UCL Museums & Collections Blog

guest blog by Gemma Romain

Seated Male Figure by Ann M. Tooth, UCL Art Museum

Drawing over the Colour Line is a new project which started in January 2012 and is run by The Equiano Centre in UCL’s Department of Geography. We have been funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) to carry out a project over the next two years looking at the experiences and identities of Black people in London during the inter-war period by exploring their relationship with the art world. We are specifically focusing on the histories of people of African and Asian heritage who worked as artists and as artists’ models, and contextualising these histories within an examination of interwar political and social movements including pan-Africanism and anti-colonial activism and also histories of empire, migration, and diaspora. The end result of the project will be a public database documenting artworks in various locations, including public and private collections, which relate to Black artists and artists’ models.

We are working with UCL Art Museum throughout the project, researching the collections and carrying out various or co-hosting public events. The project explores some of the artwork created by students based at the Slade School of Fine Art during the 1920s and 1930s, many of which are now located at UCL Art Museum. For example, we are researching the drawings of models of African heritage which won Slade student prizes. Additionally, we will be working with the museum to explore these collections in greater depth by running a summer school for young people, a pop-up exhibition and contributing towards a research guide on Black history and the collections of UCL Art Museum.

Visit our blog and twitter for more details:  http://drawingoverthecolourline.wordpress.com/ and http://twitter.com/DColourLine .

For more information on The Equiano Centre visit our website http://www.ucl.ac.uk/equianocentre/

Seeing is believing, right? I’ve often looked at historic animal paintings and wondered “how come artists back in the day couldn’t draw animals?”. We’ve all seen images of animals that are extremely inaccurate, and our recent “Strange Creatures” event had works from UCL Art Museum pop-up in the Grant which included a poorly represented lion, simply because the artist had never seen one. This lack of first-hand inspiration is one reason that the paintings are unrealistic; artists were relying on written accounts by those who had seen the critters.

A late 17th Century Dutch representation of a lion from UCL Art Museum. The opportunity to study lions from life in 17th-century Northern Europe was rare. Lions were kept at the Doge’s Palace in Venice and appear in Jacopo Bellini’s (1400–70/1) sketchbooks, but most Northern artists had to depend upon the accounts of other eye-witnesses.

But reading these descriptions, another massive source of error is that those eye-witnesses are slaves to prior knowledge. When coming across new forms, unlike anything they’d seen before, many attempted to fit models of animals they already knew on top of what they saw. This is perfectly understandable, but in the end often unhelpful. It’s an interesting example of the brain over-riding the visual system and seeing what it thinks it should see.

I’m reading Captain Cook’s account of his first voyage to the South Seas, on the Endeavour, which includes the first descriptions of kangaroos that he came across when he landed on the east coast of Australia, and he was particularly guilty of this: (more…)

Storage cupboard with solender boxes that house mounted prints and drawings

Written by Sandra DiRosa

Today marks my fifth day as an intern for UCL Art Museum and although it sounds a little farfetched, I have almost learned far more interesting things in four days than I have learned in three years of university schooling. Instead of learning about art, I am experiencing it up close…something most art history majors dream about! Growing up in New York, the center of the art world, museums were my favorite place to go and interested me far more than any movie, television show or book did. Although I just started working at UCL Art Museum, I have been in London since mid-January and in the time between then and about a week ago my time was occupied by classes. My “Contemporary British Art and Design” class that is offered through my program brought me to numerous museums and galleries around London. I have become fascinated by the curatorial aspect of art and have seen a wide array of styles and set ups: from the British Museum to the White Cube to the London Transport Museum. My interest in museum work has only become greater and now, I am getting a behind the scenes look into a fascinating museum: something I’ve dreamt about my entire life. Welcome to my experience here at UCL! (more…)

“The First Kiss of Love” from La Nouvelle Héloïse

By Cathrine Alice Liberg

Discover the sentimental side of Rousseau (and yourself!) at UCL Art Museum.

Come Valentine’s Day, we wish to highlight Rousseau’s epistolary novels, most notably his sentimental work La Nouvelle Héloïse which became a predecessor to modern Romantic novels, and was a bestseller back in its days. As for Rousseau himself, he never married, but did manage to father a significant number of children. His writings however, have been interpreted even in the realm of love as a guide to finding happiness. The long running dating show for farmers, “Boer zoekt vrouw”, is based on Rousseau’s philosophies on “the natural state” in which he praises the simple life as the source of joy and satisfaction. In this Dutch television programme, the love-hungry farmers all work side by side in nature, away from the morally corrupt city of selfishness and greed while trying to win each other’s hearts. Can this be the key to eternal bliss? (more…)

Over the past two weeks we’ve been helping a group of UCL Museum Studies students who are currently working on a research project as part of their Collections Curatorship module looking into early computer art at the Slade School of Fine Art in the 1970s, and in particular the work of Chris Crabtree. Very little is known by UCL Art Museum about this period in the Slade’s history, although the 1970s seem to have been something of a golden age for the Slade, with lots of pioneering work in what we would today call new media. Even less is known about Chris Crabtree, who started out at the Slade as a student in the Etching Department in 1972 and then went on to become first a technician and then a research assistant in printmaking.

What makes Chris Crabtree so fascinating (for me anyway) is that he combined a traditional training in printmaking techniques with an interest in computer programming at a time when computers were still massively clunky machines and difficult to access (mostly to be found in university scientific research labs). I like to speculate that Chris Crabtree may have been inspired by the highly influential exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity at the ICA in 1968 – this was one of the first exhibitions showcasing the work of digital artists such as Nam June Paik, Leslie Mezei, Georg Nees, A. Michael Noll, John Whitney and Charles Csuri. (more…)

Tessa Power, Channel (2010)

By Cathrine Alice Liberg

Every year UCL Art Museum acquires student works from the Slade School of Fine Art through the William Coldstream Memorial Prize, an annual purchase prize which recognizes a student’s particular excellence in any medium. In 2010, the prize was awarded to Tessa Power for her video installation Channel, and as a museum intern, completing a History of Art Material Studies (HAMS) placement, I have had the pleasure of setting up her work as one of the first digital art objects to be showcased at UCL Art Museum. It will feature as part of our current exhibition Word & Image, which is on display throughout the autumn term. (more…)

Our regular readers will by now be familiar with the delight we take in talking about our Pop-Up Exhibitions. The reason we like talking about them is because this simple low tech platform offers huge possibility for new ideas to emerge. Research is a strange beast. It’s origins never singular. An argument can develop out of a hunch or a passion and upon occasion even an obsession. Mix in a welcome happenstance or two, and you are on your way to a great idea! The colour mauve wasn’t discovered by someone who was looking for a colour, and photosynthesis was discovered by someone who was not a botanist at the time – he simply went on holiday to a country house to escape the grind of his day job (which if my memory serves me correctly had something to do with the chicken pox vaccine (?)).

Anyway…. as I ramble on…the bottom line here really is that research doesn’t come from nowhere, and neither do interdisciplinary collaborations, so you really need an environment that is conducive to this type of thinking. The Pop-Up set up offers just that. To our guest curators we say – bring your passion or even your research driven agenda to our rich and vast collections of print and drawings and see what happens!

Our recent Pop-Up exhibition by Professor Helen Hackett was all about cultural promiscuity. Yes, the hybrid, the appropriation of images and ideas in support of often competing ideologies… all this was present hundreds of years ago, way back in the Early Modern Period. We didn’t invent it. Helen’s Pop-Up impressed further  these ideas, starting with the Albrecht Dürer’s Whore of Babylon. It’s relevance to issues confronting contemporary British politics was recently highlighted in this blog by Lara Carim (Editor, UCL News). I hope you enjoy the read.

Alex Sampson’s Pop-Up exhibition is on Tuesday 15th November 1-2pm.

Pop-In for 10min or more!

Any researcher will tell you that for every ‘Eureka!’ moment, there is a seemingly impossible amount of long, hard, tedious and unrewarding slog.

Monkey business. Were these animals drawn from life?

We at UCL Art Museum are no strangers to the joys of the research process, so when Pippa Connolly – a postgraduate student at the Slade School of Fine Art – dropped by the other week on a mission, we were excited, but pragmatic in our approach.

Pippa is researching a particular period in the history of the Slade when, for a select few years between the wars, students were able to observe and draw animals at London Zoo from a viewing studio, specially built for the purpose.
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The UCL Art Museum Argus

Spoiler Alert! This blog entry is about a UCL Museums & Collections cross-collections exhibition currently on display in four wall-mounted cases in the North Cloister of UCL. One of the cases contains a montage of 100 images of eyes from works in the UCL Art Museum, and contains a puzzle for you to solve. If you’re within viewing-distance and would like to play the game, look away now. Or, you can read on to discover more…
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John Flaxman

was known throughout Europe for his innovative drawing style and for his sculptures. His work was copied and appropriated by many of his peers at the time, and influenced numerous artists in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Flaxman’s pursuit of the pure outline was what appealed in particular to the modernist  appetite. And yet…

Although celebrated and much in demand, and – in today’s journalistic speak – a great British export – Flaxman remains largely unknown to many: artists and non-artists alike. Equally unknown is his work as Professor of Sculpture at the Royal Academy, a position he took up 200 years ago. Last year we dedicated an exhibition to Flaxman’s preparatory sketches in which he worked through his ideas for three dimensional sculptures. They reveal his almost obsessive dedication to a the creation of a modern school of sculpture.

Since we hold an unrivalled collection of works by this Neo Classical powerhouse, including his illustrations for Homer’s Iliad, we are always delighted to see others revisit Flaxman .

On Wednesday 25th May, Jan Birksted from the Bartlett School of Architecture will be flagging up the Flaxman-Le Corbusier connection as our guest curator in our new Lunchtime Pop-Up Display series. 

Jan points out that Le Corbusier made his illustrations for the Iliad over Flaxman’s illustrations. And as Jan says ‘In so doing, he established his originality and his modernity by writing the margin – Not a single sign of Life. Homer is assassinated.

Flaxman’s fame is also well established outside UCL.  Earlier this year Flaxman’s innovations in sculpture were featured on prime time television in the BBC’s  compelling documentary ‘Romancing the Stone: The Golden Ages of British Sculpture’. In the second episode, titled Mavericks of Empire, the presenter Alastair Stooke looked at ‘mavericks who bucked the prevailing trends, such as John Flaxman, Francis Chantrey and Alfred Gilbert’. The segment on Flaxman was filmed in our very own Flaxman Gallery!

Another little known fact, that we are always happy to flag up again and again, is that the Flaxman Gallery was featured in Chris Nolan’s award winning film Inception starring Leonardo Di Caprio and Michael Caine! You can read all about this experience on the Film London Website.

We hope to see you on the 25^th May at Jan’s Pop-Up in the Strang Print Room. Please do share your comments with us here. And, if you would like to work with us, come see us, or write to us!