Midlands Art Papers 1 (2017/18)

Victorian painter Sophie Anderson was one of the first living female artists to have her work purchased by a British public art gallery. Kate Nichols explores her work and its Midlands connections.

Curator Martin Roberts explores the key ideas behind the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum's 2017 portraiture exhibition

To what extent can one commemorate the dead of war without commemorating the legacy of militarism? Eleanor Hill argues that Thou Shalt Not Kill! evokes a struggle between direct condemnation and sentimental memorialization.

Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll contextualises two forthcoming exhibitions at Ikon which juxtapose portraits of and by violent criminals, in the nineteenth-century penal colony of Tasmania, and Edmund Clark’s contemporary photography at Grendon Prison.

Matthew Rampley discusses the place of Terry Frost’s painting Madrigal (Leamington Spa Art Gallery and Museum) in his career, and its relation to abstract painting elsewhere in post-war Britain and beyond.

Claire Jones examines the representation of children and adolescents in sculpture, focusing on Italian nineteenth-century realism in sculpture, reproduction and exhibition histories.

This article tells the story of a disabled Hungarian artist, who was once a star of galleries in Berlin, London and Paris. His painting Stormy Landscape with Blue and Red Figures was donated to Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery in 1940. Nóra Veszprémi questions how artistic success is made and maintained.

Greg Salter explores Eugene Palmer’s painting of a black woman who looks out at us from what appears to be the hull of a ship. Inspired by a photograph from 1930s America, this is a painting about movement (of slavery and migration) and finding a sense of selfhood and history across time.