Felly, gweithio gwrth gyd yn y rôl, iawn i'n gweithio arall, ac y gallwn ni wedi gyd yn ymddangos gyd. Fy enw i gyd ymddangos gyd ymddangos ar yr arddangos gyd yn Brithan, 1900-1960, Paul Oppaith, ar yr arddangos. Mae ymddangos i'r ceir y tern, ond rydyn ni wedi'n ei ddweud ar yr Arddangos Paul Mellan Sensor ac mae'n gweithio ar yr arddangos ymddangos ymddangos. a dydych os yw peintlynydd yma. We really hope our conferences, us trained study events are moments of getting together to hear new research, to share ideas and knowledge that's really what a research centre is all about and really build on the work we do here at the centre through and today particularly through our archive and library collections Ieithio gweld y cyfnodd a ddweud o'r newid yn ymgyrch. Ac mae'n hoffi ddod o'r cwmfransau, sy'n ddod, yma, o'r cyfnodd yn gweithio. Mae'n gweithio gyd ymgyrch chi'n gweld yn ei wneud o'r projektyn ar gyfer o'r ysgrifennu, o'r ffynol o'r projektyn, ond yn ymgyrch o'r ysgrifennu, oed yn ymwysig, oed yn ymwysig i'r cyfnodd, oedd yn gweithio'r cyfnodd, sy'n mynd i ddim yn dweud. Felly mae'n gwneud yn y fwyaf sy'n gweithio i'r ysgrifennu i chi'n ddiddordeb i ddim yn ymdilydd yma yn y pethau sy'n ddiddordeb yma sy'n gweithio i ymdilydd i'r ysgoleth ar y bryd yng Nghymru ar y Lens Paul Ope. Yn 2017, mae'n gweithio'r ysgoleth i'r ysgoleth ar y Paul Mellan ..y'r bwysig yw'r archif a llybr yw Paul O'Pae.. ..y'r ddechrau i'r nesaf yn y Llyfrgell Cymru. Mae'r cyfnodd yma yw'r cyfnodd.. ..y'r cyfnodd yma yw'r cyfnodd yn y fwyaf. Felly mae'r cyfnodd yn ystod yma yn y gweithio.. ..y'r cyfnodd yn ystod ac yn ystod yma yw'r cyfnodd.. ..y'r cyfnodd yn ystod yma yw'r cyfnodd yw'r cyfnodd.. ..y'r cyfnodd yn yr archif syniad ar Brytwn. Ychydig ride'r hanff info a llyf. Felly iddyn nhw'n cael ei ffrwg o'i gwy observedd mewn cyfnodd a'r cyfnodd.. ..y'r cyfnodd ymwysig yma yn yr ysgol hwn ac yn y ddiwedd. Felly i'r cyfnodd yn ystod yma yw'r cyfnodd at yw'r cyfnodd.. ..y'r cyfnodd am ein bod yn yne yngyrch agaf y byd. a gennym ni'n leolge Allan i'r Uneddaeth Rydy'r Aberdeen, ac yn gweithio'r hunan fydd o'n gyflym £1600 o'r Fyllgor yw'r Fyllgor yw'r Fyllgor Fyllgor yw 2020-21-22. Mae'r hynny'n gweithio'r llwyddon yw'r gweithio'r fydd yw'r reisarch, ac mae'r fydd yw'r gweithio'r gweithio i ddod, ac mae'r rhai rydyn nhw'n ddod yn gweld i gael y byddfa ar-gweithio ar-gweithio. Mae'r hyn sy'n gwybod i'n byw ymweld i'r rôl yng Nghymru – rwy'n gwybod i'r legosiad gyda Paul Opae's twf. Maen nhw'n rhaid i'w gydigau yng Nghymru i'r ddweud yng nghymru i'r sgwrs a ddweud i'r ddweud i'r ddechrau. So ddwy'n gwybod i'r ddweud.  Maen nhw'n gwneud i'w ddweud ymlaen, i chi eisiau'n gwneud i'r sefydle i hollu'r seswn sy'n cael gyflawnio'r sefydl a gweithio'n gwneud i gael y projectu ac, rwy'n credu, mae'n meddwl yma, Elah Flemming ac Catherine Ward, yn bwysig, ac Dogg Parffyrman, mae'r ddyn nhw'n ddod i'r rŵm a'n ddod i'r tyn arall.  Mae'n eu bod ni'n gweithio, Sarah, y dyfodol y ffawr yn gwneud yn gwneud hyn yn gweithio. Felly, rwy'n meddwl i'r cyffredinol i'r ffans i'r team yma i'r cyfrannu yma i'r Llyfrgell Llyfrgell, ac i'r Cathlein yn ffant yw'r cyfrannu. Rwy'n meddwl i'r cyfrannu ar y cyfrannu o'r tyfnwys, sy'n ddim yn y bryddoedd yng nghymru ar y bryddoedd ystodol. Rwy'n meddwl i'r cyfrannu hynny yn ymddi'r cyfrannu. Rwy'n meddwl i'r cyfrannu sy'n meddwl i'r cyfrannu sy'n meddwl i'r cyfrannu, a gallwn callallow-buat o'r arbennwys, felly rhaidi, nad yw'r cyfrannu, ond wych yn rhywb ihren, newid bod yr odd a'r� selective au munia read o'r cyfrannu a'r flyneraau yn llur bydtenn't sydd i ar gael a'r rhai ac oed coconutau. Rwy'n meddwl i io'r cyfrannu sy'n meddwl i ni ddim gweithio, ac mae cristiannol oherwydd, fel mae'r cyfrannu badge ni'n playhau ar pol país sticksydd a piwb sy'n brydym ac yn ystod y gallu'r hyffordd o'r oximaron. Mae'r hyffordd o'r hyffordd yn ystod y cyfnod ymlaen yma yng Nghymru, yn y ffwrdd, yn ymgyrch ar gyfer ar gyfer arysau aristocratau ac yn ystod y cyfnod sydd wedi'u cyfnod o'r hyffordd o'r hyffordd, oherwydd, yn y ddechrau geirmanig. Mae'r hyffordd o'r hyffordd o'r hyffordd o'r hyffordd o'r hyffordd o'r hyffordd, oedd yn cyfnod o'r cyfnod. Mae Brian Sewell, byddwch, yn cyfarwyddlu i'r cyfnod, yn ystyried yma, yw yw ydych chi'n ystafell, a'r Gwyrdd Nid, ddim yn ystafell, gan ymgyrch yn Gweinig, yw'r skolngol. Mae'n cyfrifiadau o'r cyfrifiad, mae'n cyfrifiadau ond mae'n cyfrifiadau i'r cyfrifiadau. Yn ystafell o'r cyfrifiadau, mae yna'n gweithio'n o'n du y gallwn oedd nefyd wedi'i gweithio am ystod i'r maen nhw ar y maen nhw yn y rhan sydd. Yr ysgrifennu y gallwn gwneud am edrych yn ymgyrch yn ymddangosol, ond mae hwn yn ymgyrch yn cael y llyfr yng Nghymru, John Ruskin, y ffrindig yr argyrch yn y 19th, yn gwneud yn y cyfriffeithu cyfnodau cyfrifiadau o'r ffawr. ac mae'n ddweud o'r cyfnodd ar y newydd ar gyfer 1970. Felly, mae'n gweithio'r cerddau sydd o'r cerddau, sy'n gweithio'r hystod o'r gyfer yw Brytych argymdeithio'r ysgol yn ystod y ddweud o'r cyfnodd ysgrifennu, mewn meddwl o'r cyfnodd y 1916, mae'n mynd i'n gweithio'r cyfnodd yn ystod o'r cyfnodd ysgrifennu. Rwy'n meddwl i'r cerddau ar y cerddau, ac mae'r llwyffydd yn ddweud i gael ysgrifennu, I am dwy'r mynd i'r mynd i ddechrau'r llyffodol i'r hystodiaeth yr urchyniaeth yma, i ddweud i'r ymddych chi'n bwysig yng Nghaerhau Llywodraeth, ynghylch yn y ffyrdd y 1-2 ym 20 ym 20 yma. Felly, rwy'n ei ddweud yn gallu bod ddechrau'r hyn yn ei wneud cyfreithio yr ardyntau ddysgu'r hyn yn y cyfrifol yn cael ei ddweud. Dyma yw, wrth gwrs, lle yn ei ddweud i'r hyn a'r unedig a gweithio at leidio, mae'r wneud yn dweud ei wneud i wneud yn fwyfodol yn dweud. Roeddwn ni'n ffordd hearwyd ag yn ddiddorol, ond mae'r ffordd herfodol yn dweud i weithio'r wneud ond mae'r bataig iddyn nhw yn ddechrau â'r gwnaeth a'r lleolaith. Rydw i'n meddwl y gallwch ychydig yn cyffredig ymgyrchach, y hwnnw moll ychydig o'r mewn stwg a'r mewn afgyrchu'rifeil o'r hwnnw, rydyn ni'n rhoi arweinydd y bwysig o'r hyffredig o'r ffordd ac i'r ffordd. Mae'r ysgolwyr a'r ysgolwyr ar gyfer y rhesymau, rwy'n i'n dweud y dyfodol, yna y gallwn i'n ddim yn ddweud y ddechrau i ddechrau i ddechrau i ddechrau, mae rhefyd yn dweud â'r ysgolwyr. Rwy'n i fyddechrau i ddechrau i ddechrau i ddechrau i ddechrau i ddechrau i ddechrau'r ysgolwyr. i ni'n gwneud o bwysig ar ddatganiad o'i cyfrhysgafol yng Nghymru ar果r. Felly, rydyn ni'n digyn i'n gweithio'r newid mewn gyrfa'n cael ei fawr a bwysig o'r reisbeithio. First, rydyn ni'n gwybod cymwyhoedd ar gyfer y dda ni'r pwysig ysgol yng nghymwys o ddod yn y proses ogrhafa bydd f展l內 gyrhaffukeliaethu a ydy gechwyn i gyrhaffr hefyd? Y cwyr yn y period fel y dduf yn ei ddweud, Where were they educated? Which forums? Which networks did they frequent? But this basic who-what-when questions I think still deserves to be put to the floor. Something that the Germanic tradition has done since at least a hundred years. I remind you of Wilhelm Wetzold's famous book on Deutsche Kunsthistorik, German art historians came out in 1921. Displaying this pride in a national disciplinary tradition that definitely has no equivalent in Britain. neither from the 1920s nor I think from the 2020s. And connected with that I hope that we can think about, well, praxeology, about practice. About what these individuals who researched art actually did. How they worked, where they worked, which resources, libraries, epistolary networks, reference collections they used for their daily comings and goings. I hope that this is some of the groundwork that we can lay here over the next two days to think about the professionalisation of art history in that period, or the lack thereof maybe. I am keen to keep an open mind here even though my personal stance is of course maybe, that there is more of a professional story to be told than commonly acknowledged. We are doing so through the lens, as Sara has already indicated, through the lens of the Llyfriddon i cymdeithasol o Paul Oppay. Yr ystod, mae'r ffordd y dda wedi'i eu ffyrdd ymlaen, yma yn y dyfodol yn y rhaglen yn y cyfrifio yma yn ymddangos i'r ysgrifennu. Mae'r cymdeithio'r ymddangos i'r ffordd yw'r fwrdd ar y Llyfriddon i Oppay yma yn ddweud yw 51 octobor, mae'r ffordd yw hynny? Mae'n dweud yw i ddim yn y cyfrifio, mae'n dweud ar y dweud ar gyfer ystod, sy'n dweud ar gyfer y cyfrifio yma ymdweud. Ac rwy'n credu bod yw'n amlwg. Cymru'r prismau, rwy'n credu bod rwy'n credu'r cyntaf y bydd y cyfnodau o ymdweud o ymdweud o'r cyfnodau a'r cyfnodau ar y Brithn. Rwy'n credu'r cyfnodau a'r cyffredin ar gyfer yng Nghymru. Rwy'n credu'r cyffredin o'r cyffredin ar gyfer y reynesans ddaf, café arnyntam yn ymweld, a oedraeth i amdano'n gyda gefnogi-aergyfreidd, i ddweud yn yw'r deudio. I fod yn dweud y ddechrau yn yr ein ddefnyddio a ddim yn rhanol. mae'r lleoedd fynd yn fwy o'r gweithio'r ardu y byd i fod yn fyrwyru. Mae yw'r angen i'nghyd, oedd y cadw klath o'r disgwrs, ond y dyna yng nghyd i Blunt. Mae'r angen i bach oedd cref ychydig, yw ddaf i'n yr salwio, the heart of interdisciplinary discourse on professionalisation. I hope that by studying the life and work of such figures as OPE, we can actually from the bottom up maybe get a more realistic and holistic picture of what happened in British outriding in the first half of the 20th Century within institutions but also beyond institutions. Mae'r ffordd o gweithio gweithio. Mae'r papyr yno yn ystod i fod yn gwybod i'r arweithio, yna'r gweithio i'r Maartin i gweithio gwyllfa'n mawr i, gallwn i'r bwysig. Felly mae'r 30-secon pawr o'r gweithio. Felly mae'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio. Hefyd, fe yw'r Maartin Maaryn. Amgylcheddon yma mawr i gyflaenau o'r gweithio'i gweithio, felly mae'n gweithio'r gweithio yma, It's my pleasure to chair this opening session of the Concert łeistri as a profession. We have a full afternoon and we are going to follow a similar format through the three sessions this afternoon. Which is to hear the two papers in succession and then have a chance for Q & A both from within the room and as maybe fed through online from our online audience as well. I will be introducing Hans and then Sarah, but I will start.  By introducing Hans Honest, we've already heard a senior lecturer in Art History at the University of Aberdeen, who's published very extensively on historiography, on art historiography, including work on Walthlin, on antiquarianism, on migration and art history, and a new biography, I've got to plug it, of A.B. Vorberg published my reaction books in spring 2024, first of March 2024, hot off the press. As has been mentioned, he was a research collections fellow here at the centre in 2021 to 2022. We've had the great pleasure of being able to draw on Hans' research in, this is the second display in the drawing room, exploring the collections here in the most interesting and wide-ranging way. He's also the author of, I think, a really pivotal article on the clerk-like identity of art historians in British art studies, which I suspect, or actually I refer to it, I suspect it's going to be referred to a number of times today. But with that, I think over to you, Hans. Thank you so much, Martin. Hello again after my short break. I hope I managed to, yes, I managed to put the slides on, and I hope to recoup a couple of minutes of the time that's already ticking. So, I thought, God, I put myself to the beginning of the conference, and that is not entirely intentional, of course, but I think also chronologically it was quite suitable because I am actually going to speak about some of the early years of Paul Oppay, the beginnings of his career in many respects. I find it a fascinating and understudied period of his life because it in many respects captures the period before Oppay was actually an art historian. As many of you might know, he originally trained as a classicist and also succeeded in this field quite well, publishing papers on the chasm of Delphi, for example, so about mythology and Greek religion, and he also managed to hold academic posts in this subject. In 1902, Oppay was appointed assistant to John Burnett, who was professor of Greek at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, and with this appointment, Oppay achieved something that essentially was a bit like gold dust in British academia at the time. Earlier in the introduction, I spoke about the fact that the subject had little to no academic credentials, no base within the university systems, very few established chairs or even let alone more junior lectureships in the subject. However, Oppay's appointment allowed him precisely to do this one thing that so many of his peers failed to do, namely to teach academically about the history of art. Early on in his time at St Andrews, he indeed put on a whole course that was devoted to the history of Greek sculpture. Here in 1904, I'm putting on the syllabus and you can also see it up downstairs in the lecture theatre. The fascinating thing about this course is that he approached the topic of Greek sculpture, not from an archaeological maybe not even from an art historical or positivist angle, but rather from a far-reaching philosophical and at times slightly impressionistic take on the history of Greek sculpture. Even though all the lectures are of course devoted to individual problems in Greek sculpture, sculpture in reliefs, sculpture in the round, tomb reliefs and so on, this was far from a positivist iteration through the history of Greek art, but rather a far-ranging aesthetic meditation about art and sculpture as a home. We find, for example, musings about the differences between painting and sculpture, excursesies about Michelangelo or Mantegna, Morassini's horses and the interest in art. It shows the ugliness of modern movement and the ineffectual use of the body. Some side remarks about the golf swing and what have you not, some maybe not as humorous comparison as he thinks about happiness and knitting one sock and what I leave the quotes to you. The point I want to get to is that this was a man who really had the opportunity to make history of art part of his professional identity. Surely he would have still had to lecture on Greek metrics and poetry and what have you, but the history of art in this far-ranging mode was definitely part or within his remit as Greek history. And yet, Opé decided in the end, well not in the end quite quickly actually in 1905 against an academic career. He quit his position. In the meantime, in 1904, by the way, he had been appointed lecturer in Greek history at Edinburgh University, a very prestigious appointment, yet one that he gave up after less than a year. That certainly had many reasons. One of them, and perhaps the key reason being that the type of academic history that this post entailed, so the serious, positive, empirical setting that such a position demanded was at odds with Opé's own desires and beliefs. His inaugural lecture at Edinburgh was entitled A Pleaf for Life and Colour in Historical Writing, and here he made quite evident that he thinks that the historian requires primarily imaginative sympathy at the breadth of poetry. The poet is the one who can change the perception of history and not some fact monger who is just compiling lists of source texts and whatnot. Opé is, by the way, very conscious of the fact that this goes counter to what most of his colleagues at Edinburgh would have advocated for, who would think such an approach as inadequate because it is too poetical. Here we have a problem emerging. For Paul Opé, a very young man in 1905, the academic setting of being a professional historian clearly seemed primarily stifling. What he aspired to instead of being one of the scrupulous historians, a school of historians that has arisen in the last decades and have actually praised factual accuracy above everything else, this school of history clearly to him stood against the desires of a contemporary and artistic life. Time and again in his diaries of the period Opé Muses about his steep-felt desire to actually transform his life throughout into an artistic life. What then do I want? He's writing in 1904. All day today and generally I long to paint or I wish to be a poet and to express in a form not inadequate some of the emotions and thoughts which make up my real life. I want to be contemporary, he writes. And he time and again hopes that this maybe perhaps can be realised by writing something like an art book, but clearly more about aesthetics, but certainly not by engaging with the stifling ways of writing history. An aesthetic and artistic life. Time and again in the lectures about Greek sculpture, this anti-historicist stance comes through already. Here in Zynanderys in 1904 he already writes for example against museums whom he deems necessary for the education of artists and he shall be the last to deny it, but he also again sees museums simply as a repository that divorces art from real life, from art as a heartfelt and enriching existence. In short, Opay seems somebody who increasingly became disenchanted by the world of academic analysis. Now the tempting thing here of course I think probably for all of us and for me to an extent as well is to conclude that this is precisely evidence of the British dilettante mindset, a man who is maybe steeped in the writings of Ruskin and who wants to use art as an ethical elevation of self instead of the subject of sound historical studies.  I find it striking that at the same time that Opay was writing these lines we have also in Germany a wide range of writers, a wide range of scholars who argue for art writing in a similar vein as Opay did, not necessarily as a historic exercise but as a dilettantish exercise and who saw precisely in this dilettantism a source of greater artistic efficacy that is brought to your life. I'm just quoting for example Carl Einstein, one of the one of the famed art writers of this period, author of a pioneering monograph on African sculpture but also on George Brack and indeed one of the standard textbooks of art of the 20th century. Well Einstein in 19, 19, I have the date, 10, also published a novella called Bebucam or the Dilettants of the Miracle, a book where he bullishly and actively tried to reclaim a term, a pejorative term sometimes such as the Dilettant and tried to turn precisely this verdict of a non-scientific art writer into something positive as a way of immediate, instantaneous reconnecting with real life throughout, a life that allows us to regain some of the enchantment that Opay and Einstein too were precisely missing in the contemporary world. Einstein writes here, we don't sacrifice anymore, the sublime gets lost, you criticize the miracle, the miracle only has a purpose when it's real but you have destroyed all powers that go beyond humanity. Here the idea is a game that a non-scientific Dilettantish approach to art can help us again to go precisely beyond humanity. What I want to highlight here is that this dichotomy, here the serious germ, there's the dotas of British art writing probably doesn't stand up to better scrutiny but that the place of art writing was still debated quite controversially even in Germany at the time and that we don't have any issue to find voices whose agenda resonates quite directly with what somebody like Opay would have defended in his lectures and diary entries of 1905. I think again also about the criticism of museums. I can quote a text here like Carl Hillbrand's famous 12 letter spine aesthetic heretic where he complains about museum that want to do something for the people but what people do by actually cultivating museums is to put artworks in art prisons that look more similar to railway stations than palaces in which the people will never enjoy and there is indeed a sizable tendency in German academia at the time that advocates against art history as a historic inquiry and instead for a general science of art as Max Dessois famously termed it in his project of an algemeine Kunstwissenschaft. An approach to art that is precisely more aligned with philosophy for philosophical aesthetics with anthropology perhaps even with prehistoric archaeology and things like that but not necessarily an empirical historical study of art and I do wonder to what extent exactly such movements such anti-historical attempts to write the history of art or to think about art also found a positive reception in Britain at the time. Opay's close colleague and friend Gerard Baldwin-Brown, the chair of Fine Art at Edinburgh University for example published in 1891 this textbook titled The Fine Arts the motto being that beauty is the truth of art clearly a statement aligned again with this strong aestheticist credo that we also see in the writings of St. Einstein or Dessois and indeed Opay and in a book like that we find more you know anthropological reflections about the origins of art about the reasons for art and attempt to bring the study in art in close touch with disciplines such as psychology or prehistoric archaeology. I've shown the next slide here before but I just want to bring it in again out of out of local pride that for example this idea also informed what I believe is the first university degree in fine in the history of fine art at a British university namely the degree and fine art history and theory that was launched at Aberdeen University in 1921. I could go on about that I won't here today I just want to highlight that again this is an attempt to merge theory of art together with principles and history of the different disciplines across periods such as ancient art and modern art so a much much more expansive a much much more philosophical an aesthetic take on art history than what we are commonly used to see as the successful model for our discipline and I think this this helps us to an extent to question simply whether history of art as we know today was without alternative throughout its history. My strong feeling is that in the early 20th century at the time when somebody like Opay had to decide on whether to pursue an academic career or not this question as to what the study of art should be was much much more open than we often credit it to be in retrospect of course as we all know in Britain the historical tradition the Warwick tradition of if you want it won it is the one that rose to the top that that permeated most university departments to one extent or another but such historical triumph does not of course mean that there were not alternatives available and present within the discourse of the time. For Opay clearly this idea that art should not be studied as a empirical historical subject meant an unreconcilable conflict with his status as an asalary academic. The big question of course for him in that moment was what to do instead what to become if you don't pursue the career that you've been qualified for and what to do if you are not a classicist. In the years around 1904 1905 we see Opay darting around between different options for a time he clearly aspired to become a journalist mainly writing reviews and he he wrote dozens upon dozens of reviews mainly of novels for more kind of middlebrow publications like The Sketch but that too was something where he quickly got disillusioned right again I grudged a time spent on reading the indifferent novels which appear and trying to appraise them justly. There to an editor he said well I would happily of course review books on art but clearly that type of work didn't come his way which highlights one aspect I think that that's often also kind of left out of these discussions about the history of a discipline namely that a lot of these deliberations as to where to take your career were of course also motivated by financial ones in in history 1906 Opay news for example that we all require reasonable subsistence that we all need to make money yet also don't we all yeah but also voicing the hope that this is this is not the sole value of a man but that that rather connections and the worthiness of one's work in its own right should be deemed enough and I think that's exactly where we see an issue a conflict a rub between this exalted idea of art as something that that rejuvenates us that uplifts us that is this higher form of existence and the the the the the the hope to make a professional career out of these virtues out of these subjects as soon as you professionalize your existence as any kind of art writer well you of course also become exactly not a professional who works within the constraint and frameworks of an economic world which precisely leads time and again for poor opay into these double binds he then tries for a while to become a a a scholar a writer of popular art books writes a book on Raphael which gets published in 1909 something again that made his life much much better and that he approached with considerable scientific rigor passing through all the literature on Raphael but again I think it's fair to say that the end product clearly sat between different chairs on the one hand side for some of the reviewers who were looking for entertaining literature on art it was not entertaining enough too much of this serious research while for some others handish birthing for example well it was just the book of an art writer who made certain observations in front of certain images and who brings out things but without engaging with the historical or critical literature not boring not without judgment but in a way that makes it clear that he imagined an audience that is not an audience of art historians that's fair to say he probably did not want to write specifically for art historians but for a wider audience but precisely in these attempts of actually finding a an economic existence as an art writer he also didn't manage to service any of the markets in between um in the end that's just my end point here in the end he decided to become a civil servant worked in the department of education for the remainder of his career from of 1905 one of his friends of san andro's pithily remarked that this had many advantages such as lots of spare time and a constant supply of excellent stationery um and or pay seems to have taken this job in exactly this vein as something that secured him the menial side of life the income that's needed to live a life and was it a collect art for example while on the other hand side to preserve the realm of art this exalted sphere of existence for something that is well just that an amateurish pursuit a hobby not amateurish in the sense of bad or unprofessional but relegated to a different sphere of life that was not tainted and not shaped by the frameworks of a profession what does that teach us about art history and its practices around 1900 well i think it more than anything teaches us that it is an occupation that was not easily squared up the time with any sort of professional occupation um the the fact that somebody like opi did not find a professional career within art history is however not necessarily born out of ignorance or born out of an inability to find a future in the field it clearly also is indicative that art act as we would call it today so alternatives to academic areas was a choice deliberately taken by someone who simply wanted to pursue their love and interest in art in a different ways than the economic frameworks of his life presented himself and i think we have to take exactly these decisions seriously uh as as professional art historians as people who work at universities i think we often have a certain confirmatory bias we became professional art historians we trained long for that we decided it very hotly for the sake of nice conferences and a slightly above national average salary which is grand and wonderful um but that sometimes also makes us a bit kind of tunnel vision you know blind for the fact that there might be people out there who desire something else for their life and career and who indeed might forge a path that allows them to shape their profession and their interest in art in an alternative way and this is where i stop thank you so much thank you um hands for getting us started at the beginning really in terms of date and in terms of um opi as a kind of starting point for all the thinking that we're doing today um and in the the themes that you're introducing there now um next it's my pleasure to introduce uh sarah cofiello but i've not met so hello sarah i'm sorry i didn't get the chance to say hello before so i was looking around i assume you're here but you are here fantastic because otherwise that would have been a bit awkward um sarah received her phd from the vorberg institute uh with an ahc hrc funded thesis on art historians as collectors in the 20th century um she is currently further investigating the panorama of british art historians uh thanks to the support of a uh uh getty library grant and in 2018 she was a fellow at the callust gulbenkin museum research in kenneth clark's role as gulbenkin's advisor and i like this she's awesome enthusiastic member of the society of the history of collecting brackets steering committee italian chapter she all sounds vaguely masonic but i think that's a kind of exciting um so uh and and sarah is talking today on being an art historian in britain in that 1920s to 1950s clark nicholson and dinspan okay over to sarah um so well thanks for all the organizer inviting me to speak here um the title of my talk actually refers to an article by caroline illam on becoming an art historian in the 1930s that was published in 2004 which was a pivotal exploration of the art history world of the time seen through the experience of benedict nicholson of whom i will be speaking today and reconstructing it from these diaries which are actually held here um shifting and almost bouncing between the theme of being an art historian and becoming an art historian from the late 1920s up until the late 1950s my aim today is to investigate three main practices in art history such as lecturing exhibiting and writing slash publishing and that as we shall realise these are very much intertwined we will be exploring the cases of kenneth clark danis marhawn and benedict nicholson making preferences to personal objects from their art collection for each one of them as a further tool to understand their collector's professional practice so let's start with kenneth clark and i will begin with a small round portrait of a bearded man by raffael which was the inner lid cover decoration of a wooden box that was once in the collection of kenneth clark now it's in a private collection and here is a photo of how it was displayed in his house in hamsterd around the 19 in 1947 clark had bought the piece around 1928 and intrigued by its subject and its attribution immediately started researching the object the result was an article which he had written for the benefit of students conceived as a showcase of good method which combined visual analysis and description fellowship but also extensive archive of research the clue finding in fact was that there was a source where the sitter could be so that the sitter could be identified as the godfather of raffael's daughter as mentioned in an inventory of a famous collection in vicenza the guldo collection as i had the occasion to investigate for my doctoral thesis the article remained unpublished but clark's findings were soon to be divulged to a larger public for it was going to be lent to the 1930 exhibition in london dedicated to italian art um this exhibition actually kenneth clark was involved in its organization and it was a sort of crying of his recent entrance for the of kenneth clark in the london art scene that had followed his involvement with the burlington fun arts club and the history of art society and which followed his praised work for the cataloging of the lonardo drawings in the royal collection clark was in charge of helping with the catalogue he was in selection committee and he was also part of the hanging committee and clark really enjoyed staging the act of hanging um clark however has been described as a clever articulate oxford educated anglosaxon if was the heir of a cotton industry tycoon who had studied at oxford which is within the years of 1923 1925 he studied history history and there he learned the importance of writing a looking at documents which will be persistent throughout his whole career his history his interest in the arts was encouraged by the vicinity of the ashmoly museum where the keeper of fine art department char spell had become a mentor for him at the time in britain art history was still struggling to becoming an academic subject being some 30 years behind some countries such as austria or italy and germany um although possibly now we are sort of discovering that the chronology might be changing um bell initiated clark making him study from live the drawings of rafael and michael angelo from the collection of the ashmolyan training him in dark tongue that with the works of art an essential neverness enough stress feature of the formation of an art historian as pursued by his previous predecessors and as fostered by clark himself also as a tutor of um of his own students bell also took clark to visit many public and private collections and this culminated in a summer trip in 1925 to italy where they first stopped at bologna where bell's still victorian taste made clark appreciate the then disregarded art of the carachi and then they followed on to tuskany where they stayed in pojo gerardo in florins and there clark met bernand berenson for the first time just two encounters sophist berenson to invite clark to work to collaborate with him and he proposed him the task to revision his legendary um lists of florentine drawings clarks accepted on the condition that he would start one year later allowing him to finish the fourth year doxford where he was um working on a project on on the gothic revival which had been suggested by bell in 1926 after a three months trial at itaty clark moved to london where he joined the for the burlington fine arts club which maybe we will be hearing about today and uh there he became friend with roger fry he was introduced to the blumsberry group during this time berenson instructed clark to do some preparation before he came to itaty this consistent in again seeing as many galleries and collections live as possible in the uk and outside and to learn languages especially german berenson wanted clark to read regal and vulflin in original so in the end clark went off and spent two months in dresden and from there he visited the collections he attempted to learn german and it is some further traveling before starting at itaty working on the florentine drawings he continued traveling italy looking at the collection and getting training with them seeing objects in bergamot which is where berenson had his conversion to connoisseurship breccia trento padua parma and then in rome in the period between 1927 1930 which is the period in which clark buys the raffael tonda which i've showed you earlier engages the most with raffael and he represents this represents a further point in the career in the uk for him in 1927 he marries elizabeth between jane martin and after a period of living in florence with her visiting collections with her doing more work and more training with the berenson they then returned to london in 1929 he gets the call to work at the aforementioned italian exhibition of 1930 and whilst he was in rome another key fact happened he attended a lecture by abie warburg other tian in rome which is recalled and pictured as representative of clark's infatuation with the wider and innovative approach associated with the warburg and the barburgians which is a relationship that would actually span for all his life in 1929 clark makes a start in the curatorial world so again he chooses a different path from the academic um historian or the art writer for its own um he was commissioned to catalogue the leonardus of inch drawings at Windsor castle which was a perfect task even his training with berenson and at the ashmolyan so here we are back in 1930 during the italian exhibition where clark has his raffael displayed in a case next to meadows we actually that actually portrayed the sitter of the portrait which was the engraver and metalworker valerio balli from vicenza shortly after the opening of the exhibition clark was still working on that article that he had envisioned for students and he contacted the closest expert of raffael that he knew which was paul opé opé as hans christianchester had published a monograph on the artist and apparently at least for clark it was considered a good reference work let's do it that way opé had just given one of the lectures complimentary to the exhibitions in the royal academy on the raffael cartoons which is where also clark lectured for the first time this marked the official start for clark of a great career as a lecturer becoming what gertrid bing had called the toscanini of the oppositives for clark as for other scholars before and after him lecturing had become a sort of laboratory for his scholarly work which he would then turn into some of his most famous books his style has been described as accessible for any kinds of public but also at times irritating as best as there one said for its cut-fivating and somehow vague statements meanwhile his curatorial career was carrying on for the better in 1931 he was offered this to succeed bell at the ashmolean and as paul opé had predicted to him in a letter of compensation he then went on to the national gallery in 1933 1944 becoming its youngest director of in the in its history in 1934 clark also became the surveyor of the king's pictures and it was really the start of what he was being called what has been called the great clark bloom boom his book on art the drawings that he published in 1935 had established his reputation as a serious scholar and it again resulted from a series of lectures that he gave at Yale a prominent a predominant figure in the public art world clark did more and more lecturing especially up to the world embedded in the most interpretive interpretative power of English literature tradition following the samples of patter raskin baronson and indeed fry with a sweet tooth for visual analysis between culturally and chronologically different works clark's lecture expressed a wide range of interest for history literature iconography showing the width of his approach and the mix really of different art historical approaches and the influence of the recent activity of both the co older and the warbrooke institutes in this respect the three years of his late professorship at oxford are representative given once a week they formed the basis for many of these books and as in the case of the first cycle that he dedicated to landscape paintings which was entered in landscaping to art ranging from the renaissance italian artists such as alberti paulo i cello pierr de la francesca rhaffail to the end of humanism rembrandt angren de la croix art and photography error in art these lectures embodied raskin's original aim to interest youth in this case students and it really did so there was no academic art history at oxford yet and the lectures were well attended on the morning after each lecture clark was offered a room where to receive students for questions and consultation and as some of these students later recalled these sometimes was their first point of awareness and interest for the history of art as we will probably and also he had um one could say a passion for including his own works in his lectures as well which as i dim also stand for the close relationship between his collection and his professional work as we will probably hear today many times although i'm the first one for the moment well after i'm the christian um the journey for the establishment of art of academic art history as a subject or as a degree was still rather ongoing and long despite the turning points of the foundation of the court of the institute and the arrival of the war between 1931 and 1933 as also gombrik often said there was an art history tradition before it's not that he was invented at that moment and also as lisa bithears and also recently hunts christian and have thoroughly researched into the history of these early institutes the aim of the court told was to train those who want to specialise either as art historians teachers museums and galleries official and these aims were very similar for what has happened for instance in italy with the birth of the so-called school especially zetsone of adolfo vinturi in rom in 1901 the ideas for the programs and syllabuses and the plans for an integrated court and barbog approach were very promising they had the resources libraries photo libraries museums and galleries nearby and trained academic stuff but the results were slower to be seen and the reputation takes took longer to build if we make a generational jump to see sorry I just lost my truck to see what was the world of art history like in the 1930s then when danis mhawnd and benedic nicholstone were formating as art historians and also would was were pursuing a career in art history as was explored by carol yn elam we are going to see that they're being in contact with direct but they're being direct contact with institutions such as the court hold and the and the barborg sorry I keep continuing losing my stuff and the barborg Institute we will see I'm not used to this okay we will see that there are many continuities with the earlier period but also they're connected with the for the institutions and the person and the fear the figures involved with the formalization of the history of art in britain such as important aglosaxons scholars like bernand berenstone amruge a german speaking scholars and also italian scholars we saw the into a very fertile interconnected approach that had a long impacting effect well outside britain so once again I'm going to speak of danis mhawnd but through one of the objects that he owned and this is a painting by guercino jaco blessing the sons of joseph it now is in the national gallery in dublin and it was acquired by my own in 1934 in paris for only one 120 pounds in 1934 my own who had studied history at oxford and who had stayed a further year to I quote read the little art history under the direction the direction of surth canad clark at the ashmolean and the court and who had advised him to read wolflyn like berenstone did at this time with him and was going to apply for a position at the national gallery where clark's president director so he wrote to clark in 1934 inquiring about this vacancy my home had also informed at the same time clark of his recent purchase and had offered to exhibit it at the bulletin house for an exhibition but clark refused it for he would not fit it was too big clark eventually will have us to decline the offer of my home to offer a guercino to the national gallery stating that it would it would be impossible to convince the trustees the taste was not right there yet for for this ancient to art and especially for guercino this letter from clark from my home to clark dating 1935 however is also interesting because it reveals that since my home did not get this vacancy which was given to another candidate he asked clark if he could still join the national gallery as a sort of unpaid trainee trainee inventing possibly what has become then the honorary attaché for the national gallery a post from who from which many other people and many other colleagues of my own will benefit including by nicolson and john and john pop hennessy in his letter my home sets out his craving for physical learning in the museum world is for hands-on experience at closing counter with the artworks and a hunger that recently the court hall was not able to satisfy completely despite he was and would and wanted to still continue to attend lectures especially on this ancient art my home as well was the heir of a Guinness my home merchant bank family he had studied at iton then at oxford already 1933 he attended the lectures at the court hall being particularly grateful for the attention on the gentle art and the work and influence of pepsner but also anthony blunt especially as far as our theories was concerned he continued to attend private lessons with pepsner that he would pay with his own personal monthly income and he started touring galleries collections and museums and archives as pepsner had suggested him he started working on work you know and then my home came back to london and started his traineeship at the national gallery after he had gone to italy studying all the work you know and they'll be into all the archives and the sources and once at the national gallery actually repeated his traineeship for further two years this time at the same time as ben nicolson in london my home very much attending the warburg institute where he worked with friends such as otto quartz rudolfid cover and also later luigi salerno in 1947 this resulted in the publication of seicento art studies in seicento art and theory which was sponsored by the warburg institute in 1948 a rather shy mahorn wrought to the elderly and established bernard barinson i quote i heard from the warburg institute that you had expressed interest in the book and so i picked up my courage and i sent it to you on that occasion mahorn gave a rather vivid account of his education to bernison which i used for the earlier summary that i introduced before in these letters bernison also asked mahorn for some photos of his seicento pictures probably one third of all the seicento pictures that one can find in bernison's photo library that includes the guercino that was that i showed you before that was illustrated in this 1947 publication the seicento art and theory book that my home produced was sponsored by saxel as he told bernison and he's still considered a fundamental study for barock and for the history of art in general as this recent study of the fundamental books of the rediscovery of the seicento shows but in the 1950s mahorn input into the international scenario was definitely also through exhibition making both as a scholar as an organizer and as a generous lender mahorn contributed to the most pivotal shows and occasions to study and reevaluate the bolognau seicento school in collaboration with Cesare and Newdy in Bolognau the 1950s where there was a rather fertile ground for the rediscovery of seicento art in all his shades classicism caravagism in all europe if the initiators of this pass were jurisman scholars such as vos and the italians especially Roberto Longhi as mahorn himself remembered britain certainly held a role in keeping the debate vivid and fostering it farther and mahorn was one of the key figures to gather within by nicholson especially thanks to the letter to the letter's editorship of the bolognau magazine and there was a strong tradition of seicento studies already way before if we think about elliswaterhouse for instance or and then also later with and francis huskell since nicholson became editor in the nineteen in 1945 on 1947 all the bolognau magazine his editorials touched upon themes such as art history teaching art historiography history of conservation conservation as scholarship generated through exhibition the climate of the 1950s is perhaps most um best summarized by the example of the 1951 pivotal exhibition on caravaggio that was organized by robert alonghi mahorn visited visited four times and nicholson was among the most enthusiastic recipient of the opening of these of these opening of new fields of inquiries and new fields of studies the caravagia mania as it has been described um spread across the pages of the burlington magazine where nearly discolored documents and evidence were being published and there was a focus on new chronology and reshaping the catalogue nicholson also through the ages of clark made it possible that important italian voices joined the debate including robert alonghi but also robert paluchini ridolfa paluchini if mahorn was more integrate intrigued by caravaggio nicholson was all was more for the caravagia side of the seicento not just italian but especially european this is a painting by ter bruggan that nicholson possessed and he also wrote a monograph on ter bruggan in 1958 this painting was acquired in 1954 it's now in the fifth wheeler collection it's and it's only one out of eight paintings by ter bruggan in the uk public collection in 1990 it was chosen to illustrate um nicholson's great um publication and task of cataloging the international caravagest movements and this monumental work had been published postimately by louisa verteva with phydon and then it brought forward by um anthony blunt clearly burning out of the barren swinging indexing list it was a monumental work that still is a reference for the field of the caravagest movement and it was carried out in a monumental indexing and taxonomy fashion following the current um tendency in british artistry of the time it was not just a list of attribution and it hid enormous connoesership and sourced's work behind it it even had a chart of visual data and i'm just going to um conclude it incorporated the german and the italian lesson on the appreciation of the sachento and the caravagest and it was beautifully written in the best english art writing tradition as anthony blunt underlined just having a quick glance at this formation at blunt's formation again we see oxford on the rariat at she at the national gallery working with barrenson being a trainee in the museum working for the royal collection art history in this moment really benefited not only from having from not for sorry art history benefited from not having an established academy tradition even uh until the late 1930s and having contacts with emigrates german scholars and their interests and being receptive for italian and german scholarship on the sachento mahones and caracays showed that the absence perhaps of a clear direction or a clear approach in the end enriched the um the path that many scholars took but it also um fitted in in the opposite direction towards also the study the study of british art for instance and here we see how the path from robert alongi studies in nicholson then led also to looking at the art of joseph wite therapy and i'll just leave it here serif introducing um three key figures there and it we've got a a few um minutes for for questions or comments now which can come um meant to come online or can come from the room um just as we'll kick kick things off i mean we've seen from both of you figures who are collectors as well as writers art writers art historians and that's another question about what do we call them um is there ever a kind of a sense or acknowledgement that being a collector as well as a writer on art is in any way a problem is it compromising is there a kind of conflict of interest or is it always kind of generative and positive and do please use the microphones i think it should be on you think you turn it off that's a fascinating question because it of course is exactly this question of a good academic but um i don't necessarily get the sense i mean i was really struck by the terpargan who's on the cover of the very publication where this is not just a a acid inclusion of a work that you own but actually quite a bullish uh showcasing of it um i think the striking thing where opi i think sarah fits in your list really beautifully as well is that for a lot of these for practice collecting clearly came before writing about these objects right it's it's not an academic expertise that then leads them to the find to buy an impressive and undervalued work so they are not the disinterest that academic in the first place but they started with collecting opi starts around 1905 to buy british works on paper but then only writes the first articles quite a few years thereafter and i think that seemed to come through in years as well and it goes this way around uh so that's a lot of activity as collected so it's quite quite formative for finding a certain area of expertise and at this very moment i think it's not seen as an issue right not something where you exploit skill and again that's the question of professionalization when you when you read through these debates should i acknowledge whether i'm publishing one of my own works today um that assumes that you have an unfair advantage and perhaps financially invested interest where you are exploiting your maybe publicly sponsored uh a scholarship right i'm a i'm a state employed academic so i have knowledge that i that that's built on the taxpayer but i might enrich myself that doesn't happen in the moment where you don't have a job essentially that is paid by anybody else where that that this interestedness as a concept i think is quite out of the window so would you like to yeah i just um whilst reading through that letter that um a home wrote to barison he says explicitly i do not like to state in my publications that the pictures that might that i might reproduce are owned by me because i don't want the readers to be distracted by these questions of conflicts of interest and so on and one should just purely see them as illustrations of whatever he was writing and explaining and that really has been the the dilemma of my whole research and still is because that's what i'm trying to figure out um and the more i dwell into it the more i just see that really collecting is a way of fostering opening up a way of inquiry and it is accompanying and stimulating ideas um as it probably was even before then it the i think the difference is when the collector also actively involves into trying to be a professional art historian or a museum creator or whatsoever um at the front do you wait for the microphones if you're asking it's kib it's on yes um i just further comment to that especially about the idea of being a collector leading you into the idea of becoming an art historian i think most of the people you mentioned except of a most of them didn't really need a job they were looking for um they were looking for a work in the museum so that they could get hands on and work it's what their passion was and they thought that was where they could where it could take them but also it's important to remember that curators at this time too was not a very it was a very not very well paid the people that were curators in museums and galleries were very well off and they didn't need the museum salary they were there more because they wanted to be there and if you think of the ones who worked in in british art um who were in museums most of them were quite the uh i'm trying to think of um so there's this Campbell at the British Museum there's Lawrence Binion there's a whole series at Croft Murray none of them needed this the the museum salary they they were there because they wanted to work on well on british art in those instances um so i think that's really important to keep in mind and that and it's this whole idea of dilatantism it wasn't seen as something that was um uh that was negative at the time they could be proud to be sort of dilatants in british art history also the other thing is to remember the role of british art in the whole way that we looked at art history it was very much bottom rung of the of the ladder and renaissance and old masters were far more important just to stay out they are now there's a there's a front line in the Roy Strong diaries where he actually claims for a taxi fare and that is seen as outrageous by his colleagues in the bna because why would you do something like that you should have independent means of course um yeah you're absolutely right about that um i just wanted to add that sometimes it's useful to compare the british situation with some other scenarios so for instance in the italian news school of art history there were also bursary offered for students who wanted to become or join the art historical stage and this also often allowed many women to join um the the court but then at the same time there were many not very rich art historians who still collected and maybe went for trowings or actually in this case even um genre or eras that were not very looked after so in fact um Mahon's and Nicholson's purchases were not very pricey at all um and on the other side you may have someone like Roberto Longhi or Bernard Berenson who were making money through the art world and could afford them to buy what they wanted and this again usually tends to reflect their own interests and again they weren't very expensive paintings not all the time at least we're going to try and squeeze in two more in uh in order um it's just a comment is that is that am i it's working isn't it great okay hi um that was a great start to the conference this is a question for hands um i was struck by how Nietzschean you made opay sound uh not just for his um classical training uh but also for his hatred of historicism and this might be oh this might be like a mean or unfair question to start things off with but what do you think paul opay would have made of the historiography of art history oh my god that's that's that's an excellent question i'm not in time to cure what to make of it he seemed to have a certain aversion against honors as well so he he declined mbe i think something like that um you know i'm not i'm not sure whether he was into being entirely maybe historicized i do like the Nietzsche reference um i don't i'm not aware at least of him having read Nietzsche but i think it's important you know again it's we often quote Nietzsche for this kind of idea of art as this this this um this this this release this this this this this this medium to to allow us to to to to regain our true and high itself but i think again the idea is perhaps slightly slightly further spread than than we we often acknowledge and i'm struck yes you're right he's a classicist but as a classicist he's quite a quite a positivist guy you know he writes this article about delthy and it's not about the great myth of delthy it's about how exactly the geology in that side works you know it's it's very sober actually um and and yeah absolutely right i think that's where a Nietzsche of course also is somebody who's an anti anti-academic essentially even though he was a professor for a while and i think this anti-academicism um is is often renegated too much to these extraordinary figures such as Nietzsche uh instead of actually being seen as perhaps a slightly wider social phenomenon okay we are running behind but we can take one more well i haven't i haven't really got time it's fascinating stuff but um it's talk of dilatantism i was i was just reminded by the illustration you put in in the little book that we've just seen of the book on botty cherry by opae and i wondered about how much money he would have made if it was not not enough to talk about this bourgeois lady art historians in england compared to the slightly more professional thing but i just thought that the person left out of the discussion is Herbert Horn's botty cherry which is two years earlier than opae's who really couldn't be accused in any way of being a dilatant so yes yeah absolutely right and i think this fits in exactly with what i tried to say about the the attempt to make a living as an art historian as well i think about opae here was to try to break into markets that are perhaps not the strictly historical ones something that horn for example would have covered to an extent and i think that essentially is also why he remained unsuccessful because he tried to place himself between the different trends you know not not the not the bottychellian beauty this apologist of something surreal and super super super mention if you want to be meachian about it but also not the serious historian that that horn might have represented it's much traced who's praised already at the time by vaabog of course he was yes there were quite a few botty cherry publications in exactly that time so in that sense i also find it a surprising choice to be honest especially if you want to make money with a book and you go into a rather crowded market um so i'm not sure whether he entirely made the right commercial decisions as well the opae okay i think with that we will move on to the next session have a change of chair um and i'll be passing over to my colleague charlotte but i do please thank you again hands and sarah good afternoon everyone um as martin's already said i'm the centre's archivist and i was responsible with my colleague emma for bringing the archive and library to the centre so it gives me a particular pleasure to chair the next session since both of the speakers um are giving papers that are based on research conducted using the opae archive and library um and indeed their work fed into the drawing room display downstairs which i know that most of you unfortunately wouldn't have been able to see on your way in but there will be opportunities later and in fact um for those of you that are coming back tomorrow there'll be chances to to revisit the conversation that we're going to have in the next session because hands will be giving um his very own tour of the display cabinets and helens talk is very much based on one of the display cabinets and martin's on the other one so if you miss things today there's an opportunity to hear them again tomorrow without further ado because i know we're running late i will introduce the first speaker so the first speaker is dr helen glaister she is an art historian specialising in chinese ceramics and decorative arts she's particularly focused on the intersection between chinese and european art design and aesthetics during the modern period she began her museum career at the british museum and worked as program director of the world arts and artifacts program at berkbeck before progressing to her current position as course director of the arts of asia program at the vna helen was awarded her phd from soas where she regularly teaches she published her first monograph chinese art objects collecting an interior design in the 20th century in 2022 and she's contributed to various exhibitions and cataloging projects on chinese art most recently the liverpool museum's touring exhibition to china in 2023 so who better then to talk about opae and chinese art um helens paper is very simply titled very largely chinese but not entirely paul opae on chinese art helen over to you thank you for that introduction and it was a real pleasure to work on the display and to present to you today on this topic from november 1935 until march 1936 paul opae dedicated his personal diary black book 10 to the subject of chinese art the book begins on the 29th of november one day after the opening of the groundbreaking international exhibition of chinese art at burlington house which made an immediate and lasting impression on the art historian who made multiple visits towards the end of the show opae published his detailed response to the painting myriad miles of the yanksie river by the song dynasty master shagway in the times praising it as one of the most effective and imaginative landscapes in the world in his letter to the editor opae highlights the importance of observing the painting in situ being the first opportunity to see such exemplary artworks outside china opae goes on to assess the quality of the brush strokes and stylistic differences across the over 11 meter long scroll concurring with other scholars that the work is the product of at least two hands disagreements between englishening and chinese critics on this point is also alluded to indicating a degree of direct engagement between these academic circles and opae's familiarity with developments in the field this was not opae's first encounter with chinese art and culture letters in his archive reveal aspects of his short visit to china and colonial hong kong as part of an extended family trip to new zealand in 1893 to four incorporating present day Sri Lanka japan and singapore in kanton the 15 year old opae records his arrival to the narrow streets of the commercial district from a street of wood carvers he was carried by sedan chair to a street where ornaments of silver were inlaid with kingfisher feathers then on to rice painter's shops that is chinese export paintings where one man takes the head the other the body opae remarks upon various aspects of the traditional chinese secular and religious architecture visiting the viceroy's summerhouse and comparing buddhist temples to those he had already seen in japan including a nine-story pagoda with 500 images and the chinese tartar city where few foreigners ventured opae's younger brother henry was later stationed in Shanghai and correspondence between the two offer insights into the availability and acquisition of chinese art objects in the years immediately following the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912 at the time opae was employed as deputy director of the south kentington museum and on the december the 18th 1912 henry expressed his wish to present two chinese paintings portraits of once living persons that is ancestor portraits similar to these but not the those you're looking at on the screen to the museum he had purchased the paintings for three pounds and explains that they probably originated from some peaking house and had been sold owing to the revolution the paintings never entered the london museum and while the final destination of these paintings remains unknown the purchase and transfer of art objects from chinese private hands to international collectors museums and art dealers typifies the outpouring of chinese art objects onto the global art market in the first decades of the 20th century back in britain the increasing availability of arts from early china was seized upon by collectors and art critics such as roger fry who promoted chinese art and aesthetics alongside modernism through the burlington magazine as Ralph Parffect judith green and craig clunus have shown fry was among a number of influential art critics whose specialism lay in western art who turned to chinese art to revitalize contemporary art practice the 1915 exhibition of chinese art at the burlington fine arts club was the first of its kind and the selection committee included leading collectors george umorphopolis and oscar afail alongside museum experts laurence binion from the british museum and sir oscar afail from the south kensington museum who are also listed as contributors as a bfa c member opay visited the exhibition and his response to individual works of art can be observed in his annotated catalogue which is downstairs where he grades some of the objects as good bad passable or clumsy he makes interesting although inaccurate comparisons between chinese art objects and egyptian greek and bizantine art reflecting a wider tendency amongst western art critics to universalize art appreciation seeking connections between western art traditions and those of asia where none exist as interest in chinese art gathered pace collectors in britain gravitated towards ceramics and in 1921 the first specialist society dedicated to asian ceramics was formed initially constituting a small and select group of 12 gentlemen who met in the comfort of their homes the oriental ceramic society soon expanded in size and scope publishing academic papers regularly through transactions by 1933 there were 120 members and meetings were held at the court ward institute of art importment square the ocs council led by suppersival david and including umorphopolis and rafa mentioned above along with robert hobson of the british museum were instrumental in initiating and orchestrating the pivotal international exhibition of chinese art which took place at the rawl academy from november 1935 until march 1936 with the support of the british and chinese government numerous numerous rare and exceptional chinese national treasures were shipped to london where they were exhibited for the first time alongside artworks from leading japanese european and american museums dealers and private collectors including many ocs members as persival david stated quote the scope of the exhibition is wider and more ambitious than any of its brilliant predecessors an endeavour has been made to bring together as far as possible the finest and most representative examples of of the arts and crafts of china from the dawn of its history to the year 1800 the exhibition included over 3000 examples of chinese paintings sculpture and applied arts of which over 800 were loaned by the chinese government a small volume was published to coincide with the exhibition and in his chapter on painting laurence binion stressed the importance of approaching and understanding chinese painting from a chinese perspective he's stated if we are truly to appreciate any work of art it is idle to appreciate it from the outside bringing with us all our prejudices and preconceptions we must try to enter into the mind of the man who made it discover what his aim was and consider how far he has achieved his aim in the case of chinese painting while it is easy to enjoy the decorative qualities presented by its surface we cannot understand it without some knowledge of the chinese conception of picture banking of the painter's approach to his subject and the mental background behind his art with this in mind a series of lectures took place in parallel with the event some addressing a specialist topic while others were tailored to a more general audience speakers at the at the royal academy included leading british academics curators and collectors suppersible yet the first professor of chinese art and archaeology at the school of oriental studies which was founded in 1930 museum experts bernard rachem robert hobson and li aston as well as archaeologists and sinologists from France sweden america and japan only one chinese speaker was included the ambassador of the republic of china to the united kingdom dr fft chang who introduced some cultural and historical aspects of chinese art lectures also took place at the university of london and moorley college as well as those given by chinese artists chang y at soas the importance of this exhibition cannot be overstated both to the field of chinese art in britain and the impact it had on visitors such as opoe his immediate response to individual objects can be seen in his annotated catalogue where he notes the perfection of shape of exhibit 196 an ancient bronze wine vessel opoe situates unfamiliar chinese objects within established western classifications as was customary at the time identifying the decorative bands of exhibit 166 as proto carinthian greek style a more detailed and in-depth discussion of all aspects of chinese art and aesthetics is offered in his personal diary black book 10 captioned very largely chinese but not entirely his initial thoughts were further refined in his review of the exhibition and he records that quote i welcome this opportunity to write about chinese art primarily because it seemed wasteful to allow the many thoughts somewhat fresh and different which have come to me in the weeks of the exhibition to pass away like so many other things without precise utterance and permanent memorial and of course it seemed desirable to associate them definitively with my name for what they may be worth opoe's wide-ranging commentaries cover the duration of the exhibition and frequently juxtaposed chinese art on its western counterpart reality with fantasy the human form writing and calligraphy decoration and ornament and so forth his discussion of rhythmic vitality or shengdong in chinese a principle associated with fifth century chinese artists and scholars y oher and much cited in modernist signified discourse demonstrates his awareness of chinese art historical frameworks as understood at the time opoe observes interesting correlations between the work of water colorists alexander cousins and chinese landscape painting he writes cousins attempts to analyze landscape clouds trees human features into classes and groups as satirized by k clark is another indication of his similarity with the chinese even shinwassery it is conceivable that ever curious and not english he learned something from the mysterious chinese artist who is sometimes included among the early royal academy missions and he's seen on the left of the painting at the top opoe is here referring to tansha chua known as chi chua a chinese artist who modeled portraits in clay and was lionized on his arrival in london in 1769 several of his clay figures were exhibited at the royal academy and he was painted by john hamilton mortimer drawn by charles grignon and even included in zoffinies remarkable depiction of the academy painted for george the third china and the chinese landscape was certainly in the minds of cousins and his peers writing to his friend on the perceived similarities between the landscape of the netherlands and china william beckworth observed quote the minute neatness of the villages their red roofs and the lively green of the willows correspond with the ideas i had formed of chinese prospects he goes on i was perfectly in the environ of canton or ning bow till we reached meadike at the time of the burlington house exhibition opae discussed his theories with chinese artist chang yee who was by then living in london chang arrived in 1933 and was one of a growing number of chinese artist and intellectuals based here during the interwar years he lived in hamsterd with fellow expatriot the writer and playwright sure yee shong who became the first chinese person to direct a west end play lady pressure stream seen here at the bottom chang was soon well acquainted with british writers and curators who were keen to contextualise and internationalise british art they turned to him for advice on chinese painting and calligraphy and opae acknowledges his help in translating inscriptions on the aforementioned painting myriad miles so herbert reid noted he was great he has greatly extended our knowledge not only of chinese civilisation but of art and civilisation in general chang received many distinguished chinese guests including artists shu beihong and leo haisu and in 1935 the same year as the exhibition at the royal academy worked with leo to mount an exhibition of modern chinese painting at the new burlington galleries his encounters with roger fry lorence binyon and herbert reid are all discussed in his 1938 book the silent traveller in london where he recalls dining with opae at his home on the invitation of opae chang was shown his collection of english watercolours including a tiger seen here sketchily painted in the 1770s by alexander cousins in monochrome india ink the chinese painter notes the more familiar i become with english watercolours the more points of similarity i find between them and our paintings the treatment in the black and white wash drawings of cotsman cousins constable and cameron make me believe there is really no boundary between english and chinese art at all the burlington house exhibition acted as a catalyst for the production of books on chinese art for the general and specialist reader in 1935 alone five books on chinese art were published including the chinese eye by chang y the only chinese author this book fulfilled a vital role in demystifying principles of chinese art as a practice and a subject for study it offered readers an introduction to the fundamental principles of chinese painting and a clearly defined cultural context within which to appreciate it the book was not intended to be an academic study of chinese painting but offered a more accessible approach based on the personal experience and perspective of a practicing chinese artist the book was met with critical acclaim from the general public as well as the academic community art critic herbert reid wrote a bit he has explained the chinese conception of art so clearly and thus enabled us to appreciate its qualities with the true aesthetic understanding laurence binion also reviewed his book writing this book tells much in small compass and to all who take an interest in chinese painting and want to know more about its essential qualities it will be an initiation the chinese eye identified chang as a respected authority on chinese painting and marked the beginning of his prolific publishing career the following year oswald syran's important work the chinese on the art of painting provided the first book in english which drew extensively on chinese sources offering a firm foundation for academic study opa short but meaningful annotations in his book indicates his direct engagement with chinese art theory the opa archive is rich in material which connects the specialist in british art with developments in the history and historiography of chinese art in britain up to 1936 after that point little substantial evidence suggests a direct engagement with the subject and it could be argued that as the field of chinese art history developed as a distinct and separate entity it became increasingly remote from the arena of euro american art practice and theory a comment made later in 1952 indicates the lasting impression chinese art had made on opa again on the work of cousins he stated in the true blot of blot the energy of the controlled brushwork and the shaping of the black and white spaces immediately satisfy the sophisticated eye of today both with their decorative and their suggestive power though never patterns in the ordinary sense they have that compelling unity of spirit of the well-informed paragraph which in chinese eyes is equivalent to a picture if they are considered as representational the force of the impact and the emphasis of interest again as in chinese painting more than compensate for the absence of perspective and atmospheric tonality so to conclude while not usually associated with chinese art and aesthetics the personal papers exhibition catalogs books and other documents held in the opa archive shine a light on this aspect of his work from his personal engagement a wider picture emerges highlighting the intersection of chinese and british art in particular the traditions of landscape painting watercolours and ink painting from the 18th century down to his own time opa was one of a number of art specialists schooled in the western tradition who turned their attention to chinese art objects and aesthetics in the first decades of the 20th century rogefrian herbert reed can also be understood in these terms as well as museum experts lorenz binion and bernard rachem a similar shift can also be detected in the collections of george mulfopolis the pivot towards china was due in large part to political change and social upheaval which facilitated the movement of art objects and artists from china to the west raising public awareness of chinese art in britain through public exhibitions and publications and revealing the full extent of chinese art objects of all kinds as never before thank you thank you helen that was really fascinating i'm sure that there are lots of questions but um if people can hold them um in their heads until um the next speaker has finished martin this is like revolving doors so you're you're up again and i know that martin has already said martin is head of grants and fellowships and networks at the centre um and in these positions i know he plays a pivotal role in bringing together and facilitating conversations between hundreds of specialists in the field so i'm sure that he's already well known to many of you before joining the centre in 2020 martin spent over 20 years in curatorial roles at tate latterly a senior curator of pre 19th century british art his exhibitions at tate britain have included gothic nightmares in 2006 british folk art in 2014 and hogarth and europe in 2021 martin was awarded his phd from the courthold institute where he is also taught his research and publications have focused on 18th and 19th century british art with a special interest in artistic identity and artist labour class cultural opportunity and gender he's published widely his most recent book making the modern artist culture class and art educational opportunity in romantic britain was published by the paul melons centre in 2020 martin's paper is focused on opaise encounter with a young art historian david lociac his paper is titled simply opaise and david lociac martin over to you so um opaise versus lociac the new art history of circa 1955 i'm concerned here with a brisk exchange of letters between opaise and a younger art historian david lociac at stake here are four sheets of paper two ml letters from lociac in new yw yw York to opaise and chelsea London two typed responses posted back to lociac by opaise these running from 25th of july 1955 to 17th of august 1955 so you know less than a month the sequence of letters is quite readily described and i will do so in a moment beyond this there's a slightly more extended time frame which would take us from 1948 when opaise met lociac and it appears recommended him as the co-author of a new book by tom gertin on tomas gertin to be written by a descendant and namesake tom gertin through to fevri 1957 when the burnter magazine published a long response by lociac to opaise scathing review of the resulting book published in that journal in december 1955 together with um opaise shorter response to lociac's commentary opaise died later in 1957 and in a sense the matter ends there although there is a third frame i want to address one that extends across the whole of the biological lives of the of our two protagonists and indeed beyond into family histories and outwards and onwards into the world at large and through to the present day so firstly to dispense with that short chronology on the 25th of july 1955 lociac writes to opaise setting out that he intended to apply for a guginheim foundation grant to enable him to travel to europe to continue his studies on what's he had been he had previously been released from teaching duties at michigan state college to undertake a phd at the courthold in 1950 to 52 as the co-author of a substantial academic monograph and as the guest curator of the what's exhibition organized by the arts council at the tate gallery in 1954 to five lociac might reasonably have expected support he was to be disappointed on the 7th of august opaise wrote back declining to provide a reference and in quite emphatic terms he had already written his damning review and shared the proofs with tom guirton but not with lociac so the strength of opaise opinions came as a shock to the younger man he was alarmed particularly by opaise claim that he the younger man was motivated by some sort of base commercial instinct that he should be kind of writing for many rather than for scholarship making a remarkably frank statement about the material conditions of his intellectual production lociac set out in reply that it was only by virtue of the gi bill that he had been able to undertake his research in the final exchange these letters are upstairs and in the book and some of them in the booklet as well opaise slouched towards an apology but didn't quite make it there now opaise in 1955 was an old man in his late 70s and lociac was youngish 36 we might hurry past this exchange as nothing more than a bout of elderly grumpiness and intergenerational conflict perhaps but i want to make the case that there is much more at stake here seeing this as a clash of world views world views informed by class and status economic and social position nationality and understandings of ethnicity a clash that exposes the powerfully compounded elements of xenophobia anti intellectualism racial and class prejudice that sit behind the outwardly benign ingenial facade of the world of British art history to think about that question i want to mobilize some thoughts about the embodied nature of knowledge developed in the field of contemporary anti-racism much of which has been the labour of women and of women of color but also as i'm still an old white guy i want to restate the generative potential of critical theory in its early iterations and in doing this i'm going to also kind of make a case for a crudly even crassly materialist dimension for what in thinking about intellectual production even down to i mean this is about bodies and spaces and places in rooms in regard to this question opi status not only as a clerk of art history as hands would suggest but an actual civil servant is instrumental what hands views i think a little bit detachedly as a metaphor it's rather less and rather more than a means of grasping the inner scholarly dynamic of a defined field of intellectual inquiry it is instead a position within the intellectual field which is also a position in the wider social field with the kinds of exclusion and inclusion and even violence or symbolic violence that implies and as you kind of go through that you know the biographical official records of opi's life and he's always identified as a civil servant i mean i think it's right the first real kind of references when he's given an award by the British Academy he's called an art historian everything else he's always a civil servant including in in the kind of official census records opi in 1955 was a now long retired civil servant he'd stepped down in by 1938 when his annual salary was published the salaries would have been between 1450 and 1650 pounds which means to judge from this table published in the 1955 study of the civil service he earned more than a professor at Edinburgh interestingly um but less than the headmaster of the city of london school there was of course many in the in the family ready to an extent both his mother and father's families were textile traders his father a silk merchant naturalised in 1886 with his children including paul um dying that year um after oxford and we've heard a little of this already and st andrews and a stab at teaching classics he took on an appointment at the board of education we've seen this already this letter of appointment that division of the civil service had interestingly held out against the reforms of the late 19th century that were introduced a note however modest of meritocracy through examinations and interviews and interviews for higher civil servants the border that's what the board of education continued to appoint individually without exams coming in a close scrutiny for this knowing the exclusive practice in the 1912 to 13 royal commission and only conceding to a modicum of equity in its recruitment procedures under duress in 1919 so long after um he was appointed um opi's appointment was then from a kind of an older world of civil service patronage as hands as as observed opi was never a professional art historian his stints at the vna were circumvents having a full-time job in the higher echelons that the board of education did not however prevent him from pursuing his intellectual and collecting interests and hands has really quoted a day that wonderful um comment about uh from a friend that um this role would give him plenty of time in excellent stationary um and a little more seriously i'd point to gail savages 1982 analysis of the board of education in the interwar years and the uh uh educational social backgrounds and of its higher um servants and their ineffectiveness and uh indeed uh occasional obstructiveness in terms of educational reform i'll come back to this this surely provides a context for the tangible sense of distaste opi expresses toward lo shack who had downingly perhaps to make a living and it's uh and make a living as an academic and it seems worse still he was actually academically qualified not as an art historian having studied in america of all places now um there was a kind of ontological complicity between these two men uh they are both men from well-off middle class backgrounds or relatively well-off middle class backgrounds and lo shack goes to great efforts that flatter the older man and speak his language it's not we're not kind of it's a clash but they're trying to speak the same language well lo shack is trying to speak the same language but this very proximity perhaps only sharpened to quote the contemporary sociologist bevely skex more awareness how of how wrong your practices and appearance and knowledge actually are um i can't go into this here but i think there is an illuminating contrast with the very convivial letters to opi from another young american art historian ray murphy from a couple of years earlier um littered with anti-jewish sentiments and snide illusions to the world of paid work but murphy was a different kind of american opi received his copy of the gyrtin book from tom gyrtin in november 1954 and set about reading it and annotating it heavily um now i've been this is the copy in the the library here which um i've transcribed the 450 annotations and generated a little word cloud to see what um was most common in terms of opi's comments i think the intro graphic will do the work there i think the published review um that as published in the belinto magazine makes some gentle criticism of tom gyrtin the co-author but absolutely downed lo shack mainly for his apparently provocative language and thinking and distortions emanating it seems from his um uh from his contributions of provenance in an MA thesis undertaken in the US and this is a point which is made in the correspondence and and in the in the published review that somehow he's he's a long way he was producing work to um impress his supervisors rather than to um reach towards the truth we're still that american provenance of lo shack's intellectual formation made itself apparent in his writing in his use of terms in the very style of his writing um and the final words uh this is the draft where he opi uh dismisses the into the uh the book as uh an immature production um in the in the end it's ill-considered i think nicklesham must have sort of persuaded him to turn it down a little bit um now this kind of question of language use and its meaning was kind of even more emphatic and in a kind of illuminating way in a review in the uh tls by um ia williams uh where you can see the americanisms um that lo shack apparently employed are down he has a propensity to you to use words like individuation and empathic which are presumably better liked across the atlantic than here now nick 1955 is of course a moment of strong anti-american feeling stretching from the work of that richard hoggart was doing which became the uses of literacy through to the moral panic around american horror comics which played out in the latter part of 1954 and into 1955 this precise moment resulting in legislation in december 1955 and opi's words on lo shack follow a track also established in these discussions so the idea that language is being deployed for sensations effect in order to have profit or have an impact rather than with clarity and purpose the published review focused on failures of detail which in opi's eyes reflected a lack of engagement with the material object most materially the account of bridge north the drawing of bridge north where lo shack and gherting claimed it was on two sheets of paper and was the result of different moments of work um opi who could uh had only to pop over to the study room at the British Museum to check insisted it was on a single sheet from this point opi develops the claim that lo shack's argument as a whole can be disregarded as lo shack as lo shack noted in his response uh yeah so saying um yeah that that uh opi feels he can sort of dismiss the general the the commentaries on the on the general causes of the artist on the basis of this this apparent error um here's the drawing i'm going to come back to you later on oh right at the end rather now this line of argument strikes me as kind of interestingly reminiscent or kind of resonant with uh what um adorno observed in his essay guilt and defense published in 1955 lots of stuff happens in 1955 published in 1955 as part of the frankfurt schools group experiment now this is a naughty quote uh but the point is that there is truth and untruth this is not a kind of relativistic or kind of post structuralist argument about truth uh there is truth and untruth but truth is mobilised in the context and it may be mobilised um as a form of ideology themes that in themselves are justified appear in context in which their truth content functions solely to distract from the offence committed um so arguably you know this reference to truth uh the truth of that original drawing sort of offsets or or or works alongside well i can't give you a reference you know because opi's comments suggest that he viewed lo shack as unable to grasp truth as damaged perverted and in terms that was some fault of his national character he hoped and this is a kind of very odd sentence he hoped tom girdin's english common sense would benefit the younger scholar a comment which um contradicts his own claim that girdin was misguided and phantasmic because of his relationship with the artist lo shack was american but by adoption and only rather recently he was born in 1919 and pinna his parents both russian jews his father a fur merchant who had escaped political persecution and this is a little family reminiscence which i i think is kind of extraordinary in suggesting the kind of intellectual heritage which is uh bookish uh critical um and uh and uh yeah kind of knowingly intellectual and kind of multilingualistic and uh and yeah and sort of politically purposeful um the family uh or uh his father mayor lo shack um together the family had naturalized in 1911 and indeed had made a great success um there's the parents fanny and mayor who'd married in white chapel in 1907 um there's the uh certificate of naturalization giving his uh uh mayor lo shack's origins in gritsef in ukraine um and the barest statement of the family's movement from gritsef to white chapel to stoke newington to pinna sort of tracks an immigrant success story of the early 20th century and actually the success goes um some way beyond that in 1937 mayor lo shack's firm which was transatlantic had an office in new yw York as well supplied the ermins for the coronation and mayor lo shack was able to amass significant substantial wealth enough to fund an academic prize at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the prize itself is sort of suggest scientist sympathies at that point the family business had a new yw York as well as a london base and david lo shack went out with his uncle apparently on business in 1938 in the years that followed published a mark criticism worked as the secretary of the clay club a kind of artist led to space served in the u.s. army um and as he noted by virtue of his gi bill got an ma and started working on what's within the family and i've had the pleasure of being able to talk with lo shack's daughter who may actually be online i hope that she is the story was that his highest ambition as an arts historian was thwarted by the falling out with a mentor which meant that you could never complete his phd and become established um which must be this falling out with op a there was to be no guggenheim fellowship nor much further work on what's lo shack took up teaching posts a range of us universities and in sweden and in later life moved to denmark there he wrote on wunk and what's and contributed to the turner show the statins museum in 1976 his last most obviously political work um a pamphlet on art in the age of manipulation sets out to expose the rise of post war abstraction as a symptom a museum since reminitalisation by wealthy capitalists that was self published in 1982 but he was never a major player in the world of British art he died in 1996 lo shack's nephew and namesake david lo shack later a distinguished journalist and writer also went to america in his youth sent thereby his parents as during the during the war his daughter recorded a memoir published in his college magazine after his death in 2021 that on returning he found it hard to integrate with the boys at his grammar school not just for his strange last name long trousers ballroom dancing and access to a car but as the son of a jewish communist vegetarian the older david lo shack certainly has the funny name we do not need to be euphemistic it's a kind of name that signifies a foreign jewish identity and that surely has a role to play here as well i mean i don't know what his trousers were like in 1955 and apparently had a red moped rather than a car but there's a kind of there's an analogy to be drawn given the repeated insistent anti-semitic comments that appear in opi's private notebooks and indeed in the correspondence with murphy we have to acknowledge the the potential of an element of prejudice being aired here that opi had a a jewish heritage is material too here he's being naturalized which is part of the family at the age of seven but the oppenheimers who were his ancestors had become opays with a frenchifying accent in the 19th century and that jewish heritage is generally ignored in modern biographical accounts it's not in the Oxford dictionary of national biography for instance although opi does appear in reference works on jewish biography and the centre is set this out quite carefully more pointedly when in his obituary noticed Kenneth Clair Lord Clarke noted that noted opi's stooped appearance and his supposed resonance to disraeli he was not once suspects randomly choosing a historical figure still however there is a contrast here between Loschak whose father was russian and was who and who was um i got that slide and i haven't and who was personally identified as Hebrew when he when he applied for US citizenship in 1939 his family business was the fur trade and the cosmopolitan opays and jaffes with their french accident names the lives in germany in france island in england there is even an almost excessive semiotic eloquence in the contrast between the french presenting silk merchants and the eastern even orientalized fur merchants west versus east europe versus the orient silk versus fur opi versus loschak there is arguably a kind of ethnic styling of english art history in that a loschak opi exchanged a nativist elitist norming of the white upper middle class male and in this a kind of boundary work as hands describes it although i'd be more about the social and embodied nature of this boundary this is really what nirmal poo has identified as the imposition of a consecrated somatic norm within the field of british art history a subtle means of inclusion exclusion of racialized and gendered bodies not occupational spaces um hands in this article quotes this uh uh uh rather wonderful um comment from the lake david mannings um in his review of um paying for money in which he identifies the perception of the british world of british art history being the prerogative of gentlemen public school and oxbridge educated uh patricians moving easily in nature within the worlds of the mobility in landed gentry now hands um i don't think hands is quoting this necessarily approvingly but it's you know it doesn't make enough to test it out so i thought well somebody oughty shouldn't they so um i'm going to wind up by uh testing that perception out in relation both to the art history establishment and the civil service that opi was part of and which hands mobilizes metaphorically so um by the way there's okay so there this is uh uh the uh savage article that i mentioned and opi appearing as a member of the civil service um and uh with a typical um educational background in that context um and then as i kind of pose the question public school educated oxbridge educated at ease with the gentry i can't explain the methodology fully so this is the council the warple society in 1955 blue means yes orange means no grains me gray means not known so okay public school educated oxbridge educated yeah probably probably ease with the gentry um there's a board of education uh which you can see in terms of oxbridge educated about the same um it's possibly slightly more ease with the gentry uh though yeah maybe maybe there was more risk of meeting people who'd not been to public school when you're when you're at work you know so um so uh and there is the eden ministry which is the sort of until recent years the high point of aristocratic privilege in the context of the political elite um and you can see you know even even the warple society and the board of education are not quite as elite as uh the eden ministry but they're not so far off and then because the berlington magazine uh consultive committee the berlington magazine the orange who are not public school educated is generally because they're the foreign chaps and they've been educated somewhere else so i don't kind of compare it but you know heavily oxbridge educated you know similarly to the warple society at ease with the gentry and then we move into a different field historical journal um where there is more oxbridge educated less public school educated much less at ease with the gentry past and present and this was hans's suggestion so i did the work hans um where they're all oxbridge but less public school and they're just this is not at ease with the gentry you know and what you can sort of map here is a sort of shift in the balance between educational capital and social capital in these different um contexts now um so yeah so so english art history is being shaped at its establishment um kind of in you might say in in in unusually exclusive terms even compared to straight art history even compared between the berlington magazine the field of british art perhaps the opi lo shack exchange points to a compounding of anti semitism and anti election intellectualism which is surely a recurring feature of cultural life in england although at once so obscurely and so deeply that even to point this out is to expose oneself to accusations of mere tendentiousness we could point to hl mencans observation in his book on american english that for the for many british commentators americans are not in any cultural sense anglo saxons most discussions of american isms include the objection that yielding to them means yielding to a miscellaneous rabble of inferior tribes some of them by english standards almost savage named by menkin as patrick kraus rastus o brian oley ginsberg or some of the such fantastic compound of races i jewish irish it may be a point made best and briefly by pointing to the work of another product of the gi bill in the 1950s arby kitai who shared a similar heritage of russian jewish which becomes which is referenced in this well-known work from 1960 or they started when he was a student in the late 50s and the reception of the 1994 the notorious reception of the 1994 tateshow which kitai himself claimed represented a kind of deep-seated anti-semitism within english cultural and critical life that's been well documented and it summarized in a contemporary comment in the new york times as a kind of clash of worldviews between the reserve self-deprecatory english and the open jewish american sensibility lo shack was arguably like kitai in his self-description an american bystander and foreign jew who outstayed his welcome we could project a speculative history where lo shack did join the artistry establishment enough to do a girtian show at the tate in the 1980s of the 1990s perhaps and wonder what the reception of his even modestly marxist marxist interpretation would have been although in some ways we really need to speculate because there was david solkins richard wilson show at the tate in 1982 i'm not though going to end with a suggestion that oppaise view was necessarily wrong or distorted because of his privilege nor that lo shack's view was necessarily superior because he was an outsider and we'd need anyway to qualify to the extent of which he was an outsider in the matter of bridge north lo shack was wrong the current authority greg smith's online catalogue is yn edrych yn gyda ni'r cyfnod rhaglen. So yw'r rhaglen wedi'i fyddwyr i'r lawshac o'r adrefnod am wideraidd, ac oedd mae'r ysgrif iawn sy'n dweud hwn yn lwyddu hi ddweud ac o ddau peirio'r siwg ar y llwyaf o obi, o ddifenu'r ddechrau, o'r dweud i edrychwch ar y ddweud, ac o ddweud chi'n ddweud o'r grwpio'r ddweud arfer o gael eu sefydliad mewn gweld o'r ddweud. Felly o Lodzac a Lodzac dweud i ddweud, mewn gweld yn dod visu dyna yn 1954-55 ac nid yn ddweud. gyda'n meddwl yn gweithio. Onohon, mae'r cyfnod i'r cwysig, mae'n gweithio sydd wedi y gall Llociac sgwrdd yn nyfodol ar gweithio'r gweithiau, yn dynnal, a'r gweithio'r gweithio ar gweithio ymlaen, mae'r gweithio'r gweithio yn gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio. Yn oedd ymgyrch. Mae'r gweithio'r gweithio ar gyfer oedd y Cymru, yn gweithio'r gweithio, neu i fi'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio, ond iawn, yn y g credits yr eifrif yn unig fwyntiau yw'r rechydau edrych o ffyrdd gwag. Llywodraeth iddyn nhw'n dod yr ysgolol yn ychytrach sydd edrych yn gweithio i ni'r ymdarlunio cyhoedd a'i codes yn dod o'n gwirionedd sy'n gweithio yw'r eifrif ac yn cael eu ddweud yn ei dweud yn ngwygon. Mae y medwy ffost amdol gwirionedd yma hefyd yn y gwaith yw dylau ddweud ar yr E STOP, yw'r wrthym ni wedi'w gofyn yn ydych chi'n gwneud yn gweithio'r argynno'r bwysig, a'r gwrth ddau'r bwysig ar gyfer yna'r gweithio'r bwysig yn gyrddrach a'r gweithio'r chyfnoddau, y mynd i'r bwysig ar gyfer y cyfnoddau a'r gweithio'r gweithio'r ddau yn eu lle rydych chi'n gwneud yn y bwysig, dyna'r gweithio'r ffaith. Ddweud digwydd. Mae'r llwydoedd iawn hwnnw, maen nhw'n ddweud. Abertaeth, oedd ydych chi'n rhaid yn werth cyfaint ac rwy'n ddweud y llwyr o'r cwps yw'r llwyr arnyn so dyna gwybod yw eich golffant o'r ddiwrnod archwilol yn cael ei ddiogelu ond llwytaeth, hi'n sgwrdd yn rhaid yn ffaswnio a sut roedd ydw i'n peippers. A'i altru. Ydw i'n ardal, fe, dnw'n ddweud. Mae'r hollach o'r peippers. Rydyn wedi ddweud i'r wahanol o ychydig o gweinig sydd wedi cael tych yn lle fwyafio'r adnoddau. Mae'r cyfrifodau rydych chi'n bwysig ar bobl roedd bod nid obfarae gennym gwaith dylai nifer o oedd y cyfrifodau o rhaid iddo.  Mae'r llyfr yn gweithio'r llyfr yn gweithio'r llyfr yn y gydag ystod yn yr argyffredigol, ac mae'r llyfr yn cyhoedd yn ffordd lleolau'r llyfr yn y bach yn cynnwys arry o ffwrdd yr argyffredig. Mae'r llyfr yn y gweithio'r llyfr yn oed yn eu cyd-fyrddol i'r llyfr, ...how such two very different approaches to art exist next to one another, and listening to both of your papers always gave me the sense... ...that there is a certain dimension of social role play included in that, depending on whom you're speaking to... ...when you amongst your peers who travelled the world... ...you're also operating on a different register, writing about these artworks on... yng Nghymo'r Gerddifydd, ysteadysydd. Felly ydych chi'n thysg o ddemarcadu iawn rhai cyfwban o'r nadaeth. Rydych chi heb anghyddau, rydych chi'n barnd, rydyn ni'n ardal i'r gyffredigwyr, i'r rhai cyfrŵyr hwnnw chi'n byw rydych chi'n gwybod i gael ffinsig, ac mae'r ffinsig i wych criticism gyda chi, mae'n holl yn ei goblau chi'n ffordd i ddechrau ddau. I'n fath o'u meddwl am y dyfodol yng nghymru yng Nghymru, ond byddai'r hyd yn cydwybod i'r awr iawn, ond ei wneud yialog ar y cyflwph gael y social realm syniad yn gallu ei gweld ein lle metres dywedi'r clywedau, a oedd ymlaen ni'n arysolio'r crat o fe yw hyfodd â'i'r wychau clywedau yn gynhyrch ac yn ein lluniad. Mae oedd yr aelodau i'r hyfer ymateb gyda'r leoliadau ar gyfer bobachol. Maybe the Rafale book and how that was kind of pitched to a doors audience. Sort of reminder of you can change of the course of a 30, 40, 50 year career, can you? A somebody who's kind of trying to find an audience in writing a particular way and somebody who's in 1955 is kind of sitting on his pedestal. They're different people and in between and what I talked about when we did a workshop here those couple of years ago is this extraordinary essay from 1934 on early Victorian art I mean he's a kind of socialist story of art without realising it and how he addresses the context of art production in the early 19th century in a way which was way ahead of his time. So clearly yes you're right in different contexts we are manifold up. In different contexts at different times there's going to be different positions held. I mean I was something I would echo that in terms of the timing of it as well because Roeddwn i'r pwylltathau o'r 20 ac 30 oedd ydym yn ymweld rwyf yn cyfnod o'r ddefnydd yng nghymru, ac mae'r ddechrau o'r ddiwrnod Gwyllgor Cymru yn y fwyllt o'r rhaid i'r mynd i'r byw yn yr arddangos i'r dgeidwyd, ac mae'n ardal i'r dweud o'r ddechrau o'r ddefnyddio, ac mae'n meddwl o'r 50- wrth gwrs o'r rhaid i'r ddefnyddio, mae yna gweithio yn y dweud o'r wahanol. Rydyn ni'n rhai yn gwneud â'r fforddau sydd yma o wahanol, bydd ymddiwydau, ydych chi'n gweld hynny, maen nhw'n ymddiwydau gwylliant i gyd-dwylliant ar gyfer y cyd-dwylliant, ac mae'n dweud o'r dweud o ymddiwydau sydd o'r dwylliant. Mae'r cyd-dwylliant yw ymddiwydau, ar gyfer y gwaith o'r 30s a 30s, yn ymddiwydau i welfa yma i gael gyda'r difrwysgau. Mae'r ffordd o'r cyd-ffordd hwn i'ch ddwylliant mewn hynny, mae'r ffordd o'r cyd-ffordd maeth nesaf i'ch ddweithio yma. Mae'n gynhyrchu yn 1955, yn edryd bod ydych yn fwy ffrif, yn ymweld, mae'r ddigwydd i'r ddiwedd, ond mae'r ddwylliant yn ei ddweithio, ond mae'r ddwylliant yn y tu, ond mae'r bwrdd diwrnod yn ei ddweithio, a phôl o'r ddwylliant yn ei ddweithio, a'r ddweithio'r ddwylliant. It's interesting that you put on that particular period, because 55 to 57 was a period of engrained dispute between Herbert Read and American art writing about what should constitute art writing, a model based on Herbert Read, Reader had gone to America, I think, in 54 to give the Melon lectures, which were then published as The Art of Sculpture. ac Greenberg posted it as repost in early 57 saying, here we have an old world approach to a modern contemporary kind of topic of sculpture being a kind of practice that's rooted in the new world, not the old world. I think maybe, obviously you're dealing with it in different terms and different parameters, but at that moment the question of who writes, not the history, but the art writing of the moment, cos both were journalistic in many respects rather than art historical, but it becomes a key thing between who has the authority to write in an English-speaking context. Meanwhile, Wyndam Lewis had lambasted the progress in the arts and made rubbish of Herbert Reed anyway, so. This is just a small point, an observation, but going back to the Lausier-Copay-Rau, you said, Martin, they first met Opé, first met Lausier, a much younger man in 48, so by the time the book appeared, I wonder if there was a kind of deep sense of guilt on Opé's part for having recommended somebody who then turned out to be quite the opposite of what he might have hoped. Yes. I think it's the short... But it might help explain the overreaction.  I think when he almost apologised, he's saying it's disappointment rather than rank it. Yes, so not really a mischod, we're just disappointed. He let it down. So I just wanted to ask if there is anything in the Gertin archive at the BM that's further to this, what Gertin's reaction was to... Whether there's any indication that he was slowly starting to agree with Opé that he didn't like his approach, or whether he was still fine with what Lausier-Copay-Rau was producing. Yes, there is some... There are some Tom Gertin notes and comments which I actually put in support of Lausier-Copay-Rau and says he was a dream to work with and could see that there were some things wrong. I mean, quite what went on being sent the proofs and then not sharing that with Lausier-Copay-Rau or sending that on, which I think Opé sort of assumed would happen that he didn't do it himself. The other thing I wanted to ask was that throughout your paper I kept thinking of that review of David Salkins' Wilson exhibition. You referred to it, but you didn't sort of spell it out. And I don't know if all of the audience knows that at the time David was... Basically, there were vertuparative comments. This is in 82, I think, yeah. Saying what does someone from the backwoods of Canada know about British art history and should he be writing about it? He shouldn't be writing about it at all. Yeah, no. Absolutely parallel to that. But this is in 82. I wasn't going to spell it out, but you know, there's this... I don't know why I'm not a comedian, I should. Sarah? I'm still processing both papers, so it's not a fully-formed question, but I was just thinking about the work of the archive in doing the work that you both presented and sort of filling in the gaps. But you know, when you have published work and again in thinking about historiography as well, there's a certain kind of work we do with published art history of a formal kind and exhibition histories as well that are institutional. And then I was thinking how, Martin, as well, your paper is enabled by an archive and an exchange, largely through letters at this point, but also you're getting the texture of those disappointment, you know, emotion, a feeling as well, and how we account for that in art history is what we... And you know, or how one positions oneself in relationship to another culture and foreignness is something that both your papers made me think about. Sorry, not in a very formed way, but just again in the context of where we're speaking and the kinds of work we're doing and these larger questions of historiography and its products. I would agree with that, Sarah, and I think just picking up on your point, I thought it was fascinating having worked on the archives that Martin, your paper came out of about basically four letters, which I think shows how much you can get and the letters are incredibly rich. And yours, Helen, came from... I thought there were just a few scraps of information about Chinese art, but that was fascinating how you pulled all of that together. I have one quick question for you, Martin, because I read those letters a few times and then before the conference again. And the thing that fascinates me is that Opey refers to himself repeatedly in that correspondence as Old-Fashioned. I know I'm Old-Fashioned. He keeps saying it. And so I was wondering what you felt he thought he meant by that at the time he was writing, whether he understands some of the backdrop that you're talking about, or whether he's just referring to his age, or whether he's just excusing his bad manners, I don't know. No, I haven't got a good answer to that, other than good question. And I think kind of filling out the picture of what did Opey know of the state of art history in 1955 and what was he reading or aware of? But it's clear that there is...  Because this young guy, he's got an MA. I mean, had he met people with an MA without history before from America? I mean, it was a kind of... It was a new world that he was being presented with then. And familiar with. And not the people that he mixed with at the Burlington nor the Whalpole, or indeed in the office. So, yeah, no, it's a good question. I wonder... Oh, one more question, and then we'll break for tea, I think. Yeah, just a follow-up on this as well. Like the richness of archives, especially correspondence and diaries, just restitutes that personal atmosphere to what we are looking at. Because we just tend to say, okay, we're doing art historiography, we're working with people working in institutions, but there are still people, so they have also sympathies and so on. So I just think about, for instance, Kenneth Clark, refusing to write what to support Vinn's application for becoming professor. I think it was in America. And I mean, he had helped him in so many ways. But still, probably, he just thought that, you know, he had a sort of antibody, hidden one that came through for the papers. But then, on these, I just wanted to ask, out of curiosity to Helen, did Opea have any relationship with Chester Beattie as a person being interested in, also Oriental and Chinese stage art? I don't know the answer to that question. He's not mentioned in the archive here, but he could have been in those circles. But I think he's more connected to London. You know, every... People who are mentioned are very London-based, London-centered. And you've got certainly very well-connected at all the museums, all the collecting societies, Chester Beattie. I mean, there is a possibility there, but it's not mentioned in the archive, so I'd have to look into it further. I think this is a quick footnote to your... because you talked about Dennis Mann, to remind people that Pefsner encouraged Dennis Mann in the first place to appreciate baroque art, I think a mannerism, yeah. OK, that's great. I think we should break for tea now. I think... Is tea next door, Rella? It's downstairs where you were first thing this morning. So, and I think we've got... How long? Yes, so it's five to four now. So if we can all be back up here by about quarter past four, we're ready for the final session. Thank you.