SESSION: British Art, Incorporated

In recent decades, protests against corporate patronage have erupted in the galleries of Britain’s museums, making international headlines. Interventions by groups such as Art Not Oil, Liberate Tate, and Prescription Addiction Intervention Now have demanded that institutions confront the relationship between art and harmful corporate practices. These demonstrations are just the latest responses to British art’s long historical entanglement with private enterprise. As Philip Stern and others have demonstrated, modern Britain was shaped by the power of its corporations. This panel interrogates the place of the arts in that narrative, from the formation of early modern joint-stock companies such as the Royal African Company and the East India Company to the banking conglomerates of the present day. While histories of church and government patronage have long structured art historical discourse, we suggest that corporations in Britain and the British Empire were similarly influential, commissioning and funding major institutions, artists, and exhibitions.

We invite papers from a broad geographic and chronological scope that investigate how corporations shaped the visual arts in Britain and the British Empire. How have these businesses influenced what is depicted and what remains outside of the frame? What corporate histories can we discern in studies of artistic materials? How do companies use the arts to facilitate their capitalist, colonialist, extractive, and industrial objectives, and how do the arts collaborate with or challenge those missions? And how are the institutions of art history—including museums, publishing, and universities—implicated in these corporate projects?

Session Convenors:

Tobah Aukland-Peck, Postdoctoral Fellow, The Paul Mellon Centre

Zoë Dostal, Visiting Assistant Professor, Amherst College

Speakers:

Avigail Moss, Gustave Eiffel University, FR

Guinea Pigs and Gold Mines: Corporate Collusion at the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours

This paper examines how corporate shareholder governance infiltrated the workings of British artists’ societies in the late nineteenth century within a nexus of speculative imperial finance. Its subject is the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours (RI) and its president, the history painter Sir James Dromgole Linton (1840–1916), who also directed numerous joint-stock mining, insurance, and exhibition companies, many tied to extractive ventures in South Africa, Australia, and South America. Linton’s participation in these enterprises reveals how corporate forms reshaped artistic institutions, as shareholding and board management blurred boundaries between artistic self-organization and entrepreneurial speculation. The RI board thus became a site where professional integrity and moral accountability were negotiated through corporate principles pressing upon or even extended beyond the much-debated concept of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’. Drawing on uncatalogued RI meeting minutes and Linton’s correspondence and paintings, and engaging business history with theories of moral hazard and fictitious capital, the paper shows how Linton’s leadership was destabilized by the imaginative and volatile cultures of corporate capitalism (Slobodian, Alborn, Ogle, Stern). It argues that art history must consider how financial infrastructures condition artists and institutions within the corporate circuits of empire, where reputational credit and financial capital were jointly risked, circulated, and sometimes lost.

Helen Shaw, Westminster Abbey Institute

Civic Surfaces, Corporate Craft: Carter Tiles in Twentieth Century Britain

This paper repositions Carter & Co. (later Poole Pottery) within the civic–industrial infrastructures of twentieth-century Britain. Often framed as a story of studio craft or provincial design, the company’s history instead illuminates how manufacturing industry and civic modernism became materially entangled in the production of public life. From the 1930s through the 1970s, Carter’s factory and design unit supplied tiles and murals to hospitals, schools, town halls, transport hubs, and commercial buildings across Britain and the wider world, including commissions in the British Empire and its post-imperial Commonwealth networks. Although Carter & Co. was a private manufacturer, its prosperity depended on a cross-sector economy of state contracts, corporate commissions, and private patronage that positioned it within Britain’s civic-industrial complex. The firm’s dual identity as both a profit-driven company and a conduit of public values complicates distinctions between corporate, governmental, and domestic design. Drawing on research for a forthcoming monograph on Carter Tiles, the paper situates the firm as a ‘civic corporation’ whose output intersected with welfare-state ideology, colonial trade, and postwar design ethics. By analysing Carter’s corporate identity alongside its civic and commercial work, the paper traces a rarely acknowledged continuity between craft idealism and capitalist production. It argues that the decorative surfaces of public and private architecture acted as interfaces between industry and ideology: sites where commerce, care, and citizenship were visually negotiated. In doing so, Civic Surfaces, Corporate Craft reclaims ceramics not as marginal decoration but as critical instruments of Britain’s industrial and civic imagination.

Lijie Wang, The Institute of Fine Arts, NYU

Childhood, Incorporated: From “The Alice” to the “Ladette” in Contemporary British Art

This paper examines how corporate media and consumer institutions have shaped artistic constructions of childhood in British art since the 1980s. While the “Young British Artists” are often described as the “children” of Thatcherism, such narratives overlook how corporations like the BBC and the toy industry have actively produced and commodified childhood itself. Building on the work of Stephen Wagg, Máire Messenger Davies, and others, this paper traces how children’s programming and consumer culture informed the imagery and sensibilities of artists, including Georgina Starr, especially the Victorian revivals and themes of haunting in BBC dramas such as Tom’s Midnight Garden.

Starr’s practice, rooted in fantasy, memory, and performance, reclaims childhood imagination as a form of pastoral inheritance. Positioning her as the “Alice” of British neo-Pop, the paper explores how her work intersects with studies of children’s media and the commercialization of innocence. In contrast, Sarah Lucas’s deformed sculptural “toys,” refracted through 1990s “ladette” culture, reflect a more cynical view of childhood, echoing the irony of 1990s family entertainment in figures like Noel Edmonds and Mr. Blobby. By situating these practices within Britain’s corporate cultural landscape, the paper reconsiders how art and mass media co-produced the myth of British childhood as both national heritage and marketable fantasy.

Edward Christie, University of St Andrews

‘A Cosmic Monument to Coal’: Charles Jencks’s Fife Earth Project (2009–13) and the Art of Mine Reclamation

Land Art in Britain is frequently lauded for its resistance to the commercialisation of the natural world. Richard Long, for instance, claimed to espouse ‘a more thoughtful view of art and nature’ than the ‘true capitalist art’ produced by his American counterparts, whose work, he argued, involved wielding machinery and claiming possession of the land. This paper problematises this narrative by analysing Charles Jencks’s Fife Earth Project, which was commissioned by Scottish Coal in 2009 but left incomplete after the company went bankrupt in 2013. Once billed to become the largest artwork in the country, Jencks’s design centred on an artificial loch constructed in the shape of Scotland and surrounded by four monumental earthworks which would be enlivened by sculptures created using recycled machinery from the mining industry. Through detailed analysis of Scottish Coal’s records, I highlight that Jencks’s work served as an innovative means for the company to regenerate one of its largest coal mines, which it was legally obliged to do at the end of its extraction license. Moreover, I reveal that the scale of the construction provided leverage to secure planning permission for a two-year extension to the coal operations that would continue just beyond the site’s woodland perimeter. Archival material suggests that Jencks believed the development of more sustainable methods of coal extraction could lead to a greener future. Nonetheless, I assess the extent to which, from a contemporary vantage point, this project might be interpreted as an experiment in arts-led corporate greenwashing or as a source of inspiration to support the growing interest in design-led approaches to mine reclamation.