Visiting UK Art Historian

The ANU School of Art welcomes Professor Marcia Pointon who will visit the ANU School of Art to work with HDR students this March 2013.

Professor Pointon is a distinguished Art Historian and independent scholar and research consultant. She is Senior Research Professor, Norwich University of the Arts; Professor Emeritus of History of Art, University of Manchester UK and Research Fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.

The ANU School of Art, College of Art and Social Sciences is also pleased to announce a collaborative partnership with the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra to host the following public event:

Portrayal and Identity

National Portrait Gallery, Canberra

Saturday 23 March 2013

Public program 9.30am - 3.00pm

Book launch and author signing, 3.00pm – 4.00pm

Please join us for a remarkable day of discussion and celebrate the Australian launch of Professor Marcia Pointon’s new book, Portrayal and the Search for Identity (London, Reaktion Books, 2013).

Six distinguished scholars, curators and artists will explore a range of ideas concerning our understanding, interpretation and the value of portraiture in contemporary society.

• Marcia Pointon, Senior Research Professor, Norwich University of the Arts
• Jude Rae, Prominent Australian Contemporary Artist
• Anthea Callen, Professor of Art: Practice-led Research, ANU School of Art
• Colin Rhodes, Dean, Professor of Art History and Theory, Sydney College of the Arts
• Christopher Chapman, Senior Curator, National Portrait Gallery
• Helen Ennis, Associate Professor of Art History, Postgraduate Convener, ANU School of Art.

Morning tea and afternoon refreshments are included in the registration price.
Discounts will apply for NPG Circle of Friends and students.

Bookings and registration will open mid Feb and will close 15 March 2013 for catering purposes.

For prices and program information, please visit the NPG events page. All registrations for this event must be made to E: bookings@npg.gov.au or PH: 02 61027070

Portrayal and the Search of Identity will be available on the day for purchase in the NPG bookshop.

Professor Marcia Pointon

Marcia Pointon is Senior Research Professor at Norwich University of the Arts; Professor Emeritus of History of Art at the University of Manchester UK; and Research Fellow at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. She lives in central London and in Northern Tuscany and works as a writer and research consultant. Having studied both English and History of Art, her professional interests range widely across many aspects of visual culture, imagery and representation in Western media from around 1700 to the present day. She has written on Portraiture, Landscape, Book Illustration, the Body in Representation, Gender and Imagery and on the interrelations between the applied arts of jewellery and other forms of historical visual evidence. Marcia Pointon's 2009 book about jewels in art and literature explores both the materiality of gems and jewellery and the economics and politics of a culture of surface display that functioned across national boundaries and encompassed simultaneously both ancient traditional bodies of knowledge and new scientific approaches to the world (see Brilliant Effects below). Her new book entitled Portrayal and the Search for Identity looks at different ways of approaching portraiture, including in relation to the material culture of dress (click on link below). She is currently working on death masks, revising her History of Art: A Students' Handbook for a fifth edition and working on a book titled Diamond to be published in Reaktion Books' series 'Earth'. Marcia is a member of the Courtauld Institute of Art Research Forum's International Advisory Board.

Portrayal and the Search for Identity

We are surrounded by portraits: from the cipher-like portrait of a queen on a banknote to security pass photos; from images of politicians in the media to Facebook; from galleries exhibiting Titian or Leonardo to contemporary art featuring the self-image, as with Jeff Koons or Cindy Sherman. In Antiquity portraiture was of major importance in the exercise of power. Today it remains not only a component of everyday life but also a crucial way for artists to define themselves in relation to their environment and their contemporaries. In Portrayal and the Search for Identity, Marcia Pointon investigates how we view and understand portraiture as a genre, and how portraits function as artworks within social and political networks. Likeness is never a straightforward matter as we rarely have the subject of a portrait as a point of comparison. Featuring familiar canonical portraits as well as little-known works, Portrayal seeks to unsettle notions of portraiture as an art of convention, a reassuring reflection of social realities. Readers are instead invited to consider how identity is produced pictorially, and where likeness is registered apart from in a face. In exploring these issues, the author addresses wide-ranging challenges, such as the construction of masculinity in dress, representations of slaves, and self-portraiture in relation to mortality.

Pointon, Marcia. Portrayal and the Search for Identity, London, Reaktion Books, 2013 pp. 272, ill. 102 (ISBN 978-1-78023-041-2)