Public Gallery Research Articles

Renaissance to Rococo: masterpieces from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art

When the Wadsworth Atheneum opened in 1844 as the first public gallery of fine arts in America, the highlights of the collection were works by contemporary American artists. However, gifts soon brought a number of old master paintings to the museum, and today perhaps the most famous aspect of its fine European painting collection is the concentration of Italian Baroque masterpieces. The museum's distinguished director in the 1930s and 1940s, Chick Austin, acquired notable examples by Strozzi, Luca Giordano, and the first authentic Caravaggio in an American museum. Today the collection includes such Renaissance masters as Piero di Cosimo and Sebastiano del Piombo, continuing with the finest examples of Baroque painting, and culminating in a blaze of rococo splendour with Tiepolo, Canaletto, Guardi, Melendez, Greuze and Goya. This catalogue includes a history of the directors who formed the collection, and the owners and dealers from whom they bought paintings. Eric Zafran provides entries on the individual paintings by distinguished scholars.

Testing the Waters

wooden panels on which were displayed actual human veins, arteries and nerves. Donated to the young Royal Society in 1667, the panels were seen as works of art as much as tools for learning and teaching. Even in 1702 Evelyn was still stressing their literal, static qualities. The conflict between rationalism and empiricism is illu minated through an account of the personal war between Dr John Woodward and Dr Richard Mead, the former drawing on the accumulated wisdom and reputation rep resented by his collection of ancient texts, the latter relying on observation and practical efficacy, although at the risk of straying into quackery. In spite of his attitude to medicine, Mead was a prodigious antiquary who at his death owned 180 works by 90 artists and was responsible, with Hans Sloane and others (notably William Hogarth), for establishing London's Foundling Hospital (the first public art gallery in Britain). It was Sloane's collection of plants, animals, coins and other antiquities that formed the first core of the British Museum (1753) and, later, the Natu ral History Museum, just as John Radcliffe's library formed the core of Oxford University's Radcliffe Camera. Thankfully, the concentrated and demand ing text?liberally sprinkled with arcane language?is lightened by 10 excellent colour plates, including several of Evelyn's panels, and 62 black and white figures, just a few of which suffer from either their unsuitability for photography or a lack of con trast in printing. With 70 pages of notes, plus references, The English virtuoso informs rather than entertains but it richly rewards the effort that has to be put into its reading.

The Face of the Public

The Face of the Public Christopher J. Lukasik (bio) In two of the more influential accounts of America's transition from eighteenth-century colony to nineteenth-century nation, the body has been identified either as antithetical to the disinterestedness of civic republicanism or as instrumental to the development of a more democratic community based upon a common discourse of affective experience.1 Alternatively, I propose that the body's negative relationship to the public sphere, on the one hand, and its positive relationship to a culture of performance, on the other, were also mediated by a third entity: the legibility of permanent moral character upon the face. Postrevolutionary culture, I would like to suggest, was also characterized by the desire for a permanent, involuntary, and visible relationship between the face and moral character—what Richard Sennett has described more generally elsewhere as the "involuntary disclosure of character" (24)—which arose, in part, as a response to social and political anxieties generated by the fluid culture of performance that critics such as Jay Fliegelman, David Shields, and Nancy Ruttenberg so ably document. I seek here to complement recent explanations of the body's relationship to the public in the postrevolutionary period by situating two texts—Philip Freneau's "The Picture Gallery" (1788) and Hugh Henry Brackenridge's Modern Chivalry (1792–1815)—into the contemporary discourses of portraiture and physiognomy that they invoke. Following the recent work of art historians John Barrell, Wendy Bellion, Dorinda Evans, Brandon Fortune, Margaretta Lovell, and Ellen Miles, I explore how postrevolutionary American culture—its public portrait galleries, waxwork figures, prints, sculpture, profile portraits, silhouettes, and printed biographical portrait galleries—utilized the face to represent the abstract ideals of civic virtue and communicate exemplary character and thus participated in creating what Robert St. George has called a "visual national imaginary" (302). My analysis focuses specifically on why the rise in postrevolutionary public portraiture would be described as a political liability by Freneau in "The [End Page 413] Picture Gallery" and as a possible benefit for the democracy by Brackenridge in Modern Chivalry. Freneau's "The Picture Gallery" identifies the rapid expansion in access to portraiture, the growing commercial self-interest of the portrait painter, and the rise of public portrait galleries of distinguished Americans (such as those assembled by Charles Willson Peale, Pierre Du Simitière, James and Ellen Sharples, Charles B. F. Saint Mémin, and Joseph Delaplaine) as symptoms of a larger generic crisis in the civic function of portraiture. The problem with public portraiture, as Freneau conceives it, is that its emergent political benefit—the representation of abstract republican virtues (such as disinterestedness) to the public—is being undermined by its residual social function—the signification of distinction. As a result, portraits end up identifying civic virtue with the faces of particular persons rather than communicating it through them. In contrast, Brackenridge defends public portraiture on the grounds that its representations of the face can counter political dissimulation and serve the public interest in the new democracy. Various episodes from Modern Chivalry reveal how, on the one hand, the facial features of subordinate groups might be used to exclude them from embodying exemplary public character, while on the other, physiognomically informed portraits might be used to embody otherwise abstract political ideals in the faces of specific individuals. The asymmetries in Modern Chivalry's application of the logic of physiognomic distinction to the public—individual and politically inclusive for dominant groups, collective and politically exclusive for subordinate groups—provides us with a postrevolutionary precursor to the epistemology of race in America, one in which the representation of racial difference consists not simply in the opposition between white and black or master and slave, but in whether a person's face first identifies the essential features of his individual character or his collective identity.2 Freneau and the Problem of the Postrevolutionary Portrait When "a person of any condition whatsoever, have he but as much money as the painter asks," can sit for a portrait, "this is a great abuse" (165) wrote the artist Gérard de Lairesse, because portraiture should teach "posterity to emulate the same virtues" (164) as those displayed by the sitter.3...

KELLEY, P. H., KOWALEWSKI, M. & HANSEN, T. A. (eds) 2003. Predator–Prey Interactions in the Fossil Record. Topics in Geobiology Series Volume 20. xvi + 464 pp. New York, Boston, Dordrecht, London, Moscow: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers. Price Euros 115.00, US $115.00, £74.00 (hard covers). ISBN 0 306 47489 1

KELLEY, P. H., KOWALEWSKI, M. & HANSEN, T. A. (eds) 2003. Predator–Prey Interactions in the Fossil Record. Topics in Geobiology Series Volume 20. xvi + 464 pp. New York, Boston, Dordrecht, London, Moscow: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers. Price Euros 115.00, US $115.00, £74.00 (hard covers). ISBN 0 306 47489 1 - Volume 140 Issue 6

The Development of Marketing in the Canadian Museum Community, 1840-1989

Since the late 1960s, marketers have increasingly been interested in the application of marketing theories and practices to nonprofit and public organizations, including museums and art galleries. Although there has been some attempt on the part of marketing academics to understand the nature of museums and conduct research within museum environments, much of this work has failed to recognize the political context of museums and has tended to adopt an American or European focus. Canadian museums differ from their counterparts in the United States and Britain in the emphasis they place on the marketing of an idea: the sovereign nation. This article takes a chronological approach, detailing the social, economic, and political influences that have effected the development of marketing strategies from the beginning of the museum community in Canada in the early 1800s through the end of the 1980s.

Going Dutch: The Development of Collaborative Practices Between Higher Education and Museums and Galleries

This study reports on a very successful collaboration between teacher education courses in Manchester and Amsterdam and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The central aim of the initiative was to promote and sustain partnerships between Higher Education (HE) institutions, public galleries and schools with a view to developing, delivering and sharing good practice in art and design within a European context.

Portrait of the Self

Portrait of the Self

Painting in public gallery : the early stages of exhibition in modern Kyoto

Painting in public gallery : the early stages of exhibition in modern Kyoto

PEOPLE

PEOPLE

Art Theft: An Exploratory Study of the Illegitimate Art Market in Australia

The stolen art market is a large and highly profitable illegitimate industry. Despite the costs of art theft to the art industry and to society as a whole, little research has been conducted in this field. The present study gathered information about the prevalence, frequency and characteristics of art theft in Australia, as well as the types of people involved in the illegitimate art market; suppliers, distributors and purchasers. Data were collected from 27 interviews with art market and other professionals, including representatives from public and private galleries, auction houses, insurance firms, private dealers and law enforcement. A market system model is proposed as a framework within which art thefts that occur in Australia can be considered.

Defining Militancy: Radical Protest, the Constitutional Idiom, and Women's Suffrage in Britain, 1908–1909

May some definition be given of the word “militant”? (Chelsea delegate Cicely Hamilton)Scholarship on the women's suffrage movement in Britain has reached a curious juncture. No longer content to chronicle the activities or document the contributions of single organizations, historians have begun to analyze the movement's strategies of self-advertisement and to disentangle its racial, imperial, and gendered ideologies. Perhaps the most striking development in recent scholarship on suffrage, however, has been the proliferating discourse on militancy among literary critics, a development with which few historians have engaged. Yet, while militancy has spawned a veritable subfield in literary studies, continually generating new articles and books, these accounts portray the phenomenon in similarly reductive terms. After 1903 the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), under the leadership of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, revitalized a genteel and moribund women's suffrage movement. The WSPU introduced the use of militancy, first interrupting Liberal Party meetings and heckling political speakers, then moving to the use of street theater, such as large-scale demonstrations, and ultimately to the destruction of government and private property, including smashing windows, slashing paintings in public galleries, and setting fire to buildings and pillar-boxes. Once the Liberal government introduced forcible feeding as an antidote to the suffragette hunger strike, militants created a visual activism, dependent upon the exhibition of women's tortured bodies as spectacle. By this account, the activities of the WSPU became exemplary of what critic Barbara Green has called “performative activism” and “visibility politics” in early twentieth-century feminist praxis, creating “almost entirely feminine communities where women celebrated, suffered, spoke with, and wrote for other women,” and that “allowed women to put themselves on display for other women.”

Dramatic Justice?: The Aftermath of the Holocaust in Ronald Harwood's Taking Sides and The Handyman

There are many obvious parallels between the action that takes place in a courtroom and that which commonly occurs in the theatrical space. The trial is performative: within the courtroom, both the public gallery and the jury provide an audience, while lawyers and judges display a grasp of rhetorical skills designed to assist them in out-performing the witnesses. The end result of the trial is not only the verdict, but a completed narrative, pieced together from witness testimony. In this respect, the lawyer can be paralleled to the playwright, choosing what each individual should reveal at any particular moment and, in the lawyer's case, persuading them to do so. Certainly, playwrights themselves have often realised that as a dramatic device, interrogation, whether it takes place in a courtroom or elsewhere, is an economical means of conveying precisely elicited information to an audience. Not only does the trial format dispense with establishing dialogue and elements of exposition, but the question of whether witnesses are speaking the whole truth provides an undertow of dramatic tension.

Mary Potter: A Life in Painting

Neither a Baptist.. ...nor a Bohemian limbo overlooking the Eyot not a war artist Harley street The Red House Crag House - a mid-career overview change of house Att becomes Mary Red Studio - the Whitechapel the new art centre Red studio - settling in prints and portraits deaths and illnesses Kenneth Clark development of painting against the odds Serpentine. Appendices: exhibitions painting in public galleries.

Judge's Right to Close the Public Gallery

Judge's Right to Close the Public Gallery

Everyday Australia: An etho-prosaic photography

This essay will consider the emergence in Australia, especially in the 1970s, of a particular style ofvemacular photography, most frequently in the work of women photographers such as Sue Ford, Ruth Maddison, Micky Allan, Virginia Coventry and Sandy Edwards but also in work by Jon Rhodes and many others.2 This work emerged at a moment of heightened interest in the possibilities of the photographic image just at the point of the establishment of photography departments in art schools and public galleries in Australia. This concurrence has had lasting effects on the photographic image of Australia, shifting it beyond the dominant image of pioneering Anglo-Celtic heroism and masculine mateship towards a cultural portrait which is more disparate, incorporating a different, more multiple sense of nation, which is deeply contentious. Its earliest practitioners were largely selftaught, and although influences from the critical uses of photography in Europe and the USA were evident in a number of cases, there was also a tendency to eschew influence in forging a particular local practice. A concern with the everyday and especially with the details of women's lives were key elements of this work. But there is also a certain faith in photography's capacity to reveal social truths, a faith which was substantially shaken by the late 1970s. Critical theories of the image and of gender and aesthetics displaced this work in the 1980s, but it retains what Catriona Moore has called a ‘shifting etho-poetics’,3 which is worthy of further consideration.

The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century

The Pleasures of the Imagination examines the birth and development of English high in the eighteenth century. It charts the growth of a literary and artistic world fostered by publishers, theatrical and musical impresarios, picture dealers and auctioneers, and presented to th public in coffee-houses, concert halls, libraries, theatres and pleasure gardens. In 1660, there were few professional authors, musicians and painters, no public concert series, galleries, newspaper critics or reviews. By the dawn of the nineteenth century they were all aprt of the cultural life of the nation. John Brewer's enthralling book explains how this happened and recreates the world in which the great works of English eighteenth-century art were made. Its purpose is to show how literature, painting, music and the theatre were communicated to a public increasingly avid for them. It explores the alleys and garrets of Grub Street, rummages the shelves of bookshops and libraries, peers through printsellers' shop windows and into artists' studios, and slips behind the scenes at Drury Lane and Covent Garden. It takes us out of Gay and Boswell's London to visit the debating clubs, poetry circles, ballrooms, concert halls, music festivals, theatres and assemblies that made the culture of English provincial towns, and shows us how the national landscape became one of Britain's greatest cultural treasures. It reveals to us a picture of English artistic and literary life in the eighteenth century less familiar, but more suprising, more various and more convincing than any we have seen before.

Generating and Receiving Contextualized Interpretations of Figurative Sculptures

The primary goal of the experiment was to examine whether emotional and intellectual responses to sculptures increase or decrease over time. A second purpose was to explore the effects on these ratings of generating or receiving accounts of what was happening in these scenes. Seventy-two subjects viewed four groups of figurative sculptures in a public gallery and rated them twice on nine 7-point scales. They generated interpretations for two sculptures and received interpretations for two others between the first and second ratings. Results showed that emotional responses predominated during the initial encounter, while intellectual activity was more significant in the second one. Generating interpretations reduced the tendency for emotional impact and perceived originality to diminish over time. A qualitative analysis suggested four kinds of written interpretations; objectifying, personalizing, universalizing, and metaphorizing.

The Financial Value of Cultural, Heritage and Scientific Collections: A Public Management Necessity

The Australian community devotes substantial resources to building and maintaining public collections, such as its public museums and galleries. There has been comment in this journal and elsewhere on the case for placing a financial value on cultural, heritage and scientific collections. In this paper the framework proposed by Carnegie and Wolnizer (1995) is extended to show that the valuation of the service flows that come from public collections is not only feasible; it is also desirable from a public management perspective. The paper presents the case for valuing public collections and analyses alternative valuation procedures. It concludes that the valuation of public collections is an essential component of any sound system of management of the resources applied to the running of activities such as public museums and art galleries.

The Struggle for a Los Angeles Art Museum, 1890-1940

The first known attempt to raise money to build an art museum in city came from members of Ruskin Art Club. The Ruskin Art Club (also first woman's club in Los Angeles) derived its name from famous English art critic, John Ruskin, and was founded in 1888. members, finding themselves in a city claiming only a score of artists, mostly amateurs, no full-time commercial art galleries, one small, recently organized art school and no public art gallery, realized they'd have to revert to their own resources to learn about art. Initiating a program of self study, they took art history systematically, first studying various media: prints, oils, watercolors, architecture, sculpture; and then studied art history chronologically from prehistoric times to present. Most importantly, within two years of its organization, club began to organize exhibitions. The first of famous Old Master etchings the finest prints ever seen west of Philadelphia was hung in a room in Potomac Block at 223 Broadway. By arranging exhibitions, club members were acting perfectly within traditional women's roles. Nineteenth-century attitudes reserved such things as charitable, moral, and cultural aspects of a community to sex whose temperaments most naturally prepared them for such works. In 1892 club took a further step and attempted to raise funds to purchase a collection of art as a nucleus for a local art museum. Its members envisioned erection of a multipurpose building housing not only art gallery but public

Old traditions and new ways in the acquisitions policies of German public art galleries

Old traditions and new ways in the acquisitions policies of German public art galleries