Sweden’s Nationalmuseum Launches Free Online Journal, Volume 20
Press release (3 September 2014) from the Nationalmuseum:
Stockholm’s Nationalmuseum has launched its first digital journal, available online to download and read free of charge. The Art Bulletin of Nationalmuseum Stockholm contains academic articles on art history relating to Nationalmuseum’s collections. The journal is moving to digital-only format and will be available through the DiVA portal (a Swedish publishing system for academic research and student theses) and the museum’s own website. The Art Bulletin of Nationalmuseum Stockholm is an annual publication containing academic articles on art history relating to Nationalmuseum’s collections. The journal has existed in print form since 1996, but is now switching to digital-only format, starting with volume 20. The journal’s established graphic design will be enhanced through the addition of digital media features such as metadata, live links to chapter headings and page references, and high-resolution images.
“For an art institution like Nationalmuseum, it’s important to offer our readers high-quality images that do full justice to the works,” said Janna Herder, editor of the Art Bulletin of Nationalmuseum Stockholm. “Readers therefore have the option of downloading the entire journal in low-resolution format or individual articles in high-resolution format.”
Nationalmuseum expects to attract a larger and wider readership now that the journal and its articles are freely available and searchable via Google and other search engines. As a member of the DiVA portal, the museum is able to distribute the publication more effectively in the academic community. “This is a further step in the digital evolution of Nationalmuseum and a key initiative in fulfilling our mandate to improve access to and awareness of our collections,” said Magdalena Gram, the museum’s head of research, library and archives and the journal’s editor-in-chief. “Another aspect of our mandate involves collaboration with other institutions such as universities and colleges. Offering an established publication like the Art Bulletin of Nationalmuseum Stockholm in digital format through the DiVA portal marks a breakthrough in terms of our ability to make specialized knowledge and information freely available.”
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Articles related to the eighteenth century (visit the Nationalmuseum website for the full contents) . . .
Art Bulletin of Nationalmuseum Stockholm 20 (2013).
A C Q U I S I T I O N S
Carina Fryklund, “Three 17th-Century Paintings from the Collection of Gustaf Adolf Sparre (1746–94),” pp. 11–16.
Magnus Olausson, “Roslin’s Self-Portrait with his Wife Marie Suzanne Giroust Painting a Portrait of Henrik Wilhelm Peill (1767),” pp. 17–18.
Magnus Olausson, “Wertmüller’s Portrait of Henri Bertholet-Campan with the Dog Aline (1786),” pp. 19–20.
Guilhem Scherf, “Une Statuette en Terre Cuite de Jean-Baptiste Stouf au Nationalmuseum,” pp. 27–36.
Magnus Olausson, “Madame Lefranc Painting a Portrait of her Husband Charles Lefranc (1779): A Miniature by Adélaïde Labille-Guiard,” pp. 37–8.
Anders Bengtsson, “A Unique Plate Warmer,” pp. 39–40.
Anders Bengtsson, “A Chair Fit for a Prince,” pp. 41–2.
Acquisitions 2013: Exposé, pp. 61–96.
A R T I C L E S O N T H E H I S T O R Y A N D T H E O R Y O F A R T
Martin Olin, “An Italian Architecture Library under the Polar Star: Nicodemus Tessin the Younger’s Collection of Books and Prints,” pp. 109–18.
Magnus Olausson, “Louis Gauffier’s Portrait of Gustaf Mauritz Armfelt (1793): A Political or a Conspiratorial Painting?,” pp. 119–22.
Ulf Cederlöf, “An Exceptionally Protracted Affair: The Nationalmuseum’s Acquisition of Sergel’s Collections of Drawings and Prints, 1875–76,” pp. 123–34.
S H O R T E R N O T I C E S
Görel Cavalli-Björkman and Margaretha Rossholm-Lagerlöf, “A Source-Critical Comment on Roger de Robelin’s “On the Provenance of Rembrandt’s The Conspiracy of the Batavians under Claudius Civilis,” 135–36.
Roger de Robelin, “Response to “A Source-Critical Comment etc.,” pp. 137–38.
R E P O R T
Helen Evans and Helena Kåberg, “The Nationalmuseum Lighting Lab,” pp. 139–46.
Call for Papers | Streitsache: Architecture as Matter of Contention
From Candide: Journal for Architectural Knowledge:
Streitsache: Architecture as Matter of Contention
Aachen University, 29–31 January 2015
Proposals due by 20 September 2014
From January 29 to 31, 2015 the second Candide Conference will take place at RWTH Aachen University. The peer-reviewed Candide: Journal for Architectural Knowledge was founded in 2009 and publishes contributions on the knowledge of architecture. The best papers presented in the conference will be published in a forthcoming issue.
The interdisciplinary conference Streitsache: Architecture as Matter of Contention intends to probe the complex relation between architecture and conflict. There are numerous instances in which architectural objects become objects of conflict, ‘bones of contention, a Streitsache. Conceiving of architecture as a Streitsache generates new architectural knowledge, including knowledge on the interactions that emerge from and through the objects of contention. Architectural things, whether in the form of architectural details, buildings or entire cities, are actors whose agency becomes manifest in conflictual processes. The field of politics and the negotiation of law is constituted through and by them. As thresholds Streitsachen are politically operative because they render conflicts visible and negotiable. The debates surrounding the Stuttgart 21 project, the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, or Les Halles in Paris could serve as recent examples.
The aim of the conference is to expand the scope of thinking about architecture, its function and character, into fields of the theory of law and political philosophy. As agents of the political, ’things of contention render plurality and heterogeneous interests visible and negotiable. Architecture’s dissension opens up a new space for collective thinking and action. The conference is interdisciplinary and addresses scholars and practitioners from the fields of architecture, art, political sciences, legal studies, cultural studies, anthropology, science and technology studies, cultural technology studies, and media philosophy.
The structure of the conference follows the phases of architectural processes in which matters of contention become visible and negotiable: a) design, planning, and implementation b) judgment and critique c) negotiation and settlement.
a) Conflicts arise because of sketches, plans, models, construction site protocols, budgets, legal rules, and press releases. How and through which circumstances does architecture turn into a matter of contention? What precisely is the disputed subject? How can we frame the design process as a sequence and as a negotiation of difference between agencies, both human and non-human? What kind of architectural knowledge becomes manifest in a concrete dispute?
b) Matters of contention generate their own social spaces. They are the sites where a contending community—and therewith the precondition for the political—emerges. How do disputing actors appropriate architecture? What modifications do contested things undergo during the conflictual relation? How do values become comprehensible and negotiable during a conflict? How do processes of selection function and how are verdicts reached? How do architectural objects become instruments that trigger or resolve conflicts?
c) Architectural matters of contention not only promote bellicose polemics but also social knowledge, which is implemented in processes of negotiation and arbitration. How does architecture function as a repository of or evidence of past conflicts? How can knowledge gained from past conflicts be used to create strategies to prevent future conflicts? Does it make sense to think the culture of architecture as a culture of contention?
We welcome submissions of case studies, historical and theoretical reflections dealing with particular projects, built architectures and specific disputes. The working languages at the conference will be German and English. Please send an abstract (max. 500 words) and a short CV before September 20, 2014 to: candide@theorie.arch.rwth-aachen.de.
Exhibition | The Generous Georgian: Dr Richard Mead
From The Foundling Museum:
The Generous Georgian: Dr Richard Mead
The Foundling Museum, London, 26 September 2014 — 4 January 2015
Allan Ramsay, Dr Richard Mead, 1747
(London: The Foundling Museum)
Dr Richard Mead (1673–1754) was one of the most eminent physicians, patrons, collectors, and philanthropists of his day, as well as a significant figure in the early history of the Foundling Hospital. A leading expert on poisons, scurvy, smallpox, and public health, Mead counted among his patients Queen Anne, King George II, Sir Isaac Newton, and the painter Antoine Watteau. A man of action, Mead explored poisons by drinking snake venom and is said to have defended his theory on smallpox treatment to the point of fighting a duel.
His home on Great Ormond Street backed onto the Foundling Hospital grounds and housed a magnificent collection of paintings, sculptures, antiquities, coins, and a library of over 10,000 volumes. Painters and scholars were given access to Mead’s renowned collection, which in a time before public galleries offered visitors a rare chance to view masterpieces from around the world. Examining its significance in London’s cultural landscape, this exhibition reunites key objects from his life and collection, such as the ancient bronze Arundel Head (2nd century BC) and Allan Ramsay’s half-length portrait of Mead.
Exploring Mead ‘in the round’, as a collector, philanthropist and physician, this exhibition will bring to light the Foundling Hospital’s relationship with a truly remarkable individual who, according to his contemporary the writer Samuel Johnson, “lived more in the broad sunshine of life than almost any man.”
The Generous Georgian: Dr Richard Mead is supported by the Wellcome Trust, the City of London Corporation and Verita.
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Conference programme from The Foundling:
Dr Richard Mead: Physician, Philanthropist, Collector
The Foundling Museum, London, 20 October 2014
To accompany the Museum’s autumn exhibition, The Generous Georgian: Dr Richard Mead, this one-day interdisciplinary conference considers the life, work, and collections of Mead. Adults £20, Concessions £15. To book, download a booking form or book online (subject to an 8% booking fee). Please send completed booking forms to: Stephanie Chapman, 40 Brunswick Square, London, WC1N 1AZ. For enquiries please contact exhibitions@foundlingmuseum.org.uk.
P R O G R A M M E
8:30 Optional early morning tour of the Royal College of Physicians (11 St Andrews Place, Regent’s Park) with curator Emma Shepley, addressing Richard Mead and his role in the institution.
9:15 Travel to the Foundling Museum. You will need to make your own way by public transport from RCP to the Foundling Museum, but staff will be able to recommend routes. The journey time is approximately 30 minutes.
9:30 Coffee and registration
10:00 Welcome
10:15 Ludmilla Jordanova, ‘The Problem of Richard Mead’
11:00 Break
11:30 Karen Howell, ‘The Curious Prescriptions of Dr Mead’
12:00 Janette Bright, ‘Dr Mead and the Curious Herbal’
12:30 Kevin Brown, ‘Richard Mead, George Anson’s Circumnavigation of the Globe, and the Health of the Seaman’
13:00 Lunch
14:00 Stephanie Chapman, ‘Richard Mead and the Foundling Hospital’
14:30 Tour of the exhibition, The Generous Georgian: Dr Richard Mead
15:00 Charles Avery, ‘The Large Brass Medallions Cast by Soldani, Selvi, and Pozzi in the Musaeum Meadianum’
15:30 Craig Hanson, ‘Debating Dissent in Leiden’
16:00 Refreshments
Exhibition | In Miniature
Joseph Étienne Blerzy, Snuffbox with theatrical scenes of a rope dancer and a puppet show by by Louis Nicolas van Blarenberghe and Henri Joseph van Blarenberghe, 1778–79 (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917; 17.190.1130). A high resolution image is available here»
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Now on at The Met (as noted at Bendor Grosvenor’s Art History News). . .
In Miniature
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 29 August 29 — 31 December 2014
This exhibition will comprise two groups of portrait miniatures: British, from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and French, from the revolutionary period to the Empire. Also included are several eighteenth-century French gold boxes decorated with narratives or scenes in grisaille. All are from the Museum’s permanent collection and, because of their sensitivity to light, are infrequently exhibited. Six larger paintings will be exhibited in order to consider what they may share with the miniatures and to show how they differ. Gallery 624.
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In conjunction with the exhibition, The Met has a Pinterest Board dedicated to “Met Miniatures”. There are lots of things there not included in the exhibition (nor particularly relevant to the exhibition), but notes indicate items that are part of the display. Serving basically as an illustrated checklist with links to the full online catalogue entries, it seems like a fairly obvious use of Pinterest by museums. –CH
New Book | The Arts of Living: Europe, 1600–1815
Among the V&A’s New Books for the fall:
Elizabeth Miller and Hilary Young, eds., The Arts of Living: Europe, 1600–1815 (London: V&A Publishing, 2014), 208 pages, ISBN: 978-1851778072, £25 / $40.
Published to accompany the landmark opening of the V&A’s new Europe 1600–1800 galleries, The Arts of Living explores the breadth, depth and beauty of the V&A’s seventeenth- and eighteenth-century collections. Written by a team of experts, this book provides an overview of more than two centuries of cultural development and artistic endeavour. Masterpieces such as the Serilly Cabinet and Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s terracotta for his funeral monument the Blessed Ludovica Albertoni are contextualized alongside discussions of Louis XIV’s patronage and the seventeenth-century Dutch interior. Many works are shown for the first time, including Count Brühl’s Meissen fountain and actor David Garrick’s tea service.
Elizabeth Miller is senior curator of prints, and Hilary Young is senior curator of ceramics at the V&A.
A preview of the book is available here»
Exhibition | Constable: The Making of a Master
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Press release for the upcoming exhibition:
Constable: The Making of a Master
Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 20 September 2014 — 11 January 2015
Curated by Mark Evans
“We see nothing till we truly understand it.” Constable, 1821
The V&A’s major autumn exhibition will re-examine the work of John Constable (1776–1837), Britain’s best-loved artist. It will explore his sources, techniques and legacy and reveal the hidden stories behind the creation of some of his most well-known paintings. Constable: The Making of a Master will juxtapose Constable’s work for the first time with the art of 17th-century masters of classical landscape such as Ruisdael, Rubens and Claude, whose compositional ideas and formal values Constable revered. On display will be such celebrated works as The Hay Wain (1821), The Cornfield (1826) and Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows (1831), together with oil sketches Constable painted outdoors directly from nature, which are unequalled at capturing transient effects of light and atmosphere. The exhibition will bring together over 150 works of art including oil sketches, drawings, watercolours and engravings.
John Constable, Self-Portrait, ca. 1799-1804, pencil and black chalk heightened with white and red chalk (London: National Portrait Gallery)
Martin Roth, V&A Director, said: “The V&A has been one of the leading centres for Constable research since the 19th century, following a significant gift of paintings, oil sketches and drawings from Constable’s daughter Isabel in 1888. This exhibition refreshes our understanding of his work and creative influence. It shows that Constable’s art, so well-loved and familiar to many of us, still delivers surprises.”
Born in East Bergholt, Suffolk on 11 June 1776, John Constable was the second son of a gentleman farmer and mill owner. Whilst working in the family business he became intimately familiar with the countryside around the River Stour and sketched observations of nature and the scenery and motifs of the Suffolk countryside. Given permission by his father to pursue art, he travelled to London in 1799 where he studied at the Royal Academy of Arts. He was schooled in the old masters, meticulously copying their work and reflecting on their compositions in his individual style. On display will be paintings including Moonlight Landscape (1635–1640) by Rubens and Landscape with a Pool (1746–47) by Gainsborough, which inspired Constable’s early practice.
Constable made a number of close copies of the old masters which he referred to as a “facsimile…a more lasting remembrance.” Paintings including Claude’s Landscape with a Goatherd and Goats (c.1636–37) and Ruisdael’s Windmills near Haarlem (c.1650–52), as well as etchings and drawings by Herman van Swanevelt and Alexander Cozens, will be displayed alongside Constable’s own direct copies, many of which will be brought together for the first time since they were produced almost 200 years ago. Constable also owned an extensive art collection that included 5000 etchings principally by 17th-century Dutch, Flemish, and French landscape painters, which became a vital resource for his own image making.
Outdoor sketching was central to Constable’s working method. The 1810s saw the beginning of a series of expressive oil sketches and drawings in the open air, capturing the changes of weather and light in his native countryside. His naturalistic representation of the landscape and use of broad brushstrokes and impasto technique challenged conventions and brought the genre of outdoor oil sketching to a new level of refinement. Examples of his cloud studies, including sketches of Hampstead Heath and Brighton Beach will demonstrate Constable’s innovative and poetic evocations of land, sea and sky.
The exhibition will also investigate Constable’s methods for transferring the freshness of his sketches into his exhibition paintings. From 1818–19 Constable produced full-scale oil sketches to resolve the compositions, colours, and light values of his ‘six-footers’ such as The Hay Wain (1821) and The Leaping Horse (1825) which are amongst the best-known images in British art.
In the last decade of his life Constable and the engraver David Lucas collaborated on a series of mezzotints after the artist’s paintings. The final section of the exhibition will present a major group of these prints together with the exemplary original oil sketches on which they were based. Through these prints Constable sought to secure his artistic legacy and ensure the continued study of his groundbreaking paintings, which remain hugely influential to the present day.
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Constable: The Making of a Master Study Day
Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 4 October 2014
This study day will bring together scholars from a range of disciplines to explore the man, the artist, his ambitions, interests and techniques. Speakers will include Mark Evans, Annie Lyles, Sarah Cove, John Thornes, and Jonathan Clarkson. Saturday, 4 October, 10.30–17.15, Seminar Room Three. £45, £35 concessions, £15 students.
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Mark Evans, with Susan Owens and Stephen Calloway, John Constable: The Making of a Master (London: V&A Publishing, 2014), 192 pages, ISBN: 978-1851778003, £30.
The remarkable naturalism of John Constable’s paintings has always been acknowledged, and his ‘vivid and timeless’ (as he called them) oil sketches have been celebrated since the 1890s as precursors of Impressionism, modernism and photographic composition. He remains a powerful influence on contemporary artists, and was famously Lucian Freud’s favourite painter. He was also hailed in 1866 as the first painter whose ‘art is purely and thoroughly English’, and his studio oil paintings have helped to define our idea of the English countryside. Published to accompany a major V&A exhibition, this book evaluates these aspects of Constable’s work, placing the artist’s naturalism and studio work in the context of his wider practice—in particular his talent for copying, and extensive print collection. A companion volume to John Constable: Oil Sketches from the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A Publishing, 2011), this book shows how the artist’s reverence for the Old Masters is not incompatible with his revolutionary handling of paint: where others competed with the Masters, Constable assimilated their ideas and values to imbue his own naturalistic vision with dynamism..
Mark Evans is senior curator of Paintings at the V&A.
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Map: Constable’s England
In conjunction with the exhibition, the V&A has created a Pinterest map to help visitors explore Constable’s England. As is usually the case with Pinterest, there are drawbacks, but I found the map useful for visualizing big points and connecting pictures to places. Given how technologically easy it is to produce this sort of page, it could work well as a teaching assignment. It also provides an excuse for me to remind readers that Enfilade maintains a handful of Pinterest boards, too. –CH
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