Join History of Art for the next in the Research Seminar Series chaired by Professor Patricia Allmer.
This event will be hybrid (online and in person). The in-person lecture will be followed by a drinks reception in the Higgitt Gallery.
Please book your place on Eventbrite.
Speaker: Dr Tessel Bauduin - Leverhulme Visiting Professor lecture
Chair: Patricia Allmer
Title: Art and heritage artefacts in surrealist assemblages, display and collections: provenance questions and the case of Roland Penrose
Abstract:
Today cultural institutions increasingly have to answer for the provenance and provenience of works and artefacts in their collection. Modernism Studies, including Surrealism Studies, and related collections are slightly behind the curve. As is well known, surrealists, their patrons and others in their immediate network collected, displayed, and appropriated into their own work objects and practices of so-called “tribal” cultures and groups, including Kachina dolls, Yup’ik masks and North American totem poles. Part of a broader practice within Modernism to take art and heritage artefacts to integrate into European collections and displays according to Global Northern aesthetic regimes, the typical surrealist circumstances (if any) deserve closer scrutiny. In this talk I will outline the issues and questions – primarily regarding provenance, but with an eye to restitution – that may apply to surrealist art and collections, Roland Penrose’s in particular, and discuss several potential avenues of research.
Biography:
Dr Tessel M. Bauduin originally trained as a medievalist but has been a modernist for years. Situated at the University of Amsterdam, she teaches Art History, Cultural Studies, Museum and Heritage Studies, and Restitution Studies. Bauduin’s current research projects focus on global Surrealism (for instance in the Dutch Caribbean and Indonesia), usually in relation to surrealist anticolonial theory and art practice; the decolonization of museum collections, especially modern(ist) collections; provenance of surrealist and related collections and works; and the interaction of modern art and occultism in the long twentieth century. The Leverhulme Trust has awarded Bauduin a 2023 Visiting Professorship to Edinburgh College of Art.
Photograph © Dennis Konijnenburg 2021.