TATE
This paper explores Picasso’s approach to sculptural materials during the Cubist years through a close examination of his 1914 construction Still Life. Made from partly recycled and partly carved wooden elements, the table-top scene reveals the artist’s control of his techniques and materials.
Colombian artist Doris Salcedo (born 1958) addresses the themes of loss and bereavement in her sculpture Unland: audible in the mouth, 1998. Focusing on this work in Tate's collection, the paper looks at the position of witnesses to violent events and how their testimonies are translated by Salcedo into the formal language of sculpture.
Constable (1776-1837) made one of his characteristic 'six footer' oil sketches in preparation for Hadleigh Castle which he exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1829. The sketch has strips of canvas added at left and lower edges, the attribution of which has long been a subject of debate. A fresh technical study re-examines the evidence surrounding these compositional alterations.
This paper discusses the painting of the courtier and writer Sir William Killigrew and the companion portrait of his wife Mary Hill, Lady Killigrew, both painted in 1638, by Sir Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641). The pair were acquired by Tate in 2002 and 2003 from two entirely different sources.
The essay traces military relationships in the work of Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), paying particular attention to his notes of 1912 known as the 'Jura-Paris Road'. These are interpreted as 'military texts' and the author shows how military concerns remained with Duchamp throughout his career, resulting in facetious outcomes that obscured uneasy preoccupations.
Sickert's interest in popular entertainment extended beyond the London music-hall and his 1915 painting Brighton Pierrots depicts a troupe of vaudeville performers on the beach at Brighton. This paper explores the social-historical context of seaside Pierrot groups in England and the related European traditions of the Commedia dell'Arte and French pantomime.
The American artist Joseph Cornell (1903-72) is famous for his allusive box constructions. This paper examines the history of Planet Set, 1950, a work in Tate's collection that has received little critical commentary. In particular, it explores Cornell's fascination with the early nineteenth-century opera singer Giuditta Pasta, and shows how this relates to a number of other themes in his work, including stars, maps and birds.
In the late 1960s, a number of artists who had trained as sculptors, and whose most well known work was sculpture, started working with film (Robert Morris, Richard Serra, Robert Smithson). Around the same time, independent film makers who did not necessarily identify themselves as ‘artists’ began to consider the sculptural dimensions of film – paying attention not just to the images that they presented on the screen...
During the 1990s Michael Landy made four major installations, including Scrapheap Services, 1995. Although motivated by personal concerns, these installations caught the mood of social change, labour market reforms and political ideology at the tail-end of the Thatcher era in Britain. All this had a profound impact on the emerging, metropolitan art scene of the time, soon to be labelled 'young British art'.
This article explores the significance of the theatrical and literary references found in the triptych Past and Present (1858) by the British nineteenth-century painter Augustus Leopold Egg. On the surface the work appears to be a warning against the perils of adultery, but analysis of the three paintings’ theatrical and literary references suggests a possible alternative reading involving a condemnation of loveless marriages.
This paper examines Marcel Duchamp's use of the collotype printing process for publishing the contents of his Green Box and Bo�te-en-valise in the 1930s. It subsequently traces the linguistic and graphic interpretations of this work by the British artist Richard Hamilton in his 1960 The Green Book and in his recent fusion of this work with the 'topography' of the Large Glass in the print Typo/Topography, published in 2003.
This paper concentrates on the making and meaning of Kenneth Armitage Pandarus (version 8) 1963, which was recently presented to Tate in 2003 by the Patrons of British Art. Special attention is given to the humanist content of Armitage’s oeuvre and how this was interpreted by critics in the 1950s and 1960s. Pandarus (version 8) is considered in the context of the cultural and social changes of the early 1960s and the rise of the New Generation sculptors. The central proposition is that despite the critical hostility that this work and others like it met, it is in fact closely attuned to the wider social concerns of the period.
How and why I became a sculptor is not of much interest. No one looking at my work will find me in it. I have nothing to say, I have no story to tell – at least not within the means of sculpture. What happens in the studio is not all that spectacular. You have no choice when it comes to actually making the works. Everything is decided in advance. The only thing you can observe in the studio is the production of the sculpture.
In 1936 the English surrealist Eileen Agar photographed the extraordinary rock formations at Ploumanac'h in Brittany. This paper examines the ambiguous status of the photographs, using research in Tate Archives and at Ploumanac'h itself to provide new insights into Agar's images.