Spotlight Lecture: Tutankhartier: Tutmania in the 1920s

This Tuesday Spotlight lecture within our wider theme of 'Visualising Egypt' explores the diversity and complexity of Egyptian art and how it has inspired contemporary artists.
Tutankhartier: Tutmania in the 1920s as a Metaphor for a Society in Recovery from World War One
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On November 26th 1922 when Howard Carter first glimpsed such “wonderful things”, little could he have anticipated how quickly they would become endowed with a plethora of meanings for an unprecedentedly large public. The consequent ‘Tutmania’ was by no means purely an aesthetic craze. I explore in this lecture how the discovery of a young boy, lying amidst the remains of his funeral and re-born after 3000 years of obscurity, tapped into deeper preoccupations of the time. Here was a Western society in limbo trying to attribute meaning to the loss of so many of its young at war and looking for the means to resurrect itself, emotionally, socially and economically. Observers did not see the dusty remains of a long extinct civilization in Tutankhamun’s tomb, but rather something uncannily reminiscent of their own circumstances.
Lizzie uses a combination of anthropological and art historical approaches to look beyond the aesthetic reception of these Egyptian-revival items and see their value as meaningful indicators which reveal a society in flux. She focuses, in particular, on the wide and intentional application of themes around death and resurrection in 1920s jewellery and accessories, and how such references developed through the decade. One jeweller stands out. Louis Cartier understood society, he knew Egypt, and he was willing to experiment; making his firm the single most enlightening case study of the deeper reasons why Tutankhamun became an icon of the age. She will examine in detail three of these ingenious items.
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Lizzie Glithero-West has been the Chief Executive of The Heritage Alliance since 2016. Her previous career has been mainly in the civil service. She has a degree in Archaeology and Anthropology from Oxford, and an MA in History of Art from Birkbeck. Lizzie is a trustee of the Egypt Exploration Society and has published on Belzoni and the Egyptian Hall and on Cartier’s Egyptian Revival Jewellery in the Art Deco Period. She is a member of Royal Holloway's humanities advisory board and the Canal and River Trust’s Cultural Heritage Advisory Group, and she lectures at Oxford University on heritage. A paper associated with this lecture is available as part of this volume: Ancient Egypt in the Modern Imagination: Art, Literature and Culture: Eleanor Dobson: Bloomsbury Academic (www.bloomsbury....