New Director Appointed at Versailles
As reported at ArtInfo (2 September 2011) . . .
Jean-Jacques Aillagon, Photo from his blog (click to visit)
Jean-Jacques Aillagon, the Versailles director who introduced contemporary art into the sanctum of the château, will leave his post on September 30. Faced with mandatory retirement as he turns 65, he wrote in a letter to the palace’s staff that “I will depart our establishment with the regret of leaving you.” Aillagon had hoped that a special dispensation would allow him to serve at least through the end of his current appointment in 2013. But Wednesday French president Nicolas Sarkozy appointed 57-year-old journalist Catherine Pégard to replace him as head of Versailles. . . .
The full article is available here»
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Whereas Aillagon was seen by some as provocative for his inclusion of work by Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami at Versailles, Sarkozy’s new pick brings its own controversy. As reported at Art Media Agency (30 August 2011) . . .
Versailles (Wikimedia Commons)
The French newspaper Libération has announced today the appointment of Catherine Pégard as President of Versailles. . . . The art world is sad to see the former director retire, who was shocked to see that Catherine Pégard would replace him. She has no university titles, experience or particular predispositions in order to direct such a prestigious museum as the Château de Versailles. She has worked as a political journalist, mostly at the Point, and more importantly, was nominated counsellor to the French president in 2007. Since 2008, she was in charge of his political entourage. . . .
The full AMA article is available here»
Call for Papers: Graduate Student Symposium at Yale
Call for Papers from the YCBA:
Art, Agency, Empire: India in Global Contexts — Graduate Student Symposium
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 11 February 2012
Proposals due by 31 October 2011
I enquired of monuments and ruins, I questioned the Vedas whose pages count their existence by thousands of years…. And then did India appear to me in all the living power of originality. —Louis Jacolliot (1869)
The objective of this one-day graduate student symposium is to work against earlier paradigms by asserting the existence of multiple forms of agency—artistic, cultural, political—in India from about 1600 to Independence and beyond. The symposium also aims to examine visual and cultural exchanges between India and the rest of the world, with special (but not exclusive) reference to Britain and the British Empire. We welcome papers discussing the broadest range of visual materials, from architecture and material culture through representations in various media, and proposing interpretations that may engage with questions of agency, artistic identity, power, and politics. We aim to complicate canonical categories such as the “Company School,” “Mughal Miniature,” “British Art” and “British India,” “Swadeshi,” and even “diaspora” by critiquing methodologies currently employed in researching, interrogating, and evaluating materials from this place and time.
This symposium is informed by the recent proliferation of projects on India’s visual and material culture, including two exhibitions opening at the Yale Center for British Art in the fall of 2011: Johan Zoffany RA: Society Observed, which includes a substantial section devoted to the works the artist produced during his residence in India, between 1783 and 1789; and Adapting the Eye: An Archive of the British in India, 1770–1830, which concentrates on the complex networks of British and Indian artists, patrons, and scholars in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Art, Agency, Empire: India in Global Contexts explores how, in a postcolonial period, it has become increasingly pressing to reevaluate India as a site of multifarious cultural (indeed intercultural) production, which has provoked global responses across media. Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- colonizing, Independence, and postcolonial contexts
- construction of identities
- spaces of India: maps, landscapes, cityscapes, panoramas
- architecture: exterior and interior
- monuments and monumentality
- popular print, graphic satire, illustrated books
- art as document/document as art
- bodies of evidence: collections, compilations, physical bodies
- methodological innovations
- caretaking sources: conservation, preservation, digitization
We invite proposals for 25-minute papers on this theme from graduate students working in any discipline. Special consideration will be given to papers examining the topic in relation to the British involvement in India. Cross-disciplinary and comparative studies are particularly welcome. Please e-mail abstracts of no more than 300 words by October 31, 2011 to lars.kokkonen@yale.edu, Lars Kokkonen, Postdoctoral Research Associate Research Department Yale Center for British Art. Travel funds for speakers are available upon application.
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