Dr Kate Aspinall is an independent historian, writer, and artist. Based in London, she focuses her art historical research on the cultural and intellectual history of Anglo-American drawing practices. She teaches occasionally for the Courtauld and Yale in London and has a wide range of experiences with public speaking, from lecturing for the Art Society to television appearances, and delivering tailored talks to galleries and public institutions, including Tate, the Towner and Pallant House. In addition to her art practice, which recently won several grants from the European Commission and other international institutions (see bytheo.art), she was a long-term consultant for the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation, and until recently she served as a Trustee of the Association for Art History, representing freelance and independent art historians. She has degrees from the University of St Andrews, the Courtauld Institute and the University of East Anglia.
Selected Announcements, Papers and Publications
‘Occluded Depths’, chapter in forthcoming anthology: Frank Auerbach, Drawings of People
Yale University Press, October 2022
I am proud to announce my participation in the first extended study of Frank Auerbach’s remarkable portrait drawings. My chapter, ‘Occluded Depths’, considers Auerbach’s relationship with drawing – as a tool and as a set of material possibilities – in addition to his relationship to the international assortment of artists, who, beginning in the middle of the 1950s, re-established drawing as a vehicle of ambitious artistic practice.
The book is edited by Mark Hallett (Director, The Paul Mellon Centre) and Catherine Lampert (Independent Curator and Historian). It will also includes texts by the artist himself as well as new essays by James Finch (Curator, Tate Britain), Alex Massouras (Independent Historian and Artist), David Mellor (Curator and Emeritus Professor, University of Sussex), and Barnaby Wright (Curator and Deputy Head, The Courtauld Gallery).
Special Screening of Walter Richard Sickert Documentaries
British Film Institute, London
Tuesday 25 July 2023
Proud to be introducing and moderating an evening of appreciation for one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century British art, the painter Walter Richard Sickert (1860–1942) with two ground-breaking documentaries, John Read‘s Walter Sickert: Painter of the Third Floor Back of 1954 and Jake Auerbach‘s Sickert’s London of 1992, followed by an in conversation and Q&A with Auerbach.
Click here for more information and to book.
Unruly Britannia: The Brit Art Renaissance of 1945-1970
Courtauld Institute of Art, Summer School Intensive, Course 15
Monday 19 – Friday 23 June 2023
British art during the ‘Swinging Sixties’ became an important global brand. This course considers the rapid artistic developments that led up to and constituted this exciting, rebellious and innovative decade, which culminated in London becoming one of the world’s capitals of art. Roughly chronologically we shall explore dominant trends and movements, beginning with mature artistic trends that were achieving an international audience, such as the expressive figuration of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud (sometimes called ‘The School of London’) as well as the abstract Constructionism of Victor Pasmore and Kenneth Martin. We shall then look to art of the burgeoning youth culture, such as New Generation Sculpture, Op, Pop and the rise of conceptual art. This course will not only consider notable painters and sculptors within these groups but will also explore the expanded cultural field as well as the institutions, educators and gallerists who propelled them into the international limelight and helped British post-Second World War and contemporary art gain the prominence and international influence that continues today. Course visits may include several of the following: the Mayor, Saatchi or Beaux Arts Gallery; the Whitechapel or Hayward Gallery; the Design Museum; Goldsmiths, University of London; archives at the RCA, at Tate and Central St Martin’s.
Click here to for more information about my module and about Courtauld Summer School Intensives.
A Sense of the Underneath:
A tour appreciating the evolution of Frank Auerbach’s drawing practices
Piano Nobile Gallery, Midday, Sat 22 Oct 2022
A special event organised by The Piano Nobile Gallery in celebration of their outstanding exhibition Frank Auerbach: The Sitters (23 Sep – 16 Dec 2022).
The talk and tour considered key masterpieces from Auerbach’s long and prolific career, unpacking his rich relationship with drawing, the evolution of his craft, and why it is that his works on paper can be so mesmerising. Particular attention was paid to how he challenged the parameters of his medium, pushing his works on paper to and beyond the edges of their material possibilities.
Review of Walter Sickert (Tate Britain, London)
19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, August 2022
Journal based at Birkbeck, University of London
Walter Richard Sickert (1860–1942) was master of the dramatic moment. He had a broad, roving intelligence and he gives one the impression of being a man whose mind seemed to move more quickly than his brush, and whose gift for imbuing narrative tension was matched only by his apparent boredom with his own easy facility with paint.
Click here to continue reading the full review.
‘A Painter’s Painter: Considering the Legacy of William Coldstream’
Chapter in forthcoming anthology: Bill Coldstream Remembered: Portraits of a Painter
Coldstream Press, 2023/4
Coldstream’s legacy, like his life, defies simple interpretation and conventional narratives. He was a radical artist and an establishment mandarin, a beloved teacher and a distant figurehead. He continues to inspire and influence people across the British art world, not only with an idiosyncratic method and aesthetic vision but also via the professionalisation of the British artist, which has been one of the nation’s defining features on the world’s stage in recent decades.
In ‘A Painter’s Painter’ I reflect on the interplay of Coldstream’s work as an artist and as administrator – drawing upon my earlier research into Coldstream’s effect upon the National Advisory Council on Art Education (aka NACAE or ‘Coldstream Report’).
Anniversary: The Arts Society
2017-2022
This March marks my five-year anniversary of working with the Arts Society (formerly The National Association of Decorative and Fine Arts or NADFAS). From my involvement with the launch of the Society’s Lecturing Academy, these years have encompassed much, including adapting to the pandemic. I feel privileged that during this time, I have been invited to deliver 46 talks (and counting). I have travelled across the United Kingdom to speak to chapters within the London boroughs as well as those as far as Jersey, West Cornwall, and Southport. These talks included:
- The Awkward Bodies: A Defence of British Modernism
- Is Less More? Mark Rothko and the New York Colour Revolution
- Picasso in Britain: Art, Politics and Outcry
- David Bomberg’s Lost Legacy: A Master Painter and His Students
- Why Roy Lichtenstein Matters
To Tame a Bubble, a Homo Bulla Project
Fellowship/Artist in Residence, Institute for Advanced Study, 2020-2021
Central European University, Budapest/Vienna
Canceled due to Covid Pandemic
My art project ‘To Tame a Bubble’ has been awarded a fellowship from the Institute for Advanced Study, Central European University, Budapest/Vienna.
The project emerges from my technical, emotional and intellectual fascination with how the ideals of European humanism – including the hope that we could cultivate ourselves into peaceable, constructive beings apart from the human as animal (to tame ourselves) – have failed or saved us in light of new socio-political and climatic events. The aim is a series of mixed media paintings inspired by the ancient European tradition of homo bulla (‘man is a bubble’), where the bubble is a metaphor for the brevity, beauty and fragility of human life. Re-imagining the homo bulla is thus my own memento mori as an individual and also a world citizen, trying to understand the patrimony of the artistic and intellectual heritage that formed me and to locate where hope remains.
David Bomberg’s Lost Legacy:
A Master Painter and his Students
London Art History Society, London
Postponed due to COVID-19 pandemic
Rescheduled for 1 March 2021, 18:30
Join me in discussing the power of one of the most passionate, pugnacious and underappreciated painters in twentieth-century Britain. Neglected for much of his lifetime, David Bomberg (1890-1957) has only recently been rightfully celebrated with exhibitions at galleries across the country. This hour-long talk explores what it in his painting that touches a nerve today as much as it did for the talented group of artists who studied with him. From Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff to Dennis Creffield, Bomberg’s passion and craft revived the British tradition of expressive naturalism and created a visual language that remains very much alive today.
Click here to for more information and to make a booking.
Artist Versus Teacher:
The Problem of David Bomberg’s Pedagogical Legacy
Tate Papers no.33, 2020
David Bomberg (1890–1957) left two legacies: as a pugnacious, experimental painter, and as one the most influential teachers in the post-Second World War period. In the latter role, he inspired a particular artistic identity within generations of art students, some of whom, including Frank Auerbach and Gustav Metzger, have become well known. These dual legacies sit uneasily with one another, largely because Bomberg’s parallel activities of teaching and painting during the later part of his career (c.1948–1957) have been treated as oppositional, leading observers, critics and art historians to ignore how each affected the other. This paper discusses the content and community of Bomberg’s influential teaching at the Borough Polytechnic, arguing that teaching was beneficial for Bomberg’s art and that his late work deserves reappraisal.
To read the full paper, please click here.
The School of Thick Paint:
David Bomberg at the Borough Polytechnic
National Gallery, London
Saturday, 15 February 2020, 11:00 to 16:00
In commemoration of the exhibition Young Bomberg and the Old Masters (27 Nov 2019 – 1 Mar 2020), please join Richard Cork, David Boyd Haycock, Leon Betsworth and myself to discuss Bomberg in the context of artist-led art education.
Click here to download the study day’s programme: NG_15Feb2020
David Bomberg’s School of Thick Paint:
A Master Painter and His Students
Hastings Contemporary
Sunday 29 September 2019, 1:30–3:00 pm
To celebrate the newly re-opened Hastings Contemporary and its timely exhibition of Roy Oxlade’s artwork, this hour-long talk explores the relationship between Oxlade’s cohort at the Borough Polytechnic and their teacher David Bomberg, who was one of Britain’s greatest twentieth-century painters and a messianic figure for a generation of artists who span from Frank Auerbach and Leon Kossoff to Dennis Creffield and Miles Richmond. In this illustrated talk we will immerse ourselves in how the passion and craft Bomberg inspired in his students grew into a visual style that remains very much alive today.
Click here to for more information.
Taking on the World: Twentieth Century British Visual Culture
Yale in London & The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
Undergraduate Module
Summer 2019
This advanced undergraduate course considers the rapid artistic developments throughout twentieth-century Britain, which culminated in London becoming one of the world’s capitals of art during the ‘Swinging Sixties’ with the rise of Beatlemania, Pop Art and conceptualism among other cultural thrusts. The course moves chronologically from the early years of the twentieth century to the advent of the headline-grabbing ‘Young British Artists’ (YBAs) in the 1990s, focusing on major artistic trends and their significance in the broader cultural history, a period marked by tremendous energy, rebellion and innovation. Drawing on the collections in numerous museums, galleries and art colleges across London, this course will be a mix of classroom discussions and field trips responding to art objects and both primary and secondary textual sources.
Click here for University Listing
Blueprints For An Emergent Personality
Vertigo Starts Art Residency with the AMORE Lab, 2018-2019
European Commission and Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona
Blueprints For An Emergent Personality is an arts and science collaboration between Kate and a computational linguistics lab at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, whose project ‘AMORE: A distributional MOdel of Reference to Entities’ uses deep learning to probe language acquisition. The aim of the residency was to visually explore the possibilities for visual representation of non-human personality.
At the forefront of the AI revolution is deep learning, which uses algorithms inspired by the structure and function of human brain, called artificial neural networks. The AMORE team is developing one such computational system that can learn its own representations from data in order to explore the phenomenon of reference in language. In the process of this self-learning, however, can a world view be discerned? Can personality emerge from actions in machines, just as it does in humans? Blueprints as a project was my response to the AMORE team’s use of neural networks. Through art making I reflected on subjectivity – both within coders and as an potential (or possibly inevitable) by-product of the linguistic learning process – considering what worldview could conceivably grow from the particular conditions of deep learning. Over the year that I spent in the residency, I produced an archive of an 140 page sketchbook, preparatory mixed-media works and six large mixed media works on paper (80x100cm).
For more please see my art site, the AMORE team’s website, our mid-project video, or our final report for the European Commission: VERTIGO-Blueprints-RESIDENCY-public_report
Primitivism, Realism & Everything in Between
Two-part Art Course at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester
18 & 25 July 2018
Join me this July to examine the tensions around the concept of skill in 20th century British art, from the emulation of naïve art by Christopher Wood and Ben Nicholson in the 1920s to the desire for expressive freedom among David Hockney, R.B. Kitaj and many others in the 1950s and beyond.
De-Skilling: Wed 18th July 2018 (11am-1pm)
Re-Skilling: Wed 25 July (11am-1pm)
Click here to see full calendar and to book a course
Courses are available as single units or as an entire series
‘The Arts Society at 50’
Interview in Article Celebrating Art Society’s Golden Jubilee
Spring 2018
Click this link to read my interview in excerpts from in The Arts Society Magazine (Spring 2018): ArtsSocietyMagazineSpring2018
Click this link to read more generally about the history of the Arts Society in ‘Fifty years of fine art for everyone’, Country Life (April 2018): CountryLife11Apr2018
The British Drawing Revival of the 1960-70s
Three-part Art Course at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester
6, 13 & 27 June 2018
Join me this June to explore how diverse artists working in Britain participated in a revival of drawing in the 1960s and 70s. From R.B. Kitaj and David Hockney to Frank Auerbach and Barry Flanagan, drawing’s potential, as liberated from preparatory work, was widely explored and appreciated. This series looks at the often overlooked role played by drawing in the rebellious momentum of the British twentieth-century.
Click here to see full calendar and to book a course
Courses are available as single units or as an entire series
Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue?
The Colour Revolution in Mid-Century New York City
(Courtauld Institute of Art, 7pm 13 March 2018)
Following World War II, New York took the lead from Paris, Vienna and Berlin in the vanguard of artistic developments – and the focus was on colour. It was here that artists grappled with the lingering effects of art historical meanings for individual hues and encountered innovative technologies that gave colour new possibilities. Consumer culture, led by the rise of colour TV, added a novel vernacular element, leading to collective understandings of colour that have since been normalised across the Western world. Artists’ responses in 1950s and 1960s were as varied as they were explosively creative, investigating not only the properties of colour itself (Barnett Newman, Ellsworth Kelly) but also texture (Josef Albers, Mark Rothko) and its symbolism (Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein). This talk will examine some of these developments in colour, situating them within the broader culture and exploring the sometimes perplexing power of these pieces.
Lecture ten of ‘Colour: Theory, Practice, and Meaning in Byzantine and Western Art’, a part of the Showcasing Art History, Series XII 2017-2018.
Click here for more information about events on offer.
I am proud to announce my accreditation
as a lecturer for the Arts Society
January 2018
The Arts Society is a leading arts education charity with a global network of 385 local Societies, which bring people together through a shared curiosity for the arts. Arts Society events cater to 90,000+ members, providing welcoming places – locally, nationally and globally – to hear expert lecturers share their specialist knowledge about the arts
Style Cults & the School of Thick Paint
Contribution to ‘Art by the Many‘, Conversation Piece coordinated by Thomas Crow
British Art Studies, 7 (30 Nov 2017)
‘The importance of style cults in providing a vernacular charge to fine art achievements in the Britain of the 1960s, as argued for by Tom Crow’s opening provocation, is compelling and raises further questions about how art markets and historians have handled and could handle collective activity, including re-evaluating collective identity…’
Click here to continue reading my full response as well as Crow’s text and replies from other contributors.
David Bomberg’s Teaching and his Pupils
(Pallant House Gallery, 6pm 9 November 2017)
An hour-long talk exploring Bomberg’s teaching and its influence on the practices of canonical figures in British 20th century art, including Dennis Creffield, Gustav Metzger, Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach, among others. Followed by a complimentary glass of wine. Booking essential.
Commissioned for the major retrospective, ‘Bomberg‘, at Pallant House Gallery
(21 October 2017 – 4 February 2018)
Click here for more information.
Programme of Bomberg events at Pallant House: PH-Bomberg-Events
A Garden Shut Up, a Fountain Sealed:
Review of Sussex Modernism: Retreat and Rebellion (Two Temple Place)
(3rd Dimension – The PMSA Magazine & Newsletter)
Garden Statue – The Virgin (1911-12) greets the visitor entering ‘Sussex Modernism: Retreat and Rebellion’ at Two Temple Place in London (fig.1). It makes for a striking beginning: a weathered, monolithic piece exuding a presence far greater than its material form. The sculpture was commissioned from Eric Gill by Roger Fry for his garden at Durbins his home in Guildford. Illuminated against the sumptuous panelling of Two Temple Place’s Lower Gallery, the wear of its stone makes the figure all the more arresting, as it traces its endurance not only of the elements, but also of everyday family life. This is emphasised by a nearby photograph of Fry’s daughter, Pamela, all unselfconscious adolescent joie de vivre, climbing on the statue’s back. This constellation of factors accentuates what is elsewhere subtle: that this exhibition is not so much a showcase of art objects as it is of relics of greater attempts to live according to one’s creative ideals.
Click here to continue reading the full review.
‘Creating Artists’, Review of The London Art Schools: Reforming the Art World, 1960 to Now
Art History, 40:1 (Feb 2017): 200-204
Click to read full review at Art History’s online library
Art History in the Pub, London
Judith Jammers and I are re-launching the London branch of Art History in the Pub with a series of four talks to be held every other month, January through July 2017.
9 January: Lisa Maddigan Newby (Doctoral Student at the University of East Anglia) presents ‘Assembling a history of Eduardo Paolozzi’s Lost Magic Kingdoms‘
Event flyer: 9jan2017_ahitp_flyer
13 March: Eckart Marchand (Assistant Archivist at the Warburg Institute) presents
‘From the migration of motifs to the emigration of scholars: The Warburg Institute’
Event flyer:13Mar2017_ahitp_flyer
15 May: Lotfi Gouigah (Doctoral Student at McGill University, Montreal) presents
‘Flesh and Time: Lynn Hershman Leeson, Feminism and Performances of the Life-like’
Event flyer: 15May2017_ahitp_flyer
10 July: TBA
Click here for postcard for entire pan-UK series: 2017_ahitp_london
William Coldstream and the Art of Measuring
(Piano Nobile, 4pm 17 December 2016)
William Coldstream’s peculiar method of working – measuring precise relationships using a pencil held at arm’s length – has overshadowed his artistic production. Described and derided by many as “objective”, both the method and the works are both reconsidered in this talk, in which I disentangle the various strands of objectivity and subjectivity in Coldstream’s practice, finding the raw emotion at the heart of his paintings.
Gallery talk in honour of the upcoming exhibition at Piano Nobile ‘William Coldstream | Euan Uglow: Daisies and Nudes’ from 22 November to 28 January.
Teaching Integrity:
David Bomberg’s Class at the Borough Polytechnic
(Towner Art Gallery, 3pm 31 July 2016)
David Bomberg famously proclaimed that art could not be taught, and yet he did teach. His approach, often called the search for ‘the spirit in the mass’, became a rallying cry to meld self, subject and art. It went far beyond a mere process of creation to become instead a sense of personal integrity known through artistic expression. For eight years Bomberg’s teaching moulded the artistic consciousness of some of the most dynamic personalities in the rising post-war generation, including Dennis Creffield, Gustav Metzger, Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach, among many others. His students, alone or in exhibiting collectives, became the visible icons of a ‘school of thick paint’ that challenged the divide between the critical camps of figuration and abstraction. This talk will explore the details of Bomberg’s instruction and the various ways he influenced the practices of canonical figures in British 20th century art.
Paper commissioned for ‘David Bomberg: A Sense of Place‘
(9 July – 11 September 2016)
Click here for more information.
True and Pure:
Frank Dobson and Eric Gill Drawing From Life
(Review of Daniel Katz exhibition in 3rd Dimension – The PMSA Magazine & Newsletter)
The complicity between sculpture and drawing is inescapable in True and Pure, an exhibition in which the sleek shapes of pieces by Eric Gill and Frank Dobson are arranged amid the elegant domesticity of the Daniel Katz Gallery’s Edwardian town house in Mayfair.
The curation maximises on the echoes between drawing and sculpture, space and displaced space, destabilising the autonomy of the sculptures and enhancing the autonomy of the drawings while maintaining the dignity of each and allowing Dobson’s underappreciated drawings to emerge as the true stars of the show…
Click here to continue reading the full review.
The Irresistible Rise of the Independent Art Historian
AAH Bulletin, No. 122 (June 2016)
The new issue of the AAH Bulletin is out. Click below to read my Chair Report:
June 2016: Bulletin 122 F&I report
Please visit the AAH website to learn more about the Freelance and Independents and how to become an AAH member.
Click here to scroll through the AAH online directory.
Dennis Creffield in Conversation
(Borough Road Gallery, 7pm, 12 May 2016)
A conversation with Dennis Creffield, a distinguished artist and attendee of Bomberg’s classes from 1947-1951 as well as the youngest elected member of the Borough Group. Bomberg’s approach had a significant, and lasting, impact on Creffield’s practice. Creffield will describe his experience of being taught by Bomberg as a young man. The discussion will look at Bomberg’s approach, the atmosphere and dynamic of this unique pedagogic setting, Bomberg’s legacy, Creffield’s practice and more.
Leader among Equals:
The School of Bomberg and Art School Reform
(Borough Road Gallery, 7pm, 28 April 2016)
Paper commissioned for “Keep the Paint Moving”: David Bomberg and the Art of Radical Teaching (22 April – 2 July 2016) that addresses ways to understand Bomberg’s teachings against and within the rapid changes in art education in mid-twentieth century Britain, considering the claim that Bomberg created an environment set apart from the trends around him. I take the position that the culture of Bomberg’s classes laid bare fundamental concerns; specifically, how belonging to a ‘school’ positions an artist within an art world that is increasingly aware of itself as a consumer economy and yet remains reliant on the romantic myth of an artist as a heroic individualist. Looking at the culture of Bomberg’s classroom and the community of makers that it crystalised, I proffer that there was a school of Bomberg, set apart from conflations with the Borough Group or the pejorative label of ‘Bombergians’. Understanding the dynamics of this and the concurrent reactions against it sheds light on a deeper insecurity about the limits of art education within late modernism.
Click here for a pdf through the Bourough Gallery
A Signature of Our Race: Herbert Read and the Line that Links
Medieval Illumination and 1930s British Modernism
(Article in ‘Medieval Modernity: Revisiting the Middle Ages in the 20th century’, special issue of Visual Resources, Vol XXXII, no. 1-2)
In an article in The Burlington Magazine of 1933, British theorist Herbert Read (1893–1968) proposed “a basic linear signature of our race.” His invocation of line as a mark of identity is representative of a wider community of thinkers who linked the British avant-garde with medieval illumination via the watercolors of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Theorists and scholars such as Kenneth Clark (1903–1983), William George Constable (1887–1976), and Nikolaus Pevsner (1902–1983) joined Read in identifying drawing as an essential aspect of medieval illumination that had re-emerged in the compositions of the Romantic period as well as those of the Neo-Romantics, including John Piper (1903–1992) and Paul Nash (1889–1946).
Theoretical enthusiasm for this lineage arose not only from aesthetic affinities but also from political utility. Amid concerns over mounting political extremism, notions of medieval art were useful as emblems of British precedent for sustainable and proud work. This paper traces the use of line at the time, most notably by Herbert Read, as a symbolic mark that promoted a balance between individualism and collectivism through its connection to the medieval period. Furthermore, I argue that harnessing the moral connotations of line was possible, and particularly effective, because of culturally available understandings of the drawn line’s distinctive intimacy.
Barbara Pezzini’s discussion in The Burlington Magazine Blog (13 Oct 2016): burlington_magazine_2016
‘Mark of the Times: Charcoal and the Borough Group’
Paper version of Late Opening Tour of
The Elemental Force of Charcoal
(Borough Road Gallery, 23 Oct 2015 – 27 Feb 2016)
Paper placing the drawings within The Elemental Force of Charcoal: Drawing at the Borough in a wider context, with reference to seismic shifts that occurred in arts education and drawing practices of the 20th century, as well as the historical use of charcoal as a medium. It is a written version of a tour presented on 29 January 2016 at the Borough Road Gallery as part of SLAM Fridays .
For more information on the exhibition and to download a pdf of the paper, click here.
Drawing Done with Intellectual Care:
David Sylvester’s Drawing Exhibitions and the Shaping of the Creative Individual
(Exhibiting Contemporary Art in Post-War Britain, 1945–60, a Conference co-organised by Tate and the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, 28–29 January 2016)
Abstract
Critic and curator David Sylvester played a pivotal role shaping the intellectual as well as the actual consumption of avant-garde art in the post-Second World War period and yet a key series of exhibitions he curated, focusing on the practice of drawing in the 1950s and early 1960s, has been all but ignored. Drawing for Pictures (Arts Council, 1953), Recent British Drawings (ICA 1954) and Drawing Towards Painting (Arts Council, 1962) all steered public engagement with the eclectic and often private practices of drawing at a volatile moment for art institutional structures in Britain.
Sylvester’s exhibitions place him among the international vanguard for his use of drawing theory as a tool to explore the role of the artistic individual within her practice, a perspective that points toward the role drawing took in process art and conceptualism in the ensuing decades. Many years before Lawrence Alloway’s celebrated essay on Sol LeWitt (Artforum, 1975) inspired an international audience to reappraise drawing in light of conceptualism, Sylvester harnessed drawing to speak to the limitations of modernism and individualism. Sylvester’s analysis arose from the particular socio-cultural sensitivities of 1940s and 1950s Britain about the role and obligations of creativity. This paper re-examines these significant exhibitions in order to consider Sylvester’s, and by extension Britain’s, place at the forefront of the subsequent rise in international exhibitions devoted to drawing practice.
PDF copy: Aspinall_Drawing Done with Intellectual Care_Dec_2016
TRT World Showcase
29 December 2015
Discussing Ellsworth Kelly
I am proud to announce my election as the new Chair of the Freelance and Independent Committee of the AAH
November 2015
To join our mailing list, which is available to both AAH members and non members alike, click here. Please also visit the AAH website to learn more about the Freelance and Independents and how to become an AAH member.
Click here to scroll through the AAH online directory.
Click below to read my first Chair Report:
February 2016: Bulletin 121 F&I pages
‘The Pasmore Report?:
Reflections on the 1960 Coldstream Report and its legacy’
(Art School Educated Conference, Tate Britain, 11-12 September 2014)
Abstract
The publication of the First Report of the National Advisory Council on Art Education (1960), otherwise known as the first ‘Coldstream Report’, is a graspable moment of displacement in the British art world. It represents a shift between an educational system based on disciplined studies of techniques and crafts to one based on conceptual thinking and design. Its legacy is marked by trauma and confusion that deepened as the decade matured, spilling over into creative outbursts and political revolt. It has become a symbol of oppressive, narrowly defined rigour and prejudiced artistic values. As such, both the report and the painter and educator who leant it his name, William Coldstream, have been blamed and demonised. This paper approaches the report as an image, for it is not only invested with symbolic, representational meaning, but it also is among those victims of iconoclasm – works of art, signs, inscriptions or pictures – that act in the words of theorist Bruno Latour “as a mediation to access something else”. The Report is a window to a set of values for education, but also for the perception of the artist’s relationship to society. Half a century later, it is important to carefully weigh the document itself against the politics and motivations of the diverse committee members who authored it. Using ministerial archival records opened in the late 1990s, this paper reflects on how such a document presents a methodological conundrum in tracing intention and effect, as well as the dangers of conflating it with any one participant.
‘The Aesthetic of Scientific Authority in a Nuclear Age:
Jacob Bronowski and Feliks Topolski’
(British Art in the Nuclear Age, ed. Catherine Jolivette; Ashgate, 2014)
Winner of the Historians of British Art‘s 2014 Multi-Author Book Award
Abstract
Celebrity historian of science Jacob Bronowski interpreted Polish émigré artist Feliks Topolski’s use of line as an analogy for science’s use of subjective judgment in the ‘Knowledge or Certainty’ segment of Bronowski’s 1973 BBC television series The Ascent of Man. The culmination of Bronowski’s views on the relationship of scientific authority and epistemological method, the episode examines the ethics of interpreting scientific judgement through Topolski’s particular dynamic aesthetic. As a visual embodiment of Bronowski’s ideal epistemological approach, Topolski’s drawings become instructive rather than merely aesthetic – helping a public removed from scientific realities to conceptualise the language and significance of subjective (and thus fallible) judgement as a possible alternative to unreflective technocracy. Through addressing the developing paradoxes for nuclear scientists as authorities in the 1950s and Bronowski’s decades-long engagement with these discussions, it is possible to trace the seeds of that later collaboration, which was formulated around the hotly debated twenty-five year anniversary of the atomic bombings in Japan.
Preview Available via Google Books
Reviews:
Lee Hallman’s review in Burlington Magazine (May 2015): Burlington Magazine May 2015
Robert Sutton’s review in Art History (Nov 2015): Art History November 2015
Camilla Mørk Røstvik’s review in The British Journal for the History of Science (Dec 2015): British Journal for the History of Science_Dec 2015
Martin Diebel’s review in Sehepunkte, 16:3 (2016): ‘Rezension von: British Art in the Nuclear Age’
Paul Dobraszczyk’s review in Technology and Culture, 57:2 (Apr 2016): Book review_Project_Muse
Attitudes to drawing in Britain, 1918-1964
Doctoral Thesis, University of East Anglia
2013
Numerous artists and theorists in Britain between 1918 and 1964 produced rich bodies of drawing-orientated work, yet these endeavours receive little analysis. In order to account for them as more than isolated anomalies, the nature and importance of drawing during the period needs to be reconsidered – not only within private practices, but also as a concept in the wider cultural field. When engaging with a medium that does not have a fixed identity, and so does not remain stable within a historical narrative, it is not enough to write figures back into history; it is necessary to excavate a history for figures to be written back into. The history of early-twentieth-century Britain must include the full spectrum of significant permutations of the concept of drawing, and this thesis takes steps toward uncovering these permutations and analysing their development in relation to each other.
Available for download via EThOS, British Library