Association of Art Historians, Voices in Art Histo

Voices in Art History Episode 3: The definitions of a discipline: the early years of the AAH JOHN ONIANS: The Association of Art Historians as a membership organisation did break down this notion that art history is, or that academic life is controlled by institutions, sort of like Oxford or Cambridge or London or Glasgow and that it that it was evenly spread and that everybody in the community had an equal role and if you went to a one of these annual conferences it wouldn't be dominated by professors or anything like that. The role of younger faculty would be what would be most striking. LISA TICKNER: It was huge early on just by bringing people together. And maybe I say this because I would otherwise have been on the margin more. So perhaps the people at the centre would always have been together and I just wouldn’t have known or noticed. Coming out of the academic boom of the 1960s, the Association of Art Historians held its first official meeting in 1974. Its aim: to support the advancement of the study of the history of art, with membership open to all art historians ‘by profession or avocation’. But exactly how to interpret this mandate would be subject to debate. After all what are the parameters of the subject? Is it about art or is it about history? Who is writing it and who is it for? And how important is the art object? This three-part series, based on the Association of Art Historians’ oral history recordings, explores the circumstances - and personalities - that brought together a young group of scholars to form the AAH. In this final episode, we revisit the first decade of the Association, from the mid-1970s to 80s to consider how its members navigated the ongoing changes to the professional world of art history. In the postwar era, art history was a marginal academic subject. But by the mid-1970s, it was being taught in universities, polytechnics and art schools around the country. Within the first year of its existence, the Association of Art Historians counted over 500 members. But despite efforts to include a wide-variety of perspectives, the newly formed Executive Committee of the Association was still considered by some to be working from an outdated model. FLAVIA SWANN: It was dominantly male, dominantly old universities and dominantly of an older generation. And that's why several of us -- Conal Shields I mentioned and I think Mary Stewart was part of this campaign -- you know because we were all the younger generation or what were we twenty-nine, thirty that sort of age, who were teaching in art schools and had a very different agendas to deal with and there were a lot of us and there were a lot of students out there and our campaign to have a subcommittee for art schools and polytechnics was at least accepted because it was easier for us to be a sub-committee as far as the powers that be than let us on the main committee. It was not just art historians based in polytechnics who sought representation. Sub-committees were soon formed to deal with practical issues facing specific constituencies of the membership, such the sourcing of textbooks and slides for teaching; representing the subject in examination boards; or lobbying against funding cuts and museum closures. Former AAH Chairs of the Executive Committee, John White and Marcia Pointon: JOHN WHITE: It's no good just everything being general. You've got to start from the nitty-gritty of what the real problems are seen to be on the ground. And they are different problems for all of these different groups. MARCIA POINTON: The sub-committees I think were formed in order to cater for the different constituencies, so just conceptualising those constituencies was something that needed to be taken forward. We did have the museums sector represented, but it didn’t have a huge amount of activity going on in its own right. There was a much more sort of cellular structure developed, where these groups operate on their own and yet were a part of the whole. JOHN WHITE: Obviously all these build up situations there were struggles. These various universities which for the first time had a History of Art department obviously that had to fight for its life for a time and the polytechnics in particular needed a lot of help and so that's why they were so keen. But their interests in some ways were very different and so it was on the one hand they needed a lot of help and on the other hand for several years it was a question of stopping them breaking away again because of feeling that they were second class citizens and so on and so forth. With the rapid expansion of art history, the questions of when and where the subject should be taught were as important as how it should be taught. Should it be offered as a dedicated, single subject or should students be studying joint degrees to fend off any possible intellectual isolation? Should it be introduced in schools? And if so, how? As these debates filtered through the new organization, finding cohesion in the face of diverging opinions was sometimes a challenge. JOHN WHITE: Once people are in they tend to want to break out again and so at every stage where we introduced or encouraged a new kind of membership, like students or schoolteachers -- big big resistance to having mere schoolteachers. So the idea of being a big overarching institute is not what everybody tends to immediately go for. Apart from anything else it dilutes their power. As the subject gained new ground, so too did art history’s demographic. Women’s presence in academia was growing. Changing social mores and intellectual avenues resulted in new opportunities within the profession. It also led to new expectations, as Flavia Swann explains: FLAVIA SWANN: It was of course the sort of thing that you know it was polite thing to do and then you were a well-polished young lady and you married somebody well and which of course happened to some people. Others of us thought ‘No we’re going to have our own career.’ By 1974, so I would have been seven years out of the Courtauld, I actually got a fulltime senior lectureship at North Staffordshire Polytechnic. And I moved within twelve months from part-time Lecturer to Head of Department. And I was one of the very very few women Heads of Departments in any subject in the country at the time. So you can imagine I had to sit on everybody’s interview panel because they wanted a woman didn’t they, and they had to be at department level. Gradually that changed, but it was quite remarkable to be a woman Head of Department, especially aged thirty. You had to deal with a lot of old buffers. I always thought gosh, some of them I thought were fairly moribund you know and were not progressive, didn't want to come up with new ideas or new ways of doing things. Lisa Tickner, then teaching at Middlesex Polytechnic, was one of the new feminist voices tackling the subject. LISA TICKNER: What feminism might be able to contribute to art history or how it might change art history or anyway, how one was going to juggle these two different things – one of which was a kind of political take on the world and on culture and one of which was an academic discipline, you know, were we going to – as I remember it – were we going to kind of split our identities between these two things or were we going to bring them into some kind of conversation. Marcia Pointon would become the first female Chair of the Association. MARCIA POINTON: In 1984-5 there’s this huge weighting towards our male colleagues which changed and really changed substantially, and I suppose there must have been alarm in some quarters, but … you know, I think, much to the credit of … I wouldn’t want to call them the old guard but they are a generation that’s fifteen to twenty years older than I am. I think they must have realised that the change was needed, that it needed to be somebody from a new university, a woman. I think they took a great risk. I mean I think it was brave of them because you know, I was very outspoken. Of course feminism wasn’t the only new approach to art history. Lisa Tickner reflects on the generational gap between herself and her academic advisor, famed art historian Nikolaus Pevsner, best-known for his encyclopedic architectural guides The Buildings of England: LISA TICKNER: But he held to the idea that research is about a map, some bits of which have been filled in and some bits of which haven’t. And the purpose of a supervisor, or an advisor of any kind, is to point to the bits that haven’t been filled in and to tell a potential PhD student to go and do that. So of course this was completely different from the idea we were developing in the ‘70s that it’s not a map with gaps, it’s about approaches, you know, it’s about theory, it’s about reflection, it’s about the how, it’s not about the what – or it’s about the how and the what together in a particular way. Renewed theoretical frameworks proposed that art is as much about its social context, interpretation and politics as it is about any artistic genius. This emphasis on a so-called ‘social art history’ became loosely known as ‘the New Art History’ and included approaches such as Marxism, feminism, psychoanalysis and semiotics. It was a catch-all phrase that was disputed almost as soon as it appeared. Andrew Causey, an early member of the Association, explains: ANDREW CAUSEY: I think ‘the New Art History’ is a phrase, which in a sense means not the old art history because actually it’s not one thing. It was a whole lot of new ideas, flooding in which are social, which are certainly to do with psychological and psycho-analytical theory and obviously to do with gender theory, as well as theories of sexuality, and they all in a sense began to gain power in the 1970s and it seems to me as they become embedded one has become more sympathetic, one cannot help in a sense using in one’s own writing some of those discoveries because they are embedded in the way that art history is followed and there’s not much art history now which doesn’t, as it were, acknowledge those things. As more radical approaches to the subject took hold, concerns about the relationship between art historians in academia and those working in museums and galleries came to the fore. The emphasis on theoretical approaches led others to be concerned about the loss of connection to the original work of art in question: MARCIA POINTON: There were there was a lot of effort during the ‘80s to bring together museums and universities in their common interests, because everybody recognised that we were doing complementary things, but there was a lot of suspicion among museum professionals about you know, ‘These art historians giving papers about cinema’ and you know – they were very ready to accuse art historians of not actually knowing their objects this mystique. And among art historians there was this perception of museum professionals as being unbelievable boring people who knew about the fire drill and could talk about one Meissen cup and actually had no idea about cultural history and so on. Sir Alan Bowness was a founding member of the Association’s Executive Committee: ALAN BOWNESS: I suppose I was a bit bemused at that time about the so-called ‘New Art History.’ If only because I couldn't quite understand what was so new about it. Depends on how you define the ‘new Art History’ I mean if it means you're going to take an interest in things other than the pictures - in other words let us say, the critical context or collectors for example A). that was already happening and B). it's an excellent thing to do as long as you keep the primacy of the work of art. The Association’s annual conference provided ample opportunities to discuss the finer points of these debates: MARCIA POINTON: They were very good places to make your mark. And I remember very well the first papers that I gave at Art History conferences and you were very, very nervous about would people come to hear you. I mean the early ones you know there was a lot of eating, drinking, talking – people sometimes arrived with people who weren’t their spouses or else kind of departed with people they hadn’t arrived with who also weren’t their spouses. So I think there was a fair amount of … pleasurable kind of letting your hair down about the early ones. I suspect they’ve become much more staid and proper since then. The Association also looked for ways to encourage publication in new subject areas. Contemporary and Modern art, for instance, were new areas of research for art history, led by a handful of scholars such as Alan Bowness, who built up the Modernist course in the 1960s at the Courtauld Institute. One of his postgraduate students, Andrew Causey – recalls the gap in art historical publications: ANDREW CAUSEY: Of course, the problem – and it was a serious problem – is that publications were still pretty slim actually, and I remember one was being steered around subjects in seminars, where there was plenty to read and there weren’t all that many subjects at that stage. Picasso was fine. Matisse was okay, but it didn’t go very deep down and it did give one a rather nice feeling, I think of being a sort of pioneer, you know that one was one knew, I think, that one was in at the beginning of something. In 1980 the Association launched an annual art history bookfair to coincide with its conference. It was run by Pamela Courtney, a graduate of the Open University with a degree in the history of art. Flavia Swann sat on the Executive Committee at the time. FLAVIA SWANN: Pamela Courtney started that which was a great innovation. I believe she came from a publishing background herself. People could pick up books they couldn't otherwise get hold of if specially if they didn't have a good bookshop in their area, and new books get showcased you could also get someone to sign a book if you'd been wanting to get this and that the author would be there. Taking charge of publicity and marketing for the Association, Pamela Courtney’s role brought in much needed revenue. She recalls sitting in on Committee meetings: PAMELA COURTNEY: Oh they were lovely then. ‘Cause there’d only be about five or six of us with John at the chair. And it was all very informal and everything sort of agreed on the nod and so on. Be full of horror these days wouldn’t it, operating like that you’d say ‘Well who’d you think should be chair of this sub-committees?’, and we’d all think, and say ‘well what about so and so’ and they’d be ‘alright’ [laughs] and that was it. It was very very relaxed and informal. But it gradually did change -- well it had to change because the whole thing grew and became therefore had to have you know a more democratic way of working. FLAVIA SWANN: I suppose looking back on the early stages of it was all a little bit sort of gentleman's agreement and sort of a bit hit and miss, but there was a lot of good will about it you know. It became a much more professional outfit as time went on and Pamela was very much a part of that and actually contributed quite a lot to organisational matters as opposed to academic matters. But perhaps one of the most important initiatives of the AAH has been the creation of its flagship journal, aptly named ‘Art History’. John White explains how, in 1976 -- just two years after establishment of the Association -- plans for this new publication began to take shape. JOHN WHITE: It all began I went out to UEA [University of East Anglia] and I stayed for a couple of nights and talked to John Onians and Andrew Martindale and we discussed the possibility and this was again an effect of being in the States where I was very involved with The Art Bulletin and so on. But anyway so the three of us cooked up the idea of the journal and obviously then all sorts of people hummed and hawed and said was there a need for one and could we afford it and all the rest of it and again. So we discussed all this and decided to go ahead and then talked everybody into trying it. And we decided from the start that it should cover anything. John Onians was particularly interested in pre-historic art and so what some of the first articles were on pre-historic sort of signs and stuff. JOHN ONIANS: One day Andrew Martindale sidled up to me or asked me into his office whatever it was and said 'John you know there's this thing called the Association of Art Historians and they're thinking of founding a journal on the lines of the Art Bulletin for the College Art Association and they're going to be looking for a sort of an editor for it. Might it interest you?' And so I went away and thought about it. I said to myself I really am impatient with the discipline as it is now I think it's just very conventional and people just going through the motions doing good work well but compared to the importance of art and the passions that it arouses the debates in universities about art history aren't very interesting. I went around sort of asking people you know, 'What do you think of the current journals?' And I was really surprised at how negative people were. People would say 'Well I just don't feel excited when I see a new issue of The Art Bulletin in the library or you know sort of, when I open, you know, the Warburg and Courtauld journal I have a feeling that all the articles have been written by the same person. All the titles look alike. And I have no appetite to read them'. And the most depressing thing was not that they were saying these things but these were the people who'd written the articles they were talking about. In other words it confirmed in the most dramatic way my sense of the field's problems, deep deep-seated problems. ANDREW CAUSEY: This was to be a collection of quite long, serious articles in an academic sense. It was to be research reports, but speculation was also allowed, and I think in the sense that, to me actually that has been the quality of Art History, that there’s always been a sense that, you can open up a subject particularly if you say what your position is at the beginning what theoretical position there is. Art History quickly became recognized as one of the leading publications of the discipline – bringing in many of the new strands of thought into its folds. ANDREW CAUSEY: I think they found their way into the association via Art History more – via the journal, that’s to say – more than they did in the debates. And I think it’s later with people like Marcia Pointon that it becomes prominent in the Association as a whole. And that’s because in a way, the beginnings of the Association was in a sense managed by slightly older people and it’s only in the ‘80s and in the ‘90s, it seems to me, that the torch is passed to the younger people who have been brought up on those radical developments in the 1970s. One member of that generation is Alison Yarrington, the current Chair of the Association of Art Historians: ALISON YARRINGTON: Because it’s a small subject I think we have to maintain its clear identity and the same time as welcoming all kinds of ways in which it can inter-react with other subjects and be inter and trans-disciplinary. But I think as a subject with its own methodology it -- its own historiography -- it’s terribly important that that we enable it to have a clear voice. You know design, art is part of what we encounter on an everyday basis and I think it’s part of what we need to understand about ourselves and our culture and our heritage. We need to be able to understand what those images are, that they’re not just reflections of events but they’re actually products of particular times and places and that they need analysis and understanding. What it also does is it gives us the most enormous amount of pleasure. And pleasure’s kind of important, you know? It’s both the kind of serious analysis intellectual understanding but also pleasure. It’s very important for society’s growth and development that we have these things and our understanding of them … gosh I sound pompous but you know what I mean [laughs]. Voices in Art History is based on oral history interviews conducted by the Association of Art Historians. To hear more, visit www.aah.org.uk. LIZ BRUCHET: My last question is what do you think of this project that we’re doing right now, which is the Association of Art Historians oral history project? LISA TICKNER: [chuckles] I much prefer to be on the other side of it. I don’t like being interviewed. I much prefer to think of oral history as a rich repository for me to enjoy and use, rather than actually having to say things that other people will have to listen to. But if I try to project myself back into my other position as user, then I have to say I think it’s a very good thing to do. I mean oral history is no shortcut to truth, as you know, because everybody has different experiences and says different things and I know having used it, that it can get you into hot water. In some ways it’s easier to have very reduced sources: to juggle three plates is sometimes easier than to juggle twenty-five. But it’s crazy not to have it, and it’s crazy not to use it.

Voices in Art History Episode 1: The formation of a discipline In 1974 the first gathering of the Association of Art Historians took place. To many it was an overdue development; after all – such associations had been in existence in Europe and America for decades. So what were the circumstances that finally brought together British art historians to form their own professional organization? And why in 1974? This three-part series, based on the Association of Art Historians Oral History recordings, explores the circumstances and the personalities that brought together a young group of scholars to form the AAH. While it could be argued that art history is as old as the art it chronicles, in Britain, it wasn’t until the 1950s that a professional discipline began to develop. Before the Second World War, art history was virtually unknown. If it was anything, it was connoisseurship. And the idea was to analyze an artist’s style and secure attributions. On the whole, it was considered a gentleman’s pursuit, reserved for an elite few, and nowhere near the wide-ranging subject it is today. jOHN WHITE: In 1947 when I went to the Courtauld there was nowhere else in England that you could study the history of art. So it was something that was strictly marginal. Renaissance scholar John White – now Professor Emeritus at University College London – is a key figure in the story of the Association of Art Historians. He was one of a handful of young students trained at the Courtauld Institute of Art in the 1940s who would go on to watch the subject expand dramatically in the years to come. One of his collaborators in the founding of the Association was Sir Alan Bowness. ALAN BOWNESS: But of course Art History wasn't even thought of as a subject in those days, you know, it didn't really exist. It was only when I got to know the director of the Fitzwilliam Carl Winter and he told me about the Courtauld, I'd never heard about the Courtauld. It was completely unknown. It was a tiny institution lost in the University of London. The Courtauld was set up in 1932 to train future generations of art professionals including museum directors, critics and dealers. It was run by Anthony Blunt, a complicated and enigmatic figure who later gained notoriety when he was exposed as a spy for the Soviet Union. Despite his controversial past, there’s no doubt that Blunt’s ambition to transform the Courtauld into the leading centre for the study of art history, and his astute recruitment of talented scholars, encouraged others to see the wider potential of art history. Alan Bowness, who taught alongside Blunt for over twenty years, explains: ALAN BOWNESS: If you're going to talk about development of an artist, you need to know the context in quite strong historical detail. You need to know who else was exhibiting, which were the exhibitions most talked about, what did the artist you're interested in particularly like, how do we know what he likes, have you read his letters, have you read contemporary criticism, all these kind of questions which of course German art historians – at least some of them – had been asking for some time but this was really very much Anthony Blunt's attitude, that the study of Art History needed a firm basic documentation. And things were changing very quickly I would say in the 1950s. There was a feeling that there were huge changes in the subject and I think that was really made very clear to us. But in many ways, it was the refugee scholars who had settled in London as the Nazis rose to power in Europe, who truly challenged the status quo of British art history. And the Warburg Institute in London became an intellectual home to many of them: MARTIN KEMP: Art History in America and Britain was transformed by émigrés, transformed by Edgar Wind, Pevsner, Johannes Wilde, Gombrich and the whole Warburg. Martin Kemp, Emeritus Research Professor in the History of Art at the University of Oxford, reflects on their impact: MARTINKEMP: The Kulturgeschichte people who basically saw art as a visual expression of the history of ideas meant that the subject had a different intellectual dimension, meant that historians and people who were interested in religious history, history of ideas philosophy, linguists, they all, began to get a sense that the visual material was not some kind of decorative adjunct of history but actually part of it. A fellow student of Martin Kemp and the founding editor of the Association’s journal Art History, John Onians completed his PhD at the Warburg Institute under the supervision of one of these famed scholars, Ernst Gombrich: JOHNONIANS: He was most creative when it came to presenting my work to him because I would write something about, you know, a Renaissance architectural theorist and he would say [imitates] 'Well Onians this is only an aperçu'. What he meant was, you know, you've seen something, you're on to something that's interesting but you haven't sort of demonstrated that it really is there. You're sensing something not describing it or analyzing it. And then so I’d go back and rewrite it and come back with something that I thought was more than an aperçu and he would say [imitates] 'So what Onians? So what?' In other words he said, ‘you've shown something to have happened but you haven't explained why, what its importance is’ and so on. Despite the infusion of European approaches, British Art History of the 1960s was still dominated by a small network of influential men. Martin Kemp describes how his early career was tied to Anthony Blunt’s influence: MARTIN KEMP: When I finished studying he was running a kind of placement service at that point, and virtually every job in the British Commonwealth went through his hands because people would call him and say 'Who've you got coming out?' And I went to see him and I'd only ever been in two seminars, but he knew exactly what I'd been doing so this filing system, which didn't look as if it was operating at all, was all ticking away. And he said 'There's a job going in Dalhousie in Halifax in Canada I advise you to apply for, it for one year' so I touched my forelock and off I went and he wrote to me when I was in Dalhousie saying there's a job in Glasgow I advise you to apply for so again I touched my forelock and off I went to Glasgow. It was very extraordinary he had tentacles everywhere. Other key players included Kenneth Clark - the director of the National gallery; Michael Jaffé, who established the first art history programme at Cambridge; and Ellis Waterhouse at the Barber Institute of Fine Art. These were just some of the men who dominated the discipline at the time. Charles Avery – then Deputy Keeper of Sculpture at the Victoria and Albert Museum – found that his loyalties were divided: between his former Courtauld teacher on the one hand, and the director of the V&A on the other: the rather imposing figure of John Pope-Hennessy. CHARLES AVERY: When he left for the British Museum I was among various people who sighed great sighs of relief. But I admired him very much as an art historian, he was a tremendously intelligent man, incredibly well-informed and it was generally accepted that being an apostolic descent from [Bernard] Berenson through K. [Kenneth] Clark to himself [chuckles]. I always suffered somewhat in his mind I think as being a [John] Shearman pupil. He used to say occasionally say to me, ‘Ah yes, I knew you’d say that as a Shearman pupil’ i.e. as someone who’s misinformed and slightly inferior. This was the world we lived in, you know the great men the great monumental men were huge sort of behemoths: [Michael] Jaffé, [John] Pope-Hennessy would lay about themselves and you just had to take cover. And many of the people that we are talking about obviously had a sort of country house and ipso facto a kind of grand tour background, for example Kenneth Clark, who when asked as a new and insufferable young director at the National Gallery how it came about – the only thing the other curators could stand about him was that he did know how to hang a gallery. And they asked I think someone asked him how this came about, how did he have this magic touch, and he said he’d been doing it since he was six years old, or maybe it was five – it’s in the autobiography – because when his parents were out on all their either hunting, shooting, fishing or socialising in London he was left alone in the country house with the butler and to amuse himself, no doubt not the butler, he used to rehang pictures down the corridor [laughs]. But many found themselves outside of this elite circle. Marcia Pointon - Professor Emeritus of History of Art at the University of Manchester -- remembers her first impressions of the Courtauld Institute at her admissions interview in the early 1960s. MARCIA POINTON: It was only the second time I’d ever been to London on my own, and I was interviewed by Anthony Blunt and he said “oh well how often do you manage to get to London to see the exhibitions?” and you know, I never went to London. It was a long, long journey and very expensive. He gave me two photographs – this was the classic Wölfflinian compare and contrast routine – which of course was totally unfamiliar to me – and he showed me the two version of Leonardo’s ‘Virgin of the Rocks’, and I was just completely baffled, and so I had nothing that I could say. So he then handed me over to a bright, bushy-tailed, cheery-looking young man who was Alan Bowness. And Alan Bowness tried his hardest, but you know, I was so intimidated by the whole environment and these rather patrician men and polished tables and beautiful Adam’s staircases that I completely dried up, I couldn’t say anything. So I didn’t get in. John Onians reflects on how the subject had been taught at both the Courtauld and the Warburg Institutes: JOHN ONIANS: I could tell that it was people were mostly concerned with you know sort of original works of art of high quality and they were mostly concerned with understanding artists, you know what sort of man was Raphael? Why did he paint in this way? Who was he taught by? How did his style develop? It was really about individual artists and the works they made. I would say almost all the teachers were transferring the same set of skills. A number of the teachers were writing books which were using those skills to go in other direction but the core skills there was general agreement about it and there was really no sense of there being alternatives so that there were not people saying well just 'Do you think that this approach or that approach is better?'. By the late 1960s a new generation of art historians began to question the intellectual and professional conventions; as another wave of changes began to reshape the young discipline. The new universities built in the late 1950s and early 60s, ushered in a decade of rigorous growth in higher education. These so-called ‘plate glass universities’- such as East Anglia, Sussex and Warwick – helped radicalize the subject by welcoming a wider demographic of students and teachers to the field. Dramatic reforms to art school education had a further impact. Two reports – the Coldstream and Summerson reports of the early 60s – responded to concerns about the quality of art school education by replacing the existing art school diploma with a degree-level equivalent course called the Diploma in Art and Design – otherwise known as the ‘DipAD’. This meant that any art school wanting degree-granting status was required to allocate 15% of their teaching time to History of Art and Complementary Studies. Andrew Causey taught art history at St Martins College of Art in the late 60s under this new system: ANDREW CAUSEY: In the old days of the National Diploma in Design there were so-called art historians, and one did meet some of them, who really were hardly pro at all, actually, in a real sense. I mean the purpose of those reports really was to make art and the art school education degree equivalent, and I think that meant that every part of it had to be taught by people who could make some claims to having a degree. And that’s why well-qualified art historians find it pretty easy to get jobs, in what were about to become polytechnics – but were then art colleges – because in a sense one could demonstrate one’s professional credibility very easily and I think that in that sense those reports made a big difference. This of course was when I was still an undergraduate student. These were facts by the time I got involved in it. But what one did realise is that an institution like the Courtauld – particularly the Courtauld – profited enormously from those changes, and that there was a marvellous kind of exchange because it stimulated entry to the Courtauld graduate courses. It wasn’t difficult to see that there were plenty of jobs around and I have a feeling, and it does sound very peculiar now, that actually the Courtauld had difficulty at first filling the number of vacancies that came up. John Onians had at one time been cautioned by a senior scholar about his job prospects, but things had changed. JOHN ONIANS: He said 'I tell you one thing don't, don't ever think of going into Art History as a subject' this is he's saying this in 1963. He says 'I've been trying to get a job in the field for years there aren't any jobs, there's no career in it, there's no future in it'. That's the difference between 1963 and 1965, six, seven because the Summerson Report had changed everything. Although these reports led to many jobs for art historians, the opportunities came with challenges. Andrew Causey explains: ANDREW CAUSEY: Art college teaching, particularly a college of the distinction of St Martin’s where I’d been teaching, is actually much more difficult than university teaching. When I came to Manchester, all the students I taught had come to Manchester to learn Art History. Now that’s not so, of course, of an art college students whose probably come to be a sculptor, or a painter, or, a fabric designer, or something, and there was no necessary, reason why they should want to listen to me. Of course, particularly at St Martin’s, a lot of people did want to listen to one, but others actually didn’t, and not all their lecturers in the specialist departments, particularly wanted to surrender their students’ time to people like me. LISA TICKNER: There was a strand in it that was more conventionally Art History and it was quite conventional Art History that was taught in it, wasn’t really Design History or contemporary art at all. And something that was more broadly General, Complementary or Liberal Studies. And there were some very interesting people who taught this. And I just loved it. Some people hated it and didn’t turn up and felt that they’d come to be artists they hadn’t come to go to this things, but I thought this was really fascinating. A Fine Art student at Hornsey College of Art, Lisa Tickner was part of the first cohort of students to graduate under the new DipAD. It was in the polytechnics and art schools like Hornsey that alternative approaches to the subject flourished. Art historians found themselves in contact with contemporary artists. They worked alongside sociologists, cultural historians, and philosophers – which challenged traditional subject divisions. Design History was just one of the new subject areas that came out of this cross-fertilization: LISA TICKNER: Design History with one or two I think very small exceptions, didn’t have a toe-hold in any of the established universities. So people who taught in polytechnics were almost always teaching practitioners, instead of and sometimes as well as, academic students. And the chances were that they would be teaching Design students, and in some cases like us, they would also be teaching across an expanding definition of what Art History might be. Expanding both in terms of the topics that might come up for discussion, and the theoretical approaches that might be deployed to engage with them. And I’m sure there were exceptions – but I think that was much more common in polytechnics than in the established universities. Art history was in high demand, and it was branching out. In the 1940s, the Courtauld Institute was the only place in Britain dedicated to its study. But by 1975 more than 25 universities in Britain were offering art history courses. Flavia Swann, Emeritus Professor at the University of Sunderland, was one of the young lecturers filling the posts that resulted from this expansion. FLAVIA SWANN: Now you have to remember that I had long blonde hair and when you're only twenty three you look just like a student, at least I did. And I decided I'd got to look more grown up and in those days looking grown up was having short bobbed hair. So I went to Selfridges and I bought myself a wig of exactly the same colour of my own hair and on the train down to Canterbury I used to stuff this great mane of hair into this short bob wig and I'd come out the other end feeling frightfully grown up and hoping that I looked older than the students. There we were teaching straight out of University I mean in July you were a student and September there you were in front of students, you need some kind of authority you didn't feel you had. MARTIN KEMP: It was a period of terrifically vigorous recruitment and expansion. There were more jobs than you can imagine compared with now. With my somewhat patchy qualifications I probably wouldn't get to interview stage now in job applications. So it was a picture really of considerable change on a series of local bases. Leeds was getting going which became – Essex was doing it, Brighton had Art History, Warwick, you know all these now you think of as places that do Art History but these are new universities and new universities I think had a feeling for Art History it was a subject there was a demand for, it was coming up and it was something which I think the admins in the new university could look at and say 'Is there a subject that we can create even with three full members of staff – a splash in – which not all the traditional universities are doing' John Onians remembers the early days of his teaching career at the University of East Anglia, one of the new universities keen to include art history in its curriculum. JOHN ONIANS: Well for a start it was in virtually in portakabins. It was in temporary accommodation because the building where we were going to move to had not yet got far enough to accommodate us and there was a Senior Common Room which was in fact a small country house, just on the edge of the campus where we'd go and have lunch and sit by the river that flowed through the valley. It was very very idyllic. There was a lot of time for conversation and people had wine in their rooms so that after at five o'clock you know somebody might open a bottle and we'd talk and because there were so many of us who were between thirty and forty or something there was a sense of we're building a new world and we knew that our department was one of the new departments doing interesting things. But not everyone saw this expansion as a good thing. Some art historians felt that art history was lowering its standards and losing its parameters – and perhaps its exclusivity. In an effort to manage these changes, Heads of Art History Departments from around the country began meeting to exchange information. Alan Bowness: [Alan Bowness] As far as I can remember it was an annual meeting, and I'm not quite sure it did much more than discuss what people were planning to do basically in their course work and that kind of thing. It didn't have a broad remit in any sense. And some of us felt slightly, I won't say left out by the Heads of Department meetings but since Anthony's involvement was fairly minimal I mean he may have even set it up but I think he probably set it up because there was pressure from his colleagues that you know 'Let's have a meeting once a year so we can tell you what we're planning to do'. That kind of thing.’ Although Anthony Blunt sat at the helm of these meetings, he was by all accounts not a committee man – and he and his senior colleagues left it to the next generation to create a more formal professional association. JOHN ONIANS: Most of us were working very privately. There weren't conferences. You might occasionally go to the Courtauld or to the Warburg in London and meet somebody for tea but the only meetings that there were where different departments came together was when these were these meetings of department heads and which eventually led to the emergence of the Association. JOHN WHITE: If you don't speak up you don't get heard and it was a new subject an expanding subject and it needed a voice and it needed to fight for its membership, it needed to fight for the subject. In March 1974, the first official gathering of the AAH took place. It was a high-energy affair, full of anticipation of the things to come. In the next episode we find out exactly how the AAH was formed, the challenges it met, and the debates that would shape it activities.

Voices in Art History Episode 2:Establishing a professional organization JOHN WHITE: If you don't speak up you don't get heard and it was a new subject, an expanding subject and it needed a voice and it needed to fight for its membership, it needed to fight for the subject. In 1974 the first official gathering of the Association of Art Historians took place. It brought British art historians practicing in all areas of the field together for the first time. The boom in higher education in the 1960s had created opportunities for art historians across the country to explore new subject areas – challenging traditional approaches to the history of art, and the professional status quo. Jobs were plentiful as new departments opened up, innovative television programmes and glossy art publications gave it new audiences and new cache. This three-part series, based on the Association of Art Historians Oral History recordings, explores the circumstances - and the personalities - that brought together a young group of scholars to form the AAH. In this episode we find out exactly how the Association was formed and consider some of the debates that would begin to shape it activities. This is Voices in Art History: the story of the Association of Art Historians ALAN BOWNESS: There was this extraordinary growth of Art History in the '60s and it was accompanied by the growth of Art History in universities and in art schools. As these new departments grew they set up a ‘head of department meeting’. However that heads of department meeting did not involve the bulk of art historians, and as far as those of us who were teaching at the Courtauld in the centre of this new development, we had very little to do with it. Sir Alan Bowness, then lecturing at the Courtauld Institute of Art, was one of the art historians who saw an immediate need for such a professional organisation. ALAN BOWNESS: My own recollection is that the impetus really came from conversations between John White and myself. John had invited me to teach half a semester at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and John had he'd really re-established Art History as a serious subject in Manchester, and he after seven years he was tempted to America with an offer of, you know much more money, better conditions, more time for research etcetera etcetera, like us all -- we all have these offers. It was while visiting John White in the US that the topic of the College Art Association came up. An expansive organization concerned with promoting all branches of the visual arts, it provided another organizational model to consider. ALAN BOWNESS: When I went to Johns Hopkins I remember we talked a lot about what an important role it played and how important it was and so on. It gave people an opportunity to meet one another and I think we thought at that time that it would be a good idea to have something similar, because there was nothing like it. JOHN WHITE: I came back to England and I had this sort of weakness about democracy and we went to a meeting -- I think it was in Reading -- and it was a little sort of private club of selected heads of departments and they would decide things in the morning meeting and then they would tell the you know all the lecturers and unimportant people over tea in the afternoon what they'd decided and I thought well this is this is ridiculous [laughs]. So we had a meeting set up in which everybody joined in and not just heads of departments and important people. Having had a big experience of the College Art Association and its functions which are partly academic and historical, and partly lobbying and political, it seemed the obvious thing. But the American model would need to be adapted to the context of British art history, a much smaller field with specific concerns brought on by the rapid expansion of academic art history in the country. Francis Ames-Lewis, Professor Emeritus at Birkbeck College: FRANCIS AMES-LEWIS: I think there was a realisation that there needed to be more coordination between art historians across the country. There was a major expansion in the discipline, and a major expansion not only in terms of the number of academics going into it in a sense, but also in terms of the nature of discipline. And the discipline sort of stretching out to contact out with other humanities, subjects and disciplines. And I think there was a realization that the art history heads of departments couldn’t go on being a sort of cosy little group which conferred and thought about issues about curriculum and research activities and so on I’m sure, but were exclusive, they didn’t bind in this new generation of art historians which was coming into the field, into the academic side of the field, let alone really binding in with museums and galleries and thinking about their interests and concerns. The wheels were set in motion and in 1973, an open meeting for art historians across the county, was held at the University of London. A Steering Committee for the foundation of this new association was established, charged with the tasks of drafting a constitution and planning its first official gathering. Martin Kemp, Emeritus Research Professor in the History of Art at Oxford University, reflects on the prestigious members of the Steering Committee: MARTIN KEMP: That group of people were so individualistic that they couldn't have made a clique if they tried. Just the sheer individualism of that group of people there's no obvious, clubbing so I think they were rather fortunate in that they could distil a common cause out of positions that were very diverse. It was at this initial meeting that art historians based in polytechnics and art schools joined in the chorus, seeking to become a recognized part of this new organization. Most polytechnics in Britain were created in the late 1960s, following the construction of the plate-glass universities. By merging technical colleges, art schools and educational colleges together, the polytechnics offered both academic and vocational subjects, providing an alternative to full-time university education. Flavia Swann, Professor Emeritus at the University of Sunderland, remembers that first Open meeting: FLAVIA SWANN: It had been set up if you look at the names by all the high-ranking professors of traditional universities. And then of course a bunch of us that came in were now teaching at polytechnics you know and art schools and things and there was no voice. And I can remember putting up my hand and saying you know 'It's all very well but you know there's another thing going on and it's the teaching of the practicing based students which in sheer volume terms completely outstrips Art History and there needs to be a voice for that' and grumble grumble from the powers that be and so in the end I think I and another chap called Conal Shields, campaigned for a sub-committee of the Association of Art Historians for those who taught in art schools and polytechnics and that happened. Andrew Causey, Emeritus Professor at Manchester University: ANDREW CAUSEY: There was always a slight sense that there were the leaders in the major universities, in fact was more than a slight sense actually, it was a quite real sense, and the people who needed sort of bringing on, who were the polytechnics, and I think the reason for that of course, was that even then a lot of polytechnics were doing mainly service teaching really to the major departments of painting and sculpture or whatever, but I think there was a slight sense of first-class and second-class members, or something like that and it may have been partial, it may have been among some people, you know, the older more established art historians who weren’t absolutely sure about all this expansion at all I think. JOHN WHITE: And so then there was a great argument because they were all obviously university academics so they didn't want anybody else in, but it was obvious that we ought to have the polytechnics. The composition of the Association’s Executive Committee was carefully considered, as Alan Bowness explains: ALAN BOWNESS: Now certain things we decided at a fairly early stage in these informal discussions was that we would like to open it up to all art historians, not just university art historians certainly art historians now working in the art colleges and in the art departments of universities, and also to people in the museum world. I mean I think it was all quite political. We wanted somebody in Scotland, which was always a very important area for art historical studies and research and numbers of students, and we also wanted somebody who would be of an older generation in a sense, to be the Chairman. The prestigious role of Inaugural Chairman fell to Professor Andrew McLaren Young. He was by all accounts an affable man, and - having established the Department of Fine Art at the University of Glasgow - would represent the Scottish constituency. And perhaps just as importantly, provide a voice from outside of London. Martin Kemp lectured under McLaren Young at that time. MARTIN KEMP: Andrew was not a great organiser but was a great democrat. He really thought that there should be a body representative and that people generally in the profession had a right to come together. There were a whole group of people, of Heads of Department, Hamish Miles was at the Barber [Institute of Fine Arts] at that point who were not polemically interested in being anti-Courtauld but by having a representative body which recognised that Art History was now a British-wide subject and a number of the centres because they were placed in different constitutional positions in the universities some in History some linked with other modern languages that there was a diversity within the subject which needed representing. Probably in terms of constitutional, actions and a feeling for a professional body John White probably was the person who had the biggest sense of that. The others were perfectly happy but he was a much more of an organisations and procedures person. So, I think, without him being a dominant personality he said, ‘Well we need to have this kind of organization.’ He was keen to sort of get the get the junior ranks into kind of order and so on. One such member of the ‘junior ranks’ was Andrew Causey: ANDREW CAUSEY: I think that what they seemed to have wanted was a small group of younger people to kind of supplement the leaders. It wasn’t that they made one feel less important except that one did feel slightly, slightly less important. CHARLES AVERY: I sort of believe in the cause as it then was and I felt also that all of us graduate art historians from various generations we did need a professional body to further our cause, to help us and generally organise it slightly. Charles Avery, another young scholar and then Deputy Keeper of Sculpture at the Victoria and Albert Museum, was quickly recruited to lend a hand as Honorary Secretary. CHARLES AVERY: I yes I willingly agreed. Though I suppose there was the Courtauld connection and possibly being at the V&A I was in a way part of the museum aspect, the museum lobby if you like. I can’t remember if I demonstrated any great potential in other respects but … I think in those days you see it was very much still a kind of old boy network which was what the thing set out to be originally. And therefore you looked around for people that were perhaps capable of organising or might have a little bit of spare time and so on. Although the number of art galleries and museums had been steadily rising in Britain, unifying these two branches of the profession would require some effort. ALAN BOWNESS: There'd always been a schism really between the museum people and the academic people and I think the Association of Art Historians bringing these two particular groups into contact with one another did help quite a lot in that respect to make more of a sense of unified profession. CHARLES AVERY: That, you know, Art History as such would become widely established and rather silly jealousies between different areas or different departments or different aspects such as museum and art-historical departments, could perhaps be melded together, and the resource and the hierarchy of sculpture, architecture and painting to be addressed, and of modernity against older art. Managing these tensions would be an ongoing negotiation. Although the Association was conceived of as an open and democratic professional organization, exactly where its remit would fall was up for debate: ANDREW CAUSEY: I don’t want to imply that there was exclusiveness, I think there may have been on one or two people’s parts, but I think we were all wondering at that stage -- and that stage might be the late ‘70s really -- on what the parameters, of art-historical study were. Design history was one of the emerging subject coming out of the polytechnics - While some lobbied to include it within the folds of the new Association, others maintained Design History had a limited place within academic art history. ALAN BOWNESS: I mean design history was rather dismissed by some of the big Art History departments. I mean the Courtauld was always being told that they should be doing more for design history but I think most of my colleagues, and certainly this was my view, thought that by diluting things you could only do them worse really and it was better to stick to the three basic subjects of painting, sculpture and architecture and to teach these in depth and feel that if you're interested in say furniture for example, you could sort of slot that interest in to what you'd learnt about the development of architecture on the one hand painting as decoration for houses on the other hand you know so it's that kind of thing. But I think the atmosphere in the Association was always very broad from the beginning. Partly because it if it was going to succeed it had to have a fairly big membership. MARCIA POINTON: I think it was founded partly as a protectionist measure and the feeling that if we don’t, if we – we being the heads of History of Art in the conventional old universities – if we don’t organise an association, we will not have control over things. I mean that’s perhaps a bit of a negative interpretation, and that wasn’t at all the full story because, you know I think there was a great deal of concern about an exam subject in school in Art History, about the new polytechnics and so on, so I think it was seen as something to be supportive, but I think there was also a really protectionist motive in it. Marcia Pointon was an early member of the AAH and would go on to become Chair in 1986. MARCIA POINTON: And I think that kind of you know doing things in a little club of gentlemen did die very hard, though having said that, individually all those people were extremely open and enabling and I don’t blame them at all, I mean they were part of their of their culture, they were carrying on the kinds of traditions that they had had learned. And it was going to take a huge seismic shift to change that, but it did change. To much fanfare, the inaugural meeting of the Association was held at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts in 1974. ANDREW CAUSEY: There were a lot of people, because I can remember the lecture theatre, perhaps there were eighty people or something, and that was the moment I remember, when I first met Peter Lasko, for example, who I’d never met before, who was a very genial, friendly man. There was quite a rapid expansion in new contact with people who one wasn’t necessarily sharing academic things with and one became aware, perhaps for the first time, of Art History as a profession, rather than being an Art History student, as it were, even a graduate student. There was a sort of feeling that it was a part of a step up in one’s own involvement in Art History I think. ALAN BOWNESS: So we really presented ourselves at this meeting in Birmingham in March '74. That was really when we started to recruit and draw people together and plan what we were going to do. So we were then really thinking in terms of a first general conference in London in March 1975. Within a year, and after a hearty publicity campaign, the Association had over 500 members. A newsletter was launched kept its community up-to-date on issues of employment and staffing, teaching and resources, and special events. But it would be through the first conference, with its panel of distinguished speakers that the Association truly came into its own. The general theme was ‘Art versus History’ a broad approach that brought a variety of debates to the table. ALAN BOWNESS: On that Friday morning there was a reception and there was some group meetings primarily for specialists in each field to discuss matters of interest relating to universities chaired by Peter Murray. 'Should the growth of Art History courses in universities be subject to some sort of national plan?' That's what the rubric was. Then in the afternoon Philip Barlow chaired a session on 'Art History in Art Education' and the subjects discussed the role of the art historian in polytechnics and colleges of art and the History of Design because these were two of the outstanding questions how far we should include design. And then there was a session 'Museums and Public Art Galleries' chaired by Michael Jaffé, the guest speakers being Mr Dennis Farr and Dr Michael Kauffmann talking on museums and art historians. In the evening I fixed a bus to go to Dulwich [Picture Gallery] which of course hardly anybody had been to in those days. And then there was a symposium 'Art versus History'. And the speakers were John White, Anita Brookner, John Hale, and John Pope-Hennessy. And in the afternoon Michael Levey spoke, also Ernst Gombrich spoke; 'Do We Need a Method?' was his subject. JOHN WHITE: It was an attempt to get a broad spread simple as that. I mean Anita Brookner was one particular sort of Art History; Hale was a historian who knew a lot about art history; Pope-Hennessy was obviously Pope-Hennessy and a major gallery figure and as well as a top art historian. So it was an attempt again to put one's money where one's mouth was and the whole thing from the start at every point was to be as all inclusive as possible and therefore in as far as one could right from the start one got speakers from as many different fields as possible to show that it was not pushing any particular sort of art history. It must have been a success because then there was another one. Edwina Sassoon, then teaching staff secretary at the Courtauld Institute, was enlisted to help plan the inaugural conference. EDWINA SASSOON: … and when I went to work at the Courtauld one of the many people I worked with was Alan Bowness and through him I became involved in setting up the Association of Art Historians which we knew of as ‘Aha’. I do remember the reception at the National Gallery and at you know in ‘75 – nowadays drinks parties at galleries are two a penny but they were very uncommon then. I suppose although the war was long time previous to that, but people just were not used to celebrating like that. It was rather a good party, and people were delighted to meet each other and talk and you know as in any conference it's always the conversations that you can have on the side which are the interesting ones. FLAVIA SWANN: There was a reception and drinkies in the beautiful Courtauld Galleries in Woburn Square and Peter Murray was trying to get the finances right because he was the treasurer and I remember him coming up and saying 'Well Flavia given you're nice and young why don't you take out a life membership because you know for some of us old buffers it's not worth it but for thirty pounds it should be worth your while?' and so I subbed up my thirty pounds. So he was desperately trying, because you know the AAH had no money it had it had to have a cushion it had to have something in the bank, so he was going around over the drinkies recruiting people and aiming very much at the younger generation. ALAN BOWNESS: I think there was a very strong euphoric feeling I mean everybody was excited, it was obviously going to be an extremely useful organisation. I think if you take note of the speakers I mean most of those speakers there were some grandees of course because it was very important to get the blessing of Gombrich for example and Pope-Hennessy. On the other hand the majority of the speakers were all Courtauld teachers or ex-students. It was still very Courtauld-dominated as indeed it had to be because that was the pattern of where the art historians were and where they came from. But that was really changing quite quickly as we all know. In the next episode, we’ll explore the intellectual ideas and practical challenges that continued to shape the Association of Art Historians, as radical approaches gained headway in the world of British art history. This recording is protected by copyright. For more information and to hear more from the AAH oral histories, visit www.aah.org.uk.