Sweetness and electric light at the Grosvenor Gallery

• Research seminar series 2015-16

Speaker: Dr Melody Barnett Deusner (Indiana University Bloomington, Fulbright-University of Birmingham Scholar 2016)

Sir Coutts Lindsay’s Grosvenor Gallery in London has long been known to art historians as the premiere showplace for Aesthetic Movement painting in the late 1870s and 1880s. To technological historians, however, the location has a different significance as the site of London’s first truly successful central electrical power station, operated by Coutts Lindsay and located in the basement of the gallery itself. This paper draws together these two parallel histories and probes the relationships between the individuals involved in both projects. The cadre of upper-middle-class and aristocratic investors that speculated in this new technological field and reshaped the city as a series of interconnected nodes included collectors and promoters of Aesthetic paintings by James MacNeill Whistler and Albert Moore - pictures that elevate compositional arrangement and systemic organization to the level of the highest art.

Melody Barnett Deusner is an art historian for whom the networked conditions of our present world have sparked a series of investigations into the ways that an international range of artists and their audiences experienced and visualized the interconnected world of the past. As a Fulbright Scholar based at the University of Birmingham’s American and Canadian Studies Centre, she will be walking the canal towpaths and exploring the rail systems that served as key components of the nineteenth-century transportation, communications, and economics networks at the heart of her current research and teaching. Her own pathways have led her from Texas to an undergraduate degree at Rhodes College, a Ph.D. at the University of Delaware, and a post at Indiana University, Bloomington, where she serves as a specialist in American art to 1945. Her work has been recognized and supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Henry Luce Foundation/ACLS, and the Kress Foundation.

Venue: Barber Lecture Theatre, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts

Refreshments served