British art

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

Cornelia Parker is a British-born, London-based artist set to show at Australia’s Museum of Contemporary Art as part of this year’s Sydney International Art Series. Her works are marked by an unusual amount of order, coupled with an unusual range of emotion. This dualism ties together a variety of aesthetic forms and subjects, as Parker has historically ranged across broad, humanistic themes and mediums. Her large-scale artwork War Room will be one inclusion: a red-ceilinged, paper-draped room of punched-out, memorial-poppy-fabric conjuring soft, vulnerable womb-like organs, it stands as a testimony to the bodily destruction of state-sanctioned conflict. Her artworks have frequently been co-opted by political and environmental movements, but Parker does not like to be described as a political artist. Many of her works transcend national borders to speak to a global community: for instance, Apocalpse Later, which stems from an ecologically-centric interview with Noam Chomksy, as well as her early, now iconic installation Cold Dark Matter, comprising an exploded domestic shed and its material contents.

The diversity of her practice places a question mark over how Parker will engage with an Australian museological audience. Another early artwork, The Maybee, interrogates institutional approaches to the public display of objects and artefacts, throwing into account the manifold ways in which museums frame the taxonomic interpretation of objects and their histories. Parker’s canon is complex in its site-specificity, and this – coupled with the artist’s evident awareness of museum convention – provides a thought-provoking precursor to what may be on display.

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

The Nore sand remains covered at low-water, and never seen by human eye; but the Nore is a name to conjure with visions of historical events, of battles, of fl eets, of mutinies, of watch and ward kept upon the great throbbing heart of the State.

Apart from a few notable exceptions, British painters from the late Victorian and Edwardian periods have suffered from the modernist historiography which deemed it parochial and unworthy of study. Recent developments in art history have generally revised such scathing opinion and have sought to reassess the artistic quality of many pre-WWI British painters.

While riding this wave of reappraisals, this dissertation is less interested in entering the aesthetic debate than disputing the domestic nature of late Victorian and Edwardian art. Indeed, by drawing from an interdisciplinary approach including cultural studies, cultural economics and art history, the present study aims at contextualising late Victorian and Edwardian painting in an international artistic environment in order to assess its critical and commercial success.

Due to its dual nature as exhibition and commercial platform as well as some strong Anglophile leaning in its early period, the Venice Biennale arguably provides an ideal case study. Over its eleven pre-war editions running between 1895 and 1914, it gradually shifted from late-comer to reference point in the international artistic arena. Chartering the evolution of the presence, reception and commercial results of British painters at Venice, this dissertation intends to shed more light on a sample of circa three hundred artists and their place within a segment of the international Belle époque art market.

Essay published together with the artist's book presented at his exhibition João Penalva at Trondheim Kunstmuseum in 2014. The text refers to his works Sleeping men (installation, 2014), Museum of Stands, Yuteval (installation, 2012), Monument (Installation, 2011) and People on Air (installation, 2014).

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

Defiance, independence and transgression for sale. On social rituals of creating and receiving the "difficult" art.

According to Marshall McLuhan: "Art is anything you can get away with". To what extent is this statement correct nowadays? Is there any space for true defiance, a niche left for the last outsiders and contestators in today's art world, or perefably, as Howard Becker would say - simultaneously functioning art worlds? Perhaps it is street art, as a kind of paradoxically rebelious "arier-garde" ( the notion developed by Teresa Pękala), that  still has the power to draw public attention and "seduce".
In this article, the author argues that ostensibly "difficult", rebellious and transgressive art is, as a matter of fact, a part of certain social rituals, (particularly media rituals). Even an open disapproval, a negative response from the public, to shocking forms or iconography, serves as a part of those rituals. In the described process of social creating the art celebrities and superstars (e.g. Damien Hirst), influential collectors and art dealers play a predominant role. It is significant that art critics tend to turn toward quasi-religious rhetoric, which helps them explicate meanings of the most "difficult" and shocking activities or artefacts.
The author also investigates some of the popular strategies applied and developed by contemporary artists. The strategy of being the most famous anonymous artist - Banksy's case - seems to be the most interesting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In 1998 John Roberts argued that the recent ‘history of photography in Britain… is a history of dispersed and embattled counterhegemonic practices breaking out of the ideological confines of Modernism’. However, the contributions of Britain’s Black and Asian photographers to this challenge has yet to be fully recognised. This paper will address the recent work of Mohini Chandra and Allan deSouza: artists of South Asian origin, whose work engages the potentialities of Conceptual photography to pose questions about the place of the migrant in relation to transnational borders - while simultaneously testing the limits of what might be identified as ‘British Art’.

Throughout his career Allan deSouza has investigated the politics of location and the subjective experience of migration. His photographs of airport lounges, corridors, trainstations and runways present, what Marc Augé and others have described as, postmodern non-spaces. By taking the position of a migrant provocateur, deSouza’s works show these sites of mobility as inherently restrictive, and often prohibitive, for nonconforming bodies. Relatedly, issues of journeying and belonging, and how they might be articulated through the photographic object have been prescient concerns for Chandra. In her film and photographic works, that utilise and reflect upon her father’s personal archive, migration is presented from the space of transit: from the interior space of the aeroplane it is shown as both embodied experience and psychological state. In the work of both artists, the figure of the unsettled South Asian diaspora takes centre stage to remind us that migration is neither uniformly nor equally experienced.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Art museums are institutions with the general purpose to acquire, preserve and provide access to the works of art. 1 Thus, they have the unique ability to decide which art works will represent man's finest works, shaping -in this way -an aspect of society's understanding of the past. Hence, their role is of extremely importance and art museums intentionnowadays isto provide to their public, not just an aesthetic experience, but educational outcomes too.

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

https://academic.oup.com/oaj/article-abstract/44/1/23/6460077

The casket scene in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice is the supreme audio–visual manifestation of the cultic and erotic power of Elizabethan portraiture. Bassanio chooses the lead casket containing a portrait miniature of Portia. But it is so meticulous and sensuously alive that Bassanio is jealous of the ‘demi-god’ painter, and of his perceived tactile and visual intimacy with Portia during the sittings. Bassanio believes the painter ‘plays the spider’ in her hair. The purpose of this essay is to explore this scene’s rich cultural and political context. Shakespeare exploits prevailing notions of the spider as a symbol of touch that is both creative and destructive. Bassanio’s commentary is far more than a witty conceit; it is imbued with Protestant fears about the visual arts. Yet there were good grounds for his suspicions – in art myth and theory, and sometimes in practice. Shakespeare was most likely thinking of Nicholas Hilliard, the Queen’s miniature painter. Hilliard spun web-like patterns in his royal portraits, intensifying trends in elite fashion – the Queen had a penchant for spider motifs. He also envisaged the painter as necessarily in love with his English sitters, in line with the new vogue for authorial empathy.

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