Exhibition: Decoding Images of Maharaja
From the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco:
Decoding Images of Maharaja: The Splendor of India’s Royal Courts
Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 10 October 2009 — 17 January 2010
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 17 November 2010 — 3 April 2011
Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, 21 October 2011 — 8 April 2012
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, 21 May — 19 August 2012
Amar Singh II, ruler of the kingdom of Mewar, 1700–50. City of Udaipur. Opaque watercolor on cloth (London: V&A)
The word maharaja evokes for many an image of a bejeweled and turbaned ruler, whose authority is absolute, whose wealth is immense, who indulges in a lavish lifestyle. But that is only a part of the picture, and more applicable to a later chapter of history at that, after India became a colony of the British empire in the mid-nineteenth century. Although Hindu and Muslim rulers were also known by other titles — including maharana, maharao, nawab, and nizam — the word maharaja, which means “great king,” came to be used as a generic term to describe all of India’s kings.
An exhibition on the splendors of India’s royal courts initially aroused my skepticism. There should be more compelling reasons for an exhibition than merely to admire two hundred beautiful objects. Granted, admiring beautiful objects is something that we as art lovers, art historians, and curators love to do, but sometimes that is not enough. Especially not when the objects have more interesting stories to tell. Refreshingly, the Maharaja exhibition redresses commonly held perceptions and succeeds in adding greater depth and nuance to its subjects. Nearly every object included in the display has a great story and multiple layers of meaning behind it.
The two principal narrative arcs around which the exhibition is organized bring to life the complex and fascinating worlds of India’s great kings. They help us to understand the real people behind the objects that were made for them. The first goes behind the scenes to analyze the roles and qualities of kingship in India. The second traces the ways the institution of kingship shifted against a rapidly changing political and historical backdrop from the early eighteenth century through the 1930s, a period that saw a change in the maharajas’ status from independent rulers to “native princes” under British colonial rule. All of this is illustrated by a stunning range of objects from paintings and photographs to arms and armor, furniture, costumes, and jewelry.
The many paintings and photographs of the maharajas on display not only document the active presence of real people who lived real lives but also offer us a glimpse into the worlds inhabited by them. The modes of representation offer considerable information. Whether or not as deliberate design, the ways in which the subjects are depicted, their gestures and stances, the objects that have been included in or left out of their mages, and the overall settings tell us something about how they wished to be viewed both in their own time and in posterity. Looking closely at the representations of individual maharajas in the exhibition enables us as modern viewers to enter the now-distant world of these individuals and relate to them, and to realize that such portraits may not after all be that different in their intent and function from the single image that we choose to represent us on our Facebook profiles.
—Qamar Adamjee, assistant curator of South Asian Art at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Note: The Richmond venue was added to this posting on 21 May 2012; details are available here»
Call for Papers: 2012 Bloomington Workshop To Address Play
Call for Papers from The Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies at IU:
The 11th Bloomington Eighteenth-Century Workshop: Play
The Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington, 9-11 May 2012
Proposals due by 13 January 2012
The Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies at Indiana University is pleased to announce the eleventh Bloomington Eighteenth-Century Workshop, to be held on May 9-11, 2012. Our subject for 2012 is “Play.” From the aesthetics of Schiller to the card tables of socialites; from Pascal’s wager to Emile’s childhood (“which is or ought to be only games and frolicsome play”)—the long eighteenth century was a century of play. Dismayed at all this non-utilitarian behavior, Jeremy Bentham coined the phrase “deep play” to describe entirely irrational gambling, the making of bets that could reduce players “to indigence” in an instant. Writing in the twentieth century, Johan Huizinga still saw a “play-quality” penetrating all aspects of the era: “statecraft had never been so avowedly a game as in that age of secret cabals and intrigues.” Play, in other words, can look like pretty serious stuff in an eighteenth-century context. What can eighteenth-century developments tell us about the objects, forms, and occasions of play? Clifford Geertz applied Bentham’s words to the cock fights of Bali; Robert Darnton transposed that analysis to cat killing in eighteenth-century Paris: in both cases, the authors argued that grappling with such “opaque” activities allowed one to “grasp a foreign system of meaning in order to unravel it” (Darnton). But must all analyses of play culminate with the discovery of cultural work? What happens when we juxtapose different forms of play and different sets of players? Would we want to say that narrative or poetic fictions constitute kinds of play, or forms of absorption homologous to playing? Do the revolutionary dramas in the American colonies, France, or Haiti represent the fulfillment or the destruction of the notion that politics is a performance?
We invite papers that range across aesthetic, anthropological, historical, and philosophical registers, and that offer new ways to see the relation between these fields and disciplines. Possible topics include: games, toys, puppets, contests, riddles, and puzzles; play and the theory of fictions; making and breaking rules; theatricalization and mimesis as aesthetic, behavioral, and political tactic; the psychologization of play; the policing of the border between action and enactment, the “real” and the “make-believe,” play and non-play; transcultural impacts on conceptions of culture as a kind of play, game, or performance. (more…)
Exhibition and Colloquium: The Hôtels Particuliers of Paris
As noted by Hélène Bremer, from the museum’s website:
The Townhouse: A Parisian Ambition / L’hôtel particulier: Une ambition parisienne
Cité de l’Architecture & du Patrimoine, Palais de Chaillot, Paris, 6 October 2011 — 19 February 2012
Curated by Alexandre Gady
The townhouse is a key part of Paris’s architectural character, and we can trace the story of the capital by studying the development of the townhouse in different districts of the city.
The Parisian townhouse made its first appearance in the Middle Ages and became more popular during the 16th century when, thanks to François I, Paris again became the political capital where the monarchic state assembled and settled. It was important to be at court, near the king, and, therefore, at Paris. This golden age continued throughout the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. The last of the townhouses were built in the period between the two world wars, marking the end of a long history, but they still exist in today’s 21st-century Paris and are very much in use: (museums, embassies, ministries). This exhibition aims to explore this history and takes the visitor on three complementary and illuminating journeys, in a bid to discover the secret of the Parisian townhouse.
The first section features a small reconstructed townhouse, between garden and courtyard, with different authentically decorated rooms for the visitor to explore. In this way, each visitor can enjoy a sense of familiarity with, and ownership of, the building. The building is not an exact replica of an existing townhouse but aims rather to convey a general impression, an overall picture, with each “external” and internal space specifically designed for educational purposes.
In the second section of the exhibition, the visitor will take a journey through the history of the townhouse, this time organized chronologically, from the Middle Ages to the Belle Epoque. This part of the exhibition, displayed in a vast open space, presents a series of large models of townhouses, specifically chosen for their distinctive characteristics – hôtels de Cluny, Lambert, Thélusson and finally the Palais-Rose (these last two buildings no longer exist) – complete with an interactive terminal with wonderfully illustrated information on some 300 town houses.
The last section offers themed reading, examining the Parisian hotel as an architectural object. Three “alcoves” will be devoted to the relationship between the city and the townhouse – a relationship which was both passionate and destructive. A further three sections allow the visitor to explore the external architecture of the townhouse (façades overlooking gardens and courtyards), its interior décor, gardens and finally internal layout. To complete the display, there is a multi-touch screen on the layout and organization of the townhouse, presented in a fun way.
Alexandre Gady, L’hôtel particulier de Paris: Du Moyen Age à la belle époque, second edition (Paris: Parigramme, 2011), 320 pages, ISBN: 9782840967040, €49.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Colloquium: L’hôtel particulier des capitales régionales, une ambition française
Cité de l’Architecture & du Patrimoine, Palais de Chaillot, Paris, 2-3 December 2011
Ce colloque placé sous la direction scientifique de Pascal Liévaux, conservateur en chef à la Direction générale des patrimoines et Alexandre Gady, professeur à l’université de Nantes, commissaire de l’exposition L’Hôtel particulier. Une ambition parisienne, fait écho à cette manifestation.
Il propose d’en élargir la thématique à l’ensemble du territoire national et donnera la parole à des chercheurs et à des professionnels du patrimoine. Ces spécialistes témoigneront des dernières avancées dans la connaissance, la conservation, la restauration et la mise en valeur de ces édifices complexes qui, associant au plus haut niveau d’excellence l’architecture, l’art des jardins et celui du décor, témoignent de trois siècles de vitalité et de diversité de l’architecture urbaine sur l’ensemble du territoire national.
Lecture: Amanda Vickery on Georgian Family Life
From The Lewis Walpole Library:
The Eighteenth Lewis Walpole Library Lecture by Amanda Vickery
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 21 October 2011
“Family Life Makes Tories of Us All”: Love and Power at Home in Georgian England
To see the state in miniature one need only go home. Husbands were to govern wives, masters and mistresses to rule servants, and parents to discipline children. The years after 1688 saw the acceptance of new ideas about political authority and social manners, but the household hierarchy endured regardless. Notoriously Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau did not include every adult individual in their democracy of consent, but rather every male head of household, who was seen to represent the interests of his patriarchal entourage. The British considered themselves enemies to tyranny, disparaging and caricaturing ‘oriental despotism’ in foreign families as confirmation of barbarity, but local servitude passed almost unnoticed by political ideas. I have yet to encounter a single gentleman musing on whether it might be possible to reconsider his domestic rule in the light of the new political ideas. ‘Family life’, it was observed in 1779, ‘makes Tories of us all… see if any Whig wishes to see the beautiful Utopian expansion of power within
his own walls’.
The new political ideas which advocated government by consent did nothing to revolutionize the structures of domestic authority, but the content and meaning of domestic life was transformed over the eighteenth century. New ideals of politeness revolutionized domestic manners and interactions amongst the modestly propertied, while the vogue for sensibility in novels and paintings inflated expectations about affection and happiness at home. What then was the balance of love and power in eighteenth-century marriage and family life? And how did dependents live with the contradictions? ‘Do you not admire these lovers of liberty!’ snapped Elizabeth Montagu in 1765 ‘I am not sure that Cato did not kick his wife.’
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Amanda Vickery is Professor of Early Modern History at Queen Mary, University of London. She is the author of Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (Yale, 2009) and The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (Yale, 1998) which won the Wolfson, the Whitfield and the Longman/History Today prize. She is the editor of Women, Privilege and Power: British Politics 1750 to the Present (Stanford, 1991) and Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America (Yale, 2006). She writes and presents documentaries for BBC2 and BBC radio 4. In 2011, she judged the Samuel Johnson prize.
For the lecture’s calendar listing at the YCBA click here
Call for Papers: Graduate Student Conference
6th Annual Graduate Symposium, Department of Art, University of Toronto
Experimental Cultures: Mergers of Art and Science
University of Toronto, 27 January 2012
Proposals due by 15 November 2011
“All art should become science and all science art,” declared the German Romantic poet Friedrich Schlegel in one of his many philosophical fragments. Schlegel’s radical program of reform for the arts and sciences still has currency today. Art historians and other researchers are exploring the unique ways in which cultures of science and art intersect. Illustrations in anatomical atlases or manuals of natural history, for instance, hover somewhere ambivalently between the two. Even in the work of canonical artists, such as Leonardo da Vinci, what is art and what is scientific inquiry cannot be definitively distinguished. These junctions appear not only in the concerns of artists, but also in those of scientists. Developments in neuroscience are transforming our understanding of the experience and creation of art. Innovative technologies enable us to approach art and material culture, ancient and modern, from new angles. We invite proposals of graduate research across time and space that consider how science and technology have influenced the subjects of art, material culture, the practices of art-making, and aesthetic experience. Topics may include, but are not limited to:
– Applications of science and technology to art history and material culture
– How art and science have together generated new theoretical approaches
– Exchange between artists, anatomists, medical practitioners, and other scientists
– Neuroarthistory and its applications
– The use of psychology, physiognomy, or phrenology in portraiture
– Intersections between landscape painting or land art and the natural sciences
Please email abstracts of no more than 500 words for 20-minute papers, in addition to a short CV to gusta.symposium@gmail.com by November 15, 2011. Successful candidates will be contacted by December 1, 2011.
Organized by the Graduate Union of the Students of Art, University of Toronto
Call for Articles: Excess and Moderation for ‘Frame’
Excess/Moderation Theme for Next Issue of Frame: Journal of Visual and Material Culture
Manuscripts due by 15 November 2011
Frame invites scholarly submissions from a variety of disciplines that engage somehow with visual and/or material culture using unique methodologies. Possible areas of interest include art, architecture, film, visual culture, design, built environment, television, material culture, or other domains that engage with visual content from a variety of perspectives. We are particularly attracted to scholarly work that transverses traditional disciplinary borders and creates fresh approaches to the study of visual art and related areas.
This issue is themed “Excess/Moderation.” A mind-map that serves the function of suggesting topics is available on the Frame website (www.framejournal.org). Please see the website for the style-sheet as well. Papers should not exceed 10,000 words, unless for special exception. Manuscripts should be submitted electronically in .doc or .docx format. A separate document that includes a 200-word abstract, full name, email address, phone number, and institutional affiliation should accompany the article. Send all inquiries to the Managing Editor, Shawn Rice, at editor@framejournal.org.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Frame is a scholarly, peer-reviewed online publication edited by graduate students of the City University of New York Graduate Center. This journal is a re-imagined, interdisciplinary continuation of PART: The Journal of the Ph.D. Program in Art History at the Graduate Center.
Exhibition: Master Drawings from the Crocker Art Museum
From The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar:
A Pioneering Collection: Master Drawings from the Crocker Art Museumm
Portland Art Museum, Oregon, 12 June — 19 September 2010
Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California, 10 October 2010 — 6 February 2011
Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York, 16 September — 11 December 2011
Hubert Robert, "Massacre of the Innocents," 1796, chalk, brown, and red, on paper, 8 1/4 in. x 7 1/4 in. (Sacramento: Crocker Art Museum)
A Pioneering Collection: Master Drawings from the Crocker Art Museum includes 57 rarely seen works by artists such as Albrecht Durer, Fra Bartolommeo, Anthonie van Dyck, Francois Boucher, and Jean-Auguste-Cominque Ingres. The exhibition is divided thematically into four sections of drawings from Italy, the Low Countries, France, and Central Europe.
These drawings date from the late 15th- to the mid-19th centuries and were purchased between 1869-71 by forward-thinking railroad magnate E. B. Crocker, forming the basis of the Crocker Museum’s master drawings collection. In total, the Crockers purchased 1344 master drawings and 700 paintings during their time in Europe and these formed the basis of their private art gallery, which opened in 1872, featuring visitors like the queen of Hawaii and former U.S. President Grant. Following the death of Edwin Crocker, his wife Margaret transferred the gallery to the California Museum Association, now the Crocker Art Museum. Their old master drawing collection was one of the first historically to be opened to the
public in 1885.
This exhibition was organized in celebration of the Crocker’s Anne and Malcolm McHenry Works on Paper Study Center and exhibition space, designed to significantly enhance public access to this collection of master drawings.
A catalogue by lead author and Crocker Art Museum curator Wiliam Breazeale; Cara Dufour Denison, curator at the Morgan Library and Museum; Stacey Sell, associate curator of Old Master drawings at the National Gallery of Art, and Freyda Spira, research associate at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, accompanies the exhibition and will be available at the Art Center gift shop (Paul Holberton Publishing, 2010, $35).
A full checklist for the exhibition is available here»
Conference in The Hague: Dutch Emotions
From the Huizinga Instituut (as noted by Hélène Bremer) . . .
Cool, Calm, and Collected: The Dutch and Their Emotions in Pre-Modern Times
Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague, 4 November 2011
Conference organizers: Wessel Krul, Herman Roodenburg, and Catrien Santing
The conference Cool, Calm and Collected aims to enhance the burgeoning history of emotions in the Netherlands. Speakers at the conference will present their current research, integrating the study of emotional standards in advice literature with the study of actual emotional practices in ego documents, chronicles or archival sources. The fields covered will range from politics, philosophy and the urban feud to religion, the stage and the visual arts. The conference will not only be of interest to specialists in the history of emotions but also to the greater historical community.
Although the history of emotions was already suggested as an interesting topic by Lucien Febvre and Johan Huizinga it has been taken up seriously as a subject of historical study only fairly recently. Initially, historians limited themselves largely to the study of documents that prescribed emotional ideals and standards. Researchers are now going beyond such texts. They are currently identifying transformations in emotional ‘communities’ and ‘styles’ on the basis of letters, autobiographies and memoirs, as well as a variety of narrative, archival and visual sources. Historians are also emphasising performativity, what emotions actually do. At the institutional level, in Europe two important research centres have been started: in London the Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions (Thomas Dixon, director); in Berlin the ‘Forschungsbereich Geschichte der Gefühle’ (Ute Frevert, director). This conference seeks to establish a more solid footing for the history of emotions in the Netherlands and join in with these international trends.
The speakers at the conference will discuss the emotional styles of the Modern Devouts and the cult of pugnacity in Late Medieval feuds. Focusing on the seventeenth century, they will reconsider the performativity accorded to the emotions in painting, the theater, and pietist religious movements. For the eighteenth century, speakers will analyse the Dutch ‘cult of sensibility’, the contemporary appreciation and navigation of the sentiments. The day will be closed with a lecture by Dorothee Sturkenboom. She is a pioneer in the study of emotions in the Netherlands and will relate the emotional history of the Dutch to contemporary and more recent views on their ‘national character’. The conference’s keynote lecturer, the well-known English historian Thomas Dixon, will discuss the latest developments in the field.
The conference fee is €30 (€25 for members of the KNHG and €15 for students and PhD students) and includes lunch. The conference fee should be transferred to account number 6934391 of Nederlands Historisch Genootschap in The Hague. Registration by way of an e-mail to: info@knhg.nl, or by telephone: +31 (0)70 3140363.
Exhibition: Goya’s Los Caprichos
From the Nassau County Museum of Art:
Francisco Goya: Los Caprichos
Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn Harbor, New York, 17 September — 27 November 2011
Curated by Robert Flynn Johnson
Francisco Jose de Goya. The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (Caprichos No. 43: El Sueño de la razon produce monstruos), 1796-97 Etching and aquatint, 1st Edition 1799 Plate dimensions 213 x 150 mm.
This exhibition features an early first edition of Los Caprichos, a set of 80 etchings by Spanish artist Francisco de Goya y Lucientes that was published in 1799. It is regarded as one of the most influential series of graphic images in the history of Western art. Francisco Goya: Los Caprichos was organized by Landau Traveling Exhibitions (Los Angeles), in association with Denenberg Fine Art (West Hollywood).
“Capricho” can be translated as a whim, a fantasy or an expression of imagination. In Goya’s use of the term, the meaning deepens, binding an ironical layer of humor over one of the most profound indictments of human vice ever set on paper. Enigmatic and controversial, Los Caprichos was created in a time of social repression and economic crisis in Spain. Influenced by Enlightenment thinking, Goya set out to analyze the human condition and denounce social abuses and superstitions. Los Caprichos was his passionate declaration that the chains of social backwardness had to be broken if humanity was to advance. The series attests to the artist’s political liberalism and to his revulsion at ignorance and intellectual oppression, mirroring his ambivalence toward authority and the church. Los Caprichos deals with personages populate a world on the margins of reason, where no clear boundaries distinguish reality from fantasy.
In his essay accompanying the exhibition, Robert Flynn Johnson, curator in charge, Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, states:
Francisco Goya should be seen as the first modern artist–he chose to go beyond depictions of religion, mythology, and history, and even beyond observation of the visible world, turning instead toward the psychological demons that have always inhabited men’s souls. Until Goya, these demons had rarely been made artistically visible–Goya had the courage and the genius to depict them. Los Caprichos stands as the greatest single work of art created in Spain since the writings of Cervantes and the paintings of Velázquez over one hundred fifty years earlier.
Francisco Goya: Los Caprichos opens on Saturday, September 17 and remains on view through Sunday, November 27. The museum is offering several programs that will serve to enhance the viewer’s appreciation of the exhibition. Among these are daily screenings of Goya: Crazy Like a Genius, a film written by the prominent art commentator Robert Hughes, and lunchtime lectures followed by tours of the exhibition on October 13 and November 17. For details, visit the EVENTS section of the museum website.
Call for Book Proposals: British Art Global Contexts
As noted at British Art Research:
Book proposals are welcomed for Ashgate’s British Art: Global Contexts series, edited by Jason Edwards, University of York; Sarah Monks, University of East Anglia; and Sarah Victoria Turner, University of York. The series provides a forum for the study of British art, design, and visual culture in the global context from 1700 to the present. Books to be published will include monographs, thematic studies, and edited collections of essays, specializing in studies of British Art within comparative and interdisciplinary frameworks. For more information, please visit the series webpage at www.ashgate.com/Default.aspx?page=3503.
British Art: Global Contexts provides a forum for the study of British art, design and visual culture in the global context from 1700 to the present day. Focusing upon the transport, location and reception of British art across the world; the British reception and exhibition of art from around the globe; and transnational and cosmopolitan art containing significant British components; the series seeks to problematize, historicise and specify the idea of ‘British’ art across the period, as it intersects with local, regional, international and global issues, communities, materials, and environments. Books to be published will include monographs and thematic studies, single authored works and edited volumes of essays, specialising in studies of British art within comparative and interdisciplinary frameworks.
The series will publish research which deals with fine art objects and the broader visual and material cultural environment of Britain and its historical territories, as well as with the global diaspora of British artists, genres, artefacts, materials and styles, and the contribution to British art of other global diasporas. Proposals are welcomed which deal with aspects of art and design history and visual culture, from the perspective of the colonising, decolonising and post-colonial world, global history, and the circum-Atlantic.
Please send letters of inquiry or full proposals to Meredith Norwich, Commissioning Editor for Visual Studies, mnorwich@ashgate.com, AND Jason Edwards,je7@york.ac.uk; Sarah Monks, s.monks@uea.ac.uk; and Sarah Victoria Turner,svt500@york.ac.uk.
Enfilade 
leave a comment