Exhibition: ‘The Art of Courtly Lucknow’
I’m afraid this exhibition slipped past me when it was at LACMA. It opens today, however, at the Musée Guimet in Paris. Thanks to Hélène Bremer for pointing it out. The following description comes from the LACMA press release:
India’s Fabled City: The Art of Courtly Lucknow / Une cour royale en Inde: Lucknow
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 12 December 2010 — 27 February 2011
Musée National des Arts asiatiques-Guimet, Paris, 6 April — 11 July 2011
Curated by Stephen Markel and Tushara Bindu Gude
Exhibition catalogue, 272 pages, ISBN: 9783791350752
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art presents India’s Fabled City: The Art of Courtly Lucknow—the first major international exhibition devoted to the cosmopolitan culture of the northern Indian court of Lucknow, and the refined artistic production of the city’s multiethnic residents and artists. On view from December 12, 2010 through February 27, 2011, the exhibition will include almost 200 artworks: European oil paintings, watercolors, and prints; Indian opaque watercolor paintings generally made for albums, vintage photography, textiles, and garments, and a range of decorative art objects including metalwork, glassware, weaponry, and jewelry. Organized by Stephen Markel, LACMA curator of South & Southeast Asian art and department head, and Tushara Bindu Gude, associate curator, The Art of Courtly Lucknow will not only present the unique artistic traditions of Lucknow, but will also provide a framework for understanding the history of this extraordinary region and the nature of India’s colonial history and memory. . . .
After Johann Zoffany, "Colonel Polier Watching a Nautch," gouache on paper, ca. 1786-88 (Zurich: Museum Rietberg)
Lucknow was the capital of Awadh (a province in the Mughal Empire located in the present-day Indian state of Uttar Pradesh), and has become identified with the broader region and culture. From the mid-eighteenth century until the establishment of formal British rule in India in 1858, Lucknow overshadowed Delhi—the capital of the Mughal dynasty—to become the cultural center of northern India. Indian artists, poets, and courtiers flocked to Awadh seeking security and patronage, as Delhi suffered an extended period of unrest beginning in 1739. European artists, travelers and political agents were also soon lured to the region, seduced by tales of the wealth, opulence, and the generosity of Lucknow’s rulers (nawabs) and by the beauty of the city itself. The dynamic interaction between Indians and Europeans, the interplay
between their respective tastes and traditions, and the hybrid
lives led by many of Lucknow’s residents are explored in the
exhibition and accompanying publication. (more…)
Call for Papers: CAA 2012 in Los Angeles
College Art Association Annual Conference
Los Angeles, 22-25 February 2012
Proposals due 2 May 2011
The College Art Association annual conference for 2012 takes place in Los Angeles, 22-25 February. The following sessions from the Call for Participation may be of interest to Enfilade readers. I would especially draw HECCA members’ attention to two sessions: first, a New Scholars Session, chaired by Kevin Chua (details forthcoming), and second, the panel that I’m chairing on ‘Pictures in Place’. Please consider submitting a proposal, and if you have questions, feel free to send me an email. To anticipate one query: why the bias towards pictures? — in formulating the description I was especially thinking about the relationship between two-dimensional images (i.e. paintings or prints) and space as a three-dimensional realm. Sculpture would work, I think, in relation to space somewhat differently. Still, I am willing to consider proposals that address sculpture (or decorative arts), especially if they raise methodological concerns relevant to the panel more generally. The complete Call for Participation (including details for submitting proposals) is available here»
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Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture
Pictures in Place: Depicting Location and the Siting of Representation in the Eighteenth Century
Craig Hanson, Calvin College, CraigAshleyHanson@gmail.com
This panel invites papers that address the relationship between pictures and contexts in the eighteenth century—in terms of both imagery presented (the place portrayed) and the actual physical locations of pictures as experienced (the placement of pictures). In light of recent scholarship that has stressed the global eighteenth century—looking from Europe to the New World and to Africa and Asia—the session explores the role of place, be it geographical or phenomenological, in terms of how pictures functioned through consideration of where they functioned. Possible themes might include imperial or national ambitions; audience and politics of place; marketing strategies and the commodification of art viewing; exhibition venues; connections between painting and architecture; the relationship between painting, prints, and the decorative arts; and disjunctions between pictorial form and the siting of works of art. Considerations of methodological concerns in dealing with place are also welcome.
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Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture
New Scholars Session
Kevin Chua, Texas Tech University, kchua71@yahoo.com
Details forthcoming [more available here]
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Historians of Netherlandish Art
Affect and Agency: The Netherlandish Portrait (1400–1750)
Ann Jensen Adams, University of California at Santa Barbara, ajadams@arthistory.ucsb.edu
Repeating an ancient trope, Constantijn Huygens wrote that portraits “perform a noble work, that more than any other is necessary for our human needs, . . . through them we in a true sense do not die; furthermore as descendants we can speak intimately with our most distant ancestors.” Through their perceived affective qualities, portraits in the early modern period served—consciously or unconsciously—as active cultural agents, from the formation of the self to strengthening familial bonds and producing social and political relations. This session seeks papers that expand our understanding of the imaginative and cultural function of portraiture in the Netherlands and in Germany, in the broadest sense. Genres might include the selfportrait, memorial (donor) portrait, court portrait, family portrait, group portraits of voluntary associations, portrait historié, printed portrait, imaginative portrait, and portrait sculpture, with an emphasis on the viewer’s understanding of the portrait and its personal and/ or cultural uses.
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American Society for Hispanic Art Historical Studies
New Research in the Early Modern Hispanic World
Michael A. Brown, 18099 East Orchard Place, Aurora, CO 80016; and Sofía Sanabrais, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Department of Latin American Art, 5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90036; sofia.sanabrais@gmail.com
From the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, the art and architecture of Spain, Portugal, and their American dominions witnessed a period of tremendous transformation and provided fertile ground for the development of a new artistic vocabulary. This session examines new research and innovative approaches to the study of the early modern Hispanic world. In the last ten years, the field has attracted increased attention and produced groundbreaking exhibitions as scholars grapple with problems of patronage, the struggle between native and imported elements from Europe, the Americas, and Asia, and the use of art to create a sense of a New World identity distinct from its European sources. This session welcomes papers that present new research in the field of art and architectural history and conservation science.
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Italian Art Society
Territory and Border: Geographic Considerations of Italian Art and Architecture
Nicola Camerlenghi, University of Oregon; and Catherine C. McCurrach, Wayne State University; ncamerle@uoregon.edu and cmccurrach@wayne.edu
This session examines the geographic parameters that circumscribe the art and architecture of Italy. What common elements of intellectual inquiry are shared by scholars of Pompeii and those of Piedmont? How do the geographic boundaries of modern Italy shape the study of Italian art? What is gained—or distorted—by dutifully fitting eclectic and regional trends into a coherent narrative spanning centuries but limited to modern territorial borders? In light of Italy’s relation to the Mediterranean Sea, what geographic considerations ought to define the study of Italian art? As the culminating session of the year-long Italian Art Society theme “The Study of the Art and Architecture of Italy: A Reassessment of the Discipline,” papers reconsider fundamental assumptions underlying the current study of the art and architecture of Italy from antiquity to the present by addressing broad methodological themes centered around geographic definitions and boundaries.
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Information Visualization as a Research Method in Art History
Christian Huemer, Getty Research Institute; and Lev Manovich, University of California, San Diego; chuemer@getty.edu and manovich@ucsd.edu
Interest is growing in the use of information visualization across the humanities, as scholars in literature, history, and media studies discover its potential for their research. Large-scale digitization efforts by libraries, museums, and other cultural institutions are providing online access to significant collections of images and texts. Instead of using these large data sets merely for the retrieval of individual records, new software and computer interfaces enable art historians to explore complex relationships between many variables interactively. This panel presents concrete visualization projects in the field of art history and discusses questions surrounding its use as a research method: How do we combine the close reading of a small number of visual artifacts with the analysis of patterns that may manifest themselves across millions of these artifacts? How can we understand visualization in relation to other more established art-historical methods?
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Art History Open Session
Art and Architecture in Europe: 1600–1750
John Beldon Scott, University of Iowa, jb-scott@uiowa.edu
This session showcases current research in early modern European art, architecture, and urbanism. Papers that explore the persuasive intent and mass audience of the art production of the period are given preference.
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New Approaches to Post-Renaissance Florence, ca. 1600–1743
Eve Straussman-Pflanzer, Art Institute of Chicago; and Eva Struhal, Université Laval; estrau@artic.edu and eva.struhal@hst.ulaval.ca
Despite Rudolf Wittkower’s declaration that Florence became a “stagnant backwater” after the sixteenth century, recent scholarship has demonstrated the wealth of artistic activity that flourished in the city after that date. We seek to reevaluate this art-historical period by bringing together research that highlights and nuances the artistic, cultural, and intellectual riches of post-Renaissance Florence. We invite papers that consider any aspect of the period from ca. 1600 until the death of the last Medici in 1743. Paper topics might include the historiography of the period, literary academies and artists, the interchange between art and science, female patronage, women artists, or the intersection of art and music.
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No Talking Allowed: Making a Visual Argument about Art History
Jean Robertson and Craig McDaniel, Indiana University; jerobert@iupui.edu and crmcdani@iupui.edu
Anyone who has studied art history most likely has experienced the aesthetic and conceptual thrill of viewing adroit visual presentations that barely seem to require the professor’s verbal accompaniment. This experimental Open Forms session invites proposals for five twelve-minute presentations that analyze art-historical topics using visual means, either still or moving images, with minimal spoken or written words. (Nonverbal sound tracks are acceptable.) Models for the visual essays include such examples as exhibitions in which curators make conceptual points about artists, periods, styles, and themes through works of art alone; visual essays with minimal captioning created by photojournalists; and visual essays without accompanying text, such as John Berger’s visual argument about the gaze in his book Ways of Seeing. We welcome proposals from art historians, critics, curators, and artists with the goal of organizing a session that demonstrates an expansive range of possibilities for visual essays about art history. (However, we will not accept an artist’s visual essay solely about one’s own work.) Proposals may be in written form.
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Historians of British Art
Future Directions in the History of British Art
Peter Trippi, Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine and Projects in 19th-Century Art, Inc., 780 Riverside Drive, Suite 10F, New York, NY 10032; ptrippi@aol.com
The year 2012 marks the twentieth anniversary of the founding of Historians of British Art and thus is an ideal moment to scan the horizons of this field. Instead of looking back to document our recent evolution, this session highlights what lies ahead. Advanced graduate students and those who have earned a PhD or joined a museum staff since 2007 are invited to submit proposals on any aspect of British art and architecture, past or present, including ones that reflect Britain’s varied roles in the wider world. Particularly welcome are papers that employ emerging methodologies or ways of collaborating with colleagues in other disciplines.
Reviewed: ‘Artistic and Cultural Exchanges between Europe and Asia’
Recently added to caa.reviews:
Michael North, ed., Artistic and Cultural Exchanges between Europe and Asia, 1400–1900: Rethinking Markets, Workshops and Collections (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 216 pages, ISBN: 9780754669371, $114.95.
Reviewed by David Carrier, Case Western Reserve University/Cleveland Institute of Art; posted 24 March 2011.
The necessary precondition for a world art history is the close study of cultural exchanges. Even nowadays, when you can travel from New York to Beijing in less than a day, the distance between America’s and China’s visual cultures is still immense. When such travel was much slower, and curators were not much concerned with exotic art, the diverse artistic traditions were relatively self-sufficient. But once Vasco da Gama circumnavigated the globe, it was inevitable that those artifacts called works of art would move from their places of origin to other cultures. The world had become one, which is to say that all art traditions were interconnected. This, then, is why close analysis of the slow-moving process in which Europeans brought their art to China, India, and other places outside the West, as well as collected non-European art, is extremely important.
“Artistic and Cultural Exchanges between Europe and Asia,” an anthology that collects the proceedings of a conference held in Sydney in 2005, contains an introduction by Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann and Michael North, and essays by Karl-Heinz Spiess on Asian artifacts in Western European courts during the Middle Ages; Peter Borschberg on the trade in Bezour stones, the minerals believed to possess magical properties; Ting Chang on French fantasies about Asia; Martin Krieger on Dutch collecting in colonial India, circa 1800; Alexander Drost on Mughal architecture as it was incorporated into European memorials in seventeenth-century India; North on art making by European companies in Asia; Mia Mochizuki on the uses of Dutch maps in Japan; Kaufmann on markets in Funi-e; and Yoriko Kobayashi-Sato on the relationships between Japan and the West during the Edo period. . . .
The full review is available here» (CAA membership required)
‘Street Cries’ at the Museum of London
From the Museum of London:
Street Cries
Museum of London, 25 March — 31 July 2011
Curated by Francis Marshall
Paul Sandby, "Ink Seller," watercolour, ca. 1759 © Museum of London
Street Cries uses the Museum of London’s extensive art collection to consider how the urban poor were depicted from the 17th to the 19th century. Some of the earliest visual records of the urban poor were prints showing street traders. These first appeared in 15th-century Europe and continued to be made well into the 19th century. The market for this type of imagery was a flourishing one, particularly in London.
Many of these images presented an idealised vision of the poor. However, some artists, attempted greater realism. In 1760, for instance, Paul Sandby sought to redress the sanitizing tendency with his etchings Twelve London Cries Drawn from the Life. However, he anticipated a much larger set running to around forty images. He made watercolour drawings for these, of which the museum has an important group, but they were never published, probably because Sandby’s work was too realistic. Sixty years later, the French artist Théodore Géricault produced a print series depicting London’s poor. These powerful prints where a commercial flop largely because the imagery was too hard hitting to appeal to collectors at
the time.
Images of street vendors, and the urban poor generally, pose interesting questions about how society was organised, the motives of those making, selling and buying the prints, and the status and identity of the people depicted. Amongst other things, they can be seen as precursors of Mayhew’s efforts to produce a taxonomy of the London poor. The exhibition explores these issues as well as showcasing some of the Museum’s most important 18th- and 19th-century prints and drawings. Amongst the artists included are Paul Sandby, Gustave Doré, Théodore Géricault, and Thomas Rowlandson.
April 27, 3:00 — Curator Francis Marshall speaks on the exhibition at the Museum of London.
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Writing for The Independent (21 March 2011), Matilda Battersby reviews the show:
Put them all together and they resemble the cast of Oliver Twist: street urchins, prostitutes, beggars and street vendors all carefully drawn, painted or printed in the 17th and 18th centuries. They are some of the earliest depiction of London’s poor and are due to go on show at the Museum of London this week.
It is an interesting body of work for two reasons. Firstly, it encapsulates the diverse roles, functions and perceptions of Britain’s ‘underclass’ during those two centuries as well as giving insight into what was eaten, sold and readily available. Secondly, it shows an increased, although for the most part snobbish, awareness of what was then the ‘undeserving poor’ and an anthropological, if not exactly philanthropic, interest in them. . . .
The full review — plus a video with Francis Marshall discussing three images from the exhibition — is available here»
Call for Papers: Port Architecture
The Social Life of Port Architecture: History, Politics, Commerce, and Culture (1700-present)
Centre for Port and Maritime History, University of Liverpool, 23-25 June 2011
Proposals due by 29 April 2011
The architecture of port cities is entangled in the social, political, economic and cultural histories of these places. Historically, major architectural projects afforded the commissioning merchant class the capacity to materialize their status in prominent urban spaces in a way which embedded trade and commerce in a set of broader civilizational values. Architecture was one of the key sites for referencing the cultures of other places with historicist styles, civilizational discourses, ‘exotic’ motifs and — crucially — representations of the local. Architecture also housed the social interactions crucial for knitting together trading networks within and beyond the city, while the configuration of internal building spaces revealed assumptions about the ordering of wider social relationships and hierarchies.
Architecture provides a lens through which to study the economic, political and cultural practices of port-cities. How did the social practices and values (whether religious or secular) crucial for assembling trading networks shape the architecture of port-cities? Which achievements were represented and celebrated in urban space and why? How did rapidly professionalizing architects draw on and particularize repertoires of historicist and international symbols in order to create distinctive local images? What were some of the controversies centring on major architectural projects and what do they tell us about wider social issues? How were new technologies incorporated into the urban landscape? (more…)
Susan Taylor-Leduc on the French Picturesque Garden
From the Bard Graduate Center:
Susan Taylor-Leduc, The “Pleasures of Surprise” in the French Picturesque Garden
Bard Graduate Center, New York, 27 April 2011
Just as video games, smart phone ‘apps’ and online betting solicit the attention of early 21st-century subjects, gaming, particularly high-stakes gambling, was irresistible to eighteenth-century French Society. Whereas gambling was considered as an abstract science combining mathematical calculation and chance, its corollary, surprise, inspired the imagination. Baron de Montesquieu linked the two in his “Essay on Taste” in 1754, suggesting how the social practices of gambling inspired surprising images, behaviors, and sensations. Comparing playing cards, board games, engravings, and paintings to garden plans and extant garden sites, this talk investigates how gambling was projected from the card table to the picturesque gardens created by elite patrons who were themselves addicted gamers. It argues that by fostering a game-like sense of surprise, such gardens promoted new sensate experiences that reconfigured eighteenth century notions of amusement and pleasure and contributed to the formulation of modern aesthetic discourses. (more…)
Call for Papers: Merchants as Collectors
The dates of the conference topic range from 1450 to 1650 — yes, well before even the ‘long eighteenth century’ — but there’s one phrase in the Call for Papers that caught my attention: “topics falling outside of this date range will be considered if a compelling reason for their inclusion can be made.” Details are available here. -CAH
Early Modern Merchants as Collectors
Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, 15-16 June 2012
Proposals due by 31 May 2011
In 1615, Vincenzo Scamozzi highlighted the importance in Venice of the merchant-collectors Bartolomeo dalla Nave and Daniel Nijs by including descriptions of their collections in his L’Idea della architettura universale. Scholarship has also moved beyond the consideration of the artist and the patron as the principal protagonists in the history of collecting. As a result, merchants are now being regarded by historians as influential collectors in their own right.
With the 1985 publication of The Origin of Museums, a collection of conference papers edited by Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor, the Ashmolean Museum became established as a leading institution for research in the history of collecting. Recently re-opened with innovative galleries displaying objects exploring the theme ‘Crossing Cultures Crossing Time’, the new Ashmolean now affords an opportunity to re-visit the 1985 conference topic and not only to update but also to expand it into this fresh area of research and debate. This interdisciplinary conference will explore early modern merchants as collectors across a wide range of geographical regions and collecting categories, investigating whether there are any patterns connecting these merchant-collectors of the early modern period and what theoretical frameworks can be applied to them. (more…)
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