Te Summer Show’s origins the lend lease / architects’ journal awards 10
Edith Devaney recalls the renaissance of the RA’s annual exhibition open to ‘artists of distinguished merit’
How many of the thousands thronging through the first days of the Royal Academy’s 244th summer exhibition knew that, only 15 years ago, Britain’s national press rarely bothered to cover this event, which was characterised by desultory footfall and a faintly clubby atmosphere? Te majority of academicians tended not to offer
work for the show, and the exhibitions were arranged and hung in a rather cursory manner. Furthermore, art-lovers and tourists had, by then, developed a taste for the starkly iconic work of artists such as Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and Chris Ofili via groundbreaking shows such as Brilliant! at the Walker in Minneapolis, and Sensation at the RA. At precisely that time, an art-history graduate, Edith Devaney, was working in the RA’s framing
department. She quietly deplored the fact that the academy’s formal 18th-century commitment ‘to mount an annual exhibition open to all artists of distinguished merit’ seemed to be evaporating. It wasn’t just the loss of artistic prestige that
concerned her, but the fact that the summer exhibition – the world’s biggest selling show, in terms of numbers of works – had financed the training of young artists in the RA schools since 1769. What if this vital funding continued to regress? Her concern in the late 1990s was perfectly timed. ‘I
was working my way up from the framing department, and had got to know a lot of the academicians quite well,’ she recalls. ‘Te team that mounted the summer exhibition at that time was quite elderly. And the registry, as it was called, looked after the entries. It
Left: People examining paintings at the Royal Academy, 1787
Above: A view of the New Royal Academy at Burlington House, 1778 Right: ‘Ye Exhibition at ye Royal Academye’, a cartoon drawn by Richard Doyle, taken from his book ‘Manners and Customs of Ye Englyshe in 1849’
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