Exhibition | William Blake
William Blake, Newton, 1795–c.1805, color print, ink and watercolour on paper
(London: Tate Britain)
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Press release (4 April 2019) for the exhibition:
William Blake
Tate Britain, London, 11 September 2019 — 2 February 2020
Curated by Martin Myrone and Amy Concannon
This autumn, Tate Britain will present the largest survey of work by William Blake (1757–1827) in the UK for a generation. A visionary painter, printmaker, and poet, Blake created some of the most iconic images in the history of British art and has remained an inspiration to artists, musicians, writers, and performers worldwide for over two centuries. This ambitious exhibition will bring together over 300 remarkable and rarely seen works and rediscover Blake as a visual artist for the 21st century.
Tate Britain will reimagine the artist’s work as he intended it to be experienced. Blake’s art was a product of his tumultuous times, with revolution, war and progressive politics acting as the crucible of his unique imagination; yet he struggled to be understood and appreciated during his life. Now renowned as a poet, Blake also had grand ambitions as a visual artist and envisioned vast frescos that were never realised. For the first time, The Spiritual Form of Nelson Guiding Leviathan (c.1805–09) and The Spiritual Form of Pitt Guiding Behemoth (c.1805) will be digitally enlarged and projected onto the gallery wall on the huge scale that Blake imagined. The original artworks will be displayed nearby in a restaging of Blake’s ill-fated exhibition of 1809, the artist’s only significant attempt to create a public reputation for himself as a painter. Tate will recreate the domestic room above his family hosiery shop in which the show was held, allowing visitors to encounter the paintings exactly as people did in 1809.
The exhibition will provide a vivid biographical framework in which to consider Blake’s life and work. There will be a focus on London, the city in which he was born and lived for most of his life. The burgeoning metropolis was a constant inspiration for the artist, offering an environment in which harsh realities and pure imagination were woven together. His creative freedom was also dependent on the unwavering support of those closest to him, his friends, family, and patrons. Tate will highlight the vital presence of his wife Catherine who offered both practical assistance and became an unacknowledged hand in the production of his engravings and illuminated books. The exhibition will showcase a series of illustrations to Pilgrim’s Progress (1824–27) and a copy of the book The complaint, and the consolation Night Thoughts (1797), now thought to be coloured by Catherine.
William Blake, Catherine Blake, 1805, graphite on paper (London: Tate Britain).
Blake was a staunch defender of the fundamental role of art in society and the importance of artistic freedom. Shaped by his personal struggles in a period of political terror and oppression, his technical innovation, and his political commitment, these beliefs have inspired the generations that followed and remain pertinent today. Tate Britain’s exhibition will open with Albion Rose (c.1793), an exuberant visualisation of the mythical founding of Britain, created in contrast to the commercialisation, austerity, and crass populism of the times. A section of the exhibition will also be dedicated to his illuminated books such as Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794), his central achievement as a radical poet.
Additional highlights will include a selection of works from the Royal Collection and some of his best-known paintings including Newton (1795–c.1805) and Ghost of a Flea (c.1819–20). The latter work was inspired by a séance-induced vision and will be shown alongside a rarely seen preliminary sketch. The exhibition will close with The Ancient of Days (1827), a frontispiece for an edition of Europe: A Prophecy, completed only days before the artist’s death.
William Blake is curated by Martin Myrone, Lead Curator pre-1800 British Art, and Amy Concannon, Assistant Curator British Art 1790–1850. The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue from Tate Publishing (distributed by Princeton University Press), along with a programme of talks and events in the gallery.
Martin Myrone, ed., William Blake (London: Tate Publishing, 2019), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-0691198316, £43 / $55.
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Note (added 30 November 2019) — The original posting used the exhibition’s initial working title, William Blake: The Artist.
New Book | Romanticism and Illustration
From Cambridge UP:
Ian Haywood, Susan Matthews, and Mary Shannon, eds., Romanticism and Illustration (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 360 pages, ISBN: 978-1108425711, $120.
This collection of essays takes a fresh look at the important role of illustration in Romantic literature. The late eighteenth century saw an explosion of illustrated editions of literary classics and the emergence of a new culture of literary art, including the innovative literary galleries. The impact of these developments on the reading and viewing of literary texts is explored in a series of case studies covering poetry, historical texts, drama, painting, reproductive prints, magazines and ephemera. Romanticism and Illustration argues for a more detailed study of illustration which includes the context of a wider circulation of images across different media. The modern understanding of the word ‘illustration’ fails to convey the complex relationship between the artist, the engraver, the publisher, the text and the audience in Romantic Britain. In teasing out the implications of this dynamic cultural matrix, this book opens up a new field of Romantic studies.
C O N T E N T S
Figures
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
Editors’ Introduction
Part I. Illustrating Poetry
1 Peter Otto, The Ends of Illustration: Explanation, Critique, and the Political Imagination in Blake’s Title-pages for Genesis
2 Sophie Thomas, ‘With a Master’s Hand and Prophet’s Fire’: Blake, Gray, and the Bard
3 Dustin Frazier Wood, Seeing History: Illustration, Poetic Drama, and the National Past
4 Martin Priestman, ‘Fuseli’s Poetic Eye’: Prints and Impressions in Fuseli and Erasmus Darwin
5 Susan Matthews, Henry Fuseli’s Accommodations: ‘Attempting the Domestic’ in the Illustrations to Cowper
6 Sandro Jung, Reading the Romantic Vignette: Stothard Illustrates Bloomfield, Byron, and Crabbe for The Royal Engagement Pocket Atlas
7 Maureen McCue, Intimate Distance: Thomas Stothard’s and J. M. W. Turner’s Illustrations of Samuel Rogers’s Italy
Part II. The Business of Illustration
8 Ian Haywood, Illustration, Terror, and Female Agency: Thomas Macklin’s Poets Gallery in a Revolutionary Decade
9 Luisa Calè, Maria Cosway’s Hours: Cosmopolitan and Classical Visual Culture in Thomas Macklin’s Poets Gallery
10 Mary Shannon, Artists’ Street: Thomas Stothard, R. H. Cromek, and Literary Illustration on London’s Newman Street
11 Brian Maidment, The Development of Magazine Illustration in Regency Britain: The Example of Arliss’s Pocket Magazine, 1818–1833
Coda, Martin Myrone, Romantic Illustration and the Privatization of History Painting
Bibliography
Index
Call for Papers | UAAC/AAUC 2019, Québec
From UAAC/AAUC:
Universities Art Association of Canada / l’association d’art des universités du Canada
Hilton Hotel, Québec, 24–27 October 2019
Proposals due by 31 May 2019
Every fall UAAC hosts Canada’s professional conference for visual arts based research by art historians, professors, artists, curators and cultural workers. The conference is held at a different location each year, normally at a Canadian university or college, and the sessions and panels address issues and subjects in art history, theory and practice from a variety of methodological approaches. We’re pleased to announce that UAAC-AAUC’s next conference will be held in beautiful Quebec City at the Hilton Hotel from October 24 to 27, 2019.
A selection of sessions potentially related to the eighteenth century, including the HECAA panel, is provided below. A full list of panels is available as a PDF file here.
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HECAA Open Session (Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture)
Chair: Joan Coutu (University of Waterloo), joan.coutu@uwaterloo.ca
HECAA works to stimulate, foster, and disseminate knowledge of all aspects of visual culture in the long eighteenth century. This open session welcomes papers that examine any aspect of art and visual culture from the 1680s to the 1830s. Special consideration will be given to proposals that demonstrate innovation in theoretical and/or methodological approaches.
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Au préalable : œuvre(s) préparatoire(s) et processus créatif aux temps médiévaux et modernes
Chair: Audrey Adamczak (Institut catholique de Paris), audrey.adamczak@videoton.ca
Nous proposons d’interroger l’œuvre préparatoire du Moyen-Age et de la première modernité quels que soient sa forme, sa destination ou le médium utilisé, en privilégiant les études qui aborderont les processus de création mis en jeu pour générer et fabriquer une œuvre d’art, qu’elle soit individuelle ou collective : pratiques d’atelier, changements/modifications de la première intention de l’artiste, reprise ou réemploi d’un modèle antérieur, etc. Nous accorderons une attention toute particulière aux propositions touchant aux domaines souvent peu étudiés tels que la gravure, l’illustration, l’enluminure, l’art du vitrail, la sculpture et les arts décoratifs, l’architecture et le décor.
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What Was History Painting and What Is It Now?
Chairs: Jordan Bear (University of Toronto), jordan.bear@utoronto.ca; and Mark Phillips (Carleton University), Mark.Phillips@carleton.ca
The dominant visual language of European painting from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, history paintings were formidable in their monumental scale, ambitious moral lessons, and intricate narratives. With the rise of modernist avant-gardes, the genre receded from the forefront of artistic production into the realm of nostalgia. Yet history painting cast a shadow that would subtly colour even the works that sought to displace it.
This session invites presentations that explore the fortunes of this distinctive mode of visual representation. Papers might engage with any number of themes, including the creation of an audience attuned to the genre’s didactic aims, the entry of history painting into the marketplace of commercial art and attractions, or the reimagination of the mode in response to the edicts of modern and contemporary art and decolonization. We are eager to investigate the genre in its full range of geographical and chronological variety, and to consider both the tradition and the vibrant ways in which it resonates through the art of the present.
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Exhibiting Animals in the Long Nineteenth Century
Chair: Elizabeth Boone (University of Alberta), betsy.boone@ualberta.ca
Animals, both wild and domesticated, were regularly exhibited during the long nineteenth century. They appeared on canvas and as sculpture in fine art exhibitions; as public art works marking fair grounds, parks, and zoos; mounted through the art of taxidermy; and live in circus performances and at agricultural fairs. Some animals—usually those known for their performance abilities, noteworthy value, or bloodlines—appear in named portraits, while others functioned as type, to evoke particular emotions, or to communicate societal values and attitudes about these non-human beings. This session invites papers from scholars interested in exploring the current state of animal studies and the representation of animals in an exhibitionary context.
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Domestic Encodings through Craft Objects
Chairs: Ruth Chambers (University of Regina), Ruth.Chambers@uregina.ca; and Mireille Perron (Alberta University of the Arts, former ACAD University), Mireille.Perron@acad.ca
Desire, fear, pleasure, projection, and uncertainty loom large in concepts of home and domesticity. Craft objects in particular have sustaining connections with home and with the production of domestic space; how and what kind of space is produced through crafted objects is of renewed concern for many historians, curators, craft persons, and artists. Examples of recent scholarship and practice include, but are not limited to: Craft, Space and Interior Design 1855–2005, Sandra Alfody ed.; Breaking and Entering: The Contemporary House Cut, Spliced, and Haunted, Bridget Elliott ed.; and the works of Ann Low, Laura Vickerson, Shannon Bool, Carmen Laganse, Amy Malbeuf, Luanne Martinau, Judy Chartrand, and Lindsay Arnold, to name but a few Canadian artists. Following, but not restricted to investigations of these leads, we will offer Craft practice, theory, discourse, and history as ways to uncover, transform, validate, and better understand our production of domesticity. All historical, methodological and material approaches are welcome.
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Making Sense of the Senses: Evaluating the Sensorium in Visual Culture
Chair: Samantha Chang (University of Toronto), samantha.chang@mail.utoronto.ca
The classification, discrimination, and individuation of the senses have long been a topic of discussion among scholars in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities. Although the paradigm of the five senses can be found in philosophical texts from Ancient Greece and China, the sensory categories defined differed significantly between the two regions. This disparity of sense perception informed the interdisciplinary field of sensory studies and following the sensory turn of the 1990s, led to a profusion of sense-specific subfields, especially those related to visual culture. While the invention of visual culture collapsed the hierarchy of high/low art (Berger 1972; Baxandall 1972; Alpers 1983), the proliferation of visual culture studies further entrenches the hierarchical division of the senses (Howes 2018). This panel seeks to explore interpretations of the sensorium in visual culture and evaluate the cultural and social connections/implications of the senses in art.
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On Performance, Exhibitions, and Archives
Chairs: Barbara Clausen (Université du Québec à Montréal), clausen.barbara@uqam.ca; and Erin Silver (University of British Columbia), erin.silver@ubc.ca
This panel, which springboards from Clausen’s research on performance’s representational politics as a hybrid art form in the tension field of the live and mediated, and Silver’s research on the superimposition of embodied movement and political movements, examines how these practices find their various modes of existence within and beyond the framework of the institutional spaces they occupy. Bridging the recent fervour for dance’s representational and political potential within gallery spaces, to performance’s status as one of the most dominantly promoted art forms today, this panel asks: how do movement- and performance-based practices operating at the intersection of the exhibition and the archive contribute to and shape concepts of agency, site specificity, and immediacy in the cultural sphere? We invite submissions in French and English that explore notions of the performative in relation to the museum and new formats of curating, archiving, and digital mediation.
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Séance Ouverte (Réseau Art et Architecture du 19e siècle) / Open Session (Research on Art and Architecture of the 19th Century)
Chairs: Peggy Davis (Université du Québec à Montréal), davis.peggy@uqam.ca; and Ersy Contogouris (Université de Montréal), ersy.contogouris@umontreal.ca
L’objectif du Réseau Art et Architecture du 19e siècle (www.raa19.com) consiste à promouvoir le renouveau des recherches globales et interdisciplinaires sur le 19e siècle en histoire de l’art et de l’architecture. Cette session ouverte invite des propositions théoriques ou des études de cas qui couvrent des corpus issus du long 19e siècle, de 1789 à 1914. Une attention particulière sera donnée aux propositions qui font ressortir de nouvelles problématiques ou des méthodologies novatrices.
The aim of the RAA19 (Research on Art and Architecture of the 19th century; http://www.raa19.com) is to encourage innovative studies of nineteenth-century art and architecture. This open session welcomes papers that examine theoretical issues or case studies that focus on any aspect of the art and architecture of the long nineteenth century, from 1789 to 1914. Special consideration will be given to papers that propose innovative issues or methodologies.
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Perspectives on the Dutch Golden Age
Chairs: Stephanie Dickey(Queen’s University), stephanie.dickey@queensu.ca; and Amy Golahny (Lycoming College), golahny@lycoming.edu
We propose a session on the historiography and reception of Dutch art produced in the period c. 1575–1700, exploring how artists, admirers, and critics have responded to the art of the period known as the ‘Dutch Golden Age’ from the seventeenth century to the present. We welcome case studies that reflect on, for example, theoretical appraisals of Dutch art and artists; literary adaptations of artists’ lives for the popular audience; print reproductions of Dutch painting in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; emulation of Dutch artists in nineteenth century France; the rediscovery of Vermeer; poetic responses to Dutch art; the changing reception of Rembrandt and other artists; Dutch art through the lens of methodologies such as feminism or post-colonialism; the collecting and connoisseurship of Dutch art in Canada and elsewhere; and other topics.
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Interconnections in the Long Nineteenth Century
Chairs: Mitchell Frank (Carleton University), mitchell.frank@carleton.ca; and Alison McQueen (McMaster University), ajmcq@mcmaster.ca
This panel invites papers that examine the significant roles assigned to visual culture in understanding global connections in the long nineteenth century (c.1789–1914). Connections between places and power relations raise important questions, and transnational approaches offer a means of disrupting histories, including those centred on national identities. Papers may consider the following questions: What roles did visual culture play in communicating, reinforcing, enacting, complicating, and/or disrupting imperial power structures and settler- colonial narratives? What issues of agency, or factors inhibiting agency, faced imperial subjects and/or citizens as creators, patrons, or spectators? How did they traverse or negotiate between geopolitical realms, such as the metropole, provinces, or colonies? How can the social history of art raise new questions about interconnections in the long nineteenth century? How does a transnational approach enrich and expand current conceptions of nineteenth-century art and reconceptualize its parameters? What does it promise and are there drawbacks?
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The Art of Camouflage
Chairs: Claudette Lauzon (Simon Fraser University), lauzon@sfu.ca; and T’ai Smith (University of British Columbia), tai.smith@ubc.ca
Camouflage is a technique of obfuscation that operates in the realm of visibility. Mimicking the patterns of its environment, an animal becomes at once transparent and opaque. A product of branding, the fashionista is constantly adapting, continuously changing and exchanging her appearance for another to fit the mode of her surroundings. The hoodie is at once a target, an icon of protest, and a method of hiding. Terrorists, sports fans, politicians, and bank robbers all wear baseball caps. Meanwhile, drones are disguised as hummingbirds. This panel will consider the art and politics of camouflage in material and online environments. We invite contributions that address camouflage from historical, theoretical, and/or artistic perspectives. Topics may include counter-surveillance and camouflage; the politics of race and opacity; camouflage in/and animal studies; visual cultures of war and conflict; costume and fashion; biometrics; and feminist strategies of invisibility.
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À la croisée des chemins : réflexions sur les relations interespèces en art
Chairs: Anne-Sophie Miclo (Université du Québec à Montréal), miclo.anne-sophie@courrier.uqam.ca; and Valérie Bienvenue (Université de Montréal), valerie.bienvenue@umontreal.ca
Si la part de l’animal non humain est considérable au sein du processus artistique, elle est cependant assez peu questionnée. Qu’il s’agisse de sa représentation, de sa présentation (vivant ou taxidermisé) ou encore de la composition même des œuvres (par le biais des colles, pinceaux et pigments), force est de constater que cet « autre » a maintes fois pris part à la création. Pourtant, son impact sur la relation humain/animal en art reste à reconnaître : comment les rapports interespèces sont-ils réfléchis par cette présence non humaine dans les œuvres? Par ailleurs, l’artiste qui « utilise » les animaux peut-il être vecteur de revendication ou de changement dans les façons d’interagir avec eux historiquement et maintenant? Ce panel, souhaitant ouvrir la question de l’animal en art à des angles d’approches des plus variés, invite à la réflexion à partir de n’importe quelles périodes historiques ou contextes culturels et géographiques.
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Environnements artificiels au 19e siècle (Séance du Réseau Art et Architecture du 19e siècle : RAA19)
Chairs: Étienne Morasse-Choquette (Université du Québec à Montréal), morasse-choquette.etienne@courrier.uqam.ca; and Christina Contandriopoulos (Université du Québec à Montréal), contandriopoulos.christina@uqam.ca
Le 19e siècle est marqué par l’instrumentalisation grandissante de la nature. Face à un monde devenu abstrait, l’art du paysage naturalise l’emprise sur le territoire en produisant des images fantasmatiques, sauvages ou primitivistes, alors que l’architecture émule les mécanismes de la nature par des moyens artificiels (jardins d’hiver, atmosphères contrôlées, éclairage artificiel, illusions spatiales). Si certaines tentatives relèvent d’intentions spirituelles ou purement poétiques, d’autres s’inscrivent dans une démarche rationaliste ou instrumentale. Dans tous les cas, l’expérience esthétique et l’imagination sont appelées à jouer un rôle de première importance. Cette séance invite les propositions d’études de cas variées et d’approches théoriques qui nous permettent de réfléchir à l’esthétisation de la nature durant le long 19e siècle. Qu’il s’agisse d’espaces ou d’images, comment les arts participent-ils à la création de « paradis terrestres » ou d’autres environnements artificiels ?
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The Art of Visualizing Others: Early Modern Cultural Encounters
Heather Muckart (Columbia College), muckart@mail.ubc.ca
The early modern period marks a moment of accelerated cultural contact, exchange, and trade. Despite this essential feature of the period, art historical studies that examine such encounters and the ways they were represented, negotiated, and understood though art and visual culture are only recently gaining traction. This session proposes to examine the representations that such encounters generated, as well as any preexisting works that informed such moments of contact. Papers are invited that examine one or more facets of this global network of early modern encounters and their related artworks and objects. Sites of contact can include, but are not limited to: the British Empire (including British America), First Nations, Ming or Qing China, Mughal or Maratha India, Safavid Persia, the Spanish Empire (including Spanish America), or the Venetian Republic. Papers that interrogate or challenge academic notions such as acculturation, appropriation, hybridity, and liminality are particularly encouraged.
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Artifacts and the Digital Archive
Barbara Rauch (OCAD University), brauch@faculty.ocadu.ca
This panel invites papers that address issues within the field of critical digital humanities. We will attend to contradictions and criticism in the field of digital humanities to further address the impact and politics of digital technologies on our diverse practices, i.e. art, design, craft, and media. While we have announced the era of the post-material, the post-digital, and the post-studio, contemporary practitioners find themselves returning to their studio, negotiating materiality, physical and digital that is, as we have declared data as material. Visualizing and/or materializing data, results in products; our objects demand exposure, documenting, and finally, storage. The boundary object, the hyper object, the emotive object all declare specific material research including the tacit knowledges that the maker inserts in the object. In particular, with digital objects and algorithmic work, the code that is embedded in the object is also an object, yet, how do we archive and narrate these distinct materials; we question further, does the digital archive provide for much diversity?
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Open Session: National Network for the Study and Promotion of Latino Canadian Art and Latin American Art in Canada
Chairs: Alena Robin (Western University), arobin82@uwo.ca; and Analays Hernandez (University of Ottawa), analays.alvarez@gmail.com
This open session welcomes proposals that seek to foster and disseminate knowledge in Canada of all aspects of Latino Canadian art and Latin American art, from pre-Columbian and colonial periods to modern and contemporary art. The objective of this session is to bring together collaborators and proposals for the creation of a national network for the study and promotion of Latino Canadian art and Latin American art in Canada. We accept proposals in French and English/Nous acceptons les propositions en français et en anglais.
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Museums and Celebrity Culture: Historical and Critical Perspectives
Chairs: Maria Silina (Université du Québec à Montréal), silina.maria@gmail.com; and Lynda Jessup (Queen’s University), lynda.jessup@queensu.ca
This session is a reflection on museums and the phenomenon of celebrity culture. Museums are institutions that channel celebrity culture as a part of the global creative industry and mass culture. Today, it is evidenced in the boom in blockbuster exhibitions and large-scale collaborations of museums with film and fashion industry. In history, too, exhibitions and artworks on display had already served as an attraction to the enlightened public. Museums are also celebrity institutions in their own right. There is an ongoing mutual interest between museum curators and celebrities from other cultural domains (Wes Anderson in Vienna, Beyoncé and Jay-Z at the Louvre). Finally, this evolution of museums raises new concerns for the strategic management (acquisition, public criticism) of artistic celebrities in museum collections in the time of the #MeToo movement, increasing calls to decolonize cultural institutions, and the vital importance of actively engaging underrepresented artists and communities into museums.
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Locating Textiles in Global Art Histories
Julia Skelly (Independent Scholar), julia.skelly232@gmail.com
In the introduction to Art History in the Wake of the Global Turn (2014), Aruna D’Souza writes that the book is meant to address some of the ways “that a global art history troubles, even explodes, the very concepts on which the discipline is based by forcing us to see differently, to recognize the unrecognizable, to authorize the formerly unacknowledged” (xxi). D’Souza’s words strike me as particularly resonant for the study of textiles. This session will highlight new scholarship on ‘global’ textiles, with ‘global’ signifying any location in the world not typically identified as an ‘art centre’. The objective of the session will be to demonstrate anew how we as art historians can ‘explode’ the very discipline of art history by rigorously studying textiles as well as makers from a range of global contexts. Papers may discuss textiles produced during any time period.
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