New Book | Joseph Banks’ Florilegium
From Thames & Hudson:
David Mabberley, Mel Gooding, and Joe Studholme, Joseph Banks’ Florilegium: Botanical Treasures from Cook’s First Voyage (London: Thames & Hudson, 2017), 320 pages, ISBN: 978 050051 9363, £65, $85.
This is the first full-colour publication of some of the most extraordinary botanical prints of the 18th century. Banks’ Florilegium is not only a great scientific record, but also a major achievement of collaborative Enlightenment art and a work of botanical illustration of outstanding beauty.
Joseph Banks accompanied James Cook on his first voyage around the world between 1768 and 1771. A gifted and wealthy young naturalist, Banks collected exotic flora from Madeira, Brazil, Tierra del Fuego, the South Pacific, New Zealand, Australia and Java, bringing back over 1,300 species hitherto unknown to science. On his return, Banks commissioned over 700 superlative engravings as a scientific record. Known collectively as Banks’ Florilegium, they are some of the most precise and exquisite examples of botanical illustration ever made—yet they were never published in Banks’s lifetime.
The present selection has been made from a unique limited colour edition of the prints, with expert botanical commentaries provided by Professor David Mabberley. Mel Gooding describes the Endeavour voyage and the making of the Florilegium. An afterword by Joe Studholme outlines the history of the modern printing.
David Mabberley has served as Executive Director of the Royal Botanic Gardens and Domain Trust in Sydney. He is an Emeritus Fellow at Wadham College, Oxford, Adjunct Professor at Macquarie University, Sydney, and Professor Extraordinary at the University of Leiden, The Netherlands.
Mel Gooding is an art historian, writer and curator. He has taught at Edinburgh and Wimbledon Schools of Art, among others, and contributes regularly to the art press.
Joe Studholme co-founded Editions Alecto and undertook the printing of Banks’ Florilegium from the original copper plates between 1980 and 1990.
C O N T E N T S
• The Making of Banks’ Florilegium I: The Voyage of Endeavour, Mel Gooding
• The Plates, David Mabberley
• The Making of Banks’ Florilegium II: The Florilegium, 1772–1990, Mel Gooding
• The Modern Printing of the Florilegium, Joe Studholme
Call for Papers | Museums, Collections, and Conflict, 1500–2010
From the Museums and Galleries History Group:
MGHG Biennial Conference | Museums, Collections, and Conflict, 1500–2010
National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, 13–14 July 2018
Proposals due by 1 March 2018
Museums have been profoundly shaped by war and armed conflict, and have also played a significant part in shaping understandings and memories about them. Yet there has been little sustained examination of the way museums in war and war in museums has played out. Since Gaynor Kavanagh’s foundational study Museums and the First World War in 1994 and with the publication this year of Catherine Pearson’s similarly ground-breaking Museums in the Second World War, it is clear that museums have played and can play an important role in helping society address such crisis situations. On the home front, for example, museums have helped society prepare for war and armed conflict. In leading commemoration in the aftermath of war and armed conflict, museums have helped society come to terms with what happened, understand why it happened, and remember sacrifices. Yet museums have equally served as arenas where issues such as commemoration have been contested and negotiated and where particular narratives legitimising war and conflict have been developed. This conference hopes to address a broad range of questions, including on collecting (in) war and armed conflict, on the deliberate targeting and destruction or safeguarding of museums and cultural property, and the broader range of institutions brought forth or which are strongly influenced by war and armed conflict.
Keynote speaker: Annie Coombes, Professor of Material and Visual Culture, Birkbeck, University of London
We seek papers which particularly address but are not restricted to the following questions over a period from the early modern to the end of the twentieth century:
• What have museums done during periods of conflict and what has happened to them? Have they been responsible for morale, have they been targets of attack, have they physically moved and how has their staffing been affected?
• How have museums and collections acted to commemorate conflict?
• In what ways have wars and other conflicts affected museums’ and collectors’ collecting activities, positively or negatively? How have wars and conflicts been collected, and by whom?
• How have museums represented war, civil war and other conflicts such as rebellions? Have museums promoted peace by interpreting war?
• How have museums OF conflict, of the armed forces and of weaponry/armouries developed historically?
We welcome proposals for papers which deal with the history of museums and collecting in a British, European, or wider context or which address the relationships between different geographical areas.
Paper proposals should be for papers of 20 minutes’ length. Proposals should be 250 words max and include the name, contact details and affiliation (if applicable) of the speaker. Panel proposals are strongly encouraged and should consist of a panel title, proposals for 3 papers, along with a rationale for the panel theme, and contact details and affiliations (if applicable) of all participants. Please indicate whether you will provide a chair for your session or not (it does not matter which). Poster proposals are also welcomed. Please contact Kate Hill (khill@lincoln.ac.uk) for more information. All proposals should be sent to contact@mghg.info by 1 March 2018. Please note that all speakers and poster presenters will be expected to pay the conference registration fee.
The Museums and Galleries History Group (MGHG) was founded in 2002 and inaugurated in 2003 with the symposium Museums and their Histories, held at the National Gallery in London. The MGHG provides a platform for debate and contact among all those who seek to understand museums and galleries from historical and theoretical perspectives. The interests represented are wide-ranging, interdisciplinary and international and the Group also acts as a forum for considerations of the place of museum history within academic discourse and its importance for current museum practice.
Call for Papers | British Art and the Global
From the Call for Papers:
British Art and the Global
University of California, Berkeley, 17–18 September 2018
Organized by Imogen Hart and David Peters Corbett
Proposals due by 15 April 2018
What is the role of art history in the Brexit era? In the wake of the UK’s decision to leave the European Union, the history of Britain’s relationships with the rest of the world takes on renewed significance. This conference explores how art history today can shed light on the history of Britain’s interaction with other countries and cultures. Among other questions, the conference asks: How have institutions of display and education provided frameworks that have articulated and/or obscured global contexts for British art? How can the traditions of art history, including concepts of national schools, movements, modernisms, periods, originality and imitation, aesthetic judgment, and hierarchies of media be exploited and/or critiqued by scholars of British art and the global?
We invite papers that illuminate global contexts for the history of British art by considering works of art (including painting, sculpture, architecture, the decorative arts, photography, and other forms of visual and material culture) as sites and tools of international cooperation, conflict, and exchange. Potential papers may address the global history of British art in relation to topics that include, but are not limited to:
• International artistic collaborations and organizations
• Artistic movements and their international legacies
• International modernisms
• Aesthetic theory across national boundaries
• Contexts of display including museums, collections, and exhibitions
• Institutions of artistic training and education
• The international art market
• Reproduction and circulation
• Periodicals
• Art and empire
• Travel and tourism
• Immigration
• Art and war
Keynote speakers: Tim Barringer (Yale University), Dorothy Price (University of Bristol), and Mary Roberts (University of Sydney).
This two-day, international conference is sponsored by the Center for British Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. The conference is co-organized by Imogen Hart (History of Art Department, UC Berkeley) and David Peters Corbett (Courtauld Institute of Art, London). Please submit abstracts of no more than 250 words plus a brief biographical note to imogenhart@berkeley.edu by April 15, 2018. Limited funds may be available to assist with travel expenses for speakers who do not have institutional funding.
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