̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - History of Art

Kettle's Yard is back

sjr81 — Mon, 12 Feb 2018 12:03:24 +0000

We thought you might like a look inside the 'new' Kettle's Yard, which reopened to the public on Saturday, February 10, to learn more about its past – and future.

As Kettle's Yard opens its doors following a two-year, multi-million pound redevelopment and transformation of its gallery spaces, the work of 38 leading contemporary and historic internationally-renowned artists has gone on display in a spectacular opening show.

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Circling the heavens: visual culture and the bird of paradise

amb206 — Sat, 24 Nov 2012 08:00:47 +0000

Veteran wildlife broadcaster David Attenborough is not often lost for words – but sometimes nature defies description. Seeking to put into words the extraordinary courtship dance of the bird of paradise, filmed deep in the forests of New Guinea for the BBC’s Natural World series, he struggled. Eventually he shook his head and uttered two words – “beautiful” and “bonkers” - to sum up the spectacular extremes of dance and display with which the male bird seeks to impresses a female.

When in the 15^th and 16^th centuries exploration began to bring the natural riches of the world across the oceans within the grasp of Europe’s social elites, there was much to marvel at and much to capture in words and images: unknown peoples and cultures, novel flora and fauna. Wild rumour and fevered speculation surrounded these exotic beings. Among them was the bird of paradise and its splendidly colourful plumage. There was an additional element to the allure of this most madly exotic of birds: it was said to have no legs and spend its entire life in flight.

̽��ֱ��belief that birds of paradise were legless stemmed from the fact that the specimens of birds of paradise that reached Europe, from the 1520s onwards, had - in the process of being captured, stuffed and transported – literally lost their legs. For many decades the bird of paradise was portrayed in paintings as a heavenly being (manucodiata, the “bird of Gods”) circling overhead in permanent flight. It was only at the turn of the century that the bird of paradise was depicted with legs like other birds. And yet its symbolism would leave its mark on popular culture, to the extent that Carl Linnaeus named one of the species in the Paradisaea genus, the Paradisaea apoda, in reference to this remarkable feature.

Dr José Ramón Marcaida is a visiting scholar at Cambridge’s Department of History and Philosophy of Science. His background in physics and philosophy (he has degrees in both) has made him passionate about the dialogue between the arts and the sciences and his research focuses on the history of early modern science and its connection with European visual culture. While finishing his PhD and, more recently, working as a postdoctoral researcher, Dr Marcaida has become fascinated by images of the bird of paradise produced during the 16^th and 17^th centuries, a time when artists drew heavily on the exoticism that was entering public consciousness.

“ ̽��ֱ��bird of paradise, and its part in the narrative of early modern natural history, is a small but captivating detail in the bigger picture of the interaction between the arts and sciences at a time of huge religious, political and social upheaval. As an historian of science working on the visual dimensions of knowledge I look at images published in books or illustrations produced on expeditions, but I also look at paintings in order to see how people made sense of the natural objects that they were encountering for the first time,” says Dr Marcaida.

“It is really exciting to see that when in the early 17^th century Rubens painted and repainted the Prado version of the Adoration of the Magi, he showed the black magus with what is clearly a bird of paradise in his turban. You can even spot its head and beak. Its presence is symbolic of the exotic land from whence the visitor has come – and it’s a reference also to the trade in luxury goods that played a big part in the economy of the city of Antwerp, where the painting was created.”

̽��ֱ��passing of time distances us from the ways in which the world was seen, and experienced, by those who came many centuries before us. Works of art by great painters such as Rubens, with their potent imagery and multi-layered story-telling, offer a pathway into that world that can be explored not just by art historians but also by historians of science.

Dr Marcaida says: “ ̽��ֱ��history of science can learn a tremendous amount from the study of artworks exhibited in museums and galleries. And not just at an academic level: anyone interested in the history of knowledge can join in this collective enterprise and enjoy the wonders of studying a given work of art or genre, or searching for a certain scientific object or activity. Let me know if you spot a bird of paradise in an artwork anywhere around the world!”

As voyages of exploration opened up the world from the 15th century onwards, European culture delighted in encounters with exotic items. Dr José Ramón Marcaida, a visiting scholar at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��, shows how portrayals of the spectacular bird of paradise reflect the intersection between art and science.

Let me know if you spot a bird of paradise in an artwork anywhere around the world!

Dr José Ramón Marcaida

Birds of paradise

Dr José Ramón Marcaida

Slideshow image

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There but not there: the meaning of absence

amb206 — Mon, 14 May 2012 17:52:39 +0000

Reading Absence is the intriguing title of a series of lectures being given by Professor Hung Wu who is currently in Cambridge as the Humanitas Visiting Professor in Chinese Studies at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH). It’s a title that hints at an apparent paradox: often the power of the unseen is greater than the power of the seen.

An eminent scholar and curator, whose work crosses the boundaries of academic disciplines, interweaving art history and archaeology, anthropology and philosophy, Professor Wu is the Harrie A Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor in Art History and East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the ̽��ֱ�� of Chicago.

As Director of the Center for the Art of East Asia and Consulting Curator for Smart Museum of Art, he has curated major exhibitions of Chinese art around the world. He is also the author of many publications that explore Chinese art and material culture from earliest times up to the present.

Professor Wu’s analytical and philosophical approach to art history reflects the fact that he was trained as an art historian as well as an anthropologist, first at the Central Academy of Art in Beijing and then at Harvard ̽��ֱ��. He is currently preoccupied with the notion of absence in art – a theme that encompasses loss, disappearance, omission and erasure – and its role in narrative. A lack of substance gives absence a quality that is at once timeless and immediate, fleeting yet permanent: there but not there.

While standard art historical research focuses on concrete images and objects, Professor Wu is fascinated by all kinds of emptiness in architecture, pictorial representation, and design. His lectures in Cambridge last week examined depictions of everyday objects such as mirrors and pillows as examples of things that remind us of what’s missing and what appear only to disappear once more, leaving no trace.

“ ̽��ֱ��more you look for these ideas in the world around you – the sense of what’s missing, what’s impossible to depict – the more you see them everywhere. They appear throughout the history of art in all cultures. Early Chinese communities, for example, used markers to represent the spirits of their absent ancestors. Kings were too sacred, and too special to be shown, so that they were often represented by an empty throne,” said Professor Wu.

“Similarly, there are some things that are simply too weighty and horrifying to depict directly. In the case of genocide that is why an image of the empty space where a terrible event took place is more emotive than a photograph of dead bodies. Empty chairs are a theme you find throughout the history of art. Think of Van Gogh’s chair and Andy Warhol’s electric chair – because of the absence of someone in them, these are images that have a resonance that’s both personal and universal.”

In his lecture tomorrow (15 May), Demolition Projects: Absence as Memory, Professor Wu will look at the development of contemporary Chinese art over the last 30 or 40 years, a time of tremendous social transformation in China which has been accompanied by both huge construction and massive demolition. China’s artists depict the trauma felt by the population as it experiences such shifts and connects with the wider world after a period of isolation.

In 2010 Professor Wu curated Displacement: ̽��ֱ��Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art, at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke ̽��ֱ�� and the Smart Museum of Art at the ̽��ֱ�� of Chicago. ̽��ֱ��show brought the work of four very different Chinese artists - Chen Qiulin, Yun-Fei Ji, Liu Xiaodong, and Zhuang Hui - to American audiences. These artists had used as the focus for their work the largest engineering project in human history. Constructed to provide a ninth of the country’s electricity, the Three Gorges Dam permanently submerged some 1,200 cities and villages and displaced more than a million people in central China.

Most striking about the artists’ responses was their nuanced attitudes and individual responses to the project. They were not merely documenting it or judging it in an overtly political manner; they were capturing the essence of this extraordinary re-working of the landscape and the communities within it.

In its faithfulness to the narratives that unfolded as the programme of displacement got under way, the work of Yun-Fei Ji is poignantly matter-of-fact in its recording of the tiny details of human life at a time of trauma. ̽��ֱ��element of absence in his ink-on-paper panorama, Water Rising, is the huge weight of water that will soon submerge the landscape for ever. Representing fragmentation, erasure and disappearance, his and other artists’ works touch the audience with a strong sense of transformation and transience.

On Thursday (17 May) Professor Wu will take part in a symposium at CRASSH on Writing, Art and Chinese Culture that will bring together international scholars in Chinese art, literature, calligraphy to engage in a cross-disciplinary discourse.

Both the lecture on 15 May and the symposium on 17 May will take place at CRASSH. ̽��ֱ��events are free and open to the public. For more details go to http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk.

A lecture tomorrow by Professor Hung Wu is a rare opportunity to hear an eminent Chinese scholar talk about the ways in which the country’s artists have responded to huge social and political change over the last 40 years.

While standard art historical research focuses on concrete images and objects, Professor Wu is fascinated by all kinds of emptiness in architecture, pictorial representation, and design.

Hung Wu

Tang Dynasty mirror

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Vermeer’s Women: Secrets and Silence

bjb42 — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 12:00:15 +0000

"Vermeer's Women: Secrets and Silence" opens on Wednesday, 5 October, and offers a stunning view of the Dutch master and several of his contemporaries. ̽��ֱ��Lacemaker, on loan from the Louvre, is one of 32 works on display.

Painted circa 1669 to 1670, ̽��ֱ��Lacemaker is one of the Louvre's most treasured works and is rarely seen outside Paris. It offers a glimpse into some of the techniques the artist employed. Optical effects normally seen in photography are present in the painting, as Vermeer created a depth of field by blurring the foreground of the picture, while leaving the principal subject in sharp focus. This technique, rarely seen among other works of the period, gave the painting an unprecedented complexity.

Throughout his career, women were one of Vermeer's key subjects, offering a perspective of middle class life in the 17th century Dutch Republic. ̽��ֱ��scenes seem hauntingly familiar even today, given their domestic context. Needlework, playing music, reading, cooking, shopping and minding children are all beautifully captured and lend a feeling that one has stumbled upon a private moment.

Complementing ̽��ֱ��Lacemaker are three further pieces representing the pinnacle of Vermeer's later career: A lady at the virginals with a gentleman; ̽��ֱ��Music Lesson (c.1662 - 5), on loan from the Royal Collection; A Young Woman Seated at a Virginal (c.1670) from the National Gallery, London; and Young Woman Seated at a Virginal (private collection, New York).

Accompanying these are 28 masterpieces of genre painting from artists Cornelius de Bisschop, Gerard ter Borch, Esaias Boursse, and Quiringh van Brekelenkam, among others. These accompanying artists represent some of Vermeer's finest contemporaries, many of whom were more famous than Vermeer during his lifetime.

Dr Timothy Potts, Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, commented: "Vermeer's Women will be a rare opportunity to enjoy some of Vermeer's most ravishingly beautiful paintings of the intimacy of the Dutch household - frozen moments captured in Vermeer's uniquely luminous style. Although domestic scenes constitute the principal subject of Vermeer’s work and that of many of his contemporaries, and are one of the most distinctive and evocative aspects of Dutch art of the Golden Age, this will be the first exhibition to focus exclusively on them, and to explore their hidden significance in terms of contemporary Dutch mores.”

Vermeer’s Women: Secrets and Silence runs from 5 October to 15 January 2012 at the Fitzwilliam Museum, in Cambridge. A new catalogue accompanies the exhibition, with essays by Dr Wieseman and other internationally recognised experts in the field.

̽��ֱ��Lacemaker, one of the great masterpieces of the 17th-century Dutch painter, Johannes Vermeer, is to go on display in the UK for the first time as part of an exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

"Vermeer's Women will be a rare opportunity to enjoy some of Vermeer's most ravishingly beautiful paintings of the intimacy of the Dutch household - frozen moments captured in Vermeer's uniquely luminous style.

Dr Timothy Potts

̽��ֱ��Lacemaker

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