The Practice of Art History in Britain, 1900–60: Paul Oppé’s Art Worlds

Hans C. Hönes is Senior Lecturer in art history at the University of Aberdeen. He has published extensively on art historiography since the eighteenth century, and has written and edited books on: Heinrich Wölfflin (Wölfflins Bild-Körper, 2011), eighteenth-century antiquarianism (Kunst am Ursprung, 2014), and art history and migration (Migrating Histories of Art, co-ed. 2019), among others. A new biography of Aby Warburg (Tangled Paths. A Life of Aby Warburg) will be published by Reaktion Books in spring 2024. His research in the history of art history in Britain was supported by a Research Collections Fellowship 2021/22 by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.

Sarah Coviello received her PhD from the Warburg Institute in London, with an AHRC-funded (LAHP) thesis on “Art Historians as Collectors in the Twentieth Century”.  She investigates the intrinsic qualities of art historians' personal collections, and the ways art historians engage scholarly with the objects they own, ultimately applying the history of collecting as a new tool for investigating art historiography and reception studies. During her PhD, she investigated the collecting habits of Bernard Berenson, Roberto Longhi and Kenneth Clark, and she is currently further investigating the panorama of British art historians, also thanks to the support of the Getty Library Grant. In 2018 she was a fellow at the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, researching Kenneth Clark’s role as Gulbenkian’s advisor, and she is an enthusiastic member of the Society for the History of Collecting (Steering Committee – Italian Chapter).

Helen Glaister is an art historian who specialises in Chinese ceramics and decorative arts – focusing particularly on the intersection between Chinese and European art, design and aesthetics during the modern period. Helen’s teaching and scholarship investigates the role of Chinese art objects, collecting and display in identity formation and self-fashioning in a range of spatial and historical contexts. Through detailed provenance research, Helen’s work sheds new light on the circulation of Chinese art objects in Britain, both in the public and private sphere, highlighting the agency of dealers, auction houses, agents, collectors, museums and specialist societies in shaping the historiography of Chinese art in Britain.

Helen studied art history at the University of Leeds before focusing on Chinese art and archaeology at SOAS University of London where she was awarded her MA and PhD. Her thesis, titled “Collecting and Display in Public and Private: A Biography of the Ionides Collection of European Style Chinese Export Porcelain, 1920–70” formed the basis of her monograph, Chinese Art Objects, Collecting, and Interior Design in Twentieth-Century Britain (Routledge, 2023).

Helen has worked closely with the British collections of Chinese art throughout her career at the British Museum and Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London, where she currently holds the position of Course Director of the Arts of Asia Programme. As researcher and lecturer, Helen has worked at the British Library, the Wallace Collection, Birkbeck College and SOAS, where she regularly teaches as senior teaching fellow. Curatorial projects include a recent collaboration with the National Museums, Liverpool touring exhibition to China, titled Splendour: Art in the Age of Victoria (2023–24).

Martin Myrone is Head of Grants, Fellowships and Networks at the Paul Mellon Centre. Before joining the Centre in 2020, Martin spent over twenty years in curatorial roles at Tate, London. His many exhibitions at Tate Britain have included Gothic Nightmares (2006), John Martin (2011), William Blake (2019) and Hogarth and Europe (2021). His research and publications have focused on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British art, with a special interest in artistic identity and artists’ labour, class, cultural opportunity and gender. His many published works include Bodybuilding: Reforming Masculinities in British Art 1750–1810 (2005) and Making the Modern Artist: Culture, Class and Art-Educational Opportunity in Romantic Britain (2020), both published by the Paul Mellon Centre.

Matilde Cartolari is currently research associate at the Institut für Kunstwissenschaft und Historische Urbanistik of the Technische Universität, Berlin, where she completed her PhD in 2022 as part of a cotutelle with the University of Udine.

She studied art history at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, where she participated in the PRIN project La vita delle opera: dalle fonti al digitale on the history of the collection of the Gallerie dell’Accademia (2014–17). Between 2017 and 2020, she was a research associate in the international research cluster Translocations. Historical enquiries into the displacement of cultural assets at TU Berlin. Since 2022, she has been editor and coordinator of the blog for provenance research The Lives of Pictures, developed by the TU in cooperation with the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

She was a fellow of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes (2018–21) and occasional student at the Warburg Institute in London with a DAAD short fellowship (2019). Her research focuses on the interplay between exhibition and museum history, history of conservation and art historiography in twentieth-century Europe. Her doctoral thesis “Ambassadors of Beauty. Italian Old Masters and Fascist Cultural Diplomacy (1930–40)” has recently been awarded the Willibald-Sauerländer-Preis by the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich.

Richard Stephens is the current editor of the annual volume of The Walpole Society. He studies 17th and 18th century English drawings and the history of the art trade during the same period. His catalogue raisonné of the landscape painter Francis Towne (1739-1816) was published by the Paul Mellon Centre at http://www.francistowne.ac.uk in 2016. He is editor of a developing project to create a free online library of primary sources, ’The Art World in Britain 1660-1735’.

Émilie Oléron Evans is a cultural historian of art based at Queen Mary University of London, specialising in cultural transfers, historiography (nineteenth–twentieth century) and the interrelation of art and translation. In her first book, Nikolaus Pevsner: Arpenteur des Arts (2015), she analysed the career of German-born art historian Nikolaus Pevsner as a pivotal moment in the progressive integration of questions of art and architecture into British culture. Her research currently focuses on women art historians and on the role of translation in the evolution of art history as a discipline. Her second monograph, on the reception and legacy of feminist art historian Linda Nochlin, will be published in late 2023.

Rebecca Senior is a research impact manager based in the Humanities Research Centre at the University of York. Her work explores visual culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a particular focus on British monumental sculpture as physical and ideological relics of empire. She has published on monuments and violence, the repurposing of commemorative spaces and allegory as a tool of imperialism and held fellowships at the Henry Moore Institute, the Huntington Library in San Marino, California and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.

Susan Sloman’s most recent publications are, Gainsborough in London (Modern Art Press, 2021) and “The ’infant’ drawings of Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830)”, British Art Journal, XXI, no. 3, Winter 2020/21, pp. 32–41. Forthcoming is a catalogue of the Thomson collection of British portrait miniatures in the Art Gallery of Ontario (title to be determined, for publication spring 2024).

Jeffrey Lieber is an art historian, author of Flintstone Modernism: or The Crisis in Postwar American Culture (MIT Press, 2018). Highlighting canonical works within the contexts of Hollywood films and philosophical, political and literary debates, his book surveys anxieties about the fate of the Classical tradition and the durability of art in the post-Second World War era. Lieber's wide-ranging interests in the field have been sponsored by the Delmas Foundation Grant for Independent Research in Venice among others. A visiting professor at Harvard University (2015–16), his articles have appeared in the New York Times and international magazines as well as peer-reviewed journals. In recent years, he has been invited to present lectures at museums and universities in Australia, England, Germany and the United States.

Chloë Julius is based at the University of Nottingham where, from September, she will be taking up the role of Leverhulme Early Career Fellow. Chloë’s research principally focuses on the historiography of twentieth-century art history in Britain and the United States, and has been published in Art History, Oxford Art Journal and Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies. Chloë is also co-editor of Cases of Citations: On Literature and Art, a forthcoming book published by Manchester University Press. From 2022–2023 Chloë was the Archives and Library Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre.

Chloë Julius is based at the University of Nottingham where, from September, she will be taking up the role of Leverhulme Early Career Fellow. Chloë’s research principally focuses on the historiography of twentieth-century art history in Britain and the United States, and has been published in Art History, Oxford Art Journal and Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies. Chloë is also co-editor of Cases of Citations: On Literature and Art, a forthcoming book published by Manchester University Press. From 2022–2023 Chloë was the Archives and Library Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre.

Sarah Turner is an art historian, curator and writer. She is Director at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London. Her aim is to share the work and resources of the Paul Mellon Centre as widely as possible and to open up new conversations, ideas and narratives about the histories of British art. From 2008–2013 she was Lecturer in the Department of History of Art at the University of York and was Visiting Senior Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art between 2016–2018. Sarah is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. She is the founding Editor-in-Chief of British Art Studies, an award-winning digital arts publication. With Jo Baring, she is co-host of the Sculpting Lives podcast.

Sarah is a member of the Advisory Group of the Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain, 1945–1965 exhibition.

A full list of Sarah’s publications, exhibitions and projects are listed at https://www.paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk/about/people/sarah-victoria-turner

The Archivist, Records & Data Protection Manager has three main areas of responsibility. They are responsible for all aspects of the management and development of both the archive material acquired from external sources (the Collected Archives) and the Paul Mellon Centre’s own records. They are also responsible for developing and implementing a strategy for Data Protection legislation adherence across the institution.

Charlotte has worked as an Archivist & Records Manager in the arts and heritage sector for over twenty years, previously holding positions at the National Gallery and National Portrait Gallery. As well as publishing a number of articles for various professional journals, Charlotte co-authored the text book Records Management for Museums and Galleries: an introduction (Chandos 2012).

Charlotte has taught archive and records management principles and practices to a variety of audiences, both in a freelance capacity and in conjunction with the London Museums Hub. Likewise she has also provided professional advice - both as a freelance consultant and within her role at the Centre – to a wide range of institutions including the Slade School of Art; the British Film Institute; the Wallace Collection; and Venice in Peril.

Charlotte holds an MA in Archive Administration and Records Management from University College London.