Tag Archives: Ashmolean

Ashmolean Blake Exhibition: Lectures and Conferences

Posted on by
2

Members of the Illustration Network might be interested in the upcoming events associated with the Blake exhibition at the Ashmolean.

LECTURES

Towards a New Era in Printmaking: Innovation in the 18th Century With Dr Ad Stijnman FRHistS, private researcher, Ashmolean Lecture Theatre, Friday 16 January, 2-3pm £5/£4 concessions. Printmaking changed dramatically after 1700 with the introduction of new plate-making and plate-printing processes, coloured inks and state of the art print presses. Dr Stijnman looks at this era in which artists, printers, engravers and publishers produced work that astonished audiences. BOOK NOW AT http://www.ashmolean.org/exhibitions/whatsontickets/

Reading in the Spirit of Blake With Saree Makdisi, Professor of English and Comparative Studies at UCLA Ashmolean Lecture Theatre, Friday 23 January, 4.30-5.30pm £5/£4 concessions. This lecture explores the relationship between William Blake’s words and the images in his illustrated books and hopes to show you how to read ‘in the spirit of Blake’. Part of the ‘Inspired by Blake’ Festival. BOOK NOW AT http://www.ashmolean.org/exhibitions/whatsontickets/

Italian Old Master Prints Through the Eyes of Blake and His Friends With Michael Bury, University of Edinburgh. Ashmolean Lecture Theatre, Thursday 19 February, 2-3pm £5/£4 concessions. In the late 18th century, Blake and his contemporaries developed a distinctive approach to the study of Italian Renaissance prints. They paid attention to printmakers whose work has been largely ignored or disparaged in preceding years. This talk examines these artworks and identifies why Blake admired them so much. BOOK NOW AT http://www.ashmolean.org/exhibitions/whatsontickets/

CONFERENCE

Apprentice & Master: Conference With the University of Oxford’s Faculty of English and the Birkbeck Centre for 19th-century Studies. Ashmolean Lecture Theatre, Saturday 24 January, 10am-8pm £30/£25 concessions. Leading academics in the study of Blake will explore a variety of perspectives on the exhibition. The conference includes lunch and is followed by a reception and private viewing of the exhibition. BOOK NOW AT http://www.oxforduniversitystores.co.uk/

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

Posted on by
1

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.