

Coordinators: Ana Cabrera and Lesley Miller
This conference explores collecting practices, attitudes to and perceptions of Spanish decorative arts in Britain and Spain from the 19thcentury onwards, and how these attitudes influenced the development of museums and museum collections in both countries. The case studies aredrawnfrom the British and Spanish museum collections.
The conference is organisedin joint sessions dealing with the same subject from British and then Spanish perspectives. The first day considers the collecting of particular media while the second day focuses on the dissemination, display and conservation of these collections. The conference includes poster sessions during the coffee breaks.
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Programme
Friday, 8thJune 2008: Collecting Spanish Decorative Arts
10.00 Registration and collecting of conference packs; displaying of posters
10.20 Introduction
Ana Cabrera, V&A
10:30 Collecting, Display & Dissemination: The Changing Face of the Decorative Arts Collection at South Kensington, 1852-1873
Susanna Avery-Quash, National Gallery, London
Lustreware and Furniture
Chair: Holly Trusted, V&A
11.00 Collecting Spanish Lustreware at the Victoria and Albert Museum
Mariam Rosser-Owen, Asian Department, V&A
11:30 A Survey and History of the Collecting of Spanish Decorative Arts: Lustreware
Jaume Coll, Museo Nacional de Cerámica, Valencia
12.00-12.30. COFFEE BREAK
12:30 Collecting Spanish Furniture, Woodwork and Leatherwork, 1850-1950
Nick Humphrey, Furniture, Textiles and Fashion department, V&A
13:00 Collecting Spanish Furniture in Madrid, 1880-1920
Sofía Rodríguez, Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid
13.30-14.30 LUNCH
Textiles and Fashion
Chair: Sonnet Stanfill, V&A
14:30 Following the Thread: Collecting Spanish Textiles at the Victoria and Albert Museum
Ana Cabrera, Marie S.-Curie Fellow, V&A
15:30 Textile Collecting in Catalonia
Silvia Carbonell, Centre de Documentació i Museu Tèxtil, Terrasa
16:00 Fashion and Spain at the Victoria and Albert Museum
Oriole Cullen, Furniture, Textiles and Fashion Department, V&A
16:30 From Dress to Fashion: The Collection of The Museo del Traje
Helena López del Hierro, Museo del Traje, Madrid
16.30-17.00 TEA BREAK
Sculpture and Plaster Casts
Chair: Edward Payne, Auckland Castle Project
17.00 A Vogue for St Francis
Xavier Bray, Wallace Collection, London
17:30 Spanish Monuments Displayed at South Kensington: Raising the Profile of Spanish Art through Plaster Casts
Holly Trusted, Sculpture, Metalwork, Ceramics and Glass Department, V&A
18:00 Electrical Treasuries: The Decorative Arts Collection from Antiquity at the Museo Nacional de Reproducciones, 1881-1915
María Bolaños, Museo Nacional de Escultura, Valladolid
18.30-19.00 DISCUSSION
Saturday, 9thJune 2008: Collecting Spanish decorative arts continued
Silver
Chair: Antonia Boström, V&A
10:15 The Scholar, the Scoundrel and the Skater: How the V&A Collections of Hispanic Silver were formed
Kirstin Kennedy, Sculpture, Metalwork, Ceramics and Glass Department, V&A
10:45 Collecting Spanish Silver
Jesús Rivas, Universidad de Murcia
11.15-11.45COFFEE BREAK
Displaying, Interpreting and Conserving Spanish Decorative Arts
Chair: Christopher Wilk, V&A
11.45 Displaying Decorative Arts in Britain and Spain. A Comparative Analysis
Isabel Rodríguez, Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Madrid
12.15 Spain in the Europe 1600-1815 Galleries at the V&A
Lesley Miller, Furniture, Textiles and Fashion Department, V&A
12.45 The20th-century Galleries at the V&A
Corinna Gardner and Johanna Agerman Ross, Design, Architecture and Digital Department, V&A
13.15-14.15LUNCH
Displaying, Interpreting and conserving Spanish decorative arts
Chair: Joanna Norman, V&A
14.15 The Conservationof the Cast Courts. New Discoveries from Spanish Casts
Victor Borges, Conservation Department, V&A
14:45 Collecting in Action: Building a Spanish Gallery in Bishop Auckland
Edward Payne, The Auckland Project
15.15 Closing remarks
Joanna Norman, Head of the Victoria and Albert Research Institute (VARI)
Miguel González Suela, Directorate of the State Museum, Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports
Spanish art has been collected in the UK since the 17th century. This conference will explore collecting practices, attitudes to and perceptions of Spanish decorative arts in Britain and Spain, and how these attitudes influenced the development of museums and museum collections in both countries. The case studies will be drawn from the V&A and Spanish museum collections.
The conference is organized in joint sessions dealing with the same subject from Spanish and then British perspectives. The first day considers the collecting of particular media, while the second day focuses on the dissemination, display and conservation of these collections. The conference will include poster session during the coffee breaks.
Opening remarks on the history of collecting Spanish Decorative Arts by medium: Collecting, Display & Dissemination: the changing face of the decorative arts collection at South Kensington (1852-1873), Dr Susanna Avery-Quash (Senior Research Curator, History of Collecting, National Gallery)
Holly Trusted (Sculpture Department, V&A): Spanish Monuments Displayed at South Kensington: Raising the profile of Spanish Art through Plaster CastsMaria Bolaños (Museo Nacional de Escultura, Valladolid): Electrical treasuries: the Decorative Arts collection from Antiquity at the Museo Nacional de Reproducciones (1881-1915)
Helena López del Hierro (Museo del Traje, Madrid): From Dress to Fashion:the collection of The Museo del Traje
Victor Borges (Conservation Department, V&A): The Conservation of the Cast Courts. New discoveries on the Spanish Casts
Booking required: click here
Call for posters
On 8th and 9th June 2018, the Victoria and Albert Museum is hosting a conference with the aim of studying the collecting history and practices in the Spanish Decorative Arts in Britain and in Spain, from 1850 to the mid-20th century. Research on collectors, art dealers, type of collections, and the development of the Decorative Arts museums in Britain and Spain is the focus of discussion at the conference. The speakers are scholars from English and Spanish museum and universities who will present papers on the collecting of different material from Iberia, such as ceramics, furniture, metalwork, sculpture and casts textiles and fashion, as well as on displaying, conserving and interpreting these artworks.
Call for Posters
This call for poster presentations invites the participation of students studying for Masters or PhD and young researchers who would like to present a poster dealing with one of the Conference topics.
The proposal should be provided in the form of an abstract of 400 words, accompanied by a short CV (an A4 page). It should outline the aims and objectives of the research, the methods, and findings to date. All posters will be peer-reviewed. The poster format will A0
Contact
If you have any questions, feel free to contact us. All correspondence, including your proposals for papers or posters and your CV as well as further questions, should be addressed to a.cabrera@vam.ac.uk and tao.chang@vam.ac.uk
Call for papers: The Courtauld Institute of Art’s 23rd Annual Medieval Postgraduate Colloquium: Collecting (in) the Middle Ages, The Courtauld Institute of Art, 16 February 2017
Deadline: 15 November 2017
The Courtauld Institute of Art’s 23rd Annual Medieval Postgraduate Colloquium invites speakers to consider the nature of medieval collections, the context of their creation and fruition, and their legacy — or disappearance — in the present.
Inspired by objects such as a cedar box chest once kept in the Holy of Holies of the Lateran, this colloquium seeks to explore a diverse set of topics surrounding medieval practices of collecting. This wooden box may seem simple, but once opened it reveals a priceless collection: fragments of rock and wood from the Holy Land, each labelled with its precise place of origin by a sixth-century hand. Here and there, stones have fallen out, leaving imprints in the soil. The wooden relic chest is an object of small size and almost no material value, but has nevertheless been treasured for centuries by one of the largest and most powerful institutions of the medieval world.
The study of medieval collecting raises a variety of questions. How and why were objects collected, practically and conceptually? What was their expected time-span and what enabled their survival? How have medieval collections impacted modern scholarship, and how do modern collecting and display practices influence our interpretation of the past?
Applicants to the colloquium are encouraged to explore these issues from a diverse range of methodologies, analysing objects from the 6th to the 16th century and from a wide-ranging geographical span. Possible areas of discussion might include:
The Medieval Postgraduate Colloquium offers an opportunity for research students at all levels from universities across the UK and abroad to present, discuss and promote their research. To apply, please send a proposal of up to 250 words for a 20 minute paper, together with a CV, to costanza.beltrami@courtauld.ac.uk and maggie.crosland@courtauld.ac.uk no later than 15 November 2017.
Ceán Bermúdez (1749-1829), historiador de arte y coleccionista ilustrado
Biblioteca Nacional de España in association with the Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica
Madrid, 20 May – 11 September
Survey of the life and works of this Enlightenment art historian and collector, uniting158 items mainly drawn from the collections of the BNE, but also including paintings, drawings and manuscripts from other collections. Among the artworks shown are Goya’s portraits of Ceán Bermúdez of c.1786 and 1798-99, Goya’s unpublished illustrations for the art historian’s Diccionario of Spanish artists, and Rembrandt’s Abraham, Hagar and Ishmael of 1637, from his collection.
Lecture
The Ceramics Collection of the Portuguese Royal Family: the King Consort’s Collection
By Maria de Jesus Monge, Director of the Museu-Biblioteca da Casa de Bragança, Vila Viço
Wallace Collection, London
Monday, 28 September, 5:30 – 6:30PM
Admission free.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Exhibition: July 17, 2015–August 7, 2016
Includes five recently acquired eighteenth-century paintings on copper by the Mexican artist Nicolás Enríquez for a Spanish patron.
Call for Papers:
The Art Market, Collectors and Agents: Then and Now
London, Institute of Historical Research, Senate House
13 June 2016
Deadline: 30 July 2015
Proposals should be c 350 words and sent with a short CV to Susan Bracken schbracken@btopenworld.com and Adriana Turpin turpinadriana@hotmail.com with cc to collecting_display@hotmail.com
Our usual July conference date has been shifted to complement the conference being held by Christie’s to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the auction house on 14 and 15 July 2016.
Spanish Drawings from the Hamburger Kunsthalle: Cano, Murillo and Goya, Museo del Prado, 30 October 2014 – 8 February 2015.
Previously on display as The Grand Gesture: Drawings from Murillo to Goya from the Hamburger Kunsthalle, at the Meadows Museum, Dallas, this exhibition has moved to the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.
A significant percentage of the collection, acquired for the Kunsthalle’s Kupferstichkabinett (Department of Prints, Drawings and Photography) by its first Director, Alfred Lichtwark (1852-1914), is on view.
The exhibition is accompanied by a complete catalogue of all the drawings in the collection, written by Jens Hoffman-Samland with the collaboration of María Cruz de Carlos Varona, Gabriele Fialdi, José Manuel Matilla, Manuela Mena and Gloria Solache, curators at the Museo del Prado.
The exhibition has been co-organized by the Meadows Museum, SMU; the Museo Nacional del Prado; the Hamburger Kunsthalle; the Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica; and the Center for Spain in America.