Call for Papers

Learning from the Masters:
The use of art history by artist-teachers

Conference Date: 9-11 May 2008
University of Plymouth

This conference will seek to explore the role played by art history in
the teaching practices of artists in art academies, private art
schools, art colleges, polytechnics, and universities. Sir Joshua
Reynolds advertised the centrality of art history in his own
educational philosophy in his 1774 Discourse on the Arts, when he
declared that 'The great use of studying our predecessors is to open
the mind, to shorten our labour, and to give us the result of the
selection made by those great minds of what is grand or beautiful in
nature.' We invite papers that explore the agency of texts, surviving
artworks or personal recollections of artists' lives and teachings, as
positive or negative factors in the formation of the teaching
practices, lecturing, or writings of their successors. How has the
relationship between fine art and art history, manifest in this way,
impacted on the relative disciplinary ethos of the subjects? In what
ways has the Vasarian obsession with the individual impacted on
subsequent pedagogical perspectives? How have past art historical
examples been used to buttress the orthodox or anti-establishment
identities of later art teachers and the institutional climates in
which they have worked? What relationships have been constructed
between art history, pedagogy and ideology in the teaching of art?
How has the gendered concept of the Old Masters been perpetuated and/
or challenged by artist teachers?

Engagements with these questions and other allied lines of inquiry are
invited on subjects from 1700 to the present day. Individual case
studies and thematic surveys will be welcome. The deadline for
submission is 31st March 2008 and proposals of 100 words for single
papers or 500 words for panels, together with any inquiries concerning
the conference should be sent to Matthew Potter at

matthew.potterplymouth.ac.uk

or see the website at

www.research.plymouth.ac.uk/vande2008