dipping your toes into this subject, author Jo Lawson-Tancred will be chairing a panel on the subject of her book at the London Art Fair on Wednesday 17th January. Gareth Harris (author of Censored Art Today) will also be at the London Art Fair, chairing a panel for the Fair’s Museum session on Tuesday 16th January on the subject of his next Hot Topics volume: Towards the Ethical Art Museum.
Thank you to our publishing partners Sotheby’s Institute of Art for their ongoing support of the series and to Series Editors Jeffrey Boloten and Juliet Hacking for their invaluable input into individual volumes. It has been an exciting ride.
Lucy Myers
Managing Director, Lund Humphries
]]>Image: One of sculptor Henry Poole’s groups of Mermen and Mermaids on Cardiff City Hall. Credit: Author’s Collection.
'Now rarely noticed, high above the street, often stained, occasionally providing a home for moss, lichen or even worse, the odd buddleia (and far too often netted to keep pigeons at bay), are some of Britain’s greatest works of art. The richly carved sculptural detail on our historic buildings, not to mention the major allegorical groups, sculpted tympana, pediments and statues, which formed such a significant element of traditional architecture, are the work of master masons, exceptionally gifted stone carvers, and perhaps surprisingly, some of the country’s most important sculptors. The term for this work is "Architectural Sculpture" and though perhaps we do not yet generally appreciate it, we are fortunate in Britain to have one of the world’s finest collections of this art form'.
Image: One of sculptor Catherine Mawer’s many keystones, in this case a self-portrait of one of the 19th century’s few female architectural sculptors. Credit: Sally Whyte.
My latest book is a paean to this lost art of architectural sculpture in which architects and sculptors collaborated to produce the richly carved and beautifully decorated buildings that make up so much of our rich British architectural heritage. While researching the work of Glasgow architects John James Burnet and James Miller for a previous book, I began to understand for the first time, just how their ornate stone buildings were produced and in particular how sculpture was incorporated within them and by whom. What I discovered was a complex process involving masons, stone carvers, architectural sculptors and occasionally fine art sculptors who worked in collaboration with architects to create complex detail and sculpture in stone, terracotta, faience and eventually concrete.
Image: George Frampton’s magnificent bronze St Mungo with supporters at the main entrance to Glasgow's Art Gallery and Museum. Credit: Roger Edwards.
Many of the sculptors involved built their career in sculpture from humble beginnings as stone masons' apprentices, going on to establish their own studios as architectural sculptors and very occasionally as fine art sculptors – Albert Hodge, for example, born on the tiny Hebridean island of Islay, having first trained as an architect, went on to become one of the leading architectural sculptors of his day working for James Salmon, William Leiper and James Miller in Glasgow before going on to create sculpture on major buildings throughout England, Wales and Canada; John Thomas (1813-62) who was orphaned as a child, then apprenticed as a stone mason, eventually progressed to a position of overseeing the entire programme of architectural sculpture on the new Palace of Westminster for the architect Sir Charles Barry and the remarkable Catherine Mawer (1803-77) one of the few 19th century female architectural sculptors who carved much of the detail on architect Cuthbert Broderick’s Leeds City Hall successfully continued her husband’s monumental sculpture, stone masonry and wood-carving business after his death, eventually passing it on to their sons.
Image: Alfred Drury’s Truth and Justice on the Old War Office, London. Credit: Author’s Collection.
Others studied at the Royal Academy and trained as fine art sculptors in the studios of masters, such as Henry Charles Fehr who was an assistant to Thomas Brock and counted architectural sculpture as simply one of his many creative outlets along with statuary, busts and medals while others still, such as the brilliant George Frampton and Alfred Drury (1856-1944), who were amongst the leaders of the late nineteenth century New Sculpture Movement, produced much of their finest work as architectural sculpture, including Frampton’s ‘St Mungo’ on Glasgow Art Galleries and Museum and Drury’s haunting images of war on the Old War Office in Whitehall, and later Gilbert Bayes, whose ‘Queen of Time’ still looks down on shoppers as they enter Selfridges main entrance on Oxford Street. This is also not to forget the huge contribution of commercial firms of master masons such as Farmer and Brindley in London, Robert Boulton in Birmingham and J+G Mossman in Glasgow who produced everything from architectural sculpture to funerary monuments and public statues as well as forming long-term relationships with the architects, with both George Gilbert Scott and Alfred Waterhouse favouring Farmer & Brindley, Edward Godwin – Richard Boulton and Alexander (Greek) Thomson – John Mossman.
Image: One of Gilbert Bayes’ exquisite reliefs on James Miller’s Commercial Bank in Glasgow depicting Industry. Credit: Roger Edwards.
My book traces the greatest period of British architectural sculpture during which the wealth of the British empire was celebrated in stone throughout the country, from the Great Exhibition of 1851 until the Festival of Britain in 1951. It is both an introduction and a tribute to these exceptional artists and to their work, much of which survives today, high above the streets of our towns and cities.
Image: Henry Moore’s sculpture on the Time and Life building in London. Credit: John Oram.
British Architectural Sculpture 1851-1951 will be published by Lund Humphries in May 2024.
]]>To celebrate, we are offering 20% off this book with code MONTH20 until midnight on 31st December 2023.
The judging panel commented:
‘Architecture and the Face of Coal provides an innovative and compelling account of a vanished and ignored built environment. Based on a wealth of primary research, it is the first book to provide a wide-ranging architectural history of an activity which was central to the social and economic life of 20th century Britain. In investigating the impact of coal mining ‘above ground’ the author reframes our understanding of modernism and town planning within an alternative geography and introduces a new discourse to industrial archaeology. Boyd argues that the impressive architecture arising from coal extraction played a key but overlooked role in the development of modern design in Britain. In looking at pithead facilities, particularly baths as well as mining settlements and new towns, the book encompasses histories of health, welfare and housing, which will be of interest to social and cultural historians as well as architectural historians.’
Find out more about the book in this blogpost by the author.
]]>This is the first book to consider the photography of Lee Miller in relation to Surrealism in Britain and alongside artworks by key Surrealist artists, and the first to offer detailed analysis and sourcings of Miller's Surrealist collages.
Lee Miller is having a moment! As Georgina Adam writes for The Art Newspaper, collectors and institutions are only now paying sustained attention to the Modern artist and photojournalist Lee Miller, more than 75 years later.
This month two new exhibitions are opening: the Heide Museum of Modern Art in Australia is presenting a major survey of her work (from 4 November until 25 February 2024), curated by Antony Penrose.
And Gagosian in New York is showing Seeing Is Believing: Lee Miller and Friends (from 11 November until 22 December), which will feature photographs by Miller and Roland Penrose, and works on paper by artists they knew, lived with and loved: Joseph Cornell, Max Ernst, Dora Maar, Man Ray, Henry Moore, Valentine Penrose and Picasso.
Lee Miller is also of great importance for Lund Humphries as a publishing company... In May 1941 Lund Humphries published Grim Glory: Pictures of Britain Under Fire edited by Ernestine Carter, which with 22 of Lee Miller’s images. Find out more in this blogpost by Lee Miller and Roland Penrose's son, Anthony Penrose.
Lee Miller was also a good friend of Surrealist artist Dorothea Tanning - on whom Lund Humphries has published a monograph by Victoria Carruthers. Read our interview with Victoria about Dorothea's art.
The Front Room: Diaspora Migrant Aesthetics in the Home, originally published in 2009, has become a beloved and much-praised source, providing fascinating revelations into the post-war British experience of immigrants, the decoration of their living spaces and their position in society in relation to decolonisation. The 'front room' (emanating from the Victorian parlour) provides an outlet to respond to the feelings of displacement, exile and alienation and the rebuilding of a home in a strange land. Primarily concerned with Caribbean homes, The Front Room also looks at Moroccan, Surinamese, Antillean and Indonesian migrant groups in Holland—encompassing, through texts, archival documents and artistic photographs, the important cultural markers that are expressed through the domestic interiors of migrants. The author examines how this intimate space within the home raises issues of class, race, migration, aspiration, religion, family, gender, identity and alienation. He also looks at the transition from the colonial post-colonial modernity by placing the book in the context of his own family’s migrant experience.
While this revised edition includes updates of the original essays from leading social commentators Stuart Hall, Denise Noble, Carol Tulloch and Dave Lewis, as well as poems by Khadijah Ibrahiim and Dorothea Smartt, and paintings by Sonia Boyce, Kimathi Donkor and Njideka Akunyili Crosby. It also examines the iteration of the 'front room' in post apartheid South Africa and discusses how sound system culture emerged from the front room, as well as adding to the rich oral histories from different generations reflecting on their personal experiences of the front room and discussing the artefacts and objects found in them in terms of their cultural significance. The Front Room documents how the 'Windrush' generation's settlement in Britain contributed to the making of multicultural society, and raises questions about our lived experience and notions of the ‘home’, as many more people globally look for a roof over their heads in the 21st century. The book is richly illustrated with intriguing photographs of installations based on front rooms of the time and the contemporary living room and their associated objects.
This book is kindly supported by the Paul Mellon Centre through their publication grant.
Below are some photos from the launch of the book at the Museum of the Home, London. Michael McMillan's curated 1970s Front Room can still be viewed at the Museum of the Home.
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For Kurt Jackson (b.1961), ‘Painting the sea could become an obsession, an entire oeuvre in its own right, an endless life absorbing task.’ And, as this book attests, Jackson’s dedication to capturing its constant shape shifting – stillness to thundering force, shallows to mysterious depths – have brought forth paintings that communicate the sea's ebb and flow, its magic and elusiveness.
This Summer our Commissioning Editor for Modern and Contemporary Art Lucy Clark travelled to Cornwall and was inspired by some of the same seas and skies as inspire the St Just local, Kurt Jackson... Scroll down for some sunny seaside snaps – below: a walk at Lantic Bay on a sunny August afternoon:
Pages from Kurt Jackson's Sea featuring Cornish seascapes:
Get your copy of the book HERE
]]>Several members of the Lund Humphries team had the pleasure of visiting the RA Summer Exhibition this year, so we've picked out some Lund Humphries-related highlights in case you are running to the Royal Academy to catch the final days of the exhibition (or you can't get to London and want to experience it virtually)!
Upon entering the initial exhibition room, curated by artist David Remfry RA, you are confronted by bright colours and surprising textures (notably Darcey Fleming's handwoven chair, 'Conversation 2', made from recycled twine). The selection of work feels fresh and modern, often positioning figurative alongside abstract, and provoking dialogues between extremely diverse works. Through the archway at the end of the room, looking into Room II, curated by Bill Jacklin RA, you can already identify the very distinctive colours and geometric rhythms of Joe Tilson RA's Venice paintings – more on those below! Also in Room II is Rana Begum's screenprint '88K'; you can find out more about Rana Begum's art in our recently published monograph, edited by Anita Dawood.
After two great shows at Cristea Roberts and Marlborough galleries in London in April for the launch of our monograph on the artist by Marco Livingstone, it was lovely to see Joe Tilson’s work displayed at this year’s Summer Exhibition. Proving that his work continues to evolve over time, his vibrant The Stones of Venice, Ca' Mastelli, beckons you through the archway, and is both grand and intimate, alive and arresting, and captivating in a busy exhibition. These are but a few examples of Tilson’s work, from a career which spans six decades, and many different themes.
Above, large canvas: Joe Tilson, The Stones of Venice, Ca' Mastelli; and above left of large canvas: Ca' d'Oro 2 diptych & 3 diptych.
Below, bottom right: Joe Tilson, The Stones of Venice - Ca' d'Oro 1 diptych & 4 diptych.
Below: Hughie O'Donoghue, Night Navigator.
One of the great things about the RA Summer Exhibition is the sheer variety of works, and the way that these can create changes of pace as you move from room to room. Hughie O’Donoghue’s restful, melancholy Night Navigator is a case in point, as Room IV signals a contemplative mood where the passage of time is very much the tone.
Poet Tom Paulin describes O’Donoghue’s paintings as ‘like visions’ and approached him after being moved by his painting Hammering the Earth, and has written the Preface to our forthcoming book on the artist.
The Architecture exhibition, curated Peter Barber RA, and featuring the monumental construction by the late Phyllida Barlow RA, was a feast for the senses and full of diverse work: models, drawings; paintings; sculptures; etc.
Visiting in the early evening, the room was quiet initially, but later became a hive of activity as visitors explored the engrossing models and infinitely detailed architectural drawings. Read the AJ review of the Barber's room HERE.
Standing out on the pea green walls, were a wonderful collection of architectural drawings by Sir Peter Cook RA (below):
Peter Cook's work is featured in the recently published book 'Drawing Architecture: Conversations on Contemporary Archietcture', edited by Mark Dorrian, Riet Eeckhout and Arnaud Hendrickx.
Peter Cook was one of the stellar participants - including also Laura Allen, Bryan Cantley, Nat Chard, Mark Dorrian, Riet Eeckhout, Adrian Hawker, Perry Kulper, CJ Lim, Shaun Murray, Mark Smout, Neil Spiller, Natalija Subotincic, Michael Webb, Mark West and Michael Young - who took part in a series of dialogues considering drawings or drawing-related artefacts.
Other Lund Humphries artists were also included in the show... among them, Barbara Rae RA, on whom Lund Humphries published a monograph in 2008 with texts by Gareth Wardell, Andrew Lambirth and Bill Hare (now out of print). Rae's works are distributed throughout the rooms, and they capture starkly different moods through the colour palette (though always very recognisably by Rae). Find out more about Barbara Rae in this blog from our archive.
Above, bottom: Barbara Rae, Weather Law.
Above: Barbara Rae, Snowfield.
The RA Summer Exhibition is on until 20th August 2023!
]]>In the month of the Edinburgh Festival – the UK’s largest annual festival of visual art – we’re delighted to have as our August Book of the Month Duncan Macmillan’s long-anticipated new book Scotland and the Origins of Modern Art – now 20% off with code MONTH20 until the end of August.
A discussion of sensibility, sensation, perception and painting, Scotland and the Origins of Modern Art is an original work which argues that the eighteenth-century Scottish philosophy of moral sense played a central role in shaping ideas explored by figures such as Cézanne and Monet over one hundred years later.
Proposing that sensibility not reason was the basis of morality, the philosophy of moral sense gave birth to the idea of the supremacy of the imagination. Allied to the belief that the imagination flourished more freely in the primitive history of humanity, this idea became a potent inspiration for artists. The author also highlights Thomas Reid's method in his philosophy of common sense of using art and artists to illustrate how perception and expression are intuitive. To be truly expressive, artists should unlearn what they have learned and record their raw sensations, rather than the perceptions that derive from them.
Exploring the work of key philosophical and artistic protagonists, this thought-provoking book unearths the fascinating exchanges between art, philosophy and literature during Enlightenment in Scotland that provided the blueprint for modernism.
Get your copy of the book HERE and apply code MONTH20 for 20% off!
Duncan Macmillan’s newly updated monograph on Scottish artist Elizabeth Blackadder is also released this month, to coincide with two new exhibitions of her work in Edinburgh.
FIND OUT MORE about the exhibitions.
And we’re thrilled to announce that John Brennan’s book Scotland’s Rural Home was a prize-winner in the inaugural Architecture Book Awards.’
FIND OUT MORE about the prize.
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• • •
Last weekend marked my first-ever visit to the Thomas Cole National Historic Site (TCNHS) in Catskill, New York. The English-American painter after whom this museum is named founded the Hudson River School, a movement traditionally associated with male artists. But in recent years, art historians, curators, dealers and other stakeholders have begun to shine a light on the women artists of the Hudson River School.
This summer the TCNHS presents Women Reframe American Landscape, an exhibition in two parts. One segment, Susie Barstow and Her Circle, moves forward the work of recognizing the contributions of 19th-century women of the Hudson River Valley to American landscape painting. Susie Barstow and Her Circle is housed in the New Studio building. About a dozen Barstow framed landscape oil paintings of varying sizes adorn two of the walls. There are also display cases that present objects of material culture, including—among many other items—Susie’s paintbox, tickets she saved from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition, a receipt to one of her students for art lessons, and the artist’s calling card.
Installation view of the 'Susie Barstow & Her Circle' portion of Women Reframe American Landscape in Thomas Cole’s New Studio © Peter Aaron/OTTO.
On the remaining walls within the New Studio segment of the exhibition, visitors find paintings by other women artists of the Hudson River School. These painters include Laura Woodward, Eliza Greatorex, Julie Hart Beers, Charlotte Buell Coman, Mary Josephine Walters, and Fidelia Bridges. The majority of paintings in this room are on loan from private collections. This is perhaps unsurprising, given that not many works by these artists are held in public collections. But I was slightly surprised and pleased to notice that many of the collections were identified in the placards by name.
Fidelia Bridges, Small Bird with Flowering Ironwood, c. 1870, on display in 'Susie Barstow & Her Circle' in Thomas Cole’s New Studio. Author photo.
While the two Fidelia Bridges paintings in this exhibit are from private collections, this artist is an exception to my generalization above. More than 30 US museums—including the National Gallery of Art, the Met, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, to name just a few—hold at least one of her works, whether an oil painting, a watercolor, or a chromolithograph.
This year marks a significant anniversary for Bridges as well as for Barstow; it is exactly one century since each woman died in 1923. New books about each artist commemorate this anniversary, and a copy of each is available in the New Studio for visitors to browse: Susie M. Barstow: Redefining the Hudson River School, by Nancy Siegel, who curates Susie Barstow and Her Circle; and Fidelia Bridges: Nature into Art, by Katherine Manthorne, whose books on women artists also include Restless Enterprise: The Art and Life of Eliza Pratt Greatorex and Women in the Dark: Female Photographers in the US, 1850–1900.
Susie M. Barstow: Redefining the Hudson River School and Fidelia Bridges: Nature into Art flank the show’s exhibition catalog in the TCNHS Visitor’s Center. Author photo.
In Contemporary Practices, the complementary segment of this exhibition, the focus turns to living artists whose work touches—albeit in very different ways—on our relationship with the land. In one ground floor room is a site-specific installation by Teresita Fernández, which incorporates only materials found in nature; and a multi-media work by Ebony G. Patterson takes up nearly a whole wall. On the stair landing is a characteristically humorous-yet-incisive poster from the Guerrilla Girls, specially composed for this exhibition.
Installation view of Guerrilla Girls Reality Check: The Hudson River School in the Main House Entrance Hall © Peter Aaron/OTTO.
Among the works upstairs are paintings by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and some of her never-before-displayed beadwork; book art by Anna Plesset; sculpture by Jean Shin; a set of “seasons” photographic self-portraits by Wendy Red Star; and a wall-size photograph by Tanya Marcuse (it looks like a painting!) of carefully staged objects. Other artists with works on display in the house or in the Old Studio in the Visitor’s Center are Marie Lorenz, Mary Mattingly, Cecilia Vicuña, Kay WalkingStick, and Saya Woolfalk.
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, She, Her, Hers Map; Amerika Map; Stolen Map / $ Map, 2021, on display in the Main House at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site. Author photo.
The temporary display of contemporary artwork in the Main House intermixes with the permanent display, which comprises not only Thomas Cole’s paintings, but also furnishings and equipment that he and his household used. For visitors who thought they had left historic women artists behind in the New Studio, there is a pleasant surprise. The Main House display includes oil paintings by Cole’s sister Sarah, and watercolors and decorated china by his daughter Emily!
A View of Catskill Mountain House: copy by Sarah Cole, 1848 (left), on display in the Main House at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site alongside the original painting by her brother Thomas Cole (right). Author photo.
I am grateful to the organizers, lenders and funders of Women Reframe American Landscape for shining a light not only on historic and contemporary women artists, but on the profound and multi-faceted nature of our relationship with the land.
– Erika Gaffney, June 2023
Women Reframe American Landscape is on at the TCNHS through October 29. In November, the exhibition will be on at the New Britain Museum of American Art.
Find our books on Susie M Barstow and Fidelia Bridges here:
]]>Our Book of the Month for July is Michael J Prokopow's monograph on Hurvin Anderson – now 20% off with code MONTH20 until the end of July.
Hurvin Anderson is known for painting loosely rendered ‘observations’ of scenes and spaces loaded with personal or communal meaning. Anderson’s painting style is notable for the ease with which he slips between figuration and abstraction, playing with the tropes of earlier landscape traditions and 20th-century abstraction. His paintings of barbershop interiors, country tennis clubs and tropical roadsides teem with rich brushwork and multitudes of decorative patterns or architectural features, at once obscuring and adding to underlying ruminations on identity and place.
Flat Top, 2008, oil on canvas, 250 x 208 cm. Thomas Dane London. © Hurvin Anderson.
Courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery. Photo: Hugh Kelly.
Hurvin Anderson (b. 1965) first painted a Birmingham-based barbershop in 2006. Over the last 15 years, Anderson has repeatedly reworked the same barbershop in a multitude of ways to explore key painting styles, shifting from figuration to abstraction, and experimenting with the classic genres of still life, landscape and portraiture.
The Salon Paintings exhibition focuses on the Barbershop series as a lens through which to understand Anderson’s wider practice and key concerns of memory, identity and nationhood.
The exhibition displays the most comprehensive presentation of the Barbershop series, from the very first work made in 2006 to the latest paintings, Skiffle, 2023 and Shear Cut, 2023, created this spring which culminate the series. Anderson’s studio drawings and related sketches are interspersed throughout the exhibition revealing the subject matter of the barbershop as one that has sustained his approach to experimentation over the past 15 years.
Alongside the Salon Paintings exhibition, Anderson has curated a display of works that will take visitors on a journey through his formative influences. This personal selection offers a unique insight into what informs and motivates Hurvin Anderson’s approach to painting and includes work by Michael Andrews, Francis Bacon, Patrick Caulfield, Prunella Clough, Duncan Grant, Denzil Forrester, Claudette Johnson, Leon Kossoff, Keith Piper and Stanley Spencer.
Michael J. Prokopow's monograph on Hurvin Anderson - the first comprehensive overview of Anderson's career to date – won the HBA Book Award for Exemplary Scholarship on the Contemporary Period. The prize jury commented:
This beautifully illustrated book carefully maps, for the first time with such depth, the richness of Hurvin Anderson’s oeuvre across several decades. Here, the celebrated and familiar large canvases of barbershop scenes and Caribbean landscapes which have featured in key exhibitions including the Royal West of England Academy’s Jamaican Pulse (2016) and, more recently, Tate’s Life Between Islands (2021), and which were central to the artist’s Turner Prize nomination in 2017, are contextualized not only within broader dialogues around diaspora and its politics but also within a painting practice vested with complex philosophical and art historical implications. Prokopow’s concise and careful examination of Anderson’s work, which draws heavily on interviews with the artist and is supplemented by images from the artist’s archive, is an important and incisive contribution to the field of study around contemporary painting in Britain.
Dr. Michael J. Prokopow is an historian and curator. His areas of expertise include material and visual culture, design and architecture, cultural theory, postcolonial and decolonization theory and museum and curatorial practice. He has published widely on aesthetics, craft and modernism.
Get your copy of the book HERE and apply code MONTH20 for 20% off!
]]>LONDON 1870-1914: A CITY AT ITS ZENITH by Andrew Saint is beautifully illustrated with a range of cartoons, newspaper articles, maps, paintings and portraits, as well as architectural photographs and drawings. It is a delightful, intelligent revelation of Victorian and Edwardian London.
This book conveys the excitement, diversity and richness of London at a time when the city was arguably at the height of its power, uniqueness and attraction. Balancing the social, the topographical and the visible aspects of the great city, author Andrew Saint uses buildings, architecture, literature and art as a way into understanding social and historical phenomena.
While many volumes on Victorian London focus on poverty (an issue which is included in this book), the author here provides a broader picture of life in the city. It is enlivened with a rich line-up of colourful characters, including Baron Albert Grant; Henry Mayers Hyndman and his connections with Karl Marx, William Morris and George Bernard Shaw; John Burns; Octavia Hill; Aubrey Beardsley and the artistic bohemians; Alfred Harmsworth and the Garrett sisters, and includes insightful quotes on London by esteemed authors such as Trollope, Henry James and Rudyard Kipling.
Divided into four long chapters, each dealing with a decade, London’s evolution between 1870 and 1914 comes across clearly. Although not intended to be a complete history, it does cover all the most important historical developments in London and London life. Particular issues are allotted to the decade in which they seem to have been most critical. Topics covered include: the creation of new neighbourhoods and roads; how the Victorians dealt with their housing crisis; why certain architectural styles were preferred; and the fashion for focusing on certain types of building, such as ice rinks, schools, houses, hospitals, fire stations, exhibition halls, water works, music halls, recital rooms and pubs.
This is an up-to-date, readable and well-illustrated book which embraces the whole in a positive spirit. Saint’s interpretation of London’s history in the period covered is unashamedly one of progress in the face of great odds. He shows that, in almost every aspect, it was a much better city in1914 than in 1870. At a time when local autonomy in Britain has been ruthlessly downgraded and London’s face is every year coarsened further by money-led developments, this story of gradual and earnest improvement may have lessons to teach.
ORDER YOUR COPY WITH 20% OFF HERE
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Fig. 1 – John Adams Whipple, Portrait of Nathaniel Hawthorne
Fig. 2 – Oliver Ingraham Lay, Portrait of Fidelia Bridges
“Whence did you come?" novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne (fig. 1) has the old Doctor ask in his tale 'Doctor Grimshawe’s Secret.' Born in Salem on July 4, 1804, into a family that had lived there since the seventeenth century, the author knew very well from whence he came, but always harbored mixed feelings about it. Born thirty years later in the same port city, the visual artist Fidelia Bridges (fig. 2) also felt both a strong attachment and a distinct aversion to the place: what Henry James called 'the mingled tenderness and rancour.' Hawthorne often portrayed it as a sleepy town known for its past glories rather than its dull present. After being fired from his position as surveyor of custom in March 1849, he let loose with even more biting commentary. He never resided there again after his 'decapitation,' as he referred to his dismissal.
Fig. 3 – Factories at Canton, c.1840
In December 1849 Fidelia Bridges’ father – ship’s captain Henry Bridges – died in Canton, China (fig. 3), but it took three months for the notification to arrive in Salem. Only three hours before the communication of his fate reached their home, his wife Eliza Chadwick Bridges passed away, leaving the future artist and her three surviving siblings as orphans. Sixteen years old at the time, Fidelia initially lived in the vicinity with relatives. Haunted by this unthinkable tragedy, she moved away from her hometown as soon as she could, and – like Hawthorne – never lived there again. Both writer and artist, however, continued to feel the pull of Salem and its history that marked their lives and creative endeavors ever after.
Fig. 4 – Custom-House, Salem, Massachusetts, ca.1850s
Hometown ties were maintained through Fidelia’s family and former neighbors and friends with whom she continued to associate long after moving away. She was also caught up in the literary web Hawthorne had created. Copies of his books including The House of the Seven Gables, Mosses from an Old Manse, Passages from the American Note-Books of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Passages from the English Note-Books of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and The Snow Image and Other Twice-Told Tales were always on her library shelves. Fidelia might have gained insights into the challenges of female artists traveling in Europe when she read of Hilda and Miriam’s experiences in his The Marble Faun. But it was perhaps the volume that he completed in 1850 – the year she lost her parents – that meant the most to her. For The Scarlet Letter opened with its introduction entitled 'The Custom House', (fig. 4) where the author had worked on the Salem waterfront from 1846 to 1849 and surely crossed paths with Fidelia’s father, Captain Bridges, who had to report there to pay import duties on his cargo upon returning from Asia.
In my just-released book Fidelia Bridges: Nature into Art (London: Lund Humphries, fig. 5) space did not permit me to delve deeply into the contents of Fidelia's library, but it is fascinating to ponder her motivations for keeping Hawthorne’s writings close at hand throughout her life. Today it is possible to spend the night in the Fidelia Bridges Guest House, now part of the Hawthorne Hotel in Salem, Massachusetts, where you can immerse yourself in the atmosphere of her hometown and – in the words of the novelist – 'attempt to connect a by-gone time with the very Present that is flitting away from us.'[1]
– Katherine Manthorne, 2023
Images:
Fig. 1. John Adams Whipple, Portrait of Nathaniel Hawthorne, ca. 1853. Salt paper print, National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.
Fig. 2. Oliver Ingraham Lay, Portrait of Fidelia Bridges, c.1877, oil on canvas mounted on wood, 98.7 x 71.4 cm (38 7/8 x 28 1/8 in), oval, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.
Fig. 3. Auguste Borget, Factories at Canton, c.1840, lithograph by Eugene Ciceri from Sketches of China and the Chinese: From Drawings by Auguste Borget, London: Tilt and Bogue, 1842, plate 23, n.p., image size 25.4 x 40.6 cm (10 x 16 in)
Fig. 4. Artist unidentified, Custom-House, Salem, Massachusetts, ca.1850s, wood engraving, New York Public Library, New York.
Fig. 5. Book Cover: Katherine Manthorne, Fidelia Bridges: Nature into Art. London: Lund Humphries, 2023.
Notes:
[1] Margaret B. Moore, The Salem World of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Columbia and London: U. of Missouri Press, 1998) provided background on the writer.
]]>Pictured: Temple C, on the acropolis of the city of Selinunte, c.550 bce. Photo: Peter de Figueiredo, © Peter de Figueiredo.
‘You’ve got to have a point of view’: these were the words of Nikos Stangos, the legendary editor at Thames and Hudson, responding to the initial manuscript of my book on Victorian Painting, when he sent it back to me asking me to rewrite it. I felt crushed. But it was a valuable lesson. History (and art history) is not a record of what happened, it is a record of someone’s interpretation of what happened. Writing from a clear standpoint also makes for a book that readers find easier to understand. So when I undertook to write about the art and architecture of Sicily, a complex subject if ever there was one, I had to decide where I stood.
Pictured: 'La Vucciria' by Renato Guttuso, 1974. Photo: Melo Minnella.
The book was the idea of my partner Peter de Figueiredo, who took the architectural photographs for the book. Neither of us had any knowledge of or connection with Sicily when we first went there on holiday in the 1990s, but as art and architectural historians, we were both captivated by the artistic riches of the island, a product of the succession of different peoples who came to Sicily as settlers, conquerors and short-term visitors – Greeks, Romans, Phoenicians, Arabs, Normans, Germans, Spaniards, Austrians, North Italians. We were also attracted by the climate and the food. Wherever we went, on every street corner was a stall piled high with fresh seasonal fruit and vegetables, and going round the fish markets of Catania or Trapani was like taking part in a theatrical performance. The intensity of the market experience is summed up by Renato Guttuso’s painting of Palermo’s Vucciria market, reproduced in the book.
On our first visit to Sicily the hotels we stayed in were distinctly seedy; Palermo after dark was sinister, with very few places to eat, and to get into some of the churches you had to ring on the bell of a nearby house to find someone with a key (the enterprising Mayor of Palermo Leoluca Orlando changed all that: now the city welcomes tourists and most of the important churches are open regular hours). In some museums we were the only visitors, and were accompanied by a caretaker who would hustle us round, turning the lights on and off for us in each gallery. At Noto, one of the Baroque towns rebuilt after the 1693 earthquake, the cathedral was in a state of collapse, and there were only a handful of other tourists (it is now part of a World Heritage site, the cathedral has been restored, and in the summer you can hardly move for sightseers). Driving through the countryside on our first visit to Sicily, I remember being struck by the many decaying houses in orange groves or vineyards, prompting fantasies of buying one and doing it up. After returning for several years in succession, we took the plunge and bought a house - not the crumbling ruin of my dreams, but a more practical house, modern, but built in traditional style with pantiled roofs, a courtyard with a pizza oven, and a small garden with olive and fruit trees, which we have extended, creating a sustainable Mediterranean garden. The house is outside Trapani, on the west of the island, in a peaceful location overlooking vineyards and olive groves.
Pictured: Noto rebuilt. S. Nicolò, the Chiesa Madre (now the cathedral), is flanked by palaces for the aristocracy, mostly in the Baroque style, but with some Neo-classical buildings such as the Palazzo Trigona, now the Bishop’s Palace (on the right). Photo: Peter de Figueiredo, © Peter de Figueiredo.
From this base, we visited archaeological sites, museums, palaces and churches all over the island. What was particularly fascinating was the layering of different cultures, and the way they intermingled, subtly affecting each other in different ways at different times. At Syracuse, we were astonished to see the cathedral, a Baroque facade with Doric columns from the Greek temple originally occupying the site embedded into its side walls. The chapels and cathedrals of the Norman rulers of Sicily enthralled us with their juxtapositions of Byzantine-style mosaics, Arabic decorations and French structural features. We explored the dazzling church interiors of Palermo, extravagantly covered with intricate designs inlaid in multicoloured marbles; and we admired the fountains – the Pretoria fountain, originally designed for a Florentine garden, bought second-hand and transformed for its new home in Palermo; and the fountains of Messina, masterworks of flowing, watery imagery by Giovanni Montorsoli, Michelangelo’s favourite assistant. Messina is also home to two dramatic late paintings by Caravaggio (there is another at Syracuse); in these, his final works, Caravaggio responded powerfully to the Sicilians’ highly emotional approach to religion.
Pictured: 1) Syracuse Cathedral, showing columns from the second Temple of Athene, c.480 bce. 2) Cappella Palatina, Palermo. The mosaics in the dome and apse, completed by 1143, are Byzantine in style and iconography, with inscriptions in Greek. Photos: Peter de Figueiredo, © Peter de Figueiredo.
For years, people thought of Sicily as an artistic backwater and Sicilian art as essentially derivative – a hotch-potch of foreign imports imposed on local culture, a point of view encapsulated in a passage from Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s incomparable novel The Leopard, where the ageing prince Don Fabrizio, the Leopard of the title (Burt Lancaster in the film version), lamented what he saw as the burden of all the cultures which had been brought into Sicily: ‘For over twenty-five centuries we’ve been bearing the weight of superb and heterogeneous civilizations, all from outside, none made by ourselves, none that we could call our own.’ For me, it is exactly this mixture of foreign influences and the ways in which they have been absorbed and reworked by locals that gives Sicilian art its original and unique qualities. This is my point of view: a challenge to The Leopard’s lament.
Pictured: 1) 'Abigail Calms David’s Anger', marmi tramischi from the apse of the Casa Professa. 2) Marmi tramischi designed by Antonio Grano in the sanctuary of the Casa Professa. Photos: Peter de Figueiredo, © Peter de Figueiredo.
Of course, I am not the first to portray Sicilian art in this way. In recent decades, writers on different aspects of Sicilian art have stressed innovation, from the first spiral staircase in the world (in a temple at Selinunte) to the pioneering Stile Liberty (Art Nouveau) designs of Ernesto Basile. Yet until now no-one has stood back and surveyed the whole field from prehistory until the end of the last century. Granted, Sicily has not been equally creative throughout its history; it was often a late adopter of new styles and it was at times provincial and conservative. But it also gave rise to some of the most exciting works of art of their day, which I hope will receive greater recognition from readers of my book.
Julian Treuherz, 2023
Pictured: Villa Valguarnera, Bagheria, by T.M. Napoli, begun in 1712. Photo: Peter de Figueiredo, © Peter de Figueiredo.
Find out more about the book, and pre-order HERE.
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The question of who and what we as a society choose to commemorate has come under scrutiny in recent times. Closely tied in with era-defining movements such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, communities are turning their attention to public monuments and asking: “Is this really who we are?” For decades, even centuries, statues of slave traders, Confederate army generals and heads of state have been presiding over our streets, acting as a daily insult to many. Consequently, many contested monuments have been subject to removal or vandalism as the tide of citizen’s anger over historic injustice is turning.
In parallel to this surge of feeling is the development of what could be termed a ‘memorial industry’ – a climate in which governments and communities, for many reasons, are driving the construction of new monuments; often, these celebrate underrepresented, forgotten, or previously-disregarded events and individuals. Correspondingly, there is often an expectation today that a given event, if it affects the lives of ordinary citizens, will be followed by a public memorial – with negative feeling if this does not occur.
With this demand comes an increase in memorial commissions for designers. And – partly due to the changing nature of the commemorative subjects, and partly due to the need to be memorable themselves – these projects are prompting an increasingly wide range of creative responses...Exciting, creative responses, which push boundaries, blur the distinction between typologies, and elicit strong emotions.
The above forms the simplified backdrop against which my co-author Tszwai So and I decided to write our book. As a practicing architect, and head of his studio Spheron Architects, Tszwai has worked on several notable memorial commissions, including the award-winning Belarusian Memorial Chapel in London (which commemorates Belarusian tragedies during WWII and Chernobyl) and the planned Pan-European Memorial for the Victims of Totalitarianism, destined for construction outside the EU Parliament in Brussels. His first-hand experience of working with victims’ groups, clients and political organisations, to create works of meaning, gives him a unique insight into such design projects.
My academic background is grounded in the study of material and visual culture and its history – and memorials are loaded and active examples of material culture: they embody numerous paradoxes and fulfil many functions, for individuals and for international communities. Several years spent writing about construction products in my early career, helped attune me, as we were researching this subject here, to the fascinating treatment of materials within contemporary memorial design. Many such monuments deliberately reject traditional materials (such as marble and bronze) in favour of experimental materials (resin and burlap, household furniture, mirror-glass, charred wood...) which are capable of expressing abstract concepts and prompting unexpected emotional reactions. Our combined expertise as authors – architect and architectural journalist – gives this book its texture.
We researched many memorials and interviewed many architects for our book: some of these interviews can be read in full, others (because we don’t have infinite pages!) serve to paint a fuller picture of the structures they describe. We showcase 45 memorials from around the world, originating from the 21st century. These include temporary installations, largescale masterplans, synagogues, landscape interventions, converted houses, a gate to an elementary school, a petrified tree... We wanted to illustrate the diversity of the memorial typology today, and our examples all have one thing in common, which is that their designs consistently exhibit intellectual rigour and empathy.
As we wrote this book, we were well aware of the weight of academia existing on this topic of memorialisation, by historians, anthropologists, sociologists and others. From our conversations with architects, it was clear that these designers had immersed themselves in relevant research, but, beyond that, had allowed themselves to explore the existential questions that arose from their own particular relationship with the subject matter. We didn’t wish to synthesise an enormous academic subject but rather to approach it a little like a conversational show-and-tell – celebrating our selection and offering context and a glimpse into the designers’ personal philosophies.
I personally found the writing of this book to be rewarding and emotional. I gave birth half-way through writing the manuscript, and during pandemic lockdowns when many of us were transfixed by the 24-hour news cycle, I became acutely aware of reasons why we, as a sociable species, feel the need to erect commemorative monuments. It ties us in with our past, binding us to each other in a material way, and thereby contributes to how we form our identities. And it also restores agency to us, when circumstances render us otherwise powerless: in materialising these tangible memorial artefacts, we are taking acts of resistance against forgetting, and engaging in positive acts of creation.
Find out more and order your copy of Remembrance Now HERE.
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Claude Lorrain, Coast Scene with Europa and the Bull, 1634, oil on canvas, 170.8 × 199.7 cm (67 ¼ × 78 3/5 in), Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX. Image courtesy of Wikimedia, public domain.
Henry Fuseli, The Night-Hag Visiting Lapland Witches, 1796, Oil on canvas, 40 x 49 3/4 in. (101.6 x 126.4 cm), Purchase, Bequest of Lillian S. Timken, by exchange, and Victor Wilbour Memorial, The Alfred N. Punnett Endowment, Marquand and Charles B. Curtis Funds, 1980.
The Introduction of my new book Mist and Fog in British and European Painting presents quotations from Homer and other ancient authors that suggest associations with mist and fog and confer meanings to these atmospheric phenomena. Later authors are quoted in the following chapters, including Shakespeare and Milton, and writers contemporaneous with the periods covered. More quotations were available than could be accommodated in the text, but some notable examples are cited here.
Through the dull mist, I following – when a step,
A single step, that freed me from the skirts
Of the blind vapour, opened to my view
Glory beyond all glory ever seen
By waking sense or by dreaming soul!
The appearance, instantaneously disclosed,
Was of a mighty city ...
Fabric it seemed of diamond and of gold,
With alabaster domes, and silver spires,
And blazing terrace upon terrace …
Right in the midst, where interspace appeared
Of open court, an object like a throne
Under a shining canopy of state …
But vast in size, in substance glorified;
Such as by Hebrew Prophets were beheld
In vision – forms uncouth of mightiest power
For admiration and mysterious awe.
A vision by The Solitary, a character in ‘The Excursion’
from the unfinished The Recluse (1814)
The mists boil up around the glaciers; clouds
Rise curling fast beneath me, white and sulfury,
Like foam from the ocean of deep Hell,
Whose every wave breaks on a living shore
Heap’d with the damned like pebbles …
Manfred: A Dramatic Poem,
Act, 1, Scene 2 (1816–17)
I compare human life to a large room of Many Apartments, two of which I can only describe, the doors of the rest being yet shut to me – The first we step into we call the infant or thoughtless Chamber, in which we remain … a long while, and not withstanding the doors to the second Chamber remain wide open, showing a bright appearance, we care not to hasten to it; but are at length imperceptibly impelled by awakening of the thinking principle – within us – we no sooner get into the second Chamber, which I shall call the Chamber of Maiden-Thought, then we become intoxicated with the light and the atmosphere, we see nothing but pleasant wonders … However, among the effects … is that tremendous one of sharpening one’s vision into the nature and heart of Man—of convincing one’s nerves that the World is full of misery and Heartbreak, Pain, sickness and oppression—whereby This Chamber of Maiden Thought becomes gradually darken’d and at same time on all sides of it many doors are set open – but all dark – all leading to dark passages—We see not the balance of good and evil. We are in a mist – We are now in that state—We feel the burden of the Mystery.
Letter to J. H. Reynolds, 13 May 1818
Last night returning from my twilight walk,
I met the grey mist of Death, whose eyeless brow
Was bent on me, and from his hand of chalk
He reached me flowers as from a withered bough
O Death, what bitter nosegays givest thou!
‘A Ballad of Past Meridian’, Modern Love (1862)
Albeit it was simply a Sunday in autumn, I had been born again, life lay intact before me, for that morning, after a succession of mild days, there had been a cold fog which had not cleared until nearly midday: and a change in the weather is sufficient to create the world and ourselves anew … The mist, from the moment of my awakening, had made of me, instead of the centrifugal being which one is on fine days a man turned in on himself …
[T]he new world , in which the mist of this morning’s fog had immersed me was a world already known to me (which only made it more real) and forgotten for some time (which restored all its novelty). And I was able to look at several of the pictures of misty landscapes which my memory had acquired …
‘The Guermantes Way’, In Search Of Lost Time (1913–1927)
When an opening appears in the mist Wordsworth’s The Solitary sees a vision of Heaven and the Almighty’s throne. Byron in this excerpt has Manfred link mist with evil and damnation. Uncertainty and mystery are expressed by a youthful Keats as he confronts an unknown future. The spectre of Death rises out of nocturnal mist in Meredith’s grim sonnet and vapourous atmosphere evokes forgotten memories in Proust’s novel. Such associations also were fertile ground for visual metaphors in numerous paintings executed from the late 18th to the early 20th centuries.
The artists featured in this book were enamoured with mist and fog. Caspar David Friedrich observed, ‘When a landscape is covered in fog, it appears larger, more sublime, and heightens the strength of the imagination and excites expectation'. Many of his paintings shrouded in mist and fog allude to the other side, and the expectation for eternal life. JMW Turner declared ‘Atmosphere is my style’, which he used to suggest the expansiveness and magnificence of nature. Monet said, ‘I love London … It is the fog that gives it its marvellous breadth. Its regular massive blocks become grandiose in this mysterious cloak.’
In addition to the general sense of mystery and sublimity, mist and fog are the stuff of dreams, supernatural visions, and metaphors of evil, death and the passage of time. Depictions of mist and fog, their significance and atmospheric effects, as well as a number of literary parallels, are discussed in depth in Mist and Fog in British and European Painting.
Claude Monet, Effet de brouillard (Fog Effect), 1872, oil on canvas, 48.2 × 75.2 cm (19 × 29 5/8 in), private collection.
Find the book HERE.
]]>Today, 22 April, is American artist Lois Dodd's 96th birthday. With a career spanning over 50 years, and over 50 solo exhibitions, Dodd's painting clearly connects with a broad art-loving audience.
To mark this special day, Lund Humphries Managing Director Lucy Myers reflects on the great success of Faye Hirsch's monograph on Lois Dodd for the Contemporary Painters series, edited by Barry Schwabsky.
Lois Dodd on the panel of ‘Rewriting Painting’, Cooper Union, 19 April 2018, which launched the Lund Humphries Contemporary Painters Series. Photograph courtesy of The Cooper Union, photo by Marget Long.
The selection of painters for our new Contemporary Painters series in 2016 was informed by lists. The series longlist was a collation of suggestions from our advisory board, who had each been asked to propose painters for the series. It was then whittled down to a shortlist of our top names, each given a Lund Humphries score which was intended to indicate its commercial potential.
Lois Dodd scored 8.5 out of 10. A book on her work had been proposed by two advisory- board members, which must have helped. ‘Popular female American “people's” artist with long career. No monograph’, say the notes. There’s a reference to The Wall Street Journal, which had described her as ‘A quiet heroine of stick-to-your-guns, painterly painting’.
It was a risky choice. Lois Dodd, then 89, was at that time virtually unknown outside of the East Coast of the US. She had no gallery representation outside the US, and her New York gallery was a small, independent business. Her work was scattered across the collections of a few art museums in New York and Maine.
But from the beginning, Lois Dodd’s paintings resonated with the book’s readers. Her subjects were particular landscapes in New York and Maine, actual windows, doors and roofs, but they had a universality which transcended their specific location. I noticed customers being drawn to the book from its cover image, a detail of Morning Corner 1983 with its intriguing small window. The book is now in its third printing, defying the odds.
Exhibition view of Lois Dodd, July-August 2019, Modern Art gallery, London. Photo: Lucy Myers. See https://modernart.net/exhibitions/lois-dodd for more.
Since 2016, Dodd’s star has also been on the ascendant, and it’s perhaps unsurprising that this has coincided with a broader movement to tell the stories of previously neglected women painters. In 2019, a first solo exhibition of her work was held at Modern Art gallery in London. On 2 April 2023, a major retrospective opened at the Bruce Museum Connecticut, and another retrospective is planned for 2024 at the Kunstmuseum Den Haag, The Netherlands.
‘Dodd’s is an art that refrains from calling attention to itself, and perhaps for this reason has not often enough receive the close attention it deserves. It is gratifying that, as the artist enters her tenth decade, it continues to flower and draw new admirers’, wrote Barry Schwabsky in his Foreword to the book. Lois Dodd turns 96 on 22 April. Happy Birthday to an extraordinary artist whose work continues to speak to us.
Lucy Myers
Lund Humphries Managing Director
April 2023
Peter Khoroche's study of Ivon Hitchens is this month's Book of the Month, chosen by our friends at Pallant House Gallery Bookshop. Use the code MONTH20 at checkout to get 20% off during April.
'With many museums and galleries struggling to attract as many visitors as before the pandemic, Pallant House Gallery has been fortunate in hosting one of its most popular ever exhibitions. As Sussex Landscape: Chalk, Wood and Water enters its last few weeks, its popularity shows no sign of abating – a testament to the distinctive appeal of the Sussex countryside. In addition to featuring celebrated works by William Blake, J.M.W. Turner and John Constable, it is also a treasure trove of 20th-century British art – most notably, the work of Ivon Hitchens. It is perhaps only natural then that we should want to highlight Peter Khoroche’s book, a title which has sold brilliantly during the show and represents an exemplary survey of the artist.
Characterised by their vibrant colours and loose, gestural brushwork, Hitchens’ paintings are immediately recognisable for their immediacy and dynamism. Not content to simply replicate the rolling hills and wooded glades which typify the Sussex landscape, Hitchens provides an emotional and spiritual account of inhabiting such places, affording the same emphasis to the experience of looking as to the particulars of the scenes portrayed. Peter Khoroche, in this celebrated monograph, provides a detailed account of this style, tracing his development from a broadly conventional landscape painter into a practitioner of ‘figurative abstraction’. Generously illustrated with examples of his work (from his nudes to his large-scale murals), Ivon Hitchens is the authoritative guide to this artist’s remarkable life and oeuvre.'
– Joshua Blackman, Pallant House Gallery Bookshop
Find out more about Peter Khoroche's book HERE
‘Sussex Landscape: Chalk, Wood and Water’ runs at Pallant House Gallery until 23rd April. The exhibition catalogue is available to purchase, along with a wide range of books, prints and gifts.
Visit the bookshop:
Gallery Bookshop Ltd.
9 North Pallant
Chichester
West Sussex
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01243 781293
shop@pallantbookshop.com
More than 400 years after her lifetime, seventeenth-century painter Artemisia Gentileschi remains relevant. She has fired the imagination of 21st-century art lovers and feminists. Previously unknown paintings of hers continue to come to light. Her work has been displayed in—and in at least two cases has been the central focus of—recent art exhibitions in the US, the UK, the Netherlands, and Italy. More shows in which her work will feature are coming up in 2023-24 in Berlin, Hamburg, Basel, Madrid, Baltimore and Toronto. She is even the muse for a clothing line to debut this autumn!
But above all, Artemisia has inspired books. She is the subject of not only exhibition catalogs and scholarly monographs, but also of popular non-fiction books and fictional works, including at least one graphic novel. Within a long list of such publications, Artemisia Gentileschi, by Sheila Barker, stands out. Examining the artist’s life and work through the lens of cutting-edge scholarship, Barker opens readers’ eyes to Artemisia’s pictorial intelligence, as well as to her achievement of a remarkably lucrative and high-profile career. Incorporating discussion of fresh archival discoveries and newly attributed paintings, the study brings to life the extraordinary story of this Baroque artist, placing her within a socio-historical context.
Author Sheila Barker is a leading expert on Italian women artists, including not only Artemisia, but also Giovanna Garzoni, Lucrezia Quistelli, and Teresa Berenice Vitelli. In Artemisia Gentileschi, Barker weaves in-depth explorations of key artworks through the narrative. Examining the paintings in terms of their iconographies and technical characteristics, she traces developments in Gentileschi’s approach to her craft, and portrays the gradual evolution of the artist’s expressive goals and techniques.
As one would expect, given that it is written by a prominent Artemisia scholar, the text is authoritative. Yet it is at the same time accessible to, and engaging for, non-specialists, whether art lovers, feminists, and/or scholars from other fields. This accessibility is an important and deliberate feature of the series in which it is published, Illuminating Women Artists. The series profiles important but underrecognized women artists from the Renaissance to the 18th century. Many of the women represented by the volumes were celebrated professional artists in their own eras, yet whether through benign neglect or deliberate erasure, their names and works have not been passed down continually in the history of art.
Happily, there’s a movement underway now—among art historians, curators, dealers and collectors, authors of historic fiction, and other stakeholders—to recover the names, stories and works of history’s women artists, and to recognize and celebrate their achievements. Illuminating Women Artists contributes to the effort with beautifully illustrated and invitingly written overviews of the accomplishments of individual female makers. Forthcoming later this year are volumes on Elisabetta Sirani and Rosalba Carriera (the 350th anniversary of whose birth we celebrate this year). Books profiling Clara Peeters, Louise Moillon, Sofonisba Anguissola and Josefa de Óbidos are in advanced planning stages, and there are many more titles to come!
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Our Illuminating Women Artists series is co-published with Getty in North America.
Please note: our 20% discount is not available on Illuminating Women Artists series publications in North America.
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Image above: Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith and Her Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes, c.1624-7, oil on canvas, 187.2 x 142 cm, Courtesy of Detroit Institute of Arts
]]>Lund Humphries has a longstanding commitment to publishing on women artists, and our list includes a growing number of books on outstanding women practitioners in art, architecture and design, from historical figures to contemporary names. Read on for more about some fantastic women in the arts...
Modern British Art:
Lund Humphries has a long history dating back to 1939 and one of the first monographs published by the press was on a female artist: Barbara Hepworth.
Barbara Hepworth: Carvings and Drawings, published by Lund Humphries in 1952 included Hepworth’s most extensive piece of writing on her life and ideas as a sculptor up to the early 1950s, and was the first major monograph on her work.
Writing to Lund Humphries’ Chairman Anthony Bell in 1964 about the book, Hepworth said: ‘I thought it had great beauty in format. […] A good book should be the inspired result of co-operation between publisher, writer and artist.’ Since 1952, Lund Humphries has published five further books on Hepworth, two of them during her lifetime. READ MORE
We are all living through a critical moment in contemporary culture, and Lund Humphries' publishing is responding to the broader movement underway among scholars, museums, collectors, and the wider world of cultural heritage to recognise, make evident and contextualise the contributions of historical and contemporary women artists.
Reconsidering the art-historical canon:
Our Illuminating Women Artists series, co-published with Getty in North America, extends our publishing on women artists to important but neglected figures from the Renaissance to the 18th century.
Catherine Hall-van den Elsen, author of Luisa Roldán, the first volume in the series, has said, 'I am grateful to the staff of Lund Humphries whose support enabled this volume to communicate the story of an unarguably resilient woman - one of the great sculptors of the Spanish Golden Age.' READ MORE
Interdisciplinary focus:
Other books highlight the work of women in architecture and design.
Greta Magnusson Grossman by Harriet Harriss and Naomi House seeks to reaffirm Grossman's significant, multi-disciplinary contribution to design and architecture, which was largely ignored until recently. Similarly, Into the Light: The Art and Architecture of Lauretta Vinciarelli by Rebecca Siefert is another book which seeks to redress the balance of history. Talking to us in an interview, Rebecca noted:
'Unfortunately, [Lauretta Vinciarelli's] erasure is not surprising at all considering the entrenched sexism of the discipline of architecture (and art, for that matter). But it certainly is surprising considering that Judd and Vinciarelli were together for roughly a decade, not only as a romantic pair but as a professional pair, and even talked about starting an architectural firm together – and this was even published in Architectural Digest – and yet she remained absent from the Judd literature for so long. As I explain in my book, this is due to a number of factors, but I think it’s important to remember that Lauretta, like Denise Scott Brown, like Ray Eames, and like so many others, in many ways suffered from the "Star System in Architecture" that Scott Brown identified decades ago, which privileges a singular figure (usually male) over the beautiful complexity that is collaborative work.'
Indeed, this narrative is combatted by Expanding Field of Architecture by Marcia Feuerstein, Jodi La Coe and Paola Zellner Bassett – a book which documents outstanding projects from forty leading women architects/women-led practices across the globe.
Confronting Contemporary Issues:
We are so heartened by the response to recent titles addressing key contemporary issues facing women artists: in particular, Hettie Judah's volume for the Hot Topics in the Art World series: How Not to Exclude Artist Mothers (and other parents). This book brings the question of women's place in the art world right up to the present, arguing that a paradigm shift is needed within the art world to take account of the needs of artist mothers (and other parents).
Growing Demand for Women Artists:
We are immensely proud that a book on a woman artist – Susan L. Aberth's definitive survey of the life and work of Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) – has been Lund Humphries' consistent bestseller since its publication in 2004. Author Susan L. Aberth reflects for the Lund Humphries blog:
'It was Carrington’s greatest wish to have a book dedicated to her work in English, so when Lund Humphries gave me the opportunity to publish a monograph on her I flew to Mexico City to ask her permission. That it was a British publisher made her very happy, especially when she saw the quality of their art books, but she had to decide about me still. This took many bottles of Tequila drinking and cigarette smoking into the night, countless conversations not about her art but about feminism, meeting special friends for approval, in particular the artist Alan Glass and countless other tests. I understood this to be my initiation into her world and into her trust, so I felt honoured to be put through such a rigorous vetting. Luckily I passed and spent the next two years flying back and forth from New York City to Mexico City and spent many hours listening to the stories of this fascinating and inspiring human being.' READ MORE
We have only highlighted a handful of our books in this blogpost, and there are many more to discover! Visit our Women in the Arts collection to find more books.
Image credits:
Barbara Hepworth, Sculpture with Colour and Strings, 1939/61. Image courtesy of The Ingram Collection. Barbara Hepworth © Bowness. Image © John-Paul Bland.
Artemisia Gentileschi, Mary Magdalene in Ecstasy, c. 1623-25, oil on canvas, private European collection.
Greta Magnusson Grossman, Exterior and garden of the Grossman House, 9376 Claircrest Drive, Beverly Hills, 1956–57. Photograph by John Hartley (courtesy of the Greta Magnusson Grossman design records and papers located at R & Company, New York).
Photograph of Leonora Carrington, Norah Horna (Kati Horna’s daughter) and Susan L. Aberth. Courtesy of Susan L. Aberth.
]]>Katherine Manthorne, author of new monograph on Fidelia Bridges plays the detective in the case of Fidelia Bridges' mystery Valentine. Read on to discover the outcome of this curious case...
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Conducting research for my new book Fidelia Bridges: Nature into Art, a document emerged among her papers that stopped me in my tracks: a 2-page handwritten poem with illustrations in the margins that bore the final line 'Valentine Feb. 14, 1891', all done in brown ink. Bridges created a two-track body of work. She made fine art paintings primarily of birds and wildflowers that she exhibited in prestigious venues around the United States and in Britain. Simultaneously her imagery was reproduced as chromolithographs for the popular market. Her commercial work was published by Louis Prang as greeting cards and gift books for Christmas, Easter and yes- you guessed it – Valentine’s Day (fig. 1). It was intriguing to think of someone creating a greeting card for her, but who?
I began obsessing over the possibility that I had finally found a juicy tidbit related to some love interest – male or female – to spice up her life story. Samples of handwriting were compared, the content scrutinized for any revealing clues, and the document shared with a friend who was familiar with the artist and her circle.
Who were the likely suspects among her male friends? Her close confidante, artist Oliver Ingraham Lay, came to mind but was immediately eliminated as he had passed away in 1890 (fig. 2). William Trost Richards was a life-long friend, but this did not seem to be his style. Was there another male figure yet to emerge from the archives? I couldn’t rule out women, like the sculptor Ann Whitney, with whom she shared a close camaraderie. Then there was Annie Brown, one of her charges when she was a governess who became a life-long friend. All this personal speculation seemed to be to no avail, the answer had to be concealed in the text,
The lines on the second page (fig. 3) referenced her watercolors of New England birds she depicted over the four seasons of the year:
'Let others watch for blue birds note,
And long to hear the robin’s call,
Once- I too, hungered (!) for the birds,-
But now – I scorn them, one and all!
Fall, winter snow
And march wind blow,
Come, April days
With budding tree;
Bring sun or shower –
Bring bird or flower, –
But bring my mistress back to me!
That day will come. I dream and wait
Dear Mistress, grant
This prayer of mine!-
Leave friends – leave Sea- come back to me
Thy faithful Cute – thy Valentine.'
But that seemed to lead nowhere, so I went back to the first page (fig. 4):
'Dear Mistress of my heart and home
My every thought turns still to thee
Sleeping or waking, I but wait
The day that brings thee back to me!
Curled up in my bed so soft and warm
I dream no more
Of rat or mouse
My list’ening ear awaits one sound,-
They footsteps light,
About the house.
I miss thy gentle voice, that called
I miss they soft, caressing hand,-
Ah! Could I know them here, once more,
Glad, I’d obey their last command!'
The illustrations provided some help in my decoding efforts: page one was adorned with the branches of a pussy willow and page two featured cattails.
Any guesses?
Then it hit me, Fidelia had been a cat lover all her adult life and was photographed and even painted with her feline friends. The line that reads 'I dream no more of rat or mouse' gave it away. Someone had crafted the message from the point of view of her cat!
So even though I have yet to crack the riddle of who penned these lines, it was meant as a kindly joke and was not evidence of a hot romance after all.
Get your copy of the book HERE
]]>Happy New Year from Lund Humphries! We hope you are having a happy and healthy start to 2023. We're particularly looking forward to London Art Fair later this month, and seeing works by some great British artists... last year we published books on several stars of modern British art: William Turnbull, Paul Nash, Eric Ravilious, Dennis Creffield, John Wonnacott... so to start the year off right, we've chosen DENNIS CREFFIELD: ART AND LIFE by Richard Cork as our January Book of the Month! Use the code MONTH20 at checkout to get 20% off this month only.
About the Book:
Hugely admired by artists and writers from Henri Cartier Bresson to the Booker prize winner Howard Jacobson, the extraordinary life and work of painter Dennis Creffield (1931-2018) are explored in this, the first major monograph on the artist.
The narrative traces the artist's 'Dickensian' upbringing, his formative experiences as a teenager under the tutelage of David Bomberg, his conversion to Catholicism and his award-winning years at the Slade. Focus is given to Creffield's passions for the stories of England, not only in the Cathedral drawings, but in his expressive work on Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, on Blake and in his paintings and drawings of London, the great Petworth House, Cornish tin mines and the eerie military buildings on Orford Ness.
Complementing his work on England's sacred and profane identity is an equally audacious body of work on the human body, from tender paintings of mother and child to erotic paintings of women to his late paintings of men near death - Turner, Nelson and Rimbaud. To quote his fellow artist R.B. Kitaj, Creffield's cover has been 'well and truly blown'.
About the Author:
Richard Cork is an award-winning art critic, historian, broadcaster and curator. He has been art critic for the Evening Standard and the Times, among others. Alongside academic posts and curating exhibitions for venues including Tate and the National Gallery, he is author of numerous books, including his ground-breaking study of David Bomberg, and has been awarded the Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the Banister Fletcher Award and the Art Fund Award. He is also Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy.
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December's Book of the Month is chosen by our Head of Editorial, Design and Production, Sarah Thorowgood... Enriching the V&A by Julius Bryant is the first book to focus on the V&A’s collections from the viewpoint of private collectors, lenders and donors.
Use the code MONTH20 at checkout to get 20% off during December.
"The image repro stage in the life of a book’s production is always exciting: it’s usually the first time that I get to see the page layouts of the books we work on printed out at full size and in high resolution detail as colour Epsom proofs. There’s a sudden leap that happens at this point just before the book goes to press where you feel the book jump from concept to physical object. It’s tantalisingly close to being the printed and bound thing that you can hold in your hand at the end of the process! This was especially the case when working on the glorious treasure trove that is Enriching the V&A. The book’s 160 images were all so expertly photographed by the Museum and it was a great opportunity to collaborate with V&A Publishing’s production team who know the objects in the collection so well and are able to give such detailed advice to our repro team in order to colour correct images and get the printed reproductions just right."
– Sarah Thorowgood, Head of Editorial, Design and Production, Lund Humphries
About the Book:
By 1862, just a decade after its launch as a study collection for art and design, the Victoria and Albert Museum had become a reference resource for collectors, scholars and art-market experts. Enriching the V&A, the final volume in a trilogy of books on the museum’s 19th-century history, describes how the young museum’s rapid growth in the following decades was driven more by collectors, agents and dealers, through loans, gifts and bequests, than by the combined expertise, acquisitions policies and buying power of its directors and curators.
The V&A soon became a collection of collections, embodying a new age of collecting that benefitted from the break-up of historic institutions and ancestral collections across Europe, and imperial expeditions in Asia and Africa. The industrial revolution had created a new social class with the resources to buy from the expanding art market, especially in the decorative arts. Many were touched by a new moral imperative to collect for the home, however humble, and to share their specialist knowledge and enthusiasm by lending to the new public museums.
Enriching the V&A explores the formative influence on the museum, and on pioneering fields of scholarship, of the V&A’s leading Victorian and Edwardian benefactors. It also shares uncomfortable truths about the sources of some objects from the age of empires and shows how the meanings of things can change through the transformation of private property into public museum collections.
Find out more HERE.
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My book was divided into five chapters which covered the Parthenon Marbles, repatriation of ancestral material to indigenous groups, the status of war loot in museum collections, the restitution of art looted during the Nazi era, and the fight against the illicit trade in antiquities. There is a good deal to report in each of these areas.
In relation to the Parthenon Marbles, while little seems to have changed outwardly – the prized pieces remain at the British Museum – the issue has jumped far up the political agenda with overtures from both sides that may lead towards some kind of settlement. Last November, Greek Prime Minister Mitsotakis raised the issue with his (then) counterpart Boris Johnson in a high-profile encounter, trailing it provocatively on Good Morning Britain. The response from the UK side was – and continued to be – predictably dismissive, although the new British Museum Chair of Trustees George Osborne has now said in an interview that there is a ‘deal to be done’. My conclusion in the book was that there were too many structural disconnects between the two sides for any resolution to be likely, but I would be willing to suspend disbelief if the ex-businessman politician (Mitsotakis) and the business-minded ex-politician (Osborne) are able to hammer something out.
When it comes to the repatriation of material to indigenous communities, as I reported in the book, there has been extensive activity in this space for the past 30 years. That said, much of it related to internal returns, that is, returns that did not have an international element. But we have recently seen these expand out more broadly: museums with great experience in repatriation to local communities are taking action in response to claims from overseas. The Smithsonian in Washington appears to be the leader in this: while long familiar with operating under the National Museum of the American Indian Act, the institution has made an impressive statement on ‘ethical returns’, following returns by the NMAI to First Nations in Canada and to Peru.
As for the UK, while the British Museum always attracts attention for its persistent refusal to return collection items, much work has been done by other, non-national institutions. Since the book’s publication, two academic entities have returned Benin Bronzes to Nigeria (Jesus College, Cambridge and Aberdeen), with Oxford and Cambridge Universities now set to do the same. Meanwhile the Horniman Museum and Gardens in South London and Glasgow City Museum have already announced major Benin Bronze returns. Across England, museums now have helpful guidance in the area, with Arts Council England publishing Restitution and Repatriation: A practical guide for museums in England in August of this year. Likewise, there is much discussion surrounding the recent Charities Act 2022, provisions of which may soon have an impact on the ability of national museums to return items from their collections.
As for art lost or stolen during the Nazi era, there have been developments in the Netherlands, which has overhauled the approach of its once-criticised Restitutions Committee, and where the long-disputed Kandinsky at the Stedelijk Museum (written about in Chapter 4 of my book) has in the end been returned to the claimants: a somewhat unexpected decision made by the City of Amsterdam without resort to the Restitutions Committee. In the US, technical matters in longstanding claims continue to be debated before the courts, with the Supreme Court weighing in most recently in Cassirer v Thyssen Bornemisza over a work by Pissarro. In fact, my book Restitution was cited in one of the amicus curiae briefs submitted to the US Supreme Court (filed by Mark Feldman through his attorney, art lawyer Nicholas O’Donnell). New York has also recently passed a law to make mandatory the display of labels next to pieces in museum collections that may have been looted.
And lastly, when it comes to antiquities, Assistant DA Matthew Bogdanos (the colourful prosecutor who was once a US Marine) has been hard at work. I wrote about him in Chapter 5, indicating how a series of investigations he had been leading was underway. This has only accelerated, with dozens of artefacts having been returned to their countries of origin over the past year (see here for the most recent example) and with one particular investigation showing major ramifications in France and Germany, which include the indictment of the former director of the Louvre Museum.
So what does it all mean? Well, first of all, my conclusions in the book about us entering a new ‘restitution paradigm’ are certainly proving true. Secondly, we continue to see the impact of the pandemic on much of the discourse (especially as a way of prompting a rethink of the way we see our cultural institutions). And lastly, there do not appear to be any signs of it letting up. Whether the Parthenon Marbles will be swept up in this sea change is anyone’s guess. It is likely, as I wrote in the book, that the restitution discussions have moved well beyond that particular dispute, meaning that it is in the process of being left behind. But whether a ‘deal’ remains to be made may depend on the new players involved in the drama. Only in the months ahead will we see if they are capable of radically altering a story that has persisted more or less unchanged for 200 years.
– Alexander Herman, author of Restitution: The Return of Cultural Artefacts, is Director of the Institute of Art and Law, London
Preview image: detail from 'Benin Bronze' plaque showing the king (Oba) in regalia and with symbols of royal power (c.16th–17th century). Relief plaque made of brass cast using the 'cire perdue' (lost wax) technique. © The Trustees of the British Museum.
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… [In] the coalmining drawings … there was the problem of getting form out of darkness – of making the light from the miners’ helmet-lamps produce figures out of thick blackness – of drawing in the dark.
– Henry Moore, 1973 [i]
Figure 1: R. Saidman, Henry Moore Sketching Jack Hancock, a collier, January 1942 (Henry Moore Archive).
For a visual artist trying to record the physical world around him, light would seem to be an essential prerequisite. Drawing in the dark almost appears to be an inappropriate challenge. Henry Moore first ventured down Wheldale Colliery in December 1941, preparing to draw the coalminers at work in the dark, dusty atmosphere (fig.1). Five years earlier, he had been a member of the organising committee for the International Surrealist Exhibition, the first major show of Surrealism in London. For the group’s leader, Andre Breton, drawing in the dark meant retreat from the physical world, to free up the subconscious; ‘in a dark room’, with ‘eyes wide open’, he suggested, the artist could perceive new ideas and images, which the rational brain would never generate.[ii] But the Second World War forced artists who had recently been exploring their psyche through the inner eye to focus their gaze outward again, to observe the grim reality of wartime conditions now confronting them. For most, that reality included dealing with the night-time ‘blackout’, but for Henry Moore it also meant drawing in the dark, in one of the deepest coalmines in Yorkshire.
As a war artist, working for the War Artists’ Advisory Committee (WAAC), Moore had first depicted civilians during the Blitz, sheltering in gloomy but lamp-lit London Underground stations. Now far underground, eyes wide open, Moore tackled a new creative problem, drawing his surroundings in the dark. This was an optical challenge, which imposed a great strain on the human eye. Thirty years later, the artist described the process: ‘As each drawing develops, it is like going outside from a lighted room on a dark night – at first seeing nothing, then slowly distinguishing objects and distances – sensing space with unknown depths’.[iii]
In another exchange from the 1970s, asked to recall what conditions were like on his first day underground at Wheldale Colliery, Moore replied: ‘If one were asked to describe what Hell might be like, this would do’, and he added, there was ‘black dust so thick that the light beams from the miners’ lamps could only shine into it a few inches’.[iv] The artist described his first sensation as ‘a dense darkness you could touch’.[v] It is a revealing turn of phrase. He was primarily a sculptor, well used to sensing the qualities of materials and forms by touch as well as sight. In the many photographs of the artist working in his studio, Moore is often shown handling a small plaster model, or caressing a larger sculpture, in stone or bronze. For him, ‘touching the darkness’ implied recognition of this subterranean blackout as a sculptural material itself. Moore valued the creative potential of negative spaces, and in 1937 he explained how making holes through his sculptures proved that ‘sculpture in air is possible, where … [the hole] is the intended and considered form’.[vi] He wrote similarly about the misty aerial perspective in many of Turner’s paintings as ‘air that you can draw’, explaining that the ‘space [Turner] creates is not emptiness: it is filled with “solid” atmosphere’.[vii] When he talked of ‘the difficulty of seeing forms emerging out of deep darkness’ in the mine, Moore was sensing this as a sculptural as well as an optical problem (fig.2).[viii] He was endeavouring to carve forms out of the black dusty air, much as Michelangelo had carved captive slaves from solid white Carrara marble four hundred years earlier. […]
Figure 2: Henry Moore, At the Coalface: Men Fixing Prop, 1942, HMF 1996, pencil, wax crayon, coloured crayon, watercolour, wash, pen and ink, 34.8 x 56.2 cm (13.7 x 22.1 in), Leeds City Art Gallery: presented by the WAAC.
The coalmining series was completed almost exactly halfway through Moore’s life, and at a pivotal point in his career, which can perhaps be viewed as a brief respite in his life’s journey. Only three years earlier, London’s Tate Gallery had purchased its first major Moore sculpture. Four years later, his fame was such that the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) held a major retrospective exhibition of his work. If the years before the war can be viewed as the most creative and experimental in the sculptor’s career, the period after the war brought Moore soaring success, as his work came to symbolise the apparently universal human values that characterised international modernism. In 1942, the artist’s career was gaining considerable momentum, but the privations of war were holding him back from producing the sculpture which had established his reputation nationally and internationally. Far from being a distraction, it could be argued that the coalmining project provided Moore with the opportunity to take stock, to review the direction his life and work had taken, and to look forward to new themes, challenges and opportunities in the future.
Looking in both directions, this commission would, unusually, draw Moore’s attention to the masculine aspects of his life – his relationship with his father, the male body as subject matter, men at work, military service, labour politics and warrior heroes. Looking back, drawing miners in the colliery where his father had worked for most of his life inevitably reconnected Moore with his childhood and Yorkshire roots. It perhaps challenged him to review some of the beliefs he had grown up with, about family, work and politics. Working in confined tunnels, filled with the stench and noise of labourers and machinery, also seems to have stirred repressed memories of his experiences in the First World War trenches. Moore admitted that the experiences of sketching in the mine and producing drawings afterwards were sometimes difficult, but he also acknowledged that they had opened new creative avenues. Looking forward, Moore was still exploring these new pathways in old age – illustration as a discipline, the male figure as counterpoint to his favoured female form, human beings both in action and interacting, his compromised commitment to the working-class cause, plus the challenge of drawing that ‘dense darkness you could touch’ – an experience which he never forgot.
– Chris Owen
Notes:
[i] Clark (1974), Henry Moore Drawings, Thames & Hudson, London, p.291.
[ii] Breton, A. (1978) What is Surrealism? Selected Writings, ed. by Franklin Rosemont, New York, pt.1, p.133
[iii] Clark, K. (1974), p.291
[iv] Wilkinson, A.G. (1984), The Drawings of Henry Moore, (published 1977 PhD thesis) Garland Publishing, New York and London, p. 313
[v] Ibid
[vi] Moore, H.S. (1937) The Sculptor Speaks, in The Listener, vol. XVIII, no. 449, 18 August 1937, p.139
[vii] Auden, W.H., and Moore, H.S. (1974) Auden Poems / Moore Lithographs, exh.cat. British Museum, London, p.11
[viii] Ibid .p.26
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Described as 'a scintillating read’ by Artnet News, Melanie Gerlis's The Art Fair Story: A Rollercoaster Ride is this month's Book of the Month, chosen by our friends at Hoxton Books / Tabula Rasa Gallery. Use the code MONTH20 at checkout to get 20% off during November.
‘We share our bookshop with the gallery, Tabula Rasa, whose director, Sammi Liu, has lately been very busy on the art fair train from Seoul to Paris via London while teeing up more over the next few months in Miami and Singapore. Naturally this makes Melanie Gerlis’s The Art Fair Story from the Hot Topics in the Art World series our obvious choice for November’s Book of the Month and a must read for those currently on that same art fair train. In this short but comprehensive book Gerlis traces the history of the art fair as far back as the trade fairs of medieval times but shows how in the last few decades this relentless intercontinental ferrying about has become a lifeline and a necessity to the art business.’
-- Richard Grossman, Hoxton Books, London
Book contents: 1. Introduction: The art fair phenomenon; 2. Early Days: Europe, 1966 to 1976; 3. Markets new and old: The US and Maastricht, 1976 to 1995; 4. Golden Age: London, 1995 to 2008; 5. Brave new worlds: Asia and the Middle East, 2008 to 2011; 6. Everywhere: 2011 to 2020; 7. Nowhere: 2020 to 2021
Get your copy of the book HERE. Apply code MONTH20 for 20% off until the end of November!
You can also read Melanie's regular art market columns in the Financial Times and The Art Newspaper.
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When I was a child my father and uncle used to take me for walks along the Union Canal at Falkirk, my home town. The Union Canal is a contour canal, clinging to a specific altitude by following a winding path from its terminus in central Edinburgh to the point where it plunged down a series of locks to meet the Forth and Clyde canal at Falkirk, a descent now negotiated by the eponymous wheel. The path of my childhood walks began with a climb to the canal passing under the main Glasgow to Edinburgh railway line.
From an arched bridge at the canal constructed by the navvies, the vista of the Forth Valley opened before you. From here it was possible to see, with a small twist of the head, a series of vertical forms embodying centuries of Scottish history: the 19th-century monument to William Wallace on its crag at Stirling, the dramatic fires of the crude oil hydrocarbon cracking towers at Grangemouth, and the talismanic (and only recently demolished, 2021) single chimney stack of the coal-fired Longannet power station. To my young mind, however, these things weren’t as important as those immediately to hand. My father – forged in the days before over-cautious parenting – used to let me climb a disused railway signal standard which had controlled a long-disappeared branch line which he called the 'pugline'. Over the bridge was a flat concrete yard, incongruous in its bucolic surroundings of grassy and wooded slopes. There were iron rails embedded within the yard which disappeared abruptly into these slopes. But best of all were the concrete stairs which I used to run up and down, and which, echoing the rails, also went nowhere.
Derelict pithead baths at Dullatur, visible from the main Edinburgh to Glasgow railway mainline. I passed this building at least weekly while a student at architecture school without knowing what it was. This flat-roofed modernist building in the middle of nowhere was a complete enigma.
At some point when I was old enough to understand, my father explained that this had been the site of a coal mine and that when he was a boy there had been a conveyor bridge taking coal across the canal to the waiting railway wagons. This then, was South Bantaskine Mine, owned originally by the Callender Coal Company and worked until 1959. The pugline had serviced another mine, Policy, sited above the town on what later in my youth had been a windswept football pitch surfaced in the inexplicable, inhospitable red ash material that proliferated on football pitches throughout the centre and west of Scotland scarring forever the knees of the nation’s footballing youth. Policy was abandoned in 1960 but its coal yard curiously still remains as a depot for solid fuels.
The physical remnants of coal permeated my childhood. But the presence of coal was evidently more pervasive than the sites of its production or indeed its combustion within domestic grates and industrial boilers and furnaces. Coal’s position within the crucible of 19th-century industrialisation and the birth of modernity was consolidated in the 20th century. There were over a million miners in 1913. With their dependents, a total population can be estimated of about five million persons directly involved in coal mining. That is one tenth of the population. Coal also fired the electricity revolution of the second half of the 20th century. It was the agent of the modernisation of Britain, the power of, and perhaps the paradigm for, the welfare state. In certain years during the 1960s and 70s, the nationalised coal industry built more miles of tunnel than the entire network of the London Underground put together. Coal was also the site of intense research. It could be adapted to make petrol and other liquid fuels, it was used to make medicines, chemicals, fabrics, and so on. Somehow, it was present in the Zytol (shiny white) toilet paper that hung in the cold toilet of my grandmother’s house.
None of this is to say that, in the knowledge of its contribution to climate change, the extraction of coal is now in any way acceptable. Yet its history – the buildings it produced and the environments it made as it developed, modernised and was eventually made to collapse – remain important: not only as overlooked cultural artefacts, but also as potential lessons for the future.
Site of Castlebridge Colliery in Clackmannan, photographed by the author in 2019. After supplying Longannet Power Station for decades via an underground conveyer belt, it closed down in 2002. It was Scotland’s last deep mine.
This brings me back to the stairs that led to nowhere… Years later my uncle would explain that these steps had led to pithead baths. Here, miners could wash before returning from a shift, ensuring that their homes and their spouses and dependents’ domestic circumstances and workloads remained unaffected by the dirt of the pit. These baths – which would, at their peak usage in the 1930s and 1940s, service the sanitary needs of around 600,000 coal workers – were developed under a collaborative programme involving the cooperation of the workers and their unions, the government, and the mine owners. Moreover, they were designed to be beautiful: iconic works of light-filled modern architecture created exclusively and uniquely for a section of the working class on whom everyone else depended. In turn they became an architectural paradigm for the post-war modernisation of the industry whose 'superpits' and ancillary buildings, depots, research and treatment plants, medical facilities, training establishments, merry-go-round trains, worker’s clubs, sports and cultural facilities and so on, expressed the ups, downs and controversies of the industry as it moved from a critical presence in our everyday lives to its almost total eclipse as a productive force.
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This book provides a framework within which to consider the range and depth of Tanning's work, well beyond the better-known early Surrealist works of the 1940s, and makes connections between her life experiences and thematic preoccupations. Extensively illustrated and featuring unpublished material from interviews which the author conducted with the artist between 2000 and 2009, this book will appeal to the general museum-going public as well as academics, students, curators and collectors.
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Author of Revolution? Architecture and the Anthropocene, Susannah Hagan, reflects on the current situation and potential future of architectural education...
Cabaret de l’Enfer, Paris, 1910. Photo: Eugène Atget, Wikimedia Commons.
Architectural education has so many moving parts, it’s next to impossible to discuss it as a collective noun. ‘Collective’ it isn’t. Instead, it is, and has been since the 1980s, a collection of disparate and historically antipathetic disciplines that can be crudely divided into the building sciences, history and theory (usually, though not always, of architecture), and of course, design. Beyond the basic requirements of professional validating bodies, these disciplines keep to their own languages and agendas, unable to agree on whether they are there to train students pragmatically for a profession or educate them to be culturally literate critical thinkers.
Plenty of teachers of architecture see the achingly obvious need to do both, though few if any schools deliver both in equal measure. Instead of the integration of the building sciences, history/theory and design within the studio, they are still taught separately in a majority of schools, allowed only guest appearances in the studio for specific projects. This provides ample opportunity for the three cultures to diverge ever further from each other and continue speaking mainly to themselves, something that frustrates many students and fails to adequately equip them for their century. Cross-disciplinary alliances are usually supported only insofar as the group proposing them leads them. A studio initiative to bring in building science as more than simply the fulfilment of a bureaucratic requirement for technical input is rarely if ever allowed to influence the studio to the point where a permanent transdisciplinary team is formed to teach design, though this happens in practice to deliver it.
The norm is therefore three very different cultures that view each other with mutual incomprehension, if not hostility. Among those teaching history and theory can be found a distaste for measurement, i.e. for performance-linked criteria that are themselves linked to the status quo rather than a critique of it. Similarly, among those teaching building science is an impatience with the intellectual snobbery that privileges ‘pure’ knowledge over applied, critical awareness over performance, though both are equally important. And among those running studios is a resistance to anything from any quarter that threatens the supremacy of the studio in general, and their studios in particular. As schools of architecture are schools of design, this is hardly surprising, but design should be in step with the building sciences and history/theory, not holding them at arm’s length.
Where there are synergies and fertilisations across the three cultures, it is usually because an individual has managed to manoeuvre themselves into a position where they can operate between two or more of them: a history/theory academic running or helping to run a studio, for example. In this way, they can individually embody a transdisciplinarity to which schools now make obeisance, but rarely allow to affect existing pedagogy and distributions of status and power.
Vélodrome d’hiver, Paris, 1903. Photo: Jules Beau, Gallica Digital Library, public domain.
And yet this is precisely what is needed in today’s studio-based education. As architecture schools all-too-slowly turn themselves round to confront the consequences of our master-slave relationship with the planet and assess themselves in the light of it, it’s clear that studio tutors, however dedicated, however brilliant, cannot encompass all the knowledge now essential to effective thinking and practice. They need other contributions in the studio. And yet the same epistemological separations continue: building sciences assess the state of things and respond in their way; history/theory in theirs. The studio assesses it any way it likes, sometimes more practically, often more speculatively. The ‘If I ruled the world’ approach to design projects is still highly influential, producing end of year shows that are more fine than applied art. Alright in the past, not alright for the foreseeable future. There are fascinating exceptions, but not yet a critical mass to ensure that engineer speaks unto theorist, and designer speaks unto engineer as members of a studio producing new ways of seeing and doing.
A graduate in architecture who is technically competent but incapable of critical analysis is as ill-equipped today as a graduate who is adept at political critique, say, but has little idea of the how’s and why’s of assessing the environmental impact of their design choices.
The Bauhaus, Dessau, 1928. Wikimedia Commons.
In the present context of the Four Horsemen of the Environmental Apocalypse, ‘metrics’ isn’t a dirty word, ‘theory’ isn’t just for academics, and design can’t solve everything. The studio needs to respond faster and more radically, especially at undergraduate level, where the foundations of design are laid. If knowledge is power, it’s past time for some redistribution of both.
~ Susannah Hagan, 2022
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