ARTES

Forthcoming exhibition: El Greco to Goya – Spanish Masterpieces from The Bowes Museum

El Greco to Goya – Spanish Masterpieces from The Bowes Museum, 27 September 2017 – 7 January 2018, The Wallace Collection, London

In September 2017, the Wallace Collection presents El Greco to Goya – Spanish Masterpieces from The Bowes Museum: the first London exhibition of Spanish art from The Bowes Museum in County Durham, including works by Goya and El Greco.
This collaborative exhibition between the Wallace Collection and The Bowes Museum celebrates the partnership between these two great museums. Like the Wallace Collection, The Bowes Museum is the product of one family’s obsession with collecting great works of art. John Bowes and Richard Wallace – both illegitimate sons of aristocratic fathers – bequeathed collections of international significance to the nation.
The exhibition spans three centuries and explores one of the largest collections of Spanish art in Britain. The majority of these paintings were acquired by John and Joséphine Bowes between 1862 and 1863 from the collection of the Countess de Quinto in Paris, through the art dealer Benjamin Gogué. This collection was formed in Spain by the Conde de Quinto after the dissolution of the ecclesiastical institutions – known as Desamortización – carried out by the Government from 1835 to 1837.
On display are El Greco’s The Tears of Saint Peter, thought to be the artist’s earliest interpretation of this subject, Goya’s psychologically penetrating Portrait of Juan Antonio Meléndez Valdés and disturbing Interior of a Prison, plus perhaps less well known but outstanding works such as Antonio de Pereda’s Tobias Restoring his Father’s Sight. The works chosen explore a period of huge social, religious and political upheaval in Spain, providing a microcosm of the changes in style and subject matter during this period. The paintings complement works by Velázquez and Murillo on permanent display at the Wallace Collection.
The Wallace Collection’s Director, Dr Xavier Bray, says:
“El Greco to Goya is not only an unprecedented opportunity to see Spanish art of extraordinary power and significance in London, but also the beginning of an exciting relationship between the Wallace Collection and The Bowes Museum. Both institutions share a commitment to making great art accessible to wider audiences and we are looking forward to working closely together to develop a long term connection between London and the North East.”
The Bowes Museum’s Director, Adrian Jenkins, says:
“In 1892, when The Bowes Museum first opened its doors to the public, it had the largest public collection of Spanish paintings in the UK. As we mark 125 years since the creation of the museum, it is highly appropriate that the key works from this collection should be shared with London audiences, in keeping with John and Joséphine Bowes’ belief that great art should be made accessible to all. Neither John nor Joséphine Bowes survived to realise their vision, and they would be delighted to think that the best of their acquisitions would be shown at the Wallace Collection during this anniversary year, recognising that their gift to the people of County Durham is also a gift to the nation.”

The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication, El Greco to Goya: Spanish Masterpieces from The Bowes Museum, produced in collaboration with The Bowes Museum.

Forthcoming publication: Nigel Glendinning, Goya and His Critics, new edited edition

Goyaysucriticos Nigel Glendinning (1929-2013) is remembered for his perceptive writings on Goya and for the range of his knowledge on the art and literature of 18th century Spain. He had a distinguished academic career at the universities of Southampton, Trinity College Dublin, and Queen Mary University of London. He was a Corresponding Member of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid, and an Honorary Fellow of the Hispanic Society of America in New York, as well as the winner of the international Elio Antonio de Nebrija prize awarded by the University of Salamanca (2007). In 1998 he was created Commander of the Order of Isabel La Católica, an honour conferred on him by King Juan Carlos of Spain. In 2001 he contributed to the creation of ARTES and served the group as honorary president for more than ten years.

Glendinning’s work is celebrated in the forthcoming edited edition of his classic book, Goya and his critics (1977; revised Spanish edition 1983). The new volume, published by Ediciones Complutense, contains the text of the 1983 Spanish edition with a selection of Glendinning’s more recent essays on the topic. The editors, Sarah Symmons and Jesusa Vega, contributed two memoirs of Nigel as a Hispanic art historian, his contribution to Goya Studies and to Hispanic visual and literary culture. The publication also features a tribute by Valeriano Bozal.

Information on the book’s forthcoming launch will be published soon.

Conference: Digital Imaginaries of the South: Stories of Belonging and Uprooting in Hispanic Cinemas

maxresdefault International Film Conference (IV TECMERIN Academic Meeting): Digital Imaginaries of the South: Stories of Belonging and Uprooting in Hispanic Cinemas, October 18-20, 2017, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid / Casa de América (Madrid)

Over the past twenty years, digital technology has become the standard in the film production, circulation, and consumption processes. Within this context, Hispanic cinemas have undergone deep changes, both within the countries with an established cinematic tradition, as well as in those that, due to several reasons, had not developed a robust cinematography throughout the 20th century. The analogue paradigm became deeply contested and a new digital framework, which was widely discussed by institutions, film critics, and academics, emerged. This moment coincides with the widespread generalization of national and transnational neoliberal policies that, far from backing diversity, have increased the gap between those “connected” and those “disconnected” (to draw upon Néstor García Canclini’s term); a gap also experienced by those that, even if connected, still occupy subaltern positions.

The speeding of these processes has resulted in an increase of mobility, at work both in the geographical displacement of film professionals and in the emergence of new narrative models that deal with questions of belonging and uprooting, springing precisely from these experiences of displacement. The cinemas of the Global South, and, most specifically, Hispanic cinemas, have actively taken part in these processes, ultimately playing a relevant role in terms of narrative and aesthetic models, and the production, circulation and consumption of film.

Following the main research axes of the R+D project “Transnational relations in Hispanic digital cinemas: the axes of Spain, Mexico, and Argentina” (CSO2014-52750-P), the International Conference Digital Imaginaries of the South: Stories of Belonging and Uprooting in Hispanic Cinemas conference will discuss these themes:

The representation of migrations, displacements, exile, and diaspora.
Transnational flows of cultural, economic, and human capital in the production and circulation of cinema.
The reconfiguration of the regional, national, and transnational Hispanic interactions within the new century.
Public discourses and film policies within the region.
Hybridization and identity in the narratives on colonization, decolonization, and revolutionary processes.
Activism and digital praxis.
Genres, authors, stars.
Film cultures and cinephilia: festivals, publications, and digital platforms.
Minor cinemas: indigenismo, experimental, and/or militant cinemas.
Historiographic, theoretical, and methodological problems of so-called Hispanic, Iberian, and Latin American cinemas.

Find out more on the conference website conference website.

Featured exhibition: Picasso. Ceramics from the Attenborough Collection

web-Pablo-Picasso-Heads-of-women-Aztec-vase-1957.-Image-by-kind-permission-of-the-Estate-of-Lord-and-Lady-Attenborough-and-The-Leicester-Arts-and-Museums-Service-small-e1492610086596 — Pablo Picasso, Heads of Women, Aztec vase, 1957. Image by kind permission of the Estate of Lord and Lady Attenborough and The Leicester Arts and Museums Service. © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2017.

Picasso. Ceramics from the Attenborough Collection, York Art Gallery, York. Closes 5 November 2017.

Lord and Lady Attenborough began collecting ceramics by Picasso in 1954 and continued collecting for over 50 years, building one of the most significant private collections in the UK. Highlights from their collection have been loaned to York by the New Walk Museum and Art Gallery, Leicester. The Picasso ceramics created in the 1950s will be shown within York Art Gallery’s Centre of Ceramic Art (CoCA), which showcases ceramics by more than 600 artists including the founders of the British Studio Ceramics movement.

Art in Translation Special Issue: Spain and Orientalism

Art in Translation has announced the publication of a special issue on Spain and Orientalism, vol. 9:1 (2017), co-edited by Claudia Hopkins (University of Edinburgh) and Anna McSweeney (Warburg Institute).

This is the first English-language journal issue dedicated to Spanish Orientalism in art and visual culture in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. The peer-reviewed articles, drawn from a panel at the Association of Art Historians conference in 2016, examine Spain’s complex relationship with her Islamic past and with Morocco, through art, architecture, photography and material culture. They address a range of topics including patterns of collecting, the reproduction of Islamic art and architecture for private and public spaces, the role of Spain’s Islamic heritage in the construction of a national identity as exemplified in Spanish exhibition pavilions, the intersections between art and colonialism, and the role of Spanish art and visual culture in the wider debates about Orientalism.

Table of Contents:

Editorial: Spain and Orientalism, by Anna McSWEENEY and Claudia HOPKINS

The Arab Room of the Palacio de Cerralbo, by Ariane VARELA BRAGA

Reconstructing the Alhambra: Rafael Contreras and the Architectural Models of the Alhambra in the Nineteenth Century, by Asun GONZALEZ PEREZ

Mudéjar and the Alhambresque: Spanish Pavilions at the Universal Expositions and the Invention of a National Style, by Anna McSWEENEY

Vision, Lamentation and Nineteenth-Century Representations of the End of al-Andalus, by Oscar E. VÁZQUEZ

Allende el Estrecho (Beyond the Straits): The Photographic Gaze on the Orient in Andalusia and Morocco, by David SÁNCHEZ CANO

Visualizing ‘Moorish’ Traces within Spain: Orientalism and Medievalist Nostalgia in Spanish Colonial Photojournalism 1909-33, by Elisabeth BOLORINOS ALLARD

The Politics of Spanish Orientalism: Distance and Proximity in Tapiró and Bertuchi, by Claudia HOPKINS

Select Bibliography: Spain and Orientalism

The issue can be accessed online through Taylor and Francis Online.

News from the MNAC

The Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya has made two major acquisition during the summer.

baudilius At an auction held in Barcelona on 31 May 2017 they acquired a panel painting representing the Decapitation of Saint Baudilus, painted by Lluís Dalmau for the old Gothic high altarpiece in the parish church of Sant Boi de Llobregat (Baix Llobregat), one of the few works by the painter to have been conserved.
Lluís Dalmau was one of the principal artists working in Barcelona in the mid 15th century, and was employed at the court of King Alfonso IV. There are only two surviving documented works by this outstanding painter: the famous Virgin of the “Consellers”, made between 1443 and 1445, and the altarpiece from Sant Boi, dated to 1448. The Museu Nacional was able to purchase this exceptional work thanks to a donation by the Palarq Foundation. It will certainly become a well-loved masterpiece of the Museum’s impressive collection of Catalan Gothic painting.

maspons_x1500_ca They also acquired 200 photographs by Catalan photographer Oriol Maspons (Barcelona, 1928-2013), thanks to the Nando and Elsa Peretti Foundation. The new acquisition will enable the organisation of a major retrospective dedicated to this photographer in 2019. Moreover, the generosity of the Nando and Elsa Peretti fundation will enable researchers to study the over 7000 photographs and other photographic material deposited at the Museum by the photographer in 2010.

Featured exhibition: Son of Laocoön. Alonso Berruguete and Pagan Antiquity

Hijo del Laocoonte. Alonso Berruguete y la Antigüedad pagana, Museo Nacional de Escultura, Valladolid, until 5 November 2017

This is the first exhibition to explore the ‘pagan soul’ of sixteenth century sculptor Alonso Berruguete. The exhibition focuses on his fascination with the works of antiquity, which he saw on his sojourn in Italy between about 1508 and 1518, and in particular the influence of the newly discovered group of the struggling Laocoon on Berruguete’s own sacred and secular work in Spain.
The exhibition of sculptures, paintings, drawings and prints is selected from Spanish and international collections and accompanied by a full programme of conferences, guided tours, and concerts as well as a multi-essayed catalogue edited by the exhibition’s curator and deputy director of the Museum, Manuel Arias Martínez.

Call for Contributions: Chromatography special issue, HARTS and Minds Journal

goyadrowningdog — The drowning Dog, Francisco de Goya ©Museo Nacional del Prado

The Graduate School of Arts and Humanities at Bristol University seeks submissions for the newt issue of their postgraduate journal HARTS and Minds, which will be dedicated to Chromatography or Colour Studies and will be published March 2018. This Special Issue aims to renegotiate the idea that colour is rooted solely in the visual.
HARTS and Minds welcomes articles, book reviews, exhibition reviews, and creative writing pieces.
For articles please send a 300 word abstract by the 10th of September 2017 to editors@harts-minds.co.uk. Accepted articles of 6,000 words will be due October 31st 2017.
Suggested topics include:

Colour symbolism
The materiality of colour
Colour history
The significance of colour in different cultures
The effect of colour science and optics on the humanities
Synaesthesia, or hearing/tasting/smelling colour
Black and white or ‘the absence of colour’
Language and naming colour
Gendering, queer or so called ‘perverse’ colours
Colour and the emotions and the senses
Architectural color and the environment
Colour theory
Natural vs. synthetic or unnatural colour
Colour in advertising and media
The psychology of colour

Please click here for the full CFP

Liz Renes (Editor in Chief) and Jade Boyd (Special Editor)

Call For Papers: Fashion, Costume, and Consumer Culture in Iberia and Latin America: A Session in Honor of Gridley McKim-Smith, CAA conference, 21-24 February 2018, Los Angeles

María Cristina de Borbon, Queen of Spain, Vicente López Portaña ©Museo Nacional del Prado

For the next annual conference of the College Art Association (CAA), scheduled for 21-24 February 2018 in Los Angeles, the American Society for Hispanic Art Historical Studies is organizing a panel in memory of the Hispanist Gridley McKim-Smith (1943-2013). The chairs, Mey-Yen Moriuchi and Mark Castro, invite paper proposals by August 14.

Fashion, Costume, and Consumer Culture in Iberia and Latin America: A Session in Honor of Gridley McKim-Smith

“Material splendor—rare and exquisite fabrics, dazzling displays of wealth and sartorial beauty—is a compelling value in Hispanic-American clothing” (McKim-Smith, Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque 2013, 111). Gridley McKim-Smith (1943–2013) argued that the “profound materiality and sensuality of costume is crucial in Spain’s American possessions, where only stuffs recognized as prestigious can insulate the wearer from public disgrace and where the most sumptuous silks or alpacas, sometimes interwoven with precious metals, can make the wearer both admired and desired.” (114) In honor of the late McKim-Smith’s research interests and scholarship this session will consider representations of dress and fashion in Iberia and Latin America. In the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking worlds, depictions of costumes in paintings, sculptures, prints, and other visual media, as well as the creation of textiles and garments, demonstrate the power of dress in the construction of social, racial, gender, and cultural identities. The existence of extensive global trade networks facilitated the exchange and synthesis of artistic practices and craftsmanship permitting unique garments and objects which revealed the wearer’s style, aesthetic preferences, and social status. We seek papers from broad geographical and chronological periods, from Pre-Columbian to Modern, that consider the role of fashion, costume, and consumer culture in the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking worlds. How do clothes mediate identity, ideology, social rank, and subjectivity? What is the relationship between consumer culture and conspicuous consumption in Iberia and Latin America? How did dimensions of lived experience—psychological, performative, and political—survive in articles of dress?

Chairs: Mey-Yen Moriuchi, La Salle University, moriuchi@lasalle.edu; Mark Castro, Philadelphia Museum of Art, mcastro@philamuseum.org

The deadline for submissions is Monday, August 14. Click here for CAA’s proposal guidelines, which indicate that speakers on the panel must be members of CAA. Decisions on the proposals will be sent by Monday, August 28. If you have questions, please reach out to the chairs.

Priceless Pre-Columbian Gold Breastplate Now on Display at Buckingham Palace

The Art Newspaper reports that a gold breast-plate presented by the Panamanian president General José Remón Cantera to Queen Elizabeth in 1953 is now on display at Buckingham Palace.

Long kept in storage as a piece of secondary importance, the breastplate was re-discovered by Royal Collection curator Sally Goodsir. Now exhibited in the Royal Gifts Summer Exhibition at Buckingham Palace (until 1 October), the breastplate is dated to the 13th century in the exhibition catalogue.

However, the object may be much older: according to Kate Jarvis, a British Museum curator of the Americas, it is an example of tumbaga work, a term for an alloy of gold and copper that was used in Pre-Columbian central America, dating to as early as AD 700. Her opinion is shared by Warwick Bray, a professor emeritus at University College London, who dates the piece to AD 700-1000 and considers it a very large pendant to be hung on a necklace rather than a breastplate.

The future of the object after the end of the Summer Exhibition is still under discussion.