Newsletter No 45 Spring 2014 2014. By the time you read this newsletter, we will From the Chair already have completed our first event of the year, namely a guided tour of the Hunterian Art Gallery’s Spring is finally here and this is my first letter to Scottish Gold exhibition by its curator Dr Donal Bateson. you since I have taken over the chair from Ben We are also discussing potential themes for Greenman, who has served the society so well during another conference in 2015 and I am keen to hear from his one year interim chair-ship. I would like to take this you with any ideas. In this context, I would like to stress opportunity to thank Ben for his great work in moving that I see the society as a place of exchange for art the society forward and I am grateful that he is staying historians working in Scotland on a wide range of on the committee. I would also like to thank two of our subjects in terms of approach, chronology and long-standing committee members, Maria Devaney geography. So please send an email to me at (membership secretary) and Ellen Graves (minutes [email protected] if you have a possible secretary), who recently stepped down, for their conference theme in mind and we could discuss it at important contributions to the society over the years. our next committee meeting. Many of you will already have met our new committee Allow me to close by observing that art history as member Rachael Grew as our current membership an academic discipline and a professional practice has secretary and I am sure you will cross paths with Claire been under increasing pressure in recent years. In the Robinson before too long as she has kindly agreed to current cultural-political climate, societies such as the steer our new sub-group for events. Please join me in SSAH take on an even more important role as advocates welcoming both of them - we could not exist as a for a field of study that is not only dear to our own society without its committee members’ enthusiasm hearts but that imparts a wider public with an and generous dedication to the cause of art history in understanding of the importance of the past to current Scotland! events. So let us keep up the good work! Even though it is a daunting task to follow in Sabine Wieber Matthew Jarron’s footsteps as his vision has so expertly steered the society over many years, I am excited to report on a few of the society’s new initiatives. We New Committee Members have now firmly established a Facebook presence and I invite you to take a look at some of the diverse postings Claire Robinson: there. We are hoping to increase the visibility of the Claire is Collections and Exhibitions Curator in the society through this endeavour and to especially Museum Collections Unit at the University of St encourage students and younger members of our art Andrews. Her research interests are on 19th and early historical community to recognise the society as a 20th century material culture and art and design in relevant interest group composed of incredibly diverse Britain. She has worked in museums across Scotland and knowledgeable individuals. As previously and has experience of managing, displaying and caring mentioned, we also formed a new events sub-group for diverse collections, from fine art to scientific and are busily working on an exciting programme for instruments. 1 Rachael Grew: documentary films about Henry Moore, which include Rachael is an art historian specialising in gender issues sequences shot on location there: A Sculptor’s in French and British art c. 1850 - 1950. Her research Landscape (1958) and Henry Moore at Home (1974). focuses on the work of female Surrealist artists, Both films were directed by John Read, who specialised particularly that of Leonor Fini, and she has just begun a in the arts documentary genre and always privileged large project investigating Fini's designs for the theatre. shooting on location. The films can be seen online at After receiving her PhD in 2010, Rachael taught for two www.bbc.co.uk/archive/henrymoore. years at Plymouth University, and is currently a visiting In both Henry Moore scholarship and sculpture lecturer at a number of institutions in Glasgow, studies at large, one of the most frequently repeated including the Glasgow School of Art and the University quotations is Moore’s 1951 statement that ‘Sculpture is of Glasgow. an art of the open air’. This was an unusual observation at the time, because in 1951, the aesthetic practice of siting and viewing modern sculpture in ‘the open air’ had yet to be established. In most cases, sculpture SSAH Research Support Grants outdoors was decorative or monumental, rather than an aesthetic focal point. Statuary in landscape gardens, The Scottish Society for Art History promotes memorial stones in cemeteries and political scholarship in the history of Scottish art and art located monuments in urban spaces were the sculptural forms in Scotland. To facilitate this, the SSAH offers research commonly situated outdoors. Exhibitions of modern support grants from £50 to £500 to assist with research sculpture in the open air had just started to be costs and travel expenses. Applicants must be working organised in London’s parks in the late 1940s and it at a post-graduate level or above and should either be took almost 30 years for the first permanent, dedicated resident in Scotland or doing research that necessitates sculpture park in the UK to open in 1977: the Yorkshire travel to Scotland. Application deadlines: 31 May and Sculpture Park. The siting of modern sculpture at 30 November. Glenkiln does not fall into any of the above categories. To apply please send via e-mail: Keswick intended the siting as neither an open-air art a cover letter exhibition nor a sculpture park, but as an intervention current curriculum vitae in a landscape used as farmland; in this way, he a brief project description (300-500 words) anticipated the practices of Land Art. specifying how the grant will be used and how it As a film historian, I am interested in the ways relates to a broader research agenda Moore’s work was mediated through film, and more a budget specifically in the role that the representation of the name and e-mail address of one reference Moore’s sculpture at this site played in the process of Address applications to: popularising new ways of seeing sculpture against SSAH Research Support Grants, c/o Dr Shannon Hunter natural settings. In interviews, Moore often emphasised Hurtado, [email protected] that ‘out of all the outdoor placings of his sculpture’ it was the one at Keswick’s estate that ‘satisfied him most’. When this aesthetic satisfaction is articulated Project Report by Dr Katerina Loukopoulou through the audio-visual language of cinema, then the Independent film historian mediation becomes a heightened multisensory experience. It is the source of this experience, and the Near the small village of Shawhead in Dumfries dialogue between the screen landscapes and the and Galloway, four Henry Moore sculptures are sited location, that I sought to study, by comparing a physical alongside works by Jacob Epstein and Auguste Rodin: a visit to the area with the cinematic encounters provided constellation of figures and totemic forms across an by the two aforementioned documentaries. In A agricultural landscape. These sculptures were placed Sculptor’s Landscape, black and white cinematography there in the 1950s by the landowner William Keswick, is utilised to place emphasis on outline and form, so so that although the fields continued to be used as that the correspondences between sculpture and pasture, they also acquired an aesthetic identity, as landscape at Glenkiln are revealed: the two emerge as what is sometimes called Glenkiln Sculpture Park. equivalent formations of curvilinear shapes. Thanks to an SSAH research grant, I was able to visit the The auratic experience of viewing the specific site for part of my post-doctoral research on two BBC Moore sculpture at the specific location is further 2 enhanced through the film’s soundtrack, which seeks to Moore’s sculpture to be sited in such an original and establish a dialogue between the sculpture’s landscape aesthetically pleasing way fits in the long history of and nature’s sounds. The amplification of the ambient Scotland’s landscape inspiring artists and opening up sounds of birds singing and wind blowing emphasise new avenues of artistic explorations and new types of thus what a visitor to the site might not be fully mediation. conscious of: the aesthetic symbiosis of the sculpted form and the contingent sounds of nature. The montage of distant and close up views of Upright Motive No.1: Glenkiln Cross (1955-56) recreates the quite laborious experience of climbing up the hill to stand next to this totemic sculpture. The sense in which the sculptures belong in this space is brought even more to the fore in Henry Moore at Home, which ends far from Moore’s literal home, with a sequence dedicated to the Glenkiln siting. The voice-over narration evokes the unexpected suitability of the countryside near Shawhead as a home for Moore’s work: ‘For the present, the most appropriate tribute to Moore’s vision is in a Scottish glen.’ For his second visit to this location, Read brought colour film stock to capture views of the sculpture that convey the ‘naturalisation’ of the artefacts after almost twenty years at this site.