Art and the University

Its first architect, Eugene Rosenberg created large spaces and filled the blank walls with brightly coloured paintings and contemporary prints.

But Warwick wasn’t the only university to do this. All seven of the institutions founded in response to the 1963 Robbins Report for the expansion of higher education developed collections of contemporary art that they installed in their corridors, libraries, seminar rooms and public spaces. 

In the postwar era, educational theorists believed that a capacity for learning was stimulated by people encountering the unfamiliar and trying to make sense of it. Art was an effective way to introduce different ideas into educational institutions. The Pictures for Schools scheme ran for 1947-69 and introduced thousands of contemporary works to young people. The University of Warwick Art Collection inherited works from this scheme through its amalgamation with the Coventry College for Education.

The Future is Today exhibition

For this exhibition, over 60 works have been retrieved from across the 290 hectares of the University. For staff and students, its an opportunity to see familiar works in an unfamiliar context and to see new works that have been in buildings they have never visited. For visitors, it’s an opportunity to display the breadth and significance of the University’s Art Collection on its 60th anniversary. We chose to examine prints since they form the largest group by media in the Art Collection. 

The artist Joseph Beuys wrote that “prints are ideas in circulation”. The works that were bought for the Art Collection in the early years were international in scope and relentlessly modern. A significant group are “the American prints”. In 1964, the Wadsworth Athenaeum Art Museum in Connecticut USA commissioned ten screenprints by ten painters. The curator, Sam Wagstaff, said that he wanted people 'to get as big a hunk of the current aesthetic as they could, as cheaply as possible'. This comment shows the importance of the modern world, particularly the American world, to people and how printmaking made it accessible. 

A new print commissioned for the 60th anniversary of the University

To carry on this tradition, we have commissioned a print from artist Ben Sanderson to mark the 60th anniversary of the University. Ben Sanderson grew up in Coventry. He now lives and works as an artist in Cornwall. Ben writes, 

This four-plate photopolymer etching was made in St Erth, Cornwall with Master Printmaker Simon Marsh. The first plate is printed in ochre, blue and green (a cove, a sky, a field). Abstracted forms come from the second plate which uses hexagonal templates for a patchwork quilt, started by my mother when she was eighteen. The templates are made from old Christmas cards and envelopes from her part time job at Dunlop. Plates three and four dance around a watery border, restlessly sprouting new growth. Gestures break out of the edges of previous plate lines, as they jump and fall into the open space that surrounds the image.

The print has been commissioned in an edition of 60. It measures 84 x 60cm. It is available from the Mead Gallery, unframed, at a cost price of £240 including VAT.