{"title":"True to Life: British Realist Painting in the 1920s and 1930s, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, July 1–October 29, 2017","authors":"Thomas Bromwell","doi":"10.1080/14714787.2018.1450330","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14714787.2018.1450330","url":null,"abstract":"‘True to Life’ at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art is an exhibition largely of storeroom contents, yet this is not a criticism of the artworks, artists or the curators, Patrick Elliott and Sacha Llewellyn. This exhibition of over ninety infrequently seen ‘realist’ works from the interwar period is a reminder of how easily the dominant narratives of art – here the modernist narrative of the twentieth century – censure and forget. The interwar period has been characterized as one of regression – ignorable and retrograde apart from the small strand of valiantmodernists easily typified by The Seven and Five Society when its membership included Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth andHenryMoore. Thosewho shunnedmodernism have accordingly been sidelined in art history and collections. It is a stark change in fortunes, as British realist art was immensely popular in the 1920s and 1930s, and staunchly advocated by the Royal Academy (RA). The annual Summer Exhibitions either outright rejected modernist tendencies, or relegated them to a single room, which had been assigned to ‘the newmovements in art with which it is not in sympathy but which it could not entirely ignore’. A number of the works shown here were exhibited at the Academy, with the promotional image for ‘True To Life’, By the Hills by Gerald Leslie Brockhurst, featuring in the 1939 Summer Exhibition and selling for 850 guineas. It is clear why Brockhurst’s immaculate portrait of Lady Marguerite Strickland takes this role – the ‘brushless’ style achieves almost photographic levels of realism, while the poised sitter enigmatically averts her eyes away from the viewer. The background of darkened receding hillsides is influenced by Da Vinci’sMona Lisa. Mystery, glamour, high society and an unusually elongated neck mesmerizingly collide. A quiet yet palpable tension is apparent in a number of the works. Charles Spencelyah’s domestic scene Why War? and Harry Riley’s effectively anonymized self-portrait in ARP (Air Raid Precautions) uniform and gas mask titled Me confront the historical context of the Second World War meditatively. Spencelyah’s potent, almostVictoriannarrativepaintingdepicts a First World War veteran staring into space, apparently with resignation as the world descends once again into chaos during the Sudeten Crisis. It was, alongwithBy TheHills, themost talked-of painting at the RA in 1939, andwas considered one of themost powerful images of the unfolding crisis. Algernon Newton’s hauntingly still city streets, on the other hand, are paintings that","PeriodicalId":35078,"journal":{"name":"Visual Culture in Britain","volume":"19 1","pages":"132 - 134"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14714787.2018.1450330","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45898374","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Le Pavé Rouge’: Making an Example of John Singer Sargent","authors":"Hadrien Viraben","doi":"10.1080/14714787.2018.1441744","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14714787.2018.1441744","url":null,"abstract":"‘Le Pavé Rouge’ is the ironic title given by Robert de Montesquiou to a monographic article he devoted to John Singer Sargent in France in 1905. Within a frank condemnation of the American painter, the aesthete wove around Sargent’s name a complex network of his own personal enemies (artists, writers, collectors) as other targets of his article. This article tries to establish how Montesquiou reinvested his own ambitions in a declaration of war. The aim is to show how Sargent becomes a strategic issue for Montesquiou’s agenda as an art critic, writer and pre-eminent figure of ‘le Tout-Paris’.","PeriodicalId":35078,"journal":{"name":"Visual Culture in Britain","volume":"19 1","pages":"27 - 48"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14714787.2018.1441744","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46446488","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sargentology – New Perspectives on the Works of John Singer Sargent","authors":"Liz Renes, Emily Moore","doi":"10.1080/14714787.2018.1445023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14714787.2018.1445023","url":null,"abstract":"In 1910Walter Sickert penned an article titled ‘Sargentolatry’ that addressed the fervour surrounding John Singer Sargent as an artist and tastemaker. Using the language of religious devotion, Sickert writes of the ‘prostration before [Sargent] and all his works’ by the British art press, the effect this adulation had on other artists working in this period, and how this sense of complacency was bad for both critics and artists alike. While Sickert’s criticisms can certainly be placed within modernism’s early antagonism to and rejection of Victorianism – an imperialistic golden age that Sargent was seen to represent – it marked the beginning of a line of debasement that would continue well after his death in 1925. Echoing Sickert’s sentiments as to the vapidity of the blindworship of Sargent, in his Transformations of 1926 Roger Fry decided simply that ‘it seems to me he brings no new or individual insight to the interpretation even of social values. Here he moves, and it is one secret of his effect, quite naturally in step with the crowd’. Though talented, Sargent was ultimately considered a relic. Thus, at the start of the twentieth century, it would appear that Sargent would be relegated to history as an artist with nothing new or important to say to the generations of artists that succeeded him. What Sickert and Fry could not foresee, perhaps, was the complexity of an artist whose person and work pervaded nearly every aspect of the late Victorian world – from music to literature to theatre, Europe to the East, Aestheticism to the First World War. Unable to erase the ‘Sargentolatry’, and the titanesque figure that Sargent represented, later scholars often misidentified, or possibly even corrected, Sickert’s term into ‘Sargentology’, a move that attempted to wash away the dogmatic tinge of the original by focusing instead on a more impartial, almost scientific study of Sargent as a distinct entity within the history of art. Though he brought seemingly ‘no new insight’, he was worthy enough to become a movement within himself. Towards the later years of the twentieth century, however, Sargent studies began to reach a new crescendo as renewed interest in Victorian art began to emerge. The Sargent catalogue raisonné by Richard Ormond and Elaine Kilmurray, which began in the early 1990s, solved the everpresent problem of coming to terms with the quantity of Sargent’s work, but much was still to be done to interpret its significance. Recent blockbuster exhibitions – such as the recent Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends at the National Portrait Gallery (2015) and Sargent: The Watercolours at Dulwich Picture Gallery (2017) – represent just this type","PeriodicalId":35078,"journal":{"name":"Visual Culture in Britain","volume":"19 1","pages":"1 - 5"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14714787.2018.1445023","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44918867","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sargent’s Painting Materials: New Discoveries and Their Implications","authors":"J. Townsend, Georgina Rayner","doi":"10.1080/14714787.2018.1441745","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14714787.2018.1441745","url":null,"abstract":"Several paintboxes and palettes used by John Singer Sargent, now in collections in both the USA and UK because he worked in both countries, have been studied technically. The results are compared to the artist’s training and oil painting practice over his lifetime, elucidated in a recent study. Sargent’s selection of materials and use of portable gear, modular easels and palettes for outdoor work are contextualized within the practice of coeval European artists. He used a wide range of high-quality paints consistently over his lifetime, which facilitated obtaining supplies in whichever continent and city he was working.","PeriodicalId":35078,"journal":{"name":"Visual Culture in Britain","volume":"19 1","pages":"111 - 89"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14714787.2018.1441745","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47820792","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sargent and Proust: An Elusive Mouvance","authors":"E. Eells, Stephen Coon","doi":"10.1080/14714787.2018.1440973","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14714787.2018.1440973","url":null,"abstract":"Whether John Singer Sargent and Marcel Proust ever met is unknown, but they shared close personal relationships and moved in the same circles. Among those relationships were artists Paul Helleu and Jacques-Émile Blanche; society figures Dr Samuel Pozzi, Comte Robert de Montesquiou and Winnaretta Singer; and musicians Gabriel Fauré, Léon Delafosse and Reynaldo Hahn. The works of the painter and the novelist share other traits: penetrating and incisive portraiture; encyclopedic portrayals of social transformation; and complex representations of outsiders in Jewish, homosexual and artistic figures. Sargent and Proust are unexpected counterparts in the representation of life in the Belle Époque.","PeriodicalId":35078,"journal":{"name":"Visual Culture in Britain","volume":"19 1","pages":"49 - 65"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14714787.2018.1440973","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44545254","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘The Making of the Future: Now’: Edinburgh Art Festival","authors":"D. Lafarge","doi":"10.1080/14714787.2017.1377581","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14714787.2017.1377581","url":null,"abstract":"In spite of his international legacy, Patrick Geddes is perhaps not so well known outside Scotland. Born in 1854, the biologist and botanist turned sociologist, turned town planner and experimental pedagogue, conducted work at home and overseas, establishing schools, universities and city plans in France, India, Israel and Palestine. In Edinburgh, the Aberdeenshire-born polymath is perhaps most remembered for his impact on the city’s Old Town. In the mid-nineteenth century, when the area was a slum crippled with poverty and disease, Geddes moved his family into a tenement just off the Royal Mile. From this base, Geddes set about his method of tackling urban poverty: ‘conservative surgery’. Instead of entirely demolishing and clearing the area to rebuild from scratch, he suggested that existing space should be ‘opened out’ to let in light and air: a botanist’s take on city planning. In practice, this was achieved through removing selected tenements in order to create small squares or courtyards; windows could then be added to the newly exposed walls, and gardens planted in the new spaces opened up. The myriad hidden gardens, closes and courtyards peppered throughout the Old Town are testament to this. Founded in 2004, Edinburgh Art Festival is one of the major programmes existing within the city-wide palimpsest of alternative, fringe and satellite festivals. 2017 saw the alignment of two anniversaries: seventy years of the Edinburgh International Festival, and one hundred years since Geddes’ 1917 publication The Making of the Future: A Manifesto and a Project, from which the art festival takes its title. In this text, written in the middle of the First World War and looking forward to its end, Geddes laid out his vision for a new holistic society in which ‘Art and Industry, Education and Health, Morals and Business must . . . advance in unison’. The rubric of ‘inter-disciplinarity’ finds its intellectual precursor in Scottish Generalism; Geddes believed in a ‘synthesised’ intellect as opposed to what he saw as a veer towards increased specialization of disciplines. Edinburgh Art Festival’s invocation of Geddesian ideals is two-fold. Through programming projects from Scottish and international artists it seeks to reinforce an outward-looking Scotland (particularly pertinent to current independence debates, in which an independent Scotland might seek EU membership), and calls to mind a phrase that is also Geddesian in origin: ‘think local, act global’. The commissions programme treads the same turf by ‘opening out’ venues in the Old","PeriodicalId":35078,"journal":{"name":"Visual Culture in Britain","volume":"18 1","pages":"401 - 409"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14714787.2017.1377581","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46850603","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘A View from North of the Border’: Scotland’s ‘Forgotten’ Contribution to the History of the Prime-Time BBC1 Contemporary Single TV Play Slot","authors":"John R. Cook","doi":"10.1080/14714787.2017.1396913","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14714787.2017.1396913","url":null,"abstract":"This article surveys BBC Scotland’s ‘forgotten’ contribution to the history of the prime-time contemporary TV play slot on BBC1, including its contributions to The Wednesday Play (BBC TV, 1964–70) and its later leading involvement with The Play on One (BBC TV, 1988–91), following the demise of the London-produced Play for Today slot (BBC TV, 1970–84). The article argues that Scotland’s contribution to TV drama has been historically a rich one and that it is important to remember this today as BBC Scotland struggles to compete with BBC Wales in the wake of the latter’s designation as a national ‘Drama Hub’.","PeriodicalId":35078,"journal":{"name":"Visual Culture in Britain","volume":"18 1","pages":"325 - 341"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14714787.2017.1396913","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44657309","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Political Fantasy in a Realistic Situation’: The Scotch on the Rocks (BBC 1973) Controversy","authors":"John Hill","doi":"10.1080/14714787.2017.1396915","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14714787.2017.1396915","url":null,"abstract":"Scotch on the Rocks was a five-part drama series broadcast by BBC1 in May and June 1973. It dealt with moves towards the creation of an independent Scotland and was referred to as a ‘political fantasy in a realistic situation’ by the BBC. The series was based on a novel co-written by Douglas Hurd, then political secretary to Conservative Prime Minister Ted Heath, and became the object of a running campaign and formal complaint by the Scottish National Party. This complaint was upheld by the BBC Programmes Complaints Commission with the result that the programme was never repeated and for a long time was believed to have been destroyed (though three episodes have now been discovered to exist). Although the programme’s effective disappearance has imbued it with a degree of mystique in certain quarters, there has so far been little serious discussion of it or the controversy that it generated. This article fills that gap by examining the political and broadcasting contexts in which the programme was produced, the criticisms directed at it and the curious ideological tensions evident in the series itself. In doing so, the article identifies the peculiar position that the series occupies within the history of Scottish television drama and indicates how it may be understood as a work of greater interest than has so far been acknowledged.","PeriodicalId":35078,"journal":{"name":"Visual Culture in Britain","volume":"18 1","pages":"342 - 361"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14714787.2017.1396915","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46855968","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Queer British Art, 1861–1967’ at Tate Britain, London, 5 April–1 October, 2017","authors":"J. Potvin, Dirk Gindt","doi":"10.1080/14714787.2017.1407999","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14714787.2017.1407999","url":null,"abstract":"Moving through the recent ‘Queer British Art, 1861–1967’ exhibition held at Tate Britain, these reviewers were inspired by how far we, as a queer community, have come and yet at the same time were struck by how far we have yet to go in providing space for our art and artists within institutions and in garnering greater visibility within the larger public. First and foremost, the inherent bravery on the part of the curator, Clare Barlow, and all those who assisted her in tackling such a topic, even in 2017, needs to be highlighted and acknowledged. The exhibition, certainly long overdue, is a strong reminder of the constant need for such innovative programming, that the struggle for true equality is far from over and that institutions must continue to foster genuine inclusivity and diversity without falling prey to fashionable trends. Throughout the exhibition, also apparent were the difficulties and struggles that Barlow and her staff surely would have endured in the organizing of the exhibition. A confidential, reliable source informed us that Barlow met with resistance in her negotiations with conservative institutions and private collectors who were reluctant to lend their art for fear of too-close an association with the governing theme. For these two reviewers, we found ourselves caught in a double bind. On the one hand, as queers we want to applaud Barlow – and by extension Tate Britain – for her endeavour; however, as queer scholars, we also need to be aware and critical of the absences, gaps and omissions in the exhibition. ‘Queer British Art, 1861–1967’ was divided into eight thematically and loosely chronologically determined rooms. Room 1, ‘Coded Desires’, privileged a discussion of androgyny and effeminacy, exemplified by the works of Simeon Solomon and Frederic Leighton, as a way of decoding the sensual, ambiguous and alternative forms of masculinity in the nineteenth century. Works in this room were sumptuous and called out to be touched, whether Evelyn de Morgan’s Aurora Triumphans or Leighton’s celebrated Sluggard. This tactile aspect of the works must not be underestimated, in our age of presentism and Instagram mania, especially in the manner they evoked desire and the sensual. As a means of situating the underlying themes, the inclusion of contemporary art reviews proved useful such as, for example, one critic who noted that in Leighton’s Daedalus and Icarus, the former appeared more like ‘a maiden rather than a youth’ (The Times 1869). Moving from eroticism and sensuality to a concern for ‘Public Indecency’, Room 2 offered a glimpse into the world of scandal at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Here, iconic queer authors such as Oscar Wilde and Radclyffe Hall","PeriodicalId":35078,"journal":{"name":"Visual Culture in Britain","volume":"18 1","pages":"414 - 418"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-09-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/14714787.2017.1407999","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45089447","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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