By using this website you agree to our Cookie policy

April 2016

Vol. 158 | No. 1357

Editorial

Photography and museums

Photography has been a latecomer to museums, despite the huge public appetite for it. For many years photographs have been inside museums in many departments, but mostly they have been regarded as documentary or educational items, adjuncts to other museum objects or research tools for collecting practices. True, the South Kensington Museum (later the Victoria and Albert Museum), founded the year that photo­graphy was invented, acquired its first photographs in 1852 and held its first photography exhibition in 1858. In 1862 ­photography was identified as ‘an independent art’ at the South Kensington Museum during the course of London’s Inter­national Exhibition. But gradually a hiatus developed and interest in contemporary photography lapsed until 1964, when Carol Hogben, Head of the Circulation Department which toured exhibitions, began to acquire contemporary photographs for touring, particularly to colleges. He also mounted a Cartier-Bresson exhibition in 1969 which is said to have changed the climate of opinion about photography in Britain. In the preceding period, the Museum’s photographs had been housed in the library and were identified not by photographer but mostly by location, site or subject-matter. But in 1977 the ­Photographic Collection was formally transferred from what was now called the National Art Library to the newly titled department, initially called the Department of Prints, Drawings & Photographs and Paintings, but later simplified to Prints, Drawings and Paintings.

Editorial read more
Free review

Calder

THE AMERICAN SCULPTOR Alexander Calder (1898–1976) was a legend in his own day for his unparalleled inventiveness, high originality and great intelligence. In the 1920s and early 1930s – before the post-War rush of Americans to Paris, often on the GI Bill – he was one of the few transatlantic visual artists (Man Ray was another) to be fully integrated with their European peers, primarily in Paris. In 1931 Léger wrote of Calder: ‘I think of Satie, Mondrian, Marcel Duchamp, Brancusi, Arp – these unchallenged masters of unexpressed and silent beauty. Calder is in the same family. He is 100-percent American. Satie and Duchamp are 100-percent French. And yet, we meet?’1 It was also in 1931 that Duchamp suggested the name ‘mobile’ for Calder’s small and exquisite motorised sculptures. Before that, Calder had visited Mondrian in his studio and had been deeply moved by the fact that in a sense the whole studio was an installation, a painting. As he later wrote: ‘The mobiles started when I went to see Mondrian. I was impressed by several coloured rectangles he had on the wall. Shortly after that I made some mobiles; Mondrian claimed his paintings were faster than my mobiles’.2

Free review read more
  • 201604 (1)

    Visible and invisible: Jacques Stella in Melbourne

    By Jaynie Anderson
  • 201604-Avery-2 (1)

    Jean-Louis Lemoyne’s bust of King Louis XIV rediscovered

    By Charles Avery
  • 201604-Boucher (1)

    François Boucher and the art of conchology

    By Jamie Mulherron
  • 201604-Vernet (1)

    Horace Vernet’s ‘Orient’: photography and the Eastern Mediterranean in 1839, part I: a daguerrean excursion

    By Michèle Hannoosh
  • 201604-Delacroix (1)

    A ‘Delacroix’ by Pierre Andrieu from the Nicos Dhikeos collection

    By Michalis Varelias
  • 201604-Pissarro (1)

    Camille Pissarro’s ‘Turpitudes sociales’ revisited, part I: politics, caricature and family tensions in 1889

    By Richard Thomson
  • 201604-Conservation (1)

    The Art of Conservation IV: Public controversies in eighteenth-century painting restoration: the history of the transfer technique in France

    By Ann Massing
  • Obituary: Edith Hoffmann (1907–2016)

    By Régine Bonnefoit
  • The Wilton Diptych, D. Gordon, with an essay by C. Barron and contributions by A. Roy, R. Billinge and M. Wyld

    By Christopher Wilson
  • Les transferts artistiques dans l’Europe gothique, J. Dubois, J.-M. Guillouët and B. Van den Bossche, eds.

    By Alexandra Gajewski
  • Lyon Renaissance. Arts et humanisme, L. Virassamynaïken, ed.

    By Jean Michel Massing
  • Fashion Victims: Dress at the Court of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, K. Chrisman-Campbell

    By Anne Bissonnette
  • The Spiritual Rococo. Décor and Divinity from the Salons of Paris to the Missions of Patagonia, G.A. Bailey

    By Peter Fuhring
  • Degas. Klassik und Experiment, A. Eiling, ed., with texts by P. Müller-Tamm, A. Eiling, M. Stuffmann, M.A. Stevens, A. Göthe and B. Kaufmann, and catalogue entries by A. Eiling, V. Hildebrand-Schat, M. Hohn, S.M. Krämer, A. Mensger, A. Reuter, D. Schäfer, N. Trauth and K. Weiler

  • Carrying Off the Palaces. John Ruskin’s Lost Daguerreotypes, K. Jacobson and J. Jacobson, with additional research by G. Bologna and an essay by A. Arribas

  • Foreign Artists and Communities in Modern Paris, 1870–1914: Strangers in Paradise, K.L. Carter and S. Waller, eds.

    By Alexandra Parigoris
  • Louis Michel Eilshemius: Peer of Poet Painters, S. Banz Louis M. Eilshemius (1864–1941): Die Entdeckung der Performativen Malerei/The discovery of performative painting, K. Neuburger

    By Merlin James
  • Historical Perspectives in the Conservation of Works of Art on Paper, M.H. Ellis, ed.

    By Catherine Rickman
  • Painting the modern garden

    By Kathleen Adler
  • Lee Miller

    By Helena Anderson
  • Electronic Superhighway

    By Julian Stallabrass
  • Spring exhibitions

    By Jonathan Vernon
  • John Akomfrah

    By Richard Martin
  • Ivor Davies

    By Alison Green
  • The Celts

    By Richard Bradley
  • Watteau and the ‘fête galante’

    By Christoph Martin Vogtherr
  • Netherlandish genre scenes

    By Yvonne Bleyerveld
  • Schiavone

    By Bernard Aikema