New Approaches to British Art, 1939-1969

A conference organised jointly by The Courtauld Institute of Art’s Research Forum and the University of York, to be held at The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN

Friday 4 – Saturday 5 June 2010

Keynote Speakers: Alex Potts (Michigan), Chris Stephens (Tate Britain), Anne Wagner (Berkeley)

British art has benefited from an extraordinary growth in scholarly studies over the last decade but the rich history of the years between 1939 and 1969 remains relatively underexplored. Despite the buoyancy of the market, the large audiences for modern art internationally, and the significance of monographic exhibitions devoted to a few select names (Nicholson, Caro, Bacon, Freud), there is still a dearth of younger scholars working in this period and little thematic and analytic study in comparison to scholarship on the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. This conference is intended both to stimulate further study of the art of these years and to provide a forum in which new work and fresh approaches can be discussed and developed. We encourage proposals on sculpture; on art and photography; on trans-nationalism and immigration; on austerity and Americanisation; on the institutional field including art education, cultural policy, exhibitions, criticism and the market; and especially on topics that lie outside or cut across categories already established in histories of the period.

Please email initial proposals, of 300 words in the first instance, to both organisers, by 7 August 2009: Prof. David Peters Corbett, dmpc1@york.ac.uk; and Prof. Lisa Tickner, lisa.tickner@courtauld.ac.uk.