Prints of the Rustic Life at The Huntington
From The Huntington:
Picturesque to Pastoral
The Huntington Library, San Marino, CA, 31 July — 1 November 2010
Thomas Gainsborough, "Wooded Landscape with Herdsman Driving Cattle over a Bridge, Rustic Lovers, and Ruined Castle," ca. 1780, soft-ground etching (The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens)
Many of the greatest practitioners of landscape painting in Britain also were actively engaged in printmaking. Picturesque to Pastoral explores the graphic side of landscape in British art from the 18th through the 20th century. From the rustic countryside depicted by Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) to the visionary dreamscapes of Graham Sutherland (1903–1980), this focused installation of about a dozen prints showcases the variety of techniques the medium affords—wood engraving, etching, aquatint, drypoint, and mezzotint—as well as the many ways the view of landscape changed over time. In their shift from rural to urban subjects and from poetic description to interior vision, these rarely seen items from The Huntington’s art collections reveal how artists reworked this subject matter to express their own sensibilities.
Graduate Student Conference at Yale
The Substance of Painting: Graduate Student Symposium
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Saturday, 26 February 2011
Proposals due by 15 November 2010
What painting shows is its material cause, which is to say paint —Georges Didi-Huberman, 2005
This one-day graduate student symposium explores the materiality of paint and the processes of painting both historically and in contemporary practice. It invites the consideration of paint as a substance, technically, as well as in terms of meaning. How have the ways in which paint has been used and interpreted developed over time? How are paint and painterly processes considered in today’s art studios and in art history? This symposium seeks to bring together the rich historiography on painting techniques with innovative recent art-historical methodologies for analyzing painting, investigating how paint has been interpreted and exploited by artists, scholars, critics, conservators, and audiences.
The symposium coincides with two major exhibitions at the Yale Center for British Art, a mid-career survey of the work of the British abstract artist Rebecca Salter (b. 1955), and an exhibition of the portraiture of Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830), organized jointly with the National Portrait Gallery, London. This juxtaposition provides a valuable opportunity to explore the versatility of paint and painterly processes by examining the work of two artists, an academic painter active at the turn of the nineteenth century, and a contemporary artist, both sharing a highly experimental approach to the use of media. Lawrence’s complex process of creating a chalk drawing on prepared canvas, which he then covered over with bravura strokes of paint, and Salter’s technique of applying, scraping away, and reapplying pigment, both challenge the canonical notion of painting’s flatness, as does Salter’s view of her practice as “making an object” rather than a two-dimensional surface. Both exhibitions include not only paintings but also works in other media, such as pastels, watercolors, and prints, highlighting the technical innovations and methods of both artists and inviting us, in different ways, to consider the complex relationships and often porous boundaries between media, such as painting, drawing, printmaking, and sculpture. Topics may include, but are not limited to:
• paint texture
• facture and finish
• painterliness
• painting as performance
• flatness
• color
• techniques and methods
• the historiography of materials
• drawing and painting
• painting conservation
We invite proposals for 25-minute papers on this theme from graduate students working in any discipline. Special consideration will be given to papers examining the topic in relation to British art and culture. Cross-disciplinary and comparative studies are particularly welcome. Travel funds for speakers are available upon application. Please submit abstracts of no more than 300 words by November 15, 2010.
by e-mail lisa.ford@yale.edu
by mail Lisa Ford
Associate Head of Research
Research Department
Yale Center for British Art
P.O. Box 208280
New Haven, CT 06520–8280
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