Enfilade

An exceptional title, an exceptional cover. For the latter, credit goes to Karen Knorr; the photograph, “Corridor,” is from her Fables series (2007). From Penn State UP:

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Rachel Poliquin, The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2012), 272 pages, ISBN: 9780271053721, $35.

From sixteenth-century cabinets of wonders to contemporary animal art, The Breathless Zoo: Taxidermy and the Cultures of Longing examines the cultural and poetic history of preserving animals in lively postures. But why would anyone want to preserve an animal, and what is this animal-thing now? Rachel Poliquin suggests that taxidermy is entwined with the enduring human longing to find meaning with and within the natural world. Her study draws out the longings at the heart of taxidermy—the longing for wonder, beauty, spectacle, order, narrative, allegory, and remembrance. In so doing, The Breathless Zooexplores the animal spectacles desired by particular communities, human assumptions of superiority, the yearnings for hidden truths within animal form, and the loneliness and longing that haunt our strange human existence, being both within and apart from nature.

From Penn State University Press:

Rochelle Ziskin, Sheltering Art: Collecting and Social Identity in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2012), 392 pages, ISBN: 9780271037851.

The turn of the eighteenth century was a period of transition in France, a time when new but contested concepts of modernity emerged in virtually every cultural realm. The rigidity of the state’s consolidation of the arts in the late seventeenth century yielded to a more vibrant and diverse cultural life, and Paris became, once again, the social and artistic capital of the wealthiest nation in Europe. In Sheltering Art, Rochelle Ziskin explores private art collecting, a primary facet of that newly decentralized artistic realm and one increasingly embraced by an expanding social elite as the century wore on. During the key period when Paris reclaimed its role as the nexus of cultural and social life, two rival circles of art collectors—with dissonant goals and disparate conceptions of modernity—competed for preeminence. Sheltering Art focuses on these collectors, their motivations for collecting art, and the natures of their collections. An ambitious study, it employs extensive archival research in its examination of the ideologies associated with different strategies of collecting in eighteenth-century Paris and how art collecting was inextricably linked to the shaping of social identities.

Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1    Cultural Geography of the French Capital Circa 1700
2    Cloistered in the Faubourg Saint-Germain
3    The Maison Crozat Transformed
4    A Circle of “Moderns”
5    The Regent and Collecting on the Right Bank
6    Les Anciens and an Expanding Public Realm in the Arts
7    The Circles Converge: Carignan and Jullienne
Conclusion
Note on the Appendixes
Appendixes
1    Maison Crozat, rue de Richelieu, in 1740
2    Hôtel de Verrue, rue du Cherche-Midi, end of 1736
3    Collections of Lériget de La Faye, Glucq de Saint-Port, and Lassay
4    Collections of Nocé and Fonspertuis
5    Hôtel de Morville, rue Plâtrière, in 1732
6    Selections from the Collection of Carignan
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index