Art

Home Subjects is a research working group focused on the display of art in the private sphere. British houses and interiors have become the focus of tremendous academic energy during the past five years. The prevailing art-historical narrative, that British art developed primarily in relationship to a growing number of public institutions and exhibitions that captured viewers’ imaginations, is compelling but has overlooked the persistence of a cultural ideal premised on the significance of private and domestic interiors as essential spaces for exhibiting and experiencing art. This working group explores an alternative narrative of the development of British art by reconsidering the relationships between domesticity, display, and modernity in the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries. Especially relevant during this period is a capacious understanding of notions of “home,” as ideas about domesticity circulated within the United Kingdom and British Empire through decorative strategies adopted from or adapted to different colonial contexts.  We maintain a blog featuring posts on current research, exhibitions and resources that may be of interest to scholars working in this field.

We intend to explore the complicated set of expectations governing the production, acquisition, and/or commissioning of artworks intended for private display as well as their installation in private spaces, including:
--easel painting and its relationship to the domestic interior
--decorative arts, their status as works of art and relationship to interior decoration
--collecting, taste, and the uses and reception of rooms and interiors
--the relationship between private and public modes of display and decoration
For more information please visit homesubjects.blogspot.com.

Speakers:

Nicholas Tromans
Emilie Oléron Evans
Stephen Caffey

Call for Papers:

Recent scholarship has emphasized the importance of the house itself and notions of “domesticity” as important touchstones in British culture. At the same time, art historians have tended to focus on a history of British art premised on the display of art in public; according to this important narrative, British art developed in relationship to the public sphere in the 18th century. Art institutions and exhibitions asserted the importance of the display of art in forming audiences into publics in cultural and political terms. Such efforts continued in the “exhibition age” of the 19th century, when display of artwork in museums, galleries, and special exhibitions solidified the important role given to art in articulating a public sphere. This narrative overlooks the continuation of older paradigms of display, especially those premised on the private and domestic audience for works of art. We aim to explore this “counter-narrative” of the home as the ideal place to view works of art, a view which permeated all areas of art and design and which persisted throughout the nineteenth century, despite the prevailing narrative of the development of public museums. Also at stake in this project is a reconsideration of domesticity and its relationship to modernity. Important recent scholarship has illuminated some of the ways in which entrenched narratives of modernity and artistic modernism were defined in opposition to the domestic sphere. In a typical avant-garde gambit, artists distinguished works of art from objects of interior decoration by rejecting the private and the domestic. This session aims to bring together scholars whose work addresses this topic in order to posit a new trajectory for modernity, one that can be traced through the private, domestic sphere.

Although numerous studies have explored the Edwardian period (1901–1910) as one of political and social change, this innovative book is the first to explore how art, design, and performance not only registered those changes but helped to precipitate them. While acknowledging familiar divisions between the highbrow world of aesthetic theory and the popular delights of the music hall, or between the neo-Baroque magnificence of central London and the slums of the East End, The Edwardian Sense also discusses the middlebrow culture that characterizes the anonymous edge of the city. Essays are divided into three sections under the broad headings of spectacle, setting, and place, which reflect the book’s focus on the visual, spatial, and geographic perspectives of the Edwardians themselves.