Dorich House Museum

BEHIND THE GLASS: DECONSTRUCTING THE HARE-GORDINE PRINT COLLECTION

A workshop and symposium at Dorich House Museum

This all-day symposium at Dorich House Museum will explore the museum’s collection of prints and situate them within the framework of Russian and global prints history. The day consists of a morning printmaking workshop, an afternoon symposium and an evening drinks reception.

The morning workshop will be a practical demonstration of a type of folk print known as “lubok”, with Helen Higgins (Courtauld Institute of Art). Over lunch, Louise Hardiman will lead a tour of the museum’s Russian art collection. The afternoon presentations will explore the history of printmaking in the Russian Empire, including: the activities of western and Russian printmakers in Russia and the west; patronage of printmaking by imperial rulers; print connoisseurship; and transnational connections and knowledge transfer in the printed medium.

Alongside the day’s events, Dorich House Museum will launch a virtual exhibition of the museum’s collection of prints, curated by Lauren Warner-Treloar.

Three ticket options are available:

• Morning Workshop (with lunch) 10:00-13:00: £30
• Afternoon Symposium (with drinks reception) 13:00-19:00: £20
• Online Symposium 13:00-18:00: £5

If you would like to attend for the full day, please purchase a ticket for both the Morning Workshop and Afternoon Symposium individually.

Bookings through Eventbrite.

Any profit from this event will go towards the conservation and care of the print collection.

This event is supported by the Association for Art History, Association of Print Scholars, Dorich House Museum, Techne, UKRI-Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the Visual & Material Culture Research Centre at Kingston School of Art.

Timetable

9:30-10:00 Arrivals.

10:00-11:50 Lubok: Approaches to Printmaking Workshop, with Helen Higgins (Courtauld Institute of Art).

11:50-13:00 Lunch.

12:00-12:20 A Tour of the Russian Collection with Louise Hardiman (Kingston University).

13:00-17:00 Afternoon Symposium.

13:05-14:45 The Collection: Prints, Patrons, and Portraits

Through the Glass Darkly: Hidden Histories in the Hare-Gordine Print Collection, with Lauren Warner-Treloar (Kingston University)

Portraits and Projections of Power in Russia across the “Long Eighteenth Century”, with Paul Keenan (LSE)

14:45-15:10 Coffee/tea break.

15:10-16:50 Printmaking in Focus: Methods, Subjects, and Cross-cultural transfers

The International Mobility of Printing Skills: Tracing Printed Colour across Early Modern Europe, with Elizabeth Savage (Online Presenter) (University of London)

Disentangling Entangled Histories of Imperial Russian Prints, with Galina Mardilovich (Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago)

17:00-18:00 Wine reception.

Speakers

Louise Hardiman specialises in Russian, Ukrainian, and Soviet visual culture. Her PhD (University of Cambridge, 2014) examined the activities of women artists and mediators in the context of British-Russian cultural exchange, and she is currently writing a book that extends this research. Hardiman’s publications include Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art: New Perspectives (2017), Courtly Gifts and Cultural Diplomacy: Art, Material Culture and British-Russian Relations (2023), and two books of translated folk tales by Elena Polenova (Why the Bear has no Tail (2014) and The Story of Synko-Filipko (2019)). In recent years she has been a consultant to Dorich House Museum on projects to catalogue Russian art in the Hare-Gordine collection (funded by ArtFund and The Decorative Arts Society) and she has previously given many tours on the collection as a volunteer. For 2024-25, she is a Visiting Researcher at Kingston University and a Panel Tutor for the Institute of Continuing Education, University of Cambridge.

A Tour of the Russian Collection at Dorich House Museum

Abstract

The prints at Dorich House are part of a broader art collection assembled by Richard Hare (1907-1966) and Dora Gordine (1895-1991) in the twentieth century, with a principal focus on works from the Russian Empire (1721-1917). As well as highlighting the prints on display, the tour will include works of porcelain, silver, glass, lacquerware, furniture, painting, and folk art.  With the support of small grants from ArtFund and the Decorative Arts Society awarded in 2022 and 2024, Hardiman and Cynthia Coleman Sparke (Independent Consultant) carried out new cataloguing research on the collection; this tour will introduce the art works and spotlight some of the research results. 

Helen Higgins, Head of Learning, the Courtauld Institute of Art.

Helen is a printmaker, art historian and curator specialising in printmaking and drawing practices. Following a BA in Fine Art, she completed an MA in History of Art, where her research focused on ‘Exhibitions of Riposte 1937-1942: A British Response to the denunciation and attacks on modern art in Soviet Russia and Germany in 1931-1937’. (The Courtauld Institute of Art, 2013). Helen has undertaken artist residencies and projects involving interventions within museum and gallery collections, catalogued numerous prints and drawings collections and worked within curatorial and learning departments at the Hayward Gallery, Tate Modern and The Courtauld.

Lubok: Approaches to Printmaking, with an introduction by Lauren Warner-Treloar (Kingston University)

Abstract

This talk and practical demonstration will introduce the “lubok”, a type of folk print which served as urban popular literature in Russia until 1917. The session will start by examining an early nineteenth century lubok in the Dorich House Museum collection depicting the bird of paradise Alkonost, before uncovering the fascinating historical and technical intricacies of the lubok more broadly.

Consisting of a single sheet of paper with text and images (black and white, or coloured), lubok prints could be purchased cheaply from travelling peddlers in the streets, marketplaces and church doorways. They were used as affordable decoration in homes and inns, often substituting more expensive painted wooden icons. We will explore how lubok makers drew their subject matter from Russian literature, religious stories and popular folk tales – often incorporating jokes and satire – and how the visual practice of the lubok developed from the seventeenth century to its adoption by avant-garde artists in the Russian Empire in the twentieth century. The accompanying demonstration will reveal the changes in technique; from woodcut and hand colouring to engraving, etching, lithography and lino cut.

Dr Paul Keenan is Associate Professor in the Department of International History at LSE, where he has taught since 2004. His research deals with Russia during the eighteenth century and, in particular, the role of St Petersburg in the relationship between Russia and other contemporary European states. The focus of his work is primarily on the cultural life of the city, given its role as the seat of the imperial Russian court from the early eighteenth century onwards, and the influence of European fashions or trends on both its physical development and the lives of its populace. More broadly, his research examines Russia’s ‘Europeanisation’ in the early imperial period, both culturally and intellectually. His numerous publications include St Petersburg and the Russian Court, 1703-61 (2013) and Russia and the Napoleonic Wars, edited with Janet Hartley and Dominic Lieven (2015).

Portraits and Projections of Power in Russia across the “Long Eighteenth Century”

Abstract

To follow

Galina Mardilovich is Curator at the Smart Museum of Art at the University of Chicago. She specializes in the history of printmaking, the long nineteenth century, and Imperial Russian art. Prior to the Smart, Mardilovich has held teaching and curatorial positions, including at the University of Cambridge, SUNY Purchase College, and the Mead Art Museum at Amherst College. Her research has been supported by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Getty Research Institute, and the American Philosophical Society, among others, and has been published in Print Quarterly, Art History, and The Burlington Magazine, as well as in several edited volumes. She is the co-editor of and contributor to New Narratives of Russian and East European Art: Between Traditions and Revolutions (with Maria Taroutina; Routledge 2020). Mardilovich received her PhD in History of Art at the University of Cambridge, where she was a Gates Cambridge Scholar.

Disentangling Entangled Histories of Imperial Russian Prints

Abstract

As scholars, we rely on writings of the time to ground our research. Yet often those writings, the narratives they craft, and the biases they (unintentionally) exude, go unquestioned. In the late nineteenth century, Dmitrii Rovinskii published sixteen hefty treatises on the history of Russian prints, and in so doing established the field of Russian print scholarship. His extensive catalogues are still used as primary references today. But his volumes also codified what has become the lingering perception of Russian prints – and by extension Russian art of this period – as derivative, mediocre, inferior. Ensuing historians have continued to bemoan Russian printmaking’s development as peppered with decline and failure.

What is more, politics, ongoing power struggles, and the rise of the Cold War in the twentieth century have further enshrined a separation between Russian art and broader art history. This talk will reconsider Imperial Russian art by recalibrating what we take as proof in the telling of art’s development. Rather than rely unreservedly on contemporary writings, I emphasize practitioners and their artistic output, positioning both within the larger national and transnational context. I posit that through close scrutiny of prints, we can start to disentangle the histories of Imperial Russian art. In this talk, I will trace the arc of Russian printmaking through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to demonstrate how a study of prints can offer surprising perspectives on the interconnected nature of art in the long nineteenth century and the place of Imperial Russian art within it.

Elizabeth Savage FSA FRHistS is Senior Lecturer in Book History and Communications, School of Advanced Study, and Head of Academic Research Engagement, Senate House Library, University of London. Her research into pre-industrial European printing techniques, especially for colour, has won awards including the Schulman and Bullard Article Prize. Her latest book is Early Colour Printing: German Renaissance Woodcuts at the British Museum, and she co-edited Printing Colour 1400–1700 and Printing Colour 1700–1830. She regularly curates and contributes to exhibitions about print heritage, most recently at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe and Musée du Louvre. She teaches at London Rare Books School.

The International Mobility of Printing Skills: Tracing Printed Colour across Early Modern Europe

Abstract

This research offers a broader context for prints in the Dorich House Museum collection and emphasises the transnational aspects of prints and printmaking. As the recent cataloguing project has confirmed, many of the prints at Dorich House feature Russian subjects but were produced outside Russia or by European artists working in Russia. By their nature, prints are easily portable. Much research has addressed how printed objects, and printed information, travelled in the early decades of the printing press. In contrast, this paper examines how printing techniques travelled. Based on case studies of colour printing techniques, for texts, images, music, and other kinds of content, it explores how colour printing techniques—and colour printers—spread across western Europe, eastern Europe, and areas under European colonial control. It focuses on exchange during the first generations of the printing press, 1450–1520, or from the Gutenberg Bible to the Lutheran Reformation, with reference to continuing practice through 1700. Rather than celebrating individual ‘discoveries’ by printers or national trends, it argues for a unified, international history of printing, especially colour printing, that transcends geographic boundaries.

Its case studies include the far-flung first buyers of the Gutenberg Bible; practices of copying chiaroscuro and mannerist colour woodcuts abroad, including for artistic education; Christopher Columbus’ reliance on (potentially) colour-printed eclipse diagrams in what is now called Jamaica; the introduction of German printers in New Spain and the significance of European colour printing techniques in missionary projects; colour print networks across the borders of the Holy Roman Empire, including what is now Germany, Poland, and Lithuania; colour-printed textiles in India, Portugal, and Russia; and a Chinese manifesto aimed at a European audience.

Lauren Warner-Treloar is an art historian specialising in book arts, printmaking, and eastern European modernism. She is currently an AHRC Techne PhD candidate and a member of the Visual and Material Culture Research Centre at Kingston University. Her PhD project is entitled “Sound Art and Visual Culture: The Anti-Book Experiment in the Romanov Empire and the USSR, 1881-1932”. Warner-Treloar is a Postgraduate Member of the Royal Historical Society and was Manager of the Malevich Society (2016-2022). She has written articles and reviews for various platforms and publications including The Burlington Magazine, the British Library’s European studies blog, and H-SHERA. She served as co-convenor of the webinar series “From Tallinn to Tbilisi: Art Across Boundaries in the Age of Empire” (2023) at Kingston University. She is currently on a placement at Dorich House Museum as the Print Collection Research Assistant.

Through the Glass Darkly: Hidden Histories in the Hare-Gordine Print Collection

Abstract

The Russian art collection of the Hon. Richard Hare (1907-1966), a Slavic studies academic, and his wife, the artist Dora Gordine (1895-1991), includes twenty-two prints. Stored behind glass for safe keeping at the couple’s west London studio home, Dorich House, the works mainly consist of images related to the Russian Empire (1613-1917). Emerging from a complicated history of painstaking reconstruction of Dorich House and its legacy after the couple’s deaths and following recent systematic research at the museum into other object categories of the collection, the current project builds on the brief cataloguing that was undertaken in the mid-1990s to register the works.

Using preliminary findings of the present research, this paper sets out a series of case studies. The selected works are based on images that were transferred from two books of prints: the 1753 St Petersburg jubilee album after the drawings of Mikhail Makhaev (1716/18-1770) and the 1799 album of Moscow views after the paintings of Gérard de la Barthe (1730-1810?). These cityscapes presented viewers with glorious perspectives of the Russian Empire. This paper examines the transnational components of the collaborations involved in the creation of the prints, the messaging conveyed by the images, and the part played by western European publishers in disseminating this information. In doing so, it explores the roles of cultural identity and politics in prints within the imperial Russian context and suggests that a recontextualisation of the Hare-Gordine print collection as European could provide a platform for discussion about imperial ambition and the broader imperial narrative.