"It was, like any other period, a time of transition:" 1970s Britain and the "native art-historical journal"

This paper will seek to address the prominence of the social history of art in Britain by considering the contexts in which it was published. Focusing in particular on the 1970s, I want to contend that such disciplinary developments went hand in hand with the emergence of, and thus opportunity to disseminate one’s work in, various art-historical periodicals in Britain. The remarkable spate of titles to have appeared at the end of the decade, including Art History, Block and the Oxford Art Journal, is a phenomenon that itself begs historical analysis alongside, or rather, as part of, any historiographical treatment of the radical intellectual space that they facilitated. By examining such journals in terms of the visual and material politics of periodical publishing, I will argue that the strength of the distinctive mode of social history of art in 1970s Britain can be accounted for by a collective reaction to the parameters of scholarship and economic mechanisms manifested in the pages of established magazines such as Apollo, the Burlington and the Connoisseur. The dissatisfaction with, and critique of, prevailing structures of publishing implicit in so much of the so-called new art history directly mirrors, I will propose, the various challenges to such institutional frameworks made, for example, by conceptual art from the late 1960s onwards, not least through its re-evaluation of the medium of the magazine. My approach shows the specific cultural field constituted by periodicals to be integral to narratives of art-historical practice in Britain, both past and present.