Enfilade

While addressing the nineteenth century, Ting Chang’s new book will be of interest to many dix-huitièmistes, particularly in connection with Edmond de Goncourt; in chapter four, Chang explores how Goncourt’s collection of Asian art and his writings on the subject supported his larger vision of an eighteenth-century revival. It’s part of Ashgate’s series on the Histories of Material Culture and Collecting, 1700–1950:

Ting Chang, Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013), 210 pages, ISBN: 978-1409437765, $100 / £55.

Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris book examines a history of contact between modern Europe and East Asia through three collectors: Henri Cernuschi, Emile Guimet, and Edmond de Goncourt. Drawing on a wealth of material including European travelogues of the East and Asian reports of the West, Ting Chang explores the politics of mobility and cross-cultural encounter in the nineteenth century. This book takes a new approach to museum studies and institutional critique by highlighting what is missing from the existing scholarship — the foreign labours, social relations, and somatic experiences of travel that are constitutive of museums yet left out of their histories. The author explores how global trade and monetary theory shaped Cernuschi’s collection of archaic Chinese bronze. Exchange systems, both material and immaterial, determined Guimet’s museum of religious objects and Goncourt’s private collection of Asian art. Bronze, porcelain, and prints articulated the shifting relations and frameworks of understanding between France, Japan, and China in a time of profound transformation. Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris thus looks at what Asian art was imagined to do for Europe. This book will be of interest to scholars and students interested in art history, travel imagery, museum studies, cross-cultural encounters, and modern transnational histories.

Ting Chang teaches art history at the University of Nottingham. She has published in The Art Bulletin, Oxford Art Journal, and Les Cahiers Edmond et Jules de Goncourt.

C O N T E N T S

Introduction
1: The historical terms of Euro-Asian object acquisition
2: Gold, silver, and bronze: Cernuschi’s collection and re-appraisals of Europe and Asia
3: The labour of travel: Guimet and Régamey in Asia
4: Equivalence and inversion: France, Japan and China in Goncourt’s cabinet
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index