The Courtauld’s New Research Symposium 2017 is a platform for third-year PhD candidates to present and exchange their research to their peers, the wider scholarly community and the public. Ranging from medieval England to contemporary Bosnia-Herzegovina via Renaissance Florence the conference will bring questions concerning materiality, identity and institutions to bear on art and politics. Whether performing a close analysis of a late-fifteenth-century altarpiece frame or a Marxist reading of photographic technologies after the 2008 financial crisis, what are the pressing methodological questions for the discipline? This conference provides a place to consider how the cohort has been collectively thinking through critical challenges and new directions for the History of Art.
Thursday 8th June
11:00–11:55 Session 1: Conflict and Memory (Chair: Sofia Gurevich)
Claudia Zini, ‘Objects of Memory: Autobiographical Survival Strategies in post-war Bosnia-Herzegovina’
Nayun Jang, ‘Rendering Invisible Memories Visible: Memories of the Pacific War in East Asia’
12:00–13:25 Session 2: Nation, Body and Belief (Chair: Eowyn Kerr-Di Carlo)
Julia Secklehner, ‘Hitler vs. Holková?: National and International anti-Fascism in Prague Caricature, 1934’
Albert Godycki, ‘The Hard Power of Culture: Embodiment, Politics and National Identity in the Early Dutch Republic’
Massoumeh Assemi, ‘Storytelling and Ta’zieh painting’
13:30–14:25 Break for lunch
14.30–15.25 Session 3: Land and Identities (Chair: Thomas Hughes)
Edwin Coomasaru, ‘(Un)tameable Beasts: Mothers, Monsters and the Northern Irish Peace Process’
Natalie Hume, ‘Representations of the Agriculture of the American West c.1870: Eadweard Muybridge and Arthur Boyd Houghton’
15:30–16:25 Session 4: Loss and Desire (Chair: Edwin Coomasaru)
Alexander Noelle, ‘“Bel Julio”: Giuliano de’ Medici (1453–1478) as an Ideal of Male Beauty in Renaissance Florence’
Theo Gordon, ‘Phantastic Orality: Mourning and Violence in the art of Félix González Torres’
16:25–16:55 Tea and coffee
17:00–18:00 Keynote: Professor Lynda Nead (Pevsner Professor of History of Art, Birkbeck, University of London), ‘The Tiger in the Smoke: The Aesthetics of the Fog in Post-War Britain’
Followed by WINE RECEPTION
Friday 9 June
10:00–10:55 Session 5: Painting, Writing and Realism (Chair: Emily Pegues)
Thomas Hughes, ‘The Rose and the Worm: “Realism” in Ruskin, Pater and Nineteenth-Century Painting’
Catherine Howe, ‘Bacon/Picasso: The Brutality of Fact’
11:00–11:25 Tea and coffee
11:30–12:55 Session 6: In the Frame (Chair: Imogen Tedbury)
Alexander Röstel, ‘Harmonising the Church Interior: the Case of the Ospedale degli Innocenti’
Miguel Ayres de Campos, ‘The world as Image: Framing the Hereford Map’
Elizabeth Woolley, ‘“Of only modest artistic quality”: reconsidering the significance of firm ecclesiastical wall painting in England, 1845–1920’
13:00–13:55 Break for lunch
14:00–14:55 Session 7: Modernisms, Materials, Markets (Chair: Maggie Crosland)
Giovanni Casini, ‘A Dealer’s “Dictatorship”? Giorgio de Chirico, Léonce Rosenberg and the Parisian Art Market in the late 1920s’
Rachel Mustalish, ‘Arthur Dove: Modernism through Materials’
15.00–15:55 Session 8: Collections and Canons (Chair: Anna Merlini)
Naomi Speakman, The Virtuoso Appetite: The Medieval Antiquities of Ralph Bernal’
Imogen Tedbury, ‘After the “game of grab”: collecting, displaying and selling Sienese painting after the “Burlington Magazine wars” of 1903’
16:00–16:25 Tea and coffee
16:30–17:25 Session 9: Breaking the Mould (Chair: Alexander Röstel)
Emily Pegues, ‘Carving for Casting: Jan Borreman’s Wooden Models for Bronze’
Jonathan Vernon, ‘A Shape of Time: The Politics of the Pedestal in Sidney Geist’s Brancusi Catalogue of 1967’
17:30–18:25 Session 10: Reproduction and Neoliberalism (Chair: Theo Gordon)
Rachel Stratton, ‘John McHale and the Development of the Twentieth-Century “Ikon”, 1955–1961’
Boris Čučković Berger, ‘Latency of Source Materials: The Problem of “Unsupported Transit” in Museum Photography c.2008’
Closing remarks