Exhibition | The Chocolate Girl by Liotard
On view this fall at the Zwinger in Dresden:
‘The Most Beautiful Pastel Ever Seen’: The Chocolate Girl by Jean-Étienne Liotard
Zwinger, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, 28 September 2018 — 6 January 2019
Jean-Étienne Liotard, The Chocolate Girl, ca. 1744–45 (Dresden: SKD, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister).
The exhibition focuses on one of the most famous works in the collection of the Dresden Gemäldegalerie, The Chocolate Girl by the Swiss artist Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702–1789). Liotard enjoyed enormous success as a pastel painter; even Rosalba Carriera, whose mastery of the medium had helped transform it into a serious and highly-admired art form, declared The Chocolate Girl to be “the most beautiful pastel ever seen.”
It was thanks to the art dealer Count Francesco Algarotti, who purchased the picture in Venice in 1745, buying it directly from the artist for the Dresden collection of Augustus III, that the gallery first began to show works by contemporary artists. The pastel medium suited the Rococo taste for lifelike, brilliant portraits and allowed Liotard to create flawless, porcelain-smooth surfaces. The great popularity of the picture, however, also rests on the fact that it depicts a simple, unidentified housemaid, a hitherto rare motif. The clear-eyed precision of Liotard’s observation anticipated not only the art of the Enlightenment but also nineteenth-century Realism.
Equally worthy of mention are the countless adaptations and appropriations of the motif for other, often trivial purposes. Of no less interest is the eccentric painter himself. A true cosmopolitan, he travelled far and wide, sported a luxuriant beard, exotic clothing and a turban and called himself ‘Le peintre turc’. The exhibition’s epilogue showcases Hann Trier’s take on Liotard’s masterpiece. Painted in 1991, Trier’s three-part sequence La Tasse au chocolat, reinterpreted The Chocolate Girl for the twentieth century.
Stephan Koja and Roland Enke, eds., ‘The Most Beautiful Pastel Ever Seen’: The Chocolate Girl by Jean-Étienne Liotard in the Dresden Gemäldegalerie (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2018), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-3777431369, $42.
A full press release is available via Art Daily.
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Note (added 28 September 2018) — The posting was updated to include details of the catalogue and a link to the press release.
Exhibition | The Grand Cure, 1738–1740
From the exhibition flyer:
The Grand Cure, 1738–1740: A Disabled Saxon Prince and His Tour of Italy
Die Grande Kur, 1738–1740: Prinz Friedrich Christian Von Sachsen auf der Suche Nach Heilung und Kultur in Italien
Grünes Gewölbe / Green Vault, Residenzschloss, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, 9 May — 19 August 2018
Curated by Maureen Cassidy-Geiger
Rosalba Carriera, Crown Prince Friedrich Christian of Saxony, 1740, pastel on paper, 63.5 × 51.5 cm (Dresden, SKD, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister; photo by Hans Peter Klut/Elke Estel).
This is the first exhibition to be devoted to Elector Friedrich Christian of Saxony (1722—1763), who succeeded King August III in 1763 for just 74 days. Given his brief reign, few are aware of the prince’s profound physical disabilities, akin to cerebral palsy, which prevented him from standing or walking without assistance and made simple tasks like eating and dressing difficult. The marriage of his sister Maria Amalia to the King of Naples in May 1738 inspired their parents to send the fifteen-year-old heir to the throne on an impromptu journey to Italy, for life-saving medical treatments. This exceptional two-year adventure was amply documented, allowing us to precisely reconstruct the prince’s route and daily experiences as he travelled from Dresden to Naples, Rome, Florence, Milan, and Venice. Like the able-bodied Grand Tourists he met along the way, he also travelled incognito with an entourage, enjoyed celebrity status, and collected art, relics, books, and ephemera for shipment home. Some of the Italian gifts and souvenirs have been identified in museums, archives and libraries and are presented in the intimate setting of the Sponselraum.
August the Strong and August III both made Grand Tours as teenagers, with the court of Louis XIV and carnival in Venice as their primary targets. Friedrich Christian, by contrast, went to Italy as a medical tourist. Although he would never be cured, the mineral baths and holistic treatments administered abroad did soothe and strengthen the prince’s atrophied limbs, allowing him to regain the use of his left hand, bear his own bodyweight and walk short distances with two canes. Of necessity, however, he was mostly carried around Italy in a porte-chaise (sedan chair), even ascending the Leaning Tower of Pisa in this manner. Since there was no precedent for portraying a disabled heir to the throne, the Crown Prince was chronicled and painted conventionally, as able-bodied, and even thought of himself as such. A glimpse of his handicap is shown in the view of his arrival at Venice in 1739, but it was not until 1761, while in exile in Munich during the Seven Years’ War, that he was portrayed in a wheelchair. With his premature death from smallpox at the age of 41, however, the Elector’s great promise went unfulfilled.
Maureen Cassidy-Geiger, Die Grande Kur, 1738–1740: Prinz Friedrich Christian Von Sachsen auf der Suche Nach Heilung und Kultur in Italien / The Grand Cure, 1738–1740: A Disabled Saxon Prince and His Tour of Italy (Dresden: Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, 2018), 52 pages, ISBN: 978-3000596810 (German and English text).
Note (added 26 June 2018) — The posting was updated to include details for the booklet accompanying the exhibition.
Conference | Collage, Montage, Assemblage, 1700–Present
From the conference website:
Collage, Montage, Assemblage: Collected and Composite Forms, 1700–Present
University of Edinburgh, 17–19 April 2018
Organized by Cole Collins and Freya Gowrley
T U E S D A Y , 1 7 A P R I L 2 0 1 8
14.00 Registration and Coffee
14.15 Exhibiting Collage
In Conversation: FREYA GOWRLEY and PATRICK ELLIOT
15.00 Collage in the Museum and Archive
ALLAN MADDEN (The University of Edinburgh), Piecing Together the Narrative: Une semaine de bonté in the library, the archive and the gallery
BRIDGET MOYNIHAN (The University of Edinburgh), Scrappy Contexts: Archival and Digital Interventions on the Edwin Morgan Scrapbooks
15.45 Collage and Subjecthood
TOM DAY (The University of Edinburgh), Jeff Keen, Pop Film Collagist
COLE COLLINS (The University of Edinburgh), Collage as Feminist Strategy and Methodology
17.00 Wine Reception
W E D N E S D A Y , 1 8 A P R I L 2 0 1 8
9.00 Registration and Coffee
9.35 Keynote
LUCY PELTZ (National Portrait Gallery, London), Facing the Text: An Introduction to Extra- Illustration in Britain from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century
10.40 Panel 1 | Publications
KAREN DI FRANCO (University of Reading and Tate Britain), The alchemical, the instruction, and the cut up: The performance of collage in the writing of Ithell Colquhoun, Carolee Scheemann, and Kathy Acker
HANNAH VINTER (Kings College London), Historical engagement as textual collage in Ursula Krechel’s Landgericht
ALISON HORGAN (University of Sheffield), ‘Gaudy colours’ and ‘disfigur’d shapes’: The patchwork and Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765)
TOBIAS VOGT (Freie Universität, Berlin), Collage avant la lettre: Printed materials in drawings before 1900
10.40 Panel 2 | Bodies
LISA LEE (Emory University), Primal Gestures: Thomas Hirschhorn’s Ur-Collages
GRÁINNE RICE (The University of Edinburgh), ‘I can’t see the joins’: Collage and cut-up bodies in the work of Steven Campbell (1953–2007)
KATHERINE ISELIN (University of Missouri- Columbia), Erotic Aesthetics in Collage Inspired by Giulio Romano’s I Modi
KATIE ANANIA (Harvard University and Hunter College New York), Wheat Paste and Poor Taste: Carolee Schneemann’s Paper Performances, 1966–68
12.25 Lunch
13.25 Panel 3 | Materialities
CATRIONA MACLEOD (University of Pennsylvania), Writing with Scissors: Romantic Collage Poetics
LUCIE WHITMORE (University of Glasgow), Chic rag-and-tatter modes’: Remnant Fashions 1914–18
STEPHANIE KOSCAK (Wake Forest University), A Royal Tête-a-Tête: Decorating (and Decorating with) Engraved Pictures of Kings and Queens in Eighteenth-Century England
EKATERINA KOCHETKOVA (Lomonosov Moscow State University), Assemblage as Method of Garden-Making: The Case of Ian Hamilton Finlay
13.25 Panel 4 | Intimacies, Collaborations, and Emotions
BETHAN BIDE (Middlesex University), Stitching yourself back together: Finding memory, emotion, and creativity in the composite garments made under the ‘Make Do and Mend’ scheme in WW2 Britain
ROGER ROTHMAN (Bucknell University), Topographie Anecdotée du Hasard: A Multi-Authored Literary Collage
MAYA WASSELL SMITH (Cardiff University and National Maritime Museum), Cigarette Cards and the Sentimental: Sailor Collage in the Long Nineteenth Century
MADELEINE PELLING (University of York), ‘Your Affectionate Queen’: Queen Charlotte, Mary Delany, and the Art of Friendship
15.05 Coffee
15.35 Panel 5 | Legacies and Influences
FREYA GOWRLEY (Institute of Advanced Studies, Edinburgh), Reflective and Reflexive Forms: Intimacy and Medium Specificity in British and American Sentimental Albums, 1780–1850
IRENA KOSSOWSKA (Copernicus University in Torun and Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw), Modernist Synethesia and a Dialog with the Old Masters: Polish Photo-Collage and Photomontage of the 1930s
TALIA KWARTLER (The Museum of Modern Art, New York), Suzanne Duchamp’s Dada Collages, 1916–21
REBECA ACOSTA (Humboldt Universität, Berlin), ‘Composite Johnson’: Renderings of Samuel Johnson by John Hawkins and Vladimir Nabokov
15.35 Panel 6 | Technologies and Digitality
LUCY WHITEHEAD (Cardiff University), ‘Inlaid’ and ‘Intercalated’: Victorian Biography as Collage Form
BROOKE LEETON (University of Georgia), Meaning and/in Digital Collage
CRAIG BUCKLEY (Yale University), An Architecture of Clippings: Reyner Banham and the Redefinition of Collage
CAITLIN WOOLSEY (Yale University), Imaging Orality in the Sound and Visual Collages of Henri Chopin
17.30 Performance
FLORIAN KAPLICK, Kurt / ANNA \ Paul
A recital collage using texts from Kurt Schwitters and Paul Auster
18.30 Wine Reception
T H U R S D A Y , 1 9 A P R I L 2 0 1 8
9.00 Registration and Coffee
9.15 Panel 7 | Identities
RACHEL MIDDLEMAN (California State University, Chico), Collage as a Feminist Strategy in the Work of Anita Steckel
SUSAN LAXTON (University of California, Riverside), Psicofotógrafa: Grete Stern and the Administration of the Unconscious
KATE SCHNEIDER (University of Cambridge), A Short History of Postwar Reconstruction via Humphrey Jennings’s Swiss Roll Collages
BEATRIZ MANTEIGAS (University of Lisbon), Collage on the Life and Work of R.B. Kitaj
9.15 Panel 8 | Intermedialities
PATRICIA ZAKRESKI (University of Exeter), A Patchwork Novel: Tessellation and Women’s Writing in the 1870s
FLORIAN KAPLICK (Musician and Speech Performance Artist), Composing collages with texts and collaging compositions with music
CHRISTINA MICHELON (University of Minnesota, Twin Cities), Printcraft: Reclaiming and Renaming Early Collage Practices
DAVID NELSON (University of Pennsylvania), City of Paper: The Materiality of Montage in Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz
10.55 Coffee
11.25 Panel 9 | Ethnographies and Geographies
ORLA FITZPATRICK (National Museum of Ireland), From the medieval to the modern: Decoration, collage, and photography in the album work of Lady Louisa Tenison (1819–1882)
MOLLY DUGGINS (National Art School, Sydney), Crafting the Colonial Environment through Album Assemblage
JOANNA PAWLIK (University of Sussex), Collaging Surrealism in Ted Joans’ The Hipsters (1961)
DEBRA HANSON (Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar), Interventions: Collage, Black Bodies, and a New History of Modernism
13.10 Lunch
14.15 Panel 10 | Display and Dissemination
COLE COLLINS (The University of Edinburgh), Loss of Texture: Displaying the Collages of Kurt Schwitters
ROCÍO ROBLES TARDÍO (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), Mies van der Rohe: Working with Collage, Thinking about Replicas, 1939–43
KAYLEE ALEXANDER (Duke University), Cut, Copy, Paste: A Truthful Picture of the Paris Catacombs
14.15 Panel 11 | Historiographies
JESSICA BARNESS and STEVEN MCCARTHY (Kent State University and University of Minnesota, Twin Cities), Coding and Decoding: Collage as Communication Design Scholarship
ZOE KINSLEY (Liverpool Hope University), Coherence and Customisation in the Scrapbooks of Dorothy Richardson (1748–1819)
MATTHEW BOWMAN (University of Suffolk), Collage as Model
SAMUEL BIBBY (Art History), ‘How to present your ideas effectively and make them stick’: Historiography as Collage
16.00 Keynote
ADRIAN SUDHALTER (Art Historian and Curator, New York), The Museum of Modern Art’s 1948 Collage Exhibition
17.00 Closing Remarks
Enfilade 
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