Call for Papers | Books and the City
From H-ArtHist:
Books and the City
Maastricht, Netherlands, 23-24 June 2016
Proposals due by 1 March 2016
This symposium aims to investigate the relationships between books and urban spaces. Cities are complex networks that exist in a constant state of transformation. More than just the built environment of the metropolis, cities are constituted through a range of geographic, social, political and economic dynamics. Drawing together a range of interdisciplinary perspectives, the symposium seeks to investigate the ways in which these aspects of the city have been articulated by books, their production, distribution and collection.
Books and the City poses a number of questions: How has the city been represented in literature, travel guides, artists’ books, newspapers, prints, graphic novels or zines? How has the book been used to reflect, challenge or produce urban identities? To what extent is the book implicated in strategies of mapping, defining borders and city limits or articulating boundaries between the urban and suburban? What role have books played in constructing narratives about the history, memory or future transformations of the city? How do book collections, publishers and systems of distribution relate to notions of civic identity? How might the materiality of books and their preservation reveal the structures or concerns of city spaces and their communities? Papers exploring these questions and others are invited from artists, academics and professionals working across periods and geographies.
The symposium will be organized around sessions on
• Book history
• Artist’s books
• Representations of the city
• Travel
• Urban centers (London, Paris, etc.)
• Conceptions of space and time
• Books and city networks
• Circulation of books and reading practices in the city
These session themes are suggestions and are not an exhaustive list. The Books and the City symposium coincides with the Netherlands 2016 Year of the Book. Abstracts of 300 words (max) along with a short bio should be submitted to barbara.garrie@canterbury.ac.nz, p.fleskens@maastrichtuniversity and emilie.sitzia@maastrichtuniversity.nl by 1 March 2016. Panel proposals will also be considered.
New Book | Young Mr. Turner: The First Forty Years, 1775–1815
From Yale UP:
Eric Shanes, Young Mr. Turner: The First Forty Years, 1775–1815 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 552 pages, ISBN: 978-0300140651, $150.
A complex figure, and divisive during his lifetime, Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) has long been considered Britain’s greatest painter. An artist of phenomenal invention, complexity, and industry, Turner is now one of the world’s most popular painters. This comprehensive new account of his early life draws together recent scholarship, corrects errors in the existing literature, and presents a wealth of new findings. In doing so, it furnishes a more detailed understanding than ever before of the connections between Turner’s life and art.
Taking a strictly chronological approach, Eric Shanes addresses Turner’s intellectual complexity and depth, his technical virtuosity, his personal contradictions, and his intricate social and cultural relations. Shanes draws on decades of familiarity with his subject, as well as newly discovered source material, such as the artist’s principal bank records, which shed significant light on his patronage and sales. The result, written in a warm, engaging style, is a comprehensive and magnificently illustrated volume which will fundamentally shape the future of Turner studies.
Eric Shanes is a professional painter, independent art historian, and lecturer. He is a leading expert on Turner, a vice president of the Turner Society, and the author of many books on the artist, including Turner’s England (1990) and Turner’s Watercolour Explorations (1997).
New Book | China and the Church: Chinoiserie in Global Context
From the University of California Press:
Christopher M. S. Johns, China and the Church: Chinoiserie in Global Context, Franklin D. Murphy Lectures (Los Angeses: University of California Press, 2016), 206 pages, ISBN: 978-0520284654, $50 / £35.
This groundbreaking study examines decorative Chinese works of art and visual culture, known as chinoiserie, in the context of church and state politics, with a particular focus on the Catholic missions’ impact on Western attitudes toward China and the Chinese. Art-historical examinations of chinoiserie have largely ignored the role of the Church and its conversion efforts in Asia. Johns, however, demonstrates that the emperor’s 1722 prohibition against Catholic evangelization, which occurred after almost a century and a half of tolerance, prompted a remarkable change in European visualizations of China in Roman Catholic countries. China and the Church considers the progress of Christianity in China during the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, examines authentic works of Chinese art available to the European artists who produced chinoiserie, and explains how the East Asian male body in Western art changed from ‘normative’ depictions to whimsical, feminized grotesques after the collapse of the missionary efforts during the 1720s.
Christopher M. S. Johns is Norman and Roselea Goldberg Professor of History of Art at Vanderbilt University. He is author of Papal Art and Cultural Politics: Rome in the Age of Clement XI, Antonio Canova and the Politics of Patronage in Revolutionary and Napoleonic Europe, and The Visual Culture of Catholic Enlightenment.
Call for Papers | The Royal Palace in the Europe of Revolutions
The Royal Palace in the Europe of Revolutions, 1750–1850
Centre André Chastel, Paris, 28–29 October 2016
Proposals due by 1 May 2016
Organized by Basile Baudez and Adrián Almoguera
Since the publication of Nikolaus Pevsner’s History of Building Types in 1976, architectural historians have been alert to the importance of typologies for rethinking their discipline. As analyzed by Werner Szambien or Jacques Lucan, thinking through types allowed for the articulation of concepts of convenance, character and composition in both public and private commissions. Along with metropolitan churches and royal basilicas, in ancien régime Europe princely palaces represented the most prestigious program an architect could expect. For a period in which the divine right of kings was being called into question, however, what happened to the physical structures of royal or princely power, symbol of political authority and dynastic seats? Did the national models of the Escorial, Versailles, Het Loo or Saint James palaces still hold, even in light of new models made available through the publication of archeological discoveries in Rome or Split? The second half of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century represent a moment of intense construction or reconstruction of the principal European palaces, from Caserta to Buckingham Palace, Saint-Petersburg to Lisbon, Versailles to Coblenz. This trend, addressed by Percier and Fontaine in their Résidences des souverains de France, d’Allemagne, de Russie, etc. (1833), took place in a Europe that was undergoing political developments that altogether changed the nature and symbolic structure of princely power.
This symposium, focused on Europe from roughly 1750 to 1850, aims to interrogate the manner in which architects and their patrons integrated the changing concepts of character in architecture and symbolic place of dynastic palaces, reconciling them with theory and/or practice through rethinking issues of distribution, construction, environmental situation, décor, function, reuse of interpretations of printed or drawn sources.
Submissions of 500 words (maximum) should be sent before May 1, 2016 to basile.baudez@gmail.com and af.almoguera@gmail.com.
Call for Papers | The Medium and the Message: European Architecture
From the University of Birmingham:
The Medium and the Message: Re-evaluating Form and
Meaning in European Architecture, 1400–1950
Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, 1–2 July 2016
Proposals due by 1 April 2016
All buildings—whether polite, vernacular or somewhere in between—were initially informed by some kind of presiding idea or set of ideas. Some of these ideas presumed an audience (and are therefore part of the building’s rhetoric and essential to its intended ‘meaning’), while others did not (in being part, for example, of a production process, or allied with social and cultural contexts, and no more than that). All such ideas should concern the architectural historian, but the most engaging and historically resonant may well belong to the first category and also be ones that can be inferred and recovered from the buildings themselves. The architectural historian may also profit from a keener understanding of how the ideas initially underpinning a building may, in time, have become modified, or even eclipsed by associations of very different kinds.
The conference will investigate the ways in which ideas are conveyed by the physical and visual medium of architectural form. It will include case studies which will move us beyond explanations of architecture that borrow too liberally from literature and theory, and will thereby deepen our understanding both of the medium of architecture and of the construction and operation of architectural ‘meaning’. Moreover, by establishing or re-exploring the intellectual foundations sustaining the designs of certain key buildings, and by examining the ways in which they informed the physical realities of the buildings themselves, we hope to reinvigorate and enrich our understanding of significant moments in European architectural history.
We welcome papers that directly explore the relationship between message and medium through detailed historical case studies which directly address the agency of architecture itself in the conveying of meaning. Papers could tackle, for example, Filippo Brunelleschi’s innovative ‘Renaissance’ style of architecture; Inigo Jones’s Italianate classicism; Francesco Borromini’s departures from classical proprieties; complex stereotomy in French architecture of the early modern period; the new language and meanings of English Palladianism; the rarefied classicism of John Soane or Karl Friedrich Schinkel; form and association in the concrete architecture of Le Corbusier. In general, therefore, they will examine architecture’s expressive potential, through such topics as the materiality of buildings, the visual logic and implications of built form or the evocation (or not) of the historical past, and in relation to particular people, periods and places.
Papers should be of 20 minutes in length (followed by 5 or 10 minutes of questions). If you wish to apply, please write to Professor Anthony Geraghty (anthony.geraghty@york.ac.uk with the subject line Medium and Message), giving the subject and a brief synopsis (250 words) of your proposed topic. Please also specify your title and full name and your institutional affiliation (if any). The deadline for the submission of proposals is 1 April 2016, and we aim to have a decision on the acceptance of papers within 4 weeks of that date.
Convenors
David Hemsoll (University of Birmingham)
Anthony Geraghty (University of York)
Exhibition | The Lavish Prince Regent
From the MFAH:
The Lavish Prince Regent
Rienzi, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 5 March — 30 July 2016
Henry Bone, King George IV, 1821, enamel on gold, 9k rose gold, embossed metallic foil, and glass (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Rienzi Collection)
Prior to his accession to the British throne in 1821, King George IV served as Prince Regent of the nation during the mental illness and incapacitation of his father, George III. Before and during his regency, the prince led an extravagant lifestyle that held great sway over the fashions of the day, which saw him advocating new forms of leisure, style, and taste.
During this period, he built the famous Royal Pavilion in Brighton, which was an Orientalist fantasy in architecture. As with the pavilion, the ‘Regency Style’ that the prince created was a mixture of the Antique and the exotic, the gilded and the decorated—and with an interest in elegant innovation. This exhibition presents a survey of this most sumptuous of historical styles
Exhibition | À la Mode: Fashioning European Silver
Paul Crespin, Epergne, 1742–43, sterling silver c
(Museum of Fine Arts, Houston)
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From the MFAH:
À la Mode: Fashioning European Silver, 1680–1825
Rienzi, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 10 October 2015 — 7 February 2016
For centuries, silver was one of the most popular expressions of style and taste, with its universal appeal and powerful hold on the imagination making it the necessary luxury. Silver was designed for almost every occasion, from everyday drinking and dining to commemorating christenings and weddings.
À la Mode draws from the rich holdings of the MFAH, Rienzi, and two private collections to explore the social life of silver. The exhibition shows how prevailing attitudes and changes in fashion determined the form and function of objects, and how people thought about and lived with silver.
New Book | Companion to Glitterati: Portraits and Jewelry
The exhibition, which opened in December 2014, is on view through November 2016. The catalogue has just been published by the University of Oklahoma Press:
Donna Pierce and Julie Wilson Frick, Companion to Glitterati: Portraits and Jewelry from Colonial Latin America at the Denver Art Museum (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016), 96 pages, ISBN: 978-0914738756, $15.
During the Spanish Colonial period in Latin America (1521–1850), precious gold and silver were crafted into elegant jewelry, then embellished with emeralds from Colombia, coral from Mexico, and pearls from Venezuela. To demonstrate their wealth and status, people were painted wearing their finest dress and elaborate jewelry. Selecting from its permanent collection, the Denver Art Museum installed the long-running exhibition Glitterati: Portraits and Jewelry in Colonial Latin America in its Spanish Colonial galleries in December 2014. This lavishly illustrated publication serves as a companion to the Glitterati exhibition and, on a larger scale, to the collection of Spanish Colonial jewelry and portraiture at the museum.
The Spanish Colonial collection at the Denver Art Museum is the most comprehensive of its kind in the United States and one of the best in the world with outstanding examples of painting, sculpture, furniture, decorative arts, silver and goldwork, and jewelry from all over Latin America during the time of the Spanish colonies. The Stapleton Foundation of Latin American Colonial Art, made possible by the Renchard family, gifted art acquired by the intrepid Daniel C. Stapleton between 1895 and 1914, when he worked in Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela overseeing plantations and emerald mines. Frederick and Jan Mayer worked closely with museum curators to build a collection of Mexican colonial art rich in many subjects and media, notably portrait paintings. Examples from both of these major collections are augmented by other pieces of jewelry and portraiture from the museum’s permanent collection in the Glitterati exhibition and in this volume.
Donna Pierce is Frederick and Jan Mayer Curator of Spanish Colonial Art at the Denver Art Museum and Head of the New World Department.
Julie Wilson Frick is the Mayer Center Program Coordinator and Junior Scholar in the New World Department at the Denver Art Museum.
CAA 2016, Washington, D.C.
104th Annual Conference of the College Art Association
Washington Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, 3–6 February 2016
The 2016 College Art Association conference takes place in Washington, D.C., February 3–6, at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park Hotel (2660 Woodley Rd NW, Washington, DC 20008).
Speaking for no one but myself, I’m frankly perplexed at how thin the eighteenth-century offerings are, indeed how little there is on any period prior to 1850! In 2010, I could identify eleven sessions with connections to the eighteenth century. This year, I came up with only four (out of 200 sessions). My sense is that CAA is beginning to understand how dissatisfied affiliates are. In any event, the format of the conference will apparently be substantially different next year (note the session on Wednesday addressing the changes). Will the changes matter? We’ll see. The call for submissions will be posted March 1. Stay tuned.
And yet for all that seems to be missing from this year’s schedule, I want to highlight the HECAA and ASECS sessions, both of which look fabulous! And so on Friday, at least, from 12:30 to 5:00, CAA will be a terrific conference.* –CH
* Wearing my hat as president of the Historians of British Art, I can vouch for affiliate frustration there, too. And yet, as with the eighteenth-century offerings, there will be a handful of treats for scholars in British studies, too. And for whatever things, I’ve overlooked, please feel free to note these in the comments section.
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Looking Ahead: Changes to the CAA Conference
Wednesday, 3 February 2016, 12:30—2:00, Wilson B, Mezzanine Level
Chair: Suzanne Preston Blier (Harvard University)
The CAA Annual Conference will undergo significant changes in future years, beginning with the 2017 conference. These changes will create more opportunities for participation. Among the changes:
a) The session grid will feature all 90-minute sessions.
b) The call for proposals will include not one but three main submission categories: sessions without panels, sessions with panels, and individual papers.
c) The call for submissions will be posted on March 1, 2016.
If you have questions about these important changes, please attend this session.
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Neatline for the Art Historian
Thursday, 4 February 2016, 2:30—4:30, Roosevelt 2, Exhibit Hall A, Exhibition Level
Lisa Reilly (University of Virginia) and Ronda Grizzle (Scholars’ Lab, University of Virginia Library). Limit: 25 Participants. $45 for members and $60 for non-members.
Using Neatline, anyone can create beautiful, interactive maps, timelines, and narrative sequences from collections of objects, architectural models, archives and artifacts, which tell scholarly stories in a whole new way. Neatline is a remarkable digital presentation tool that allows art and architectural historians to show change over time. Art historians can use it to create visual presentations which reveal building sequences, mapping of artistic influences and patterns of historic change. Join us for this hands-on introduction to Neatline which will also discuss applications for our discipline. This will be a hands-on workshop; attendees are encouraged to bring their own laptops to participate.
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The Mystery of Masonry Brought to Light:
Freemasonry and Art from the Eighteenth Century until Now
Friday, 5 February 2016, 9:30—12:00, Delaware Suite A, Lobby Level
Chair: Reva J. Wolf (State University of New York at New Paltz)
• David V. Bjelajac (George Washington University), Peter Pelham, Freemasonry and the Alchemical Cunning of John Singleton Copley
• Alisa L. Luxenberg (University of Georgia), Building Codes: New Light on F.*. Baron Taylor and Les Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France
• Talinn Grigor (University of California, Davis), Reveil de l’Iran: Freemasonry and Artistic Revivalism from Parsi Bombay to Qajar Tehran
• William D. Moore (Boston University), ‘To Consummate the Plan’: Solomon’s Temple in American Masonic Art, Architecture, and Popular Culture, 1865–1930
• David Martín López (University of Granada), What If Pombal, Goya and Lorca Were Freemasons? New Perspectives on the Masonic and Philo-masonic Presence in Portugal and Spain
Discussant: Aimee E. Newell (Scottish Rite Masonic Museum and Library)
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Eros and Enlightenment (ASECS Session)
Friday, 5 February 2016, 12:30—2:00, Washington 2, Exhibition Level
Chairs: Nina Dubin (University of Illinois at Chicago) and Hérica Valladares (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)
• Susanna Caviglia (University of Chicago), Painting of Love as Ideology of Harmony
• Paul Holmquist (Carleton University), Centralizing Love: Eros and Politics in the Oikéma of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux
• Camille Mathieu (University of Oxford and St. John’s College), Eros amongst Eagles: Iconographies of Alliance in Napoleonic France
Discussant: Mary Sheriff (University of North Carolina)
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Pastel: The Moment of a Medium in the Eighteenth Century (HECAA)
Friday, 5 February 2016, 2:30—5:00, Washington 6, Exhibition Level
Chairs: Iris J. Moon (Pratt Institute) and Esther Bell (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco)
• Rochelle N. Ziskin (University of Missouri Kansas City), Pastel (and Other) Portraits Chez Mme Doublet
• Marjorie Shelley (The Metropolitan Museum of Art), Painting in Crayons: Pastel as an Artists’ Medium in the Cultural and Commercial Context of the Eighteenth Century
• Oliver Wunsch (Harvard University), Face Time: Permanence and Pastel Portraiture
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Taking Stock: Early Modern Art Now
Saturday, 6 February 2016, 9:30—12:00, Salon 1, Lobby Level
Chairs: Hanneke Grootenboer (University of Oxford) and Amy Knight Powell, University of California, Irvine
• Susan Dackerman (Getty Research Institute), The Paleontology of Print
• Itay Sapir (Université du Québec à Montréal), Patterns of Attention: Early Modern Art and the Potential Deceleration of Looking
• Claudia Swan (Northwestern University), Global Encounters Then and Now
• Marika T. Knowles (Harvard Society of Fellows), The Subject of History in the ‘Figures de différents caractères’ after Watteau
• Shira Brisman (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Hugo van der Goes and the Slip of Sin
New Book | Picture Titles
From Princeton UP:
Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Picture Titles: How and Why Western Paintings Acquired Their Names (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 352 pages, ISBN: 9780691165271, $35 / £25.
A picture’s title is often our first guide to understanding the image. Yet paintings didn’t always have titles, and many canvases acquired their names from curators, dealers, and printmakers—not the artists. Taking an original, historical look at how Western paintings were named, Picture Titles shows how the practice developed in response to the conditions of the modern art world and how titles have shaped the reception of artwork from the time of Bruegel and Rembrandt to the present.
Ruth Bernard Yeazell begins the story with the decline of patronage and the rise of the art market in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as the increasing circulation of pictures and the democratization of the viewing public generated the need for a shorthand by which to identify works at a far remove from their creation. The spread of literacy both encouraged the practice of titling pictures and aroused new anxieties about relations between word and image, including fears that reading was taking the place of looking. Yeazell demonstrates that most titles composed before the nineteenth century were the work of middlemen, and even today many artists rely on others to name their pictures. A painter who wants a title to stick, Yeazell argues, must engage in an act of aggressive authorship. She investigates prominent cases, such as David’s Oath of the Horatii and works by Turner, Courbet, Whistler, Magritte, and Jasper Johns. Examining Western painting from the Renaissance to the present day, Picture Titles sheds new light on the ways that we interpret and appreciate visual art.
Ruth Bernard Yeazell is the Chace Family Professor of English and director of The Lewis Walpole Library at Yale University. Her books include Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature and Art of the Everyday: Dutch Painting and the Realist Novel (Princeton).
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C O N T E N T S
List of Illustrations
Prologue (This is not a title)
I Naming and Circulating: Middlemen
1 Before Titles
2 Dealers and Notaries
3 Early Cataloguers
4 Academies
5 Printmakers
6 Curators, Critics, Friends—and More Dealers
II Reading and Interpreting: Viewers
7 Reading by the Title
8 The Power of a Name
9 Many Can Read Print
10 Reading against the Title
III Authoring as well as Painting: Artists
11 The Force of David’s Oath
12 Turner’s Poetic Fallacies
13 Courbet’s Studio as Manifesto
14 Whistler’s Symphonies and Other Instructive Arrangements
15 Magritte and The Use of Words
16 Johns’s No and the Painted Word
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Enfilade 
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