We and the editorial board are proud to present the 2019 issue of immediations. The articles in this edition of the journal reach from the Trecento to the 1950s and encompass manuscript illumination, oil painting and urban planning. Each speaks to the multifaceted relationship between art and society.
Bryan C. Keene tackles the vexed question of attribution and the flabby oeuvre of Pacino di Bonaguida. Ruth Helen Smith elucidates the connections between the work of Burne-Jones and Victorian physiology. Caitlin Doley offers another perspective on Victorian Britain, unpicking the subversive depiction of military masculinity in the work of James Tissot. While Giovanni Casini brings the journal into the immediate post-war period and situates Richard Hamilton’s paintings of the early 1950s firmly within the context of the Festival of Britain and his investigations into microscopic and aerial photography.
In its sixteenth year, immediations is proud to continue to showcase and support the dynamic and innovative research of postgraduate students and early career researchers from The Courtauld Institute of Art. The journal is committed to creative, fluid and complex engagements between scholars and the objects of their study. The work of the poet and artist Adonis embodies these concerns and represents a sustained meditation on the relationship between text and image. His cover work Virgule dans le Livre de la Civilisation Monothéiste combines Arabic text and found objects and provokes questions around visibility, legibility and intelligibility. Members of the editorial board were able to interview Adonis and their wide-ranging and fruitful discussion touches and expands upon many of these matters.
The issue concludes with three exhibition reviews, which as a collective point to the diverse ways in which collections, galleries and museums continue to bring new audiences to old collections and old audiences to new collections. Rachel Beaudoin reviews the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art’s Brave, Beautiful Outlaws: The Photographs of Donna Gottschalk. Andrew Cummings’ review of Chinternet Ugly at Manchester’s Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art confronts pervasive myths about China and the Internet and the responsibility of exhibition makers to confront clunky, outdated and deceptive stereotypes. Sandro Weilenmann speaks to the recent attempts of more traditional museums to rethink their collections, in particular the mixed results of the Kunsthistorisches Museum’s recent collaboration with Wes Anderson Spitzmaus Mummy in a Coffin and Other Treasures.
The 2019 issue is available both in print and online, allowing immediations to be as widely accessible as possible and at the forefront of open access to peer-reviewed scholarship in the arts and humanities. We extend our warmest thanks to our External Advisory Group, Dr Alixe Bovey and the staff of the Research Forum, our designers Grace Williams (online) and Janina Zylinska (print), Karin Kyburz (picture researcher), Teresa Lane and Talitha Schepers (Editors-in-Chief, immediations 2018) and Adonis.
This issue of immediations has been edited by Ana-Maria Milčić and Harry Prance with the assistance of the editorial group: Ambra D’Antone, Emily Christensen, Lorne Darnell, Giosuè Fabiano, Leah Gouget-Levy (reviews editor), Sophie Guo, Wiktor Komorowski (subscriptions editor), Emma Merkling (reviews editor), Erica Payet, Alice Zamboni.
Ana-Maria Milčić and Harry Prance (Editors-in-Chief)