British Art Talks
British Art Talks is the audio series of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. It features new research and aims to enhance and expand knowledge of British art and architecture. The PMC is an educational charity that champions new ways of understanding British art history and culture. We publish, teach and carry out research, both at the Centre in London and through our online platforms. Our archives, library and lively events programme are open to researchers, students and the public. The Centre was founded in 1970 by the art collector and philanthropist Paul Mellon. It is part of Yale University and a partner to the Yale Center for British Art.
Episodes
May 5, 2021 • 40 mins
This series, Experiments in Art Writing, features a set of highly innovative UK-based art writers, asking them to describe the encounters, materials, voices and texts that have shaped the very form of their writing.
Episode image: Bartholomew Dandridge, A Young Girl with an Enslaved Servant and a Dog, c. 1725, oil on canvas, 121.9 x 121.9 cm. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection (B1981.25.205). (Public ...
Episode image: Bartholomew Dandridge, A Young Girl with an Enslaved Servant and a Dog, c. 1725, oil on canvas, 121.9 x 121.9 cm. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection (B1981.25.205). (Public ...
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April 28, 2021 • 40 mins
This series, Experiments in Art Writing, features a set of highly innovative UK-based art writers, asking them to describe the encounters, materials, voices and texts that have shaped the very form of their writing.
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April 21, 2021 • 46 mins
This series, Experiments in Art Writing, features a set of highly innovative UK-based art writers, asking them to describe the encounters, materials, voices and texts that have shaped the very form of their writing.
This programme contains a description of suicide taken from the novel La Fin De Cherí, by Sidonie Gabriel Collette. If you’d prefer to skip over that, it’s between 14:43 - 16:08. If you need support, you...
This programme contains a description of suicide taken from the novel La Fin De Cherí, by Sidonie Gabriel Collette. If you’d prefer to skip over that, it’s between 14:43 - 16:08. If you need support, you...
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April 14, 2021 • 35 mins
This series, Experiments In Art Writing, features a set of highly innovative UK-based art writers, asking them to describe the encounters, materials, voices and texts that have shaped the very form of their writing.
Episode image: Anna Bunting Branch, W.I.T.C.H. ("Wild Imaginations Transform Chauvinist Hegemony"), oil and acrylic paint on folded aluminium sheet, 2016. Courtesy of Anna Bunting Branch.
Episode image: Anna Bunting Branch, W.I.T.C.H. ("Wild Imaginations Transform Chauvinist Hegemony"), oil and acrylic paint on folded aluminium sheet, 2016. Courtesy of Anna Bunting Branch.
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December 2, 2020 • 26 mins
Ryan Gander’s inventive, shapeshifting and associative works materialise in many forms ranging from sculpture and writing to painting and performance. His engagement with histories is not without mischief, in his 2006 work A Future Lorum Ipsom, Gander invented a palindromic word, ‘Mitim’, designed to be inserted without comment into newspapers, magazines, crosswords or everyday speech, meaning ‘a mythical word newly introduced...
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October 28, 2020 • 43 mins
Lucy Skaer has exhibited extensively and has had recent solo exhibitions at the Museo Tamayo, Mexico, SMAK, Gent and Kunstwerke, Berlin, and a current solo show at Bloomberg Mithraeum, London. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2009 and was awarded the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award in 2016. She works in collaboration with as Nashashibi / Skaer, and they were included in the last Documenta together. Born in 1975 in Cambr...
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June 24, 2020 • 44 mins
The garden has long been an important subject matter of the British history of art, but what of the medicinal garden, its visual culture and aesthetics, its significance as a sensory and experimental site, and for artists? This episode brings together a set of scholars whose diverse researches shed new light on the physic, botanical and medicinal garden from the medieval to the eighteenth century. A wide-ranging discussion wil...
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June 17, 2020 • 36 mins
When John, 13th Duke of Bedford, opened up Woburn Abbey to the paying public in 1955, he took care to maintain the sense that this was his family’s home, even though they occupied only a section of the house, away from the tourist route. As he recorded, his wife, Lydia, ‘succeeded most cleverly in arranging the main state-rooms for show while still making them look as if they were lived in’. To see great treasures such as the ...
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June 10, 2020 • 27 mins
Lisa Tickner, a leading historian of British art, has just published a new book on the dynamic art world that emerged in 1960s London. In this podcast, she talks with Mark Hallett about the remarkable array of artists, curators, galleries, art-schools, films, publications and documentaries focused on in the course of her research, and about the highly original way she has written her book
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June 3, 2020 • 33 mins
This talk focuses on a key instance of the social realism that played an important role in late Victorian art and culture. Hubert von Herkomer’s Hard Times (1885), has to do with conditions of migrant and insecure labour at the time. Artistically, and in its address to vital social issues, it is an intriguing and complex creation. It continues to strike a chord nowadays, partly because its conception has a certain bearing on p...
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May 27, 2020 • 30 mins
The Carthusian order was founded in the late eleventh century in France. It spread rapidly and widely, and experienced great popularity during the later Middle Ages, when dozens of new charterhouses were founded against a background of sharp decline in monastic foundation in general. The main reason for Carthusian popularity was the order’s consistent adherence to the eremitic precepts and form of living established by its fou...
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May 13, 2020 • 31 mins
Medieval tombs often depict husband and wife lying hand-in-hand, immortalised in elegantly carved stone: what Philip Larkin would later describe in his celebrated poem, An Arundel Tomb, as their ‘stone fidelity’.
These gestural monuments seem to belong to a broader tendency towards ‘expressivity’ in late-medieval sculpture. Whereas the figures on Romanesque portals stare back at the viewer impassively, their G...
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May 6, 2020 • 34 mins
William Etty was obsessed with the female form. At the height of his career as a history painter, long after his election to Royal Academician in 1828, he sat side-by-side with novices to study naked models, a practice he continued even as his health faded toward the end of his life. Whether posed alone or in groups, these models served as templates for goddesses, graces, muses, nymphs and sirens in his finished paintings. Byp...
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