Exhibition | William Blake: Visionary
Opening this fall at The Getty:
William Blake: Visionary
Getty Center, Los Angeles, 7 October 2023 — 14 January 2024
A remarkable printmaker, painter, and poet, William Blake (1757–1827) developed a wildly unconventional world view, representing universal forces of creation and destruction—physical, psychological, historical—through his own cast of characters. By combining his poetry and images on the page through radical graphic techniques, Blake created some of the most striking and enduring imagery in British art. This major international loan exhibition explores the artist-poet’s imaginative world through his most celebrated works.
Organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum in cooperation with Tate.
Edina Adam and Julian Brooks, with an essay by Matthew Hargraves, William Blake: Visionary (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2020), 168 pages, ISBN: 978-1606066423, $35.
Celebrated for his boundless imagination and unique vision, William Blake (1757–1827) created some of the most striking and distinctive imagery in art, often combining his poetry and visual images on the page through innovative graphic techniques. He has proven an enduring inspiration to artists, musicians, poets, and performers worldwide and a fascinating enigma to generations of admirers. Featuring over 130 color images, this catalogue brings together many of Blake’s most iconic works. Organized by theme, it explores Blake’s work as a professional printmaker, his roles as both painter-illustrator and poet-painter, his relationship to the medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque artists that preceded him, and his legacy in the United States. It also examines his visionary prophetic books, including all eighteen plates of America a Prophecy.
A specialist in works on paper, Edina Adam is assistant curator of drawings at the J. Paul Getty Museum. Julian Brooks is senior curator and head of the Department of Drawings at the J. Paul Getty Museum and is the author of many books, most recently The Lure of Italy: Artists’ Views (Getty Publications, 2017) and Andrea del Sarto: The Renaissance Workshop in Action (Getty Publications, 2015). Now the director of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Matthew Hargraves was previously chief curator of art collections and head of collection information and access at the Yale Center for British Art.
Conference | Rethinking British and European Romanticisms, Part II
From ArtHist.net and the University of York:
Rethinking British and European Romanticisms in Transnational Dimensions, Part II
University of York, King’s Manor, 19–21 September 2023
Organized by Elisabeth Ansel, Johannes Grave, Richard Johns, Christin Neubauer, and Elizabeth Prettejohn
The event is the second part of a cooperative two-part workshop between the History of Art Departments of the University of York and the Friedrich Schiller University Jena. Considering the institution’s main research areas, the event aims to discuss the different concepts of Europe present in the art and culture of Romanticism.
In recent years, national tendencies have challenged the European idea, exemplified by the wake of Brexit and its aftermath. In this context, the question arises to what extent European and national identity concepts can be reconciled. Today’s debate between Britain and Europe still roots in the divergent notions of national identity that manifested in several European countries in the 1800s.
Therefore, the workshop addresses the relationship between visual images and constructions of nationality and questions how European Romanticism can be understood. In contrast to literary studies, investigating transnational transfer processes of Romantic movements has been a desideratum in art historical research. Considering transcultural methods, the participants will reflect national patterns of thought and Romantic identities not as fixed but as processual and hybrid phenomena within the framework of the binational exchange. Based on individual case studies, the event aims to reevaluate the complex interplay of alterity and reciprocity of the relations between cultural spaces.
Funded by University of York and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation)
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9.45 Welcome and Introduction — Richard Johns
10.15 Morning Papers
• Marte Stinis (York) — ‘Sound Resounded from All the Treetops’: The Musical Landscape
• Sammi Lukic-Scott (York) — The Language of the Copy
• David Grube-Palzer (Jena) — Copy and Self-Repetition in the Age of Genius: Using the Example of Caspar David Friedrich
13.00 Lunch
14.30 Afternoon Papers
• Christin Neubauer (Jena) — Debts to German Romanticism in Joseph Noel Paton’s Luther: Dawn at Erfurt (1861)
• Miguel Angel Gaete Cáceres (York) — Johann Moritz Rugendas’ Picturesque Slavery: Denounce or Morbid Sublime Pleasure?
17.00 Evening Presentation
• Elizabeth Prettejohn (York) — Romanticism and Renaissance: Ideas for an Exhibition
18.30 Reception at King’s Manor
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10.00 Greeting
10.15 Morning Papers
• Richard Johns (York) — Further Thoughts on the Artist’s Bequest as a Romantic Phenomenon
• Elisabeth Ansel (Jena) — Heroic Femininity and the ‘Joy of Grief’ in Elizabeth Harvey’s Malvina Lamenting the Death of Oscar (1806)
• Mira Claire Zadrozny (Jena) — Emergent Pictoriality: Images of Ruins in 19th-Century France
13.00 Lunch
14.30 Afternoon Papers
• Helena Cox (York) — The Mánes Family: Bohemian Romanticism and (Inter)National Belonging
• Kayleigh Williams (York) — ‘Her Eyes Were Wild’: Transmediation of Gender and Gaze in Rossetti’s La Belle Dame Sans Merci
16.45 York Museum Garden
18.00 Evening Presentation
• Johannes Grave (Jena) — Duality and Temporality: Evocations of the Sublime in Romantic Paintings
20.00 Dinner at House of Trembling Madness
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9.15 Greeting
9.30 Morning Papers
• Johannes Rössler (Jena) — An Imagined Journey? Caspar David Friedrich and Switzerland
• Wanda Sue Warning (Jena) — Romanticising Youth: Sir Henry Raeburn’s Boy and Rabbit (1814) and the Portraiture of Anonymous Children
• Justus Hierlmeier (Jena) — Ligne et couleur in Théophile Thoré’s Des envois de Rome
12.15 Concluding Discussion
14.30 Afternoon Field Trip
• York Art Gallery
• Stroll through York
20.00 Dinner at Côte Brasserie
Enfilade 
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