The Historians of British Art Book Prize Committee is pleased to announce the Book Award winners for publications produced in the 2022 calendar year. The winners were chosen from a nominating list of sixty-seven books from thirty-two different presses. Awards were granted in six categories.
The award for a single-authored book with a subject before 1600 goes to Kate Giles, The Wall Paintings of Pickering Church: Their Discovery, Restoration and Meaning, published by Shaun Tyas.
The award for a single-authored book with a subject between 1600–1800 is awarded to Paris A. Spies-Gans, A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in London and Paris 1760–1830, published by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art / Yale University Press.
The award for a single-authored book with a subject between 1800–1960 is jointly awarded to Mark Crinson, Shock City: Image and Architecture in Industrial Manchester, and Holly Shaffer, Grafted Arts: Art Making and Taking in the Struggle for Western India, 1760–1910, both published by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art / Yale University Press.
The award for a single-authored book with a contemporary subject goes to Gavin Butt, No Machos or Pop Stars: When the Leeds Art Experiment Went Punk, published by Duke University Press.
The multi-authored book prize goes to Gabriel Byng and Helen Lunnon, eds., Medieval art, architecture and archaeology in Cambridge: college, church and city, published by Routledge.
The prize for exhibition catalogue goes to Fay Blanchard and Anthony Spira, eds., Ingrid Pollard: Carbon Slowly Turning, from MK Gallery and Turner Contemporary / Philip Wilson Publishers.
Jay Bernard’s Look Again: Complicity and Johny Pitts’s Look Again: Visibility, published by the Tate, are Highly Commended for accessible art writing.
HBA would like to offer congratulations to the winning authors and the publishing teams at Duke University Press, MK Gallery and Turner Contemporary / Philip Wilson, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art / Yale University Press, Routledge, Shaun Tyas, and the Tate.
This year’s committee of readers consisted of Alison Syme (Chair), Julian Luxford, Temi Odumosu, and Lizzie Robles.
HBA Book Award for Exemplary Scholarship on the Period before 1600
| Kate Giles, The Wall Paintings of Pickering Church: Their Discovery, Restoration and Meaning, Donington: Shaun Tyas, 2022. ISBN: 978-1-9157-7401-9 |
The Wall Paintings of Pickering Church: Their Discovery, Restoration and Meaning offers a fresh, insightful, and meticulously researched account of an important programme of fifteenth-century mural painting. Kate Giles’s approach is novel in its archaeological focus and interest in the longue durée history of her subject. Rather than beginning when the paintings were made, she turns first to their rediscovery in 1852, then deals with their exposure and restoration (1882–91) and conservation in the twentieth century, before addressing their original making and meaning. The reader thus gets a sense of wider debates surrounding the preservation of such work, the heavy-handedness of early restorations, and the local responses to the sudden appearance of medieval art in the midst of a rural community. Giles also offers a new interpretation of these well-known paintings, observing that that the selection and placement of the imagery was influenced by the festal cycles of the liturgical year. Few existing studies of English medieval wall painting rival the importance of this one.
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HBA Book Award for Exemplary Scholarship on the Period between 1600-1800
| Paris A. Spies-Gans, A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in London and Paris 1760–1830, London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art / Yale University Press, 2022. ISBN: 978-1-9131-0729-1 |
The long eighteenth century suffers from many stereotypes about the way people lived and worked. One enduring notion is the idea that women artists were few, and that women’s participation in the arts was primarily as privileged patrons or as a controlled subject in a man’s artistic lexicon. In A Revolution on Canvas, Paris A. Spies-Gans mines archival details and compellingly uses quantitative data to completely rework these perspectives, revealing instead hundreds of women between Britain and France, professionalizing their artistic practices, and being included in exhibitions, academies, and publications like any other jobbing artist. Between the pages of this extensive and elegantly produced volume, we hear about the anxieties surrounding women’s participation in art making but also find out that British women were more likely to train in artistic families than French women who often trained in studios. Interestingly, these familial ties appear to have been supportive and even encouraged profitability. Furthermore, we encounter the savvy thematic choices made by women competing for contemporary relevance, such as Maria Cosway’s decision to represent the Duchess of Devonshire in the guise of Cynthia (see front cover), thereby fusing celebrity, portraiture, and the fashion for referencing English literature. Whilst the presence of black, brown, or poor working-class women involved in artistic labor is liminal in this book, and largely relegated to what appears on the canvas surface, Spies-Gans’s concluding assertion that “there are multiple feminisms” (305) opens the way for further stories to be told from this corpus of information. What this incisive volume shows, as a promise for future art histories, is that it is possible to weave “big data” through narrative and analysis, in ways that challenge and complicate our view of what has come before.
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HBA Book Award for Exemplary Scholarship on the Period between 1800-1960
| Mark Crinson, Shock City: Image and Architecture in Industrial Manchester, London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art / Yale University Press, 2022. ISBN: 978-1-9131-0733-8 |
In Shock City, Mark Crinson argues that Manchester should be seen as a different kind of capital of the nineteenth century—one of industrial capitalist production rather than consumer phantasmagoria—in which the threat modernity posed to the idea of the city and its forms inspired richly strange negotiations and naturalisations in built form and imagery. A chapter on the town hall by Alfred Waterhouse, for instance, compellingly reads the Gothic Revival edifice as machine on multiple levels, a product of the industrial bourgeoisie’s civic ambitions and inventions “reverse engineer[ed] into nature” (132), while another on the Rylands Library traces the intimate connection between coal faces and bookcases. Ancoats mills, palazzo warehouses, the Royal Exchange, and Crinson’s other examples, including James Mudd’s well-known photograph of the river Irwell from Blackfriars Bridge, are all subject to rigorous social, political, and material contextualisation and subtle close readings that build up a picture of Manchester’s factory suburbs, ‘Free Trade townscape’, and moral city aspirations as part of an industrial complex in which nature and machine, ancient and modern, find a distinctive consilience.
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| Holly Shaffer, Grafted Arts: Art Making and Taking in the Struggle for Western India, 1760–1910, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art / Yale University Press, 2022. ISBN: 978-1-9131-0728-4 |
The concepts of ‘graft’ (in English) and kalam (in Marathi)—with their spectrum of botanical, anatomical, artistic, and financial connotations—underpin Holly Shaffer’s fascinating account of artistic exchanges springing from the Maratha-British alliance around the Third Anglo-Mysore War. Focusing on British and Maratha artists, patrons such as Nana Fadnavis at the Poona court, and collectors whose “mercenary, predatory, yet unboundedly clever model of mixed artistries counters court and academic ones of making identifiable, even branded arts” (7), Shaffer illuminates the under-researched art world of the Marathas and demonstrates its wider impact on both Britain and India. She reveals a mutual responsiveness and adaptability on the part of British and Maratha artists through detailed analyses of individual works such as James Wales’s eclectic oil portraits that bring together British academic, Mughal courtly, and Hindu devotional traditions, and Gangaram Tambat’s watercolours of rock-cut architecture that eerily subvert British picturesque aesthetics. The complexities of collecting art in the period, as war plunder or prizes, souvenirs or commissions, are explored through a chapter on Edward Moor’s acquisitions, while another on the publication of his sculptures in The Hindu Pantheon (1810) considers the paradox of the book’s use by missionaries in the service of empire and, grafted into his own art, by William Blake in the service of revolution. Concluding with a discussion of the stylistically mixed, nationalist chromolithographs of the Chitrashala Press, Shaffer reflects on the history of reciprocal aesthetic grafting she traces that is simultaneously generative and linked to histories of violence.
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HBA Book Award for Exemplary Scholarship on the Contemporary Period
| Gavin Butt, No Machos or Pop Stars: When the Leeds Art Experiment Went Punk, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022. ISBN: 978-1-4780-1863-6 |
Reflecting on the current conditions of Higher Education in the UK, marked by the erosion of state-funding since the late 1980s, Gavin Butt begins No Machos or Pop Stars: When the Leeds Art Experiment went Punk by highlighting the seismic shifts that defined a brief, halcyon period in the not-too-distant past. During this time, from roughly 1962–1986, public funding for university-level study and, more centrally tothis book, advanced art education, opened up a unique, and now much mythologized, set of social and cultural conditions that became central to an experimental avant-garde that wove together art-school education and experience with popular music to yield what one critic referred to as a ‘second coming of British art-rock’. Here, Butt picks up the strands that weave together the dynamic Leeds scene – the changing shape of art education and the particular innovations of what was then Leeds Polytechnic; the radical and alternative left milieux that accumulated around the city and its three institutions for art education; the collectivization of students under, and sometimes against, the structures and strictures of the art school and broader social and political shifts – in a richly researched and utterly enjoyable book.
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HBA Book Award for an Exemplary Multi-authored Book
| Gabriel Byng and Helen Lunnon, ed., Medieval art, architecture and archaeology in Cambridge: college, church and city, Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2022. ISBN: 978-1-0321-5620-0 |
Medieval Art, Architecture and Archaeology in Cambridge: College, Church and City makes a major contribution to knowledge of one of England’s most famous built environments. Importantly, it places collegiate buildings of the medieval University of Cambridge in the context of regional monastic, parochial, and seigneurial architecture, uncovering formal and cultural relationships which have been missed in past studies. Containing seventeen essays and three site reports, the volume arises from the 2018 conference of the British Archaeological Association, the leading body for the study of British medieval architecture and art. Art is not neglected: there are essays on sculpture, seals, woodwork, and stained glass, all written by leading experts in those fields. Three papers are also devoted to nineteenth- and twentieth-century topics, one of them a fascinating meditation on the influence of Cambridge and Oxford on North American university colleges. The volume is generously illustrated and intelligently edited by Gabriel Byng and Helen Lunnon.
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HBA Book Award for an Exemplary Exhibition Catalogue
| Fay Blanchard and Anthony Spira, eds., Ingrid Pollard: Carbon Slowly Turning, MK Gallery and Turner Contemporary / Philip Wilson Publishers, 2022. ISBN: 978-1-7813-0119-7 |
For over four decades, artist and photographer Ingrid Pollard has been archiving and working through environmental politics and the vulnerabilities involved in national belonging. Her portfolio thus represents a diligent and insistent record of imperial entanglements and Black-body subject positions (in, on, and under land, sea, and sky) that marks Britain as an island of settlers and arrivants-becoming-settlers, who are in an ongoing struggle with multivalence. Carbon Slowly Turning is the first, and long overdue, monograph to gather Pollard’s range of expressive forms in one place. In this sense it requires quietness, openness, and pause to become truly involved in its piercing details – as Anna Arabinden-Kesson writes, this book demands “a slowed-down process of looking, opening the space for other forms of meaning and other experiences of relation” (47). From the tactile matte book cover to the beautifully illustrated artworks, the interactive experience of being with this catalogue also adds to the intentional pacing, and the conversations unfolding within. Alongside the artist’s works are sensitively written essays by Paul Gilroy, Arabinden-Kesson, Mason Leaver-Yap, Cheryl Finley, and Gilane Tawadros. Together they map the haunting details, political urgencies, locations, communities, and material inquiries that make this catalogue an important art historical document, for this moment and in the future.
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 Author Photo by: Felix Spira |
 Author Photo by: Emile Holba |
Highly Commended for Accessible Art Writing
 Jay Bernard, Look Again: Complicity, London: Tate Publishing, 2022. ISBN: 978-1-8497-6826-9  Johny Pitts, Look Again: Visibility, London: Tate Publishing, 2022. ISBN: 978-1-8497-6825-2 |
Tate’s Look Again series is predicated on rethinking the national collection and its resonances with contemporary life by inviting diverse voices from across the political, cultural and creative landscapes into conversation around a set of broad themes. Of the recent four Look Again publications – which take up the themes of Fashion, Sea, Complicity and Visibility – the latter two are particular stand-outs.
In a short text titled Complicity, the writer and artist Jay Bernard invites the reader on a walk across London – from Henry Tate’s Mausoleum in Norwood Cemetery to the tomb of Henry Tulse in the City via their Uncle Derek’s grave, Mona Hatoum’s iconic Brixton walk Roadworks (1985), Windrush Square, and the monuments of Kennington Park. As they move through the streets of South London, we encounter the spectres of the city’s colonial history that connect Tulse and Tate with today’s Londoners in a striking meditation on the meaning of complicity, compromise, complication, and ‘comp-location’.
In Visibility,the broadcaster, photographer, and writer Johny Pitts offers a radical rethinking of how we engage with and know a ‘British art history’. Rather than taking up the Black and brown subjects that peek out of the margins of historical portraits or the realities of the colonial violence that funded those works and the galleries that they now sit in, Pitts amplifies the knowledges held by ‘the proletariat beneath the paintings’. In collaboration with Marcia Henderson, a member of the security Team at Tate Britain, he presents here a visual walk in the footsteps of Tate security featuring sketches of Henderson’s favourite works and work colleagues, her thoughts and experiences and key themes that arose from their conversations.
Published around and in support of the recent rehang at Tate Britain, these books provide important and beautifully written provocations for a meaningful and generative rethinking of the stories that accrue around the notion of a national collection.
 Author Photo by: Joshua Virasami |
 Author Photo by: Jamie Stoker |
The book prize committee would also like to recognize the excellent scholarship of the finalists in these categories:
Exemplary Scholarship on the Period between 1800–1960
Bethan Stevens, The Wood Engravers’ Self-Portrait: The Dalziel Archive and Victorian Illustration, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022.
Nicholas Tromans, The Private Lives of Pictures: Art at Home in Britain, 1800–1940, London, Reaktion, 2022.
Exemplary Scholarship on the Contemporary Period
Marina Warner, Helen Chadwick: The Oval Court, London: Afterall Books, 2022.
Exemplary Multi-authored Book
Jo Baring, ed., Revisiting Modern British Art, London: Lund Humphries, 2022.
Exemplary Exhibition Catalogue
Daniel Pih and Laura Bruni, eds., Radical Landscapes: Art, Identity and Activism, London: Tate Publishing, 2022.
Georg Lechner et al., Face to Face: Marc Quinn meets Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, Belvedere / Walther und Franz König, 2022.
Lastly, the committee commends Alice Correia’s edited collection What is Black Art?: Writings on African, Asian and Caribbean art in Britain, 1981-1989, London: Penguin, 2022.