Association of Art Historians Conference at Tate Britain
Friday 7th November 2008
Coffee, tea and delicious chocolate chip biscuits started our day at Tate Britain. The theme of this year’s conference was ‘Distortion’. Our first lecture was by Nicholas Tromans, Senior lecturer at Kingston University and curator of the recent Tate exhibition ‘Lure of the East’. It was a fascinating talk on the life of the artist Richard Dadd. We knew nothing about this artist who had spent most of his life in the psychiatric hospital, Bedlam, for murdering his father. Tromans spoke with such great enthusiasm that we were spellbound. We felt we had learnt not only about this artist and the exquisite painting he created despite his illness but also about the treatment of psychiatric patients in the nineteenth century. We had no idea that the Imperial War museum is housed in one of the remaining sections of Bedlam.
Rachel Barker, conservator of twentieth century art at Tate lacked her predecessor’s vigour but the subject was interesting. The fragile nature of contemporary art has led to nightmare conservation scenarios due to the unusual and unstable media that artists now work with, for example Chris Ofili’s elephant dung which is in danger of falling off. Don’t worry, they have plenty of spares in the freezer kindly donated from Dolly the elephant at London zoo!
The first student presentation was from Steven, a second year undergraduate at Oxford. He was passionate about his research into the copyright issues that surround paintings; he illustrated his point with a case into a copyright claim by Jack Vettriano. This was worthy of Miss Marple or Morse.
During our lunch hour we went to see the Francis Bacon exhibition: our response was varied, from those who loathed it to those who were bowled over by it, namely Eppie.
We were really looking forward to the talk on careers in History of Art but were a little disappointed as the Cambridge post-graduate student read directly from a book. Two very impressive A2 students discussed their personal dissertations. Both had thoroughly researched their subjects and displayed an awesome knowledge, which made us feel rather inadequate. It was inspirational to see them challenging the conventional views of their work as they sought new interpretations.
The last talk was by Martin Harrison, curator of the current Bacon exhibition, a man with staggering knowledge of the artist who had made Bacon his life’s work. He examined the different ways in which Bacon could be studied and the complexity of establishing the truth when the artist himself lied!
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