J18 | Mary Sheriff on Casanova, Art, and Eroticism
Jean-Marc Nattier, The Lovers, detail, 1744, oil on canvas
(Munich: Alte Pinakothek)
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Trusting that readers regularly visit J18 (always available through the link to the right), I only occasionally note content here at Enfilade. But this contribution from Mary Sheriff is worth highlighting. It’s also worth noting, incidentally, that Journal18 and HECAA are mentioned in the editorial of the January 2018 issue of The Burlington Magazine! I imagine Mary would have been thrilled. –CAH
From Journal18:
Mary D. Sheriff, “Casanova, Art, and Eroticism,” Journal18 (January 2018).
Mary D. Sheriff, one of the most brilliant and beloved scholars of eighteenth-century European art, died on October 19, 2016. Among her last essays was a playful and erudite encounter with Casanova’s memoirs, seen through the prism of eighteenth-century European painting. She originally wrote it for the catalogue to the exhibition Casanova: The Seduction of Europe, connecting paintings in the show with episodes from Casanova’s erotic intrigues. This explains the choices behind some of the artworks she discusses. Due to late changes in the exhibition’s checklist, however, Mary’s essay did not appear in the catalogue. We wanted to publish it in Journal18 so that her vivid insights into Casanova’s libertine text and like-minded artworks could be shared with our scholarly community. The essay is yet another testament to Mary’s unique talent for bringing eighteenth-century art to life and for making us think about it in a new way, as well as her own seductive powers of analysis and wordplay. We are grateful to Keith Luria and Melissa Hyde for making final revisions to the essay and for permitting us to publish it in Journal18.
The essay is available here»
Exhibition | Pastels in Pieces
Maurice-Quentin de La Tour, Portrait of Gabriel Bernard de Rieux, 1739–41; pastel and gouache on paper mounted on canvas, 201 × 150 cm (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum).
On view through the summer at The Getty Center:
Pastels in Pieces
Getty, Los Angeles, 16 January — 29 July 2018
Curated by Emily Beeny
European paper was not manufactured in giant sheets until the nineteenth century. Competing with painters who worked on monumental canvases, eighteenth-century pastellists joined together multiple sheets of paper in order to create large, continuous surfaces. The piecing together of pastels, however, also served other purposes, allowing artists to paper over their mistakes or paste the heads of important sitters onto bodies posed by models. Matching each exhibited pastel with a map of its component sheets, this installation encourages visitors to consider how these objects were made.
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