New Book | Art, Commerce, and Colonialism, 1600–1800
From Manchester UP:
Emma Barker, ed., Art, Commerce, and Colonialism, 1600–1800 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017), 200 pages, ISBN: 978 15261 22926, £18 / $35.
The book examines how increasing engagement with the rest of the world transformed European art, architecture and design. It considers how commercial activity and colonial ventures gave rise to new and diverse forms of visual and material culture across the globe. Drawing on a wide range of recent scholarship, it offers a new perspective that challenges Eurocentric approaches.
Emma Barker is Senior Lecturer in Art History at The Open University.
C O N T E N T S
Introduction, Emma Barker
1 From Iberia to the Americas: Hispanic Art of the Colonial Era, Piers Baker-Bates
2 The Golden Age Revisited: Dutch Art in Global Perspective, Emma Barker
3 Creative Interactions: Chinoiserie in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Clare Taylor
4 Transatlantic Architecture: Classicism, Colonialism, and Race, Elizabeth McKellar
Conclusion, Emma Barker
Index
New Book | The Sun King’s Atlantic
From Brill:
Jutta Wimmler, The Sun King’s Atlantic: Drugs, Demons, and Dyestuffs in the Atlantic World, 1640–1730 (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 230 pages, ISBN: 9789004336070, 80€ / $93.
In The Sun King’s Atlantic, Jutta Wimmler reveals the many surprising ways in which the Atlantic world channeled cultural developments during the age of the Sun King. Although hardly visible for contemporaries at the time, Africa and America were omnipresent throughout early modern France: in the textile industry, pharmaceutics, medicine, scientific methods, religious discourse, and court theatre. The book moves beyond typical plantation crops and the slave trade to illustrate how a focus on Europe challenges us to rethink the place of Africa in the early modern world.
Jutta Wimmler, Ph.D. (2011), University of Graz (Austria), is a researcher and lecturer at the European University Viadrina, Germany. She has published several articles about Africa’s impact on Europe, most recently in the Journal of Religion in Africa.
C O N T E N T S
1 Introduction
2 Sugar and Slaves? French Atlantic Trade before 1730
3 The Fashionable Atlantic: Innovation and Consumption
4 Body Matters: Remedies, Foodstuffs and Cosmetics
5 The Iatrochemical Advantage: Methods for an Expanding World
6 Perfect French Subjects: Staging the Atlantic World
7 Devils and Martyrs: Religious Concepts Travel the Globe
8 Epilogue
New Book | The Image of the Black in African and Asian Art
From Harvard UP:
David Bindman, Suzanne Preston Blier, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., The Image of the Black in African and Asian Art (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2017), 456 pages, ISBN: 9780674504394, $95 / £70 / €85.
The Image of the Black in African and Asian Art asks how the black figure was depicted by artists from the non-Western world. Beginning with ancient Egypt—positioned properly as part of African history—this volume focuses on the figure of the black as rendered by artists from Africa, East Asia, and the Indian subcontinent. The aesthetic traditions illustrated here are as diverse as the political and social histories of these regions. From Igbo Mbari sculptures to modern photography from Mali, from Indian miniatures to Japanese prints, African and Asian artists portrayed the black body in ways distinct from the European tradition, even as they engaged with Western art through the colonial encounter and the forces of globalization.
This volume complements the vision of art patrons Dominique and Jean de Menil who, during the 1960s, founded an image archive to collect the ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art from the ancient world to modern times. A half‐century later, Harvard University Press and the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research completed the historic publication of The Image of the Black in Western Art—ten books in total—beginning with Egyptian antiquities and concluding with images that span the twentieth century. The Image of the Black in African and Asian Art reinvigorates the de Menil family’s original mission and reorients the study of the black body with a new focus on Africa and Asia.
David Bindman is Emeritus Professor of the History of Art at University College London.
Suzanne Preston Blier is Allen Whitehill Clowes Professor of Fine Arts and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.
C O N T E N T S
Preface, David Bindman, Suzanne Preston Blier, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Acknowledgments
Introduction, David Bindman
I. Africa
1 Images of Africans by and of Themselves: Historical and Comparative Factors, Suzanne Preston Blier
2 The Body in African Art, Kristina Van Dyke
3 Masquerade in Sub-Saharan Africa, John Picton
4 The Image of the Black in Early African Photography, Christraud M. Geary
5 The Image of the Black in Modern and Contemporary African Art, Steven Nelson
II. Asia
6 The Image of the Black in Islamic Art: The Case of Painting, Robert Hillenbrand
7 The Image of the Black in India, John McLeod and Kenneth X. Robbins
8 The Image of the Black in Chinese Art, Don J. Wyatt
9 The Image of the Black in Japanese Art: From the Beginnings to 1850, Timon Screech
10 The Image of the Black in Japanese Art: Nineteenth Century to the Present Day, Alicia Volk
Notes
Illustrations
Index
Exhibition | Gods in Color: Polychromy in the Ancient World
From the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco:
Gods in Color: Polychromy in the Ancient World
Bunte Götter: Die Farbigkeit antiker Skulptur
Glyptothek, Munich, 2003
Liebieghaus Sculpture Collection, Frankfurt am Main, 2008
Legion of Honor Museum, San Francisco, 28 October 2017 — 7 January 2018
Reconstruction (A1) of the so-called Chios kore from the Akropolis in Athens, 2012. Copy of the original: Athens, ca.500 BCE. Crystalline acrylic glass, with applied pigments in tempera. Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung, Polychromy Research Project, Frankfurt am Main, acquired in 2016 as gift from U. Koch-Brinkmann and V. Brinkmann (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco).
Gods in Color: Polychromy in the Ancient World will offer an astonishing look at Classical sculpture swathed in their original vibrant colors questioning the perception of an all-white ‘classical’ ideal. Ancient sculpture and architecture from Greece and Rome will be revealed as intended—garishly colorful, richly ornamented, and full of life—along with original sculpture from the Near East, Egypt, Greece, and Rome against the backdrop of the Legion of Honor’s neoclassical building.
To find out more about the exhibition, explore this digital offering from the Liebieghaus in Frankfurt:
In the eighteenth century there was already considerable debate about the extent to which ancient architecture and sculptures were painted. Two centuries later technical investigations with ultraviolet light and glancing light are providing new evidence about ancient polychromy. Investigations carried out in Munich’s Glyptothek in the 1960s resulted in important findings. In the 1980s a group of researchers associated with the archaeologist Volkmar von Graeve studied the polychromy of ancient works of art with the help of modern technological aids. At the time, Vinzenz Brinkmann was a member of von Graeve’s team. Later, as head of the Liebieghaus’s Department of Antiquities, he brought the research subject to Frankfurt.
By now the original painting of hundreds of Greek and Roman artworks around the world has been studied. Thanks to the development of new investigative methods, scholars have meanwhile been able to provide an increasingly precise sense of the kind and extent of the painting. Over the course of centuries of damage owing to wars or weathering it was lost. Even though only scant traces of pigment and scoring have survived, they can provide valuable information. Our newly won understanding of the original polychromy leads in many cases to surprising discoveries!
From FAMSF Publications:
Vinzenz Brinkmann, Renée Dreyfus, and Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann, eds., Gods in Color: Polychromy in the Ancient World (New York: Prestel, 2017), 192 pages, ISBN: 978 379135 7072, $40.
Although not widely known, antiquities were colored to dazzling and powerful effect. Polychromy—the painting of objects in a variety of hues—was a regular feature of the sculpture and architecture of most ancient cultures, especially in Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Aegean, Greece, and Rome. When such works began to be rediscovered in the eighteenth century after prolonged exposure to the elements, their colored surfaces were often so faded that later sculptors evoked classicism by leaving white marble and bronze surfaces unadorned.
Published on the occasion of an exhibition at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, Gods in Color: Polychromy in the Ancient World reintroduces the unexpected effect of these bright pigments. Through reconstructions of well-known sculptural works dating from Bronze Age Greece to Imperial Rome, readers can see firsthand how these objects would have appeared when they were first created. Complementing these reconstructions are many fine examples of original antiquities, many with surviving polychromy, from ancient Greece and Rome and beyond to Egypt and the Near East. Rounding out these offerings are breathtaking watercolors of Greece’s landscapes and monuments painted in 1805 and 1806 by English antiquarian Edward Dodwell and Italian artist Simone Pomardi.
This handsome volume features six essays alongside catalogue entries that describe the cultural contexts of the ancient works and the modern technological methods to uncover their original coloration. Vinzenz Brinkmann and Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann offer a history of the research and scholarship of polychromy since the eighteenth century; with Heinrich Piening, they also describe the pigments and techniques used. Renée Dreyfus discusses polychrome examples from Egypt and the Near East to demonstrate the strong influences these cultures left on the classical world. Oliver Primavesi recounts the dilemma of eighteenth-century German archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who at once celebrated the “pure” form of classical Greek and Roman sculpture but became increasingly aware that such works were originally colored and ornamented. John Camp describes the Greek tour of Dodwell and Pomardi as they depicted classical monuments, some of which still retained their original color.
An enduring scholarly record, Gods in Color reveals how ancient sculpture is incomplete without color. White or monochrome sculpture, an inherited notion of the classical ideal, would have been as strange to the ancients as these color reconstructions might seem to us today.
• Vinzenz Brinkmann is head of the department of antiquities at the Liebieghaus Sculpture Collection, Frankfurt and professor of classical archaeology at Goethe University, Frankfurt.
• Renée Dreyfus is curator in charge of ancient art and interpretation at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
• Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann is an archaeologist of classical antiquity based in Frankfurt. She is also assistant lecturer of classical archaeology at Georg August University in Göttingen.
• John Camp is the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Professor of Classics at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia and the director of the Agora excavations in Athens.
• Martin Chapman is curator in charge of European decorative arts and sculpture at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
• Louise Chu is associate curator of ancient art and interpretation at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
• Jens Daehner is associate curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
• Jonathan Elias is an Egyptologist and the director of the Akhmim Mummy Studies Consortium.
• Kenneth Lapatin is curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
• Rebecca Levitan is a PhD student in the history of art department at the University of California, Berkeley.
• Heinrich Piening heads the department of restoration and conservation, furniture and art objects of wood, at the Bavarian Department of State-Owned Palaces, Gardens, and Lakes in Germany.
• Oliver Primavesi is professor of Greek philology and philosophy at the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich. In 2007 he was a recipient of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, an important research award given by the German Research Foundation.
• Andrew Stewart is Nicholas C. Petris Professor of Greek Studies and professor of ancient Mediterranean art and archaeology at the University of California at Berkeley and curator of Mediterranean archaeology at UCB’s Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology.
Call for Papers | Ephemeral Exhibition Spaces, 1750–1918
From H-ArtHist:
Ephemeral Exhibition Spaces, 1750–1918
Geneva, 16–17 March 2018
Proposals due by 1 December 2017
During the last decades of the Ancien Régime and throughout the long nineteenth century, people in Europe marveled at absent worlds or past events that were reenacted visually or mentally in a variety of ephemeral exhibition spaces, like temporal museums, exhibits, (private) cabinets and, most strikingly, panoramic theaters and dioramic constructions. The latter installations or decors visually imitated reality, rather than represent it, like art would do, and with their illusory optical effects they were very popular with the big audience. They were however also criticised by those who stressed the imaginative, mental nature of vivification against forms of visual mimicry. From the very outset, reenactment in these spaces comes forward as an ambiguous, multifaceted and conflictive strategy.
In the new public and private spaces of the nineteenth century, ephemeral exhibition spaces or spaces with an exhibitional dimension par excellence fitted more encompassing epistemological and experiential strategies of reenactment. Within a wide scope of cultural practices, they provided new spatial frameworks of understanding and experiencing reality, of imagining, of identification and control. It is however still a matter of debate how the epistemological, visual and experiential dimensions of reenactment interrelated, conflicted and coincided in these spaces. Reenactment in ephemeral exhibition spaces was caught between visual and mental strategies, between material tangibility and imagination. Reenactment in these spaces was also at the same time a tool of (scientific) knowledge and of subjective experience. Imagination could in this context strongly relate to the sensation of the uncanny, to aesthetic rapture, to (ideological and political) identification and to personal memory or even, in particular cases, to solipsist isolation. These spaces, finally, precisely because of their exhibitional nature, are also revealing of a dynamic of control, of voyeurism, of a problematic dealing with otherness, difference and absence, of people, of cultures or of the past.
Our symposium intends to discuss a wide variety of ephemeral exhibition spaces or spaces with a distinctively exhibitional dimension, such as for example dépôts, derelict gardens, ruins, boudoirs, museums, exhibits, private interiors, cabinets, antique stores… against a broad cultural background and treated from various interdisciplinary angles within the humanities, including cultural history, history of art, literary studies and comparative literature, intellectual history, material culture studies, museum studies and others.
We particularly, but certainly not exclusively, welcome papers, either in English or in French, on the following topics:
• Ambiguous, multifunctional, liminal or hybrid spaces, in-between spaces, spaces between public and private uses, as well as the cultural practices they are connected with
• Imagery spaces, for example in written or visual sources (literature, catalogues, guides, travel literature, letters, art, images etc.) or material spaces that are able to stage the role of the imaginary in the construction of cultural practices
• Mediating spaces that worked as catalysts for interaction and interrelation between a number of cate- gories such as gender and social classes
There is no registration fee for the conference. Final papers, either in French or English, will be published in an edited volume with a reputable editor. Proposals (maximum 250 words) should be sent to Camilla Murgia (camilla.murgia@unige.ch) and Dominique Bauer (dominique.bauer@kuleuven.be) by December 1, 2017. Those who submitted their proposal will be notified of their acceptance by December 20.
Conveners: Dr. Camilla Murgia (University of Geneva) and Prof. Dominique Bauer (Catholic University of Leuven)
Exhibition | Turner in Surrey
J.M.W. Turner, Thomson’s Aeolian Harp, 1809
(Manchester Art Gallery)
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Opening this month at The Lightbox:
Turner in Surrey
The Lightbox, Woking, Surrey, 18 November 2017 — 4 March 2018
For the first time ever, this exhibition explores J.M.W. Turner’s work produced on his various travels, stops, and periods of residence on the Thames, Wey Navigation and in the county of Surrey, prior to the London boundary changes of 1889.
It will explore how Turner retreated into nature, capturing both the beauty of the landscape and its rustic elegance. Open air sketches highlighting his swiftness of hand and the changing effects of nature will sit alongside finished works, completed in the studio. Combining pencil and oil sketches, finished oils and watercolours, the exhibition will feature Newark Abbey on the Wey and View of Richmond Hill and Bridge from Tate, and Thomson’s Aeolian Harp from Manchester Art Gallery. The exhibition will also give a rare opportunity to see personal possessions of the artist—his fishing rod, travelling watercolour box, and watercolour palette—from The Royal Academy of Arts.
Exhibition | Napoleon: Images of the Legend
From the Châteaux de Versailles:
Napoleon: Images of the Legend
Arras Musée des Beaux-Arts, 7 October 2017 — 4 November 2018
Curated by Frédéric Lacaille and Marie-Lys Marguerite
The exhibition will present a large selection of the Napoleonic collection from the palaces of Versailles and Trianon, which is the world’s largest on the subject. Visitors will be able to discover the history of Napoleon in chronological order, from General Bonaparte to the fallen Emperor.
The exhibition will also throw the spotlight on the Emperor’s close circle (family, important officers, imperial Court) and the Parisian and international societies of the time (artists, scholars, foreign sovereigns etc.) It will show how, from very early on, Napoleon wanted to write his own legend for posterity by commissioning multiple paintings commemorating key moments of his life. Paintings, sculptures, and furniture will reveal the wealth and quality of artistic production at the time and will lead visitors in the footsteps of Napoleon Bonaparte, whose unique destiny forever.
The exhibition is part of a partnership project between three major institutions: the region Hauts-de-France, the town of Arras, and the Palace of Versailles. This large-scale partnership was established in 2011, allowing collections from Versailles to be displayed in Arras. Major event-exhibitions are held alongside educational and cultural work in order to allow as many people as possible to discover the history and heritage of the Palace of Versailles.
The exhibition is curated by Frédéric Lacaille, Curator in charge of 19th-century paintings at the Musée National des Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, and Marie-Lys Marguerite, Director of Arras Musée des Beaux-Arts.
Frédéric Lacaille, ed., Napoléon: Images de la Légende (Paris: éditions Somogy, 2017), 280 pages, ISBN: 978 27572 12929, 28€.
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