The AoI Arts & Society Forum is delighted to announce the return of Dido Powell’s Art Museum Tours in 2023, taking place on five Sundays between 5 February and 4 June. All tours take place on a Sunday 11am to 1pm. They cost £12 per tour or £55 if you book all five. See the full list here. Please message Wendy Earle (wendyearle@talktalk.net) to reserve your place.

INTRODUCTION

Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite narrative paintings are often crammed with clutter. Objects are used as descriptive devices, with social significance, as part of a symbolic language and also to amplify a story’s message whilst demonstrating the artist’s own virtuosity and hard work. Space, structured and empty, also carries a narrative; pictorial space – colour and composition – can accentuate a theme and reveal hidden counter-narratives. Space and clutter can be oppositional or work together. We will explore paintings from the nineteenth-century and the twentieth-century British collections and see how ‘spaces’ progressed from being suggestive to becoming ‘significant form’ (as English artist and critic Roger Fry described it) – a canon of Modernism with its delight in empty spaces.