Tag Archives: art

The Visual and the Verbal’, a skills-based training event for postgraduate students using material held at the Ruskin Library, Lancaster University on Wednesday 20th May.

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The Visual and the Verbal’, a skills-based training event for postgraduate students using material held at the Ruskin Library, Lancaster University on Wednesday 20th May.

http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/english/events/visual-verbal.htm

The Ruskin Library holds the largest collection of material relating to the life and work of John Ruskin (1819-1900), one of the most important cultural figures of his era in the English-speaking world. Among the most important manuscripts in the collection are 29 diary notebooks, covering the period 1835 to 1888, and c. 4000 manuscript letters. Also in the Library are over 1000 drawings by Ruskin, with others by his associates and pupils, and 125 plates from his collection of daguerreotypes, one of the most important collections of early photographs in the world dating from 1845-1858. The strength of the archive lies in its breadth and depth, enabling research in a number of disciplines, and it will be used at our event to teach the research skills required for work with both manuscript and visual materials. Students working in English, History, Museum Studies, Visual Arts, Art History are welcome to apply for this event.

The event will feature a combination of teaching methods, including intensive, practical hands-on sessions with Ruskin’s manuscripts. The event is being supported by the North West Doctoral Training Consortium. There are limited spaces but the training is open to both AHRC and non-AHRC funded students in the North West. Those nearing the end of their PhDs will be given preference (see below for details on how to apply). The students participating will be asked to prepare a five-minute presentation on their work in advance and to do some advanced reading.

10-11am: introductory seminar discussing what it means to do interdisciplinary research.

11am-12.30pm: students will give their presentations focusing on the ways in which their work is interdisciplinary and on their use of manuscript and/or visual sources. The postgraduate presentations will be filmed and made available on our website.

12.30pm-lunch: students will walk round the current Ruskin Library exhibition (Returned Triumphant: Loans to the Ottawa and Edinburgh exhibition ‘John Ruskin: Artist and Observer’).

2-3.30pm: there will be a hands-on session, where students will work with the full range of archive holdings held in the Ruskin Library, including Ruskin’s manuscript diaries, letters and notes to drawings, watercolours, engravings and photographs. We will teach skills of manuscript handling, palaeography, cataloguing, and discuss issues of transcription and editing.

4-5pm: there will be a workshop on approaches to the visual and verbal; this will focus on the nineteenth-century ‘ut pictura poesis’ debate (‘as in painting so in poetry’) and consider how we can attempt to approach the relationship between meaning in visual and verbal forms by means of analogy; semiotics or the concept of the ‘imagetext’.

5-6pm: there will be a practical session on the use of the notebook and forms of notation as research tools in the museum and archive. The workshop will offer guidance and examples of good practice of how to purposefully apply visual scrutiny, and students will draw from material held in the Ruskin collection.

The teaching team, all from Lancaster University, will include: Professor Sally Bushell (English and Creative Writing), Dr Gerald Davies (Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Art), Dr Andrew Lacey (Senior Research Associate, Davy Letters Project), Professor Sharon Ruston (English and Creative Writing), Dr Andrew Tate (English and Creative Writing), Professor Stephen Wildman (Professor of the History of Art and Director of the Ruskin Library and Research Centre; also former Curator of Fine Art at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery).

To apply: students need to submit a 500-word abstract of their current research, stating why this event will be of use to them. Please also submit an estimate of travel costs to Lancaster for this event with your application. Applications should be submitted by Friday 10th April. Applications and enquiries should be addressed to Prof Sharon Ruston, s.ruston@lancaster.ac.uk

CFP: The Romantic Eye (Yale, 17-18 April 2015)

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Please see below for a Call for Papers for an exciting-sounding symposium on the Romantic Eye at Yale this April.  The organisers are particularly keen to secure contributions from early career scholars (including people working on their doctorates).  Flights and accommodation will be provided for those invited to speak, so if you’re working on a topic in this area, this could be a really great opportunity.

(Taken from the BARS blog)

— — — — —

The Romantic Eye, 1760–1860 and Beyond
April 17, 2015-April 18, 2015
Yale University
Yale-Conference-300x222

This symposium examines Romanticism as a shape-shifting cultural phenomenon that resists easy categorization. Focusing on the period from 1760 to 1860, the symposium embraces the amorphousness that has been ascribed to Romanticism historically by eschewing any limiting definition of it, seeking instead to explore the broad range of art and visual culture characterized as “Romantic” during this hundred-year span. We are interested in what the Romantic “eye” pursued and perceived, and how it set itself the task of recording those perceptions. In addition to interrogations of the relationship between the visual arts and Romanticism, we welcome papers on writers, composers, scientists, and philosophers whose projects engaged the visual. Papers also are sought for a special panel that will address the legacies of Romanticism in contemporary art.

This symposium coincides with a major collaborative exhibition organized by the Yale Center for British Art and the Yale University Art Gallery, The Critique of Reason: Romantic Art, 1760–1860, which opens March 6, 2015. The exhibition comprises more than three hundred paintings, sculptures, medals, watercolors, drawings, prints, and photographs by such iconic artists as William Blake, John Constable, Honoré Daumier, David d’Angers, Eugène Delacroix, Henry Fuseli, Théodore Géricault, Francisco de Goya, John Martin, and J. M. W. Turner. Talks that respond explicitly to works in the collections of the Yale Center for British Art or the Yale University Art Gallery are particularly encouraged, as are cross-disciplinary and comparative studies.

We are seeking presentations of thirty minutes in length. Graduate students and early career scholars are particularly encouraged to apply. Travel and accommodation costs will be covered by the organizers. Please e-mail abstracts of no more than three hundred words and a short CV or bio (no more than two pages) by February 2, 2015, to romanticism2015@gmail.com.

The symposium is cosponsored by the Department of the History of Art at Yale University, the Yale Center for British Art, the Yale University Art Gallery, and the Yale Student Colloquia Fund.

Third RIN Symposium ‘The Literary Galleries’: REGISTRATION OPEN

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Romantic Illustration Network Symposium
‘The Literary Galleries: Entrepreneurship and Public Art’
Supported by the University of Roehampton, the Bibliographical Society, and Tate Britain

We are  pleased to announce that the third RIN symposium is now OPEN for REGISTRATION.

Friday 27th February 2015, 10am – 5pm
Board Room and Duffield Room, Tate Britain,
Millbank, London SW1P 4RG

This symposium brings together the authors of the key scholarship on the literary galleries of the Romantic period: Fred Burwick (The Boydell Shakespeare Gallery, 1996), Rosie Dias (Exhibiting Englishness, 2013), Ian Haywood (Romantic Caricature, 2013), Luisa Cale (‘Blake and the Literary Galleries’, 2008; Fuseli’s Milton Gallery 2006) and Martin Myrone (Gothic Nightmares, 2006; John Martin: Apocalypse, 2011) in a venue that is itself a form of literary gallery (Tate Britain) to present new research and to debate the relationship of painting to illustration, text, and print.  To what extent did the literary galleries change the role of illustration in the Romantic period?

Registration:

Places are FREE but limited to 15 in total, excluding speakers and organisers. This is due to restricted access to the Print Room. To secure your place, please email Mary.Shannon@roehampton.ac.uk, providing your name, status/job title, and institution (for name badges). Places will be awarded on a first-come, first-served basis and you will receive email notification. However, there will also be a waiting list. If you are unable to take up your place, please NOTIFY US BY EMAIL IN GOOD TIME so that someone else on the list may be offered your place.

We are able to offer 2 postgraduate ‘Bibliographical Society Studentships’ of £60 each to assist with the cost of attending at the symposium. Postgraduate students who live outside London are eligible. To apply, please send a CV and a statement (200 words) to Mary.Shannon@roehampton.ac.uk by Friday 6th February explaining your current research and its relevance to the interests of the Romantic Illustration Network as well as to the aims of the Bibliographical Society. Successful applicants will be notified by Tuesday 10th February.

Subject to permissions, we are hoping to record proceedings for the benefit of those unable to attend.

Programme:
10.00 Registration: meet at Staff Entrance (see map) to transfer to Board Room
10.15
Rosie Dias (Warwick), ‘Viewers, Patrons, Readers, Consumers? John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery and its Public’
Ian Haywood (Roehampton), ‘Macklin’s Poets Gallery and the age of Terror’
11.45 tea and coffee
12.15 Luisa Calè (Birkbeck), ‘The Hours’
1-2 Lunch (attendees to make own arrangements)
2.00 Frederick Burwick (UCLA), ‘Painting and Performance: Tableaux Vivants on the London Stage’
3pm Tours of Print Room and Galleries, led by Tate facilitators
4.00 Martin Myrone (Tate), ‘Blake and the Limits of Illustration’
4.45 Open Discussion
5pm Close. Please join us for a drink nearby.

For a full programme and a map of the venue, visit https://romanticillustrationnetwork.wordpress.com/events/

CFP: Print Culture and the Arts

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‘Print Culture and the Arts’
SHARP @ SAMLA
Durham, North Carolina
13-15 November 2015

Papers are invited for the SHARP affiliate session at the 2015 South
Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA) Convention. Potential
topics include print culture, history of the book, authorship,
publishing history, ephemera, illustration, publishers’ archives,
circulation, and reception. Papers addressing this year’s theme, “In
Concert: Literature and the Other Arts” are especially welcome. What
connections can be made between print culture/book history and the
areas of visual art, theatre, and music? How has the relationship
between print culture and the arts evolved from the manuscript age to
the digital world of the 21st century?

The 87th annual SAMLA Convention will be held November 13-15, 2015, at
the Sheraton Imperial Hotel & Convention Center, located in Durham,
North Carolina. Proposers need not be members of SHARP to submit, but
panelists must be members of both SHARP and SAMLA in order to present.
By June 1, 2015, please email a 350-word abstract and short biography
(including contact information) to SHARP liaison Dr. Melissa Makala,
at me.makala@gmail.com.

Please also visit SHARP at SAMLA’s Facebook page for more updates:
https://www.facebook.com/SHARPatSAMLA

CFP: ‘James Gillray@200: Caricaturist without a Conscience?’ Oxford, March 2015

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http://www.new.ox.ac.uk/james-gillray200-caricaturist-without-conscience

James Gillray@200: Caricaturist without a Conscience?

The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford & New College, Oxford present:
A one-day symposium to be held at the Ashmolean Museum
Saturday 28 March 2015

CFP deadline: 15 November 2014

Programme will be announced: 21 November 2014

James Gillray’s reputation in the two centuries since his death has been as varied and layered as his prints. Trained at the Royal Academy, he failed at reproductive printmaking, yet became, according to the late-eighteenth-century Weimar journal London und Paris, one of the greatest European artists of the era. Napoleon, from his exile on St Helena, allegedly remarked that Gillray’s prints did more to run him out of power than all the armies of Europe. In England, patriots had hired him to propagandize against the French and touted him as a great national voice, but he was an unreliable gun-for-hire. At a large public banquet, during the heat of anti-Revolutionary war fever, he even raised a toast to his fellow artist, the regicide, Jacques-Louis David. Gillray produced a highly individual, highly schooled, and often outlandish body of work with no clear moral compass that undermines the legend of the caricaturist as the voice and heart of the people, so that the late Richard Godfrey described him as a caricaturist without a conscience. Following 2001 and 2004 retrospectives in London and New York, and fuelled by scholarship of a new generation of thinkers, our era’s Gillray is just now coming into focus.

To commemorate the 200th anniversary of Gillray’s death, and in conjunction with the Ashmolean Museum’s exhibition, Love Bites: Caricatures of James Gillray (26 March-21 June 2015), based on New College’s outstanding collection, we are organising a one-day conference at the Ashmolean Museum to hear and see the latest Gillray scholarship.

We seek proposals for papers that address any aspect of Gillray’s work or that consider artistic duty or purposeful negligence of duty in the period around 1800. Comparative, formal, contextual, and theoretical approaches to Gillray and our theme are all welcome. Proposals should be a maximum of 200 words and be accompanied by a short biographical statement.

Organised by Todd Porterfield, Université de Montréal; Martin Myrone, Tate Britain; and Michael Burden, New College, Oxford; with Ersy Contogouris, Université de Montréal.

All enquiries should be addressed initially to the New College Dean’s Secretary, Jacqui Julier, jacqui.julier@new.ox.ac.uk, to whom all abstracts should be submitted by:
15 November 2014

The programme will be announced on 21 November 2014.

Blake, The Flaxmans, and Romantic Sociability: 18-19 July 2014

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RIN member Luisa Calè (Birkbeck) asks me to post the following:

I hope you are enjoying the summer. I am writing to invite you to attend

Blake, The Flaxmans, and Romantic Sociability
18-19 July 2014
Keynes Library, School of Arts, Birkbeck, 43 Gordon Square, London

Registration and Programme:

http://www.bbk.ac.uk/events-calendar/blake-the-flaxmans-and-romantic-sociability

Blake’s sociability encompasses the real, the satyrical, and the imaginary. His visionary company includes ‘Companions from Eternity’, corporeal friends, and spiritual enemies. From the salon to the moon, across the geographies of ‘a certain island near by a mighty continent’, a mighty cast of characters intermingle. Enter Steelyard the Lawgiver and Mrs Nannicantipot, Suction the Epicurean, Sipsop the Pythagorean, Quid the Cynic, Inflammable Gas the Wind Finder, Etruscan Column the Antiquarian, Aradobo the Dean of Morocco, Obtuse Angle, Tilly Lally the Siptippidist, Miss Gittipin, Gibble Gabble, and Scopprell. Their imaginary, emergent, and satyrical disciplines include ‘Fissic Follogy, Pistinology, Aridology, Arography, Transmography, Phizography, Hogamy HAtomy,& Hall that’. This wild jamboree is a record of the convivial friendship and patronage of John and Ann Flaxman, Harriet and her husband the Reverend Anthony Stephen Mathew, who provided the young artist with ‘The Bread of sweet Thought and the Wine of Delight’.

Starting from the world of An Island in the Moon, this conference illuminates Blake’s relationship with the ‘Sculptor of Eternity’ and his circle from the early days to the ‘Regions of Reminiscence’, from the 1780s to the 1820s, following the Flaxmans across the channel, into the cosmopolitan networks of the Grand Tour, in order to recover the material cultures, sites, and dynamic forms of their Romantic sociability.

Conference organizers: Helen Bruder and Luisa Calè
Contact: blakeflaxman@bbk.ac.uk
To book a place to attend the conference, you need to follow the link at the bottom of the website.

First Meeting – 19/05/2014

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You are invited to the first session of our new Reading Group!

‘Illustration: So What?!’ Reading Group,

5.30pm – 7pm
Monday 19th May,
Fincham 001,
Digby Stuart College,
University of Roehampton,
London SW15 5PU.

First session introduced by Susan Matthews (Roehampton) and Mary L. Shannon (Roehampton). ‘Illustration’ only takes on its central modern meaning (an illustrative picture; a drawing, plate, engraving, cut, or the like, illustrating or embellishing a literary article, a book, etc.) in 1816: its modern sense is a creation of the Romantic period. But this modern sense also marks a limitation and a decline from the word’s earlier history when it carried a sense closer to ‘illustrious’. This Reading Group will throw new light on the idea of illustration: our first session will ask whether we can recapture the earlier sense of light central both to this word and to illumination.

All welcome.

Texts:

1) OED definition, ‘illustration’ (accessible online)
2) Hillis Miller, ‘Illustration’ (1992): pp. 61-75; pp. 88-111; pp. 146-151 (Contact Mary.Shannon@roehampton.ac.uk for a pdf)
3) JMW Turner, ‘The Sun of Venice Going to Sea’ (exhibited 1843), Tate
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/turner-the-sun-of-venice-going-to-sea-n00535
4) Olafur Eliasson: ‘A View Becomes a Window’ (2013)
http://www.channel4.com/news/olafur-eliasson-glass-books-tate-modern-turbine-hall
http://vimeo.com/75012416
(Eliasson’s earlier work, The Weather Project (2003-4), Tate, is here, if you are interested
http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/unilever-series-olafur-eliasson-weather-project)

We look forward to seeing you there.