Dr Pat Simpson, Reader in Social History of Art and SCA Research Tutor
2016-18
I am currently engaged with two research projects:
Aftermath, exhibitions
and film festival at UH Gallery & St Albans Museum, 2018.
This is a collaborative project between UH Art &
Design Gallery & St Albans Museum led by Matthew Shaul [UH A & D Gallery].
The project team includes Professor Owen Davies [History], Dr Sarah Lloyd
[History] Annabel Lucas [UH A & D Gallery] and myself, amongst others.
The projected exhibitions and film festival will explore
the aftermath of WWI through images, narratives and artefacts [some of them
local], and the themes will include nostalgia for the past, visions of a new
world [both positive and negative], as well as evidence that contradicts the
idea propagated post-war, that WWI was the 'war to end all wars'. It is hoped
that it will include photographic work by Kathe Buchler, a German photographer
working both before and after WWI, who made remarkable images of recuperating
soldiers as well as nostalgically idyllic landscape scenes.
My contribution to the project will involve images of
Soviet health propaganda connected to the utopian ideal of creating a new world
and a new type of humankind, and also images of the little known western ‘War
of Intervention’ in the new Soviet state 1918-c1923.
Art
and Bio-Politics: Representations of Soviet Darwinism 1917-1964. Monograph on the Moscow Darwin Museum and its
use of art in the service of bio-politics.
Currently in preparation.
2016
Abstract - A common belief regarding globalisation is
that it is driven by ‘information’. For
Maurice Castells (1996) the primary vehicles of networked information were the
internet and the media. This paper sets
out to explore whether art works, particularly paintings can be regarded as
containers of information which participate in the process of globalisation.
Today, identification of what counts as a painting is
sometimes problematic, nevertheless a painting still has certain basic physical
and visual characteristics. Do these
characteristics constitute ‘information’ ?
I suggest that, to be able to read and understand what the
characteristics might signify, we need to know about the artist and the
historical context in which the work was produced. Thus, I argue that the
characteristics of a painting might rather be regarded as raw ‘data’, hence the
retrieval of ‘information’ depends on a process of interpretation of the data
by the viewer, using verifiable data from other sources. The extent and veracity of the retrieval and
interpretation of the data will depend on the cultural/socio-political baggage
that the viewer brings to the encounter with the painting, in context.
Art, particularly painting, has been used in the process
of globalising cultural colonisation since at least the 1400s, and this has
never been disconnected from power politics. The conclusion highlights problems
with treating any visual material as ‘information’, and also the deeper problem
with the concept of ‘information’, and its ambiguous relationships with
constructs of truth, reality, authenticity, and with the operations of power
and money.
This publication is based on an eponymous paper presented at the the
International Society for the Study of European Ideas conference, Porto,
Portugal, August 2014.
Forthcoming
in 2016
‘Art, Biopolitics and
Anglo-Soviet Cultural Exchange: The “Russian Room” at Down House 1958-1964’, in
Emily Lygo, ed. Russian Journal of Communication, special edition, 2016.
Abstract - Charles Darwin’s home at Downe in Kent, a memorial
museum now owned by English Heritage, has an interesting secret. For a brief time between c1961 and 1964 it
had a ‘Russian Room’.
In this room were displayed commemorative paintings, monumental
sculpture busts and photographic albums all sent to Britain between 1958 and
1962 by Professor Aleksandr Kots and his wife Nadezhda Ladygina-Kots, the
directors of the Soviet Darwin Museum in Moscow. As will be argued, the sending of such gifts
had precedents, including connections with the SCRSS, or SCR as it was named in
the 1920s.
The period in which the gifts were sent coincided with Kruschev’s
‘Thaw’, the decline of Trofim Lysenko’s power over Soviet bio-science, and the
tentative resumption of Anglo-Soviet cultural and scientific relations. This talk examines some aspects of the
contextual and strategic motivations for the gifts, their display and the
eventual closure of the ‘Russian Room’.
This publication is
based on the
paper: ‘The Russian Room at Down House Kent: Anglo Soviet Relations with the
Moscow Darwin Museum in the 1950s-1960s’, delivered at the conference British-Soviet Friendship and Cultural
Exchange: Promotion, Partnership and Propaganda conference, Brixton, May
2014.
‘Lysenko “Michurinism and
Art 1935-1964’, in William deJong Lambert & Nikolai Krementsov, eds, Lysenkoism as a Global Phenomenon, New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
Abstract - This chapter
offers a case study from an art historian’s perspective, of the impact of the
growth and decline of Trofim Lysenko’s power between 1935 and 1964 on the
displays at the Darwin Museum, a natural history museum in Moscow. The
institution was unusual for the heavy commitment of its directors, Aleksandr
Kots and Nadezhda Ladygina-Kots, to the use of art works for illuminating past
and contemporary evolutionary theory within the displays. The discussion
focuses on the Museum’s strategic, discursive use of what Nikolai Krementsov
has termed “Marxist Darwinst” rhetoric, in contextualising and explaining the
significance of the art works, in order to defend its position and access state
resources for a larger building to house the collection.
It will be seen that the Darwin Museum
gradually aligned itself in the 1920s-1930s with aspects of Marxist Darwinism
that became key elements of Lysenko’s “Michurinist biology”. This strategy
opened up a gap between the scientific research and interests of the museum
directorate, their connections with western scientists, and what was said to
the museum visitors. Lysenko’s triumph in August 1948 necessitated dramatic
changes to the museum display and very careful adherence to the current nuances
of Lysenko’s version of “Michurinist biology”. After 1955, while Kruschev’s
“Thaw” and de-Stalinisation allowed the museum tentatively to indicate visually
its (enduring) adherence to genetics rather than Michurinism, this was
strategically, equivocally expressed - ultimately to the museum’s disadvantage
regarding the new building.
In conclusion, while the study notes that
the museum clearly contributed, however unwillingly, to the entrenchment of
Lysenkoism, it vividly illustrates some of the attendant dangers of
transforming the complex discourses of science into simplified and demagogic
“cultural resources.” In particular, it
underlines the deep problems underlying any suppression of public access to the
complexity and relativism of real scientific discourse.
In the course of producing this chapter I was put in
touch with Ben Lewis, a successful, award-winning, British freelance
documentary film-maker who is preparing to make a drama-documentary about the
Soviet ‘pseudoscientist’ Trofim D. Lysenko. I supplied him with visual data on
two of Lysenko’s victims who are depicted in portraits displayed at the State Darwin
Museum in Moscow, and also information on the Darwin Museum to Ben Lewis,
September 2014. This contact has led to a recent invitation to collaborate with
a number of eminent historians of science, notably William deJong Lambert,
Nikolai Krementsov and Kiril Rossianov,
to support Lewis’ bid to the US National Endowment for the Humanities ‘Bridging
Cultures’ fund, to develop the film.
2015
‘Shaw and The Russians on
The Mantelpiece’, presentation to volunteers and staff, Shaw’s Corner [National
Trust], Ayot St Lawrence, Herts. February 2015.
Abstract - On the
mantelpiece in the dining room at Shaw’s Corner there are images of 3 Russians
– Vladimir Ilich Lenin, Feliks Edmundovich Dzerzhinskii, and Joseph
Vissarionovich Stalin. The focus of my
talk is to say something about who these people were, what they did and why,
perhaps, Shaw was so interested in them that he ensured that images of them
were prominently embedded in the display at Shaw’s Corner when it was handed
over to the National Trust. I will look
at Lenin first, move on to Dzerzhinsky, and end with Stalin [as so many people
did…].
This talk
related in part to my own research specialism in Soviet and Russian visual
images, and also to the outstanding work
of my AHRC funded Collaborative Doctoral student, Alice McEwan, on the Shaw’s
Corner collection.
‘Beauty and the Beast: Imaging Human Evolution at the
Moscow Darwin Museum in the 1920s’, in Fay Brauer & Serena Keshavjee, eds, Picturing Evolution and Extinction:
Regeneration and Degeneration in Modern Visual Culture,
Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars’
Press, April 2015, pp.157-178. ISBN
978-1-4438-7253-9.
Abstract - The Darwin
Museum in Moscow was, from its foundation in 1907, committed to using art works
to support stories of evolution.
Nationalised in 1917 as an adjunct of Moscow State University, the
museum remained under the direction of its founder, Professor Aleksandr Kots, a
zoologist, ornithological expert and amateur taxidermist. He directed and supervised the creation of
paintings and sculptures, principally made by Vasilii Vatagin, an artist and
zoologist, to support the versions of Darwinism being projected over that
period. From the October Revolution to
his death in 1964, Kots ensured that the displays at the Museum were always
politically correct.
This chapter explores the
potential contextual resonances of certain works by Vatagin and others in the
early Revolutionary period. The
discussion starts with an examination of a pair of monumental sculptures by
Vatagin entitled Age of Life (1926),
depicting the variations of role, behaviour and appearance of, on the one hand
Orangutans (the beast), and on the other hand, human women at different stages
of their lives (beauty). The paper then goes on to consider how the modes of
imaging, both in these sculptures and in other works representing human
evolution in this period, connected with contemporary discourses on, and
visualisations of Darwinian evolutionary
theory, both in the Soviet Union and in Western Europe. What emerges, I argue, is a complex
relationship between the images and the dialectic between contemporary
Bolshevik anxieties about degeneration within the Soviet population, and
utopian dreams of the Revolutionary production of a new, human biologic type.
‘Art History, Politics, Heritage’, digital poster
presentation, Public Engagement with
Research conference UH, June 2015.
‘Prince Peter Kropotkin: Anarchism, Eugenics and the
Utopian Ideal of Letchworth Garden
City’, Utopia! Experiments in Perfection conference,
Letchworth, September 2015.
Abstract - Prince Peter Kropotkin was a major Russian
pre-Revolutionary socialist, who, prior to the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution,
theorised an anarchist [ie. without a centralised government and associated
administrative bureaucracy] theory of a potential utopian form of social
existence. Like the English utopian
socialist, William Morris (who may have drawn on Kropotkin’s work), Kropotkin’s ideal was of a semi-agrarian idyll as set out
in his book, Farms, Fields and Factories
(1898), comprising both intellectual and physical labour. Kropotkin was also
very interested in the new discourse area of eugenics, and prominently
participated in debates during the 1912 International Congress of Eugenics in
London. This paper considers the
implications of the records held at the Letchworth Garden City Archive,
regarding both Kropotkins’ interest in eugenics and in the construction of
utopian anarchist society through innovative social housing projects.
2014
‘Tales from the ‘Russian
Room’ at Down House, Kent’: talk given to members of the Society for
Co-operation in Russian and Soviet Studies, SCRSS headquarters, Brixton, March
2014.
Abstract - Charles Darwin’s home at Downe in Kent, a memorial museum now
owned by English Heritage, has an interesting secret. For a brief time between c1961 and 1964 it
had a ‘Russian Room’. In this room were
displayed commemorative paintings, monumental sculpture busts and photographic
albums all sent to Britain by Professor Aleksandr Kots and his wife Nadezhda
Ladygina-Kots, the directors of the Soviet Darwin Museum in Moscow. The period coincided with Kruschev’s ‘Thaw’,
the decline of Trofim Lysenko’s power over Soviet bio-science, and the tentative
resumption of Anglo-Soviet cultural and scientific relations. This talk examines some aspects of the
strategic motivations for the gifts, their display and the eventual closure of
the ‘Russian Room’. [This is quite an established organisation (founded
1926) which has a broad membership that includes people who are just interested
in the Soviet Union, and emigrés from Russia and the Soviet bloc, as well as a
few academics and teachers of Russian.
The paper was occasioned by the fact that the Darwin
Museum has first established contact with the eminent British biologist and
later vociferous opponent of the Soviet ‘pseudoscientist’ Trofim Lysenko,
Julian Huxley, through the SCR [Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR,
which was the SCRSS’s predecessor]. The
research has also enabled the SCRSS to gain more insight into Society’s
activities in the 1920s.]
‘Art or Illustration?
The Status of Painting and Sculpture in the Soviet Natural History
Museum’, Association of Art Historians Conference, London, April 2014.
Abstract - It might be said that a painting is a painting
and a sculpture is a sculpture, and as such they putatively belong to the realm
of ‘fine art’. Such objects,
particularly when offering recognisable figurative representations and created
out of traditional materials, seem clearly to declare their status and/or
definition. But, what if the painting or
sculpture has a useful function within a natural history museum in illuminating
or illustrating the history of evolutionary theory, or, through portraiture,
represents a hagiography of evolutionary theorists? Is it, therefore, a piece of decorative art
because of its illustrative connotations?
This is the big overarching question I opened out to the panel and
audience, because I did not, then, have any clear answers.
