UCL Art Museum

Crème de la crème – Van Dyck’s inner circle

When I first came back to London in 1982, I worked on a show curated by Sir Oliver Millar called Van Dyck in London. I fell in love with Van Dyck and particularly his treatment of silk in paint. His work still seduces me; despite the bad press he receives as being a so-called 'superficial' artist. These etchings from his Iconographia show his mastery of drawing and ability to render character. In this respect, I feel that he is close to Holbein. I am also intrigued by the fact that he wants to elevate the status of the artist by including his friends and compadres within the canon of statesmen, collectors and scholars - in other words - the higher echelons of society. By including their faces in this catalogue of personalities, he ensures their place in history, thus emphasizing the importance of the role of the artist within it and (naturally) his image is the one to grace the frontispiece. The image and text below come from the Prints and Drawings department of the British Museum, a similar work is in the UCL Art Museum.

Anthony van Dyck, Self-portrait, an etching (around AD 1630)

Bequeathed by Felix Slade, Printed from the unfinished plate (state I) ©The Trustees of the British Museum

This famous self-portrait captures the immediacy of an autograph drawing, while leaving the bust of the figure to be completed by a specialist engraver. The backward glance suggests spontaneous movement, while the stipple technique indicates that van Dyck had been inspired in Italy by the engraved portraits by Ottavio Leoni. The unfinished state may mean that van Dyck distributed the print in this form among the friends and patrons, who would have appreciated, too, the superior quality of an early impression.

On his return to Flanders from Italy in 1628, van Dyck planned an ambitious project to publish portrait prints of distinguished contemporaries, which became known as his Iconographia. Initially he etched the heads, but he soon left all the printmaking to specialist engravers such as Paulus Pontius, supplying them with oil sketches and drawings from which to work. 52 of the 80 portraits published in the 1630s represent artists or art connoisseurs. They are shown elegantly dressed and at their ease, in a clear attempt to enhance the social status of the profession.

After van Dyck's early death, the publisher Gillis Hendricx reissued the plates with this self-portrait as the title-page. A bust was added below and set on a base, with a Latin inscription announcing that the portraits were drawn from life by van Dyck, who had had them engraved at his own expense.

My research area is Digital Humanities - the use of computational techniques in the arts and humanities - and so for my pop up I have chosen to look at computer generated art from UCL Art Museum’s collections. My selection covers a broad sweep of computer and multi-media art, from 1970s line art algorithmically plotted by a computer, to the juxtaposition of digital and traditional media in the 1990s and early 2000s, to a prize winning digital video installation from one of last year's students from the Slade. The use of computing in producing art has changed dramatically over the past 40 years, and this selection demonstrates the different types of art works which emerge.

Dr Melissa Terras is the Co-Director of UCL Centre for Digital Humanities, and has a background in the History of Art and Engineering Science. You can generally find her @melissaterras on twitter.

My research involves measuring the physical properties of rocks and minerals at high-pressure: basically squashing rocks in massive presses and seeing what happens. With its reliance on presses, it is perhaps natural then that I chose printmaking as my preferred artistic medium. 

Letterpress printing involves rolling ink onto the surface of the block to be printed and any material which has been cut away remains white in the final print. This makes the technique ideal for printing in line with text and that is how it developed.  One of the prints I selected, by Albrecht Dürer, epitomises woodcut printing as used in early books.  Even the smallest areas of white such as the lozenges, which make the shading beneath the fabric of the dress, have been painstakingly cut out of the block.  This really is very difficult to do in woodcutting where the grain of the block can so easily control the image.  At their best these Dürer prints have a black-line style mimicking the intaglio prints which were popular at the time but could not be printed simultaneously with text.

I prefer to engrave wood than cut it.  This is a much finer process, in which the end-grain of the block is used rather than the long grain. This allows a rich range of tonal and textural qualities to be produced without the risk of the grain breaking out during engraving.  It rapidly became the illustration medium of choice for books and newspapers only to be superseded with the development of photographic printing techniques.  The engravings on display today show some of the styles and textures possible with the technique, from the exquisitely fine formal illustrations of John Farleigh through to the much freer engravings of Claire Leighton and others.  Interestingly, for both media, their reduced popularity in illustration has allowed practitioners to be much more expressive, using the textures of the wood and tool marks to produce less formal but richer compositions.  With its bold regions of black and white and less modelled lines, the Slade pamphlet could have been produced as either a woodcut or an engraving; the artist has used engraving tool marks to mimic the texture produced by the wood grain during cutting. I find wood engraving, with its full tonal and textural range, to be an ideal medium to capture the rock and landscapes which I encounter during my holidays in the mountains.

— Dave Dobson

The sketches I chose by Charles Bell are new arrivals to UCL Art Collections. Bell was among the College’s founding professors, a European powerhouse in medicine, surgery and anatomy. Plus, he was one of the people trying to make London an extension of the Scottish Enlightenment. I like the twist found in the idea of London being a satellite of Edinburgh. For me, his artistic skill combines technical and expressive styles. These two caricatures marvellously show the latter, poking fun at stereotypes of English and Scottish alike. What a creative, inquisitive mind he had. Bell must have been a joy to watch in lecture, sketching these things on the fly at the chalkboard. Think of what was erased shortly after one of his classes at UCL.

The portrait of Bell: This is a familiar image of Bell, widely circulated. In this particular object, I’m struck by the additional layer of colour. Someone has taken the time to elaborate on the original print. I wonder why. Was it to out of reverence or respect? Or, was it to create something more attractive so as to catch the eye of a buyer in search of their hero’s image? Or, is the colouring incidental, perhaps done by someone who simply enjoyed painting? We’ll never know.

— Joe Cain

From John Flaxman¹ to Le Corbusier:

Modernist originality versus tradition?

In 1948, Le Corbusier drew a frontispiece for a published edition of Homer’s Odysseus.

In 1954, he illustrated the Iliad.

But not any Iliad…

And in a particular way…

This was the Iliad published by the same Le Club français du livre who had published his frontispiece to the Odysseus. And what was special about their Iliad was that they used John Flaxman’s illustrations. And Le Corbusier made his illustrations over Flaxman’s.

In do doing, he established his modernity and his originality by writing in a margin:

Not a single sign of life. Homer is assassinated. (Pas un seul signe de vie. Homère est assassiné).²

Thus modernist artists and architects establish their originality…

However, when we look into it, the reality is quite different…In fact, this followed an established French tradition. In 1911, it was reported in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts that Jacques-Louis David had said about Flaxman’s outlines that “Cet ouvrage… fera faire des tableaux” (This work… will trigger off new paintings”) and L’Artiste had already written in 1833 that “Chacun veut avoir son Flaxman” (“Everyone wants their own Flaxman”).³

Many others had already appropriated Flaxman’s outlines, including Géricault, Rude, Gros and Ingres.⁴ In 1903 in his Études sur l’École française, Roger Marx had discussed the ongoing significance of Flaxman for “l’École française” (“The French School of Art”).⁵ The year 1903 was when Charles-Edouard Jeanneret started his studies at the École d’art de La Chaux-de-Fonds under the teaching of Eugene Schaltenbrand and Charles L'Eplattenier, both educated at the École des Beaux-Arts.⁶

Thus, in 1917 when Charles-Edouard Jeanneret (the future Le Corbusier) moved definitively to Paris, this French tradition of appropriating Flaxman’s outlines and the very notion of an École française were regularly discussed.

And, indeed, around this very time, Picasso himself was reworking Ingres’ reworking of Flaxman.⁷ And in 1921, L’Esprit nouveau No. 9, edited by Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant, noted that

L’exposition Ingres est avec l’exposition de Picasso l’événement du mois (The Ingres exhibition is, with the Picasso one, the event of the month).⁸

Thus Le Corbusier and Picasso, both foreigners in Paris, tried to establish their Frenchness and their belonging to the great French artistic and cultural tradition. Reworking Flaxman was part of the tradition!

Thus, Le Corbusier is neither simply an architect nor an historical figure but a lieu de mémoire, that is, one of many “‘sites’ that actually or allegedly constitute French identity”.⁹

Le Corbusier therefore, as with any lieu de mémoire, requires bringing “the models that underpin social structures and shape collective representations together with the singularities, or distinctive char­acteristics associated with the image of France.”¹⁰

But, for something to become a lieu de mémoire, two things are needed.

To become a lieu, it must embody a certain idée de la France.

But to become memorable, that is, mémoire, it must simultaneously continue and contravene that idée de la France.

Le Corbusier fulfils both conditions admirably…

This small Pop Up exhibition, in addition to Le Corbusier’s illustrations of the Iliad (being his reworking of Flaxman), includes work by Flaxman, tracings of Flaxman’s work (one can see the pin-pricks of the tracings) by unknown copyists and even contemporary work by students of the Slade who are today appropriating and reworking Flaxman in modern media (sculpture and video)…

—  Jan Birksted, The Bartlett School of Architecture

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¹ John Flaxman is of course intimately associated with UCL: see his work in the Rotunda in the Main Library, his statue in The Cloisers, etc.

² See Le Corbusier’s copy of Homère, L’Iliade (Paris: Club français du livre, 1954), n.p. (FLC J 90).

³ Flaxman (1755-1826), Premier article’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, XIII, 1911, pp. 233-246; p. 233 and 234.

⁴ Outside France, artists who had done the same included Goya and Runge.

⁵ Roger Marx, Études sur l’École française (Paris: Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1903), p. 20. This is discussed in Jeanne Doin, ‘John Flaxman (1755-1826), Deuxième et dernier article’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, XIII, 1911, pp. 330-348.

⁶ See my book, Le Corbusier and the Occult (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2009).

⁷ See Michael Marrinan, ‘Picasso as an ‘Ingres’ Young Cubist’, The Burlington Magazine, Special Issue Devoted to European Art Since 1890, Vol. 119, No. 896, November 1977, pp. 756+758-763.

⁸ Anon., ‘Exposition Ingres’, L’Esprit nouveau No. 9, June 1921, pp. 1018-1019.

⁹ Pierre Nora, ‘Introduction’, Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. ix.

¹⁰ Pierre Nora, ‘Introduction’, Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. ix.

I work in the Housman Room surrounded by wonderful paintings, and above my desk is a conversation piece. It is painted by Albert Rutherston (Slade 1898–1902) and illustrates a moment from a novel by Emile Zola, one of my favourite authors. It’s a genre I particularly like, for the sense and detail it conveys of other people’s lives and other periods as well as for the pleasure of looking at painting. So when I was asked if I would like to curate a Pop-Up Display in the Strang, my immediate thought was to look for conversation pieces and follow whatever direction they might lead.

In the Strang my eye was caught by one of the works exhibited in ‘Moreover – the Slade revisits UCL Art Collections’, an animation piece (by Slade student Mo Wang) inspired by the early nineteenth-century Japanese artist Utawaga Kunisada’s print of ‘Courtesan likened to a painting by Moronobu”. And that was it – I loved the idea of extending, however tenuously, the Slade’s revisiting of UCL art collections, I have a Japanese daughter-in-law (and, increasingly, books and postcards of Japanese art) and I was told that UCL owns a fine collection of Japanese woodblock prints.

The first two prints I chose, both by Hokusai, could indeed be called conversation pieces – in one, a woman customer is being shown bolts of cloth by a shop assistant, in the other a woman is untying cloths from around her luggage-baskets. And there are others – three men drinking sake under a maple tree, women planting rice – as well as landscapes, animals and birds, old customs. All show an astonishing delicacy of drawing, subtle colours and varied composition – I find them irresistible and have chosen as many as there is room for.

My final choice was ‘Sudden shower, Ôiso’, by Hiroshige, drawn so that you almost feel the heavy drops of rain yourself. It reminded me of another rain-filled work by Hiroshige, ‘People on a bridge’, which inspired Wisława Szymborska’s poem of the same name, and was used as her collection’s cover illustration: both prints might almost be called conversation pieces for the immediacy with which they draw you into the picture and provide a moment in the lives of the people bent and hurrying under the rain:

(from ‘People on a bridge’ by Wisława Szymborska, translated by Adam Czerniawksi)

— Jane Spender

Taking its inspiration from the Durer prints on display as part
of UCL Art Museum Word and Image exhibition, this pop-up explores the
phenomenon of illustrations removed from books for purposes of sale and /
or display. Often important as works of art in their own right, these
images exist at the intersection of Art History and Historical
Bibliography, challenging both disciplines to consider the nature of
illustration, the primacy (or otherwise) of text, and the role of visual
art within the book. Can an illustration ever really escape from the words
that inspired it? A phenomenon of the early modern period, the removal and
resale of prints continues to be a thriving trade today, and the pop-up
reflects this.
— Anne Welsh

I will use some items from the exhibition 'Word and Image: Early Modern Treasures at UCL' to illustrate how England defined itself in relation to
other cultures in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Durer's 'Whore
of Babylon' can be placed alongside other versions of this iconic figure
to illustrate how she became a symbol of foreign, Catholic vice against
which England defined itself. Meanwhile, the Hogenberg plan of London
suggests that both London and England were defining their boundaries
firmly and tightly - yet was created by a foreigner. In fact England was
absorbing people and influences from many different nations and cultures,
as shown by the translations in the exhibition, of which I'll focus on
Harington's Ariosto, Florio's Montaigne, and Sandys's Ovid.

— Helen Hackett

Following some unplanned retrospection, it turns out that I’ve been into funny-looking creatures for a long time now.

I’m assuming this has something to do with being brought up Hindu; a religion where there are plenty of funny-looking creatures to choose from. There’s the blue-skinned Lord Krishna, Maa Durga, who has with ten arms, each brandishing a deadly weapon. There’s Mahishashur, the shape-shifting demon, Hanuman, monkey son of the wind god with a heart as big as the sky, and, everyone’s favourite, benevolent Ganesh, with his elephant’s head.

Combine this with the fact that I had memorized My First Book of Dinosaurs by age 6 (such a swot), the usual adolescent obsession with Greek and Norse myth (lots of women in flowy dresses turning into trees or flowers when not being seduced by gods in animal form – what’s not to love?), and my propensity to not pay attention in biology class (fish gonads, anyone?), and its unsurprising that a regular visit to the zoo leaves me cold.

So when I heard that Word & Image – our latest exhibition at UCL Art Museum – includes a section on exotic animals and plants and how they were illustrated by people who'd never actually seen them (I’ve been drawing for a good while too), the proposition was irresistible: why not hold an informal drawing session where everyone has the chance to doodle, sketch or design their own strange creatures?

I’ve picked out a few other prints and drawings of weird and wonderful oddities from the collections and drawn up a few of my own – come and have a look at what I’ve come up with, and have a go yourself!

— Subhadra Das

My work on translation from Spanish into English and the influence of Hispanic culture on early modern England led me to look at the earliest Spanish-English dictionaries and language learning text books. For us translation is an invisible process – how often do we look to see who the translator of a given work is as opposed to what the book is?  However, in the sixteenth century with the rise of vernacular languages, translation was a much more explicitly competitive, ideological and political process.

It is no surprise that the largest library of Spanish books in Tudor England belonged to Lord Burghley, Elizabeth I’s chief minister for nearly thirty years, or that the first dictionaries should have been produced by men seeking the patronage of the queen’s favourite, the earl of Essex. Richard Perceval’s Bibliotheca Hispanica (1591) and John Minsheu’s Dictionarie in Spanish and English (1599) laid the way for the explosion of interest in the culture of Spain and the New World at the start of the 17th century with translations of La Celestina, Quevedo, and Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Exemplarie Novels and Persiles and Segismunda. The dialogues at the back and etymologies tell us a great deal about the nature of  contemporary interest in language, literature and culture.

In addition to these two books, I will also look at the multilingual Colloquia et dictionariolum (1st edition 1576), Florio’s Queen Anna’s new world of words (1611), Christian Raue’s A discourse of the Orientall tongues (1649), as well as works that address Spain and its history more directly such as Sir William D’Avenant’s The cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru (1658), Richard Hakluyt’s The principall navigations (1589), Fynes Moryson’s An itinerary (1617), Robert Devereux’s Profitable instructions (1633), one of the earliest works of Egyptology Lorenzo Pignoria’s Mensa Isiaca (1669) and Johannes Scheffer’s History of Lapland (1674).

Many of these later works move beyond the dictionary and dialogue to encompass a more extended notion of translation as travel, ethnography and history. I will also look at the role that images played in transporting viewers to other worlds, whether real or imaginary.

— Alexander Samson

I began without quite knowing what I was looking for, other than wanting to start with the many archive boxes of prize winning life drawings, made by Slade students over the last century. I hoped I might find in the background of these drawings details of the Slade's interior, familiar architectural details - as it was then and as it is now, a sense of continuity. Instead I stumbled on the pieces I have chosen, four prize-winning studies of drapery by two Slade students from the 1940s. They stood out from the life drawings as being particular, personal and feminine in their subject matter, thoughtful and lovely. In addition, I asked to see the small painting 'Group Portrait' by the wonderful Gwen John. Coincidently, her painting carries on its reverse side two studies, one of which happens to be of drapery. Both the painting and the studies, set against a backdrop of the many Flaxman reliefs adorning the Print Room, open a space for reflection on the role of drapery in art. Drapery is both a detail and the very fabric of expression, be it revealing the form and attitude of the body and its movement, or forming part of the décor, the staging and drama of the image. Either way it presents a challenge for the artist. Choosing these works has been a pleasure and has brought a new awareness to my looking. Thank you to Andrea Fredericksen for introducing me to the joys of Print Room viewing and giving me an opportunity to study.

— Jayne Parker

Artist, Curator and Researcher Fabien Pinaroli and UCL Mellon Fellow Antony Hudek team up for a Pop-Up display that considers the role of the university print room in the context of today's global circulation of visual information. Once a site dedicated to the contemplation of rare prints and drawings, such spaces now compete with a proliferation of images easily accessible online. Yet Google is hardly the first threat to institutional collections of works on paper: a glance at the history of reproduction technology suffices to show that images have, since the origins of modernity, been prone to multiplication and dispersal, and that the 'print room' has always had to sift through myriad copies of copies.

For this Pop-Up display Pinaroli and Hudek performed a simple key-word search through the Art Museum’s online catalogue to identify a dozen images relating to 'Michelangelo', from an anonymous Pietà from the late 17th century to 20th-century illustrations of Michelangelo's Sonnets. The same method was applied to 'Raimondi', revealing another dozen images attributed to Marcantonio Raimondi (1470-1534). Finally, the display includes images not in the Art Museum’s collections, of preparatory drawings by Pontormo (1494-1557) for his frescoes in the choir of San Lorenzo, Florence, which were destroyed in 1742.

The use of the photocopying machine is itself a technique of reproduction in the process of becoming obsolete. Introduced in the 1960s, it has become a standard feature in offices and libraries, but now risks being superseded by ink-jet printers. This Pop-Up display relies on xerography to cover the walls of the UCL Art Museum with enlargements of the prints ‘found’ on- and offline. The choice of photocopied enlargements is a nod to Celebration of the Body, an exhibition organised in 1976 at Queen’s university, Kingston, by the conceptual artists Iain and Ingrid Baxter, to coincide with the Summer Olympics in Montreal. 

Just as Celebration of the Body accumulated representations of the body in art and the 'mass media', this Olympic Pop-Up presents a profusion of copies of found images involving numerous bodies that are themselves copies or reinterpretations of unattainable originals.

I first came across the notion of sculptural colour as a young lecturer at Exeter College of Art where it was impressed upon me by senior colleagues with a strong traditional training and interest in figurative sculpture. My own training was during the late 1960s and early 1970s when I learned traditional techniques, but was also exposed to the massive shift in art at that time. I have never come across the term outside of that original context, either in manuals on making sculpture, or books on sculpture and remain curious as to its origins especially as I have found it very useful as a way of looking at sculpture and as a tool for making it.

The first thing to note about the notion of sculptural colour is that it does not involve colour at all, or rather is indifferent to it.

Sculptural colour should be seen as separate from pigmented surfaces or integral colour which might be intrinsic to the materials used: terra cotta, steel, plastics and so on. Sculptural colour is about shadow, it is about three dimensional shading. It is about how the sculptor uses light to create form. Sculpture might be described as three dimensional form located in space and revealed by light. The latter value – light – tends to be overlooked. In fact, it might be better to reverse the description and say sculpture is how light is used to reveal form in space.

Fortunately UCL Art Museum has an outstanding collection of works by John Flaxman (6 July 1755 - 7 December 1826) and to understand the notion of sculptural colour there is no better example.

John Flaxman is perhaps best know for his early work for Wedgwood, whose Jasper Ware using designs, or designs influenced by Flaxman are still in production. His fame is largely based on his extremely reductive line drawings illustrating Dante and the classical poets, as well as being the sculptor of several outstanding funerary monuments still to be found in the churches of London; Flaxman was a master of low relief. Although used by many contemporary artists such as Hew Locke and Angela Dela Cruz, Low relief tends to be overlooked both as a discipline and a way of understanding the art which uses its principles.

I see Flaxman as the Don Judd of his day. A purist, reductive in the extreme, and as an artist responding and reacting to the perceived decadence around him. In Flaxman's case the Baroque and Rococo, in Judd's case, expressionism in all its manifestations. See Donald Kuspit’s The Dialectic of Decadence (Stux Press, NY,1992) for a more in-depth analysis of this dichotomy. Most contemporary work is seen less through its physicality, its sheer use of materials and form, its use of light, than through its conceptual content. It might be said that the conceptual element of a work is information crucial to its understanding which is not actually present in the art object. A meta language, or noemantic object (mental object) as Edmund Husserl described it. Flaxman's work is in these terms conceptual, as without an understanding of the classical imagery and the meanings inherent within them the works are very difficult  to appreciate. Today when most people are not aware of the classical myths, or of Christian iconography Flaxman's works can seem empty. As can Donald Judd’s if you don't know his writing, the context in which his work was produced, and in both cases what the artist has rejected, which is what makes both artists art historically significant.

Please look again at these works, see how the smallest lines and the minimal use of form is used. Look at how light is used to create shadow, which in turn creates volume, notice also as you move in front of them how the light changes, and with it the form, this is sculptural colour.

One of the fascinating facts about the legacy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau is the contrasting perspectives we have on him today, on his 300^th anniversary. He is widely regarded as both a champion of the Enlightenment and a beacon of Romanticism, as an ancestor of radical revolutionaries but also a forefather of totalitarian regimes, as the inventor of modern notions of the self who was at the same time an advocate of ancient republicanism. The pop-up session will use items from the Rousseau 300 exhibition at the UCL Art Museum to explore these contrasts, while highlighting the differences between our own perception of Rousseau and his contemporary reception. The talk will suggest we have lost or neglected significant aspects of Rousseau’s work.

— Avi Lifschitz

Bank Holiday Special: The Seaside

Few places are associated more closely with bank holidays than the seaside.  Twentieth-century artists depicting crowds on the beach have been able to draw on a rich legacy of holiday-making imagery that stretches back to the eighteenth century, when artists such as Turner added an edge to their picturesque tourism with scenes of stormy seas and calamitous shipwrecks.  This exhibition looks at how far have modern artists sought to admit these frissions of danger in their representation of the seaside, and asks how far we continue to be excited by the overwhelming enormity of tragic events and dangerous environments.