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Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series Autumn 2012
Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series
Autumn 2012
Sponsored by the F M Kirby Foundation and The Prince’s Foundation
Histories in Transition
Seminar: Aspiring to the Condition of Music
Tim Barringer (Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art, Yale University)
Tuesday, 23 October
12.00 - 14.00, Research Forum South Room
Walter Pater's dictum of 1877 'all art constantly aspires to the condition of music' is regularly cited with regard to the Aesthetic Movement. Music is invoked as a metaphor for painting in which formal qualities outweigh or replace altogether narrative concerns. The imbrication of music into every aspect of Victorian Aestheticism was, however, far more complex than this would suggest. This seminar will examine the role of music in British culture of the 1860s and '70s, referring to actual performers, performances and works, critical and musicological discourse, and the attempts of painters such as Frederic Leighton, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Albert Moore to create what one might describe as a musical visuality in addition to a musical iconography. Gilbert and Sullivan's 'entirely Aesthetic' operetta, Patience, provides the perfect foil for Aestheticism's nostrums; a musical satire on art aspiring to the condition of music.
Tim Barringer is Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. His books include Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (1999; new edition, 2012) and Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (2005). With colleagues he co-authored American Sublime, and co-edited Art and the British Empire and Art and Emancipation in Jamaica. He is currently completing a book Broken Pastoral: Art and Music in Britain, Gothic Revival to Punk Rock and is co-curator of Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde (Tate, 2012). Co-edited volumes in preparation include Victorian Jamaica and Panoramic Vistas.
Open to all, free admission
Lecture: Broken Pastoral and the English Folk: Art and Music in Britain, 1880-1914
Tim Barringer (Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art, Yale University)
Tuesday, 23 October
17.30, Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre
This lecture examines the revived interest in folk culture in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain, exploring the relationships between ethnography, musicology and the study of historical arts and crafts. Professor Barringer contends that the aesthetic potency of visual and musical compositions drawing on folk sources lay in the widespread acknowledgement of the imminent disappearance of folk culture in the face of modernity and mechanized warfare. Under consideration are the photographer P.H. Emerson, painters George Clausen, Henry Herbert La Thangue and Augustus John, the gardener and writer Gertrude Jekyll, ethnographer E.B. Tylor, and composers Sir Hubert Parry, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Percy Grainger.
Tim Barringer is Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art at Yale University. His books include Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (1999; new edition, 2012) and Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (2005). With colleagues he co-authored American Sublime, and co-edited Art and the British Empire and Art and Emancipation in Jamaica. He is currently completing a book Broken Pastoral: Art and Music in Britain, Gothic Revival to Punk Rock and is co-curator of Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde (Tate, 2012). Co-edited volumes in preparation include Victorian Jamaica and Panoramic Vistas.
Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series
Autumn 2012
The 2012 Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series explores intersections between modernity and historicism worldwide. It extends and enriches the Research Forum project Revival: Utopia, Identity, Memory and interacts with the provocative Research Forum theme, ‘The Quick and the Dead’. Spanning art, architecture and design across America, Europe and Asia from the nineteenth century to the present, each lecture demonstrates the allure and the value of the past in forming challenging responses to new circumstances. Interrogating the nature of revival, historicism and transnationalism, the series engages with nature and artifice, ritual and memory, and the flexible meanings of materials, images and structures that simultaneously inhabit traditional and innovative territory.
Traditionally sponsored by the F M Kirby Foundation, this year the Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series is in addition sponsored by The Prince’s Foundation for Building Community; Transforming Lives through Engaging, Educating and Empowering People. “The Prince's Foundation believes that sustainably planned, built and maintained communities improve the quality of life of everyone who’s part of them. They help us both live better at a local level and start dealing with the broader global challenges of urbanisation and climate change. Our goal is a future where all of us can take part in making our communities more sustainable. We're working with everyone from local residents groups to governments to make it happen.” See www.princes-foundation.org
Lectures are at 5:30pm in the Kenneth Clark Lecture Theatre:
Tuesday 23 October
Tim Barringer (Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art, Yale University)
Broken Pastoral and the English Folk: Art and Music in Britain, 1880-1914
Tuesday 20 November
Rémi Labrusse (Professor, Université de Paris Ouest - Nanterre)
Orientalism and "Islamophilia"
Tuesday 27 November
Tapati Guha-Thakurta (Director and Professor in History, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta)
The Dead Object of Public Statuary: Sculptural Iconographies of Colonial and Postcolonial Calcutta
Tuesday 4 December
Toshio Watanabe (Professor, University of the Arts London; and Director, Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation [TrAIN])
Ryoanji Garden as the Epitome of Zen Culture: The Process of Transnational Canon Formation
This year the Frank Davis Memorial Lecture Series will include two seminars which will take place in the Research Forum South Room as follows:
Monday 8 October, 12.00 - 2.00pm
Mark Cheetham (Professor, University of Toronto)
Landscape & Language: from Conceptualism to Ecoaesthetics
Tuesday 23 October, 12.00 - 2.00pm
Tim Barringer (Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art, Yale University)
Aspiring to the Condition of Music
Open to all, free admission
Organised by Dr Ayla Lepine