ACADEMIC conference programmes give a rough guide to prevailing intellectual preoccupations. The Association of Art Historians' annual conference, held this year at the Courtauld Institute, had the umbrella title of 'Frame- works'- loosely defined as 'the material and conceptual frames of reference which condition our definition of art and understanding of cultural objects and practices'. The fifteen sessions included discussions of popular culture, narrative, religious objects, object-viewer relationships, anti-academicism, art criticism, art education, feminism, and the nature of art history itself or selves. While non- western art made a token appearance, the decorative arts and design were largely absent, perhaps because they rarely figure on university curricula in Britain (the planned closing of the binary divide between universities and poly- technics might remedy this). A superficial reading of the synopsis printed in the programme might lead to the view that art itself had now largely disappeared from academic art history, but this would be to underestimate the resource- fulness of art historians in 're-packaging' their research for the intellectual 'market-place'. An unprecedented number of transatlantic speakers (with a sprinkling of continental Europeans) made this the most international meeting of the Association yet held. With as many as ten sessions running in parallel on any one day, serious engagement with one precluded more than a glancing attendance at others. We will return on another occasion to the subject of one of the plenary sessions: 'The Hanging and Display of National Collections of Art', at which the Directors of the National and Tate Galleries stated their philosophies. This complemented an academic session, 'The Value and Politics of Display' which ran through all four days. Problems of communication between academics and museum curators were still pain- fully evident. In the present intellectual climate, an expressed belief in the aesthetic value of a work of art may be derided as 'fetichisation' (a notion, which, as Alex Potts reminded us, has a long history). However, the technical study of the physical properties of objects is apparently allowable. A session called 'Why study techniques?', organised by Stephen Hackney and Rica Jones of the Tate Gallery, suggested ways in which art historians can learn from, use, and interpret the physical research of the conservator and chemist. This session had originally been devised by Gerry Hedley, whose tragic death last year was such an appalling loss to the Courtauld's Technology Deparment. The session's title was perhaps unnecessarily proselyt- ising. Art historians have been taking account of technical evidence for many years. Johannes Wilde was a pioneer in the use of X-rays in Vienna in the 1930s; Philip Pouncey's first article in this Magazine made use of X-ray evidence (see p.312). The scientific examination of pigments and paint media begun byJoyce Plesters in 1949 at the National Gallery has become a subject frequently treated in these pages, as well as in the conservation journals. More recently infra-red reflectography has supplied a whole new array of visual evidence in terms of underdrawings, on which art historians have seized, sometimes with too much alacrity. A recent acceleration of interest is, however, apparent. Technique has emerged from behind the studio door to become the subject of entire exhibitions. Mixed restoration shows have long been staged in Italy, but the exhibitions of the last five years in Britain devoted to the techniques of single artists or periods (The Hidden Face of Manet, 1986, the three Art in the Making shows at the National Gallery, 1988-90) have been all the more fruitful for addressing themselves to self-contained subjects. Enormous care has also gone into the compiling of information in the National Gallery catalogues, and in its presentation through attractive and accessible typography. The conservator's voice, all too often in our pages reduced to small print, is no longer subordinated to that of the art historian. The three National Gallery exhibitions demonstrated the variety of art historical questions that can be addressed with technical means - from attribution and chronology, to the intellectual genesis of a work, to reconstruction of dismembered polyptychs, to the demolition of cherished myths. As Juliet Wilson Bareau has demonstrated, and as will be apparent in the Constable exhibition of the Tate Gallery this summer through the work of Sarah Cove, vanished early works can sometimes be excavated through X-rays from below later works on the same canvas. At the conference, and in last year's exhibition catalogue, Rica Brown showed how Joseph Wright of Derby's individual layering of paint, and blocking out in 'dead colouring', not visible through the dense surfaces of his pictures, re-emerges from cross-sections of paint samples. If cross sections are as individual as finger prints, their study, like that of technique in general, must clearly be part of the art historian's armoury. It emerged in discussion that there was a perceived demand for slides of technical material to be made available to academic art history departments. It was also suggested that, in view of the enormous variety of condition within the work of individual artists, it would be useful to establish a register of paintings in prime state, to which reference could be made (one such would be the Jacopo del Casentino Madonna, discussed by Alfio del Serra in the January 1985 issue, p.4). The session pointed up once again how vital are continuity of records and personnel and expansion of the available data in the study of technique: the National Gallery conservators per- petually go back to ask new questions of their samples. One of the attractions of the study of technique has always been that it seems to provide objectively reliable results. However, the evidence under the picture surface may be as hard to interpret as what lies on top. Juliet Bareau, in arguing for a more integrated approach to the picture as object and as image, articulated a general feeling that the study of technique could be fruitfully extended to the study of meaning. It is timely, then, that the National Gallery's next series of (smaller) exhibitions on technique will be entitled 'Making and meaning'.

discussed by Alfio del Serra in the January 1985 issue, p.4). The session pointed up once again how vital are continuity of records and personnel and expansion of the available data in the study of technique: the National Gallery conservators per- petually go back to ask new questions of their samples. One of the attractions of the study of technique has always been that it seems to provide objectively reliable results. However, the evidence under the picture surface may be as hard to interpret as what lies on top. Juliet Bareau, in arguing for a more integrated approach to the picture as object and as image, articulated a general feeling that the study of technique could be fruitfully extended to the study of meaning. It is timely, then, that the National Gallery's next series of (smaller) exhibitions on technique will be entitled 'Making and meaning'.