Digital Project: Voices of art

Voices of art, a digital project supported by a Paul Mellon Centre Digital Project Grant and created by National Life Stories at the British Library is available to access here.

Voices of art champions a rich and unusually detailed spoken word history of British art of the 20th and 21st centuries. Art historians and others working in the field of visual arts have written essays in response to Artists’ Lives, an oral history project run by National Life Stories at the British Library. Within the text of each essay are a series of playable audio extracts from Artists’ Lives enabling readers to listen to the first-hand testimony of artists and those in related professions.

Among the voices in the 98 audio extracts within the essays are artists Eileen Agar (1899–1991), Anthony Caro (1924–2013), Robyn Denny (1930–2014), Sheila Girling (1924–2015), Richard Smith (1931–2016) and Richard Wentworth (born 1947). Alongside their accounts are audio contributions from art historians, curators, three former Directors of Tate (Norman Reid, Alan Bowness and Nicholas Serota) whose successive careers with the gallery cover the years 1946–2017, and the vivacious former Bond Street gallery owner, John Kasmin.