Picasso didn’t just draw on paper – he tore it, burnt it, and made it three-dimensional. From studies for ‘Guernica’ to a 4.8-metre-wide collage, this major exhibition, open until 13 April 2020 at the Royal Academy, brings together more than 300 works on paper spanning the artist’s 80-year career. Click here for more information.
In conjunction with the exhibition, the Instituto Cervantes has organised a programme of talks and concerts paying homage to the famous Spanish artist.
Dear Fellow ARTES Members,
We look forward to celebrating the life and work of the first Spaniard to graduate from Oxford with you!
Osma Centenary
7 February
Bodleian Library
Pembroke College
Guillermo J. de Osma was the first Spaniard to study at Oxford after the Universities Test Act 1871, which opened Oxford, Cambridge and Durham universities to non-Anglicans. Osma was a diplomat, a politician, an art historian and an art collector. He served as the first president of the Board of Trustees of the Alhambra and founded the Instituto Valencia de Don Juan, a research centre in Madrid, which contains a wide-ranging collection of art works and archival materials, including medieval manuscripts, Philipp II’s state papers, textiles, ceramics, and rare books.
He then went on to found the first Spanish scholarship at Oxford – the Osma Studentship – in 1920. The Studentship, which was open to both men and women since its foundation, is under the exclusive remit of the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford and has been held over the past century by many distinguished scholars and practitioners.
The one-day symposium will be held at the Bodleian Library on 7 February 2020 to coincide with the anniversary of Osma’s death and will convene Osma Students from across the generations and countries, specialists from Spain and the UK, and de Osma’s descendants from around the globe.
The symposium will be held in the Lecture Theatre at the Weston Library on Broad Street. Lunch will be served at Convocation House in the presence of the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Louise Richardson. After the symposium, we will make our way to Pembroke, where Osma read History, for an evening reception.
Welcome Coffee: 9.45 am
Start: 10.30 am
Reception: 5.30–7pm
Please click here for a conference programme and practical information.
For questions, contact: marina.perezdearcos@politics.ox.ac.uk
Marina Perez de Arcos
ARTES members with experience of using the National Library of Scotland’s Astorga Collection or expertise in topics related to its formation and contents are encouraged to contribute to an upcoming conference organised by Dr Christopher Storrs, Reader in History at the University of Dundee, to be held in Edinburgh on Wednesday 20 May 2020.
The collection contains 3,617 early-modern Spanish printed books and is one of the National Library of Scotland’s lesser-known treasures. Part of the library of an aristocratic Spanish family, the Marqueses de Astorga, it was acquired in 1826 for the Advocates Library (the National Library’s precursor) by Sir Walter Scott’s son-in-law, J.G. Lockhart. The collection contains several texts on history, theology, geography and science, and illustrated books, some with maps or hand-coloured plates. Eleven are incunabula, and many others date to the sixteenth century.
At present, the conference programme includes presentations on Sir Walter Scott and Spain, J.G. Lockhart, and themes related to the Astorga collection in a nineteenth-century British context. Additionally, the organisers seek proposals addressing the collection from a Spanish viewpoint, notably on the Astorga family, the situation of Spain in the early nineteenth century, the book acquisitions and their value to historians. Papers on Golden Age holdings are particularly encouraged.
The collection is catalogued on the NLS’ website under the shelfmark G. (click here), but a handlist is also available upon application.
For further information, and to propose a conference paper, please email Dr Christopher Storrs, c.d.storrs@dundee.ac.uk.
Hispanic identity has been shaped during the last century by a conscious selection of historical periods of its history. After the loss of the last colonies of the former Spanish Empire at the end of the 19th century, the nation had hit rock bottom in political terms. To counterbalance this decline, writers, poets, essayists and scholars from the so-called generation of ’98 aimed for the restoration of the cultural splendor of the Spanish Golden Age, a period of flourishing in the arts and literature that spans from Philip II’s reign until the death of Charles II in 1700, the last of the Habsburg monarchs. This wish has been constant through the 20th century and is also connected with the rise of neobaroque aesthetics and postmodernism. Baroque has become a multifaceted concept and, nowadays, is more a space of reflection than a chronological or formal label. The lecture will explore the continuity of baroque art in Spanish contemporary culture such as art, photography, cinema, pop music, comics, cartoons, internet memes, football or television series, where the fascination with Spanish Golden Age is not only a matter of style or aesthetics but also political and identitary. From inspiration to appropriation, from art galleries to politics, baroque art is a powerful tool in contemporary Spain.
Click here for more information.
CALL FOR PAPERS
Deadline: December 15, 2019
The call for papers is open for the DR-DS 2020 International Congress, which will be hosted in the cities of Seville and Granada, from the 11th to the 15th of May, 2020. The congress will include inaugural and closing conferences by professors Amadeo Serra, from the Universitat de València, and Fernando Marías, from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, as well as a number of highly qualified guest speakers.
The great transformation experienced by Spanish architecture during the reign of Emperor Charles V finds a brilliant and diverse expression in the activity of Diego de Riaño and Diego Siloé. Both masters, one working in the Sevillian metropolis and the other in the former Nasrid capital, the last bastion of Islam on the Peninsula, defined two very different models of operation. Both produced some of the first Spanish buildings with a fully Renaissance language.
This congress proposes to approach these two great architects in the context of the transition to the Renaissance in Spain. They will also serve as a pretext for tackling similar phenomena from a broader perspective, incorporating methodological and historiographic problems within a European framework. The organisers invite national and international researchers to an event that builds a cooperative space for interdisciplinary dialogue, offering an attractive and exciting programme of keynotes and plenary sessions given by experts in the field, with the presentation of unpublished papers selected by a scientific committee. All contributions will be published in an edited volume. Papers are subject to evaluation using a double-blind peer reviewed system to ensure scientific quality.
The congress will be hosted in Seville and Granada. The organization will be responsible for the transport between the two cities. The conference will open on 11 May in Seville. Paper sessions will be accompanied by special visits, for example to the sacristy of Seville cathedral and the city’s town hall, both works by Diego de Riaño. On 13 May sessions will take place in Granada, including a visit to the cathedral, designed by Diego Siloé, and Charles V’s palace, designed by Pedro Machuca.
The conference will focus on the following themes:
General:
– Theoretical and historiographic approaches.
– Graphic and documentary testimonials.- Science and technology.
– Architecture and city.
– Promoters, patrons, ideologists, artificers.
Specific:
– Diego de Riaño and Lower Andalusia.
– Diego Siloé and Eastern Andalusia.
– The transition to Renaissance in other areas.
Deadline: December 15, 2019
The abstracts (1000 words maximum, in Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, French or English) should be sent to: http://gestioneventos.us.es/38059/section/21403/congreso-dr-ds.html
Alonso Berruguete: First Sculptor of Renaissance Spain will be the first major exhibition held outside Spain to celebrate the expressive art of the most important sculptor active on the Iberian Peninsula during the first half of the 16th century, Alonso Berruguete. The exhibition will present an impressive range of more than 40 works from across his career, including examples of his earliest paintings from his time in Italy, where he trained. His abilities as draftsman will also be celebrated with the largest group of his drawings ever to be assembled. The primary focus will be on his painted sculptures in wood, which generally decorated large altarpieces, or retablos. The Museo Nacional de Escultura in Valladolid, Spain, will be lending a substantial group of some of his very best figures. A section of one of his altarpieces will be loosely reconstructed in the exhibition to convey an idea of how his sculptures were originally seen.
The exhibition is curated by C. D. Dickerson III, curator and head of sculpture and decorative arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington.
A fully illustrated catalog accompanying the exhibition will be the first general book on Berruguete published in English and will feature essays by Dickerson as well as Manuel Arias Martínez, deputy director, Museo Nacional de Escultura, Valladolid, and Mark McDonald, curator of Italian, Spanish, Mexican, and early French prints and illustrated books, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The exhibition was organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the Meadows Museum, SMU, Dallas.
It will travel to the Meadows Museum, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, from March 29 to July 26, 2020.
Click here for more information.
The Maius Workshop returns for the 2019–20 academic year!
Please join us for an informal welcome meeting, which will take place on Thursday 10 October, 2019, at 6:00pm in Room 209 in Gordon House, 29 Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, London WC1H 0PP (at UCL, but just outside the main campus: click here for directions)
This event is open to anyone interested in pre-modern Hispanic cultures, widely considered: literature and language, history, geography, art and visual culture, medical humanities, music, etc., from Iberia, the Americas, and other Spanish and Portuguese colonies and communities. PhD candidates and ECRs from London universities and beyond are especially invited.
The Maius Workshop’s organisers, Costanza Beltrami, Bert Carlstrom and Elizabeth Chant, will introduce the group and events planned for the coming academic year. It will be an opportunity to meet people with similar research interests working at other universities and departments.
If you would like to attend, please register on Eventbrite: click here.
Image caption: Joaquín Domínguez Bécquer, ‘La Feria de Sevilla’, 1867. Colección Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza en préstamo gratuito al Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga, © Colección Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza. Source: Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21170539
