I had always known that Bard Graduate Center was a
distinctive place but it was only when I spent two months there in the fall of
2016 that I really discovered why. I arrived having spent eleven years teaching
art history in two US universities, USC and UC Riverside, and with thirty years
experience before that in an institution with close links to BGC—the Victoria
and Albert Museum in London. As a member of the Research Department at the
V&A back in the 1990s I’d seen the newly established course on West 86th
Street take on the pioneering role in the US, a role which the V&A/RCA
course in the history of design had already begun to pursue in the UK a decade
earlier. In those days art history was done in departments bearing that name in
traditional universities while design history was done in the former
polytechnics. But design history in the polytechnics (or the “new universities”
as they were to become) was invariably taken to mean the history of design
after 1851, meaning that most of the objects displayed at the V&A—what were
described as “decorative arts” —were nowhere considered worthy of serious
academic study. Of course, there had been a long tradition of distinguished
scholarship by museum curators—John Hayward’s research on mannerist goldsmiths
and Peter’s Thornton’s on the history of interiors—but it was only with the
foundation of the course run by the V&A in collaboration with the Royal
College of Art that the history of design was recognized as beginning long
before the nineteenth century and that the “decorative arts” were given an
academic institutional home. With the establishment and rapid expansion of BGC
the serious study of this expanded design history not only became a presence to
be reckoned within the US but also, not least through its journal, began to set
new standards for what was now becoming a recognizable discipline. Seen from
afar by a historian of sculpture, who had always seen sculpture having as many
links with decorative or luxury arts as with painting, BGC was obviously a
lively place. But only when I arrived at the start of October last year did I
realize how ambitious its brief now was and what a central position it and its
remarkable faculty had within what had become the cultural history of
objects. With the “material turn” and
the new engagement of historians of every sort with things and “material
culture” (however that is defined), what the V&A/RCA course and BGC had
been pioneering was now being recognized as of critical and central importance.
The trajectory which I have rather simplistically
described here was much on my mind during the two very stimulating months I
spent on at BGC. The particular project I had come to work on forms one aspect
of a book I have been mapping out about the role played by portraits in
changing notions of authorship in eighteenth-century Britain. Linking an aspect
of literary history with a question about the agency of images might seem to be
a conventional art historical task but I was here in West 86th Street responding
to the spirit of the place by focusing on a more specific topic—the production
and dissemination of ceramic images of writers. Bringing those ceramic objects
into play, especially as I talked about them with BGC colleagues who took
material culture seriously, opened up new possibilities of thinking about how
eighteenth-century publics “saw” writers. Here, then, I was in a sense heeding
the plea made by Michael Yonan in a challenging article in the BGC journal West
86th that art historians
pay more attention to material culture. Pursuing ceramic images produced by
Wedgwood and others was of course made easy not only by the rich holdings of
the BGC’s library but also by the fact that everything was immediately
available on the open shelves. What this reminded me of was how readers could
use the Warburg Institute’s library. (Perhaps this is hardly surprising giving
the Warburgian mode of thinking I encountered in my conversations with faculty
members such as Ivan Gaskell, Ittai Weinryb, and Peter Miller). But both the
way in which the library was so invitingly accessible and its distinctive range
of contents—rather more surprisingly—also prompted me to think differently
about another project which I had planned to move on to later. This was an
article about “Material” for a volume on the methods and theories of art
history. Here at my fingertips was all the archaeological and anthropological
literature with which I needed to familiarize myself. But more than that were
the people—not least Paul Stirton (whom I first got to know on the 27 bus in
Edinburgh in the 1970s) and Urmilla Mohan—all of whom who had been thinking
hard (and differently) about how “material” might be approached. BGC’s scale
and its intellectual liveliness make it a uniquely lively institution and this
made it for me such a productive context for thinking and writing. While I
certainly advanced the project I had come to work on, my fellowship at BGC had
the very welcome effect of taking me in an unexpected direction through its distinctive
culture and resources. What more could one ask of two months on West 86th
Street?
Malcolm Baker, Professor of Art History, University of California, Riverside; Bard Graduate Center Research Fellow, October–November 2016
