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Description: Modern Life & Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century
Acknowledgements
PublisherPaul Mellon Centre
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Acknowledgements
This book has been a long time simmering. My first debt is to Brian Allen, Director of Studies at the Paul Mellon Centre in London, and to Duncan Robinson – now Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum but formerly Director of the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven – for their kind invitation to give the Paul Mellon Lectures in 1996. This provided the impetus to shape the material for a particular audience, together with a discreet but insistent pressure towards seeing it in print. I am grateful to them both, and thereby also for the generosity of the late Paul Mellon and for the hospitality of Neil MacGregor and Patrick McCaughey in hosting the lectures at the National Gallery in London and the Yale Center for British Art.
Among many colleagues and friends who shared information, conversations and advice, it is my pleasure to thank Caroline Arscott, Stephen Bann, Sandra Carter, Stephen Chaplin, Tim Clark, Sadie Coles, David Peters Corbett, Jan Dalley, Dinora Davies-Rees, Carol Duncan, Paul Edwards, Bruce Ferguson (who said ‘do it’), Pamela Fletcher, Hal Foster, David Glasser, Christopher Green, Andrew Hemingway, Dick and Cat Humphreys, Rebecca John, Nicola Kalinsky, Agi Katz, Sandra Lummis, Michael Paraskos, Marcia Pointon, Griselda Pollock, Beth Porter, Alex Potts, Lawrence Rainey, Christopher Reed, Adrian Rifkin, Anna Gruetzner Robins, Anthony Sampson, the late Raphael Samuel, Peter Selley, Richard Shone, Elaine Showalter, Debora Silverman, Paul Smith, Christine Stansell, Andrew Stephenson, Sandy Tait, Nancy Troy, Daniel Waley, Judith Walkowitz, Simon Watney, Christopher White, Joan Winterkorn and Rebecca Zurier. I am grateful to Tamar Garb who read the chapter on Bomberg in draft and to Anne Wagner who offered astute responses to the lectures on Sickert and Bell in particular. Annabel Cole, Dinora Davies-Rees, Henrietta Garnett, Luke Gertler, Michael Holroyd, Rebecca John, Omar Pound, Anna Gruetzner Robins, Richard Shone and Julius White were especially helpful in tracing reproductions or with permissions. Several private collectors prefer to remain anonymous, but their generosity in granting access to their paintings should not go unrecorded. I wish also to acknowledge the pioneering work on Walter Sickert, Augustus John, Wyndham Lewis, David Bomberg and Vanessa Bell carried out in the 1970s and early 1980s by Wendy Baron, Michael Holroyd, Richard Cork and Frances Spalding. Each of them helped me in different ways, which is not, of course, to suggest their necessary agreement with my conclusions.
Among museum, library and archival staff I wish to thank in particular Denison Beach at the Houghton Library, Harvard University; Stella Beddoe, at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery; Jennifer Booth, Adrian Glew and Jonathan Thristan at the Tate Gallery Archives; Martin Beeson, Simon Bradford, Debra Harris, Judy Vaknin and Margaret Wagstaff at Middlesex University Library; Constance Clement at the Yale Center for British Art; Emma Chambers and Susan Owen at the Strang Print Room, University College, London; Stephen Chaplin, formerly of the Slade Archives; Hilary Diaper, Curator at the University of Leeds; Meg Duff at the Tate Gallery Library; Cynthia Farar and Rachel Howarth at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin; Guy Holborn at Lincoln’s Inn Law Library; Debbie Ireland at the Royal Photographic Society; David Fraser Jenkins of the Collections Division at the Tate Gallery; Susan Kent at Sotheby’s; Isabelle King, Jon Newman and their successor, Janeen Haythornthwaite, at the Whitechapel Art Gallery Archive; Peter Jenkinson at Walsall Museum and Art Gallery; Martin Ladd at the Hatton Gallery, University of Newcastle; Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan of the National Library of Wales; Graham Melville at the National Film Archive; Jane Munro at the Fitzwilliam Museum; David Rich and Malcolm Barr-Hamilton of the Tower Hamlets Local History Library and Archive; Joanna Shacklock in the Records Office, University College, London; Anna Southall, formerly of the Tate Gallery Conservation Department, now Director of the National Museums and Galleries of Wales; Barbara Thompson of the Witt Library, Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London; Jim Tyler, formerly of the Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts, Cornell University; Maureen Watry in charge of Special Collections at the University of Liverpool; Shirley Wickham at the Dorchester Reference Library; Sarah Woodcock at the Theatre Museum; and staff at the British Library, the London Library and the New York Public Library.
Over the last few years I have given a number of papers on different aspects of British modernism. I am grateful for invitations extended to me by Mieke Bal, Hollis Clayson, David Peters Corbett, David Cottington, Briony Fer, Sandra Harding, Michael Ann Holly, John House, Keith Moxey, Michael Orwicz, Linda Nochlin, Alex Potts, Christine Stansell and Nancy Troy, for their responses and for those of their colleagues and students. A much longer version of the lecture on Wyndham Lewis appeared in the special Lewis issue of Modernism/Modernity (vol. 4, no. 2, April 1997), edited by Robert von Hallberg and Lawrence Rainey, and in In Visible Touch: Modernism and Masculinity, edited by Terry Smith (Sydney: Power Publications, 1997). A version of the chapter on Vanessa Bell appeared in Representations (no. 65, Winter 1999). Different but related material on British modernism has appeared in Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations, edited by Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1994); in the Oxford Art Journal (vol. 16, no. 2, 1993); and in Significant Others, edited by Whitney Chadwick and Isabelle de Courtivron (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993).
I am especially grateful for a Yale Fellowship in British Art in December 1990, for a Leverhulme Research Fellowship of six months in 1992–3 and for a semester’s study leave in 1995–6. This work would not have been possible without the support of my institution, Middlesex University, in the persons of my colleagues and in particular the late John Lansdown, former Dean of the Faculty of Art, Design and Performing Arts, and Barry Curtis, Faculty Director of Research.
At Yale University Press I have benefited from the exemplary care and attention of Gillian Malpass, my editor, who also designed the book, and from the efforts of all those who saw it into print, among them Yale’s anonymous reader, Elizabeth McWilliams (endlessly patient with the administrative detail) and Ruth Thackeray, my copy-editor (a model of precision and tact).
Finally, my family. My debt to them for their support and forbearance is daily compounded. To Sandy, Kit and Ellie Nairne, my love and thanks.
Acknowledgements
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