Conference | The Images and Texts of Alexander Pope
Originals, Translations, and Imitations:
The Images and Texts of Alexander Pope
Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire, 12 July 2014
A one-day conference organized by Waddesdon Manor (the Rothschild Foundation) in collaboration with The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
This conference will explore some central themes running through the exhibition, Fame and Friendship: Pope, Roubiliac, and the Portrait Bust in Eighteenth-Century Britain, organised jointly by the Rothschild Foundation and Waddesdon Manor with the Yale Center for British Art. At the heart of the exhibition are eight portrait busts of the poet Alexander Pope by Roubiliac along with various replications of this model. These images imitate classical portrait busts, translating the conventions of the originals into an eighteenth-century mode. At the same time, the replications translate Roubiliac’s original into other media, such as plaster or ceramic. At Waddesdon these various images will not only shown not only alongside both some of the most celebrated painted portraits of the poet and examples of his printed texts, but also juxtaposed with French works celebrating Pope and other writers. These various processes of imitation and translation could hardly be more appropriate for a subject whose contemporary fame rested partly on his own translations of Homer and whose poetry constantly imitated classical models. In its turn, Pope’s work was itself translated into French. All the papers in this conference will address different aspects of imitation and translation, in the form of both images and texts. The fee for the day is £40. To book a place, please ring the booking line on 01296 653226. Please let us know of any dietary requirements.
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P R O G R A M M E
9:45 Coffee and registration in the Manor Restaurant with the exhibition open for viewing
10.30 Welcome by Sarah Weir (Chief Executive, Waddesdon Manor)
10:45 Text, Image, and Translation (Chair: Alastair Laing)
• Nigel Wood (Loughborough University), Pope as the Translator of Homer and Horace
• James McLaverty (Keele University), Pope in his Pastorals: Manuscript and Print
• Valerie Rumbold (Birmingham University), The Use of Art in Alexander Pope’s “To Mr. Addison, Occasioned by Dialogues on Medals”
12:45 Lunch
1:50 Pope and the Image (Chair: Martin Postle)
• Caroline Pegum (Independent Scholar), Charles Jervas and Pope’s Portraits
• Malcolm Baker (University of California, Riverside), For Friends and Admirers: The Sculptural Replication of Pope’s Image
• Juliet Carey (Waddesdon Manor), Pope and the Ceramic Canon
3.50 Tea
4:20 Pope, Writers, and France (Chair: Malcolm Baker)
• Russell Goulbourne (Kings College, London), Voltaire’s Pope
• Guilhem Scherf (Musée du Louvre), French Sculptors and the Image of the Writer
5:45 Drinks reception (Parterre or Manor Restaurant, depending on weather) during which the exhibition will again be open for viewing.
Call for Papers | CAA 2015 Session, The Materiality of Art and Experience
A late addition to the CAA 2015 sessions:
The Materiality of Art and Experience in the Eighteenth Century
ASECS Session at the 103rd Annual Conference of the College Art Association
New York, 11–14 February 2015
Proposals due by 1 July 2014
The recent interdisciplinary ‘material turn’ in the humanities and social sciences has, according to anthropologist Daniel Miller, followed two distinct paths. The first is to emphasize artifacts, to create object theories in which things are investigated as they relate to social processes. The second is a more totalizing conception of materiality, one far broader in its implications. It encompasses consciousness, knowledge, history, theory, and sensation and conceives all of them as rooted in material conditions: the immaterial is expressed materially and accessible only through it. Materiality enables the structures of human experience to exist. Art History has largely followed the first path in its interrogation of objects and their social meanings. This panel asks what can be gained by following the second. How did the materiality of eighteenth-century art, its physical presence and its capacity to elicit an embodied relation to a viewer, shape or determine human experience? How did art objects broadly defined engage the eighteenth-century material world? How did new and coveted materials alter the experience of eighteenth-century collectors, connoisseurs, antiquarians, and others who engaged with art? And more broadly still, how did eighteenth-century art make the immaterial material?
Please send an abstract and C.V. to Michael Yonan (yonanm@missouri.edu) and Kristel Smentek (smentek@mit.edu) by July 1, 2014.
Exhibition | Design and Fashion: Norway 1814
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Now on display in Oslo:
Design and Fashion: Norway 1814
Museum of Decorative Arts and Design, Oslo, 2 February — 31 August 2014
To celebrate the bicentennial of Norway’s constitution, the National Museum presents three historical exhibitions under the common title Norway 1814, in three different venues: the National Gallery, the Museum of Decorative Arts and Design, and the National Museum. These exhibitions will explore the art of the period in a new light. Visitors will be able to view many works that have rarely if ever been shown in public before. The exhibition is accompanied by a packed programme of events aimed at a broad audience, and a variety of educational activities for children and young people.
Furniture, glass, ceramics, fashion and architecture all express new ideas about democracy and national independence in the transitional period from the opulent splendour of the rococo to the simplicity of the Empire style, which built on the ideals of antiquity. Trade relations with foreign countries and the development of Norwegian industry were other important factors that influenced new ideas about design and fashion in these decades.
The exhibition at the Museum of Decorative Arts and Design presents, among other things, the magnificent residence of the Anker family known as the Paleet, which in 1814 became the royal residence of Christian Frederick and, later, of Karl Johan, Norway’s first king during its union with Sweden. The exhibition presents objects from the National Museum’s collection together with artefacts loaned from other national and international collections.
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