Academic Sessions: Liverpool 2002
Legitimising Art in Public: the Development of Art Institutions and Exhibitions c.1750 - 1914
Convenors:
James Moore and Dongho Chun, School of Art History and Archaeology, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, Dongho.Chun@man.ac.uk
Recently, increasing attention has been paid to the institutional history of art. Germane to this process is an awareness of the significance of art institutions and their exhibitions in shaping the public taste for art. Museums, galleries, artistic clubs, societies, and associations are all forms of art institution concerned with the public production and consumption of art beyond the private realm of individual artists and patrons. Also, the practice of holding exhibitions to reach a wider and/or appropriate public has been common in most art institutions. Needless to say, art institutions have been primarily intended, or claimed to be intended, to mobilise and foster the public concern and taste for art, but they have inevitably reflected, and helped to instigate, broader social discourses rather than merely aesthetic issues. This session seeks to bring together research on the roles, functions, and polemics of different art institutions within their concrete historical contexts - political, economic, and social, etc - with a view to throwing fresh light on the histories, ideologies, and cultural politics of art institutions and their exhibitions. Exploring the underworld of art institutions and exhibitions, this strand aims to address the issue of legitimising the production and consumption of art in public, and hopes to prompt some fruitful interdisciplinary approaches to the subject.
\'Un ouvrage compose dans un gout nouveau\': the Development of \'Art Didactics\' and Public Display under the Elector Palatinate, c.1750-1800
Angela M. Opel (Munich Alte Pinakothek, Germany)
This paper focuses on the change of a Baroque princely picture gallery into a \'public museum\' and on the art pedagogic intentions and politics of taste which are manifested in the composition of a mid-18th century public display of collection within such a gallery. The Elector Palatinate, Carl Theodor von der Pfalz (1724-1799) was one of the first sovereigns on the continent (the first in Germany) to open his picture gallery in Dusseldorf- nucleus of today\'s Alte Pinakothek, Munich- to the public around 1750 for the benefit of art students and an interested public, so combining economic interests with socio-political ideas of enlightened absolutism. The Elector\'s Zeichnungskabinett in Manheim- predecessor of today\'s Staatliche Graphische Sammulung in Munich- was founded in 1758 and likewise through a public display made accessible to the public. Through archival material as well as research on the drawings themselves it is possible today to reconstruct the display of the collection in the late 1750s consisting of more than 550 pictures and get an idea of the beginnings of contemporary art pedagogy and didactics. The paper will analyse the impetus and rhetoric for going public and will show the development of an \'enlightened\' and \'modern\' art and display policy tempered by princely/personal taste.
A National Gallery for Ireland: Issues of Ideological Significance
Sighle Bhreathnach-Lynch (National Gallery of Ireland, Ireland)
On January 30, 1846 the National Gallery of Ireland, dedicated to \'the noble objects of promoting and fostering the genius of the country and of contributing to the refined pleasures and intellectual enjoyments of the community at large\' was formally opened by the Lord Lieutenant, the Earl of Carlisle. This paper traces the history of the Gallery throughout the nineteenth century; from the initiative in setting it up in 1853, through to its realisation just over ten years later, and the manner in which the institution evolved in the decades that followed. These developments are examined within the context of issues of ideological significance. Drawing on the museological theories of cultural historians Tony Bennett and Carol Duncan, the paper analyses the motivations behind the proposal to set up a national cultural institution in Ireland, how \'Irishness\' was defined, particularly through its collection policy, and the implication of factors such as site and location, display and space. The institution was to prove to be a producer of potent symbolic meanings and is important in the context of nineteenth century cultural politics and emerging concepts of national identity.
The Persistence of Institutional Power: The French State, the Academy and Official Art in the time of Cubism
Fae Brauer (The University of New South Wales, Australia)
When Henri-Charles Dujardin Beaumetz was appointed French Undersecretary for the Arts in 1905, he promised to implement a Radical Republican policy supporting cultural pluralism and democratizing the State\'s decision-making processes. Yet despite his inception of equitable councils and committees, they became dominated by Academicians. Despite reassertion of the Salon des Artistes Français\' principle of universal suffrage, its juries and committees remained monopolized by Academicians. Despite reforms to the École des Beaux-Arts, its professors remained Academicians. Through its nepotistic network of relationships with State committees, councils, the École and the Salons, the Academy seemed to exercise, behind the scenes, what the Socialist Deputy Simyan called an \'invisible hegemony\'. Doubly masked by its counter-balancing strategies of selection and exclusion, he concluded that the Academy had successfully manipulated the State machinery to safeguard its cultural capital and ostracise Modernism. Through a close reading of Simyan\'s 1911 parliamentary Report, in conjunction with the painting bringing these institutional players together in one tableau - Jules Grün\'s \'Un vendredi au Salon des Artistes Français\' - this paper will investigate whether the eclectically democratic policies of Dujardin-Beaumetz were thwarted by the Academy. By identifying the discrete clusters of academicians and politicians in Grun\'s tableau, as well as its marginalizations and absences, it will consider why it may have been this network of coteries which shaped, following Bourdieu, a field of cultural production and legitimation in which Academicians were the dominant artists in the time of Cubism.
Collecting for the \'Public\' in the Domestic Interior, 1798-1824
Anne Nellis (Brown University, USA)
While public venues for the display of art, such as the Royal Academy, the British Institution, and the National Gallery, have been receiving increasing scholarly attention, less-studied private collections provided some of the most important spaces of \'public\' display in early nineteenth-century London. In this talk, I shall examine the discourses surrounding private collections in this period and the ways in which these depended on underlying notions of foreignness, \'domesticity,\' and Britishness, as well as femininity and masculinity. In particular, I shall focus on the collection of the Marquess of Stafford, which was opened to a limited public in May, 1806. Stafford\'s large collection of (mostly) old masters, which included many from the Orléans collection, was the subject of two important cataloguing projects. As the Stafford case shows, an emphasis on discourses of \'domesticity\' was key to the process of justifying collecting important paintings in private houses rather than in public collections. By interrogating the meanings of \'domesticity\' within the context of discourses about public and private, gender, travel and empire, we can see how the rhetoric of the \'domestic\' bolsters arguments ranging from the continued importance of collecting old masters to the politics of display.
\'To Educate the Eye and the Soul\': the Newcastle Exhibitions c.1863-1890
Laura Newton (University of Northumbria at Newcastle, England)
By the mid-19th century the belief that exposure to art was beneficial to both rich and poor - as a source of refinement, elevation for the soul, a panacea to industrialised society\'s ills, an education in morality, \'taste\' and good design - was common currency. This paper will explore how far successive exhibiting societies in Newcastle succeeded in developing the \'taste for art\' during the second half of the 19th century.Central to this is the identification of the major organisers and patrons, consideration of the impact and critical reception provoked by the public display of key private collections, the ability to attract major contemporary artists and the localised attempts to educate public \'taste\'.I will argue that the Newcastle exhibitions reflect the belated yet full flowering of north-east industrialism and its attendant societal changes. The exhibition societies, far from being merely distant outposts of Royal Academy elitism operated, in the first instance, as a hegemonic tool of the area\'s bourgeoisie, echoing the ethos of metropolitan venues such as the Grosvenor Gallery; but increasingly stimulated and sustained a less class-based culture of local art production and consumption supported by a well-informed local press.
Contesting the Canon of Heritage: The Burlington Magazine and the National Gallery, London, 1903-1911
Helen Rees (University of Manchester, England)
This paper will identify and discuss the fundamental shifts that occurred in the status and meaning of acquisitions of Old Master paintings by the National Gallery from 1903 to the outbreak of the First World War. During this period, the trustees of the National Gallery came under growing pressure not only as a result of the continuing expansion of the international art market in Old Masters, but also due to their failure to adopt the principles of the new "science of connoisseurship" espoused in England by critics such as Roger Fry and Charles Holmes. As a consequence, the increasingly costly purchases made by the gallery were subject to unprecedented scrutiny, particularly in The Burlington Magazine, which had been founded in 1903 and which, from 1904 onwards, was effectively controlled by Fry until he finally assumed the editorship in 1909. From the start, the Burlington acted as a kind of bridgehead from which Fry and Holmes mounted their assault on the Gallery, culminating in a sustained barrage of protest at the prolonged failure of the Trustees to appoint a new Director to succeed Sir Edward Poynter (who resigned in the wake of the scandal over the purchase of the Marquis of Northampton\'s "Dürer" in 1904). Eventually, Fry himself was offered the position and, although he was unable to accept it, the offer was notable as an instance of the institutionalisation of dissent and an admission of the incipient professionalisation of art history in England (although it would not be taught as a university degree for another 26 years). By 1914, the authority of the Gallery had been challenged - artistically, politically, economically - for more than a decade, as a consequence of which the Trustees were obliged to justify their collecting practices in new ways - ie with explicit reference to the history of English collecting as well as to the history of Western European art.
Art as a Matter of Civic Pride: The Stories and Ideologies of the Walker Art Gallery
Chrissy Partheni (Walker Art Gallery, England)
The history of the Walker Art Gallery\'s foundation in 1873 is interwoven with the history of the economy and society of Liverpool: the wealth and influence of important art collectors and patrons, as well as a vibrant artistic scene, not always in agreement with the will and taste of those who formed the clientele of high art. In addition, state interference by the Liverpool Town Council and donations by public figures, such as Andrew Barclay Walker (1824-1893), who paid for the Gallery\'s building, all contributed to the establishment of the gallery as not simply a permanent home for important historical collections of art but an institution promoting the work of contemporary artists through the Liverpool Autumn Exhibitions. In this paper I aim to unravel the political tensions of the Walker as an institution in the 19th century, and to explore the historical legacy of the will of enlightened benefactors and committees of the past to use art to instruct the lives and elevate the morals of the local population. Who actually constituted the public for the Liverpool Autumn Exhibitions, who was in control of the decision making process and furthermore what were and are the political complexities of a civic gallery assuming a national status and role?
James Moore and Dongho Chun, School of Art History and Archaeology, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, Dongho.Chun@man.ac.uk
Recently, increasing attention has been paid to the institutional history of art. Germane to this process is an awareness of the significance of art institutions and their exhibitions in shaping the public taste for art. Museums, galleries, artistic clubs, societies, and associations are all forms of art institution concerned with the public production and consumption of art beyond the private realm of individual artists and patrons. Also, the practice of holding exhibitions to reach a wider and/or appropriate public has been common in most art institutions. Needless to say, art institutions have been primarily intended, or claimed to be intended, to mobilise and foster the public concern and taste for art, but they have inevitably reflected, and helped to instigate, broader social discourses rather than merely aesthetic issues. This session seeks to bring together research on the roles, functions, and polemics of different art institutions within their concrete historical contexts - political, economic, and social, etc - with a view to throwing fresh light on the histories, ideologies, and cultural politics of art institutions and their exhibitions. Exploring the underworld of art institutions and exhibitions, this strand aims to address the issue of legitimising the production and consumption of art in public, and hopes to prompt some fruitful interdisciplinary approaches to the subject.
\'Un ouvrage compose dans un gout nouveau\': the Development of \'Art Didactics\' and Public Display under the Elector Palatinate, c.1750-1800
Angela M. Opel (Munich Alte Pinakothek, Germany)
This paper focuses on the change of a Baroque princely picture gallery into a \'public museum\' and on the art pedagogic intentions and politics of taste which are manifested in the composition of a mid-18th century public display of collection within such a gallery. The Elector Palatinate, Carl Theodor von der Pfalz (1724-1799) was one of the first sovereigns on the continent (the first in Germany) to open his picture gallery in Dusseldorf- nucleus of today\'s Alte Pinakothek, Munich- to the public around 1750 for the benefit of art students and an interested public, so combining economic interests with socio-political ideas of enlightened absolutism. The Elector\'s Zeichnungskabinett in Manheim- predecessor of today\'s Staatliche Graphische Sammulung in Munich- was founded in 1758 and likewise through a public display made accessible to the public. Through archival material as well as research on the drawings themselves it is possible today to reconstruct the display of the collection in the late 1750s consisting of more than 550 pictures and get an idea of the beginnings of contemporary art pedagogy and didactics. The paper will analyse the impetus and rhetoric for going public and will show the development of an \'enlightened\' and \'modern\' art and display policy tempered by princely/personal taste.
A National Gallery for Ireland: Issues of Ideological Significance
Sighle Bhreathnach-Lynch (National Gallery of Ireland, Ireland)
On January 30, 1846 the National Gallery of Ireland, dedicated to \'the noble objects of promoting and fostering the genius of the country and of contributing to the refined pleasures and intellectual enjoyments of the community at large\' was formally opened by the Lord Lieutenant, the Earl of Carlisle. This paper traces the history of the Gallery throughout the nineteenth century; from the initiative in setting it up in 1853, through to its realisation just over ten years later, and the manner in which the institution evolved in the decades that followed. These developments are examined within the context of issues of ideological significance. Drawing on the museological theories of cultural historians Tony Bennett and Carol Duncan, the paper analyses the motivations behind the proposal to set up a national cultural institution in Ireland, how \'Irishness\' was defined, particularly through its collection policy, and the implication of factors such as site and location, display and space. The institution was to prove to be a producer of potent symbolic meanings and is important in the context of nineteenth century cultural politics and emerging concepts of national identity.
The Persistence of Institutional Power: The French State, the Academy and Official Art in the time of Cubism
Fae Brauer (The University of New South Wales, Australia)
When Henri-Charles Dujardin Beaumetz was appointed French Undersecretary for the Arts in 1905, he promised to implement a Radical Republican policy supporting cultural pluralism and democratizing the State\'s decision-making processes. Yet despite his inception of equitable councils and committees, they became dominated by Academicians. Despite reassertion of the Salon des Artistes Français\' principle of universal suffrage, its juries and committees remained monopolized by Academicians. Despite reforms to the École des Beaux-Arts, its professors remained Academicians. Through its nepotistic network of relationships with State committees, councils, the École and the Salons, the Academy seemed to exercise, behind the scenes, what the Socialist Deputy Simyan called an \'invisible hegemony\'. Doubly masked by its counter-balancing strategies of selection and exclusion, he concluded that the Academy had successfully manipulated the State machinery to safeguard its cultural capital and ostracise Modernism. Through a close reading of Simyan\'s 1911 parliamentary Report, in conjunction with the painting bringing these institutional players together in one tableau - Jules Grün\'s \'Un vendredi au Salon des Artistes Français\' - this paper will investigate whether the eclectically democratic policies of Dujardin-Beaumetz were thwarted by the Academy. By identifying the discrete clusters of academicians and politicians in Grun\'s tableau, as well as its marginalizations and absences, it will consider why it may have been this network of coteries which shaped, following Bourdieu, a field of cultural production and legitimation in which Academicians were the dominant artists in the time of Cubism.
Collecting for the \'Public\' in the Domestic Interior, 1798-1824
Anne Nellis (Brown University, USA)
While public venues for the display of art, such as the Royal Academy, the British Institution, and the National Gallery, have been receiving increasing scholarly attention, less-studied private collections provided some of the most important spaces of \'public\' display in early nineteenth-century London. In this talk, I shall examine the discourses surrounding private collections in this period and the ways in which these depended on underlying notions of foreignness, \'domesticity,\' and Britishness, as well as femininity and masculinity. In particular, I shall focus on the collection of the Marquess of Stafford, which was opened to a limited public in May, 1806. Stafford\'s large collection of (mostly) old masters, which included many from the Orléans collection, was the subject of two important cataloguing projects. As the Stafford case shows, an emphasis on discourses of \'domesticity\' was key to the process of justifying collecting important paintings in private houses rather than in public collections. By interrogating the meanings of \'domesticity\' within the context of discourses about public and private, gender, travel and empire, we can see how the rhetoric of the \'domestic\' bolsters arguments ranging from the continued importance of collecting old masters to the politics of display.
\'To Educate the Eye and the Soul\': the Newcastle Exhibitions c.1863-1890
Laura Newton (University of Northumbria at Newcastle, England)
By the mid-19th century the belief that exposure to art was beneficial to both rich and poor - as a source of refinement, elevation for the soul, a panacea to industrialised society\'s ills, an education in morality, \'taste\' and good design - was common currency. This paper will explore how far successive exhibiting societies in Newcastle succeeded in developing the \'taste for art\' during the second half of the 19th century.Central to this is the identification of the major organisers and patrons, consideration of the impact and critical reception provoked by the public display of key private collections, the ability to attract major contemporary artists and the localised attempts to educate public \'taste\'.I will argue that the Newcastle exhibitions reflect the belated yet full flowering of north-east industrialism and its attendant societal changes. The exhibition societies, far from being merely distant outposts of Royal Academy elitism operated, in the first instance, as a hegemonic tool of the area\'s bourgeoisie, echoing the ethos of metropolitan venues such as the Grosvenor Gallery; but increasingly stimulated and sustained a less class-based culture of local art production and consumption supported by a well-informed local press.
Contesting the Canon of Heritage: The Burlington Magazine and the National Gallery, London, 1903-1911
Helen Rees (University of Manchester, England)
This paper will identify and discuss the fundamental shifts that occurred in the status and meaning of acquisitions of Old Master paintings by the National Gallery from 1903 to the outbreak of the First World War. During this period, the trustees of the National Gallery came under growing pressure not only as a result of the continuing expansion of the international art market in Old Masters, but also due to their failure to adopt the principles of the new "science of connoisseurship" espoused in England by critics such as Roger Fry and Charles Holmes. As a consequence, the increasingly costly purchases made by the gallery were subject to unprecedented scrutiny, particularly in The Burlington Magazine, which had been founded in 1903 and which, from 1904 onwards, was effectively controlled by Fry until he finally assumed the editorship in 1909. From the start, the Burlington acted as a kind of bridgehead from which Fry and Holmes mounted their assault on the Gallery, culminating in a sustained barrage of protest at the prolonged failure of the Trustees to appoint a new Director to succeed Sir Edward Poynter (who resigned in the wake of the scandal over the purchase of the Marquis of Northampton\'s "Dürer" in 1904). Eventually, Fry himself was offered the position and, although he was unable to accept it, the offer was notable as an instance of the institutionalisation of dissent and an admission of the incipient professionalisation of art history in England (although it would not be taught as a university degree for another 26 years). By 1914, the authority of the Gallery had been challenged - artistically, politically, economically - for more than a decade, as a consequence of which the Trustees were obliged to justify their collecting practices in new ways - ie with explicit reference to the history of English collecting as well as to the history of Western European art.
Art as a Matter of Civic Pride: The Stories and Ideologies of the Walker Art Gallery
Chrissy Partheni (Walker Art Gallery, England)
The history of the Walker Art Gallery\'s foundation in 1873 is interwoven with the history of the economy and society of Liverpool: the wealth and influence of important art collectors and patrons, as well as a vibrant artistic scene, not always in agreement with the will and taste of those who formed the clientele of high art. In addition, state interference by the Liverpool Town Council and donations by public figures, such as Andrew Barclay Walker (1824-1893), who paid for the Gallery\'s building, all contributed to the establishment of the gallery as not simply a permanent home for important historical collections of art but an institution promoting the work of contemporary artists through the Liverpool Autumn Exhibitions. In this paper I aim to unravel the political tensions of the Walker as an institution in the 19th century, and to explore the historical legacy of the will of enlightened benefactors and committees of the past to use art to instruct the lives and elevate the morals of the local population. Who actually constituted the public for the Liverpool Autumn Exhibitions, who was in control of the decision making process and furthermore what were and are the political complexities of a civic gallery assuming a national status and role?