This Week's Lectures
Painting Pairs 2021/22: Collaborative Research in Conservation and Art History – Second Presentations
Painting Pairs presents collaborative research undertaken by graduates in conservation and art history focussing on paintings currently in the conservation studios at the Courtauld. The paintings that form the focus for investigation by each a pair of graduates are from different periods and pose a range of questions related to their history, conservation and display.
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Considering Collecting: The Future of Public Collections
The sixth and final event in the ‘Considering Collecting’ 2021/22 series will look to the future. Having looked at some of the key issues affecting those who collect art and who work with collections today, we will think about what needs to happen next: can collecting become a more democratic, representative activity, particularly for those institutions and organisations which serve the public?
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Open Courtauld Hour - Episode 7, S6: Art and Scent
What does it mean to smell art history? This Open Courtauld Hour will explore how The Courtauld can use aromatic stimuli, perfumes and fragrances, to transport people to places, moments and feelings (without using written or visual languages). Join The Courtauld Community to learn more about how we are taking visitors on an olfactory journey, designed to reflect the inspirations and illustrations in the artworks on our walls.
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Imagining the Apocalypse: Art and the End Times
What are the politics of picturing the end times? This panel discussion will celebrate the launch of Imagining the Apocalypse: Art and the End Times with Courtauld Books Online.
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Image, Pattern, Repetition: The Craft of Romanesque Sculpture in Southwest England
Speaker: Dr Alex Woodcock
Organised by the Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland.
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Considering Collecting: Women and Collecting
Women have been making, selling, and collecting artworks and artefacts for centuries, but few have reached the status and renown of many of their male counterparts. While many men collecting art have gone on to found internationally famous museums, galleries and institutions to house their collection, there are fewer women collectors who have been in such a privileged position historically.
Where artworks, documentation, and objects relating to the lives of men are often carefully collected, catalogued and preserved by collections of all sizes, there has been much work to do to restore this balance to uncover and share stories of – and by – women connected to the visual arts. In the fifth event in the ‘Considering Collecting’ series, our panel will explore this ‘rebalancing’ in more depth.
Supported by Laurence C. Zale Associates, Inc., a visual arts advisory company
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The Guest of the Body: Visualizing Souls in Medieval Europe, 1100-1200
Shirin Fozi is Associate Professor in History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of a monograph titled Romanesque Tomb Effigies: Death and Redemption in Medieval Europe, 1000-1200 (2021), which received a Millard Meiss Grant from the College Art Association, and co-editor of Christ on the Cross: The Boston Crucifix and the Rise of Medieval Wood Sculpture (2020). Fozi has also published several articles on modern collections of medieval art, and her most recent Museum Studies seminar culminated in a student-curated online exhibition called A Nostalgic Filter: Medieval Manuscripts in the Digital Age (2020). Organised by Dr Tom Nickson (The Courtauld) and Dr Jessica Barker (The Courtauld)
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Open Courtauld Hour - Episode 6, S6: A Good Brew
This Open Courtauld Hour will interrogate the problematic history of tea, coffee and sugar and its connection to objects in The Courtauld and collections across the UK. The implicit relationship to the lives of those colonised and enslaved can be exposed through tracing the intended content of seemingly banal objects. Made for tea and coffee consumption these objects tell a darker tale, one that is often obscured by the everyday presence of these items today. These objects can also reveal the stories of ordinary people in the UK and showcase the often disregarded domestic and everyday lives of the working classes. Join experts, artists and makers, Tasha Marks (Founder of AVM Curiosities), Fozia Ismail (Founder of Arawelo Eats) and the team from Braintree Museum, in scrutinising the commonplace.
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Parmigianino Round Table
This Round Table brings together a group of world-leading scholars on Parmigianino to discuss their latest projects and research on the artist, one of the most celebrated of sixteenth-century Italy. During an afternoon academics and curators from Italy, UK and the US will present on the artist’s manifold artistic practices, including drawing, printmaking and painting, substantially updating our knowledge on this important artist and producing a state-of-the-art assessment of scholarship on his oeuvre.
Organised by Dr Ketty Gottardo (The Courtauld) and Dr Guido Rebecchini (The Courtauld)
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Digital Art History as Social Art History: Working through Architecture and the Built Environment of Krakow During Nazi Occupation
Speaker: Paul Jaskot, Professor of Art History and German Studies, Department of Art, Art History & Visual Studies, Duke University
Organised by Dr Stephen Whiteman (The Courtauld) and Dr Austin Nevin (The Courtauld) as part of their Frank Davis Memorial Lecture series titled ‘Art History Futures: At the Junction of the Digital and Material Turns’.
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Lynne Cooke, Briony Fer and Ricardo Alcaide in Conversation about “Purity Is a Myth: The Materiality of Concrete Art in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay”
Celebrating the book launch of “Purity is a Myth: The Materiality of Concrete Art from Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay” in a roundtable conversation with Prof. Briony Fer, Professor of History of Art and Research Director at University College London, Dr Lynne Cooke, Senior Curator, Special Projects in Modern Art at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and Venezuelan-born artist Ricardo Alcaide.
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The Psycho-Architectonics of the Imżā Inscriptions: Denotations and Connotations of Text in the Arts of the Safavids
The Bahari Foundation Lectures on Art and Culture
Speaker: Dr Mahroo Moosavi – Bahari Fellow in the Persian Arts of the Book, University of Oxford; Oliver Smithies Lecturer, Balliol College, University of Oxford; Lecturer, Architectural History, Theory, and Design, University of Sydney
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Open Courtauld Hour - Episode 5, S6: Van Gogh and his Self-Portraits
This Open Courtauld Hour celebrates the first ever exhibition devoted to Vincent Van Gogh’s self-portraits across his entire career, currently on show at The Courtauld Gallery from 3 February – 8 May 2022.
The Morgan Stanley Exhibition: Van Gogh. Self-Portraits takes as its springboard Van Gogh’s iconic Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, one of the most celebrated works in The Courtauld’s collection, and will bring together around half of the self-portraits Van Gogh created during his short years as a painter – an exciting opportunity, given that many of these works are rarely lent. Several works in the exhibition were last together in Van Gogh’s studio and have never been reunited, until now.
Join us to hear more about the exhibition, the works on display, the motivation behind it and its special relevance to London itself. Learn from experts Karen Serres (Curator of Paintings at The Courtauld) and the team behind Van Gogh House London. This event allows those unable to come to the exhibition itself a rare opportunity to experience the artworks virtually.
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Curating the Virtual
New technologies are taking over the planet. Art institutions will be transformed and collectors of art have discovered the world of unique digital objects, so-called NFTs. Exactly how will today’s visual media — AR, VR and Mixed Reality — expand the ways we experience art? Will the virtual turn change art itself, just like photographic techniques and mass distribution once altered our understanding of what an artwork can be? Walter Benjamin’s influential 1935 essay on mechanical reproduction opens with a quote from French poet Paul Valéry: ‘We must expect great innovations to transform entire techniques of the arts, thereby affecting artistic innovation itself and perhaps even bringing about amazing change in our very notion of art.’
Speaker: Professor Daniel Birnbaum, Director of Acute Art
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Considering Collecting: Collecting the Ephemeral
When we think of art collections, our thoughts often turn to paintings, sculptures, drawings, ceramics, photography, or perhaps to mixed media, collage or found objects. However, there are an increasing number of artworks in the art market which use more complex, ephemeral materials: light, sound, the internet, computer software, digital images and even the body. The fourth event in the ‘Considering Collecting’ series will focus on the collection of performance art – works which are made using the artist or performer’s body and which often do not leave any material trace once they are finished.
Speaker: Rose Lejeune, Director of Performance Exchange.
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The Textual-Visual Collaborations of Blaise Cendrars
Speaker: Professor Eric Robertson, Professor of Modern French Literary and Visual Cultures, Royal Holloway, University of London
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History and Her-stories: Women artists in Moscow Conceptualism
What happens if the history of Russian art is retold from the point of view of female artists? Is it possible to overturn the narrative of artistic progress driven by the male artistic “geniuses” and instead, reclaim and celebrate the influence of female artists upon contemporary Russian art?
Speaker: Elena Zaytseva – Independent curator and historian of art
Organised by Professor Sarah Wilson (The Courtauld) and Professor Sussan Babaie (The Courtauld) as part of their Frank Davis Memorial Lecture series titled ‘Exiles and Émigrés’.
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Pastoral Fellowship and the Performance of Virtuosity in Titian’s Concert Champêtre
This talk places Titian’s Concert Champêtre (ca. 1509–11) within the context of elite domestic leisure in early sixteenth-century Venice. In particular, it explores the combined role of sociable gathering, theatrical performance, music making, and art collection in the establishment of a new mode of self-fashioning and generational distinction on the part of young Venetian patricians and the virtuosi they patronized.
Speaker: Chriscinda Henry, Associate Professor of Art History, McGill University
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Framing the Body: Yip Cheong Fun and Singapore Photography in the 1960s and 1970s
This session of Addressing Images is based on the work of Singapore photographer Yip Cheong Fun (1903-1989) in the 1960s and 1970s. We will discuss how Yip achieved 美感 (mei gan), or a feeling of beauty, that he along with other “amateur” practitioners in the local photographic community were seeking in the vignettes they composed, sometimes on group field trips across the island city.
Speaker: Nadya Wang (PhD candidate at The Courtauld Institute of Art and lecturer in the School of Fashion at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore)
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Open Courtauld Hour - Episode 4, S6: In Conversation with Cecily Brown
This Open Courtauld Hour, an in conversation between the artist Cecily Brown, Barnaby Wright (Deputy Head of The Courtauld Gallery and Daniel Katz Curator of 20th Century Art) and Leyla Bumbra (Research Forum Programme Manager), will traverse the commission, Cecily’s inspirations, processes and materials. The event will allow attendees to ask Cecily questions about this work.
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Considering Collecting: Caring for Collections
Speakers:
Rosemary Lynch, Director of Collection Care at Tate 2013-21
Megan Narvey, Outreach Conservator at the Minnesota Historical Society
Kathleen Lawther, freelance curator
Marenka Thompson-Odlum, Research Associate at the Pitt Rivers Museums and a doctoral candidate at the University of Glasgow
Northern Ireland’s Feminist and Queer Art Histories
This symposium examined how feminist and queer art and visual culture challenged Northern Irish art and society since 1968.
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The Development of Historical Digital Methods: Late Hokusai as case study
Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series
Speakers: Tim Clark FBA (British Museum) and Dominic Oldman (British Museum)
For the full list of events available to watch online
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