Renewing and Displaying our Ukrainian Collections

By Jamie Copeland

Since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine (24 January 2022), the Bodleian Art, Archaeology and Ancient World Library has maintained a book display celebrating Ukrainian culture and presenting a selection of the material held in our collections that can enrich awareness of Ukraine’s art, architecture, archaeology and history. It was also intended to refresh this display periodically, both to mark events such as Ukraine Independence Day and to guard against the impression that attention has moved on. The change of material is also an opportunity to address areas that may not have been as prominent in previous displays, while drawing on the expanding collection and resources available.

The first anniversary of the invasion was an obvious moment both to reflect upon the events of the past year and to address some of the issues that I have become aware of. One of the difficulties that I had encountered was in finding material featuring contemporary artists and their responses to the ‘special military operation’ and the preceding near-decade of Russian hostilities. Although many cultural institutions and journals have commemorated the war many of the articles and institutional resources remain online only. I was able, however, to find a physical issue of the journal Artforum that has a description of an artist’s experience of the onset of the war and images of their reaction to it.

The second issue that I wanted the display to address was a response to Putin’s speech denying Ukraine’s statehood, and his preceding essay “On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians”, something I had considered during the display’s previous iteration but had learned more about over the last year. The publication ‘Postcolonial Europe?: essays on post-communist literatures and cultures’ was useful in this regard, especially the chapter titled ‘Ukrainian Culture after Communism’.

One of the major figures of Ukrainian nationhood is Mikhail Hrushevsky, historian and President of the Central Rada (Central Council of Ukraine) before its overthrow by German backed forces in April 1918. Hrushevsky continued his efforts to claim a historical legitimacy for Ukraine independent of Russia for the rest of his life, despite mounting repression. One of his more popular works was The Illustrated history of Ukraine, a single volume edition derived from his ten volume Survey of the History of the Ukrainian People, the first major work on Ukrainian history. The early 1913 version can be contrasted with the revised, post-independence 1997 edition.

A complication in selecting publications for the display was the definition of a Ukrainian. From various perspectives (for example frequent border and regime shifting) the list could include people of Ukrainian heritage, such as Hrushevsky himself, who was born in Chełm, then part of Poland subject to Imperial Russia, to a family of the Ukrainian aristocracy. There are also artists such as Abraham Manievich, born in Belarus to a Jewish family, who studied in Kiev and was a co-founder of the Ukrainian Academy of Fine Arts. Although primarily resident in Kiev, he travelled throughout the Russian Empire and Europe before emigrating to the United States after the murder of his son in a pogrom during the Russian Civil War. A similar example is Sonia Delauney, also Jewish, born in Odessa, but who moved to St. Petersburg in her early childhood. She then moved to Paris at the age of fifteen. Would it be justifiable to include an important artist, the first living female artist to have a retrospective exhibition of her work at the Louvre (1964), just because her birthplace was in Ukraine although her education and career took place abroad? One of the quotes about her work addressed the subject of Ukraine as a formative influence upon her work.

“About 1911 I had the idea of making for my son, who had just been born, a blanket composed of bits of fabric like those I had seen in the houses of Ukrainian peasants. When it was finished, the arrangement of the pieces of material seemed to me to evoke cubist conceptions and we then tried to apply the same process to other objects and paintings.” Sonia Delaunay.[12]

The recent exhibition In the Eye of the Storm: Modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s (Madrid, Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, 29/11/2022 – 30/04/2023) displayed works from their the museum’s collection in conjunction with works from the national collections of Ukraine; this was a response to the Museums for Ukraine initiative, providing a cultural protest to both the invasion and Russia’s denial of a separate Ukraine culture. In the accompanying publication Francesca Thyssen-Bornemisza addresses this subject, stating that the war is ‘not only about controlling territory, but also about owning the narrative’. In the introduction, the curator and art historian Konstantin Akinsha traces the history of modern Ukraine from the culturally tolerant early years of the Bolsheviks, through the terror of the Stalinist years, the relative calm of Khrushchev and the re-emergence of Ukraine as a nation state. In parallel with this political history runs a cultural history with the idealism of Ukrainian modernism experiencing both genocidal suppression and Russian appropriation as the Western art markets made modernism useful to the USSR, then the post-Soviet attempt to rediscover and exhibit the ‘Ukrainian Avant-Garde’. The lives of various artists, as they experienced fates ranging from execution, imprisonment, exile to suppression,were restricted as they saw their works confined to the ‘Spetsfond’ a sealed archive for works produced by ‘formalists’, ‘nationalists’ and other ‘criminals’. In the Eye of the Storm is broadly divided into parts, with the first three – on Kyiv, Karkhiv, and Odesa – following the various regions and associated schools with distinctive but connected experiences as they attempted to preserve the expression of their selves in the face of an overwhelming hegemonic power. The fourth part, ‘Aftermath’, follows the lives of the surviving artists. An essay, ‘From Oblivion to Glory’, discusses the Spetsfond and its function as an inadvertent resource for the subsequent study of Ukrainian art; with works held by the State Ukrainian Museum then divided among five categories, determining (for example) whether they could be exhibited, used for scientific work or transferred. The final paragraph of the book notes:

‘Almost all works from the spetsfond were allocated to the fifth group, the so-called zero category, with the majority being taken out of their frames and rolled up. As luck would have it, this eventually saved them from destruction. Because the zero category did not belong to the Museum’s primary collection it never featured in official reports and was not subject to further checks. All works from this group, therefore, remained intact in the Museum’s vaults to be discovered by future generations of curators and art historians.’

With this in mind I wanted to display the work of artists not restricted by artistic schools or questions of identity, but to focus on their response to Ukraine as a nation. Zinaida Serebryakova, was born in Kharkiv in 1884, her family prominent in the artistic establishment of the Russian Empire. She spent much of her life in exile, often in near poverty after the death of her husband and her reluctance to conform to depicting the preferred subjects of the Soviet establishment, preferring instead to paint landscapes, scenes of rural life and domestic portraits, often of her children. Unable to afford the materials for her preferred technique of oil painting she then worked with cheaper materials such as pencil and charcoal, learning to sketch rapidly. In 1924 she was given a commission for a mural in Paris, leaving her four children under the care of her mother. On completion of this work she was unable to return to the Soviet Union and was separated from her family, although she retained her Soviet citizenship until the Nazi occupation forced her to abandon it in order to gain a Nansen passport. In 1947 she was granted French citizenship and was able to bring two of her children to Paris but was unable to meet the rest of her family until the so-called Khrushchev Thaw. In 1960 she was reunited with her daughter, now an artist at the Moscow Art Theatre. Her daughter was able to help arrange a series of major exhibitions in Moscow, Leningrad and Kyiv, which took place in 1966. The success of these established Serebryakova’s reputation in her homeland after half a life in exile. She died in 1968.

I chose to show, as openings in the book display, several paintings from Serebryakova’s earlier work. On the Terrace in Kharkov (1919) shows a peaceful family scene, with the strong use of blue and yellow, emphasizing the theme of Ukraine. The below landscapes of Ukrainian countryside, with sunflowers, rolling plains, and Crimean hills offering a counterpoint to the images of devastation we have seen since the invasion.

Contrasting with Serebryakova’s peaceful landscapes, the paintings of David Burliuk have the unstable energy typical of Futurism. Born in Riabushky, part of the Kharkov Governorate, Burliuk’s family was a mixture of Ukrainian Cossacks with a Belarussian mother. His portrait of fellow futurist Vasily Kamensky draws on the Byzantine tradition of icon painting normally used to depict the divine serenity of saints, an effect undermined by the clash of colours and almost vibrating shapes. The painting Dnieper Rapids is barely recognisable as a landscape, the land and sky merging into broken reds. Burliuk’s early life was a flurry of travel through Russia and Europe and a string of movements and manifestos. After the end of the Bolsheviks’ initial tolerance for dissent by prominent figures on the left he was forced to flee via Japan, eventually settling on Long Island, New York.  Despite persistent campaigning he was refused permission to revisit the USSR until the Khrushchev years.

The revival of interest in Soviet avant-garde movements following the Khrushchev Thaw notwithstanding, the art markets of the West had only an outside view of the influences prevalent in their creation. In his above-mentioned essay, Konstantin Akinsha quotes Oleh Ilnytzkyz, an early proponent of Ukranian Futurism: “The goal is not to place a new ‘Ukrainian’ straitjacket on cultural activities in the empire, but to find a way to do justice to the variety of sources and the myriad of cultural influences that flowed from so many directions. The recognition of Burliuk, [Aleksandra] Ekster and [Kazimir] Malevich as Ukrainians does not diminish their relevance for either the imperial (transnational) avant-garde or for strictly Russian culture, where their impact is undeniable.”

In a similar attempt to recognise cultural specificity, the National Gallery recently renamed its Degas pastel drawing formally known as Russian Dancers to Ukrainian Dancers.

A brief section titled ‘Note on Transliteration’ (p. 8) in the publication In the eye of the storm: modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s (2022) – often used as a resource for this display – discusses one of the issues encountered when discussing Ukraine and its culture. While recognizing the complex identities of artists from this period and area, the project shows that the individuals discussed belong to the narrative of Ukrainian art history. The editors have therefore favoured the transliteration of Ukrainian versions of artists names, except for emigrés with previously well-established reputations in the West. While using various sources to research this book display I found the question of whether to use the Russian or Ukrainian versions of names and places increasingly problematic. Although current resources tend to use Ukrainian names, many/most printed materials, especially those published before the break-up of the USSR, use Russian versions. Many artists themselves may have used Russian versions, including in place names and titles of their works. Unwilling to impose a choice I largely stayed with the version used in the source material I was discussing. The modern history of Ukraine and its relationship with Russia has itself led to several linguistic variations. In contrast with Imperial Russia’ imposition of ‘Russification’ on its provinces, Lenin supported korenizatsiia (nativization), a policy encouraging indigenous cultures and languages as a means of increasing support for the Bolsheviks beyond Russia itself. This policy was abruptly brought to an end by Stalin, whose purges destroyed symbols of Ukrainian culture such as the Kobzars (travelling singers) and had so effective an impact on Ukrainian artists that they became known as the “The Executed Renaissance”.

Although later policies were less harsh, the Soviet regime still used imprisonment and censorship as tools to suppress potential dissent. Under these conditions conformity to approved approaches such as ‘Socialist Realism’ became a necessity for many artists, with even coded references such as colour or national symbols risking censure.

Like Burliuk, several other artists’ work was influenced by Byzantine icon painting and nativist art. An example is the poignant,  folk art-inspired Portrait of a Woman by Mykhailo Boychuk who, in 1936, along with two of his students and four months later his wife, was executed by the NKVD.  Boychuk’s work, described by his killers as ‘bourgeois nationalism’ and largely destroyed, was an influence on the later artist and regime opponent Alla Horska, who was herself killed by the KGB in 1970. Much of the work of both of these artists, often in the form of murals, mosaics and other large public works drawing upon Byzantine sources, was destroyed by the Soviet authorities, with some of the work only surviving in preliminary sketches or photographs. Others were preserved by fellow artists and archivists, such as Yaroslava Muzyka, who kept most of the paintings Boychuk left in Lviv after he was forced to abandon them.

In my attempt to select publications and show artists’ works for the display, and also learn of the fates – exile, appropriation, suppression or attempts to erase from history – of the works and their creators it became impossible not to admire the resilience of people currently struggling to preserve themselves as a nation, however varied. One of the claims put out by the Kremlin, was that Russia and Ukraine are one people separated by a Western coup, thus justifying a ‘special military operation’ to reunite them. Author Andrey Kurkov’s Ukraine diaries, detailing his experiences in Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) in Kyiv, as he and others struggled to resist the 2014 attempt to permanently bind Ukraine to Russian vassalage, was also an inspiration for the display. The PEN Ukraine book Treasures of Ukraine, for which Kurkov wrote the foreword, was similarly invaluable in providing a cultural history and a guide to more contemporary work.

The following gallery and list of publications on display can show only a small section of the Art, Archaeology and Ancient World Library’s collection of material celebrating Ukraine.

Gallery

Publications on display

Aĭvazovskiĭ, Ivan Konstantinovich. 2011. Aiwasowski : Maler des Meeres / herausgeg Ostfildern : Hatje Cantz

Akinsha, Konstantin. Denysova, Katia. Kashuba-Volvach, Olena. 2022. In the eye of the storm : modernism in Ukraine, 1900-1930s. London : Thames and Hudson

Balashova, Olha [editor-in-chief]. 2021. The art of Ukrainian sixties. Kyiv : Osnovy Publishing

Delaunay, Sonia, 2014, Sonia Delaunay. London

Grushevskiĭ, Mikhai. 1913. Illi͡ustrirovannai͡a istorīi͡a ukrainskago naroda. vyp. 1.  S.-Peterburg : Tip. T-va “Ekateringofsk. Pechatnoe Di͡elo

Grushevskiĭ, Mikhail. 1997 Illi͡ustrirovannai͡a istorii͡a Ukrainy. Kiev : MPP “Levada

Hnatenko, Stefania. 1989. Treasures of early Ukrainian art : religious art of the 16th- 18th centuries New York : Ukrainian Museum

Kadan, Nikita, 2022. Project

Artforum international. v.60: no.8(2022: Apr.)

Kruglov, Vladimir, 2004. Zinaida Evgenʹevna Serebri͡akova = Zinaida Serebryakova

St. Petersburg

Kurkov, Andrey. 2014. Ukrainian diaries: dispatches from Kiev. London : Harvill Secker

Marko, Olya [Editor] 1991.  Spirit of Ukraine : 500 years of painting : selections from the State Museum of Ukrainian Art, Kiev : an exhibition organized by the Winnipeg Art Gallery in honour of the centenary of Ukrainian settlement in Canada. Winnipeg : Winnipeg Art Gallery

Monti, Matteo de. 2011. Colour moves : art and fashion by Sonia Delaunay London : Thames & Hudson

Morozov, A. I. (Aleksandr Ilʹich), 2007 Sot͡srealizm i realism Moskva : Galart

Mudrak, Myroslava M. “The Painted Surface in the Ukrainian Avant-garde: from Facture to Construction.”

Pantheon 45 (1987): 138–43. [München] : [Bruckmann]

Pensler, Alan. 2001. Abraham Manievich, Manchester : Yivo Institute for Jewish Research : Hudson Hills Press

Petrova, Yevgenia. [editor-in chief], 2001.  Abstraction in Russia, XX century

St. Petersburg,

Russian futurism : and David Burliuk, “The father of Russian Futurism”

Petrova, Yevgenia [editor-in-chief] 2008.  XX century in the Russian Museum: painting, sculpture 1900-2000 Sankt-Peterburg : Palace Editions, 2008.

Pucherová, Dobrota [editor-in-chief]. 2015. Postcolonial Europe? : essays on post-communist literatures and cultures  Part V: Between the East and the West: the colonial present — Ukrainian culture after communism: between post-colonial liberation and neo-colonial subjugation. Riabchuk, Mykola. Leiden : Brill Rodopi

Shulʹkevich, M. M. 1982. Kiev : arkhitekturno-istoricheskiĭ ocherk. Kiev : “Budivelʹnyk”

Teboul, David. 2011. I’ve been here once before. Boris Mikhailov interviewed by David Teboul. München : Hirmer

Surudz͡hiĭ, N.M. 2016. Pysanky nashykh babusʹ : zibranni͡a pysanok I͡Urii͡a Ferenchuka = Our grandmothers pysankas : pisankas collection of Yuiy Ferenchuk / avtor proektu ta upori͡adnyk. Chernivt͡si : Misto

Ukrains’kiĭ modernizm 1910-1930 = Ukrainian modernism. 2006, Kyiv : National Art Museum of Ukraine

Versari, Maria Elena (Curator), 2022 Archipenko and the Italian avant garde London : Estorick Foundation

From
LGBT+ History Month (February 2023)

To
International Transgender Day of Visibility

31 March 2023

Happy Trans Day of Visibility 2023! For this 31 March, our LGBT+ History Month book display has been rearranged to cast a spotlight on the trans artists included there. As part of this change, I have also added Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (MIT Press, 2017), which features many and varied trans artists and theorists presenting interesting and nuanced arguments about the meanings and consequences of visible transness. This book is currently on display open to a page featuring artist, activist, and trans man, Reed Erickson. I thought the title for his self-portrait particularly appropriate for Trans Day of Visibility: I am fire, I am Wind, I AM BEING All that YOU IS SEEING.

I have also opened the volume Queer!? (Zwolle, 2019) to a page about the trans masculine Russian-Hungarian performance artist and painter, El Kazovsky; and, from Jonathan Weisberg’s Art after Stonewall: 1969-1989 (2019), I have centred an image of Marsha P. Johnson alongside a conversation about her between filmmaker, Sasha Wortzel and writer and trans activist, Tourmaline. While the relationship of drag performers like Marsha to transness is complicated – some identify as trans and some do not – their importance to trans movements cannot be denied, and their representation of fluid gender performance complements this theme.

Similarly, beginning in the 1970s, Nan Goldin, represented in this display through Nan Goldin, by Guido Costa (Phaidon, 2005), drew the attention of the art world to drag queens and transgender life. This book features on its cover her photograph Jimmy Paulette & Misty in a Taxi, NYC (1991) – just one of the many images she recorded of her drag queen friends.

Then, while explicit trans representation is extremely difficult to find in ancient history, I thought that the page entitled ‘A Gender Changing Goddess’ from Richard Parkinson’s A Little Gay History (2013) provides a concise introduction to ancient evidence for gender variance.

I hope that you too have enjoyed this brief look into trans representation in the collections at the Sackler Library!

Ashley Parry, Library Assistant
Sackler Library, Bodleian Libraries

LGBT+ History Month 2023
‘Behind the Lens’ Book Display
by Ashley Parry

It’s February already! In the UK, this means that it’s LGBTQ+ History Month, which offers an occasion to acknowledge and celebrate the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer people of all identities throughout the ages. At the Sackler Library, we are marking this month with a display to highlight LGBTQ+ related items in our collections. This year’s theme, Behind the Lens, marks LGBTQ+ people’s contribution to cinema and film not in front of the camera but behind it.

Behind the Lens book display, Sackler Library. Image Credit: Ashley Parry

Through my research, I was drawn to the work of the trans artist, Wu Tsang, who uses dance and film to explore the theme of perspective in her work.Then, while Andy Warhol looms large over the history of queer art, this month has enabled me to highlight his films specifically. In fact, both Wu Tsang and Andy Warhol illustrate one of the key themes of this display – that LGBTQ+ artist-filmmakers not only question the boundaries between sexualities and genders, but also the boundaries between different forms of artistic expression.

Another artist whose work illustrates this is Derek Jarman (1942-1994), represented in the display by Derek Jarman: Brutal Beauty and also included in Caravaggio in Film and Literature: Popular Culture’s Appropriation of a Baroque Genius. Jarman is best known for his films but has also been very influential in his installation work, and he applied his knowledge of art and art history to his films in their composition and subject matter.

The anthologies on show in the display also illustrate the permeability of genre boundaries, where the work of artists who use film installation is represented alongside that of poets, photographers and fine artists.

For example, Sex Ecologies includes a diverse range of contributions, from photography by filmmaker Pedro Neves Marques to Léuli Eshrāghi’s discussions of Sāmoan sexual and gender diversity. The volume AIDS Riot contains interviews with filmmaker and “TV-guerrilla” Gregg Bordowitz, who “conceived of [‘video’] as the privileged instrument in the de-marginalization of PWAs [People With AIDS]”, alongside discussions of other installation, graphic design, and photographic work from artist collectives in the New York of the 1980s and 1990s. Similarly, in the book Outlaw Representation, Richard Meyer discusses the work of artist and filmmaker, David Wojnarowicz alongside other controversial figures such as photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. The potential for crossover between photography and film gave me the opportunity to include Mapplethorpe’s photographs with those of with those of other queer artists such as Berenice Abbot, and Sunil Gupta. In fact, it is Abbott’s image that has been used for the poster of this display.

(A note about the poster for this book display: The image of Berenice Abbott (1898-1991), with camera almost the same height as photographer, is a good fit with this year’s ‘Behind the Lens’ theme. Also aligning itself with the theme, the Courier typeface is typically used for screenplays. As for the text’s colours, I chose Valentino Vecchietti’s tones in his 2021 intersex-inclusive redesign for the Progress Pride Flag at the top of the poster, and the colours of Gilbert Baker’s original 1978 rainbow flag design at the bottom of the poster. Using these colour ranges incorporates as many queer identities as possible without privileging any in particular, while also paying tribute to the past 45 years of queer art history.)

The book Sexuality & Space creates a bridge between the film and photography related books in this display and other fascinating titles on queer theory and architectural criticism, such as Eileen Gray and the Design of Sapphic Modernity, and Queer Space: Architecture and Same-sex Desire. Another related publication, available as an ebook, that is well worth a look is Preservation and Place: Historic Preservation by and of LGBTQ Communities in the United States .

Although this year’s theme meant that most materials skewed towards the modern, it would be a disservice to the Sackler’s collections and the true diversity of historical experience to concentrate only on this era. For example, no overview of LGBTQ+ history would be complete without the Classical Greek poet Sappho, whose evocations of same-sex desire in her poetry led to the adjective ‘sapphic’ and whose home of Lesbos gives us the word ‘lesbian’. She is included in this display not only through a collection of her poems, but also through Page duBois’s post-modern analysis of her work in Sappho is Burning.

Representing our archaeology collections on the LGBTQ+ front, both L’homosexualité dans le Proche-Orient Ancien et la Bible and Sex and Gender in Ancient Egypt demonstrate the presence of individuals we might now consider queer in the Ancient Near East. The Queer Archaeologies special issue of the periodical World Archaeologies includes various perspectives on how the field can diversify its approach. One of the aspects of reading about LGBTQ+ interpretations of ancient history that I found enlightening is the way they challenge heteronormative cultural customs – questioning whether conclusions about ancient lives are backed up by evidence or based on imported modern assumptions.

One of the pioneers of treating the history of ancient art as a discipline was Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768). This influential gay philologist is represented by several books in the display, such as Winckelmann – das göttliche Geschlecht and Gay and Lesbian Studies in Art History. Both of these texts examine the ways that Winckelmann’s sexuality informed his approach to the study of ancient art, and contributed to his innovative modes of writing about the subject.

Winckelmann’s work was brought to my attention by Richard Parkinson, author of A Little Gay History, who also kindly donated one of the images accompanying this display.It depicts a still from the set of the film adaptation of E. M. Forster’s Maurice, directed and produced by partners James Ivory and Ismail Merchant. Forster’s inspiration for the novel is also mentioned in the introduction to John Potvin’s Bachelors of a Different Sort as part of his evocations of queer masculine domestic life. The image serves to tie together some of the threads of the display, combining as it does the Egyptian artefacts in the British Museum with a behind-the-scenes look at the work of queer filmmakers.

There’s so much more fascinating material on LGBTQ+ related topics to discover throughout the Sackler Library’s collections, but only so much that could be fit into this display. However, I have included many more titles in the bibliography of this blog post – though, of course, I still have not included everything that the library has to offer!

Ashley Parry, Library Assistant
Sackler Library, Bodleian Libraries

Display List

Ackerman, S., 2005. When heroes love : the ambiguity of eros in the stories of Gilgamesh and David, New York.

Alvarado, L., Evans Frantz, D., Gómez-Barris, M., Ondine Chavovoya, C., et al., 2017, Axis mundo: queer networks in Chicano L.A., Munich.

Anthonissen, A., 2019. Queer!?: Beeldende kunst in Europa 1969-2019 = Visual arts in Europe 1969-2019, Zwolle.

Behdad, A. & Gartlan, L., 2013. Photography’s Orientalism: new essays on colonial representation, Los Angeles.

Betsky, A., 1997. Queer space: architecture and same-sex desire, New York.

Boehringer, S., 2021. Female homosexuality in ancient Greece and Rome, trans. Preger, A., London.

Cann, T., Kinigopoulo, A., Sawyer, D., & Weinburg, J., 2019, Art after Stonewall : 1969-1989, Columbus, OH.

Colomina, B., 1992. Sexuality & space, New York.

Cortjaens, W., Goerlitz, G., & Tobin, R. D., 2017. Winckelmann – Das göttliche Geschlecht Auswahlkatalog zur Ausstellung im Schwulen Museum Berlin, 16. Juni bis 9. Oktober 2017, Petersburg.

Davidson, J. N., 2007. The Greeks and Greek love: a radical reappraisal of homosexuality in ancient Greece, London.

Davis, W., 1994. Gay and lesbian studies in art history, New York.

Dowson, T. A., World Archaeology, Oct. 2000, Vol. 32 (2), ‘Queer Archaeologies’.

DuBois, P., 1995. Sappho is burning, Chicago.

Engel, C., Fenouillat, N., Guitton, A., Di Loreto, B., Loyau, F., Mestrov, I., & Olszewska, A., 2003. AIDS riot: collectifs d’artistes face au Sida = Artist collectives against AIDS, New York, 1987-1994: 12e session de l’École du Magasin, Grenoble.

Gilhuly, K., 2020. Erotic geographies in ancient Greek literature and culture, London.

Graves-Brown, C., 2008. Sex and gender in ancient Egypt: ‘don your wig for a joyful hour’, Swansea.

Gupta, S., 2011. Queer, Munich.

Hessler, S., 2021. Sex ecologies. Cambridge, MA.

Julien, I., 2008. Derek Jarman: brutal beauty. London.

Kuo, J. C., 2013. Contemporary Chinese Art and Film: Theory Applied and Resisted, Washington, D. C.

Mapplethorpe, R., Danto, A. C., Holborn, M., Levas, D., & Smith, P., 2020. Robert Mapplethorpe, London.

Meyer, R., 2003. Outlaw representation: censorship & homosexuality in twentieth-century American art, Boston.

Morelli, A., 2009. Roman Britain and classical deities: gender and sexuality in Roman art, Oxford.

Murphy, J. J., 2012. The black hole of the camera: the films of Andy Warhol, Berkely, CA.

Nardelli, J., 2007. Homosexuality and liminality in the Gilgameš and Samuel, Amsterdam.

Parkinson, R. B., 2013. A little gay history: desire and diversity across the world, London.

Potvin, J., 2014. Bachelors of a different sort : queer aesthetics, material culture and the modern interior in Britain, Manchester.

Rault, J., 2011. Eileen Gray and the design of sapphic modernity: staying in, Farnham.

Römer, T. & Bonjour, L., 2016. L’homosexualité dans le Proche-Orient ancien et la Bible,

Rorato, L., 2014. Caravaggio in film and literature: popular culture’s appropriation of a baroque genius, London.

February marks LGBT+ History Month in the UK, which aims to educate people about and increase visibility of the accomplishments of LGBT+ identifying people, and the contributions they have made and continue to make to society. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and asexual people, as well as people of other gender, sexual and romantic minority groups, have been present in the arts, the sciences and daily life from ancient times to the modern day. The Sackler Library has chosen to celebrate the rich history and diversity of the LGBT+ community by means of a book display highlighting the contribution of LGBT+ people to the areas of study within the remit of the Sackler Library.

In terms of Classical literature, our display highlights the work of Sappho, e.g. in Rayor and Lardinois’ Sappho: a new translation of the complete works (2014). Sappho was a prolific lyric poet from the Archaic Greek era^[1]. Her poetry was well-known and greatly admired through much of antiquity, and she was among the canon of nine lyric poets most highly esteemed by scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria. She is also the subject of some scholarly debate, but it is generally thought amongst modern scholars that her work portrays evidence of love and desire between women^[2]. Indeed, the modern use of the word ‘lesbian’ is derived from the name of her home island of Lesbos.

We can also see the contributions of LGBT+ people in the field of Egyptology, namely through Amelia Edwards’ A Thousand Miles up the Nile, a best-selling travelogue published in 1877. Edwards, born in 1831, was an English novelist, journal-writer, and traveller, and contributed greatly to Egyptological Studies, co-founding the Egypt Exploration Fund in 1882^[4]. She was also the founder of the Edwards Chair of Egyptology at University College London. Edwards died in 1892 from influenza, and was buried alongside her partner, Ellen Drew Braysher. In 2016, her grave  in Bristol was designated as Grade II listed by Historic England, and is celebrated as a landmark of English LGBT+ history^[5].

The cover, an illustration, and author’s signature from an 1877 edition of Edwards’ A Thousand Miles up the Nile (Sackler Library, Special Collections)
To view Special Collections materials, please enquire at the Sackler Issue Desk
Image(s) Credit: Erin McNulty

We have also highlighted the relevance of LGBT+ studies to the study of architecture by including Betsky’s Queer space: architecture and same-sex desire (1997). This work discusses how same-sex desire is creating an entirely new design process. Vincent’s LGBT people and the UK cultural sector: the response of libraries, museums, archives and heritage since 1950 (2014) also deals with LGBT+ influences in the library and heritage sector specifically.

Works on art also form a substantial part of the Sackler’s collections. Both of these disciplines benefit greatly from the contributions of the LGBT+ community. Davis’ Gay and lesbian studies in art history (1994) gives an overview of this. We have also chosen to showcase art books dealing with LGBTQ+ themes from earlier periods, such as Mills’ Seeing sodomy in the Middle Ages (2015), to the more modern, e.g. David Wojnarowicz: history keeps me awake at night and Robert Mapplethorpe: the Archive.

A library’s collections can tell the story of a community, such as the LGBT+ community, and it changes as new works are acquired. How the Sackler, as well as many other libraries across the Bodleian, tells these stories will be reviewed by the upcoming project Changing the Narrative: Championing Inclusive Collection Development. This project, led by Helen Worrell, “will champion diversifying our collection development across the Social Sciences and Humanities Libraries, with the aim of enhancing collections in areas such as LGBTIQ+ Studies, Disability Studies, Indigenous Studies, Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) Studies and the intersections between these identities. This will enable us to think critically about the collections we currently hold so that we are aware of the gaps and the narrative these collections tell.”^[5] Keep an eye out on the Sackler blog for upcoming posts regarding this project, or head to the LibGuide for more information.

Our book display also ties in to the theme of 2020’s LGBT+ History Month, launched at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford: Poetry, Prose and Plays. We showcase works by all four featured authors: Dawn Langley Simmons’ Man into woman: a transsexual autobiography (1970), E. M. Forster’s Collected short stories (1947), Lorraine Hansberry’s A raisin in the sun (2011), and William Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1945 edition). We have also featured the work of ancient authors, such as Plutarch, Virgil, and Petronius, who are now thought by some scholars to have been LGBT+^[6]. You can visit the LBGT+ History Month website for more information and resources.

We hope you enjoy browsing the books we have on offer on our display. However, these are only a small sample of the resources the Sackler, and the University of Oxford as a whole, has to offer for anyone interested in LGBT+ studies. For example, TORCH’s Queer Studies Network meets weekly for lectures, reading groups, seminars, workshops and events. The Bodleian Libraries are also currently trialling several informational databases, accessible through SOLO, e.g.:

Archives of Sexuality and Gender (Gale Cengage)

This resource spans the sixteenth to twentieth centuries and is the largest digital collection of historical primary source publications relating to the history and study of sex, sexuality, and gender research and gender studies research. Documentation covering disciplines such as social, political, health, and legal issues impacting LGBT communities around the world is included, as well as rare and unique books on sex and sexuality.

LGBT Magazine Archive (Proquest LLC)

Includes the archives of 26 leading but previously hard-to-find magazines, including many of the longest-running, most influential publications of this genre.  For example, the complete backfile of the US publication, The Advocate, one of the very few LGBT titles to pre-date the 1969 Stonewall riots, is made available digitally for the first time.  Other titles include the UK’s Gay News and its successor publication Gay Times.

LGBT Life Full Text (EBSCO)

Provides scholarly and popular LGBT+ publications in full text, plus historically important primary sources, including monographs, magazines and newspapers. It also includes a specialised LGBT+ thesaurus containing thousands of terms, 140+ full-text journals, approaching 160 full-text books and reference materials, 260+ abstracted and indexed journals and more than 350+ abstracted and indexed books and reference works.

Also, don’t miss other LGBT+ projects at the University of Oxford! For example, the Pitt Rivers Museum’s project, Beyond the Binary, due to launch this month, will work with local, national and international partners to explore the global diversity of sexual and gender identities. The project will challenge historical interpretations of the museum’s collections so that all visitors can understand humanity better. It will also include a community-focused acquisition programme for LGBT+ cultural and historical artefacts. Objects will be collected from British communities and across the globe that highlight traditions of gender non-conformity, bringing British LGBT+ heritage into conversation with global LGBT+ material culture.

We hope that you will join us in celebration of LGBT+ History Month, and that you have a fantastic February!

Erin McNulty,
Graduate Library Trainee

References

^{[1] Campbell, D. A. (ed.) (1982). Greek Lyric 1: Sappho and Alcaeus (Loeb Classical Library No. 142). Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass}

^{[2] Rayor, Diane; Lardinois, André (2014). Sappho: A New Translation of the Complete Works. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.}

^{[3] Rees, Joan (1998). Amelia Edwards: Traveller, Novelist and Egyptologist. London: Rubicon Press.}

^{[4] Queer history’ landmarks celebrated by Historic England”. BBC News. 23 September 2016. Retrieved 24 September 2016.}

^{[5] https://libguides.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/changingthenarrative}

^{[6] Claude J. Summers, ed., The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage: A Reader’s Companion to the Writers and Their Works, from Antiquity to the Present (New York: Henry Holt, 1995)}

Book Display Bibliography

Benson, M., 1901. The soul of a cat, and other stories. London.

Betsky, A., 1997. Queer space: architecture and same-sex desire, New York.

Boehringer, S., 2007. L’homosexualité féminine dans l’antiquité grecque et romaine, Paris.

Breslin, D., Kiehl, D., & Wojnarowicz, D. (2018). David Wojnarowicz : History Keeps Me Awake at Night.

Cook, M. & Oram, A., 2017. Prejudice & pride: celebrating LGBTQ heritage, Warrington.

Davidson, J. N., 2007. The Greeks and Greek love: a radical reappraisal of homosexuality in ancient Greece, London

Davis, W., 1994. Gay and lesbian studies in art history, New York.

Dedichen, H. & Butin, H., 2013. Warhol’s queens. Ostfildern.

Dover, K. J., 1978. Greek homosexuality, London.

DuBois, P., 2015. Sappho. London; New York.

Edwards, A.B., 1982. A thousand miles up the Nile. London.

Forster, E.M., 1947. Collected short stories of E.M. Forster. London.

Hansberry, L., 2011. A raisin in the sun. London.

Horace & Bennett, Charles E, 1960. The Odes and Epodes. London.

Mapplethorpe, R., Martineau, P., & Salvesen, B., 2016. Robert Mapplethorpe: the photographs, Los Angeles.

Mapplethorpe, R., Terpak, F., Brunnick, M., Smith, P., & Weinberg, J., 2016. Robert Mapplethorpe: the archive, Los Angeles.

Meyer, R., 2003. Outlaw representation: censorship & homosexuality in twentieth-century American art, Boston.

Mills, R., 2015. Seeing sodomy in the Middle Ages, Chicago.

Parkinson, R. B., 2013. A little gay history: desire and diversity across the world, London.

Petronius Arbiter & Brown, Andrew, 2009. Satyricon. Richmond.

Plutarch, Romm, James S & Mensch, Pamela, 2012. Plutarch: lives that made Greek history. Indianapolis.

Sappho, Rayor, Diane J. & Lardinois, A. P. M. H., 2014. Sappho: a new translation of the complete works. Cambridge.

Rorato, L., 2014. Caravaggio in film and literature: popular culture’s appropriation of a baroque genius, London.

Rothbauer, P. Locating the library as place among lesbian, gay, bisexual, and queer patrons, in eds. Buschman, J., & Leckie, G. J., 2007. The library as place: history, community, and culture, Westport; London.

Shakespeare, W. & Bullen, A.H., 1945. The sonnets of William Shakespeare. Oxford.

Simmons, D.L., 1970. Man into woman: a transsexual autobiography. London.

Spike, J. T., Brown, D. A., Joannides, P., De Groft, A. H., Rogers, M., & Bisogniero, C., 2015. Leonardo da Vinci and the idea of beauty, Williamsburg, Virginia.

Vicinus, M., 2004. Intimate friends: women who loved women, 1778-1928. Chicago.

Vincent, J., 2014. LGBT people and the UK cultural sector: the response of libraries, museums, archives and heritage since 1950. Farnham.

Virgil, Dryden, John & Keener, Frederick M., 1997. Virgil’s Aeneid. London.

Warhol, A., Feldman, F., & Defendi, C., 2003. Andy Warhol prints: a catalogue raisonné: 1962-1987, New York.

Wasserman, N., 2016. Akkadian love literature of the third and second millennium BCE. Weisbaden.

Weinberg, J., 1993. Speaking for vice: homosexuality in the art of Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and the first American avant-garde, New Haven; London.

Weinberg, J., 2004. Male desire: the homoerotic in American art, New York.

Williams, C. A., 1999. Roman homosexuality: ideologies of masculinity in classical antiquity, New York; Oxford.

Williamson, M., 1995. Sappho’s immortal daughters. Cambridge, Mass.; London

Wojnarowicz, D., 2018. The waterfront journals. London

We welcome suggestions for future blog contributions from our readers.
Please contact Clare Hills-Nova (clare.hills-nova@bodleian.ox.ac.uk) and Chantal van den Berg (chantal.vandenberg@bodleian.ox.ac.uk) if you would like propose a topic.

The Sackler staff are getting into the holiday spirit, so we decided to put up a book display in honour of the festivities. We drew on books from various areas in our collection to illustrate links between our ancient past and how we celebrate Christmas and other winter holidays today.

Midwinter festivals have been celebrated in Western Europe and beyond since at least the Neolithic period. Archaeological sites in Britain and Ireland may show evidence of such festivities taking place, one of the most famous of these being Stonehenge, in Wiltshire, constructed from around 3000 BCE to 2000 BCE. Find out more about Stonehenge by reading Chippindale’s Stonehenge Complete (1983; 4^th ed., 2012). There are many theories about why Stonehenge was constructed, but recent evidence hints that it was a gathering place for a festival held around the winter solstice (21^st December). This is because the stones are aligned in such a way that the sun at dawn on the winter solstice is aligned with the central aisle, indicating that the site may have functioned partly as a timekeeping device for our ancient ancestors.

The same is true of other Neolithic sites, such as Maeshowe on Orkney, and Brú na Bóinne (Newgrange) in Ireland. The latter site is constructed so that the dawn sun on the first few minutes of the winter solstice illuminates a carved spiral on the very back wall of the chamber, the meaning of which remains a mystery. Prendergast’s Houses of the Gods (2017) explains more about the role of such sites in terms of archaeoastronomy.

It seems that this time of year has been important to people for a long time. No wonder, then, that, after the Christianisation of the Roman Empire, many local traditions were incorporated into Christmas festivities, such as the British/Irish midwinter feast, or the German hanging decorations on the branches of a tree, traditions which we still celebrate to this day. Evans’ Christmas is Coming (2009) explores the origins of some of our wintertime festive traditions.

Although it incorporates ancient festivities, the midwinter celebration as an explicitly Christian festival, which would become known as Christmas, is a much newer tradition. People who follow a Christian faith believe that Jesus Christ was born in a stable in Bethlehem over 2000 years ago, with event celebrated on 25^th December in many countries. Hence Bethlehem has been regarded as an important religious site since the founding of Christianity. However, it is also an important archaeological and historical site, with evidence of human habitation from as early as 2200 BCE. Studying such sites can give us clues as to how people in the Near and Middle East lived thousands of years ago. For more information about Bethlehem in ancient history, see Harvey’s The Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem (1910) and Kihlman’s The Star of Bethlehem and Babylonian Astrology (2017).

The subject of Christmas has been, and remains, a theme often covered in art. The traditional Christmas story has many iconic moments from which Western artists have drawn inspiration. According to the story, angels acted as messengers announcing the birth of the baby Jesus. Selby et al.’s The Angel Tree (2011) and Ward and Steed’s Angels: a Glorious Celebration of Angels in Art (2005) showcase representations of angels in art from ancient times to the modern day. Similarly, the arrival of the ‘Three Kings’ with gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh has been reinterpreted by many artists, as detailed in Beer’s The Magi: Legend, Art and Cult (2014).

The theme of the Nativity is also often a subject in East European art. The Eastern Orthodox Church operates in some East European countries, Russia, and Greece, among others. People who follow Eastern Orthodox Christianity celebrate Christmas on 7^th January, as their liturgical year follows the Julian calendar rather than the Western, Gregorian calendar. The Sackler has many books on art reflecting Eastern Orthodox traditions, some of which exemplify Christmas scenes. We have chosen to showcase books on the art of Byzantium and Greece, such as Bratziōtē et al.’s Icons Itinerant (1994), which shows art from Corfu, and Petsopoulos’ East Christian Art (1987).

Of course, Christmas is not the only religious festival to take place in December. In ancient Rome, Saturnalia was celebrated. As the name suggests, this festival honoured the Roman god Saturn, and took place on 17^th – 23^rd December. It involved gift-giving, partying, a public banquet, as well as a celebratory sacrifice. Saturnalia was also a time for the inversion of societal roles and social norms, with slaves being waited on by their masters over the festival period. Macrobius’ Saturnalia describes the festivities that took place at this time of year during the Roman era.

People of Jewish faith celebrate Hanukkah, also known as the Festival of Lights, around late November to late December. This festival commemorates the rededication of the Second Temple in Jerusalem at the time of the Maccabean Revolt against the Seleucid Empire, during the reign of Antiochus in 175 BCE. According to the story, what little remaining oil there was in the sacked Temple miraculously kept the candles burning for eight days while the Temple was being restored. Viewed as a celebration of religious freedom, Jewish people mark this miracle by the gradual lighting of the Menorah. These religious artefacts can also have immense artistic value. Braunstein’s Luminous Art (2004) shows the collection of Menorahs in the Jewish Museum in New York.

More recently, Yuletide festivities have also included more secular forms of celebration, with the rise in popularity of figures such as Father Christmas, or the American Santa Claus, who is said to bring children gifts on the night before Christmas. Christmas celebrations around the world often include such a figure, such as the French Père Noël or the Dutch Sinterklaas. The name ‘Santa Claus’ is believed to have its origins in ‘St. Nicholas’, one of the figures who evolved over time into the jolly character we know today. St Nicholas was a 4^th century bishop, and during the Middle Ages, children would receive gifts in his honour on the evening of 5^th December, which may have contributed to our modern gift-giving traditions. Sinterklaas travels to the Netherlands each year from Spain via steam boat with his helpers, an event that is broadcast on national television. On the evening of 5th December, a sack of presents is delivered to well behaved children, and children are told that badly behaved children will be taken back to Spain in a sack. English’s The saint who would be Santa Claus (2012) discusses the contribution of stories about St. Nicholas to the origins of the modern Santa Claus figure.

Whatever you choose to celebrate, if anything, this December, we hope that you have a joyful and restful vacation, and return in the New Year with renewed vigour. Have fun browsing the book display, and Season’s Greetings from everyone here at the Sackler Library!

Erin McNulty
Graduate Library Trainee

References:

“Stonehenge”. Science. 133 (3460): 1216–22.

“Stonehenge druids ‘mark wrong solstice'”. The Daily Telegraph.

Jazombek, M. A Global History of Architecture. Cambridge, Mass., MIT. Online Lecture Series. Last consulted 28/11/19.

“Sí an Bhrú /Newgrange”. logainm.ie.

O’Kelly, M. J. (1982). Newgrange: Archaeology, Art and Legend. London: Thames and Hudson.

“Ancient Burial Ground with 100 Tombs Found Near Biblical Bethlehem”. LiveScience.

Miller, J. F. (2010). Roman Festivals. In “The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome”. Oxford: OUP.

“Santa Claus: The real man behind the myth”. NBC News.

Further reading:

Asmussen, H. (1955). Weihnachten; farbige Buchmalerei aus der Zeit der Ottonen. Hamburg: F. Wittig.

Bacci, M. (2017). The mystic cave: a history of the Nativity church at Bethlehem. Brno: Masaryk University; Roma: Viella

Beckwith, J. (1966). The adoration of the Magi in whalebone. London: H.M.Stationery Off.

Beckwith, J. (1970). Early Christian and Byzantine Art. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Beer, M. (2014). The Magi: legend, art and cult. Cologne: Museum Schnütgen.

Boucher, B. et al. (2012). Bartolo di Fredi: the Adoration of the Magi, a masterpiece reconstructed. Charlottesville, Va.: University of Virginia Art Museum.

Bratziōtē, P. et al. (1994). Icons Itinerant: Corfu, 14th-18th century: June-September 1994, Church of Saint George in the Old Fortress, Corfu. Athens: Ministry of Culture, Directorate of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Antiquities.

Braunstein, S.L. (2004). Luminous art: Hanukkah menorahs of the Jewish Museum. New York: Jewish Museum; New Haven; London: Yale University Press.

Braunstein, S. L. (2005). Five centuries of Hanukkah lamps from the Jewish Museum: a catalogue raisonné. New Haven, Conn.; London: Yale University Press.

Chippindale, C. (1983). Stonehenge Complete. London: Thames and Hudson.

Demus, O. (1970). Byzantine Art and the West. London: Weidenfield and Nicolson.

Ebon, M. (1975). Saint Nicholas: Life and Legend. New York: Harper & Row.

English, A. C. (2012). The saint who would be Santa Claus: the true life and trials of Nicholas of Myra. Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press.

Evans, A. J. Christmas and ancestor worship in the Black Mountain.

Evans, M. (2009). Christmas is coming: the origins of our Christmas traditions and some of the stories and legends which surround them. Brighton: Pen Press.

Hamilton, R. W. (1939). A guide to Bethlehem. Jerusalem: Azriel Press.

Harvey, W. et al. (1910). The Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem. London: published on behalf of the Fund by B. T. Batsford.

Hodne, L. (2012). The virginity of the Virgin: a study in Marian iconography. Roma: Scienze e Lettere.

Kaster, R. A. (2011). Macrobius: Saturnalia. Cambridge, Mass.; London: Harvard University Press.

Kihlman, D. (2017). The star of Bethlehem and Babylonian Astrology: astronomy and revelation 12 reveal what the magi saw. Trollhättan, Sweden: Kihlman.

Lawson-Jones, M. (2011). Why was the partridge in the pear tree?: The history of Christmas carols. Stroud: History.

Johnson, A. (2008). Solving Stonehenge: the new key to an ancient enigma. London: Thames & Hudson.

Matthews, J. (1998). The winter solstice: the sacred traditions of Christmas. London: Thorsons.

Miles, C. A. (1912). Christmas in Ritual and Tradition: Christian and Pagan. London; Leipzig: T. Fisher Unwin.

Northrup, M. (1966). The Christmas story from the Gospels of Matthew & Luke. Greenwich, Conn.: Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Petsopoulos, Y. (1987). East Christian Art. London: Axia.

Prendergast, K. (2017). Houses of the gods: neolithic monuments and astronomy at the Brú na Bóinne in Ireland and beyond. Saarbrücken: LAP LAMBERT Academic Publishing.

Rice, D. T. (1959). The Art of Byzantium. London: Thames and Hudson.

Rockland, M. S. (1976). The Hanukkah Book. New York: Schocken Books.

Selby, L. H. et al. (2011). The angel tree: celebrating Christmas at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: the Loretta Hines Howard collection of eighteenth-century Neapolitan crèche figures. New York, NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art: Abrams.

Scarre, C. (2007). The Megalithic Monuments of Britain and Ireland. London: Thames and Hudson.

Snyder, P. V. (1977). The Christmas tree book: the history of the Christmas tree and antique Christmas tree ornaments. Harmondsworth; New York: Penguin Books.

Tolkien, J. R. R. (2004). Letters from Father Christmas. London: HarperCollins.

Tyndale, W. (1996). A medieval Christmas. London: Frances Lincoln in association with the British Library.

Vasilakē, M. et al. (2000). Mother of God: representations of the Virgin in Byzantine art. Milano: Skira; New York: Distributed in North America and Latin America by Abbeville.

Verdon, T. and Ross, F. (2005). Mary in Western art. New York: in association with Hudson Mills Press.

Ward, L. and Steeds, W. (2005). Angels: a glorious celebration of angels in art. London: Carlton.

Vikan, G. (2003). Sacred Images and Sacred Power in Byzantium. Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum.

Ziadé, R. (2017). Chrétiens d’Orient: 2000 ans d’histoire. Paris: Gallimard.

We welcome suggestions for future blog contributions from our readers.
Please contact Clare Hills-Nova (clare.hills-nova@bodleian.ox.ac.uk) and Chantal van den Berg (chantal.vandenberg@bodleian.ox.ac.uk) if you would like propose a topic.

Studying Black and Visual Culture: An Ever-Evolving Addendum

A Book Display at the Sackler Library

Building on the Sackler’s 2018 Black History Month Book Display, we would like to extend the possibilities of study further, offering additional sources and consideration. (Please see Further reading at the end of this blog post.) As Ben Gable noted, Black History Month in the United Kingdom has its origins in the work of Dr. Carter G. Woodson, a renowned African American historian. In 1926, Woodson proposed a week-long concentration on African American contributions to history and culture and established the Journal of Negro History to ensure critical scholarship and awareness of the African Diaspora. With an increasing interest in Black Studies, in 1976 the United States extended the week to a month-long focus, encouraging other countries to consider the opportunity to engage and address the history of the African Diaspora that has shaped global consciousness. At the forefront of the campaigns against institutional racism in the UK and the apartheid regimes in Southern Africa, Ghanaian political refugee Akyaaba Addai-Sebo worked with others to adapt the idea with a special focus on inspiring black youth. Black History month in the UK was established in 1987 with the intention of extending a broader global awareness.

To that end, we would like to offer an addendum to the excellent resources aleady assembled by the Sackler, calling out a wide array of writers and artists who continue to define and challenge our understanding of the African Diaspora. We are especially keen to emphasise the global character of this diaspora even while singling out titles from the literature published for English-speaking audiences. The primary setting of the slave trade, the Atlantic Ocean featured prominently in the creation of a diasporic Black consciousness. Books such as Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic and Characters of Blood: Black Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination reflect this history, continuing an intellectual tradition that privileges the idea of movement over that of national identity. Moving into the present, Okwui Enwezor and Chika Okeke-Agulu’s Contemporary African Art Since 1980 reflects the growing ascendency of the African continent on the global art market, while Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria offers a case study that decenters the modernist canon beyond its Anglo-European axis. Indeed, the historic lacunae of the western art canon continues to be addressed by recent monographs and exhibition catalogues such as Richard Powell’s Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist and Jeffreen Hayes’s Augusta Savage: Renaissance Woman, demonstrating the ways that these influential figures shaped transatlantic modernism.

Similarly, the formation of a Black visual culture in Britain is indebted to centuries of migrations across the British Empire and later the Commonwealth of Nations. Victorian Jamaica and An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque examine the conflicts as well as the innovations that resulted from British ways of seeing being forcibly imported into the colonial Caribbean. In contrast, Black Britain: A Photographic History documents the lives of those who emigrated to the ‘motherland’ in the aftermath of the Second World War, as British territories across Africa and the Caribbean gained independence. The 1980s and 1990s witnessed the emergence of a new generation of Black British citizens who were born and raised in the UK. Frustrated with persistent racism and emboldened by the ideology of Black Power, they fought back. Artists like Eddie Chambers, author of Black Artists in British Art: A History Since the 1950s to the Present, embraced the separatist tactics championed by the Black Arts Movement in the US. In Britain, however, the term ‘Blackness’ had wider applications than in the United States, often accommodating strategic coalitions between artists of both African and Asian descent. The essays included in Shades of Black: Assembling Black Art in 1980s Britain are testament to a time when the very notion of ‘Blackness’ was dissected as part of the formation of an emerging postcolonial consciousness. Contemporary practitioners engage in a critical race theory as demonstrated by Huey Copeland in Bound to Appear, in which he considers how contemporary practitioners reframe strategies of representation and how blackness might be imagined and felt long after the end of the “peculiar institution” of slavery.

The artists involved in these foundational debates are only now receiving the recognition they deserve. Our display reflects this by including the recently published monograph on the Lubaina Himid CBE, who in 2017 was the first black woman artist to win the Turner Prize. We also include a monograph on Frank Bowling OBE RA, the British Guyanese painter who arrived in London in 1953 and whose tremendous achievements were celebrated last summer with a retrospective at Tate Britain.

We hope that this display will inspire staff and students alike, highlighting both the achievements of individual black artists and the influence of the African diaspora on Western culture more widely.  Furthermore, we hope that it illuminates some of the ways in which race plays a part in the subject areas covered by the Sackler’s collections.  The display will run until the end of the month, but the bibliography will remain accessible on this blog post.

Dr. Amy M. Mooney
Terra Foundation Visiting Professor of American Art
Department of the History of Art
Oxford University
amy.mooney@history.ox.ac.uk 

and

Dr. Giulia Smith
Leverhulme Early Career Fellow
Ruskin School of Art
University of Oxford
giulia.smith@rsa.ox.ac.uk

Further reading

(NB: Please also consult the list compiled for 2018)

Abdul Alkalimat, Romi Crawford and Rebecca Zorach, eds. The Wall of Respect: Public Art and Black Liberation in 1960s. Chicago, 2017.

Baker A., Houston, Manthia Diawara and Ruth H. Lindeborg, eds. Black British Cultural Studies: A Reader. London; Chicago, 1996.

Barringer, Tim and Wayne Modest, eds. Victorian Jamaica. Durham, 2018.

Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert, eds. W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America: The Color Line at the Turn of the Twentieth Century. New York, 2018.

Bernier, Celeste-Marie. Characters of Blood: Black Heroism in the Transatlantic Imagination. Charlottesville; London, 2012.

Bindman, David, ed. The Image of the Black in African and Asian Art. Cambridge, MA, 2017.

Boyce, Sonia and others, eds. Shades of Black: Assembling Black Art in 1980s Britain. Durham, 2005.

Buick, Kirsten P.  Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject. Durham, 2010.

Campt, Tina M. Image Matters: Archive, Photography and the African Diaspora in Europe. Durham, 2012.

Chambers, Eddie. Black Artists in British Art: A History Since the 1950s to the Present. London; New York, 2014.

Chang, Andrea, ed. Circles and Circuits: Chinese Caribbean Art. Durham, 2018.

Cleveland, Kimberly L. Black Art in Brazil: Expressions of Identity. Gainesville, FL, 2013.

Copeland, Huey. Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America. Chicago, 2013.

DuBois Shaw, Gwendolyn. Portraits of a People: Picturing American Americans in the Nineteenth Century, Andover, MA; London, 2006.

Enwezor, Okwui and Chika Okeke-Agulu. Contemporary African Art Since 1980. Bologna, 2010.

Frances, Jacqueline. Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art” in America. Seattle, 2015.

Fracchia, Carmen. ‘Black but Human’ Slavery and Visual Arts in Hapsburg Spain, 1480-1700. Oxford, 2019.

Finley, Cheryl. Committed to Memory: the Art of the Slave Ship Icon. Princeton, 2018.

Fox-Amato, Matthew. Exposing Slavery: Photograph, Human Bondage, and the Birth of Modern Visual Politics in America. Oxford, 2019.

Gilroy, Paul. Black Britain: A Photographic History. London, 2007.

Godfrey, Mark and Zoé Whitely, eds. Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power.  London, 2017.

Gooding, Mel. Frank Bowling. London, 2015.

Hayes, Jeffreen, ed. Augusta Savage: Renaissance Woman. Jackson, Florida; London, 2018.

Jay, Martin and Sumathi Ramaswamy, eds. Empires of Vision. Durham, 2014.

Jones, Kelli. South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s. Durham, 2016.

Lungo-Ortiz, Agnes and Angela Rosenthal, eds. Slave Portraiture in the Atlantic. Cambridge, 2013.

Mercer, Kobena. Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies. London, 1994.

Mercer, Kobena, ed. Annotating Art’s Histories: Cross-Cultural Perspectives in the Visual Arts (4 vols.). Cambridge, MA; London, 2005-2008.

Mercer, Kobena.  Travel and See: Black Diaspora Art Practices Since the 1980s. Durham, 2016.

Miller, Monica L. Slaves to Fashion. Durham, 2009.

Murrell, Denise. Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet to Matisse to Today. New Haven, 2018.

Okeke-Agulu, Chika. Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria. Durham, 2015.

Pantin Malin Stahl, Lisa, ed. Lubaina Himid: Workshop Manual. London, 2019.

Patton, Pamela A. Envisioning Others: Race, Color, and the Visual in Iberia and Latin America. Leiden, 2015.

Powell, Richard J., ed. Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist. Durham, 2014.

Thompson, Krista. An Eye for the Tropics: Tourism, Photography and Framing the Caribbean Picturesque, Durham, 2006.

Thompson, Krista.  Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice. Durham, 2015.

Walker, Hamza, ed. Black Is, Black Ain’t. Chicago, 2013.

Wallace, Maurice O., and Shawn Michelle Smith, eds. Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity. Durham, 2012.

Walmsley, Anne. The Caribbean Artists Movement, 1966–72: A Literary and Cultural History. London, 1992.

Wainwright, Leon. Art and the Transnational Caribbean. Manchester, 2011.

Wainwright, Leon. Phenomenal Difference: A Philosophy of Black British Art. Liverpool, 2019.

Williams, Lyneise. Latin Blackness in Parisian Visual Culture, 1852-1932. London, 2019.

Willis, Deborah. Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present. New York; London, 2000.