The 108th Annual Conference of the College Art Association will be held in Chicago from February 12–15, 2020. HBA will be represented by an affiliate panel chaired by Dr. Meredith Gamer, our annual business meeting, and an off-site visit to the Newberry Library.
HBA Annual Business Meeting
Date and Time: Thursday, February 13, 2020, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM
Location: Hilton Chicago – 4th Floor – Room 4K
HBA Affiliate Panel:
Past & Present: Britain and the Social History of Art
Chairs: Meredith J. Gamer (Columbia University) and Esther Alice Chadwick (Courtauld Institute of Art)
Date and Time: Thursday, February 13, 2020, 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM
Location: Hilton Chicago – 4th Floor – Room 4K
Panel Abstract:
What’s British about the social history of art? This panel joins ongoing conversations about what the social history of art is and what its stakes might be for us today. Specifically, it takes a “localized” approach to this model of art history as it developed in and out of Britain and its former colonial territories. Whether of an “activist” Marxist or more general “art and society” cast (Clunas 1996), it is striking that key protagonists of the social history of art—from Hauser, Antal, and Klingender to Baxandall, Clark, and Pollock—were born, trained, or based in the UK. At the same time, the social history of art has been a dominant frame adopted by historians of British art itself, beginning with field-defining studies of landscape painting by John Barrell, David Solkin, and Ann Bermingham. How do we account for the strength of this distinctive art historical mode in Britain? Has it received peculiarly “British” inflections? What impact has it had on the study of British art and on the writing of art history more broadly, in Britain and elsewhere? What possibilities has it generated? What others has it foreclosed?
Presenters:
Andrei Pop, Pictures Exchanged For Windows: Ruskin, Dilke, And Social History Of Symbols
Barbara Larson, Gerard Baldwin Brown And The Origins Of The Social History Of Art In Great Britain
Samuel Bibby, “It Was, Like Any Other Period, A Time Of Transition:” 1970s Britain And The “Native Art-Historical Journal”
Douglas Fordham, Islands Of Art History