Our talks are delivered by staff, students, academics and researchers at the Barber and our wider University of Birmingham community. Focused on key works in our exhibitions and collection, the talks take place in the gallery and are an informal and interesting way of looking closely at artwork. Join Dr John Fagg, for a special talk, following our Barber Lunchtime Concert, which celebrates our new exhibition, Scent and the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites.

Can – and should – our encounters with visual art be purely visual? The exhibition Scent and the Art of the Pre-Raphaelites encourages us to both look and smell, and it is not uncommon to refer to a painting as tactile, or to invoke sound when describing colour as harmonious or clashing. But the Pre-Raphaelites might also be located in a story about modern art, which claims that -- to be true to its flat, visual medium -- painting should be a matter of eyesight alone. Or, on a slightly different account, that reading makes sight the privileged sense in the modern sensorium, and so an art of modernity is ocularcentric, as in impressionism’s insistent emphasis on visual experience. This talk will use works from the Barber collection to think critically about these stories and where scented Victorian paintings fit within them.

Dr John Fagg is Senior Lecturer in American Literature and Culture here at the University of Birmingham. His research, including his recent book, Re-envisioning the Everyday: American Genre Scenes, 1905-1945, focuses on early-twentieth-century American art and literature and the way cultural forms respond to the changing conditions of modern life. He communicates his research to wider audiences through exhibition catalogue essays, on artists including Ben Shahn and Doris Lee, and through curatorial work, including exhibitions on George Bellows and John Sloan at the Barber.

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