International conference organized by the research group ACE at Rennes 2 University
April 23rd and 24th, 2009
For now more than three centuries, the art and the commercial activities of the British Isles have been more or less harmoniously bound together. Indeed, it was precisely at a time when, just after the Glorious Revolution, a large middle-class audience suddenly became consumers of culture, that an actual vernacular artistic and visual tradition was born in Great Britain. The growing individualization of British art was made possible during the XVIIIth century thanks to a prosperous economy which was largely due to the country’s intense commercial activity, clearly setting the practices of the English and Scottish apart from that of their European counterparts.
The very beginning of the XVIIIth century saw the rise of an organized trading system for British art with the use of go-betweens, or even of merchants, while before that, it had been against the law to import foreign paintings and transactions had been scant, with buyers and artists usually dealing directly together.
The period saw figures like Andrew Hay and Samuel Paris emerge, along with the development of a bidding system and of a network of auction houses. While a royal academy of painting and sculpture was long in the making and only opened in 1768, and in the absence of aristocratic patronage to match that of their French and Italian neighbours, British artists had to deal with a bourgeois clientele whose attitude to money was still fraught with age-old anxieties.
As David Solkin has shown in his book Painting for Money, it is the very nature of this new market which gave rise to new genres, among them Conversation Pieces, ambiguously positioned between genre painting and group portraits. For all the theoretical support of the Academy, history painting carried on being dismissed by buyers thirsty for sensationalist gothic pictures and pre-raphaelite genre scenes.
The new ways in which artworks were commercialised progressively came to have an influence on the way they were produced, reproduction and photoengraving having been developed in order to circulate some of the works and to provide the artists with an income (which in the case of William Hogarth proved to be quite comfortable.) This allowed the artists themselves to join the ranks of the middle-class and to become respected professionals with structured careers. Eventually, the finish and technical niceties of many 18th century paintings were influenced by the anticipation of these modes of dissemination.
Victorian genre painting largely owed its popularity to the tastes and buying power of a new class of avid collectors which came to prominence at the turn of the century. These merchants and entrepreneurs, newly-enriched by the Industrial Revolution, untrained in classical art history and too busy to take the Grand Tour started investing their assets in art collections. While doing so, they shunned old Masters, put off by the risk of gambling their money on one of the many fakes forged at the time, in favour of living artists painting accessible everyday subjects. The tastes of this new moneyed class, anxious for respectability and imbued with family values and a protestant work ethic encouraged story-telling in religious and domestic subjects, attention to detail and the small-scale format of canvases intended to improve the minds of viewers in the comfort of their own homes. The accusation of philistinism levelled by Roger Fry in the early XXth century at a British audience incapable of appreciating French post-impressionism was inherited precisely from the commercial preoccupations of the British art world. This stigma held fast until the end of the XXth century, only to be compounded by a marked condescension for the parochialism of a national art overshadowed by its American counterpart.
Today’s context is one in which the internationalisation of the contemporary art world can be seen as both a by-product of and a mirror held to today’s globalized commodity culture. In 2007, Damien Hirst therefore decided to capitalize on this duality of today’s art, both for himself and for the sake of the British scene. His diamond-encrusted skull, For the Love of God was sold to an investment group for £50 million, thus becoming the most expensive contemporary art work in the world and making British art a force to be reckoned with.
More information is available here.
Program:
Thursday, April 23rd
08h30 Registration
9h00 Opening address by Jean Emile Gombert, Head of Rennes 2 University’s Research Board
Session 1: Selling and Inventing a British School
Chair: Prof. Marie-Madeleine Martinet, Sorbonne
9h30 Dries Lyna, University of Antwerp. In Search of a British Connection. London Art Dealers and the Sellout of Flemish Art in the Eighteenth Century
10h00 Bénédicte Miyamoto-Pavot, Paris 7. “Making Pictures Marketable”: The Georgian Invention of a Modern Art Market
10h30 Dr David Humphrey, Royal College of Art, London. “…as for the Duchess, Well my Dear…”: The Social Role of Goldsmiths’ Shops in Late Georgian London
11h00 Break
11h30 Prof. Xavier Cervantes, Toulouse 2. “Vanquish’d and oppress’d at home by the Invasion of Foreign Luxury”: Italian Opera, the Commercialisation of the Arts and the Luxury Controversy in London during the first half of the XVIIIth century
12h00 Dr Bärbel Küster, University of Stuttgart. Copies on the Market in 18th Century Britain
12h30 Dr Laurent Châtel, Sorbonne. “The Satire of Commerce in William Beckford’s Writings on Art”
13h00 Lunch
Session 2: The Britishness of the British Art Market
Chair: Dr Sophie Mesplède
14h45 Keynote Speaker: Dr Anne Helmreich, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland. Traversing Objects: London and the International Art Market, c.1850-1914.
15h30 Dr Meredith Paige Davis, New Jersey. On Hogarth’s The Battle of the Pictures
16h00 Julia Skelly, Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada. Dual Consumptions: Art and Alcohol in Britain, 1751-1851
16h30 Break
17h00 Guillaume Evrard, University of Edinburgh. “English Pictures are but Little Known and Esteemed Out of England”: The Royal Academy of Arts and British Visual Arts at the 1878 Paris Exposition Universelle
17h30 Dr Cécile Doustaly, Université de Cergy-Pontoise. “What is the use of such rubbish to our manufacturers?” – The State, Art and Commerce in Victorian times
18h00 Dr Isabelle Cases, Université Via Domitia, Perpignan. Art, Commerce, Reconciliation and Renaissance: Manchester as a Case Study
Friday, April 24th
Session 3: Dealers of Modernity
Chair: Prof. Jacques Carré, Sorbonne
9h30 Dr Ignacio Ramos Gay, University of Castilla-La Mancha, Spain. Theatrical adaptations from the French and the low culture paradigm
10h00 Dr Grischka Petri, University of Bonn. Whistler Between the British and French Art Markets
10h30 Dr Patricia de Montfort, University of Glasgow. Exhibitions and the Late 19th c. Art Market: An Analysis of the Fine Art Society, London
11h00 Break
11h30 Dr Anne-Pascale Bruneau-Rumsey, Paris 10. Patronage and the Modernist Avant-Garde: Art, Commerce and Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops
12h00 Dr Andrew Stephenson, University of East London. From Conscription to Depression: The Market for Modern British Art in London c. 1916-1930
12h30 Ulrike Weber, Technical University, Berlin. The Design and Industries Association, D.I.A.: Art and Commerce and the Development of Modernism in Interwar Great Britain
13h00 Lunch
Session 4 : The Economics of Contemporary British Art
Chair: Dr Charlotte Gould
14h45 Keynote Speaker: Dr Julian Stallabrass, Courtauld Institute, London.
The Selling of Internet Art: Vuk Cosic et al
15h30 Dr Chin-Tao Wu, Assistant Research Fellow, Institute of European and American Studies, Academia Sinica. The Collector as Phoenix: Can Charles Saatchi Rise from the Ashes?
16h00 Break
16h30 Uta Protz, EUI Florence. Beautiful Inside my Head Forever: The Realignment of the Artist and the Art Market in Great Britain at the Beginning of the 21st Century
17h00 Gabriel Gee, Paris 10. Art Without Commerce in Northern England 1980-2000
17h30 Davy Babel, Paris 7. Tate Modern – The Museum and the Market