Visiting Professor Lisa Tickner


In the Autumn of 2007 the Courtauld welcomes the eminent historian Lisa Tickner as Visiting Professor of Art History. She will teach a new MA Special Option, ‘Modernism in Britain: 1890-1970’.
 
Formerly Professor of Art History at Middlesex University, Lisa Tickner is the author of such essential texts such as ‘The Body Politic: Female Sexuality and Women’s Art since 1970’ of 1978, and ‘Feminism, Art History, and Sexual Difference’ of 1988. That year, too, she published The Spectacle of Women: Imagery of the Suffrage Campaign 1907-1914, a work of pioneering political and cultural history. Equally agile in her handling of theory and the archive, Tickner is also known for a distinctive visual approach, a facility memorably demonstrated in the Paul Mellon Lectures she delivered at the National Gallery in 1996. A series of compelling, intimately observed readings of works by Walter Sickert, Augustus John, Wyndham Lewis, Vanessa Bell and David Bomberg, the lectures culminated in Modern Life and Modern Subjects: British Art in the Early Twentieth Century (Yale University Press, 2001).

In ‘Modernism in Britain: 1890-1970’, Tickner will invite students to explore such interesting questions as: What are the effects of casting a history one way or another (in terms of period, or geography, or thematic focus)? How are artworks related to traumatic events (such as war), or on-going technological change (such as jet air travel or colour reproduction), or social divisions (including those of gender and ethnicity)? What happens to the body in this period, or landscape, or other traditional genres under the impact of surrealism, or abstraction, or the influence of Paris or New York?

With her riveting lecture on ‘The Gestetner Revolution: The Hornsey Sit-In of 1968’ still firmly in our minds from the autumn 2006 Frank Davis lectures, it is with the warmest anticipation that we prepare to welcome Lisa Tickner to the Courtauld.

Prof. Mignon Nixon

The Courtauld is particularly grateful to Nicholas and Judith Goodison, keen advocates of twentieth-century British art, who are generously providing the funds for this initiative.


Dr David Landau is awarded the CBE


Congratulations are extended to Dr David Landau, member of the Governing board of the Courtauld Institute of Art, who has been made a Companion of the British Empire. He was awarded this honour for his important work on the Board of the National Gallery for a number of years.