Previous Posts: June 2024

The proposed PhD project, ’Experimental Approaches to Global Histories of Art and Architecture’, will uncover and historicise experimental approaches to the history of art and architecture, with the aim of exploring diverse epistemological viewpoints. We are interested in PhD projects on artists, architects, historians, critics, and curators who used alternative media to challenge the narratives and methodologies of the history of art and architecture. The PhD project could focus on objects and practices that take the form of artworks, buildings, more complex intermedia projects, or curatorial and pedagogical experiments. The experimental practices under study may have emerged at any point from the nineteenth century to today, anywhere in world. Methodologically, the project encourages PhD candidates to uncover unpublished and under-examined sources that can help us rethink existing disciplinary frameworks.

This year’s exhibition reveals how Turner captured environmental and social developments that would go on to change Britain and the world‘s climates forever. This will be the first exhibition dedicated to this subject. Highly attuned to changes in the landscape and atmosphere, Turner captured them in his ground-breaking paintings, drawings and engravings. Through his art, he documented plumes of smoke, burning furnaces, urban sprawl, deforested landscapes, overfishing and extreme weather. The exhibition will also seek to connect the changes that Turner was observing and capturing in beautiful works of art, with changes to the environment that we are currently seeing.

This new role will further develop BMT's already exceptional learning offer to embed lifelong learning into BMT's practice whilst supporting the organisation to develop its emerging research practice.

This role will be the strategic lead of lifelong learning across BMT, delivering the Lifelong Learning Strategy. This includes strategic leadership of the formal learning program across BMT. The role will support the Learning Manager and Learning Officers with program design and liaise with Primary, Higher and Further Education providers in the city and region to deliver strategic aims for equitable access to heritage education.

The exhibition includes a study for Rembrandt’s first masterpiece; Greuze’s virtuoso depiction of a young cook made for his friend Jean-Georges Wille; Delacroix’s intimate portrait of Jenny, his confidante and caretaker; and a striking watercolor landscape by Cézanne. Also in the gift are significant sheets by major artists such as Rubens, Guercino, Jordaens, Watteau, Géricault, Constable, Degas, Renoir, Seurat, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, Rodin, Vuillard, Bonnard, and Gris, including many rarely seen drawings. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.

The Royal Castle in Warsaw has added several hundred new works of art to its collection in the past few years, including paintings, drawings, engravings, furniture, porcelain, items of silver and also militaria. Among the acquired objects were over 60 paintings dating from the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries, executed by representatives of important European art centres, as well as Polish and contemporary artists active in Poland. The acquisition of paintings is conducted strictly in compliance with the most significant tenets of the Royal Castle's approved activities, which include gathering historically significant items, putting on temporary and permanent exhibitions, and making its collections accessible to the public for scientific and educational purposes.

The eleven paintings on display in this exhibition span a wide range of genres, periods, themes and origins, including the Quattrocentro of Florence, the trend in Baroque painting initiated by Caravaggio's students and continuators, the animal portraits of the Dutch Golden Age, Venetian vedute, the Renaissance works of Piedmont and Venice, the portrait painting of the Enlightenment, and the Classicist depiction of ancient history.

One of the main goals of this unique series is to understand the complex and multi-layered interaction between women and the evolution of a major national museum. It will include new studies focused on female artists’ production and their presence or absence in museum rooms. But it will go beyond these established topics to examine the link between the formation of the collections of the Prado Museum and women patrons. It will also commission work on women who inspired and received works of art that were incorporated into the collections, not forgetting the contribution of women in technical and ancillary roles. The broad chronology will enable us to trace and reflect the changing role of women and their relationship with the arts, as well as the evolution of a major Western cultural institution and its dependence on women.

Presenting a more expansive and inclusive history of sculpture, Great Women Sculptors surveys the work of more than 300 trailblazing artists from over 60 countries, spanning 500 years from the Renaissance to the present day.

Organized alphabetically, each artist is represented by an image and newly commissioned text. This wide-ranging survey champions the best-known women sculptors from art history alongside today’s rising stars. From more recognizable names such as Camille Claudel, Gego, Barbara Hepworth, and Yayoi Kusama to some of today’s most significant contemporary artists including Huma Bhaba, Mona Hatoum, and Simone Leigh, this book showcases 500 years of sculptural creativity in one accessible, visually stunning volume.

Redisplaying a room that is dedicated to pre-1600 works heavy on Christian iconography takes some thinking when your aim is to make it accessible to the residents of Birmingham, one of the most ethnically diverse communities in Britain. ‘The walkthrough is a Western European narrative, with many gaps and problems,’ Powell tells me as we amble through the galleries ahead of the reopening. ‘For a long time the Barber’s collecting was done in a purist “connoisseurial” way. The fact that there seems to be one single lens here is quite problematic – and the way it presents the idea of “masterpieces”, with that very male sense.’

At the Barber, that very male sense can be hard to escape. Only four of the paintings in a 152-strong collection are by women. The first of these to have been acquired remains by some distance the most memorable: a startlingly direct portrait of the Countess Golovina, all smiling candour, by Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1797/1800). It was purchased by Hamish Miles, the Institute’s third director, in 1980.Works on paper aside, the three successive women directors have not acquired many more pieces by women between them. Kalinsky made some headway here – one of the last works she purchased was Maria Tassaert’s Still Life with a Garland of Fruit (c. 1660s), with its rutilant cherries and luminous grapes – but Powell sees lifting that torch as a key part of her mission. ‘We need to go further,’ she says, a note of urgency in her voice. ‘We have to move that forward.’

Tātaki Auckland Unlimited Gallery Director Kirsten Lacy says, “War Dance at Taranaki, New Zealand, Mount Egmont, in the distance is an incredibly rare artwork and a major addition to the Gallery’s collection. A small painting with a huge story to tell, this work holds immense historical importance, and I am delighted to be bringing this into a public collection where all can enjoy and learn from it.”

The Gallery purchased the painting from Art+Object by a private treaty sale for $885,000 with funding from several trust funds dedicated to supporting the Gallery’s collection, contributions from private individuals and the Gallery’s collection development budget.

“Artworks of this calibre are rare on the market – the last time the Gallery purchased a historic New Zealand work of this significance was 34 years ago in 1990,” adds Lacy.

• To lead and inspire the Collections directorate to achieve and maintain excellence in the stewardship of the collection.

• To play a role in the strategic leadership of the museum, including as a member of the Directorate Group, deputising for the Director and contributing to the development and delivery of the Museum’s
strategy.

• Motivating senior managers to ensure continued excellence in the face of constrained resources, a complex and long-term plan for changes to the estate, and significant external pressures.

• Leading and inspiring high performing teams of specialists.

This exhibition sets out to decipher the elements of colonial power within the iconography of certain works in the Thyssen-Bornemisza collections. A selection of paintings will reveal “invisibilised” stories of racial domination, marronage and the civil rights struggle, as well as the introduction of the modern mercantile system based on European military control, the use of enslaved African workers and the appropriation of firstly Latin American and later Asian and African land and raw materials. Visitors will be introduced to fictitious representations of new Arcadias and will witness the western projection of its unsatisfied desires in the form of the “Orient” and the construction of the “other” as barbarian or primitive.