A highly interdisciplinary artist, Nick Shaddick’s research interests include the afterlives of nineteenth-century European visuality, intertextualities, media translations and the parapraxes and silences of early modernism.
His postdoctoral research explored the appropriation of design theory amongst progressive British and French artists and photographers in the Imperial lifeworld that Pierre Bordieu once described as the ‘second bohemia’.
Re-thinking the fashioning of early modernism offers him fresh perspectives on European modernism’s dissolution and its fragmented persistence in the present.
He is currently tracing the construction and afterlife of an informal Imperial visual culture in the photography of Clementina Hawarden, responding to her work as a collaborative and embodied enactment of political domination.
CV
EDUCATION
2013 - 2018 PhD in the History of Art, University of York
Thesis: ‘A Forced Accord; The Dispositif of Industrial Art in the Works of the Manet-Whistler Circle, 1858-68’.Examined by Professor Stephen Bann
The thesis explored the relationship between French and British painting in the decade 1858-1868, a period in which progressive artistic practices on both sides of the Channel were concurrently transformed in style and subject matter. The thesis demonstrates that existing accounts of the development of early modernist painting in England and France may be more closely aligned by attention to the contemporary discourse of industrial art. Shaddick proposed that international state collaborations in design theory, museology and photography served to construct a universalist and predicative model of stylistic change that was subsequently appropriated by the vanguardist group known as the Manet-Whistler Circle. The discursive formation thus identified had not previously been considered a theoretically-coherent determinant on early modernist painting.
1989 - 1991 MA(RCA) History of Design, Royal College of Art
Dissertation: ‘Beautifying the Beast: Design and Display Issues in British Locomotive Engineering, 1870–1914’. Supervisor: Dr. Paul Greenhalgh, Examiners: Professor Tim Benton, Professor Sir Christopher Frayling
1984 - 1987 BA(Hons) Fine Art, Maidstone College of Art
2:1. Dissertation: ‘Joseph Beuys and the Image of Divided Europe’. Awarded Noel Machin Prize for Art History
PUBLICATIONS AND PAPERS:
Publications
Anglo-Indian design and the ‘Funeral Car’. An incident in the formation of Gottfried Semper’s Eurocentric universalism (provisional title, Art History, forthcoming)
Review: Anthony Hamber, Photography and the Great Exhibition of 1851 (History of Photography, forthcoming)
‘A.W.N. Pugin’ and ‘Owen Jones’ in The Encyclopaedia of Interior Design, ed. J. Banham, London and Chicago, Fitzroy Dearborn, 1996
Conference Papers
La Belle Anglaise and her Sisters: Clementina Maud Hawarden, elite performativity and international Realist pictoriality
Pre-Raphaelite Sisters: Making Art, University of York (December 2019)
A[ccelerationist] Venus: Gottfried Semper, Albert Moore and ‘queer rationality’ in 1869
ORDER‽ Art, Classicism, and Discourse from 1755 to Today (November 2019)
An Ideal Museum? Perpetuating stylistic change in Albert Moore’s Pomegranates
British Association for Victorian Studies Conference 2019 Victorian Renewals (August 2019)
An Ideal Museum? Furniture and Materiality in Moore’s ‘Pomegranates’
Rethinking Albert Moore, York Art Gallery (July 2017)
Industrial Art and “la pensée populaire”: L’Angélus in 1859
Alphonse Legros in France and Britain, a Tale of Two Countries, Université de Bourgogne and Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon (May 2017)
Kipling’s Universalism: Process and the London International Exhibition Drawings
Lockwood Kipling: Changing Worlds, Kings College London (March 2017)
Pottery, Procession, Process: Frederic Leighton and Gottfried Semper
The Leighton Network, Paul Mellon Centre for British Art (December 2016)
Mourning, Reverie and Masculine Absence: Re-thinking Whistler’s At the Piano
“In the Midst of Life we are in Death" - Death, Burial and the Afterlife in the Arts and Humanities, University College Dublin (June 2016)
A Reverie of Mastery; New Research on At the Piano
Morbidity and Mourning – Death in British Art, British Art Research School, University of York. (March 2015)
Un bar aux Folies Bergère: Manet and Rossettian allegoric symbolism
International Pre-Raphaelitism, Paul Mellon Centre for British Art. (January 2013)