Worlds Turned Upside Down: Quiet Revolutions in Art

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• Professor Frances Spalding
• Friday 23 February 2024, 17:30-18:30
• Lady Mitchell Hall, Sidgwick Avenue.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Janet Gibson.

The argument of my lecture is that a series of revolutions, mostly in opposition to the dominance of the Western European tradition, have marked modern and contemporary art, as experienced here in Britain, but taking into account the wider European context. However, what is being turned upside down is not on the scale implied by this phrase when it was first used of the English Revolution in the seventeenth century. Instead this scatter or vein of revolutions has challenged the parameters associated with the older tradition in large and small ways. An instance of this is the revolutionary impact made in 1919 by African Carvings at the Chelsea Book Club in London (and echoed in 1923 by another exhibition of the same subject in the Brooklyn Museum, New York). At this time, you could find African carvings in the British Museum, in an enfilade of rooms called the Ethnographic Galleries. Here even Benin Bronzes were packed into overcrowded cases, jumbled with objects from Asia, Africa, America, and Oceania. But at the Chelsea Book Club exhibition the critic Roger Fry saw clearly the African grasp of ‘complete plastic freedom’ in the handling of three dimensions. Earlier, in 1910 and 1912, Fry had mounted two exhibitions of French Post-Impressionist paintings which revolutionised modern art in Britain. In 1919 in the Chelsea Book Club exhibition he discerned what seemed to him things greater than any other sculpture produced in this country since the Middle Ages. Written for the Athenaeum, his review was afterwards rushed into the proofs of his best-selling book of essays, Vision and Design (1920). It is possible that Fry’s essay may have influenced the exhibition of African art shown at Brooklyn in 1923, as it replaced the more usual ethnographic presentation with a layout that focused attention on art not anthropology.

This revolutionary way of looking at African art proved difficult for some, but not for Henry Moore. He found a copy of Vision and Design in Leeds Art Reference Library, as an art student, and went on to read other of Fry’s wide-ranging essays in this same book. The year before, Moore had himself started writing, for his own benefit, ‘A World History of Sculpture’. Nevertheless, as he later admitted: ‘Once you’d read Roger Fry the whole thing was there.’ Soon after entering the Royal College of Art in the autumn of 1921, he embarked on an intensive study of world sculpture, often spending more time each week in the British Museum than in the College.

This lecture asks why the Western European tradition occupies such a hallowed role in world culture. E.H. Gombrich provides one answer to this question in his The Story of Art (1950), with reference to the restlessness within Western culture in comparison with some Eastern cultures that have lasted almost unchanged for a thousand years. His own book has done much to promote the Western view of art, having now reached its 16th edition, been translated into 30 languages, and sold 8 million copies. When Gombrich tried in the twelfth edition to take the story of art up to the present day, he admitted some discomfort. Art veined with the revolutionary spirit had aligned itself more easily with progressive developments, with ‘primitivism’, modernism and modernity. Admittedly, modernism, modernity and even postcolonialism, with its reaction against Western Cultures, although moving towards globalisation, remain inextricably tied to the West, even during recent years when its socio-economic power has been challenged by global financial crises and troubled by the phenomenon of runaway global warming. Yet when a leading institute for the teaching of art history in this country admits that in the 2023-24 academic year two-thirds of its classes are consigned to American and European art, more revolution is needed. More cross-cultural exchange, of the kind demonstrated by the British Library exhibition, Chinese and British; more interventions like Chila Burman’s transformation of classical imperial public buildings into palaces of Hindu delight; more things that surprise and can turn a world upside down.

Frances Spalding is an art historian, critic and biographer. She read art history at the University of Nottingham and began writing pieces for the TLS , The Burlington Magazine and art journals while still a post-graduate. She has a specialist interest in twentieth-century British art and first established her reputation with Roger Fry: Art and Life. She went on to write lives of the artists Vanessa Bell, John Minton, Duncan Grant, Gwen Raverat and John and Myfanwy Piper, as well as a biography of the poet Stevie Smith. Her survey history, British Art since 1900, in the Thames & Hudson World of Art series, has been widely used in schools, colleges and universities, and in the mid-1990s she was commissioned by the Tate to write a centenary history of this national institution. Between 2000 and 2015, she taught at Newcastle University, becoming Professor of Art History. She acted as Editor of The Burlington Magazine, 2015-16, and is now Emeritus Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art and in 2005 was made a CBE for Services to Literature.

This talk is part of the Darwin College Lecture Series series.

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