Exhibition | Wallpaper from the Deutschen Tapetenmuseums
Orangerie, Kassel
(Wikimedia Commons, November 2005)
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While this exhibition of wallpapers in Kassel addresses primarily the nineteenth century, there are eighteenth-century examples, and it’s useful to draw attention to the collection of the German Wallpaper Museum (Deutschen Tapetenmuseums), which includes some 23,000 objects. With plans for a new home in the works, the current exhibition is mounted in Kassel’s Orangerie, which itself dates to the opening decade of the eighteenth century. From the exhibition description:
Aufgerollt. Tapeten: Vom Entwurf an die Wand
Westpavillon der Orangerie, Kassel, 13 September 2013 — 12 January 2014
Jeder kennt sie, fast jeder hat sie: Tapeten. Seit dem 18. Jahrhundert begeistern die in allen nur denkbaren Farben und Motiven gedruckten Wanddekore. Ob geometrisch oder malerisch, farbenfroh oder dezent, ob im 18. oder im 21. Jahrhundert entstanden: Bevor die Tapete ihre Wirkung als Wandschmuck entfalten kann, sind zahlreiche Arbeitsschritte notwendig, die von der Inspirations- und Entwurfsphase, über die Produktion bis hin zur Vermarktung reichen. Die Sonderausstellung des Deutschen Tapetenmuseums zeigt Objekte aus dem reichen Schatz der Sammlung, die dieses faszinierende Thema insbesondere für das 19. und frühe 20. Jahrhundert beleuchten. Gezeigt wird eine Vielfalt an Vorlagewerken, Tapetenentwürfen und Handdruckmodeln ebenso wie das fertige Produkt Tapete. Musterbücher und Werbebilder mit gesamten Wandabwicklungen lassen die Möglichkeiten der Vermarktung von Tapeten lebendig werden.
Das Schaufenster bietet einen Einblick in die fantastische Sammlung des Deutschen Tapetenmuseums, die mit fast 23.000 Objekten nahezu lückenlos die Geschichte der Tapete dokumentiert. Von 1976 bis 2008 im Hessischen Landesmuseum ausgestellt, wurde die Sammlung 2010 in ein fachgerechtes Depot verlagert. Ein Museumsneubau ebenso wie eine neue Dauerausstellung sind in Planung.
Call for Papers | The Visual Arts in Wales
Wales / Iâl / Yale: Graduate Student Symposium
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, 5 April 2014
Proposals due by 22 January 2014
This one-day graduate student symposium considers the visual arts in Wales.
For centuries, Wales has been an integral and yet distinct part of the United Kingdom. Its history, language, and landscape have inspired artists of all kinds–from painters, sculptors, and architects to musicians, dancers, and poets.
Yale University itself has deep and enduring ties to the country. Founded in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it was renamed Yale College in 1718 after Elihu Yale (1649–1721), the original benefactor who was of Welsh ancestry. Indeed, the surname Yale comes from the Welsh place name Iâl. Elihu Yale himself is buried in his ancestral home in the churchyard of St. Giles Church, Wrexham, while Wrexham Tower at Yale University’s Saybrook College is modeled after St. Giles’s tower and incorporates an inscribed stone sent to the university as a gift from the church.
The symposium coincides with two exhibitions opening at the Yale Center for British Art in spring 2014 that feature Welsh artists and depictions of Wales: Richard Wilson and the Transformation of European Landscape Painting (March 6–June 1, 2014) is the first major exhibition devoted to the Penegoes-born artist in thirty years and explores
Wilson’s work in its broader European contexts, focusing on his transformative experience in Rome, where he spent nearly seven years in the 1750s; and, Art in Focus: Wales (April 4–August 10, 2014), the Center’s eighth annual Student Guide exhibition, presents depictions of Welsh landscape in the Center’s collections and their significance to
the history of landscape in British art.
Papers are invited on all topics relating to the visual arts in Wales including, but not limited to:
• standing stones, cromlechs, and stone circles in Wales
• medieval wall paintings in Welsh churches
• the production of Insular manuscripts in Wales
• landscape painting in Wales
• bardic imagery and Welsh nationalism
• the development of schools of art and architecture in Wales
• photography and Wales
• art and industry in Wales
• the architectural heritage of Wales
• public sculpture in Wales
• Welsh modernism in accounts of British modernism
• the historiography of art in Wales
• Welsh artists abroad
• Welsh art now
We invite proposals for 25-minute papers on this theme from graduate students working in any discipline. Cross-disciplinary and comparative studies are particularly welcome. Please e-mail abstracts of no more than 300 words by January 22, 2014.
lars.kokkonen@yale.edu
Lars Kokkonen
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Research Department
Yale Center for British Art
Travel and accommodations will be provided for speakers arriving from outside the New Haven area, and meals will be provided for all.
Exhibition | The Remondini & Eighteenth-Century Print Culture
This is the last week for a small exhibition I worked on with one of my exceptional students, Paula Manni (having graduated with her B.A. in May, she’s currently an intern at the Detroit Institute of Arts). Pedagogically, the project was immensely gratifying and provided more evidence for me of just how much one can do with online projects at basically no (economic) costs whatsoever. While we developed the online component primarily for a popular audience (iPads were available in the gallery), I was thrilled to receive—just one week after the exhibition opened—an email from a UK museum that owns several prints from the same Prodigal Son series and to learn that their images have been manipulated and combined with other prints in really interesting ways, further highlighting the interactive character of these sorts of perspective views. The bibliography for the exhibition provides a useful starting point for anyone working on zograscopes and vue d’optique prints generally. Paula and I shall continue to update the site occasionally , so I would welcome suggestions for sources we should add. As is typically the case with any project involving Google, there are terrific, telling measures of assessment: search for ‘Remondini’ and ‘Prodigal’, and among the top results will be the Prodigal Son among the Harlots. -CH
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A Prodigal Story for the Marketplace: The Remondini and Eighteenth-Century Print Culture
The Center Art Gallery, Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1 November — 17 December 2013
Curated by Craig Ashley Hanson and Paula Manni with Joel Zwart
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Founded in the mid-seventeenth century, the Remondini publishing firm produced prints and books on a massive scale for nearly two hundred years, marketing their paper commodities not only across Europe but also in the American colonies and parts of Asia. Based in Bassano, Italy (45 miles northwest of Venice), the firm targeted a large, popular audience. By offering a wide array of printed materials, ranging from religious pictures and texts, to genre scenes, to sweeping landscape views (often copying the works of others without permission), the firm appealed to the interests—and budgets—of an emerging middle class audience.
Highlighting Calvin College’s own Prodigal Son series of six etchings produced by the Remondini firm in the 1780s—copies after a series first published by Georg Balthasar Probst around 1770—this exhibition situates the prints within the visual culture of the period. While there is a tendency to address eighteenth-century prints as ‘art’ simply because of their age, exploration of the original publishing context allows us to see these pictures as both belonging within and contributing to an expanding popular culture that conflated entertainment, religion, and the marketplace. Most of the items included in the exhibition were never intended to be framed (much less hung on a gallery wall) but were instead expected to be handled and seen through perspective-enhancing viewing devices—variously described as diagonal mirrors, optical pillar machines, or (most commonly today) zograscopes.
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