Enfilade

Upcoming at the BGC (the lecture is scheduled to be livestreamed; see the website for details). . .

Basile Baudez, Inessential Colors: A History of Color in Architectural Drawings, 16th–19th Centuries
Bard Graduate Center, New York, 3 October 2017

Isidro Velázquez (1765–1840), Roma, Anfiteatro castrense. Alzado, sección y vista de sus ruinas, 1792–96, 48.5 × 32.5cm (Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional Dib/13/5/51).

Basile Baudez will deliver a Françoise and Georges Selz Lecture on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Decorative Arts and Culture on Tuesday, October 3, at 6pm. His talk is entitled “Inessential Colors: A History of Color in Architectural Drawings, 16th–19th Centuries.”

Architectural historians have focused on the history of drawing primarily as a project design tool. By applying the methods of art history, this talk traces color as a key player in the long history of rivalry and exchange between European traditions in architectural drawing and practice. While Italian Renaissance drawings were largely monochrome and developed their conventions under pressure from engravers, seventeenth-century European drawings are characterized by a contrast between a colorful German and Dutch world—developed around architect-painters’ designs that influenced French and Spanish draughtsmanship—and a still largely monochrome tradition in Italy and England. At the end of Louis XIV’s reign, French architects adopted color conventions taken from engineers, largely for informational purposes. In the middle of the eighteenth century, however, a color revolution took place, one in which a new generation of architects who were working alongside painters developed a wide chromatic range that was no longer limited to informing the worker but to persuading academic juries and gaining commissions. This eighteenth-century French employment of color laid the foundation for Beaux-Arts architectural drawings in the first half of the nineteenth century, at a moment when English architectural drawings also adopted color in response to the English watercolor movement.

Since 2007, Basile Baudez has been Maître de Conférences in heritage studies and architectural history at Université Paris-Sorbonne, Paris IV. For the 2015–16 year he was a Visiting Scholar in the History of Art Department at the University of Pennsylvania. His research has been supported by fellowships from CASVA at the National Gallery of Art and the Getty Research Institute. He received his PhD from the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Études in 2006 and published his dissertation at the Presses Universitaires de Rennes under the title Architecture et tradition académique au siècle des Lumières. His main areas of research are the history of architectural schools and the Beaux-Arts system as well as the history of architectural representation in the Western world. He co-edited a monograph on Les Hôtels de la Guerre et des Affaires étrangères à Versailles (Paris: Chaudun, 2010) and a volume Chalgrin, architectes et architecture entre l’Ancien Régime et l’Empire (Bordeaux: Blake and Cie, 2016). He has published extensively, including in La Revue de l’Art, Metropolitan Museum Journal, Journal of Art Historiography, Bulletin Monumental, The Burlington Magazine, and Livraisons d’Histoire de l’Architecture. He curated the exhibition À la Source de l’Antique (2011) at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, devoted to Italian, Russian, and French neo-classical architectural drawings, and he co-curated, with Nicholas Olsberg, the exhibition Civic Utopia, France 1765–1837 (2016–17) at the Courtauld Institute of Art. His current book project addresses the history of color in architectural representation from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century.

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Wolf Burchard, The Sovereign Artist: Charles Le Brun and the Image of Louis XIV

• Charleston Library Society, Charleston
Tuesday, 26 September 2017, 6:00

• Institute of Classical Architecture and Art / Boston Design Center
Friday, 29 September 2017, 2:00

• Institute of Classical Architecture and Art / New York School of Interior Design
Thursday, 5 October 2017, 6:00

• National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.
Friday, 6 October 2017, 3:30

• The Bard Graduate Center, New York
Tuesday, 10 October 2017, 12:15

King Louis XIV’s favorite artist, Charles Le Brun (1619–1690) has often been described as a “dictator of the arts in France”—a view Burchard reassesses in his new book, The Sovereign Artist (Holberton 2017). Le Brun was a gifted and versatile artist, an excellent painter and designer of tapestries, sculpture, architecture, and furniture. As Louis XIV’s principal painter and director of the Gobelins manufactory, he sought to translate the Sun King’s claim for absolute power into a visual form. This lecture will explore Le Brun’s different fields of activities and his relationship to the great monarch.

Wolf Burchard, an art and architectural historian and a specialist on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century royal patronage, is the Furniture Research Curator at Britain’s National Trust. From 2009 to 2014 he was Curatorial Assistant at the Royal Collection Trust, where he assisted Desmond Shawe-Taylor, Surveyor of The Queen’s Pictures, in curating The First Georgians: Art & Monarchy, 1714–1760, an exhibition held at The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, to commemorate the tercentenary of George I’s accession to the British Throne. He studied history of art and architecture at the universities of Tübingen and Vienna as well as the University of London, where he earned the MA and PhD at the Courtauld Institute of Art. He regularly publishes and lectures on art and architectural patronage at the British, French, and German courts. He is a Trustee of the Georgian Group and a member of the Committee of the Society for Court Studies and of the Events Committee and Editorial Panel of the Furniture History Society.

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