BA (York), MA, PhD (Courtauld, University of London).

Contact details

Courtauld Institute of Art

Somerset House

Strand

London WC2R 0RN


+44 (0)20 7848 2826

joanna.woodall@courtauld.ac.uk



Joanna Woodall read history at the University of York, with a year abroad at Vassar College. She trained as an art historian at The Courtauld Institute and began her PhD at the University of Cambridge, as Speelman Fellow in Dutch and Flemish Art. Having spent several years in curatorial work at Christ Church Picture Gallery in Oxford, and a year on a Leverhulme Fellowship at the University of Leiden, she joined the academic staff of The Courtauld Institute of Art in 1986 as Lecturer in Netherlandish Art. From 2002-2005 she was Deputy Director, Head of Studies, with responsibility for the teaching and research programmes, widening participation and staff development. She has currently returned to her research and teaching, in which she is committed to a theoretically informed, historical analysis of visual materials. She has published widely in Art History, the Berliner Jahrbuch, the Leids Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek and the Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek. Her edited book: Portraiture: Facing the Subject (Manchester University Press, 1997) has become a standard work on the subject.  She is a member of the editorial board of the Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek and is co-organiser, with Dr. Rose Marie San Juan (UCL), of the London Seminar in Early Modern Visual Culture . (Please contact Joanna Woodall by email if you would like to offer a paper)

Joanna is interested in the creative and educational potential of collaboration. Her previous work in conjunction with others includes the exhibitions Rubens. A Touch of Brilliance (2003-4) and Self Portrait. Renaissance to Contemporary (2005). She co-curated the latter exhibition and built her MA option that year around it; students were involved in writing catalogue entries. She is responsible for the website Picturing the Netherlandish Canon, an online project focused on a crucial early modern text on Netherlandish art and culture: Hendrick Hondius the Elder’s print series of artists, Pictorum aliquot celebrium, præcipué Germaniæ Inferioris, effigies (The Hague 1610). This makes accessible online English translations by Daniel Hadas of the Latin texts relating to these prints and includes essays by Joanna Woodall and Stephanie Porras. Designed by Eva Bensasson, the website has an interactive dimension.

research interests

 

  • Netherlandish art from about 1540-1670, particularly painting and prints, in the broader context of developments in European art and the construction of knowledge. A special interest in 16th century Antwerp.
  • Portraiture, especially early modern portraiture, with some forays into contemporary photographic portraiture.
  • Self-portraiture and the artist as a figure for subjectivity in the early modern period.
  • Broader Issues of realism, including the significance of the copy, translation, the relationship between realism and desire.
  • Virtue and the senses; death and the image; medals and money.

 

Courses Taught in 2010-2011

 

  • MA programme in the History of Art. Option: Bodies of Knowledge in the Early Modern Netherlands, c.1540-c.1660.
  • MA programme Curating the Art Museum.  Strand: Text and Interpretation  (with Sarah Hyde).
  • BA programme in the History of Art. BA2 Frameworks (course leader).


PHDS CURRENTLY SUPERVISED


  • Art and violence in the work of Jan Fyt (1611-1686)
  • Rembrandt’s Pendant Marriage Portraits
  • Pallas in the Palace: The Changing Function of Minerva at the Stuart Court
  • Velázquez and Mythological Painting at the Court of Philip IV
  • The portraiture of Hans Eworth (c.1520-1574), a Netherlandish Artist in London
  • Mary Beale and her ‘paynting room’ in London 1655 to 1665 and 1670 to 1699.

 

Recent/forthcoming publications


Forthcoming 2011

Joanna Woodall, ‘Lost in Translation? Thinking about classical and vernacular art in Antwerp, 1540-1580 in Bart Ramakers (ed.), Understanding Art in Antwerp. Classisizing the Popular, Popularizing the Classic (1540-1580). Leuven, Peeters Publishers, 2011 (Groningen studies in Cultural Change).

2011
Picturing the Netherlandish Canon. An online project focused on a crucial early modern text on Netherlandish art and culture: Hendrick Hondius the Elder’s print series of artists, Pictorum aliquot celebrium, præcipué Germaniæ Inferioris, effigies (The Hague 1610).

2010


 H. Perry Chapman and Joanna Woodall (eds.), Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 59 (2009): Envisioning the Artist in the Early Modern Netherlands.

This volume of twelve essays is concerned with the ways in which Netherlanders negotiated their positions in relation to varied, often contested ideas of what it meant to be an artist at a time when relations between a community of craftsmen and elite individuals, between consciousness of a native tradition and membership in an international humanist society, between image and word, between hand, mind and spirit, were being actively defined. It includes an introductory essay jointly written by the editors: ‘The Netherlandish Artist has his intelligence in his hand.’

2008

Joanna Woodall, ‘A Woman’s Place. Joanna Woodall 1982-1985’, in Jacqueline Thalmann (ed.), 40 Years of Christ Church Picture Gallery. Still one of Oxford’s best kept secrets, pp.89-103.  One of a collection of nine essays by former Assistant Curators to commemorate the opening of Christ Church Picture Gallery in 1968.

2007



Joanna Woodall, Anthonis Mor. Art and Authority. Studies in Netherlandish Art and Cultural History Volume 8. (Waanders Press, Zwolle).

This major study of the leading sixteenth-century portrait specialist Anthonis Mor considers his arresting images of princes, prelates, artists and merchants in dialogue with his intriguing religious paintings. A series of case-studies marks different moments in the artist’s exceptionally varied and peripatetic career. As a whole, the book explores ways in which the Albertian concept of the image as a divine force that makes the absent present, as friendship is said to do, was challenged and re-negotiated during a period of radical change to the order of things.

2005

Tony Bond and Joanna Woodall, Self Portrait. Renaissance to Contemporary (National Portrait Gallery, London and Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney).
A book published to accompany an international exhibition co-curated by Joanna Woodall and Tony Bond. Including essays by T.J. Clark, Ludmilla Jordanova and Joseph Leo Koerner in addition to those by the two curators, it is an ambitious exploration of the symbolic and material means through which artists visualized themselves in oil paint from the early fifteenth century to the beginning of the twenty- first century.

2004

Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 54 (2003): Virtue, Virtuoso and Virtuosity in Netherlandish Art 1500-1700, edited by Jan de Jong, Dulcia Meijers, Mariët Westermann and Joanna Woodall.

This volume, of which Joanna Woodall was the lead editor, begins to map out a research territory in which value, in the form of virtue, is recognised to be invested in the work of art, the artist and elite beholders. It includes her introductory essay, ‘In Pursuit of Virtue’ and two articles by former PhD students.

2000

Joanna Woodall, 'Wtewael’s Perseus and Andromeda: looking for love in seventeenth century Dutch painting’ in C. Arscott and K. Scott eds., Manifestations of Venus. Art and Sexuality (Manchester University Press).
This volume of essays resulted from a collaborative venture by women teachers at The Courtauld Institute of Art.


KEYWORDS


Portraiture; portrait prints; self-portrait; virtue; Antwerp; translation; early modern Netherlands; iconoclasm; friendship; authority.