Enfilade

A selection of this year’s Getty scholars working on the eighteenth century:

Getty Research Institute: Art and Materiality, 2015/2016

In the past decade, a greater attention to the art object and its materiality has enhanced the study of art history, opening new avenues of investigation. Combined with more historical methodologies, the focus on the materiality of artworks is offering profound insights into their meanings. Artists across time and space have infused materials not only with ritual and symbolic significance but also social, political, and economic functions. Art historians, increasingly in collaboration with conservators and scientists, are gaining insight into the process of art making from raw material to finished object, the chaîne opératoire, as well as the strategic deployment of materials both for their aesthetic qualities and for their power to signify. The inquiry into an artwork’s materiality raises questions about procurement, trade, value, and manufacturing on the one hand, and, on the other, about the materiality of mechanically reproduced objects or of ephemeral, durational, and conceptual works. Finally, as artworks move between cultures, their materials—whether feathers, shells, marble, or oil paint—are given new meanings, thereby accumulating additional interpretive layers.

G E T T Y  S C H O L A R

Corinna Gramatke is an independent scholar based in Düsseldorf, Germany. Her research concentrates on material-technical research and written art-technological sources from Spain and Latin America of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
José Sánchez Labrador’s Manuscript Paraguay natural ilustrado (1771–76): Critical and Annotated Edition of the Chapters Dealing with Art Technological Materials and Indications for the Artistic Production in the Jesuit Missions in Paracuaria during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century
(April–June)

Fernando Guzmán is Associate Professor at the Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Santiago, Chile. He specializes in Spanish colonial art.
From Polychrome Wood to White Marble: Devotional Art in Santiago de Chile during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
(January–March)

Gabriela Siracusano is Director of the Centro de Investigación en Arte, Materia y Cultura at the Universidad Nacional de Tres de Febrero, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Career Scientific Researcher at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas in Buenos Aires; and Professor of Theory and Historiography at the Universidad de Buenos Aires. Her research concerns Andean colonial artistic production and artistic materiality.
The Bowels of the Sacred
(January–March)

P O S T D O C T O R A L  F E L L O W

Noémie Etienne received her doctorate in the Department of Art History from the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and University of Paris 1 Sorbonne, France.
A Material Art History? Paintings Restoration and the Writing of Art History
(September–June)

A full list is available here»