Art History 40 Image and Memory: 40 Years of Art-Historical Writing 09.30 – 18.30, Saturday 12 December 2015 (registration from 09.00) Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN Abstracts Samuel Bibby (Art History, Association of Art Historians UK) The Pursuit of Understanding’: Art History and the Periodical Landscape of Late-1970s Britain This paper proposes a two-fold approach to the historiography of our subject. On one hand, art history can be traditionally conceived as a set of ideas, the evolution of which might be charted through textual analysis of its archives. But on the other, it might be thought of too as a set of material objects lending themselves to an all-too- often-overlooked additional process of visual analysis. This latter avenue of historiographic enquiry, I will argue, is all the more important precisely because of the discipline’s concern with questions of materiality and visuality in relation to the objects of its enquiry. Art History and its genesis is my case in point. I begin by proposing a general framework whereby new journals can be considered – the periodical landscape; when a new title comes into being it is usually because those involved feel that their intellectual concerns and endeavours are failing to be adequately represented within the existing field of serial publications. Thus is born the desire to create a new space – a journal – in order to redress this perceived imbalance. The contours of the periodical landscape remain ever present during this process of coming into being – journals define themselves, and are judged, precisely in relation to pre-existing titles in their field. This situation, I will show, is at once not only textual but also, crucially, both visual and material. Alongside its generally-championed paradigm-shifting methodologies, Art History is here considered precisely in terms of its design and production, and in particular in relation to already-established periodicals of late-1970s British art history, as well as those of adjacent fields. In doing so, I suggest that the process of disciplinary recollection and memory – the pursuit of understanding – should take the form of an historiographical analysis firmly rooted in its own visual and material past. John Onians (University of East Anglia) Art History on the Couch: How the New Art History remembered its roots and woke up to a Neural future For nearly forty years Art History has been at the forefront of change in the discipline, productively integrating new approaches from Structuralism, Marxism, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, Post-Structuralism and elsewhere. For much of that time the emphasis has been on the merits of theories of ‘social construction’ and the weakness of ‘perceptual’ accounts with their ultimately biological basis. Increasingly this opposition is seen as unhelpful. Leaders of the New Art History such as Bryson and WJT Mitchell have withdrawn their earlier assertions and it has become clear that such pioneers of a social approach as Aby Warburg and Levi-Strauss, Baxandall and Gell always realised that the regularities in the mind’s behaviours that interested them must be founded in the principles of neurobiology. This last point was something people preferred to forget. Now that those principles are increasingly being revealed by neuroscience and a wave of new phenomenological approaches associated with an interest in the somatic and the sensory make them daily more relevant to our enquiries the challenge is to exploit a knowledge of them to ensure Art History retains its role at the head of the field. The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN tel +44 207 848 2909/2785 web http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/researchforum/index.shtml Dana Arnold (Middlesex University) Misprisions of London Early nineteenth-century London is often seen as the poor cousin of other European cities. The backward glance of the historian presents a story of what might have been, rather than what was achieved. Contemporaries viewed things differently; London was 'the new Rome', the first city of a new Empire, and the new classical architecture and urban planning made reference to its ancient counterpart. But Rome was in ruins. For London to equal the status of Rome would it too need to become a ruin? Did its future lie in fragments? My interest is in the relationship between London and its historical misprisions, by which I mean our failure to appreciate the city’s identity. The concept of the ruin is essential here as the veneration of Rome was built on its wreckage and the eternal city inspired the development of early nineteenth-century London. Here I take my lead from the many contemporary writers, artists and architects who projected London in to the future through a vision of its destruction. Two well-known early nineteenth-century examples are indexical of the ways ruins can project social, political and cultural urban identities. Sir John Soane commissioned Joseph Gandy to depict The Bank of England in Ruins (1830), which he later used in his Royal Academy lectures. The monumentality of both the building and the institution are enhanced through decay. Similarly, Thomas Babington Macaulay’s comment on the Catholic Church ‘And she may still exist in undiminished vigour when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.’ speaks of decline. But this time the architectural devastation shows us the end of the empire and the then most populated city in the world as deserted. Images of architecture in fragments are undeniably powerful, but my interest goes beyond the aesthetic of the ruin as an object. Using Walter Benjamin’s idea that ‘Allegories are, in the realm of thoughts, what ruins are in the realm of things’, I aim to read the ruins of London as a process rather than an aesthetic. Ruination becomes a critical tool through which we can explore misprisions of London’s past and future through fragments of (invented) memory. David Peters Corbett (University of East Anglia) Memory and Decreation: George Bellows’ Excavation Paintings, 1907-1909 This paper is interested in the role that destruction and the abject play in the work of the American Ashcan painter George Bellows and in the relation of these things to the perception of memory and the past. It charts the vivid love affair with destruction in a series of four paintings Bellows made between 1907 and 1909. The excavations for a new Pennsylvania Station building in mid-town Manhattan fascinated and horrified New Yorkers for six years and Bellows responded to the compelling spectacle it provided with what has been called the first “great drama” of his career. In the excavation series and particularly in Excavation at Night (1908, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art), Bellows offers us an image of destruction as a fantasy of remaking the vanished past. “Decreation” in the sense the term is used by Giorgio Agamben in Potentialities (1999), provides a way into these meanings. I argue that the series amounts to a nuanced interrogation of the impulses and implications of the “rage” to undo both memory and the past. Genevieve Warwick (University of Edinburgh) Memory’s Cut: Caravaggio’s Sleeping Cupid of 1608 Caravaggio’s late painting of a Sleeping Cupid has long been recognised as a mimetic engagement, as well as a reversal, of the antique sculptural tradition of sleeping cupids that commonly decorated ancient funerary monuments. Painted in 1608, it was destined for a Florentine patron, Francesco dell’Antella, secretary of state for Italy to the pan-European order of the Knights of Malta, while Caravaggio was a novitiate brother of the order himself. Drawing on the significance of its Florentine provenance, the work has also been understood as intentionally troubling the art-historical legacy of Michelangelo’s famous (now lost) sculpture of this subject. Michelangelo’s rendition was itself bound up with the techne of art-historical memory in its closely-worked simulation of antiquity, to the point of purportedly burying the work in the garden in order to acquire the sculptural surface of a recently-excavated antique. In Caravaggio’s work too, its contrapuntal relationship with art-historical memory is most explicit in the rendering of surfaces – the awkward caress of Cupid’s enveloping feathered wings, but above all the skin marked by ungainly folds and swellings, that together seem to repel touch as much as to invite it. The body of the classical sculptural Cupid, by contrast, was made to solicit the affect of tenderness through a haptic rendering of stone in terms of an idealised smoothness. The skin of Caravaggio’s Cupid is instead semiotically unstable, its references to Caravaggio’s own social world and art of realism in seeming conflict with the established idealising visual conventions of the subject matter, so challenging its own pictorial act of recollection. This paper probes the troubled relationship of Caravaggio’s Cupid with that of his art-historical memory. Caravaggio famously described himself as a painter of the real, without memory. Yet much of his oeuvre, as in this The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN tel +44 207 848 2909/2785 web http://www.courtauld.ac.uk/researchforum/index.shtml instance, works at the boundaries of art-historical citations that are then vexed, as if to undo the work they seek simultaneously to emulate. The concomitant implications for reframing the significance of the subject matter are therefore leading. In this instance, the child’s body seems to reference not only Caravaggio’s self-acclaimed social history of art as a painter of observed realism, but also the most archaic of Cupid’s ancient identities as a primordial deity of archaic myth, born of Chaos.