Academic Sessions: London 2008
Victorian Art since 1901
Session Convenors:
Colin Trodd, University of Manchester, colin.trodd@manchester.ac.uk
Alison Smith, Tate Britain, alison.Smith@tate.org.uk
Speakers:
Colin Trodd (University of Manchester) The Ruined God: Some aspects of G.F. Watts in the 1920s and 1930s.
Heather Birchall (The Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester) Acquisition and Exhibition: Tate and the Pre-Raphaelites
Aris Sarafianos (University of Manchester) Aubrey Beardsley's Morbid Vitalism: ‘Sensationalism’, economies of sensation and modernist art languages
Pat Hardy (Courtauld Institute of Art) Wyndham Lewis and The Last of England: A 21st-century assessment
Emma Chambers (University College London) The Persistence of Narrative: Tradition and innovation in early 20th-century conservation piece portraiture
Claire Donovan (Dartington College of Arts) Memorialising Millais: The impact of Life and Letters on the reception of the work of Sir John Everett Millais, PRA
Mark Stephen Bills (Watts Gallery) A Short History of Watts Gallery: G F Watts in the 20th century
Matthew Potter (University of Plymouth) The Dubious Desirability of Victorian and Modern Art in the British Empire
Shalini Le Gall (Northwestern University ) Confronting the Secular Perspective in Studies of Victorian Art
Chloe Johnson (Leamington Spa Art Gallery and Museum) Presenting the Pre-Raphaelites (1947–97)
Paul Jonathan Barlow (University of Northumbria) Hating Millais: Why do Millais’ critics go mad?
Lara Perry (University of Brighton) Monumental Materiality: The legacies of Victorian public sculpture
Session Abstract:
Recent commentary on Victorian art has tended to stress the affinities and interactions between dominant forms of visual culture and dominant strands of social experience. Accordingly, Beardsley, Brown, Burne-Jones, Leighton, Millais, Rossetti and Watts have re-emerged as critical figures articulating the changed issues, definitions and identities of an art world shuttling between ‘academic’ and ‘aestheticist’ values. Naturally, such readings challenge commonly held ideas about the character, development and significance of British art, as well as its alignment with the broader structures of social modernity. Yet relatively little work has been devoted to an assessment of the impact of post-Victorian cultural memory on subsequent national and international interpretations (both academic and popular) of Victorian art itself.
By contrast, the papers in this session investigate how the very idea of Victorian art was made and remade through the authority and status of a range of relevant agents and agencies: the display and collecting systems of public and commercial art galleries; the extension of Bloomsbury values into the invigilatory mechanisms of public bodies and organisations; the identification of Victorian culture as a condition of critical failure and public embarrassment in modernist art criticism; the centrality of specific media techniques and technologies; economic cycles in the art market and national and international interventions by collectors and curators; general codifications of the relative importance of ‘tradition’ and ‘innovation’ in wider cultural and social discourses directed at Victorian matters, particularly in different manifestations of ‘popular’ criticism.
The purpose of the session is to locate the multiple contexts in which narratives and representations of Victorian art have been preserved, recast and reformed. Accordingly, by reviewing the historiography of Victorian art we wish to assess the extent to which recent revisionist readings establish their own hierarchies of cultural value. In sum, we intend to review the cultural conditions, critical themes and multiple perspectives in which the Victorian art world has been conceived, channelled and composed since the beginning of the last century.
Colin Trodd, University of Manchester, colin.trodd@manchester.ac.uk
Alison Smith, Tate Britain, alison.Smith@tate.org.uk
Speakers:
Colin Trodd (University of Manchester) The Ruined God: Some aspects of G.F. Watts in the 1920s and 1930s.
Heather Birchall (The Whitworth Art Gallery, University of Manchester) Acquisition and Exhibition: Tate and the Pre-Raphaelites
Aris Sarafianos (University of Manchester) Aubrey Beardsley's Morbid Vitalism: ‘Sensationalism’, economies of sensation and modernist art languages
Pat Hardy (Courtauld Institute of Art) Wyndham Lewis and The Last of England: A 21st-century assessment
Emma Chambers (University College London) The Persistence of Narrative: Tradition and innovation in early 20th-century conservation piece portraiture
Claire Donovan (Dartington College of Arts) Memorialising Millais: The impact of Life and Letters on the reception of the work of Sir John Everett Millais, PRA
Mark Stephen Bills (Watts Gallery) A Short History of Watts Gallery: G F Watts in the 20th century
Matthew Potter (University of Plymouth) The Dubious Desirability of Victorian and Modern Art in the British Empire
Shalini Le Gall (Northwestern University ) Confronting the Secular Perspective in Studies of Victorian Art
Chloe Johnson (Leamington Spa Art Gallery and Museum) Presenting the Pre-Raphaelites (1947–97)
Paul Jonathan Barlow (University of Northumbria) Hating Millais: Why do Millais’ critics go mad?
Lara Perry (University of Brighton) Monumental Materiality: The legacies of Victorian public sculpture
Session Abstract:
Recent commentary on Victorian art has tended to stress the affinities and interactions between dominant forms of visual culture and dominant strands of social experience. Accordingly, Beardsley, Brown, Burne-Jones, Leighton, Millais, Rossetti and Watts have re-emerged as critical figures articulating the changed issues, definitions and identities of an art world shuttling between ‘academic’ and ‘aestheticist’ values. Naturally, such readings challenge commonly held ideas about the character, development and significance of British art, as well as its alignment with the broader structures of social modernity. Yet relatively little work has been devoted to an assessment of the impact of post-Victorian cultural memory on subsequent national and international interpretations (both academic and popular) of Victorian art itself.
By contrast, the papers in this session investigate how the very idea of Victorian art was made and remade through the authority and status of a range of relevant agents and agencies: the display and collecting systems of public and commercial art galleries; the extension of Bloomsbury values into the invigilatory mechanisms of public bodies and organisations; the identification of Victorian culture as a condition of critical failure and public embarrassment in modernist art criticism; the centrality of specific media techniques and technologies; economic cycles in the art market and national and international interventions by collectors and curators; general codifications of the relative importance of ‘tradition’ and ‘innovation’ in wider cultural and social discourses directed at Victorian matters, particularly in different manifestations of ‘popular’ criticism.
The purpose of the session is to locate the multiple contexts in which narratives and representations of Victorian art have been preserved, recast and reformed. Accordingly, by reviewing the historiography of Victorian art we wish to assess the extent to which recent revisionist readings establish their own hierarchies of cultural value. In sum, we intend to review the cultural conditions, critical themes and multiple perspectives in which the Victorian art world has been conceived, channelled and composed since the beginning of the last century.