Wide-ranging topics and brilliantly-written essays are a highlight of this year’s AHLU x Christie’s Education Trust Scholarship

By Ted Sandling, Global Director of Education at Christie's

On the first sunny Saturday in May, I wheeled a suitcase packed with brand-new laptops down the Strand to Somerset House, the second year I’ve taken the walk from Christie’s to the classroom where Art History Link-Up teaches A-Level students. As a Trustee of the Christie’s Education Trust, I’ve worked with Rose Aidin to set up a scholarship that offers prizes for essay-writing or video production. Presenting the computers to the winners is a highlight of my year.

Christie’s long-standing support for Art History Link-Up is widely valued, and when I became a Trustee I was keen to expand it. Our objectives relate to the education and promotion of art and craftsmanship, and supporting the next generation of art historians is central to that. We award laptops to five winners - to help them as they’re finishing their A-levels and to support them through their time at university as well as access to Christie’s Education’s online programming.

Although the prizegiving is a moment of celebration, I get just as much from judging the essays and videos. The approaches the students take are all so different, and the art they choose even more so (this year ranged from 17^th century Baroque to a recent Tracey Emin, by way of a Fabergé egg and a Käthe Kollwitz print). What unites them is an enthusiastic spirit of enquiry: the reader can sense the curiosity of the authors as they respond to their chosen piece.

The submissions have shifted over the past two years. Last year students were heavily into video, and there was one submission that still resonates with me, a narrated, contemplative study woven from shots of transcendent stillness. This year, more essays than video made the shortlist – and some of the essays were astonishingly well-written. The winning piece was a fiery study of Michael Armitage’s 2019 painting The Promised Land, which took the reader through cultural, material and political history in an explosive outpouring of images and insight. The author wrote a highly sophisticated analysis, showing her interest in multiple interconnected threads (the artist’s biography, the symbolism in the work, recent Kenyan history and much more), as well as developing a simply astonishing visual reading of the painting.

I also delighted in the storytelling of the second-place essay, about the infographic installation by W.E.B Du Bois for the 1900 Paris Exposition. This work of data-visualisation, researched and constructed to show the lives of 19^th century African Americans, transcended functional reporting to become a work of graphic art. In her essay, the student was able to uncover remarkable connections: Florence Nightingale’s data ‘diagrams’, Pan African colours, the contemporary typeface designer Tré Seals. Her narrative is as curled as one of Du Bois' spirals.

Both these essays had very different styles: One an explosion of imagery, the other a digressive exploration of the subject, but what marked them out was the strength of their voice in their writing, and for me this was a major part of my marking criteria. I wanted to read essays that were confident about what they wanted the reader to take from the encounter. I was also interested in the essayists’ analysis of the work. I wanted close-looking and perception, and to understand what those observations meant.

This scholarship speaks directly to the ethos of the Christie’s Education Trust, and so does being part of Art History Link-Up’s mission, but I’m learning too, and that’s just as rewarding.