Enfilade

From The Courtauld:

Art against the Wall
The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, London, 19 November 2011

Organized by Thomas Balfe and Jocelyn Anderson

Art against the Wall is the third symposium of The Courtauld’s Early Modern department. The symposium will provide an occasion for established and emerging scholars to present and discuss their research together. This one-day symposium will explore the relationship between walls and art in early modern visual culture. During the period 1550-1850 the interplay between work and wall became increasingly complex as art objects began to pull away from the walls which had previously defined them. The enduring association between artistic skill and craft production meant that many art works were often still regarded as elements in overarching decorative schemes; paintings installed in eighteenth-century English domestic interiors, for example, continue to be described as part of the ornamentation, even as the furniture, of a room. Conversely, walls now had the power to redefine art works, giving them a new meaning through a new context; thus, in late sixteenth-century debates on the status of the religious image, walls – which map the division between sacred and secular space – take on crucial importance. Yet the wall could also become art, as the numerous examples of trompe l’oeil wall illustration to be found in seventeenth-century architecture and garden design suggest. Taking as its point of departure Derrida’s insight that there can be no clear separation of ergon (work) from parergon (not-the-work, ‘wall’), the symposium will attempt to investigate the rich questions raised by the phenomenon of art against the wall.

To book a place: £15 (£10 students) Please send a cheque made payable to ‘Courtauld Institute of Art’ to: Research Forum Events Co-ordinator, Research Forum, The Courtauld Institute of Art , Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN, clearly stating that you wish to book for the ‘Art against the Wall’ symposium. For credit card bookings call 020 7848 2785 (9.30 – 18.00, weekdays only). For further information, send an email to ResearchForumEvents@courtauld.ac.uk

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P R O G R A M M E

9:30 Registration

10:00 Introduction – Jocelyn Anderson and Thomas Balfe (The Courtauld Institute of Art)

SESSION 1: Work, Wall and Space: How Does Art Fit In?

10:15 Rodrigo Cañete (The Courtauld Institute of Art), Velazquez’s Wall Hermeneutics or How Only His Role as Palace Superintendent Can Allow Us to Unlock The Meaning of His Paintings

10:35 Dario Donetti (Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa), ‘Quattordici cappelle a canto al muro’: Some Architectural Issues Concerning Santa Croce in Florence under Cosimo I de’ Medici

10:55 Catherine McCormack (UCL), Caravaggio’s Madonna of the Pilgrims or Just Another Brick in the Wall?

11:15 Discussion

11:30 COFFEE/TEA BREAK

SESSION 2: Domestic Displays: Art in London Residences

12:00 Adriano Aymonino (Getty Research Institute), The Integration of the Arts in British Neoclassical Interiors: Aesthetics and Meaning

12:20 Susannah Brooke (Queens’ College, Cambridge), Issues of Display: a Private Picture Collection in London, c. 1795-1820

12:40 Gerry Abalone (Tate), Painting, Frame and Setting

13:00 Discussion

13:15 LUNCH (not provided)

SESSION 3: The Wall Transformed: Monumental Illusionism

15:15 Meriel May Geolot (independent scholar), Unravelling the Tapestries: The Gobelin’s Tentures de Boucher in the Late Georgian English Country Home

14:35 Marika T. Knowles (Yale University), Pierrot and the Wall-Mask, or How the Wall Became a Character

14:55 Kristina Kleutghen (Washington University, St Louis), Contradictions of Illusion and Immateriality: Psycho-Pictorial Disjunctions in Early Modern Chinese Wall Paintings

15:15 Discussion

15:30 COFFEE/TEA BREAK

SESSION 4: Ergon/Parergon: Grand Schemes in Palaces

16:00 Kevin Childs (British School at Rome), ‘…piena di grazia, di bellissime fantasie e di molte capricciose…’ Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel Ceiling and the Wall that is no Wall in late sixteenth-century Roman Fresco Decoration

16:20 Francesco Freddolini (Getty Research Institute), The Eloquent Walls: Stucco Decoration and Display of Art in Seventeenth-Century Rome

16:40 Friederike Drinkuth (Stately Palaces and Gardens Mecklenburg) and Tobias Locker (Technische Universität, Berlin), Reconsidering the Frederican Rococo: The Discovery of Mirow Palace

17:00 Discussion and concluding remarks

17:30 RECEPTION

Abstracts of the talks are available as a PDF file here»