 My name is Émilie Oléron Evans and I will be chairing the session three of this conference, which has already been productive and rich and very fascinating. So the panel is called Institutions, Disciplining Artistry. I do like a panel with a question in the title that means my job of chairing is made much, this much easier. So thank you for the organizers for that and I'm very excited to hear how our panelists are going to respond to that prompt. Let me introduce our first speaker, Mathilde Cartoralli, who is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Artistry of the Tahira University in Berlin, where she completed her PhD in 2022. She was fellow of the Student Stiftung des Deutsches Volkes from 2018 to 2021 and of the DEAAD in 2019, as well as associate researcher in the project Translocation Historical Inquiries into the Displacement of Cultural Assets at the TU Berlin from 2017 to 2020. Her thesis was recently awarded the Zauer Lenderpreis of the Trans-Halle Institute für Kunstgeschichte in Munich. Congratulations. And the paper she will present is entitled Our Pleasant Aesthetic Scotland Yard. The Wit Photolibrary before the Kurto. Mathilde. So thank you Emily for the introduction and thank you, thank the organizer for having me. So to illustrate the history of the Wit Photolibrary, we shall first introduce the figure of its founder or we shall see maybe co-founder Robert Claremont-Witt, who originated the photo collection in the 1890s during his college studies at Oxford. He graduated in history in 1894. Eventually the Witts will donate their photo library to the Kurto Institute of Art. The donation was announced at the foundation of the Kurto in 1932, but was officialised only 10 years later in 1944, although the photo library actually remained at the Witts in the Witts house until their death in 1952. So this is the start and the end in point. Between these two extremes, Witt managed to conduct a parallel career in the art administration, notably as co-founder and first honorary secretary of the National Art Collections Fund, today known as Art Fund, and also in the board of trustees of the National Gallery and the State Gallery. I say a parallel career because by profession Witt was actually a solicitor. It was the end of an important lawyers company in London. This is a painting showing Witt and his wife, Mary Ellen Merton, sitting in the background. And the green patterned as you see on the wall are not like wall decoration, but are the boxes of the photo library. You might know it from the from the portal because they're still the same. And so you see that the photo collection basically invaded the whole apartment of the Witts. So the photo library had a sort of double life. A first life under the Witts until 1952 when it reached an amount of about half a million reproduction and then a sort of institutional afterlife as part of the facilities of the Court and the Institute of Arts when it continued to implement and increase its number and it counts now more than two million reproduction and it's currently undergoing digitization. So in the first part of my talk today I will talk about the first life of the Witt photo library and notably I will focus on the transition of the library from a private hobby to an international research institution. So I said a hobby but actually I should have said two hobbies because in fact we know that the Witt photo library was born out of two different nucleus, the one of Robert Witt and that of his future wife, Mary Helen Martin. Of course this often happened, always happened at the time. The figure of Mary Helen sort of disappears. She's sort of incorporated in a public profile of her husband, but we know that she was an important figure in the life of the library, not only from an organizational point of view but also from a scientific and from a social point of view she cultivated all the networks that rotated around the library. So after the marriage in 1899 the marriage is considered sort of the founding moment of the library and this is one of the rare publications by Mary Helen Martin which as you see it begins with a discovery that she made in the somewhat ruthless process of dissecting a publication for the purpose of incorporating its illustrations into the Witt library. So this gives us an idea of Mary Helen's tasks in the library. The institutionalization of the Witt photo library occurred particularly starting from the 1910s. From 1913 the Witts hired external staff and they moved from Connaught Square to Portman Square in 1915. In 1920 they published the first catalog of the library. The library is a collection of photomechanic reproduction of western painting and drawing spanning from the 11th, 12th century to modern times and it included at the time of the first catalog, so 1920, 8,000 artists and about 150,000 reproductions which were almost doubled five years later when a supplement to the catalog was published. The library was and is still today organized according to national schools and within each school the artists are arranged by alphabetical order. Within each folders then there are some subdivision according to subject matter. Here you see the hours of admittance, so the library was open to everyone from Monday to Friday 10 to 1 and 2 to 4 o'clock and also the list of artists included. The mission of the library was according to Witt to form, I quote, after the analogy of the great Oxford dictionary of the English language, a kind of mares dictionary of pictures and drawings by concentrating and bringing together reproductions of as nearly as maybe the whole body of European painting and drawing and arranging it as a dictionary in the matter most convenient for easy reference. Witt describes then the composition of the library which is made of not only the most famous photo of publishing houses like Alinari, Anderson Broglie, so pictures of museum collections but also and this is the peculiarity of the Witt, every kind of cut from sale catalogs and catalogs of private collection. So you see illustrations are cut from art publication of all kinds, books including monographs and general works, periodicals, magazines and newspapers. So the peculiarity and the distinctive feature of the Witt is not much in the quality of its reproduction but rather in the quantity and the comprehensiveness which together with its indexing system allow to compare and access huge quantity of images in a very short time. The reproductions are mounted on brownish cardboard of the side more or less of an A4 and this is again a quotation from Witt. Each reproduction bears the name of the painter, so the main reference, the subject of the picture and the name of the owner or institution to which it belongs and were available the text of any descriptive or critical medal dealing with size, material, condition, date, signature and the names of the collection through which it has passed together with literary, critical and biographical reference. In the case of alternative attribution, numerous duplicate photographs are inserted under each name with cross-reference. So you see for example here, this is an example of work by which was formally attributed to the School of Lippo Mammy is reattributed to Giotto according to a proposal by Longhi in 1930 and therefore it migrates from the Lippo Mammy to the Giotto folder and this is what remains as a trace. It might have been a duplicate in his case it's only an empty card referring to the new Giotto collocation and Witt also states here at the end of the quotation Senator Adolfo Venturi, the dian of Italian critics has spoken of treating attribution as a game of football. It is a brilliant and exciting game but it isn't even more. In fact it is the basis of art scholarship. So indeed Adolfo Venturi who we have already heard was the first holder of the the holder of the first university chair of art history in Italy at La Sapienza in Rome from 1901. Adolfo Venturi made research and visited the Witt Library and published his discovering, praising the initiative of Robert Witt. This is a quote from his article of 1927. Those who visit the photographic library of ancient and modern paintings in the London house of important square of Sir Robert Witt are sure to find an extraordinary aid for their studies such as no library in the world can provide. A similar stance was made by the most probably the most famous authority of museum connoisseurship of the time Villenbauder, Villenfonte Bauder who he was very old in the late 1920s so he didn't visit the Witt photo library but made a research per mail and he praised this collection as an arrival resource for scholarly use because the comparison between these different reproduction allowed him to reconstruct the artist's life, his travels and a field of work and you see that he concludes I recommend our fellow countrymen, German, to use the institute not only for the work but also to learn from this exemplary model for the establishment of similar institutes in Germany, you will receive all the information supported from Sir Robert. So by the late 1920s the Witt Wauder was a claim, recognized international institution for art scholarship, he was still private but he had a public function and at the point that it inspired the creation of analogous institutes in other parts of the world, most famously the Frick Art Reference Library founded by Mary Ellen Frick in memory of her husband Henry in 1920 in New York but also maybe a less renowned offspring of the Witt library is the library of the Art Research Institute, today National Research Institute for Cultural Properties in Tokyo which was founded by Yuko Yoshiro, a pupil of Berenson and this is again a quote from Charles Holmes in the Burlington Magazine praising the Witt as our pleasant aesthetic Scotland yard and you see on the left this is from the archive of the court of the institute, this is a collection of acknowledgments of authors who thank the Witt photo library and because they use them the resources of the library for their research and publication and you see among the others John Popennessy who thank Berenson and Witt but also as Dietrich Gronau the son of Georg and other international scholars and I will give you just a quick glimpse of the visitor's book that I could consult at the Witt library, you see here this is the visit of Mary Ellen, I have a lapsus about the name so I'm saying Mary Ellen but I think I'm wrong anyway Frick who visited the library in 1924 and you see that in these same days also William George Constable, future director of the court of the institute and Philip Andy, future director of the National Gallery then you see Yoshiro's here and Langton Douglas on the same day, these are just some highlights of really impressive list of names, you see here again Yoshiro accompanied by Berenson and Nicke Mariano in 1927 and these are the Germans, Hans Poster and Max Jakob Friedländer from Dresden and Berlin respectively and finally also Roger Frye, Leo Ferrum, founder one of the important figures in the founding of the Court and Institute, Wilhelm Suida and I think I should have also yes Adolfo Venturi with his wife Maria Perotti and also Collins Baker and other you see both British and international scholars so I would like to devote this last five minutes to situate the photo the Witt photo library in the context of the time and what I refer to as the politics of connoisseurship of the early 20th century because the whole lifespan of the Witt photo library and the Witts themselves to occurred in a I would say troubled period for British art history and art heritage because it is the period which is also known as the Great Art Text so this namely the massive drain of art treasures, art assets from British art collections that were taken to first to German museums at the end of the 19th century and then more and more to the US with the new tycoons such as you see here JP Morgan with his big dollar magnetic dollar attracting all the assets overseas so the National Art Collections Fund was founded exactly to try to limit and counter the art exodus through public campaigns for fund raising some of them were successful this is the example one of the most famous examples all by Cristina of Denmark which was successfully acquired by the fund for the National Gallery in 1909 but there were of course also many cases in which the fund didn't manage to meet the huge prizes paid by the American collectors such as for instance the one of the blue boy purchased by Henry Huntington in 1922 and Gethys Paul's studies have shown how these art exodus was the same time the cause and the symptom of a deep crisis of the traditional model of aristocratic stewardship a model that was re-discussed and redefined in favor of a new essentially middle-class and professionalized model of stewardship the position of the fund which is also the position of wheat which was its chairman was essentially a paraphrase he wrote many texts on the on this subject this is an example of a letter of the time on the to the times where he essentially says that the British government cannot enforce legislation that limit the freedom of owners to dispose of their cultural assets so what the government has to do is to conduct a selective acquisition policy with the support of private donors essentially along two lines that you see shortly mentioned here on the one hand the great masterpieces who shall by no means leave the country and on the other hand the representative works of all schools and periods with the idea of completing and increasing the comprehensiveness of national collections so the national collections fund needed both a Sun scholarship to orient and conduct this selective acquisition policy but also a popular support for on the part of donors and this dual policy emerges also from the organization of the fund which while targeting a mass audience of potential subscribers entrusted the decision-making process to groups of experts in subcommittee purchase committee you see this the example of the purchase committee of pictures and drawings drawings and prints around 1930 with the entry of a young Kenneth Clark and also Willan judge constable so the future director of the court this position also reflects with comment on the on the funding of the of the court institute in a in a letter that he wrote to the Burlington magazine I quote those interested in art and art history however include also a very large number who are in no sense professionally concerned with its teaching or administration collectors amateurs connoisseurs men and women in every work of life and of every profession many I know readers of the Burlington magazine who care deeply for art in all its manifestation love and visit museums and galleries and are eager to learn all they can I do not of course suggest that the two outlooks are necessarily antagonistic I cannot be combined in one organization on the contrary I am convinced that in great as rich a certain stature and age they should integrate each other so this combination of professionalism and dilettantism is we have seen also at the very genetic core of the wheat photo library we have seen the these visitors are rooms where the great name of international connoisseurs were side by side with an on for us anonymous names of common common people lay men and women who were who could attend the library just for their own interest and love for the arts and I think in this serene coexistence of the amateur and the professional element is really one of the distinctive traits of British art historiography in the early 20th century and also of the political and cultural cultural mission of the court at the institute at its outset and I want to conclude by quoting again Robert wheat photographic library should form part of the educational art equipment of every capital and indeed to a subsidiary degree of every art center that these will gravel gladly come about as with the growing interest in art and the higher standard of collusion connoisseurship the need is felt more and more by every art lover whether student or expert cannot for a moment be doubted and the court at the institute representing as it will the side of London University which concerns itself with all the aspects of teaching of art history will surely satisfy the need thanks so the next speaker is Richard Stevens whose biography I have in front of me who is the current editor of the annual volume of the warpole society he studies 17th and 18th century English drawings and the history of the art trade during the same period his catalogue raisonnés of the landscape painter Francis Tone 1739 to 1816 was published by the Paul Mellon Center in 2016 and he is editor of a developing project to create a free online library of primary sources the art world in britain 1660 to 1735 and the title of the presentation today is the first half century of the warpole society 1911 to 1960 thank you very much and thanks for the opportunity to speak today paul opay was closely involved with the warpole society during its first half century he was a founding committee member in 1911 and stayed on the committee until 1950 his final warpole society publication was the memoirs of thomas jones in 1952 so his life and scholarly work overlapped significantly with with the first half century of the warpole society my aim today really is just to give an overview of the society in its first few decades there's no warpole society archive for these years unfortunately so no type type letters to to show and I actually wanted to do this talk in order to make myself look at the society because nobody's really looked at the early history so in the best traditions of the the clerical english art history and this is very much a a preliminary sketch and and hopefully you know we can we can hone and improve it as time goes right sorry forgive me just to to clarify the warpole society was founded in 1911 to promote the study of british art but it still exists today in pretty much the same form as a century ago and with the same aims it publishes an annual volume of long form research on british art and I borrowed for the on my title side a quote the foundations of knowledge from hans's article that's been referred to in british art studies which I recommend everyone reads and where he uses it to stand for a particularly scholarly agenda among mid 20th century english art historians I think it's fair to say that the warpole society not only then but now strongly identifies with that and embraces that phrase and that agenda as its own and we're a membership organization of about 400 members anyone can join for as little as 20 pounds if you're a student and you get access not only to the current year's volume but our entire archive of hundreds of papers published since 1911 so do please visit the website and take a look but back to 1911 and to alexander finberg who was the founder of the warpole society on the right is a drawing by finberg in the vna professionally finberg was an illustrator and a writer on art and very interested in in english drawings and in 1905 he was employed by the national gallery to reorganize the drawings that jmw turner had bequeathed to the nation in the 1850s after turner's death following a court case brought on by turner's relations the president and secretary of the royal academy had been tasked with returning to turner's family everything in the bequest that turner hadn't himself drawn everything by turner was to belong to the nation but when he went to write an inventory of the turner bequest turner found that many mistakes in attribution that meant that drawings by turner had been returned and drawings that weren't by turner had been retained including works by gertin de luthberg samuel scott michael angelo rooker and days um all of whose work was mistaken for turners and finberg realized that really the royal academy couldn't tell one 18th century artist's hand from another um furthermore in his preface to the turner bequest inventory finberg also described how a french writer on art had complained to him that based on the published biographies of turner he was still in the dark whether for example turner had visited italy in 1822 whether his travels in 1804 were real or fictional and and when he'd visited holland first or venice so there was a general lack of sound information about even a major figure like turner who'd been the subject of various books and the last point opportunity versus rescue there are two sides to the warpaw project and and to finberg's views on all this there's looking forwards you see the opportunity you're making progress you're building foundations and you have this wonderful opportunity to explore um uh underexplored areas of art but you're you're also very critical um about an england establishment the incapacity of the royal academy um and a need to rescue arts and those two um aspects um sort of coexist so um uh finberg circulated a manifesto in 1911 which was um appeared in the times newspaper and um he'd sketched out a society that should do four things it should make provision for the collection preservation and classification of material for the study of the history of british art should publish an annual illustrated volume containing reproductions of fine examples of the work of british artists particularly um the work of artists who've been neglected or forgotten um it should organize exhibitions and arrange for the delivery of lectures um although those last two um points never really happened due to um financial constraints and really the the society's only ever really published um this volume of research um furthermore the manifesto also contains a sort of scholarly agenda which I think is worth quoting from it gives us a snapshot of how things looked at the start of the 20th century um and so I'm quoting finberg here few realize how intimately our art is bound up with our past history and with our national life and character even among ourselves we too often hear our national school of painting spoken of as if it were a sudden and unaccountable birth of the 18th century remarkable only for the achievements of five or six men of genius practically nothing has yet been done to study the remains of british painting in the 12th 13th 14th and 15th centuries from the artistic point of view to trace out their aesthetic development and to form trustworthy ideas about their relation to similar things abroad the english school of portrait painting in miniature requires much deeper and more documented study than has yet been spent upon it above all perhaps the painting of the 17th and 18th century requires patient and widespread investigation painters have been numerous in the country ever since the time of Charles I but little is known about them and comparatively few are as yet represented in our public galleries by identified works so here finberg's staking out the ground and explaining how to build the foundations of knowledge do wide-ranging survey work I guess boundary work what might call it locate art in its historical context pay close attention to documents identify and attribute works relate british art to continental models and look beyond the famous names okay this was all happening at a really interesting time as we've heard actually from several speakers in the in the art world and we get discussions about the status of british art including contemporary art and the fate of the country's cultural heritage where had british art emerged from where was it headed and how and where should it be put on display much of the debate centered around the fate of the turn of a quest and the new pymlico gallery which finberg was strongly against actually part of a wider trend for new museum buildings including at the national portrait gallery and the ashmolean which brought with it new thinking about their collections the art market again we've heard the the talk about the the foundation of the nacf there was a lot of anxiety about the export of european old masters to new museums in berlin and to private collectors in america and the irreparable damage being done to the national interest and i think it's strongly appealed to finberg that private citizens were getting together to sort this problem out he had no faith in governments or institutions and i know that um my talk is in the institutional slot but really i think there's there's a huge difference between a few private people sitting around a table and trying to do something and you know a government department the treasury university and national gallery that kind of stuff technology photography advances in photography were fundamental to the way that art history was developing it's no coincidence that illustrations were a prominent part of the wall post society manifesto without published images obviously there'd be no wit library and the camera could be taken in the pocket from from the early 1900s and it completely transformed how ambitious you could be and the kind of veracity that you could claim from a from a photograph was was a new thing as well um it stimulated new publishing societies like the wall post society funded by a subscription model um the closest comparison is campbell dodgson's the juror society which issued 12 volumes between 1898 and 1911 and there was a large overlap between its committee and the wall post society and in fact the volumes uh just are designed in a very similar way the medici society launched in 1908 with a vast catalog of i think six and a half thousand high quality reproductions of paintings and hundreds of drawings almost the drawings for sale um its book published our publishing arm published opa's book on Botticelli in 1911 and finally scholarly models the foundational work wall poles anecdotes which is where the the society gets its name from but also museum collections were being described systematically for the first time binion Lawrence Binion's catalog of english drawings the last volume came out in 1907 colvin's lists of dutch and flemius artists and finberg's inventory of the turn of the quest which came out in 1909 and continued to be in use throughout the 20th century and i think really until 2012 when an online catalog replaced it and and boarded bibliographic biographical projects Lionel Cust's dictionary of national biography entries Ulrich team's algaminus lexicon and these were sort of literary equivalents of of the wit library project really and someone like algin and graves who put a lot of primary materials out there with his checklist and indexes of exhibitors at the royal academy and other indexing societies and other exhibiting societies sorry um paul opi's turn is so i just wanted to shoo on two to francis town drawings in the case i love francis town but in july 1910 paul opi bought these two drawings in a parcel of 16 drawings by francis town they were all cataloged as by turner and i think that's right isn't it tim um and but even though they clearly signed by town they were dated um these are dated 1781 when turner was five and i just mentioned it so that the the ignorance about 18th century darsmanship goes went broader than royal academy and it was um you know generally seen it in the art market but um it's also a good example of how 18th century art once it was noticed could seem really exciting and even modern and you know and you can you can imagine seeing this for the first time in 1910 being really excited and wanting to explore that period and find out about it so who these are the people who ran the war post society in 1911 this is the the founding executive committee um there was a larger committee of about 20 21 people of which opi was a member at this point um and their late victorian civil servants really the average date of birth was 1859 opi born in 1878 would have been um by far the youngest um the chairman was the charles holroyd who was um director of the national gallery homes was director of the national portrait gallery um armstrong director of the national gallery of ireland colvin was keeper of prince and drawings at the bm lorenz benion worked at the bm um charles bell as we've heard i worked at the ash mullion and the the other two apart from finburg were a lawyer and a judge um and really it was benion bell and finberg who were the who were the british art specialists the others were people in senior jobs who sat on various committees to give the initiative some weight and you see them on um the um you know um other publishing i mean the uh the the juror society they were part of the organizing committee of various exhibitions as well at the same time so i think people once you were a senior person you were just expected to fulfill um various committee jobs but um the call for call for papers asks um whether we should consider the various spheres of the art world as separate realms and i think um looking through the early lists of committee members of the war post society you really get the sense of revolving doors of their being you know seven or eight institutions um the slade professorships burning some magazine the mpg um a few other galleries um where these people occupy um you know they take turns in occupying these roles and um it seems like a very small world going to the broader membership that um the war post society launched with about 300 members or so and i've just picked out the googleable names basically and the names that i recognized i think it'd be really worth looking more closely at the membership lists which which were published in in the annual journal um and they were more um spread out geographically that we had quite a few german members um some in america um there were quite a few um british base members but who had their family roots in europe as well um and they span um traditionalists i mean people who thought that the post impressionists were um um trying to destroy the art world and those who thought that you know stop making such a fuss kind of thing um and um uh artists from the new english art club collectors um and so on now i was going to skip this um but i just wanted to to give an example of the sort that the the range of material that was published um in the in the early um in the early volumes and go on to the virtue notebooks because really they are the the central thing that the war post society's published um linel kust um you see him here in the um in his court uniform i guess he was um severe of the king's pictures um and he uh also he was uh um co-editor of the burlington um with roger fry and he was director of the national portrait gallery um he uh also published 300 entries in in the dictionary national biography that was published at the end of the 19th and early 20 beginning of the early 20th century um and in 1934 the burlington magazine called the war post society the third great landmark of scholarship after war post anecdotes of paintings and um kust's dmb entries um and it said british art history was transformed by kust's articles which were based upon researchers into original documentary materials it's this tradition which is carried on by the war post society and when he was proposing the publication of of the notebooks in 1914 kust uh saw george virtue as the model our english art historian the prototype methodical clark really um and he quoted hat horris wallpole's description of virtue that virtue quote visited and revisited every picture every monument that was an object of his research is and being so little a slave to his imagination he was cautious of trusting to that of others in his memorandums he always puts a query against whatever was told him of suspicious aspect and he never gave credit to it until he received the full of satisfaction and when i wrote that and when i think about the the virtue notebooks um highly methodical notebooks um amassed over a lifetime and organized into a single library an index library really they're no different than oliver miller's notebooks and um they're working in exactly the same tradition really and i'm sure there are other notebooks um i mean ellis waterhouse had to serve as a notebooks and op-op it did full i know um publishing the notebooks not only consolidated the society's reputation it effectively established document publishing as a practice in its own right in british art history um and um from this point the number of transcripts that society published significantly increased um but between the foundation and 1930 fewer than one in five publications were transcripts from 1930 to 1959 it was half so they uh the number really increases unsurprisingly um world war two had a had a massive impact on the practice of art history in the uk and the war post society was put completely on hold no volumes appeared between 1940 and 1946 and when things started up again the volumes came out only every other year and it wasn't until 1983 that the volumes became an annual volume again and i'm just showing you the the executive and editorial committee in 1940 and you can see op a now is one of the one of the old guys he's the second oldest after the chairman uh no sorry the president the the early vilchester ilchester had spent the war or was to spend the war writing the index to virtue's notebook the top row were from this younger generation of clerks really i guess all four were in the unit that's come to be known as the monuments men and jeffree web in fact ran the monuments men unit and established its protocols and um i've just thought um the call for papers invites us to consider what was different about the practice of art history before and after the war but i also wonder what were the effects and scholars of the war itself of their military service and and war experiences um i don't know the answer but but they've seen huge cultural destruction on a vast scale um the fragility of cultural remains the ease with which things can be lost forever must have been very obvious to them um and also these these guys and the monuments men had been called on to make these kind of life or death judgments about what was worth saving and what wasn't and so you can very easily see that you might have a sort of idea about what civilization was and what we need to what we need to know a kind of common corpus of the i guess the the european um yeah the european civilization well i'm moving to the 1950s essentially the founders pretty much all die um helder finberg was alexander finberg's widow and herself an art historian and a dealer um charles bell was was the last founder to die age 94 in 1966 um the society looks beyond virtue um the virtue notebooks were all completed in 1955 and other major transcripts followed notably oliva miller's two volumes on the art collection of king charles the first um the first appeared in 1960 and but there um there's there's there's a sense which the society hasn't ever really shaken off of needing another virtue another um you know completely game changing um a set of transcripts to publish um modernization um the uh society adopted a constitution that codified the shift away from illustrations so um whereas in 1911 it was to publish an annual illustrated volume containing reproductions in 1959 it was an annual volume containing original documents um women had published in the war post society um since the beginning people like hilda finberg and catherine isdal who will um hear about tomorrow she transcribed the virtue notebooks but it wasn't until the 1950s that the um the society's first editors were women um pamela tutor craig margaret winnie um were the two editors um and mary woodall was a third who was um on the executive committee um all three graduates of the courthold but mary woodall actually had a more traditional route into the courthold um she'd studied at the slade and very many um early art historians um studied had studied at the slade and um just to note yeah the as as this becomes more commonly something uh studied at university the number of university members increases but um this is all a slideshow really to um um of the post the the the significant factor of the post where it was paul melan really um using his vast vast fortune based on his family's shareholding in the gulf oil corporation to found in effect what became his own national gallery of british art um his own courthold institute and and his own war post society um but that's uh that's for another day um just so this is my final slide i wanted to um highlight that really we're dealing with several generations of scholar in this in this period 1900 to 1960 and there was a point when the earlier people um died and people who we who um we think of you know the oliver millers and the ellis waterhouses um write their obituaries and i thought it was interesting to see how those people look back um enhances article um he just explores how they face the future looking forward but how did they look back and what did they think about what opa's generation had done so um martin hardy's obituary was written by basal taylor and he says hardy's qualifications um while by while by no means uncommon in his generation would now be most rare and in some unreasonable opinions treated as a handicap and what what he was referring to was the fact that hardy had trained as as an artist um ellis waterhouse says that collins baker who had also trained as an artist belonged to that last great age of the self-taught scholar in england before it was permissible to call oneself an art historian and waterhouse considered collins baker's book on steward portrait painters the last great scholarly monument of that generation it seems to me almost the foundation stone of the serious study of our native painting the birdings a magazine obituary of campbell donch and similarly um talked about him having developed the foundation of our knowledge in prince and doorings and referring to to to martin conway um who founded the conway library now at the wit the birdings a magazine suggested that the modern world with its institutions and its highly specialized knowledge is less likely than victorian england to encourage men as adventurous as many sided and as individual as lord conway to make the history of art their career um so these societies they all idealized the past as a simpler and more innocent time and and now their authors seem to regret the greatest specialization and and the fact that work was based around institutions um but while they clearly felt that the conditions of working had changed a lot what i found striking was that their intellectual agenda hadn't people working in the middle of the century saw themselves as building on or extending rather than questioning or changing the previous generations work um and just as a as a final remark as as a as a an art historian um to bring it into the present day i wanted to end by saying that for some of us even today doing art history hasn't changed fundamentally since the mid 20th century it's still something that happens in the sail room and the print room and the archive it's still about looking at things closely over a period of years um being as interested in what the first person said um as what the latest person has said and um the the wit library being the starting point um for everything thank you very much well thank you both for wonderful papers that are um complimentary and in them in of themselves at the same time so rich um i i see connections already um but maybe if i may be as bold as to ask what do you think of the question that uh was the title of this panel um do you see that it's it's very uh it's great that both your paper had this chronological so taking us through the history of both these spaces so to what extent can we call them institutions and to what extent uh does their work build a discipline of art history um so as regards the wit photo library um i think i talked about institutionalization starting from the 1910s because it is the moment when the catalogs are published there's a stuff external stuff is not anymore the so Robert and Mary and Anne taking care of the collection and you see that isn't in there is an effort of system systematizing and making public um so the systematizing input was already there i think it belonged to the late 19th century um sort of universalist lexicographic tradition you quoted um team abecker and it's very interesting because wit uh signed an an appeal for the team abecker on the barlington magazine i think it was in 1919 because there were in financial difficulties after the war so he signed an appeal to have the team abecker funded um so which is also um very um typical of wit as a future chairman of the national art collections fun to call for subscription so i think that there is already an idea at the start but the resources and the reputation and you know also the open administration outside of the wit uh grows together with the collection and that that's the reason why i talked about institutionalization so this uh transition from a private to a public space thank you yes that's definitely an important element of the definition but i don't really think of the war post society at that time as an institution um i think it was too small um it was run on a voluntary basis and um i think it was um a little bit like the nxcf although the nxcf n a cf then became very large and um you know had its offices at the the walrus collection um and it was written of as being almost a state organization um i think the the war post society was was more in tune with someone like opa who clearly didn't get on with um official term and you know had wasn't very successful in his in his career um i think it was um a group of people who wanted to publish something and but i think it followed a program i think the the agenda that finberg set out in 1911 was basically executed um i mean i didn't really talk about it in my talk but i mean you know it's fit um the the publications of the first 20 years do fill in these gaps and then i think um um cast what cast wanted to do which was published the virtue notebooks and also published the papers of the society of artists of great britain and they were all transcribed and they've now just been lost basically i don't know how they were lost and but they were going to publish that as well um so i don't think they made any great methodological advances but they did um cover the cover the ground i guess in terms of subject matter and so on thank you yeah i i hear what you're saying um and you're the expert but at the same time what i want to bring on bring up the commonalities that i saw this this um this objective this goal of comprehensiveness and being systematic uh i found it i completely agree with with your your assessment of their of their position and uh there are things missing to call it an institution and at the core at the same time if we talk of the practice of artistry there is so the composition of a comprehensive photographic library so library of images that people could use and in the case of the world for society this objective of making available documents uh i find is really central to the practice of then i mean what were their target readership and um um were these documents to what extent were they offering these documents as is or contextualizing them and analyzing them as they were publishing them they were mostly just transcribed um and um uh indexed so there was a fairly bear there wasn't any great footnoting um they were offered to the members of the Woolpole Society the deal was you subscribe as a member and you get a copy of the book and that's that's why i think the membership lists are quite interesting and there are some hundreds of people um i but i think though i think i think honestly um that happened to the Woolpole Society i think that they fell into this thing of um being the people who published documents because in the first 20 years they didn't really publish documents they published something in the very first volume it wasn't till volume five that they had another document um and but then i think the virtue notebooks became such a big deal that that um they themselves and also all their readers and their public thought okay i'm going to send these people a document and they just became the people who published documents thank you very much i'm going to open the to the floor for for questions is it a question for both of you but it's picking up on something i think particularly Richard that you mentioned about the Slade as a source of art historians and i wonder if you've got any observations about the relationship between art school and the world of art history which in a way is kind of being reconfigured presently when you think of as a very contemporary thing but clearly there's a kind of an earlier history of a much closer relationship and whether that was changing by the end of the period that you're covering here well it was but it was only um i didn't touch it just through time but um Mary Woodall even though she she i think died in 1988 so you know recently really and she was a she's a post-war figure she nevertheless shows how late in date the that that Slade to postgraduate court hold thing carried on and you're absolutely right when i was thinking um i i came to mark Hallott's leaving do and he talked about that film you know so he was engaging with contemporary artists and so um that's that's a very old thing that we're doing again um uh yeah i mean um Charles Holmes the director of the MPG was a practicing artist lots of these people um C.H. Collins Baker was a trained as an artist um so many of them did and also lots there were just lots of just practicing artists and some amateur artists who were in the in the early memberships thank you i think that's the question and i don't know if there are any questions online uh you you will let me thank you yes um it's interesting that the final historical cutoff point is the 60s for all kinds of reason the gold stream report 67 and the fact that op-ed and died in that period but arguably the greatest change in attitude social attitudes towards art art history and the public kind of perception of art was the foundation of the arts council over the labor government 1945 that plus you know the kind of requirements then the art to be explained to an audience with the rapid expansion of regional art galleries the requirement that these galleries and exhibitions have a guide to to inform the person what implications did that have for art history surely what was required was a massive increase in the number of art historians or art trained people be they artists or whatever who could explain to a wider audience whereas if you're looking at the wallpole society it seems to be a narrowing down not an expansion so i'm i'm trying to kind of understand the implications that that not only had for if in a sense the arguing for the accountability of the wallpole's existence but also the implications for art history it's only really in the 60s that art history begins to expand so you've got this brief period from 45 through to 60 that really we don't know a great deal about what happened i wondered if you could say something about that well i can't say much i must admit i don't know much about 20th century you know history of art and museums but it strikes me that art history was expanding as a practice in in universities and the the wallpole society primarily spoke to professional art historians not to the art public and if there was where it fits in perhaps was informing curatorial practice and exhibitions that maybe i mean i think mary woodall worked at birmingham and she put on a what was considered a groundbreaking exhibition of was it ritchie wilson and she was talking she published a gainsborough's letter so you know i guess it stimulated that kind of stuff maybe it just doesn't it didn't interact at the the level of the public that the new art public thank you there's a question at the back perhaps perhaps this is more a thought for overnight and coming back to tomorrow but i'm going back to hance's question at the beginning about the black hole um it does always bother me that people seem to think that art history begins in this country with the courthole institute um of course you told us that in the 19th century it was very active lots of famous books written but yes i do think going back to martin's point there is art history was alive and well and taught in art schools in in this black hole period and many great names it's not just that that there were artists and it's still very much the case today that you talk to curators and you find that they actually were gifted artists who decided they'd make a living as a great but i think we do need to recognize um the the amount of art history that is being taught and to ask ourselves why that is not regarded as academic i mean it's is it simply that uh the history of art was being fed to art students to sort of pick and choose what they could use in their own art or or or was it as you say i'm just trying to help people to understand art better as citizens as well so i think there is a another cast of characters here that we we haven't talked about is is the people at the slade people at the royal college of art you know many distinguished publishing art historians who were teaching in art schools thank you absolutely yes there are a lot of worlds uh that coexist and that overlap in many ways and um i'm sure the other panels tomorrow will will complement what we've heard so far which was fascinating i i have a question for matilde about the international dimension of the of the wit collection and this wonderful cast of international figures who have come so um do you do you know what about their their own research so what was their intention come in here just curiosity to see such a library or for for specific research and um apart from the two examples that you gave us in in japan and the free collection i was quite impressed to hear that villain from border had been uh complimentary and and elogious about this um do you see resonance and of the the reputation so of the wit collection seems to be positive internationally do you feel like it also had an impact on the perception of the art world in britain abroad well to answer your first question about the users um there are really i just selected a few i singled out a few important names but there are dealers collectors a huge variety artists of course as well who come to the library for many different reasons but of course these international scholars like venturi badansson they did they visited the library for their own studies venturi writes in 38 a text in which he really he talks about the education of um in particular women at the perfectionamento this school for professional art historian in rome and he mentions a series of sort of mandatory um schedule a mandatory schedule of visits of research trips which were funded by these borsaries in rome and the wit is one of the um institutes that um the so pupils and students of venturi had to visit for the research so it was really recommended and he had a huge reputation um there were of course other examples the duce library in paris but he stopped in the 1910s when he was donated to the so bonus sort of it didn't the the wit really kept growing and had this comprehensiveness and there were of course also private photo libraries libraries badansson of studded growth um fridt lander so um i can say that there was awareness of the importance speaking of institutionalization that if you want to lay the the foundation of art history as an academic discipline and also in the attempt to demarcate from practitioners i think that photography played a very important role and um he was discussed since the very first international congress of art historian in vienna 1873 and he kept being discussed for instance in the international congress of 1921 where both conway and wit are mentioned so there is a transnational uh comparison and uh an awareness of the importance of these facilities and these equipment to promote the um academic autonomy of of art history worldwide thank you there's another thank you very much was it relevant that um wit's wit was german actually wasn't he so his parents were german i think the family but he was um he was never part of did they maintain any both his parents were 100 as far as i but i found really little about early years i to be honest because the visitors book started only in 1923 and the catalogs as i said 1920 so before the 1910s uh i really don't know much but actually now that you let me think about he mentions a german publication it was something like classic adakunst um as a sort of the starting point of his collection because he had this publication he decided to cut all the reproductions and started indexing ordering according to artists and that was so it comes from you know editing and from the printed image to the photo library and so probably that might be a plausible link thank you for for for making me think about it and i'm thinking by contrast this germanic systemization perhaps and the very amateur foundations of the wall pole site of course wall pole himself was fancied himself with some sort of art history can i can i just briefly say how deeply odd i still find the wit library in particular i mean it's the same for the konwe library but that there are educated men with of course an interest in the artist suddenly start clipping pictures not in the hundreds but in the hundred thousands is i still am always puzzled by it by the psychology behind this particular collecting effort but that's very soothing yes i know but this is just a little side remark i just from going back to the discussion i found it fascinating to think about to what extent both these institutions are something like almost accidental institutions starting as this fairly individualized fairly you know small scale coterie where you have a club of people maybe or indeed a husband and wife team who sit there doing their thing with a professional intention no doubt and with a scholarly purpose in mind but nevertheless very much not starting out by saying right we need you know proper government backing or we need to attach it to university or whatnot it starts out as this universal thing and i think that's where the kind of post-45 developments are so important that suddenly other institutional frameworks come around these institutions that i feel always can adopt them when you have a substantial amount of universities teaching subjects such as art history well these endeavors to me seem to become suddenly exposed almost professionalized and i think coming back to the point of the slate as well that that's where i completely agree we see this split in retrospect because after 45 essentially the university system won they did the department model the art historical academic model brought it was brought forward and then absorbed the achievements and the outputs of say wall pole and wit into that realm which was not necessarily a given because these might also be resources that could have been mined by entirely different players in the field that might not have been academics maybe just a quick reaction to that so also i didn't mention that but the wit photo library the regional intention around the 1910s 1920s was to give it to the national gallery and i think it's very interesting because it's leo ferham who does some political strategic moves and manages to take constable who was meant to be the director of the national gallery and the wit photo library and then court all donation and his own donation and also a contribution of joseph to win so it's really a political move and i have the feeling coming from the italian context where we have adolfo venturi the ministry i have the feeling that in written due to the fact that also there was not i think like a ministry but this board of trustees and these organizations so networks really played a huge role also in defining cultural politics yeah that thank you that's that all ties it in very neatly together i'm not sure about the time so um do we have time for maybe one 10 minutes anybody has a burning question ah you know there's there's this famous isn't there's this book oh god like oh he was the author again 1817 or something like that the history of britain with the worst left out kind of trying to approach british history from it from by consciously leaving out the main driving force that normally is that the main player in historiography i think in that spirit i think we have left out the warburg so far but um i think that it's a fact that's something we might come back to tomorrow but i think in exactly that realm that i meant that these these these resources also become adopted in in spirit but also in output i think that's where the warburg does play play a role in simply highlighting again and that's where i find the parallel histories so fascinating the warburg of course is also a private foundation by an individual who simply was a magnetic book collector um who also always saw it as an alternative organizational model to the in germany very top-down organized university system so where it is clear that this is meant to be the refined intellectual realm where like-minded people meet discuss and research as any as warburg always called the arbeitsgemeinschaft so a community of laborers of scholars where they in ethos i think might have been surprisingly compatible in many respects to organizations such as the wallpole society and i think that's sometimes where we maybe overestimate the warburg in its institutionality if you know what i mean well it becomes part of the university but yeah okay um that was well we have mentioned the warburg so we've done it check but we obviously they are in the constellation of institutions and spaces that we consider i would like to ask you to join me in thanking warmly again our two panelists for a brilliant session and thank you for all your questions