New Book | The Gardens of the British Working Class
From Yale UP:
Margaret Willes, The Gardens of the British Working Class (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 416 pages, ISBN: 978-0300187847, $40.
This magnificently illustrated people’s history celebrates the extraordinary feats of cultivation by the working class in Britain, even if the land they toiled, planted, and loved was not their own. Spanning more than four centuries, from the earliest records of the laboring classes in the country to today, Margaret Willes’s research unearths lush gardens nurtured outside rough workers’ cottages and horticultural miracles performed in blackened yards, and reveals the ingenious, sometimes devious, methods employed by determined, obsessive, and eccentric workers to make their drab surroundings bloom. She also explores the stories of the great philanthropic industrialists who provided gardens for their workforces, the fashionable rich stealing the gardening ideas of the poor, alehouse syndicates and fierce rivalries between vegetable growers, flower-fanciers cultivating exotic blooms on their city windowsills, and the rich lore handed down from gardener to gardener through generations. This is a sumptuous record of the myriad ways in which the popular cultivation of plants, vegetables, and flowers has played—and continues to play—an integral role in everyday British life.
Margaret Willes is an enthusiastic gardener and the former publisher at the National Trust.
Call for Articles | Art and Art History Libraries
From H-ArtHist:
Art and Art History Libraries
2016 Issue of Perspective: La Revue de l’INHA
Proposals due by 15 June 2015; finished papers due by 1 June 2016
The next special issue of Perspective (the journal of the Institut national d’histoire de l’art) will focus on topics relating to art and art-history libraries and their specificity as bibliographic, artistic, and documentary resources. We will examine these places, which make information pertaining to our discipline available to artists and researchers, while at the same time endeavoring to conserve their collections of texts and images. This double purpose requires examining the practices and profiles of users, the way in which people visit these institutions, either by consulting the images in reading rooms or websites (consultation of reproductions as opposed to reading monographs, digital access to works, etc.), and also a study of their collections: in addition to books and magazines, art libraries also preserve prints, photographs, manuscripts, artist books, etc.
The interest of such a project for an art-historical review lies partly in the difficulty in defining the exact scope of an art library. However, the planned reopening by the INHA in 2016 of the Salle Labrouste, which will house one of the most important art libraries in the world in terms of its number of volumes, its symbolic importance, and its accessibility, offers a unique opportunity for a collective historical and aesthetic reflection on the forms and ambitions of these collections of art and knowledge, past and present. Nevertheless, this issue will not be limited exclusively to the example of the INHA. On the contrary, consistent with the editorial philosophy of Perspective,
the volume will contain articles that cover a historical range in their study of art libraries in general and present the most innovative studies from an international standpoint. At the same time, we aim to publish original papers on the place of the library in the work of artists and architects.
We would like to suggest several potentially interesting paths, without excluding others: issues related to the conservation and dissemination of ephemera and small publications such as invitation cards, almanacs, booklets, announcements, etc.; the study of exceptional bibliophiles such as, for example, Doucet, Wyder, and Oechslin; the correlation between library holdings and research topics (the Mesnil collection given to the Warburg Institute and research projects at University College, London in the 2000s); the study of art libraries during wartime similar to research on artworks plundered during such extreme periods; evaluation of the losses and gains following the merger of disparate collections originally belonging to art schools, museums, universities (for example, the INHA Library); the particular fate of iconographic documentation (Bildarchiv Foto Marburg); the recent foundation of specialized research centers with libraries created from scratch like the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal; and also the inclusion of various media resources, including recordings, such as oral archives at the British Library (artists’ interviews) or performance videos in the Kandinsky Library of the Centre Georges Pompidou. Finally, projects are certainly needed from the perspective of the history of art education, on specialized establishments for art craftsmen such as the Bibliotheque Forney and the Ratti Center at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, without neglecting the opportunity offered by digital technology in new ways of disseminating collections.
The proposals could range from a synthetic short article focusing on a specific aspect of the art library, or on relations between art and the library in a given period and in a particular geographic area (25,000 characters), to a detailed and multidisciplinary study of a moment in art library history, or even the problematization of their absence in time and space (45,000 characters).
The intention of this call for papers is not to cover all possible topics exhaustively: all proposals are welcome. However, within the framework of an art-historical review dedicated to recent international research in the field, we wish to emphasize historical and aesthetic approaches, rather than research relevant to library studies proper. Projects in whatever language—Perspective takes responsibility for translations—will be reviewed by the scientific committee consisting of Laurent Baridon, Ewa Bobrowska, Anne-Élisabeth Buxtorf, Penelope Curtis, Godehard Janzig, Thomas Kirchner, Rémi Labrusse, Anne Lafont, Johanne Lamoureux, Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, Michel Melot, Pierre-Michel Menger, Philippe Saunier, Jean-Claude Schmitt, Valérie Sueur-Hermel, Veerle Thielemans and Bernard Vouilloux.
Please submit your proposals (2000–3000 character summary and a 2–3 line biography) to revue-perspective@inha.fr up to and including June 15, 2015. Full texts of accepted contributions will need to be sent by June 1, 2016.
Call for Panel Proposals | Creating Markets, Collecting Art
From AAH:
Creating Markets, Collecting Art
Christie’s King Street, London, 14–15 July 2016
Proposals due by 1 June 2015
To commemorate the traditional founding date of Christie’s auction house in 1766, a two-day conference, 14–15 July 2016, will be held at Christie’s King Street, focusing on the theme of Creating Markets and Collecting Art.
Christie’s Education is known for its collaborative and cross-disciplinary approach to the study of works of art through its Master’s programmes in the History of Art and its Markets, Art-world Practice and Art, Law and Business internationally. This conference hopes to explore this cross-disciplinary area, looking at the interrelationship of commerce, collecting and the academy.
Sessions should engage with current scholarship on any aspect of the art market, in particular on creating markets, collecting, regulation and cultural heritage, from the eighteenth century to the present day, and in all geographical regions. Session proposals may address the following:
• the role of the intermediary in the structure of art ecosystems
• the economics of taste and its relationship to value(s)
• how artefacts are transformed into works of art by the market and by enthusiasts and collectors
• the role of regulation and the law
• the auction house as cultural space
• current theoretical debates surrounding ‘aura’ and the making/meaning of authenticity
Session proposals should include a title and abstract (maximum 250 words), the contact details of the convenor(s) and a brief biography. Please submit the Session Proposal Form by e-mail to the Conference Secretary (aking@christies.com) by 1st June 2015. This will be followed by a Call for Papers in July 2015.
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