ARTES member Maria Vittoria Spissu has organised a symposium with the title ‘Empire of Role Models? Championing and Challenging Global Ideals in the Early Modern Iberian Worlds’. The symposium will take place on the 19th and 20th June at the University of Bologna. Full details of the symposium and the programme are contained in the flyer attached below:
Mario Vargas Llosa – a tribute
The following is a tribute to Mario Vargas Llosa by Susan Wilson, an ARTES Trustee, Painter, and Senior Member of The Royal Drawing School. Vargas Llosa, a Peruvian novelist, journalist, and politician, was born on 28th March 1936 and died in Lima on 13th April 2025. As Susan explains Vargas Llosa had a significant influence on Susan’s life and her work as an artist:
‘I was 24 when I landed in Lima from Tahiti, having left NZ for the first time. Lima dazzled me, amazed me, and I could not get enough of the streets, architecture, museums and jirons, where I stayed in the Residential Roma, and ate Brazo gitano daily from a cake shop near the hotel.
Arriving in London, it wasn’t long before I discovered Vargas Llosa. “Aunt Julia and The Scriptwriter” enchanted me. Lituma, the sergeant on his rounds in the foggy night air of Callao, the radio shack that broadcasts the soap operas, with this, the smell and sight of Lima returned. Vargas Llosa campaigned to save the jirons with their narrow streets and characteristic wrought iron.
I went on to read “The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta” , an account of a revolutionary cell in Jauja, vivid and precise. You are Peru when you read it. You are high up, in the Andes in the mist and rain, overshadowed by looming peaks, or in cheap rooms in Lima conspiring. Rooms that Llosa knew. Rooms he had lived in.
Later I devoured “A Fish in The Water” , a long account of Vargas Llosa running his campaign for Peru’s presidency spliced with his life story. One chapter goes forward, one goes back. A long, gripping and complex read following the intricacies of Peruvian politics. In this book, he tells of his job in the San Marcos Library reading and filing the earliest accounts from Spanish explorers, conquistadors, and priests of the culture. They encountered. Llosa, like Hugh Thomas saw how these early Europeans had a medieval mindset which interpreted all they saw and encountered. Mine was medical, provincial, left wing but essentially, Calvinist. The Presbyterians were the ruling class in my NZ childhood.
After crossing Peru to Bolivia in trains ( I was lucky to take one of the last trains out of Desamparados Station in Lima where we queued all morning to get on the train, up to Huancayo zigzagging all day up the Andean mountainside. One engine was in front, one to the rear. Desamparados Station is now a library. Trains no longer run. )
I took trucks and buses into Bolivia from Lake Titicaca standing up all day in a fantastical bleak golden landscape ringed by mountains through ploughed fields where huge pigs slumbered. Once, my companions and I were summoned from our perch on the truck by two men in uniform by a hut. One polished a bayonet knife throughout our conversation. They asked for our passports and one man I didn’t like kept turning it over and over, looking at its blue cover again and again and looking again and again at me. We were travelling on NZ passports, the same colour as American. Finally we were allowed to climb back up to the top of the truck. Vargas Llosa does describe how gringo tourists were taken and held hostage.
My impression has always been that “Magic Realism” is a European, Anglo-Saxon term for a world that is real. It’s inaccurate to call the writers magic realists. The culture is so complex, different, rich with roots in pre conquest customs and beliefs that we need to grasp its different reality and engage with it. On trains I saw, after many hours travelling, that mothers were very young. Mostly teenagers, they saw I was even ten years older than them, with no children in tow. They asked me about myself, I was as much a complete mystery to them as they were to me. Even the railway station, the forsaken? How could anyone name a railway station? To a traveller from a very Protestant culture where stations bore the names of the town of origin, to call a station after the Virgin of Desamparados was strange. I understand it now.
Then in Cuzco, up at 0400 to get the cheapest train to Machu picchu, we weaved our way through sleeping market traders, their children, of all ages dozing beside them well wrapped up against the cold. Misty air, pickpockets so adept they would slice your pocket without harming you to get money. Americans, sleeping later asserted that all the traders and market stall holders lived in luxury flats just out of town..
Each time I longed to go back and resume my travels I could reach for Casa Verde.
In “Aunt Julia and The scriptwriter” a curious theme emerges of dreams and of fantastical life stories told. Last year I visited Sigmund Freud’s house in Hampstead. I had never been but my psychiatrist niece was keen to go, so we went. There was a small section devoted to Freud’s connection with South American Psychiatrists who carried a long correspondence with Freud, eager to explore and follow his writings. In turn a genre of radio shows grew out of this friendship. People could phone in with their dreams which a guest Psychiatrist would interpret. It was wildly popular, and the connection can be seen in Vargas Llosa’s themes and characters and his Peruvian sense of reality and culture.
In A Fish in the Water, he describes how he worked in the San Marcos Library in Lima translating very early accounts of first European explorers and describes how these men arrived with an entirely medieval, fantastical mindset interpreting all they saw through these eyes. That thought delighted me.
Later, much later, I read Michael Jacob’s “Andes”, and here Jacobs comes to understand the culture he has immersed himself in. It isn’t going too far to say that my arduous, uncomfortable rides, standing up all day in a truck crossing the Altiplano changed my life. I was never to be the same after seeing the world Vargas LLosa so magnificently describes. The noisy, rackety,chaotic cities like La Paz, where nobody drove a car with anything more than small side lights and horns blew night and day.
The poorest shanties up in the heights of the town, the wealthy living far below, the reverse of European ideas of preferred place. In this world LLosas characters move, act and live. His is an astounding achievement. I’m going back to reread more.
In this work, entitled ‘Guadeloupe’, Susan reflects that ‘often in Spain I’ve been searching for traces of Peru‘. Susan’s latest show ‘In Ladbroke Grove’, will be held at Browse & Darby, 34 Bury Street, London SW1Y 6AY, from 2nd to 23rd May 2025.
ARTES Nigel Glendinning Lecture 2025
The annual ARTES Nigel Glendinning Lecture of 2025: Problems in Velázquez’s Portraiture will be given in person by Dr. Peter Cherry on 29 May from 6.30pm (BST) at the Instituto Cervantes, 15-19 Devereux Ct, London, WC2R 3JJ. The event will also be live streamed.
Tickets for in-person and online attendance can be obtained at the following link: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/artes-nigel-glendinning-lecture-problems-in-velazquezs-portraiture-tickets-1335260182149?aff=oddtdtcreator
Dr. Cherry’s lecture will consider a range of problems associated with the portraiture of Diego Velázquez, which have emerged in the preparation of a book-length study of the subject. Specific portraits will be used to exemplify problems of typology and chronology; naming and interpretation; and controversies around attributions and the pressure to expand the Velázquez canon. The discussion will also take into account methodological questions which have helped and hindered in framing these problems.
Dr. Peter Cherry was until 2024 a lecturer in the History of Art at Trinity College Dublin. He has had a long-standing and internationally recognised career teaching and publishing on Hispanic art and archives. His research interests have focussed on painting in Spain during the seventeenth century and particularly in the areas of still-life and genre painting, and artists working in Seville, including Velázquez and Murillo. He has recently turned his attention to the portraiture of Velázquez for a book in the Renaissance Lives series for Reaktion. He now lives in Madrid.
SAVE THE DATE!
We have two very important upcoming ARTES events:
First, our annual Glendinning Lecture will take place at 6.30pm on Thursday 29th May at the Instituto Cervantes in London. This year’s speaker will be Emeritus Professor Peter Cherry of Trinity College, Dublin, who will deliver a lecture on ‘Problems in Velázquez’. Peter’s work will be known to many of us and this is bound to be a stimulating and fascinating talk.
Second, our AGM will be held this year in London on Monday 9th June. It will begin at midday at the National Gallery, and a buffet sandwich lunch will be offered to members. We will then travel together by public transport to the new V&A East Storehouse, where we will view objects from the museum’s collection and the mudéjar Torrijos ceiling from Toledo. Paperwork for the AGM will be sent out to Membership a month in advance.
Further details for both events are to follow. We hope to see as many members attend as possible. For now, save the dates in your diary!
Symposium – Tracing Jewish Histories: The Long Lives of Medieval Hebrew Manuscripts, Judaica, and Architecture
When: 19 May – 20 May, 2025, 10:00 – 17:00
Where: Courtauld Institute of Art – Vernon Square Campus, Lecture Theatre 2
Free, Booking essential – To book your ticket, please follow this link
Works of art and architecture made by or for Jewish communities in the medieval period are often examined through the lenses of persecution and expulsion, or are contrasted against Christian or Muslim“styles.” This symposium seeks to expand and nuance these narratives in order to highlight how works of art and architecture can uniquely trace the history of particular Jewish communities by mapping their movements and traditions across generations and geographies. Medieval Jewish objects and spaces can also serve as loci to examine ideas related to collective memory and cultural identity. To that end, the symposium seeks to open new dialogues regarding the “afterlives” of medieval Jewish art more broadly, initiating discussions regarding the ways in which works of art and architecture continued to bear witness to the richness of Jewish life and culture long after they were created.
Organised by Laura Feigen and Reed O’Mara, this symposium is supported by Sam Fogg and the Mellon Foundation with additional support from The Department of Art History and Art at Case Western Reserve University.
Programme:
Monday 19 May
10.00 – 10.30: Registration opens
The Courtauld, Vernon Square Campus
10.30 – 11.00: Opening remarks, and introduction to the day
Tom Nickson, The Courtauld; Laura Feigen, The Courtauld, and Reed O’Mara, Case Western Reserve University
11.00 – 12.30: Session I – Manuscripts and movement
Chaired by Claudia Haines, Case Western Reserve University
Judith Olszowy-Schlanger, University of Oxford,
“Palaeography and the Tracing of the Origins and History of a Bilingual Psalter (MS Oxford, Corpus Christi College 10)”
Katrin Kogman-Appel, University of Münster,
“Illustrated Books, their Makers and Owners in an Age of Migration”
Javier del Barco, Universidad Complutense de Madrid,
‘“From Northern Italy to Dublin: The Journey of a Hebrew Bible at the Chester Beatty Library”
12.30 – 13.30: Lunch Break
Provided for speakers and organisers only
13.30 – 15.00: Session II – Making and remaking
Introduced by Allison Boroff, Case Western Reserve University
Chaired by Sarah Frisbie, Case Western Reserve University
Leor Jacobi, Bar Ilan University,
“Bound in Catalonia: Jewish Bookbindings Produced for Christians as Historical Witnesses”
Hila Manor, Hebrew University of Jerusalem,
“The Long Lives of the Oldest Pair of Torah Finials”
Roni Cohen, Goethe University,
“Manuscripts, Gamblers, and Medieval Hebrew Hits”
15.00 – 15.30: Break
15.30 – 17.00: Session III – New lives of architecture
Introduced by Darren Helton, Case Western Reserve University
Chaired by Natalia Munoz-Rojas, The Courtauld
Ilia Rodov, Bar-Ilan University,
“ ‘A Time to Gather Stones’: Spolia, Sacredness, and Memory in Ashkenazi Synagogues”
Eva Frojmovic, University of Leeds,,
“A Second Life in the Museum: Jewish Tombstones After the Black Death”
Franziska Kleybolte, University of Münster,
“The Synagogue-Church of Santa María la Blanca in Toledo: A Site of Jewish-Christian Memory Between Entanglement and Disentanglement”
17.00 – 18.00: Drinks reception
Open to all
———————————
Tuesday 20 May
10.00 – 11.30: Session IV – Collecting practices at large
Introduced by Olga Morgalyuk, The Courtauld
Chaired by Tess Artis, Case Western Reserve University
William Diebold, Reed College,
“The Darmstadt Haggadah’s Turbulent 1950s”
Abby Kornfeld, City University of New York
“The Róza Gomperz Endowment: Rethinking the Kaufmann Collection of Illuminated Hebrew Manuscripts”
Anna Nizza-Caplan, The Israel Museum,
“ ‘Accessible to All’: The Most Detailed Illustrated Manuscript of the Mishneh Torah”
11.30 – 11.45: Refreshment Break
Coffee and Tea provided
11.45 – 13.05: Curatorial Panel – Problems and Priorities: the acquisition and display of Jewish material culture in museums
Introduced by Sam Truman, Kress Fellow at The Courtauld
Response by Elizabeth Morrison, J. Paul Getty Museum
Simona Di Nepi, Museum of Fine Arts Boston
Riva Arnold, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Alice Minter, Victoria & Albert Museum
13.05 – 13.30: Closing Remarks
Elina Gertsman, Case Western Reserve University
CALL FOR APPLICATIONS: Juan Facundo Riaño Essay Prize, deadline 30th April 2025
ARTES is excited to announce the call for applications to the Juan Facundo Riaño Essay Prize of 2025, funded by the generous support of the Embassy of Spain, for the best art-historical essay on a Hispanic Theme. Please consult the Award section for the full description of the application requirements and the awards.
ONLINE EVENT – ‘The Spanish Gallery Collection Studies’ Series on March 11th at 6pm, UK Time
The Zurbarán Centre is looking forward to celebrating the inaugural publications in ‘The Spanish Gallery Collection Studies’ series, produced by the Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica (CEEH) in Madrid. This series commences with four volumes authored by distinguished experts on Spanish art, who conducted their research during a CEEH-funded fellowship at the Zurbarán Centre between 2021 and 2023:
Murillo’s True Portrait of the Holy King Ferdinand III by Xanthe Brooke
Artistic Exchanges between Spain and Italy, 1516-1621: Orrente Maíno, Tristán, and Cavarozzi by Piers Baker-Bates
Damaged Soul. Visual Cultures of the Repentant Mary Magdalene by Marta Cacho Casal
The Sculptural Works in the Spanish Gallery by Holly Trusted
To join the event, please use the Zoom link below (or copy and paste it into your browser).
https://durhamuniversity.zoom.us/s/99261572629
Copies of the four books can be purchased via the CEEH website: https://www.ceeh.es/en/colecciones/publications/spanish-gallery-en/
REMINDER: 29th January 6pm GMT: Goya’s Caprichos in Nineteenth-Century France: Politics of the Grotesque
The Artes and Zurbarán Center for Spanish and Latin American Art would like to remind members of the upcoming Seminar Series to be held over zoom on January 29th at 6pm GMT, by Dr. Paula Fayos Pérez. Fayos Pérez will be sharing with us her research for the her recent book, Caprichos in Nineteenth-Century France: Politics of the Grotesque (2024), published by the CEEH.
Goya’s Caprichos in Nineteenth-Century France: Politics of the Grotesque
Goya’s impact on 19th-century French art was immense and multifaceted. In Spain, he was known for the royal portraits, while in France he became celebrated for the Caprichos, which were obsessively studied by artists like Eugène Delacroix. French Romantics saw them as a satire of late 18th-century Spain, ignoring Goya’s universalism; his work holds a mirror up to humanity, and even his monsters and witches are nothing but the deformed reflection of humans. In a sort of two-way influence, Goya contributed to shaping French Romantic art–hence the beginning of modern art–while the Romantics modelled his critical image. The established interpretation of Goya is therefore partly based on Romantic stereotypes, many of which have been perpetuated to this day.
Paula Fayos Pérez received a PhD in History of Art from the University of Cambridge in 2019 with a dissertation on the influence of Goya on nineteenth-century French art and literature. She worked as a researcher in the Duke of Wellington’s private collection at Apsley House (London) and Stratfield Saye House (Hampshire). Before receiving a ‘Leonardo’ scholarship from the BBVA Foundation she held a ‘Margarita Salas’ postdoctoral fellowship to teach and conduct research at the Universities of Strasbourg and Madrid (Complutense). In 2023 she organised the international seminar Goya: grotesco / coleccionismo. She has written articles for The Burlington Magazine (2019, 2020), Boletín del Museo del Prado (2022) and Print Quarterly (2023).
To join the event, please use the Zoom link below (or copy and paste it into your browser).
CALL FOR PAPERS – Who Ruled the World? Queen Urraca and Her Contemporaries in the Early Twelfth Century
International Conference
Dates: 3 – 5 March 2026
Place: Museo Arqueológico Nacional, Madrid
Organization:
Research Grant: Intersections of Gender, Transculturalism, and Identity in Medieval Iberia:
The Recycling and Long Life of Objects and Textiles (Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation,
and Universities, PID2023-151143NA-I00, 2024-2027), PI: Verónica Carla Abenza Soria,
Universidad Complutense, Madrid
Organizer: Therese Martin, Instituto de Historia, CSIC, Madrid
This conference marks the 900th anniversary of the death of Queen Urraca of León-Castile (born
1079/80, r. 1109-1126) by investigating issues of ruling power and its material display in the early
twelfth century. Previous historiography has tended either to downplay Urraca’s seventeen-year
reign or at best to compare it with that of other queens, especially Matilda of England (d. 1167),
Melisende of Jerusalem (d. 1161), and to a lesser degree Petronila of Aragón (d. 1173). These
reigning queens, while instructive comparisons, were born respectively in 1102, 1105, and 1136;
they were from the generations after Urraca, more properly contemporaries of her son Alfonso
VII (born 1105, r. 1126-1157). Therefore this conference seeks instead to call attention to rulers
– male or female, of any religion – whose reigns were strictly contemporary to Urraca’s in the
first quarter of the twelfth century, in order to understand how her rule played out in its day, not
in hindsight.
We welcome paper proposals investigating the artworks and material culture that can be
associated with early twelfth-century rulership, including coins, seals, textiles, manuscripts,
metalworks, sculptures, buildings, etc., as well as written evidence. Of particular interest are
studies focused on objects and texts that demonstrate cross-cultural or long-distance networks, as
well as analyses of the concepts of gender and religion in the construction of power and authority
in the early twelfth century. We encourage both individual case studies and larger inquiries, for
Europe and beyond, that consider figures whose rulership, like Urraca’s, made an impact on the
social and material culture of this period.
Paper proposals are sought on rulers and the display of rulership from Urraca’s lifetime, especially
those that will contribute to clarifying the larger framework of her reign.
Send title with abstract and author bio, in English or Spanish (not more than 500 words
each), and any queries, by 1 April 2025 to: Urraca2026@gmail.com
ICDAD Talk (In Spanish, Online) – Miquel Barceló: una conversación sobre su viaje con la arcilla / Miquel Barcelón: A Conversation about his Journey with Clay
ICDAD Talk en Español
Monday, July 29, 2024
(16:00 London ||17:00 Paris || 9:00 Mexico City || 11:00 New York || 00:00 Tokyo)
Online Zoom Meeting (approx. 1 hour program)
Miquel Barceló: una conversación sobre su viaje con la arcilla
Esta charla del ICDAD reúne al escritor y comisario Enrique Juncosa y a la comisaria Margaret Connors McQuade para hablar de la obra menos conocida de Miquel Barceló en cerámica, objeto de una exposición retrospectiva en la Fundació Catalunya La Pedrera de Barcelona (sede de la popular casa de Antonio Gaudí) desde el 8 de marzo hasta el 30 de junio de 2024.
La conversación comenzará con una breve introducción de la rica historia de la cerámica en España, que abarca desde el tercer milenio a.C. hasta principios del siglo XX, a partir de los fondos del Hispanic Society Museum & Library de Nueva York. El estudio se centrará en la materialidad de la cerámica a lo largo de los siglos y servirá para estimular el debate sobre la importancia de la alfarería como primer gran avance tecnológico de la humanidad. Seguidamente, se abordará la trayectoria artística de Miquel Barceló (Felanitx, Mallorca, 1957), pintor, dibujante y uno de los artistas más internacionales de su tiempo (su obra se ha expuesto en los principales Museos de Boston, Montreal, París, London, Dublín, Roma, Madrid, Barcelona, México, Río de Janeiro o Tokio). Comenzó a trabajar con cerámica a finales de 1994, casi por casualidad. Sin embargo, desde entonces, la cerámica se ha convertido en una práctica esencial. Destacan sus enormes murales de cerámica para una de las capillas de la Catedral gótica de Mallorca, terminados en 2004.
Miquel Barceló: a conversation about his journey with clay
This ICDAD talk joins writer and curator, Enrique Juncosa, and curator, Margaret Connors McQuade, to discuss the lesser known work of Miquel Barceló in ceramic, the subject of an exhibition at Fundació Catalunya La Pedrera in Barcelona (the famous apartment building designed by Antoni Gaudí in Barcelona) from March 8 until June 30, 2024.
The conversation will begin with a brief introduction of the rich ceramic history of Spain spanning from the 3rd millennium BC through the early twentieth century drawn from the holdings of the Hispanic Society Museum & Library in New York. The survey will be centered on the materiality of ceramic ware over centuries and serve to stimulate discussion on the importance of pottery as the first major technological breakthrough of humankind. Next, it will analyze the career of a Spanish artist Miquel Barceló (born 1957). He became internationally known in the early 1980s as a painter and draughtsman, having had by now museum shows in Boston, Montreal, Paris, London, Dublin, Rome, Madrid, Barcelona, Mexico City, Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo, among other cities. He started making ceramics at the end of 1994, almost by chance. Since then, however, ceramics have become a major part of his work. He built huge ceramic murals for one of the chapels of Mallorca gothic Cathedral finished in 2004.
This talk will be moderated by Mariàngels Fondevila, Conservadora, Art Modern i Contemporani / Curator, Modern & Contemporary Art, Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya.
Enrique Juncosa (Palma de Mallorca, España, 1961) es escritor y curador. Fue director del Museo Irlandés de Arte Moderno en Dublín entre 2003 y 2012, tarea por la cual recibió la Orden del Mérito Civil del Gobierno de España. Anteriormente, había sido Subdirector del Museo Reina Sofía de Madrid y del IVAM de Valencia. Juncosa ha publicado dos libros de relatos, nueve colecciones de poemas y numerosos ensayos sobre arte contemporáneo. Ha comisariado cerca de 80 exposiciones en museos de todo el mundo.
Enrique Juncosa (Palma de Mallorca, Spain, 1961) is a writer and a curator. He was director of the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin between 2003 and 2012, task for which he was granted the Order of the Civil Merit by the Spanish Government. Before, he had been Deputy Director of Museo Reina Sofía Madrid and IVAM, Valencia. Juncosa has published two books of short stories, nine collections of poems, and many essays on contemporary art. He has curated near 80 exhibitions in museums all over the world.
Margaret E. Connors McQuade es una conservadora independiente de Nueva York. Hasta hace poco era Directora Adjunta y Jefa de Colecciones del Hispanic Society Museum & Library, donde desempeñó diversas funciones durante casi 31 años. Se doctoró en Historia del Arte por el Graduate Center de la City University de Nueva York en 2005. Además de una serie de exposiciones a pequeña escala en la Hispanic Society, Margaret fue comisaria de las exposiciones Talavera Poblana: Four Centuries of a Mexican Ceramic Tradition (Americas Society 1999), y Alcora en Nueva York: La colección de cerámica de Alcora en el Museo de Bellas Artes de Castellón de la Plana y en el Museo de Bellas Artes de Valencia, 2005. Actualmente es comisaria, junto con Alexandra Frantischek Rodriguez-Jack, de la exposición, A Room of her Own: The Estrados of Viceregal Spain, que se inaugurará en la Hispanic Society el 7 de noviembre de 2024.
Margaret E. Connors McQuade is an independent curator from New York. Until recently, she was Deputy Director and Head of Collections at the Hispanic Society Museum & Library, where she worked in a number of roles for nearly 31 years. She received her Ph.D. in art history from the Graduate Center at the City University of New York in 2005. In addition to a series of small-scale exhibitions at the Hispanic Society, Margaret curated the exhibitions, Talavera Poblana: Four Centuries of a Mexican Ceramic Tradition (Americas Society 1999), and Alcora en New York: La colección de cerámica de Alcora at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Castellón de la Plana and Museo de Bellas Artes, Valencia, 2005. She is currently co-curating with Alexandra Frantischek Rodriguez-Jack the exhibition, A Room of her Own: The Estrados of Viceregal Spain, which opens at the Hispanic Society on November 7, 2024.
Register Here!
You will be sent a link shortly before the program.
This ICDAD organized talk is the fifth in a series of online conversations with decorative arts and design professionals.
ARTES 