Art History Student Gets Backstage Look During London Art Week
Alumnus Alan Templeton (B.A., art history and psychology, ‘82), a longtime supporter of arts and humanities programs at UC Davis, recently started a program to give an art history graduate student a behind the-scenes-look at the art world. Second year master's student Lawrence Stallman joined Templeton for London Art Week, visiting museums and galleries, meeting with curators, collectors and professors, and attending art auctions at Christie’s and Sotheby’s.
“I was able to see a side of the art world I’d not been exposed to, especially learning a great deal about the economics of art,” said Stallman, who earned a B.A. in anthropology at UC Davis in 2022. “It was also a saturation of images and objects. Being in the presence of these work is a very different experience than seeing them in books and on screens.”
At the city’s many well-established galleries and auction houses, Stallman viewed major artworks, including one of the most famous Rococo period paintings, and had up-close encounters with Old Master drawings, including a Michelangelo drawing. He also explored the art, architecture and objects of the Wallace collection, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, The Courtauld Gallery, the British Museum, Tate Modern and The National Gallery.
And Templeton served as the best guide one could imagine.
“Mr. Templeton provided me with great information to make sense of what was going on,” Stallman said. “He knew the period a painting was from, how long it had been in that location and its background. The people there know him very well and he could take me places many people don’t get to go.”
In preparation for the trip, Templeton wrote to Stallman, “I want you to start to learn about the commercial side of the art world, as well as how to discern quality and value. Market savvy and connoisseurship are both essential qualities to develop over time in order to be successful as a curator, scholar, art dealer and/or collector and donor. I want you to benefit from what I have learned over the years. There are many aspects to art and art history that no one ever told me about when I was a student.”
Learn more about Templeton’s contributions to UC Davis programs.
For his master’s thesis, Stallman is researching the painting The Storming of the Teocalli by Cortez and His Troops by German American history painter Emanuel Leutze, who is best known for Washington Crossing the Delaware. The 1848 painting depicts Spanish conquistadors attacking a temple in Mexico. It was one of many paintings by Leutze celebrating and glorifying the still-young United States’ growing power and reach. While not specifically about U.S. expansion, it was painted during the Mexican-American War, which resulted in the U.S. occupying and annexing what is now California and the U.S. Southwest.
Along with examining how the painting functioned at the time it was created, Stallman will look into how the pre-Columbian past has been depicted by the modern American imagination, and how that depiction ties into the rediscovery of the arts of the ancient New World.
After completing his master’s degree, Stallman plans to earn a doctorate in art history and become a professor. The trip gave him the opportunity to speak with people who could offer him a window into that world.
“It was a life-changing experience,” Stallman said.
— Jeffrey Day, content strategist in the UC Davis College of Letters and Science