The Practice of Art History in Britain, 1900–1960: Paul Oppé’s Art Worlds – Call for Papers
- 13 April 2023
We are inviting papers for a conference that takes Oppé’s life and multifaceted career as a springboard to reassess British art historiography in the first half of the twentieth century.
In 2017, the Paul Mellon Centre acquired the archive and library of Paul Oppé (1887–1957). The archive is one of the most comprehensive collections of the private and professional papers of an art historian in twentieth-century Britain. Oppé is best known as an independent scholar and a leading expert on British works on paper. A trained classicist, Oppé also acted as advisor and buyer for international museums, he wrote literary criticism, published popular art books, occasionally worked for museums (e.g. as Deputy Director of the V&A) and was a notable collector of eighteenth-century prints and drawings.