International conference
organized by the research group ACE
Rennes 2 University,
April 23d and 24th, 2009

"Art and Commerce in Great Britain, XVIIIth-XXIst centuries."

Key speaker : Julian Stallabrass, Courtauld Institute, London.

Presentation

For now more than three centuries, the art and the commercial activities
of the British Isles have been more or less harmoniously bound together.
Indeed, it was precisely at a time when, just after the Glorious
Revolution, a large middle-class audience suddenly became consumers of
culture, that an actual vernacular artistic and visual tradition was born
in Great Britain. The growing individualization of British art was made
possible during the XVIIIth century thanks to a prosperous economy which
was largely due to the country's intense commercial activity, clearly
setting the practices of the English and Scottish apart from that of their
European counterparts.

The very beginning of the XVIIIth century saw the rise of an organized
trading system for British art with the use of go-betweens, or even of
merchants, while before that, it had been against the law to import
foreign paintings and transactions had been scant, with buyers and artists
usually dealing directly together.

The period saw figures like Andrew Hay and Samuel Paris emerge, along with
the development of a bidding system and of a network of auction houses.
While a royal academy of painting and sculpture was long in the making and
only opened in 1768, and in the absence of aristocratic patronage to match
that of their French and Italian neighbours, British artists had to deal
with a bourgeois clientele whose attitude to money was still fraught with
age-old anxieties.

As David Solkin has shown in his book Painting for Money, it is the very
nature of this new market which gave rise to new genres, among them
Conversation Pieces, ambiguously positioned between genre painting and
group portraits. For all the theoretical support of the Academy, history
painting carried on being dismissed by buyers thirsty for sensationalist
gothic pictures and pre-raphaelite genre scenes.

The new ways in which artworks were commercialised progressively came to
have an influence on the way they were produced, reproduction and
photoengraving having been developed in order to circulate some of the
works and to provide the artists with an income (which in the case of
William Hogarth proved to be quite comfortable.) This allowed the artists
themselves to join the ranks of the middle-class and to become respected
professionals with structured careers. Eventually, the finish and
technical niceties of many 18th century paintings were influenced by the
anticipation of these modes of dissemination.

Victorian genre painting largely owed its popularity to the tastes and
buying power of a new class of avid collectors which came to prominence at
the turn of the century. These merchants and entrepreneurs, newly-enriched
by the Industrial Revolution, untrained in classical art history and too
busy to take the Grand Tour started investing their assets in art
collections. While doing so, they shunned old Masters, put off by the risk
of gambling their money on one of the many fakes forged at the time, in
favour of living artists painting accessible everyday subjects. The tastes
of this new moneyed class, anxious for respectability and imbued with
family values and a protestant work ethic encouraged story-telling in
religious and domestic subjects, attention to detail and the small-scale
format of canvases intended to improve the minds of viewers in the comfort
of their own homes. The accusation of philistinism levelled by Roger Fry
in the early XXth century at a British audience incapable of appreciating
French post-impressionism was inherited precisely from the commercial
preoccupations of the British art world. This stigma held fast until the
end of the XXth century, only to be compounded by a marked condescension
for the parochialism of a national art overshadowed by its American
counterpart.

Today's context is one in which the internationalisation of the
contemporary art world can be seen as both a by-product of and a mirror
held to today's globalized commodity culture. In 2007, Damien Hirst
therefore decided to capitalize on this duality of today's art, both for
himself and for the sake of the British scene. His diamond-encrusted
skull, For the Love of God was sold to an investment group for £50
million, thus becoming the most expensive contemporary art work in the
world and making British art a force to be reckoned with.

Abstracts should be sent along with a short biographical note both to
Sophie Mesplede sophie.mespledeuhb.fr and to Charlotte Gould
c.gouldwanadoo.fr before July 15th, 2008.

Charlotte Gould - Sophie Mesplède
Département d'anglais
Université Rennes II - Haute Bretagne
Campus Villejean
Place du Recteur Henri Le Moal
CS24 307 Rennes Cedex - France
Tel: +33 (0)2 99 14 10 00
www.uhb.fr
Email: sophie.mespledewanadoo.fr