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Transformations in the Victorian Art World 1860-1910

Overview

  • Credit value: 30 credits at Level 7
  • Convenor and tutor: Dr Charlotte Ashby
  • Assessment: a 5000-word essay (100%)

Module description

In this module we focus on the transformation of the Victorian art world, centred on London, in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. What ‘British art’ should look like was closely contested, with awareness of new art being shown elsewhere and especially in Paris. Asian art and antiquities were also being imported in large quantities, transforming British visual culture. To understand the nature of these transformations it is necessary to go beyond individual artists, to reflect on the interactions of the many different people, institutions and art objects that came together in the capital at this time of rapid social and cultural change. This interplay between art practice, dealers, curators, the art press, collectors and art audiences remains integral to how the art world operates today but took shape during the period examined by this course.

We will consider the importance of understanding the art world and national art histories as socially constructed entities within which a range of different agendas compete. We will reflect on what tools are useful to art historians in managing this complexity, including actor-network theory, transculturation and translation theory, object biographies and histories of art journalism, exhibitions and institutions. We will work extensively with primary sources from Victorian newspapers and art journals.

Indicative syllabus

  • The Victorian art world: actors and networks
  • Cosmopolitanism: Whistler and the Aesthetic movement
  • Regionalism: Naturalism and Impressionism
  • New galleries, dealers and exhibition societies
  • First encounters with Asian art: Yuanmingyuan and the British Museum
  • Insider artists: Sir Frederic Leighton and Academy orientalism
  • Writing on art: journalists and audiences
  • Outsider artists: Beardsely, Japonisme and queerness
  • Art or craft: debates around Indian art in Britain
  • Bloomsbury and the shattering of the Victorian art world

Learning objectives

By the end of this module, you will have:

  • developed acuity in observing visual and material culture
  • an enhanced understanding of this culture within the historical and political context of its production
  • knowledge of methodologies concerned with the discipline
  • engaged constructively in current debates concerning the discipline and its changing nature.
  • the ability to select and acquire relevant visual and textual material and evidence and to analyse, present and interpret this as appropriate within the context of the course
  • developed appropriate historical and theoretical methodological frameworks and approaches.