Exhibition – Art in Focus: Gazes Returned, The Technical Examination of Early English Panel Painting

Yale Center for British Art – until Sunday, December 9, 2012

Art in Focus is an academic initiative for members of the Center’s Student Guide Program through which students are introduced to every aspect of exhibition practice. Students intensify their engagement with the Center’s collections, strengthen their research skills, and test writing in new formats. Student curators select objects for exhibition, write text panels and object labels, and make decisions about installation.

The sixth exhibition in this initiative, Art in Focus: Gazes Returned, explores Tudor painting technique and examines the condition of key paintings in the Center’s collection. Works in the collection were examined using a variety of analytical techniques employed in modern conservation practice, such as x-radiography and infrared reflectography, x-ray fluorescence, and polarizing light

Exhibition – Sarah Lucas: Ordinary Things

Henry Moore Institute: 19th July – 21st October 2012

Ordinary Things takes Sarah Lucas’ (b. 1962) recent series of sculptures ‘NUDS’ (2009-) as a starting point, looking forward and backward across an artistic practice that has engaged with the possibilities of sculpture for over two decades.

Many exhibitions of Lucas’ work have focused on her as a central player within British art in the 1990s. Ordinary Things offers a counter position: this exhibition of thirty sculptures turns to the sculptural rather that the sensational, positioning Lucas’ work within an art historical lineage that addresses the materials and processes of sculpture. From ‘Big Fat Anarchic Spider’ (1993) to ‘NUDS’ (2009-2010), to ‘Unknown Soldier’ (2003) and ‘Jubilee’ (2012), via ‘Suffolk Bunny’ (1997-2004), ‘Au Naturel’ (1994) and ‘Penetralia’ (2008),Ordinary Things identifies Lucas’ consistent questioning of the definition of sculpture. Lucas works with the ‘ordinary things’ that form our surroundings and assumptions.

Display – Dead Standing Things: still life 1660–1740

On now at Tate Britain

A familiar genre today, still life painting became established in Britain in the late seventeenth century. Writing in the 1650s, the author William Sanderson referred to such paintings as ‘dead-standing-things’, the term ‘still life’ (from the Dutch ‘stilleven’) only appearing in the following decades. Characterised as the detailed depiction of inanimate objects, the genre had been established in the Netherlands early in the seventeenth century and its introduction into Britain was through the work and influence of Dutch incomer artists. Pieter van Roestraten arrived in London from Amsterdam in the mid-1660s and became known for his ‘portraits’ of objects, particularly silver; another Dutchman known by the anglicised name of Edward Collier was active in London from the 1690s. 

Coming soon: Picasso and Modern British Art

Tate Britain, 15 February  –  15 July 2012

Picasso remains the twentieth century’s single most important artistic figure, a towering genius who changed the face of modern art. In a major new exhibition at Tate Britain, Picasso and Modern British Art explores his extensive legacy and influence on British art, how this played a role in the acceptance of modern art in Britain, alongside the fascinating story of Picasso’s lifelong connections to and affection for this country. It brings together over 150 spectacular artworks, with over 60 stunning Picassos including sublime paintings from the most remarkable moments in his career, such asWeeping Woman 1937 and The Three Dancers 1925. It offers the rare opportunity to see these celebrated artworks alongside seven of Picasso’s most brilliant British admirers, exploring the huge impact he had on their art: Duncan Grant, Wyndham Lewis, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, Graham Sutherland and David Hockney.

Funding Opportunities: The British School at Rome

Funding Opportunities with the British School at Rome, various deadlines in January and February 2012

There are several funding opportunities available to art history researchers working in the field of Italian art from pre-history to the modern period, covering art and architecture, and at levels ranging from pre-doctoral to senior scholars.The full details of the scholarships are available on The British School at Rome‘s website, but we have outlined the main grants for early career researchers below.

Call for Papers – Conflicting Art Histories: Cosmopolitanism and Nationalism in Eighteenth-Century British Culture

AAH 2012 Session: William Hogarth’s traditional position as the stalwart of English nationalism in the arts was drastically re-evaluated in 2007 with the publication of Robin Simon’s Hogarth, France & British Art. Published to coincide with the Tate’s major Hogarth exhibition of 2007, Simon’s text situates Hogarth, a renowned anglophile, within a firmly European context of artistic theory and practice. How does the idea that Hogarth gleefully propagated his anti-Gallic public image, but was in fact greatly indebted to French art and theory, affect our understanding of apparently critical eighteenth-century works of art such as his Marriage-à-la- Mode (c. 1743)?

Luminous Paper: British Watercolors and Drawings

Watercolor is one of the most challenging artistic techniques—capable of extraordinary luminosity but often resistant to control. Luminous Paper: British Watercolors and Drawings presents more than 25 works of the 1700s and 1800s by some of the greatest masters of the medium, many on view for the first time.

Exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, Los Angeles, 19 July — 23 October 2011

Watercolor is one of the most challenging artistic techniques—capable of extraordinary luminosity but often resistant to control. Luminous Paper: British Watercolors and Drawings presents more than 25 works of the 1700s and 1800s by some of the greatest masters of the medium, many on view for the first time. Featuring the work of some of the most famous British artists, including J.M.W. Turner, William Blake, and Samuel Palmer, this exhibition reveals their multifaceted innovations in the field of drawing and watercolor painting. From Turner’s use of his thumbprint to roughen the texture of wash in a whirling seascape, to the reflected and re-reflected light built in layers by John Sell Cotman, the medium of watercolor was transformed beyond recognition. Other artists experimented with novel subject matter or new modes of representation, playing important roles in the development of European drawing and watercolor painting.

Call for Papers: Europe’s Academies at AAH Conference

Association of Art Historians 38th Annual Conference, The Open University, Milton Keynes, 29-31 March 2012

Proposals due by 7 November 2011

The 2012 AAH Annual Conference will showcase the diversity and richness of art history in the UK and globally over an extensive chronological range. Like The Open University itself, AAH2012 is open to all people, places and ideas. This three-day event will profice a broad scope of geographies and methodologies, ranging from object-based studies, socio-historical analyses, theoretical discourses, visual culture of the moving image, exhibition cultures and display. Sessions and papers will reflect the composition of the wide consituency that is art history today. Keynote events and special interest sessions/workshops will celebrate the strengths and respond to the challenges that face art history now, whilst the book fair, receptions, and visits will provide opportunities for delegates to relax and network.