00:00 GVs
– Scientists in Laboratory
Exterior,
Barber Institute
Interior,
lobby of Barber Institute
GVs
Dr Spencer-Longhurst at desk in library with research materials
Guide Voice - For many people these are the
images that University research conjures up. Scientists working
away in laboratories – but there’s another, less
publicised side of academic investigation that is equally
important.
Here at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, part of the
University of Birmingham in the West Midlands and at the heart of
the UK, academic research focuses on broadening our understanding
of the arts. Dr Paul Spencer-Longhurst, Senior Curator at the
Barber Institute is researching background to their latest
exhibition, "Moonrise over Europe – JC Dahl and Romantic
Landscape."
As part of a research University, Dr Spencer-Longhurst and his
colleagues see the advancement of knowledge of the arts as an
integral part of their work.
00:44 SOT: Dr. Paul Spencer-Longhurst, Snr.
Curator, Barber Institute of Fine Arts –
“Without research you don’t get the exhibition
because, with something where you’re actually coming to a
work that’s in the collection that has emerged from a private
collection only very recently, very little is known about how it
might relate to other works by that artist or other works in
general of the period and so, what one really has to do is start
with what one’s got, in this case Dahl’s “Mother
and Child by the Sea” and then work outwards to put it in the
context that we want for the exhibition.”
01:23 GVs
Researcher in archives looking for book on Dahl
Researcher
brings book to Dr Spencer-Longhurst
GVs
Dahl’s “Mother and Child by the Sea” being hung
in the gallery
c.u.
“Mother and Child by the Sea”
Guide Voice: Johan Christian Dahl, one of the
foremost landscape painters of the nineteenth century, has been
called the father of Norwegian painting yet remains relatively
unknown outside northern Europe. Building this current exhibition
around the gallery’s purchase of Dahl’s exquisite
“Mother and Child by the Sea”, the exhibition seeks to
expand our understanding of the romantic landscape painters of the
nineteenth century, locating the Dahl painting within the romantic
movement and investigating the fascination with the moon that came
to preoccupy Romantic painters, especially in northern Europe,
between 1770 and the mid 1800s.
01:59 SOT: Richard Verdi, Director of the
Barber Institute of Fine Arts and Professor of Fine Art at the
University of Birmingham – “We bought 4
years ago a very great, bewitchingly lovely Norwegian landscape of
moonlight by Johan Christian Dahl. He’s
Norway’s greatest landscape painter of the
19th Century and completely unknown in this country and
it struck me that this was an exhibition waiting to happen. I
believe that a University Art Gallery has an obligation to teach
and to push the boundaries of knowledge forward and one way of
doing that, certainly, is to put the public in front of artists
they’ve never heard of and artists you’re bound to
suspect they will love and that’s certainly been the case
with Dahl.”
02:36 GVs
of Exhibition Gallery
c.u.s
various paintings -
02:39 Coastal
Scene (La Nuit) Claude-Joseph Vernet
02:41 The
Face of the Moon – John Russell
02:58 View
of Stege in Moonlight – Johan Christian Dahl
03:02 Kirkstall
Abbey, Yorkshire, by Moonlight – William Henry James Boot
03:20 Moonlight,
A Study at Millbank – JMW Turner
03:22 Boats
on the Beach near Naples -
Dahl
03:26 Shots
of Exhibition catalogue
Guide Voice : Other artists featured in the
exhibition include better-known painters such as Turner, Friedrich
and Daumier but it is Dahl’s small but stunning “Mother
and Child by the Sea” that forms the centrepiece of this
exhibition and is attracting a new and enthusiastic audience to the
work of this artist. Attendance figures are impressive and the
exhibition has already overtaken previous records, beating the
gallery’s exhibition of Turner’s early Seascapes,
‘The Sun Rising through Vapour’, into second place.
The Barber Institute is making a name for itself as a developer
of exhibitions based on and highlighting academic research.
Previous exhibitions have featured little known 17th
century masters Bartholomeus Breenbergh and Mathias Stom as well as
more familiar names such as Turner and Rossetti. Their policy of
steering away from exhibitions as blockbusters means that they are
successfully raising the profile and appeal of lesser-known
artists, such as Dahl through their research based approach.
03:34 SOT: Dr Spencer-Longhurst –
“The exhibitions’ afterlife is through the
catalogue and the catalogue is what retains the fruits of the
research and the catalogue actually does contain some new material
some new insights – its actually pushing out the boundaries
of what we know about Dahl and particularly what we know about Dahl
as a painter of moonlight in the European context.”
03:59 Wide
of painting being viewed
c.u.
Painting - `”Mother and Child by the Sea”
Guide Voice:A painting as beautiful as this
deserves the widest possible appreciation. The work of the Barber
Institute is helping to ensure that artists such as Johan Christian
Dahl receive that appreciation.
04:10 End
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