UCL ART COLLECTIONS
Looking Back at the Life Room
A project by Naomi Salaman
27 January – 11 June 2010
British artist Naomi Salaman documents a vanishing model of art education for UCL Art Collections, one of
the three public museums at University College London.
Salaman has spent many years photographing European art school studios where drawing is taught,
charting the remnants of a pedagogical system now suspended. In the tradition of the visual essay, this
exhibition brings together historical prints, photographs and extracts from the artist’s research archive.
Looking Back at the Life Room echoes the historical ‘curved space of observation’ described by the artist
through the documentation of life rooms and dissection theatres of the late Renaissance. The life room, in
which the human figure is posed and drawn, was established in the first art academies, and institutionalised
in art education in the mid 1600s. This exhibition positions the life room as a historical space which marked
a distinction between fine art as an intellectual pursuit, and the workshop practices of the guild.
Alongside the artist’s images of art academy life rooms in Florence, Paris and London is the much cited
reproduction of Johan Zoffany’s The Royal Academicians (1772), which illustrates the exclusion of women
artists from the life room. Important in the emergence of feminist art history, this painting and its
reproductions in books, is central to the way this project connects the life room with the models of art
education that followed.
With the implementation of the ‘Coldstream Report’ in the 1960s, named after Professor William
Coldstream of the Slade School of Fine Art, art education in the UK underwent radical change. A shift from
the life room began towards the now compulsory core component of complementary studies - a range of
courses embracing the ‘new art history’ formed by Marxist, feminist, semiotic, structuralist and
psychoanalytic perspectives.
The tradition of the life classes at the Slade School of Fine Art came to an end in December 2008.
Looking Back at the Life Room is co-curated by Nina Pearlman and Naomi Salaman. It includes works on
paper from the Royal Academy Collections and UCL Art Collections and is supported by Arts Council
England and the University of Brighton.
The conference, Art Schools: Inventions, Invective and Radical Possibilities, will be held on 11 & 12 June
2010
For more information about the exhibition, talks, events & conference please visit
www.ucl.ac.uk/museums/uclart Contact Nina Pearlman – college.art@ucl.ac.uk +44 (0)20 76792821
UCL ART COLLECTIONS
The Strang Print Room
University College London Gower Street London WC1E 6BT
Tel: +44 (0)20 7679 2540
college.art@ucl.ac.uk
www.ucl.ac.uk/museums/uclart
Notes to Editors
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums/uclart/exhibitions/liferoom/
http://artsresearch.brighton.ac.uk/research/academic/salaman/biography
UCL Art Collections was founded in 1847 with the Denman gift of John Flaxman’s work.
The collections now hold more than 10,000 paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures
dating from the 1490s to the present day. Of national importance for the study of art
education in Britain is the Slade student prize collection, which continues to be collected
since the 1890s. The Strang Print Room, home of UCL Art Collections, is a dynamic space
for teaching, research and exhibition.