Art, Architecture and Visual Culture
The deliberate destruction of the university library in Louvain during World War I caused an international outcry, but also elicited constructive reactions. One of the most impressive responses was the collection in England of an enormous donation of books to replace those lost, a project coordinated by the John Rylands Library in Manchester. Although the librarian, Henry Guppy, documented the donation in issues of the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, this generous and altruistic work has received little mention in the recent scholarship on the burning of the library and its rebuilding. This article charts the development of the project and the extent of the contribution, drawing on Guppy’s publications and documents in the library archives of the University of Manchester, Oxford University and the University of Toronto. Some of the most valuable gifts from private individuals receive special attention, as do the institutional donations by the Bodleian Library and the University of Toronto.
Much has been published about John Rylands, whether during his lifetime, in response to his death, or by historians looking back. While records of his business are plentiful, archival records for the Longford estate he bought in Stretford, Lancashire in 1855, including the hall he subsequently built, were not easily found. In recent years, however, estate records have emerged with new information, suggesting others may have survived. These records prompt a reassessment of the date at which Longford Hall was built, and identify the architect as Philip Nunn. This article explores Nunn’s career, and his work as a leading architect is set in the context of the contemporary vogue for Italianate architecture, especially for warehouses. Longford Hall’s demolition in 1995 was a major loss to Longford Park, but a more positive approach to the Park’s history is in prospect, with a multi-million pound Lottery bid approved, and plans to catalogue Stretford’s building plans.
This article examines three medieval charters of the Norman abbey of Mont Saint-Michel, today preserved among the collections of the John Rylands Research Institute and Library. Rare survivors of the destruction of the abbey’s archives in 1944, these charters previously formed part of the enormous private library assembled by Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792–1872), antiquarian and bibliophile. They are here studied in detail for the first time, showcasing them not just for what they can tell us about the property to which they relate and the celebrated abbey to which it once belonged, but, more importantly, for what they reveal about the structure and organisation of the lost institutional archive of which they formed a part in the Middle Ages. This article also contextualises these charters within the wider Phillipps collection, exploring questions associated with the antiquarian practice of preserving and presenting medieval documents, a subject which has only recently begun to receive the scholarly attention it deserves.
The nature of Britain’s unreformed parliamentary electoral system has been the focus of interest and study for over two centuries. For the unreformed period, historians have identified a range of factors influencing the outcome of parliamentary elections: prevailing economic and social power structures; the nature, extent and effectiveness of electoral treating and corruption; and the role of political issues, among both the political elite and the electorate. Within these interpretations, the role of parliamentary boroughs dominated by electoral patrons has been seen as an important feature. This article considers one such borough, Newton in Lancashire. Often presented as the archetypal ‘pocket borough’, Newton’s parliamentary elections were indeed dominated by the lords of the manor, the Leghs of Lyme. The papers of this family show, however, that this electoral control was more complex than has previously been thought, and required significant electoral management by the family.
In February 1902 a short notice in the London Times announced the intention of the authorities at Westminster Cathedral to conduct a tuning concert, the third in a series of large-scale experiments on the still uncompleted cathedral’s acoustic properties. Coverage of the first experiment, undertaken the previous summer, had been largely confined to the Catholic newspaper the Tablet. As the programme expanded, however, details began to filter with increasing regularity into the national press. Intended to showcase the effect of the new cathedral’s architecture on a particular musical style, the experiments capitalised on the specific acoustic context of the building to play with perception, creating ghost chords and ethereal effects. As a large-scale musical-acoustic experiment, the concerts were to resonate in the worlds of science and architecture for the next five decades, prompting a particular trajectory of scientific development and architectural innovation. This chapter explores those experiments and the role of Westminster Cathedral as a space for science and music. It examines the significance of the cathedral as a conceptual platform for further development in architecture, acoustics, and music, most publicly expressed in the renowned tuning concerts which informed the design of Royal Festival Hall in 1951.
Setting the tone for the essays that follow, this introduction begins with a single artwork: American artist Nancy Spero’s 1979 work Perhaps She Was Right. Incorporating a citation from a poem written by the modernist poet H.D. eighteen years prior, this work opens out many of the questions the wider book seeks to pose, questions about time, influence, and art history. After a discussion of Spero’s work, the Introduction then outlines the broader field and summarises the contributions.
Showcasing new scholarship by emerging and established art historians, Cases of Citation tracks a history of artists who incorporated literature into their work. In doing so, this collection investigates why literary citation emerged as a viable and urgent strategy in art made during and after the 1960s, and explores how we can account for such citational practices in contemporary scholarship. By spotlighting new voices in the field of art history, this book makes a significant, topical, and, above all, current contribution to a fast-growing field of inquiry. Structured as a series of in-depth case studies, the essays that form this volume generate their own specific questions about the relationship between art and literature through the analysis of a single artwork. The collection covers a diverse group of artists from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including David Wojnarowicz, Marcel Broodthaers, Lis Rhodes, Romare Bearden and Silvia Kolbowski. Cited authors range from Oscar Wilde to Frank O’Hara, Mary Shelley to Jean Genet. And together, the artworks and cited texts are approached from various critical angles, with each author questioning and complicating the ways in which we can ‘read’ textual citations in art. The book concludes with a richly illustrated conversation between the editors and the pioneering feminist artist Elaine Reichek, whose lifelong engagement with text serves as a foundational art historical touchstone for the collection as a whole.
This chapter shifts the focus from individual and domestic concerns to a broader international stage. It demonstrates a crystallising of the conceptual work that emerged in World War I through a series of controversies and catalysts surrounding the design and construction of Herbert Baker’s Assembly Chamber for the new city at Delhi in 1923. Baker’s Assembly Chamber was regarded as a scientific experiment (from drawing board to construction), and rather unusually, as this chapter demonstrates, scientists as well as architects were involved in its design. In the process, architectural acoustics was re-categorised from ‘special intelligence’ to ‘fundamental’ investigation, becoming embedded into a national programme of government-funded research, which marked the beginnings of formalised research in environmental science within the construction industry in Britain. Taking the Assembly Chamber at Delhi as a pivot point, this chapter explores the changing position of acoustics as a branch of environmental science in 1920s Britain. It demonstrates the manner in which the political and economic controversies surrounding the design and construction of the chamber acted as catalysts for the instigation of a new laboratory – located in a disused munitions factory near Perivale in London – and stimulated a broader programme of acoustic research. With reference to unpublished papers held in archives, this chapter brings to light the tensions that sustained early official research in the discipline of architectural acoustics.
This essay uses the publication of Roland Barthes’ 1967 essay ‘The Death of the Author’ as a starting point to consider the changed status of citations in art made during and after the 1960s. Setting the scene for the ensuing essays, Julius argues that each of the instances of citation explored by the contributing authors variously belongs to an intellectual landscape shaped by the questions Barthes posed in this essay, questions that the American art critic Craig Owens claimed that ‘the art frequently referred to as “postmodernist”, can perhaps best be understood as a response or series of responses to.’ Owens’s name recurs throughout the collection; his writings toward a theory of postmodernism from the late 1970s and 1980s help to draw out the art-historical implications of Barthes’ essay. Although Owens’s vision for art after ‘The Death of the Author’ never came to pass, his art criticism reveals the context in which citations erupted into the expanded field of post-1960s art.
London’s Royal Festival Hall opened its doors on 3 May 1951. The first concert hall to be built in Britain after World War II, Festival Hall was not just an iconic piece of architecture but also an archetype of designing for musical tone. Its design fused architecture, music, and science, and its construction process was interspersed with a series of tuning concerts that were implemented throughout 1950 and 1951 to allow for acoustic adaptation as the building was finalised. Drawing on the trajectory of experimental work and interdisciplinary collaborations that were explored in previous chapters, the Conclusion demonstrates how these informed the process at Royal Festival Hall. It also explores the differing forms of experience and expertise that formed a valid part of the hall’s construction. and the contemporary social and cultural priorities which were brought to the fore as a result. This is the point when international knowledge-sharing was becoming a reality, and when the formal and informal work of the preceding decades was ultimately expressed in a landmark building. This is the contemporary era of architectural acoustics.