BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//Talks.cam//talks.cam.ac.uk// X-WR-CALNAME:Talks.cam BEGIN:VEVENT SUMMARY:Worlds Turned Upside Down: Quiet Revolutions in Art - Professor Fr ances Spalding DTSTART:20240223T173000Z DTEND:20240223T183000Z UID:TALK205840@talks.cam.ac.uk CONTACT:Janet Gibson DESCRIPTION:The argument of my lecture is that a series of revolutions\, m ostly in opposition to the dominance of the Western European tradition\, h ave marked modern and contemporary art\, as experienced here in Britain\, but taking into account the wider European context. However\, what is bein g turned upside down is not on the scale implied by this phrase when it wa s first used of the English Revolution in the seventeenth century. Instead this scatter or vein of revolutions has challenged the parameters associa ted with the older tradition in large and small ways. An instance of this is the revolutionary impact made in 1919 by African Carvings at the Chelse a Book Club in London (and echoed in 1923 by another exhibition of the sam e subject in the Brooklyn Museum\, New York). At this time\, you could fin d African carvings in the British Museum\, in an enfilade of rooms called the Ethnographic Galleries. Here even Benin Bronzes were packed into overc rowded cases\, jumbled with objects from Asia\, Africa\, America\, and Oce ania. But at the Chelsea Book Club exhibition the critic Roger Fry saw cle arly the African grasp of ‘complete plastic freedom’ in the handling o f three dimensions. Earlier\, in 1910 and 1912\, Fry had mounted two exhi bitions of French Post-Impressionist paintings which revolutionised moder n art in Britain. In 1919 in the Chelsea Book Club exhibition he discerned what seemed to him things greater than any other sculpture produced in th is country since the Middle Ages. Written for the Athenaeum\, his review w as afterwards rushed into the proofs of his best-selling book of essays\, Vision and Design (1920). It is possible that Fry’s essay may have influ enced the exhibition of African art shown at Brooklyn in 1923\, as it repl aced the more usual ethnographic presentation with a layout that focused a ttention on art not anthropology.\n\nThis revolutionary way of looking at African art proved difficult for some\, but not for Henry Moore. He found a copy of Vision and Design in Leeds Art Reference Library\, as an art st udent\, and went on to read other of Fry’s wide-ranging essays in this s ame book. The year before\, Moore had himself started writing\, for his ow n benefit\, ‘A World History of Sculpture’. Nevertheless\, as he later admitted: ‘Once you’d read Roger Fry the whole thing was there.’ S oon after entering the Royal College of Art in the autumn of 1921\, he emb arked on an intensive study of world sculpture\, often spending more time each week in the British Museum than in the College.\n\nThis lecture asks why the Western European tradition occupies such a hallowed role in world culture. E.H. Gombrich provides one answer to this question in his The St ory of Art (1950)\, with reference to the restlessness within Western cult ure in comparison with some Eastern cultures that have lasted almost uncha nged for a thousand years. His own book has done much to promote the West ern view of art\, having now reached its 16th edition\, been translated in to 30 languages\, and sold 8 million copies. When Gombrich tried in the tw elfth edition to take the story of art up to the present day\, he admitted some discomfort. Art veined with the revolutionary spirit had aligned its elf more easily with progressive developments\, with ‘primitivism’\, m odernism and modernity. Admittedly\, modernism\, modernity and even postco lonialism\, with its reaction against Western Cultures\, although moving t owards globalisation\, remain inextricably tied to the West\, even during recent years when its socio-economic power has been challenged by global f inancial crises and troubled by the phenomenon of runaway global warming. Yet when a leading institute for the teaching of art history in this count ry admits that in the 2023-24 academic year two-thirds of its classes are consigned to American and European art\, more revolution is needed. More c ross-cultural exchange\, of the kind demonstrated by the British Library e xhibition\, Chinese and British\; more interventions like Chila Burman’s transformation of classical imperial public buildings into palaces of Hin du delight\; more things that surprise and can turn a world upside down. \ n\nFrances Spalding is an art historian\, critic and biographer. She read art history at the University of Nottingham and began writing pieces for t he TLS\, The Burlington Magazine and art journals while still a post-gradu ate. She has a specialist interest in twentieth-century British art and fi rst established her reputation with Roger Fry: Art and Life. She went on t o write lives of the artists Vanessa Bell\, John Minton\, Duncan Grant\, G wen Raverat and John and Myfanwy Piper\, as well as a biography of the poe t Stevie Smith. Her survey history\, British Art since 1900\, in the Thame s & Hudson World of Art series\, has been widely used in schools\, college s and universities\, and in the mid-1990s she was commissioned by the Tate to write a centenary history of this national institution. Between 2000 a nd 2015\, she taught at Newcastle University\, becoming Professor of Art H istory. She acted as Editor of The Burlington Magazine\, 2015-16\, and is now Emeritus Fellow of Clare Hall\, Cambridge. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature\, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Art and in 2005 was made a CBE for Services to Literature. \n \n LOCATION:Lady Mitchell Hall\, Sidgwick Avenue END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR