Tate Gallery

Art museums are institutions with the general purpose to acquire, preserve and provide access to the works of art. 1 Thus, they have the unique ability to decide which art works will represent man's finest works, shaping -in this way -an aspect of society's understanding of the past. Hence, their role is of extremely importance and art museums intentionnowadays isto provide to their public, not just an aesthetic experience, but educational outcomes too.

Let's start with the poster and catalogue cover of the Tate's 'Kurt Schwitters in Britain' exhibition, which both feature Schwitters' 1947 collage En Morn. On each, the strip of white print running along the lower edge of the original is lacking. 'These are the things we are fighting for' it reads, in the manner of a caption. No doubt the curators had good grounds for the omission, but to find a complete, horizontal sentence in a Schwitters collage is unusualnot to say suspectso this one at least deserves special attention. Automatically we associate it with the dewy-eyed blonde on the right who is encircled by a somewhat forbidding jumble of elements dominated by the colours of the flag of Weimar Germany. Below her, an upturned photo of a respectable Victorian male, a piece of arrow-like frame and a red stain draw our attention to the irregular and comparatively nondescript grid of torn and crumpled papers on the left. Is the blonde gazing at a grubby bus ticket or into a blank future? Who might be fighting for what in 1947? And who does 'we' refer to? Artists? The British? Schwitters was of course German, if alienated from his homeland and on the brink of gaining British citizenship. Is he preaching, mocking, warning or just plain teasing? For a clue, we might look to another assemblage on show, which he has entitled As You Like It.

As 1960s Australia struggled to reconcile its emerging identity, Sidney Nolan explored the country’s contemporary character creating portraits of everyday women and giving them mythic makeovers, mixing national and international artistic icons with memories of Australia’s light and the spirit of the country.

Nolan had demonstrated time-and-time again, that both the heroic and the tragic formed part of the distinctive Australian consciousness. From London he said of his February 1964 trip to Australia “I was fascinated by truly Australian faces. I found myself looking at them for the first time and I wanted to paint them, but not masked as I had painted Ned Kelly”. In a contemporary series, of over 50 works completed between 27 April and 12 June 1964, he considered women heroes and anti-heroes, their countenance an attempt to hold a human significance in the vastness of the country, a modern representation of so much of the adversity, distance, size, social background and class difference in white Australia’s short but intense history.

His desire to paint them was a way of capturing their spirit and he dubbed them, with great affection, his ‘Adelaide Ladies’. Nolan’s deft touch nationalised bitter, optimistic and even cosmic themes. He pinpointed a time in modern society and a role that only women could own.

For all their size, they were full of expressive depths. For all their stillness, they were full of life and the spirit of the country. They flashed around the globe on the covers of international bestsellers, took part in New York exhibitions and graced London poetry festivals, personifying Australian isolation and self-examination. But their gender and nature blinded male critics and curators to the artistic, tragic and heroic identities hidden within. Many of their secrets have been forgotten, but they should always be remembered as a master painter’s response to the face of contemporary Australia in the 1960s.

To cite this article use: 
Andrew Turley, ‘Painted Ladies’, Portrait: Magazine of Australian and International Portraiture, NPG Australia, Spring (Sept) 2015, p.62-67

In the J.M.W. Turner Bequest, the composition of sketch D35925–consisting only of a tan wash, one segmented black line, and one unbroken red one – seems peculiarly modern to eyes untrained in the period. While it is anachronistic to view it as an abstract painting, the assignment to section CCCLXIV as “one of a large number of sketches on loose sheets of paper depicting coastal terrain and seagoing vessels in various combinations”  would likely strike most viewers as odd. I argue that the cataloguing of images within the J.M.W. Turner Bequest often results in a radical misrepresentation of the content contained therein. I also argue that this problem has roots in the naturalistic and nationalistic biases of its two most famous cataloguers.

The attempt to frame the image as a “boat,” rather than pay attention to its material substance, has roots in John Ruskin and A.J. Finberg’s catalogs. Ruskin connected his catalog to the naturalistic Turner he conjured in Modern Painters: Volume One. Finberg, however, viewed Turner’s sketches as “pictoral symbols” for de facto natural objects in a hypothesized private language.  Both writers expressed aesthetic naturalism firmly in terms of British identity. In Ruskin’s case, it was the degradations of Indian art in “The Conventional Power of Art Over Nations.” In Finberg’s, it was a Francophobic Anti-Impressionism. In questioning the current catalog’s framing of the image, I hope to turn attention to the sketch itself, and rediscover how we can view D35925 as something other than boats at sea.


  1. John Chu, ‘?Boats at Sea c.1830–45 by Joseph Mallord William Turner’, catalogue entry, June 2015, in David Blayney Brown (ed.), J.M.W. Turner: Sketchbooks, Drawings and Watercolours, Tate Research Publication, November 2016, accessed 27 April 2020.
2.  A.J. Finberg, Turner’s Sketches and Drawings, (London: Methuen & Co Ltd, 1910), 122-23

Peter Lely is known to have painted two portraits of Katherine Pegge, mistress of Charles II and mother to the Earl of Plymouth. This paper advances the theory that those portraits are possibly well known Lely works with no fully confimred confirmation of the subject.

Access is a key element for an architectural work. In museums, access takes on special significance due to the connection between two very different worlds, and it is therefore associated with an 'access ritual', in which three parts can be considered for study: preliminary, liminal, and postliminary. Recently, the enforcement of security elements has been implemented differently and in distinct parts of the entrance, which, in many cases, breaks the flow of passage. To analyse this situation, we have examined the seven most visited museums in the world and two emblematic cases in France, where the 'ritual of passage' is contrasted with security elements, in order to reflect on how to link security elements to museum access.

'Guillaume Évrard’s archival research on the Royal Academy of Art’s involvement in the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1878 represents another constructive contribution to the body of research initiated by Paul Greenhalgh into the nineteenth-century culture of international exhibitions that is proving an increasingly helpful way of reading the evolution the rapidly evolving "event culture" of sprawling art fairs now dominating the global contemporary art market.'
Tom Flynn, Kingston University, London
http://www.cercles.com/review/r71/Gould.html

This paper focuses on the role of the Royal Academy of Arts (R.A.) in the preparation of the visual arts exhibition Great Britain presented in the galleries of the 1878 Paris Exposition universelle et internationale on the Champ de Mars.

While, in the last quarter of the 19th century, London is an imperial metropolis and Great Britain, a global economic and industrial power, the R.A. is still able to come to the conclusion that, “whereas Belgian and French pictures are well known and command a sale all over Europe, English Pictures are but little known and esteemed out of England.”

Great Britain was in 1878 the most important foreign exhibiting country in the world exhibition, across the various sections of the event, with the largest area of galleries at disposal, including the fine arts galleries.
International and universal exhibitions were major commercial events, although items were not available for immediate sale (at least in Paris), and political gatherings, even if most visitors were more enthused by unique attractions than by grand discourses.

This paper relies on original research conducted within the archival resources of the Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, London. It aims at analysing the issues at stake and the more or less clearly defined objectives in the preparation of the British fine arts galleries, between artistic and commercial interests.

The exhibition 'Manet: Inventeur du moderne' attracted 470,000 visitors at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris. The term blockbuster derives from the military vocabulary, but in the American slang of the fifties, it has traditionally been associated to the commercial success of a play. Nowadays, we use it as related to the entertainment industry, though it is more common to hear it when we talk about a film with a large budget .
What is noticeable is the size and scale of this phenomenon, its promotion and press coverage. Only recently, the term has been employed to characterise highly popular exhibitions attracting wide audiences. This expression might seem surprising since these exhibitions mostly feature high or fine art paintings, while the term blockbuster used to refer to more 'popular' forms of entertainment.
Accordingly, Open University lecturer Emma Barker, in her essay 'Exhibiting the canon: the blockbuster show', investigates the popularity of such events. Her article, published in Contemporary Cultures of Display, is devised for students who undertake a distance-learning course in art history; it is therefore well structured and quite accessible.

The major survey of Australian art that opened at the Tate Gallery in January 1963 is often compared unfavourably with 'Recent Australian Painting', Bryan Robertson's curation of contemporary painting held at the Whitechapel Gallery some eighteen months earlier. 'Australian Painting: Colonial, Impressionist, Contemporary' was openly criticised in the press following its preview showing at the Adelaide Festival of Arts in 1962 and these criticisms surfaced again in some of the reviews of the Tate show that appeared in the London papers. The exhibition has become more famous for the controversy surrounding it than for being, as it undoubtedly was, the biggest historical survey of Australian painting to be held in London since 1923. In a vociferous letter to the Sydney Morning Herald, Albert Tucker condemned the under-representation of contemporary works, accusing the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board (CAAB) of perpetrating 'a shocking deception on the state gallery directors, the Tate Gallery Trustees, Australian artists and the Australian public.'

Review of the exhibition catalogue "Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Pasts", produced to accompany the exhibition of the same name at Tate Britain, 2016.

Published by College Art Association (CAA)
http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/3237#.WqAW9GWtv8s

In 2012, Tate Britain used J. E. Millais' "Lorenzo and Isabella" to draw attention to their Pre-Raphaelites exhibition. Phallic symbols of course always cause some exitement, but Tate missed a chance to let the visitors take a new look at Millais' "Christ in the House of His Parents". In that 1850 painting, Millais quite probably alluded to two older works of art. The first one is "Edward VI and the Pope, An Allegory of Reformation" by an anonymous painter (16th century, NPG 4165) and the other one is the print "Ahasuerus consulting the records" (1564) by Philip Galle (after Maarten van Heemskerck). The connection between these last two images already has been subject to research (Margaret Aston, 1994). I assume that in an illustration to Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark" (1876), Henry Holiday alluded to all three of them. And the comparison of a detail in all of the four images (and the preperatory draft to Holiday's Snark illustration) is funnier, than that phallic shadow in "Lorenzo and Isabella".  --- See also: https://www.academia.edu/10062371/Red-headed_Boys

More (by Albert Boime) on sources to Millais' painting: http://www.albertboime.com/Articles/29.pdf

2015-03-17 (page 4): http://www.ipernity.com/doc/goetzkluge/22708359/ added to this file

2016-05-14: Major rework

In 1970 the sculptor Barbara Hepworth published her Pictorial Autobiography. That same year she reacquired Infant (1929), sold forty years previously, for display in her prospective museum, which opened, after her death in 1975, on the site of her studio. These moves coincided with a drive that had seen Hepworth produce numerous bronzes from earlier carvings since 1958. Each of these archival projects – book, museum, sculpture – have served as powerful interpretive frameworks through which Hepworth’s life and work have been viewed.

What can we make of Hepworth’s impulse to archive? How do these different archives intersect? And how might one undermine another? At the museum an atypical archive subsists in the form of two preserved studios, the contents of which ostensibly remain the same as they were on the day Hepworth died. Although some arrangement was made after her death – including the movement of an uncast plaster edition of the wood carving Oval Sculpture (Delos) (1955) – there are untouched areas, such as the contents of cupboards. These studios, which speak of sculptural process, also speak of other, unquantifiable things.

Through new interviews with museum staff past and present, archivists cataloguing Hepworth’s papers, conservators addressing the studios, museum visitors, and contemporary artists working with Hepworth’s legacy, this paper will navigate between these different sculptural archives, exploring both how a famous sculptor archives her legacy and how different audiences interact with and interpret these archives today.

In this review, I discuss the exhibition 'Conceptual Art in Britain 1964–1979' (Tate Britain, London, 2016), which aimed to provide a comprehensive account of the movement and contextualize Conceptual art in the history of contemporary art in Britain. My review points to the problematics of nation-centered histories of an international phenomenon as well as to the pitfalls of periodization and terminology, and argues for a more diverse history of Conceptual art and conceptualism in and beyond the UK.

Twitter played a significant role during the festival ‘Art in Action’ at The Tanks, Tate Modern’s new space dedicated to live art. This paper analyses the tweets that mentioned The Tanks during this period and covers the process of collecting, coding and analysing the data following three different lines: Twitter as a communication tool, as a conversation tool to engage with the visitors and as an audience research tool.

Download PhD here: https://researchonline.rca.ac.uk/3963/

This thesis argues that artists’ legacies are not fixed entities with circumscribed arenas of knowledge but are in constant flux and in continual contact with diverse epistemologies and ontologies. The legacy of the British modernist sculptor Dame Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) at Tate serves as the case study for this research in its exploration of questions of value formation and knowledge production in relation to artistic legacy and its interpretation and mediation within a museological context.

This research explores these questions by means of investigating the specificities of Hepworth’s legacy – both her ‘cultural legacy’ in terms of how she is commonly understood and her ‘patrimonial legacy’ in terms of the objects and rights she bequeathed. In identifying the ways in which the authoritative construction and mediation of the patrimonial legacy impacts upon the received understanding of Hepworth’s cultural legacy, the thesis argues that this patrimonial legacy also contains within it the ambiguity, alterity and complexity that point towards alternative ways of knowing and valuing.

As this research argues, Hepworth’s legacy is framed by an authoritative and dominant narrative that has led to it becoming naturalised and unquestioned. As an AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership held with Tate and the Royal College of Art and taking place at a pivotal moment in Tate’s role in the shaping of Hepworth’s legacy, the need for a new methodological approach was particularly pressing. The method used in this research is designed to provoke and instigate change within understandings of Hepworth’s legacy. More specifically, it is formulated through a practice-led, curatorial research enquiry into an object of her patrimony – a stone-carving chisel from the preserved studios at the Tate-managed Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden in St Ives, Cornwall. Bringing this tool out of this static framing, the research reframes the tool to become the focus of discursive discussion and object-handling at displays and events at Tate St Ives and Tate Britain. In so doing, the research asks: How can a curatorial research methodology serve to disrupt the established narrative of Hepworth’s legacy and what new knowledge and value is subsequently revealed? How is value formed and how can it be reformed differently?

As the thesis demonstrates, Hepworth’s legacy contains within it both a formalised, authoritative, historical motivation and mediation (constructed and naturalised through art-historical and museological methods), as well as a tacit, discursive and changeable approach, as found most pressingly in the irregularities and ambiguities of her material practice and the presence of this within the museum context. The former contributes towards the key problem of Hepworth’s legacy – its appearance as being fixed, unambiguous and naturalised – while the latter provides the opportunity for re-evaluation and, ultimately, for change. 

In the situated institutional context of Tate, therefore, this project’s expansive, practice-led curatorial research method breaks up the homogeneity of the museum’s traditional and conventional systems of inherited knowledge and, in so doing, both recognises the way in which its ‘patrimonial knowledge’ has shaped the dominant reality of Hepworth’s legacy, while also opening out that legacy to the multiple worlds it actually functions in and connects with.

Généralement envisagé sous l’angle de sa position privilégiée de prototype, voire de mythe fondateur, le Musée du Luxembourg a très longtemps échappé aux études comparatives. Ce phénomène a perduré jusqu’à ce qu’un chercheur espagnol, Jesús Pedro Lorente, replace ce musée dans la perspective du développement d’un réseau informel et international d’institutions privées et publiques destinées à promouvoir l’art contemporain, élargissant ainsi à l’Europe et à l’Amérique du Nord le point de vue adopté par Daniel J. Sherman quelques années plus tôt, dans une thèse pionnière. Contaminée par la prégnance du modèle établi par le Louvre, l’analyse problématique des relations entre le Musée du Luxembourg et ses émules étrangers demeure en outre menacée par la tentation « d’isoler les développements nationaux de leur contexte européen ». Un autre risque relève d’un point méthodologique : pour étudier les possibles « modèles », ne vaut-il pas mieux procéder d’abord à partir d’une analyse des enjeux de la création des « imitations » ? En outre, il est bien difficile de trancher la question à l’heure d’aborder les pratiques de l’imitation, de la copie, de la parodie et du pastiche, qui toutes ne peuvent pas prétendre traduire la complexité d’un procédé de transfert conscient et sélectif de données originales plus ou moins formelles d’un contexte socioculturel à un autre. Si certaines de ces pratiques – la parodie, le pastiche ou même la transposition – relèvent de la logique de l’hypertextualité, d’autres, comme la citation, l’allusion ou le plagiat, relèveraient de l’intertextualité, ou encore de la métatextualité, comme c’est le cas du commentaire : certaines de ces pratiques n’excluent pas, nous allons le vérifier, la possibilité d’une réversibilité de la logique transtextuelle que le texte source entretient avec le texte qui en est l’émanation directe ou indirecte. Toutefois, dans quelle mesure la convocation des trois pratiques littéraires que nous venons d’énumérer permet-elle d’éclairer les procédés à l’œuvre dans le processus de création de deux musées nationaux à la fin du XIXe siècle? La réponse à cette question présupposera la vérification de deux hypothèses : premièrement, que la notion de « modèle » n’est pas pertinente pour le champ muséal ; deuxièmement, que l’idée d’une diffusion, qui évoque un mouvement centrifuge, multidirectionnel, assimilable à l’exportation d’un produit culturel, ne se justifie pas, tout au moins dans les cas que nous avons choisi d’étudier dans une perspective comparative, en nous appuyant sur un examen approfondi des archives et de la presse.