Calling Open House London volunteers…

The end of the summer term is on the horizon, and we’re eagerly anticipating the two key events that mark the end of the academic year: the BA exam board, and the Department summer party. I hope you’ve all seen the invitation to come and join staff and students in the Keynes library on Friday 7 July, 6-8 pm, to raise a glass to another very successful year in History of Art! It’s a great opportunity to celebrate everyone’s hard work, and particularly to congratulate undergraduate finalists who have come to the end of their BA degrees. Congratulate, but not necessarily ‘say goodbye to’, as I know from our admissions system that we will happily be welcoming a number of you back to Birkbeck in the Autumn, as you progress to Masters level work with us! I hope as many staff and students as possible can come along to the party – please do bring along a bottle, or some nibbles to share, and join in the fun.

Events are now starting to draw to a close. The final Murray seminar of the year takes place this coming Wednesday, 28 June, at 5pm in the Keynes. Robert Maniura will be speaking about Jaume Huguet, decoration and innovation in fifteenth-century Iberian art. This research is part of Robert’s broader project to explore art of this period which is so often neglected, due to art historians’ dominant concern with the Italian and Netherlandish schools. In his paper, he will be considering and restoring welcome attention to the output of Huguet, whose elaborate and heavily gilded works conspicuously depart from these familiar traditions. Huguet was the most prominent painter in Barcelona in the later fifteenth century, but he is now seldom explored.

Another busy year for the Architecture, Space and Society Centre, meanwhile, comes to a close next Wednesday, 5 July, with a symposium entitled Modernism and the Museum Space in Germany (6pm, Gordon Square Cinema). This event will explore the ways in which the advanced architecture of the early twentieth century in Germany confronted the space of the museum, and was itself curated and presented for display. Come and hear Max Sternberg from Cambridge speaking about the Schnütgen Museum in Cologne, 1910-1932, and Jeremy Aynsley, from the University of Brighton, on the topic of Curating Bauhaus Houses, 1923-2019. Robin Schuldenfrei from the Courtauld will be present as respondent. Places are free, but do need to be reserved. 

I hope you’ve all seen the call for volunteers for the next Open House London which went round recently? A number of you have been involved in this fantastic event in the past, when the School of Arts building has previously been opened up to members of the public. Last year, during Open House London 2016, the Derek Jarman Lab made this film, which includes lots of footage of those members of staff and students who got involved, as well as being packed with information about our building and its history. Open House London 2017 falls on the weekend of Saturday 16 and Sunday 17 September, and the School of Arts will be open for both those days. As ever, the success of the opening relies on our wonderful volunteers – those students and former students who are prepared either to act as wardens, or as guides to those coming to see both those rooms rich with historic Bloomsbury Group associations, and the award-winning spaces around the cinema, designed by Surface Architects from 2008. Volunteers need to be available for a training event on the evening of Monday 11 September, and then for one morning or afternoon of the Open House London weekend itself. It’s a lot of fun – and it’s great for the CV! Do email  Eva Höög at eva.hoog@btconnect.com with your name and programme of study if you’re interested in taking part.

Over the course of this year, I have kept you up to date with our Careers and Employability programme for History of Art students. It’s been a great success, from the valuable training sessions provided by my colleagues in the Careers and Employability team, on topics ranging from ‘CVs for Arts’ to ‘The Value of Internships’, to our three masterclasses, generously hosted by Sonia Solicari, Alice Payne and Jacqueline Riding. The final part of the programme, which has taken place this summer term, has been a series of work shadowing opportunities. Andy Stirrups, in the Alumni office, worked hard to organise a total of seven placements for us, with impressively placed alumni, now working in institutions ranging from the Whitford Fine Art gallery to the V&A. Applications were invited from students, and those successful were provided with a training session ahead of the day of workshadowing itself, for which we were able to pay a London Living Wage allowance thanks to the support of the Alumni Fund. I’m now starting to receive feedback from those seven lucky students – and picked up a message at the end of last week from Tatiana Nenilina, who’s just completed the BA History of Art programme. We matched Tatiana with Dr. Katy Barrett, Curator of pre-1800 Art at Royal Museums Greenwich, and an alumna of our Graduate Certificate in History of Art. Katy achieved a distinction on that programme in 2010, before moving to Cambridge for a PhD looking at the cultural history of the longitude problem in the eighteenth century through the work of William Hogarth. She was then appointed to her current role at the National Maritime Museum. We’re very grateful to Katy, as well as to the other alumni who so kindly offered work shadowing placements, for the time and effort they have put into giving our current students these valuable opportunities.

Tatiana Nenilina on work shadowing at the National Maritime Museum

“A Job Shadowing Programme offers the unique opportunity to gain an insight into the working world of an institution. In my case, it was the National Maritime Museum and its Curatorial Department.

I had a fantastic day with Katy Barrett, who is a Curator of Art at Royal Museums Greenwich. She perfectly organised the day, starting with a short introduction about the museum, its programmes and new projects, one of which was the Travellers’ Tails pop-up museum at Lewisham Shopping Centre.

lewisham-pop-up

Later, Katy, knowing my interest in provenance research and my background in law, organised a meeting with a member of the Registration Department, where I could ask questions about due diligence, provenance research and ethical issues, loans of objects and legal regulations regarding their movement, insurance and display.

The Job Shadowing Programme has broadened my vision of working in a museum. It has offered the chance to ask questions about career paths in the art sector, from what stage to start and how to progress, through to what resources will be useful in advancing my knowledge and career.”

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Research in History of Art, and Teaching-Led Research…

The exam period has now run its course, and it’s almost possible to hear the sighs of relief from undergraduates echoing up and down the corridors of the School of Arts building! I hope that everyone got on well, and is now having some well earned rest. If you do now have a little more time on your hands than you had previously, then you might like to take advantage of a couple of free Curator’s Tours of the current Peltz Gallery exhibition, Mr A Moves in Mysterious Ways, being run on Wednesday 14 June, at 1pm and 2pm, as part of London Creativity and Wellbeing Week. If you haven’t yet had a chance to drop into the gallery and have a look around the display, then please do so – it’s a very powerful exhibition of objects made by residents of a British psychiatric hospital between 1946 and 1981, under the guidance of art-therapy pioneer Edward Adamson.

Academic staff are, of course, busy with all those exam scripts, but research activities continue apace. Some of you will remember me writing last summer about the wonderful news that Professor Fiona Candlin has been awarded around £1 million by the Arts and Humanities Research Council for a project to map and analyse the UK independent museums sector, from 1960 through to 2020. This is a monumental undertaking, taking place across four years. Records of the around 1600 independent museums currently operating in the UK, and those that have opened and closed since 1960, are very patchy, and this project is going both to document and analyse the emergence, purpose, development and closure of these institutions. The project blog is now up and running, so do have a look at Fiona’s first postings, and subscribe here.

Meanwhile, I am delighted to announce the publication of Dr. Suzannah Biernoff’s new book, Portraits of Violence: War and the Aesthetics of Disfigurement, by University of Michigan Press. Many of you will know of Suzannah’s research in this area, whether through the seminar and conference papers she has given over the last few years, or through the material she has incorporated into her teaching. Two of her presentations which I remember particularly vividly concerned material to be found in a chapter of the book on Henry Tonks’s drawings of WWI facial casualties, comparing them to medical photographs in the Gillies archives, and one dealing with the extraordinary appearance of the image of one of Tonks’s patients in BioShock, a major computer game. These are two case studies in her powerful study of the image and idea of facial disfigurement, as a symbol and consequence of war. It’s an important contribution to disability studies, art history and visual studies, and literature on the first World War. And it’s already elicited this kind of critical response, from the very eminent Sander Gilman: ‘A powerful and engaging study of the politics of representation of facial disfigurement in medical and mass culture, Portraits of Violence is a substantial addition to the study of visual culture and disability.’ Congratulations Suzannah!

I’m going to end this blog with another welcome piece from Dr. Laura Jacobus, who has a major article coming out this month in the journal Art Bulletin (100, June 2017). Here she explains how her teaching at Birkbeck has fed into the work showcased in this forthcoming publication: ‘”Propria figura”: The Advent of Facsimile Portraiture in Italian Art’.

Laura Jacobus on ‘teaching-led research’

“I’ve written a couple of times for this blog on the subject of ‘research-led teaching’, a concept which is fundamental to Birkbeck’s work, though the many ways we put it into practice are not always obvious. This time, I thought I’d write about ‘teaching-led research’, which seldom gets talked about, but which is also fundamental to our work as scholars.

In the June edition of the journal, Art Bulletin, I’ll be arguing that a statue of the businessman Enrico Scrovegni, made around 700 years ago, is the earliest known accurate image of any human being. But how did I reach this conclusion? It’s a long story, but it began when I was teaching a class of second-year BA students and I showed them a slide of Arnolfo di Cambio’s Portrait of Pope Boniface VIII.

bust-of-boniface-cropped

Enrico Scrovegni was one of the wealthiest men of his era, and a colourful character – a bit of a scoundrel, who personally knew Giotto and (probably) Dante, two of the greatest painters and poets of all time. He owned the breathtakingly beautiful Arena Chapel in Padua, where his true portrait can still be seen. I reached this conclusion by digitally comparing two sculptures of Enrico at different times of his life, helped by my colleagues Liz Drew and Nick Lambert. I found that, although the sculptures of him as a young man and a very old one looked quite different, their underlying bone structures were identical.

arena-chapel-073-copyenricos-face-det-low-res

This is something that no artist could have achieved by simply observing their subject at a sitting. In fact, until the invention of photography in the nineteenth century, most ‘true’ portraits were just approximations of the sitters’ appearances. For Enrico’s accurate portrayal the sculptors would have had to constantly take very precise measurements of Enrico’s face using three dimensional instruments. It wouldn’t have been feasible to do this with their sitter ‘in the flesh’, so the only way round the problem would have been to make a plaster cast of his face. A contemporary description of the process tells us that Enrico would have had to lie on his back with breathing tubes up his nostrils while the cast was being made. The artist would have tried to keep the customer happy by mixing the smelly plaster with rose-water, and greasing his eyebrows so that they didn’t hurt when the cast came off. The results were worth it.

If I’m right about this, we now know, for the first time, what a medieval individual actually looked like. An encounter with the portrait of Enrico Scrovegni has the compelling power to bring us face-to-face with someone who lived seven hundred years ago, but is recognisably real even today. It’s a discovery which has come too late for me to teach to those students who first made me see the problem – they graduated a few years ago now. But my students still have the capacity to make me see things afresh, and I thank all of you for all the opportunities for teaching-led research that you send my way.”

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