Gallery London Research Articles

On the Road to the “Manifesto”: The Surrealists’ March Between Blois and Romorantin from May 5 to May 15, 1924

Abstract: This article aims to demonstrate that, in a sense, the 1924 “Manifesto of Surrealism” of André Breton was written by walking as a way to reassess its impact in the light of the recent revival of the “manifesto” form in contemporary art. The “Manifesto Marathon” held on October 18–19, 2008, at the Serpentine Gallery in London on the initiative of Hans-Ulrich Obrist enabled some sixty artists to propose manifestos that were subsequently published. It is interesting to note that the artists hardly mention, and in any case that the catalogue never reproduces, the Surrealist ” Manifesto,” which appears totally absent and invisible alongside the Futurist Manifesto (1909), the Dada, Constructivist, and Situationist manifestos, and so on. This is undoubtedly because the Surrealist “Manifesto" is not sufficiently inscribed in our cultural and visual landscape, in our memory or is considered purely literary. From our point of view, however, it is clearly a performative form. The ten-day journey that Breton, Louis Aragon, Max Morise, and Roger Vitrac made on foot between Blois and Romorantin (Sologne) in the first half of May 1924, just before Breton wrote the Surrealist “Manifesto,” which was published in October 1924, appears as an ironic and distanced response to the Olympic Games, which began in Paris on May 4, 1924. It was a sort of “countermarch,” in the spirit of the nineteenth-century wanderings of Verlaine and Rimbaud, or of the Grand Meaulnes in Alain-Fournier's 1914 novel of the same name. Breton told André Parinaud that it was an "initiatory" journey. Walking has something to do with automatic writing, which in a different way expresses the need for continuous movement, differential speeds and physical and nervous exhaustion. In fact, from March to May 1924, Breton had once again engaged in automatic writing and had even organized it collectively by distributing writing notebooks to the members of the group.

The Body and the Gallery: Cross Exhibition Review of Sarah Lucas: HAPPY GAS, Women in Revolt!, and If Not Now, When?

From autumn 2023 to spring 2024, several of London's galleries showcased the works of contemporary women artists, including Sarah Lucas and Helen Chadwick. This review critically examines three key exhibitions: Women in Revolt! and Sarah Lucas: HAPPY GAS at Tate Britain, and If Not Now, When? at Saatchi Gallery’s Season on Sculpture. As the exhibitions highlight themes of identity, resilience, and empowerment, particularly focusing on the female body as a powerful medium of expression, this review explores how women artists utilise the female body in contemporary art as a form of resistance against traditionally repressive, male-dominated art practices. The female body, a common feature in feminist art, is often used as a symbol of rebellion, with artists asserting control and autonomy over their bodies through their work. By occupying these contemporary art spaces, these artists affirm their positions within both the public sphere and the broader art discourse. This cross-exhibition review delves into the current renaissance of the gallery space as a site of resistance, examining its contributions to wider feminist discourses and art practices.

Tactics for Troubling Taste: Barbara Jones and the Blackeyes and Lemonade Exhibition at Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1951

Curated by the artist Barbara Jones (1912–1978) for the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1951, Blackeyes and Lemonade was an exhibition of popular art or, what Jones defined as, “the things people make for themselves, or that are manufactured in their taste.” The exhibits, which included a tiled fireplace in the shape of an Airedale dog, a giant anthropomorphic lemon, pub beer pulls, advertising posters, and industrially manufactured confectionary, posed a challenge to a codified and class-based conception of taste, fine art, and high culture that was prevalent in the post-war British museum. Through an analysis of the production and reception of Blackeyes and Lemonade, this paper charts the intellectual and practical battles Jones had to engage in to defend her selection and interpretation of objects, while simultaneously defining an unfamiliar branch of esthetic impulse and attempting to redirect what she called the “museum eye.” Finally, the paper explores the role of the temporary exhibition in re-opening discussions about taste, class, and gender in the museum.

The Myth of Heterosexuality: Queer Australian Artists, Art Historians and Gallerists in London, 1930–1961

ABSTRACT The 1961 Recent Australian Painting exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London is an important and much-discussed moment in Australian art history. It is when the idea of Australian art as “isolated” and “exotic” first became popularised in both British and Australian cultures. The prominent Australian art historian Bernard Smith criticised the idea, but in many ways his book Australian Painting, published the year after, repeated the assumption. What is overlooked in accounts of the show is that many of its artists were not “isolated”, frequently having spent extended periods in Britain living and studying. But, more than this, what is rarely, if ever, discussed is how many of the artists in the show were queer, as was its curator, the director of the Whitechapel Gallery, Bryan Robertson. In many ways, the social and professional connections between Australian and British artists were forged through their shared homosexuality. It is this that puts Australian artists in connection with the British art scene and, on occasion, explains their influence upon it. Queerness has often connected Australian artists to those around the world—it is also the case for the Australian women artists in Paris before and after World War I.

‘Boys, too, can be objects of desire’: Psychic and Erotic Domination in Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts (2020)

The present paper aims to analyze the psychic nature of the female protagonist in Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts (2020), as well as her relationships with other characters. For this purpose, I will use psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin’s theory of intersubjectivity. Benjamin’s intersubjectivity “reorients the conception of the psychic world form a subject’s relations to its object toward a subject meeting another subject”. For my analysis, I will focus on concepts such as recognition, a process of identification with the other, and destruction, a process which allows the individual to go beyond identification with the other and, consequently, to perceive them as a separate self. In Eliza Clark’s Boy Parts, Irina is a photographer who specializes in takes explicit pictures of “interesting”-looking men. The offer of an exhibition at a gallery in London triggers a tailspin of self-destructive behavior partly centered around Irina’s relationship with her best friend, Flo. The analysis of Irina’s psyche and her bonds with Flo and other characters will lead us to conclude that the aforementioned theories provide us with an enriching ground for uncovering the intricacies and what lies at the core of Irina’s psychic nature.

The export of Old Masters from Poldi Pezzoli’s Milan to international museums

Abstract The mid-and later nineteenth century saw the creation and enrichment of some major international museum collections alongside the development of connoisseurship. In this process, Milan was an important hub for the supply of major works of art. This essay offers new insights into Milan’s art market of the period through the methodical examination of export documents; analysis of the unpublished manuscripts of two great exponents of international connoisseurship of this period, Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle and Joseph Archer Crowe; and new sources from the archives of the National Gallery in London. A number of case-studies are presented in chronological order, focusing on examples of works of art imported from Milan by the National Gallery, the Musée du Louvre in Paris, the Royal Museums in Berlin and the Imperial Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. The conclusions that emerge from this study pave the way for a comparative investigation of other Italian cities in the same period.

Representing slavery in visual art: a multimodal approach

Abstract This article explores some issues related to the trauma of slavery, colonialism and identity-formation processes through a multimodal analysis, which is particularly useful in studying the manifold meanings and relationships emerging from the forms of cultural and social representation such as visual art. A series of images, chosen within Ellen Gallagher’s art exhibition “AXME”, held at Tate Gallery in London, is investigated to deal with the discursive constructions of gendered and racial identities. Employing Kress and van Leeuwen’s model (2021 [1996]. Reading images: The grammar of visual design. London: Routledge), this article attempts to identify the signs related to categories such as gender and race, as well as the persistence of stereotypical representations in our contemporary societies.

Architectural space in the work of Ernö Goldfinger

Ernö Goldfinger (1902–1987) as an architect wrote and talked most about space as a determinant of his architecture. This article traces the sources of this preoccupation in his thinking, especially his contacts with Adolf Loos and Auguste Perret in Paris in the 1920s, and outlines its progressive emergence in his built and designed work from that period through his relocation to London in 1934 to its culmination in his major projects of the 1950s and 60s. His three Architectural Review articles on space in architecture and urbanism of 1941–1942 are discussed in relation to his later built work and participation in the French Groupe Espace, and its spin-off, the ‘This is Tomorrow’ exhibition of 1956 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

“The Anamorphic Journey”: Jean‐Luc Marion on Revelation

AbstractIn part four of D'ailleurs, la Révélation (2020) Jean‐Luc Marion evokes the state of being seized by a saturated phenomenon, whether divinely revelatory or not, which guides one “across the desert on an anamorphic journey [parcours d'anamorphose].” The figure of anamorphosis is well‐known to anyone familiar with sixteenth‐century art, visual or literary; it comes directly from experiments with mirrors or perspective, giving rise with the latter to examples of affine transformation. Undoubtedly, Hans Holbein the Younger's double portrait “The Ambassadors” (1533) is the best‐known visual example: if one looks directly at the canvas in the National Gallery in London, one sees a diagonal blur across its bottom center, beneath Jean de Dinteville (1504‐1555), French Ambassador to London, and Georges de Selve (1508‐1541), Bishop of Lavaur and French Ambassador to the Republic of Venice. Only when one views the blur from a particular point—either low on the left‐hand side or high on the right‐hand side—can one see that it is a skull. The vanity of human achievement or, worse, human pride, is made manifest only when the artwork is viewed from a perspective that one is constrained to adopt. The sole sign of hope is a crucifix in the top left of the canvas.

Sir Charles Eastlake, the National Gallery and Milan

Abstract The first director of the National Gallery in London, Sir Charles Eastlake (1793–1865), was an Italophile. His favourite Italian city was Venice, where he once thought of buying a second home. The city he knew best, having lived there for fourteen years from 1816, was Rome. However, between 1854 and 1864, Eastlake made twenty-three trips to Milan, meaning that during his decade as director of the National Gallery from 1855, he visited Milan more often than any other place. This article suggests that Milan became a crucial hub for Eastlake, as the place where he connected with individuals who played important roles in several interconnected areas. Milan was significant, first, as an area rich in private collections, offering fertile ground for the discovery of potential acquisitions and a place from where it was relatively easy to export paintings because German-speaking Austria, which occupied north Italy and the Veneto until 1866, was comparatively lax about imposing export restrictions; second, as a place where art-historical knowledge and connoisseurship could be developed; and third, as a leading centre of picture conservation and framing.

Hate speech and environmental activist discourse

On 14 October 2022, two activists from the environmental group Just Stop Oil threw a can of tomato soup at Van Gogh’s famous Sunflowers at the National Gallery in London, gluing themselves to the wall beneath the painting. The action, covered in a tweet by the organisation, received a backlash of negative comments by social media users. The present paper focuses on hate speech in response to the controversial tweet by Just Stop Oil in a dataset of about 2700 user comments. Moving from critical discourse studies of hate speech in digital contexts, the manual and software-assisted qualitative analysis employs the appraisal framework and discourse-historical strategies to observe the discursive construction of hate themes against environmental activism. In line with ecolinguistics, findings suggest that, when something valued as extremely positive and important such as art is under attack, people may fail to recognise the motivations behind activist action, appraising it negatively through hate speech, and even distancing themselves from environmental values.

Leonardo da Vinci’s London Virgin of the Rocks re-examined

The anniversary in 2019 of Leonardo’s death prompted a new investigation of the Virgin of the Rocks now in the National Gallery in London. This built on a substantial foundation of earlier research, one past milestone being the discovery through infrared reflectography of an underdrawing for a completely different composition, showing a Virgin higher up on the panel and in a different pose. This paper focuses on the latest findings associated with this first abandoned composition, discussing how the re-examination using macro X-ray fluorescence (XRF) scanning and reflectance imaging spectroscopy (RIS) in the infrared range allowed a much more complete visualisation of the initial design, found to include figures for the Christ Child and an angel. The new study also provided interesting insights into Leonardo’s underdrawing materials and methods, identifying different drawing media (which include zinc-containing iron gall inks mixed with variable amounts of carbon black), seemingly used at different stages of the creative process to develop initial ideas into a more defined composition. The findings are relevant to the long genesis of the painting and its relationship with the version in the Musée du Louvre, Paris.

The ‘Temptation of Indifference’ and the Search for an Elemental South in A.S. Byatt’s ‘Crocodile Tears’ (Elementals)

Heading south to seek oblivion or erasure may be considered as something of a topos. What the aptly named Patricia Nimmo in Byatt’s ‘Crocodile Tears’ chooses to call ‘indifference’ is a mild word for the character’s mystifying reaction to the death of her husband, struck by a violent heart attack in an art gallery: catching a glimpse of the body, Patricia runs off, leaving it for others to deal with. Her escape involves several brushes with death from which she is saved, as it happens, by a Northerner encountered in the city of Nîmes. The overall trajectory of the story seems almost too simple: the headlong flight south comes to an end when the first step is taken towards a process of mourning which is not only marked by a return to the North but by the restoration of polarities threatened by ‘the temptation of indifference’. Such simplicity is nevertheless challenged from the beginning by the tension at work between the dream of an ‘elemental’ South, associated with the possibility of driving story and history out of the landscape, and a haunting textual south which creeps back at every turn. As storylines multiply and get woven into Patricia’s own story, the 75-page long text turns into a dense visual and textual network and Byatt’s South into a place in the making that transforms itself at every step at the same time as it transforms the character. ‘Indifference’ itself becomes ambivalent as it turns into an exploratory mode. The numbing of emotions offers a vantage point to conduct an experiment in seeing which welcomes whatever presents itself to the eye. The journey which starts in a London gallery and moves to the deep yellow South of Van Gogh recounts an imaginary flight which is not just an illusory flight. It takes the form of an intense material encounter which produces a series of striking pictures, an intricate landscape that remains after the journey has ended.

Des images attaquées : la soupe sur les tableaux et le déclin de la contemplation

"In 2022, two cans of tomato soup were thrown over Van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery in London by two climate activists. The aim of this paper is not to explain the motives behind the protest in terms of environmental activism, but to address the implications of this phenomenon for the status of artistic images in our time. The protest in question is one of the many symptoms of the fact that images associated with a pure state of gaze have become morally dubious due to a certain moralistic turn in contemporary discourses on art. Consequently, what seems to be lost in today’s movements of moralizing aesthetics, whether in art or in environmental activism, is not only the “aura” of an artwork, but also the idea that the contemplation of beauty in and for itself would provide a foundation for humans’ moral vocation. In a gaseous state of art (Y. Michaud) in which the transient effects of things are more important than their essence, the moralistic tendencies combined with the lack of moral foundations can no longer conceive of the ethical effects of images without explicit moral content, thus calling for a new form of heteronomy in art. Keywords: Kantian aesthetics, ethics, contemplation, natural beauty, autonomy of art, environmental activism. "

Attempts at a Description: Rose English’s Plato’s Chair and the Hear Tell

At a commercial gallery in London in 2019 I’m listening to audio recordings of Rose English’s 1980s performance Plato’s Chair, while a video of the show is projected on the wall ahead. The effect is of the performer describing what she is doing as she does it, the description displaced from one medium or occasion to another. Although, what she appears to be doing – for all her constant motion – is enacting a kind of hiatus while she ponders her next move, alone with herself, removed from her audience, thinking it all through and using words to do so. Description attempts to move things along. At play here, a certain – or uncertain – mimetics. Pleasures, for sure, for those who were there, or are placed there now. And a theatrical know-how – comedy, melodrama, opera-dance, and dressage all get a try-out – which is rooted in repertoire, but which ponders how to proceed. She is at once, she says, a comedian and philosopher. Which is to say also, ironist. In her book-length study of our ordinary acts of self-description, The Words of Selves (2000), Denise Riley locates in irony a ‘political astringency’ that corrodes ‘excessively vaunted’ categories, such as the human. But she finds irony also arising spontaneously within injury, compelled into intensities of self-contemplation. The injury, for instance, of one – as human as they come – who describes to me, on the phone, a tree outside her window. ‘I don’t know what to call it’. Description goes around.

Exhibiting Migration Stories: An Exploration of Poetics in Moysés Zuñiga’s Photography

This article discusses the exhibition Migration Stories Whispered in My Ear/Me Susurran Al Oído Historias de Migrantes, shown at Western University’s McIntosh Gallery in London, Ontario, Canada, in 2022. The exhibition focused on Moysés Zuñiga Santiago’s photography, the curatorial work of Anahí González and the accompanying research of Dr. Sarah Bassnett. It explored how the mainstream media has influenced public perceptions of forced migration and showcased the work of a Mexican photographer who has travelled alongside undocumented migrants. The article discusses the curatorial choices used to create an immersive exhibition that counteracts mainstream portrayals of migration.

Effect of music tempo on duration of stay in exhibition spaces

Investigations have been made into the effect of music tempo on the duration of stay in commercial spaces, but not in exhibition spaces. Previous research has frequently used the duration of stay as an indicator of exhibition learning. To understand how music tempo may influence this learning, this study investigated the effect of music tempo on the duration of stay in exhibition spaces. Because the density of visitors, exhibit elements, or music or exhibit element preferences may affect the duration of stay in exhibition spaces, further investigation was conducted to determine which factors had an impact on the duration of stay in exhibition spaces and which factors had the greatest impact. An online experiment was conducted with a virtual representation of the famous White Cube Gallery in London. To investigate the influence of three factors on the duration of stay in exhibition spaces, 36 scenarios were generated for objective evaluation: music tempo (fast, medium, slow, none), exhibit element density (high, medium, low), and visitor density (single, crowded, uncrowded). Then subjective evaluation was used to investigate whether music preference or exhibit element preference influenced the duration of stay during the above 36 scenarios. Additionally, through subjectively and objectively exploring all the factors affecting participants’ duration of stay (music tempo, exhibit element density, visitor density, music preference, exhibit element preference), this study sought to determine which factors exerted the greatest impact. The objective results revealed that participants stayed longer (by approximately 30 s) with slow-tempo music than with fast-tempo music. Moreover, when the influence of music tempo (fast, medium, slow, none), exhibit element density (high, medium, low), and visitor density (single, crowded, uncrowded) were considered, the results showed that when the visitor density reaches crowded conditions, fast- or slow-tempo music will exert an impact on the duration of stay. The subjective results revealed that, when the effect of exhibit element density or visitor density were considered alongside the effect of music tempo on participants’ duration of stay, exhibit element preferences will also exert an impact on the duration of stay. The subjective and objective results revealed that of all the factors that influence participants’ duration of stay, music tempo (fast or slow) exerted the greatest impact.

Gendered Obstacles in Contemporary Art: The Art Market, Motherhood and Invisible Ecologies

This article addresses issues of gender inequality in the UK’s contemporary art sector. It combines quantitative data on shifts in gender representation from over a hundred commercial contemporary art galleries in London in 2016, 2019 and 2022 with qualitative interviews with leading gallery directors. The research seeks to uncover structural inequalities in the commercial art sector which continue to create obstacles for female artists. In particular, we highlight the impact of the myth of meritocracy and an insistence on “quality” (particularly in relation to masculine ideology around ‘genius’); the continuing relationship between art history and the contemporary art market; the impact of parenting on the careers of female artists; and, the commercial sector’s influence on the public and not-for-profit arena in light of dwindling government financial support of public institutions. Our key findings underline that the commercial sector is increasingly necessary for career success, and that biases against women in the commercial art world inhibit opportunities for women artists and the number of women being represented by commercial galleries. Our data, collected over a period of six years, shows a mere 1% annual improvement, to just 34% in 2022.

Gazing through the window: A participatory Covid-19-exhibition for a nation in crisis

This visual essay focuses on the digital exhibition ‘Hold Still. A portrait of our Nation in 2020’ by the National Portrait Gallery in London. Regarding a visual social analysis of the Covid-19-pandemic, two main aspects are relevant: first, the project shows new modes of image creation, collection, and presentation. Based on a public call for pictures with more than 31 000 submissions, people contributed to the visualization of the pandemic. Second, 100 images were selected and exhibited in the form of a photoblog. This compilation constitutes a specific way of seeing a nation in crisis. The exhibition depicts one object – the window – as an important symbol of the pandemic. In the form of image sets, three main categories will be presented: (1) on an aesthetic level, the window is used as a specific picture frame; (2) creating an outside and an inside, a particular form of window gaze is established, and (3) the window functions as a specific communicative medium – a connecting divider – that establishes a shared space while dividing it simultaneously. In conclusion, the photoblog can be understood as a specific form of iconic image cluster. By juxtaposing the images in the blog regarding similarities and differences, a new meaning is established. Their combination symbolizes the individual’s friction between proximity and distance, showing persons in the in-between. Instead of displaying states of personal distress, the image compilation depicts the collective struggle in a crisis, thereby establishing new forms of imagined communities.

AGHDRA by Arthur Jafa

Reviewed by: AGHDRA by Arthur Jafa Gwyneth Shanks AGHDRA. By Arthur Jafa. Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York City. December 5, 2021. Over the course of eighty-five minutes, AGHDRA, Arthur Jafa’s most recent film installation, unfolds. Or perhaps, more precisely, it enfolds, the churning movements of an abstracted seascape seeming to embrace or envelop a viewer. Projected on an almost wall-sized screen, the installation shifts between twelve distinct locked-frame ocean scenes. Across each, the angle is slightly different, such that a viewer’s perception transitions from looking out across a moonlit expanse of gently undulating waves to being immersed within the relentless pounding of a rough sea. The water itself appears composed of distinct shards or chunks. At times, it resembles obsidian fragments moving in concert to form rolling waves; at other points, the water is like the fractured surface of an earthquake-ravaged land, smeared with thick oil. This animated oceanscape is a deep onyx, shifting between deepest blacks, indigos, and bright blues, as the light of the sun or moon on the animation’s far horizon illuminates the scene. Jafa, while reticent to delimit the meaning of his installation, has described it as a “[James] Turrell while you’re chained in the bottom of a boat,” a descriptor that makes undeniable AGHDRA’s evocation of the Middle Passage and the Black Atlantic. The work premiered at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark, in 2021, and then was reedited and screened at the now-defunct Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in Harlem, which had been closed for much of the pandemic, between November and December of 2021. Brown himself took a new position with Gladstone Gallery in London, a move announced in summer 2020. Jafa’s piece was the final artwork presented at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, which by December 2021 had been stripped of all indications of its six-year stint as a blue-chip art gallery. When I ventured there, my companion and I were the only two people present. Some half-dozen 8½ x 11 ad hoc wayfinding signs taped to the walls directed us first to the back of the space and then to a large crate elevator that deposited us on the second floor. A cluster of metal folding chairs was arranged at the far edges of the cavernous room in which AGHDRA was installed, the high-powered projector and many massive speakers hung in the room’s fly space the primary indication of just how much curatorial support went into the work’s presentation. The empty, vacated space, and Jafa’s fully realized and pulsating piece seemed to press up against each other, grappling for authorial claim over my experience. The confluence of AGHDRA and the particularities of its installation speaks to how imaginings of blackness emerge in and through an extended spatial and temporal context: an animated abstraction of the Middle Passage, the cavernous screening room in which the work played, the near-empty and now defunct Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, and a gentrifying Harlem. I argue that this extended spatial analysis of AGHDRA is, in fact, constitutive of the filmic work itself. By staying with its horizon line—unmoving and perpetually imminent, never arriving—that anchors the upper third of each animated frame in the film, we must contend with how subjectivity accrues perceptual significance precisely through spatial and geographic registers, articulating installation art as a practice always already embedded within an intersectional interplay between site and body, political possibility and spatial autonomy. The horizon, in other words, allows for an entangling of: 1) a colonial imagining of the horizon as a perpetual sight of and for conquest; 2) recent discourses of urban gentrification that take up conquest narratives, framing such actions as new horizons or frontiers for settlement; and 3) certain strains of Black feminist thought that draw upon the language of astrophysics and the event horizon to grapple with the profound implications of a wholly different paradigm for blackness’s temporal and spatial existence. The horizon—to follow Susanna Ashton’s description of W. E. B. Du [End Page 363] Bois, Freeman H. M. Murray, and L. N. Hershaw’s short-lived magazine The...