Leeds, New York and Tokyo: Sir Joseph Duveen’s Support of Living British Artists

This work in progress aims to highlight a hitherto unresearched area of Sir Joseph Duveen’s sprawling career, i.e. his support of living British artists. Indeed, contrary to common belief, Duveen (1869-1939) took an active interest in modern art, from funding Tate’s ‘Modern Foreign Galleries’ in the 1920s to organising a series of solo shows, and national and international exhibitions of living British artists in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Thanks to Duveen’s efforts, British artists were shown in Leeds, Paris, Brussels, Stockholm and as far as Tokyo, using diplomatic networks and media coverage to foster public awareness. Using unpublished archives, report and letters, Marie’s talk will consider Duveen’s possible motivations as well as it will attempt to measure the success of these endeavours.

Marie Tavinor, PhD, is currently Programme Director in the Executive Master in Cultural Leadership at the Royal Academy of Arts, and the co-Chair of the Society for the History of Collecting. She wrote her PhD on the early years of the Venice Biennale (1895-1914), obtained from the Royal Holloway, University of London in 2017. Of late, her research has focused on Sir Joseph Duveen and his active support of French and British modern art, on which she is currently writing a book.