The Historians of British Art Book Prize Committee is pleased to announce the Book Award winners for publications produced in the 2023 calendar year. The winners were chosen from a nominating list of fifty-three books from twenty-three different presses. Awards were granted in six categories.
The award for a single-authored book with a subject before 1600 goes Brian Sprakes, The Medieval Stained Glass of West Yorkshire, published by Oxford University Press.
The award for a single-authored book with a subject between 1600–1800 goes to Andrea Pappas, Embroidering the Landscape: Women, Art and the Environment in British North America, 1740–1770, published by Lund Humphries.
The award for a single-authored book with a subject between 1800–1960 goes to Swati Chattopadhyay, Small Spaces: Recasting the Architecture of Empire, published by Bloomsbury.
The award for a single-authored book with a contemporary subject goes to Richard Birkett, Donald Rodney: Autoicon, published by Afterall.
The multi-authored book prize goes to Griselda Pollock, Adrian Rifkin, and Rachel Dickson, Woman in Art: Helen Rosenau’s ‘Little Book’ of 1944, published by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art / Yale University Press.
And the prize for exhibition catalogue goes to Linsey Young, ed., Women In Revolt!, published by the Tate.
The HBA would like to offer congratulations to the winning authors and the publishing teams at Afterall, Bloomsbury, Lund Humphries, Oxford University Press, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art / Yale University Press, and the Tate.
This year’s committee of readers consisted of Alison Syme (Chair), Julian Luxford, Lizzie Robles, and Matthew Hunter.
HBA Book Award for Exemplary Scholarship on the Period before 1600
| Brian Sprakes, The Medieval Stained Glass of West Yorkshire, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023. ISBN: 9780197267097 |
This handsome account of pre-1700 stained glass in West Yorkshire is the fruit of over twenty years’ work. Brian Sprakes has conducted an exhaustive search of the surviving material and documentary evidence to produce a resource that will guide the researcher, conservationist, and art-lover for decades to come. The volume opens with an authoritative survey of the history, style, and imagery of its subject. Then comes a detailed catalogue of the surviving stained glass at twenty-nine churches and museums, plus a series of appendixes. Everything is lavishly illustrated in colour, in a way that evokes of a lost world of coloured, sun-struck windows, as well as the beauty of what survives. Books like this make a major contribution to the preservation of England’s threatened artistic heritage. The Medieval Stained Glass of West Yorkshire is the latest addition to the library of the Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi.
HBA Book Award for Exemplary Scholarship on the Period between 1600-1800
| Andrea Pappas, Embroidering the Landscape: Women, Art and the Environment in British North America, 1740–1770, London: Lund Humphries, 2023. ISBN: 9781848226241 |
Andrea Pappas’s Embroidering the Landscape is a work of serious intellectual ambition. Not content to foreground embroidered needlework as subject of intensive art-historical inquiry, Pappas excavates women’s contributions to an expanded vision of pictorial art. Written with lucid, critical acuity, Embroidering the Landscape troubles received views in which embroidered landscapes embody “naïve” visions. Instead, the book demonstrates how these understudied works were made by worldly women actively combining representational systems and spatial projections encountered in European precedents, Asian export ware, and first-hand experience. Working up from the archive to theorize scalar hierarchies and the “telescopic perspective” incorporated into embroidered pictorial logics, Pappas places needleworks and their makers in an Atlantic world of imperial inequality, land spoliation, and colonialism’s devastating ecological consequences. Embroidering the Landscape is a timely contribution that will find readership in environmental history, women’s studies, and histories of science, among other fields.
HBA Book Award for Exemplary Scholarship on the Period between 1800-1960
| Swati Chattopadhyay, Small Spaces: Recasting the Architecture of Empire, London: Bloomsbury, 2023. ISBN: 9781350288201 |
In this fascinating, engaging, and experimental book, Swati Chattopadhyay examines a variety of small spaces and objects produced by empire—from the bottlekhana to the verandah, potted plants to homeopathic medicine chests—and the way they proliferated modes of engagement with the world. Chattopadhyay draws on an eclectic array of archival documents including recipe books, trade reports, servant lists, memoirs, and visual artifacts to read the microdynamics of such seemingly insignificant locales in practical and poetic terms, recasting them as sites of emergence in which power, community, and solidarity were negotiated. Her genre-bending mode of narration unfolds a world in which minor places and things fostered habitation, imagination, resistance, and creativity, and while her focus is on British India, she compellingly makes the case for the significance of small spaces and their challenge to master spaces and master narratives in other contexts.
HBA Book Award for Exemplary Scholarship on the Contemporary Period
| Richard Birkett, Donald Rodney: Autoicon, London: Afterall, 2023. ISBN: 9781846382574 |
In Donald Rodney: Autoicon, Richard Birkett offers an incisive and detailed look at the specificities of the singular and complex eponymous work: Donald Rodney’s Autoicon. Initiated shortly before the artist’s death in 1998 and first launched in 2000 as a web-based work hosted by London’s Institute for International Visual Arts (Iniva) before a slightly later release on CD-ROM, the work plays across the lines of interactivity, simulation, and prescription; the self and the ‘live’ digital ‘body’; audience, artist, and interlocutor. Like much digital and net-based art produced in the mid- to late 1990s, the work is largely inaccessible and requires now-historical hardware and software to run. In this wonderful forensic engagement with the work, Birkett provides a critical record of Autoicon and, crucially, indexes it to the broader entanglements of the “objects, events, people, ideas, behaviours and properties” from which it is constituted, from an expansive engagement with Rodney’s practice to the promising vistas of late-1990s concepts of ‘digital diaspora’.
HBA Book Award for an Exemplary Multi-authored Book
| Griselda Pollock, Adrian Rifkin, and Rachel Dickinson, Woman in Art: Helen Rosenau’s ‘Little Book’ of 1944, London: Paul Mellon Centre / Yale, 2023. ISBN: 9781913107413 |
Bringing together a reproduction of Jewish refugee art historian Helen Rosenau’s 1944 book Woman in Art, an affecting memoir by her student Adrian Rifkin, a useful documentary biography compiled by Rachel Dickson, and brilliant framing essays by Griselda Pollock that contextualise and analyse Rosenau’s text, Woman in Art: Helen Rosenau’s ‘Little Book’ is critically important reading. Contrasting Rosenau’s work to Gombrich’s gender-exclusionary art history, Pollock situates Woman in Art and its author’s intellectual formation in terms of contemporary art historical, anthropological, and sociological discourses and concerns as well as traumatic geopolitical events and the author’s migration and institutional challenges. Pollock’s compelling close readings plumb Rosenau’s long overlooked, politically resonant ideas, making this beautifully produced volume’s challenge to “the violence of decades of continuing silencing, effacing, willed ignorance, and blatant sexist indifference that have distorted the histories of art and the character of the discipline of Art History” as absurdly needful as ever.
HBA Book Award for an Exemplary Exhibition Catalogue
| Linsey Young, ed., Women in Revolt!: Art and Activism in the UK 1970–1990, London: Tate Publishing, 2023. ISBN: 9781849768627 |
In Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK 1970–1990, curator and editor Linsey Young brings together a rich account of the intersections of art, activism, and second wave feminisms. Like its namesake major exhibition, the catalogue draws its power precisely from its insistence on multivalence and polyvocality, from, as Young writes in her introduction, an interest in “rolling with the messy.” Here, there is an emphasis on communities, networks, collectives, and solidarities not only as central components to this complex art historical period—as outlined in chapters by Amy Tobin, Stella Dadzie, and Alice Correia—but also as key curatorial and editorial modes, exemplified by an illuminating ‘note’ from the project’s advisors Althea Greenan, Griselda Pollock, and Marlene Smith. This richly illustrated catalogue opens up the complicated messiness, the strident politics, and the joy that weave through this important chapter of British cultural and political history and invites the reader to conceive of the threads that bind the questions of the past to the urgencies of the present.
The book prize committee would also like to recognize the excellent scholarship of the finalists in these categories:
Exemplary Scholarship on the Period between 1600–1800
Steven Brindle, Architecture in Britain and Ireland 1530–1830, London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art / Yale University Press, 2023.
Rebecca Whiteley, Birth Figures: Early Modern Prints and the Pregnant Body, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2023.
Exemplary Scholarship on the Period between 1800–1960
Kristy Sinclair Dootson, The Rainbow’s Gravity: Colour, Materiality and British Modernity, London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art / Yale University Press, 2023.
Tom Young, Unmasking the East India Company: British Art and Political Reform in Colonial India, c. 1813–1858, London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art / Yale University Press, 2023.
Exemplary Multi-authored Book
Wing Chan and David Morris, eds., Precarious Solidarities: Artists for Democracy 1974–77, London: Afterall, 2023.
Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, ed. Tupaia, Captain Cook and the Voyage of the Endeavour: A Material History, London: Bloomsbury, 2023.
Exemplary Exhibition Catalogue
Esther da Costa Meyer and Claudia J. Nahson, The Sassoons, New York: Jewish Museum / Yale University Press, 2023.
Isabella Maidment, ed., Isaac Julien, London: Tate, 2023.