Mortarboard tossing

If you’re in the midst of your studies, graduation can seem a long hard way off. So take a look at these happy faces and take inspiration! We had BA and Cert HE students graduating last week in a celebratory and moving ceremony at Senate House – warm congrats to all of them. The monumental stairs in the foyer were the perfect setting for some impressive mortarboard tossing.

 

 

A great way of staying in touch with Birkbeck post-graduation (but also during your studies) and satisfying your need for art history is to join the London Art History Society, which is afffiliated with the department and organises a rich programme of lectures, courses and visits. They also have a snazzy new website.

The first of our major events in the Opening Up Art History: 50 Years at Birkbeck anniversary programme is coming up on Thursday 30 November 6pm in the Clore Lecture Theatre. There are still a few places for what promises to be a fascinating lecture by Gabriele Finaldi, Director of the National Gallery, on How to form a national collection. The Prado Museum and the National Gallery, London. Book here! Come along to the fun reception afterwards too – all warmly welcome.

You can also now book for the second of our big anniversary lectures, by Tristram Hunt, Director of the V&A, who will be giving us insights into where the V&A is headed in the future.

Our own Suzannah Biernoff has been in Houston, Texas, where she was an invited speaker at Rice University Art History department’s inaugural interdisciplinary graduate conference, Vital Constitutions: The Appearance of ‘Health’ in History. The conference explored representations and realities of health, illness, care and condemnation and included presentations by artists and emerging scholars in art history, anthropology, architecture and performance studies.

You can hear Suzannah talking about her research on Radio 4’s World War One: The Cultural Front, available on BBC iPlayer. The series examines artistic responses to the war year by year. In 1917 sculptor Francis Derwent Wood set up a studio for portrait masks in Wandsworth after witnessing the profound psychological impact on patients with facial injuries. Wood and his team at the 3rd London General Hospital sculpted masks that would make the patient look as close as possible to how he had been before he was wounded. A century later, we’re left puzzling about what these masks really are: a well intentioned but flawed medical tool, or a kind of anti-portraiture that shows the realities of war in a way that still feels visceral even today.

It’s a big year for new books by Birkbeck art historians. Kate Retford (whom you’ll remember as former head of department and blogger) launched her new book published by Yale University Press and the Paul Mellon Centre for the Study of British Art, The Conversation Piece: Making Modern Art in Eighteenth-Century Britain, in the atmospheric spaces of the Art Workers Guild. It was a sparkling evening and a celebration of an amazing achievement.

I’m off now to moderate a seminar at the Paul Mellon Centre entitled ‘Policy into Practice: Implementing Fair Dealing for image copyright at British Art Studies’. There are still places if you decide at the last minute you’d like to come along. It’s part of a series of events at Birkbeck on Fair Dealing and the uses of images in academic research. The final event, the Fair Dealing Conference, takes place this Friday 25th, 10-6, and features our own Steve Edwards as well as experts in copyright law, moving images, and artists’ rights. Meaty and important stuff, both practically and conceptually.

 

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Reading week – but are you getting any reading done?

I hope you’re having a restful and reflective reading week. The trick is always finding the time to read, amid all the catching up with life.

I’ll kick off this post with a report from colleague Patrizia Di Bello on a fascinating-sounding talk she’s giving in Rome later this month:

In November, Patrizia Di Bello is giving a keynote lecture titled ‘L’album fotografico: guardare, toccare, raccontare’ (her title in English was ‘The Photographs Album: Histories of Looking and Touching’, but she realised it sounded too much like an Elena Ferrante story, especially when translated in Italian!), at the International conference L’Album Fotografico: Oggetto e Narrazione, Rome, 23-24 November 2017. This is organised by the Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione, which is the organization in the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali (Ministry for Heritage and Cultural Activities) that manages the catalogue of Italian cultural heritage or assets (in Italian, the more familial but also patriarchal ‘patrimonio’) – archaeological, architectonic, historical, artistic and ethno-anthropological. They have a vast collection of photographs, including albums, and one of their activities is researching and conceptualising the processes of archiving, cataloguing, and exhibiting such materials. Photographs albums, often very mixed and heterogeneous objects, can be hard to handle systematically. In the past, they were often split to turn them into single items, easier to catalogue, store and exhibit. Recent scholarship, including Patrizia’s book, Women’s Albums and Photography in Victorian England (Routledge, 2007), has questioned this practice by arguing for the importance of the narratives embedded in the materiality of albums.

Meanwhile, here at Birkbeck, we celebrated the publication of Professor Lynda Nead’s new book, The Tiger in the Smoke: Art and Culture in Postwar Britain, published by Yale University Press in association with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, with a buzzing party in the Keynes library. You can hear Lynn talking about her book on a recent edition of the Radio 3 programme Free Thinking.

 

And as always there are lots of events coming up for you to attend. The next Murray Seminar is given by our own Zoe Opacic on Monday 13 November at 5pm in the Keynes Library. Her topic is ‘From Sacroscape to Cityscape: Images of Central European Towns in Late Medieval Sources’.

Next time you read an article or book for one of your classes, take a look at the way the images are labelled and especially for the part of the caption which reads ‘reproduced with kind permission of’ or similar. Those image credits, as they’re called, are the result of often protracted negotiation with rights holders (museums, archives, libraries, artists’ estates, etc.) and significant expenditure – all of which is almost always done by the author, not the publisher. This has always been a difficult aspect of publishing our research as art historians, and it’s only getting more difficult as so much academic publishing goes online. A couple of excellent events organised by Birkbeck turn the spotlight on this problem:

Art History and Fair Dealing, 22 November 2017, 3-4.30, at the Paul Mellon Centre for the Study of British Art, 16 Bedford Square

and

Fair Dealing Conference, 24 November 2017, 10-6, Birkbeck Cinema

Both are free, but you need to book.

A few more places have been made available for the upcoming Murray Lecture, given by Dr Gabriele Finaldi, director of the National Gallery, on ‘How to form a national collection. The Prado Museum and the National Gallery, London’, 30 November 6pm in the Clore lecture theatre. Grab your place before they run out!

And speaking of grabbing opportunities before they run out…a message from the Art Fund.

Enjoy a year of endless inspiration at world-class museums across the UK with a Student Art Pass.

From the V&A and Tate Modern to Kensington Palace and Jupiter Artland, you’ll get free access to over 240 museums, galleries and historic houses, and 50% off major exhibitions. Plus, grab tasty treats or mementos at a bargain price with loads of café and shop discounts too.

A limited number are available for £5 until 10 December. Get yours before they go:

https://www.artfund.org/student

 

 

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