Exhibition | Black Out: Silhouettes Then and Now
From the National Portrait Gallery:
Black Out: Silhouettes Then and Now
Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C., 11 May 2018 — 10 March 2019
Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, 27 April — 25 August 2019
Curated by Asma Naeem
Silhouettes—cut paper profiles—were a hugely popular and democratic form of portraiture in the 19th century, offering virtually instantaneous likenesses of everyone from presidents to those who were enslaved. The exhibition Black Out: Silhouettes Then and Now explores this relatively unstudied art form by examining its rich historical roots and considering its forceful contemporary presence. The show features works from the Portrait Gallery’s extensive collection of silhouettes, such as those by Auguste Edouart, who captured the likenesses of such notable figures as John Quincy Adams and Lydia Maria Child, and at the same time, the exhibition reveals how contemporary artists are reimagining silhouettes in bold and unforgettable ways.
Highlights of the historical objects include a double-silhouette portrait of a same-sex couple and a rarely seen life-size silhouette of a nineteen-year-old enslaved girl, along with the bill of her sale from 1796. The featured contemporary artists are Kara Walker, who makes panoramic silhouettes of plantation life and African American history; Canadian artist Kristi Malakoff, who cuts paper to make life-size sculptures depicting a children’s Maypole dance; MacArthur-prize-winner Camille Utterback, who will present an interactive digital work that reacts to visitors’ shadows and movements; and Kumi Yamashita, who ‘sculpts’ light and shadow with objects to create mixed-media profiles of people who are not there. With both historical and contemporary explorations into the silhouette, Black Out reveals new pathways between our past and present, particularly with regard to how we can reassess notions of race, power, individualism, and even, our digital selves.
This exhibition is curated by Portrait Gallery Curator of Prints, Drawings and Media Arts, Asma Naeem.
Asma Naeem, Black Out: Silhouettes Then and Now (Princeton University Press, 2018), 192 pages, ISBN: 978 0691180588, $45.
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Note (added 27 April 2019) — The posting was updated to include the Mississippi Museum of Art as a second venue.
Artists in Paris: Mapping the 18th-Century Art World
Results for a search for ‘Hubert Robert’; screen shot from Hannah Williams and Chris Sparks, Artists in Paris: Mapping the 18th-Century Art World, www.artistsinparis.org (accessed 2 April 2018). As noted in the FAQs for the site, “there are 10,915 addresses in the database,” with coverage for “a total of 471 artists,” that is, for “every artist admitted to the Academy between 1675 and 1793.” Useful site details are available with the ‘settings’ tab.
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From the ‘About’ page of Artists in Paris:
Artists in Paris: Mapping the 18th-Century Art World
Artists in Paris is an open-access digital art history project funded by The Leverhulme Trust and supported by Queen Mary University of London. The Principal Investigator of the project is Dr Hannah Williams. The website was designed and built by Dr Chris Sparks.
Introduction
Paris is a city renowned for its artistic communities. Neighbourhoods like Montmartre and Montparnasse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are familiar spaces of artistic activity and sociability. But when it comes to earlier generations of artists, we know strikingly little about how they inhabited the city.
Where did the artists of eighteenth-century Paris live? Which artists were neighbours? What sub-communities formed within the city? Which neighbourhoods formed the cultural geography of the eighteenth-century art world? And did that geography change over the course of the century?
This website provides answers to these tantalising questions about the geography and demography of the Paris art world in the eighteenth century. Based on original archival research retrieving the addresses of hundreds of artists’ homes and studios, this website uses digital mapping technologies to locate those spaces on georeferenced historical maps, making them available for visitors to explore.
Significance
Artists in Paris is the first project to map comprehensively where artistic communities developed in the eighteenth-century city and offers rich scope for subsequent investigations into how these communities worked and the impact they had on art practice in the period. Yielding crucial new information and harnessing the exciting possibilities of digital humanities for art-historical research, this website is intended as a valuable resource for anyone studying or researching French art, or for anyone with an interest in the history of Paris.
With its two modes—Year and Artist—the website accommodates searches either by date or by person. For instance, visitors can explore where every artist was living at certain moments in time, or they can select individual artists and explore all the addresses lived at across their careers. Designed to be simultaneously inviting and informative, these interactive data-enriched maps answer many questions about the Paris art world. But they are also intended as an empirical base upon which to pose new kinds of inquiries, inspiring continued explorations into networks of artistic sociability, the role of the city in art production, the geography of the art world, and urban experience more generally.
Credits & Acknowledgements
Artists in Paris has been funded through a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research Fellowship, awarded to Hannah Williams and held at Queen Mary University of London (2015–2018). Additional support for the project has been provided by Queen Mary University of London. Preliminary stages of the research were funded by a grant from the University of Oxford’s John Fell Fund, awarded to Hannah Williams, and undertaken at the University of Oxford (2013–2015).
Thanks are due to the many people who offered advice and suggestions, attended research seminars, workshops, and usability testing sessions, and provided feedback and encouragement throughout the project. Among the many are Laura Auricchio, Robin Carlyle, Craig Clunas, Rebecca Emmett, Noémie Étienne, Keren Hammerschlag, Colin Jones, Meredith Martin, Gay McAuley, Chris Moffatt, David Pullins, Helen Stark, Chloe Ward, Sam Williams, Emma Yates, the community of developers on Stack Overflow, students at Queen Mary University of London and the University of London in Paris, and attendees of presentations at the Institute of Historical Research in London, the Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte in Paris, University of Birmingham, University of St Andrews, and the National Gallery of Art in Canberra.
Special thanks are due to Dr Mia Ridge (British Library) for advice and technical support from the project’s inception and throughout its development.
The website logo and colour-design are by Jason Varone.
This website was built using OpenLayers and Bootstrap. It also makes use of other great libraries including Handelbars. The historical maps were georeferenced using Map Warper. The greyscale contemporary map layer is by Stamen Design, licensed under CC BY 3.0. Map data is by OpenStreetMap under ODbL. The digitized historical maps of Paris have been sourced from Wikimedia Commons.
New Book | Commedia dell’Arte in Context
From Cambridge UP:
Christopher Balme, Piermario Vescovo, and Daniele Vianello, eds., Commedia dell’Arte in Context (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 377 pages, ISBN: 9781139236331, $120.
The commedia dell’arte, the improvised Italian theatre that dominated the European stage from 1550 to 1750, is arguably the most famous theatre tradition to emerge from Europe in the early modern period. Its celebrated masks have come to symbolize theatre itself and have become part of the European cultural imagination. Over the past twenty years a revolution in commedia dell’arte scholarship has taken place, generated mainly by a number of distinguished Italian scholars. Their work, in which they have radically separated out the myth from the history of the phenomenon remains, however, largely untranslated into English (or any other language). The present volume gathers together these Italian and English-speaking scholars to synthesize for the first time this research for both specialist and non-specialist readers. The book is structured around key topics that span both the early modern period and the twentieth-century reinvention of the commedia dell’arte.
Exhibition | Blondel, Architecte des Lumières
Opening next month in Metz:
Blondel, Architecte des Lumières
Galerie de l’Arsenal, Metz, 12 April — 13 July 2018
Architecte parisien, académicien, professeur royal, Jacques-François Blondel (1705–1774) vint à Metz en 1761. Il est chargé par le Maréchal d’Estrées d’aménager les places autour de la Cathédrale Saint-Étienne. Son projet, réalisé quelques années plus tard, constitue l’un des meilleurs ensembles urbains du xviiie siècle. En effet, avant tout théoricien, ses constructions sont rares et précieuses. Son chef-d’oeuvre est incontestablement l’aménagement de la Place d’Armes à Metz qui se situe dans la lignée de ses prestigieuses consoeurs parisiennes, que sont Vendôme ou Concorde. Cette exposition inédite, accompagnant la candidature de « Metz royale et impériale » sur la liste du patrimoine mondial, propose de faire découvrir à travers le projet messin les talents multiples de Jacques-François Blondel, collaborateur de l’Encyclopédie de Diderot et d’Alembert, auteur prolifique, créateur de décors éphémères, concepteurs de nombreux projets et surtout professeur qui forma toute une génération d’architectes européens et dont la méthode d’enseignement servira de fondement au système actuel d’apprentissage de l’architecture.
Une production de la Ville de Metz en partenariat avec la Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine de Paris, l’École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Nancy et la Cité musicale-Metz.
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More information about Metz’s UNESCO application is available here:
The National Committee of French World Heritage Properties, meeting on January 9, 2009, issued a favorable opinion about the inclusion of Metz on the French tentative list. This is only a first step, but it is essential. The city is eligible for inclusion on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Metz has accumulated an incredible architectural and urban heritage over time. Under the label “Royal and imperial Metz,” the application aims at recognizing the unusual urban adventure that took place in the Messin city from the second half of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century, before, during and after the German annexation [in 1871].
Exhibition | Architecture et Pouvoir
In 1903 Paul Tornow’s neo-Gothic portal for the Cathedral of Metz replaced the classical portal designed by Jacques-François Blondel, which dated to 1764.
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From Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine:
Architecture et Pouvoir: Un Portail pour la Cathédrale de Metz
Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine, Paris, 28 March — September 2018
Curated by Aurélien Davrius
En parallèle de l’exposition Blondel, architecte des Lumières présentée à Metz, du 12 avril au 13 juillet 2018, le musée des Monuments français, en partenariat avec la Ville de Metz et l’École nationale supérieure d’architecture de Nancy, propose une exposition-dossier consacrée à la singulière fortune du portail de la cathédrale de Metz.
Le portail élevé en 1764 par Jacques-François Blondel est remplacé par le portail néo-gothique que nous connaissons aujourd’hui, inauguré en 1903. Les photographies et documents rassemblés dans l’exposition retracent l’histoire de cette transformation ; ils soulignent aussi la manière dont les deux portails ont chacun servi de support à la manifestation et à l’expression du pouvoir politique. Le roi Louis XV tout d’abord, à qui l’œuvre de Jacques-François Blondel rendait hommage ; Guillaume II ensuite, kaiser du Second Reich immortalisé sous le traits du prophète Daniel sur le portail néo-gothique conçu par son architecte, Paul Tornow (1848–1921).
La massivité et la dissonance du vocabulaire classique du portique élevé par Jacques-François Blondel avec le style gothique de la cathédrale, maintes fois décriées dès le début du XIXe siècle, ont certainement contribué à cette métamorphose. Cependant, dans le contexte de l’annexion de l’Alsace-Moselle par la Prusse, son démantèlement au profit du portail néo-gothique de Paul Tornow invite aussi à interroger la portée politique du geste architectural : entre francisation et germanisation d’un territoire, le nouveau pouvoir n’a-t-il pas tenté de faire disparaître les traces d’un certain passé pour inscrire sa propre histoire ?
Stephanie Wiles Named Director of the Yale Art Gallery
Press release (28 March 2018) from Yale:
Stephanie Wiles (Photo by Jon Reis Photography).
Stephanie Wiles, currently the Richard J. Schwartz Director of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, will serve as the next Henry J. Heinz II Director of the Yale University Art Gallery, announced President Peter Salovey. Her appointment will begin July 1.
“I am thrilled to announce the appointment of Stephanie Wiles,” Salovey said. “She is an inspiring leader who is excited by the power of art to help us make connections and spark new ideas. I know she will steward the gallery—one of Yale’s finest treasures—while, together with other arts leaders on campus, envisioning new possibilities for the arts at our university.”
Wiles comes to Yale with over 20 years of experience leading college and university art museums. In her prior roles, Wiles has led efforts to connect the visual arts to other areas of university life by developing interdisciplinary courses, reimagining gallery spaces to be more inviting to visitors from campus and beyond, and spearheading exhibitions and publications to showcase research. She served on several committees at Cornell Tech, a science and technology graduate school in New York City, tasked with bringing art to the campus and into the curriculum. Wiles has successfully created educational and research opportunities across disciplines that take advantage of museum collections. She secured funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop eight semester-long courses that bridged the arts, humanities, science, and engineering.
At Cornell, Ms. Wiles oversaw the negotiation and completion of Cosmos, a site-specific light sculpture by Leo Villareal ’90 comprising 12,000 LED lights. The work, named in honor of scientist Carl Sagan and visible across campus and from many parts of Ithaca, is a beacon attracting visitors to the museum.
“Stephanie shares my commitment to connecting the arts to everything we do at Yale,” Salovey said. “The arts can bring us together, inspiring us to see ourselves and the world with new eyes. As we continue to foster an even more unified Yale, we are imagining new ways to connect the gallery’s magnificent resources to education, research, preservation, and practice. I am confident Stephanie will guide these efforts with enormous wisdom, creativity, and vision.”
Wiles began her career in the department of drawings and prints at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City; she later assumed leadership positions at Wesleyan University, Oberlin College, and, most recently, Cornell. Wiles received her bachelor’s degree from Hobart and William Smith Colleges, a master’s degree in art history from Hunter College of the City University of New York, and a Ph.D. in art history from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her dissertation surveys the careers of British-born artists Thomas Charles Farrer, a Ruskin admirer and leader of the American Pre-Raphaelites, and his brother Henry Farrer.
In making the announcement, Salovey expressed his deep appreciation to members of the search committee: Mary Miller (committee chair), Sterling Professor of History of Art and senior director of the Institute for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage; Emily Bakemeier, deputy provost and dean of faculty affairs of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences; Tim Barringer, the Paul Mellon Professor in the History of Art and chair of the Department of the History of Art; Deborah Berke, dean of the Yale School of Architecture; Susan Gibbons, the Stephen F. Gates ’68 University Librarian and deputy provost for collections and scholarly communication; Daniel Harrison, the Allen Forte Professor of Music Theory; Roger Horchow ’50, a member of the Yale University Art Gallery Advisory Board; Ian McClure, the Susan Morse Hilles Chief Conservator of the Yale University Art Gallery; and John Walsh ’61, a member of the Yale University Art Gallery Advisory Board and director emeritus of the J. Paul Getty Museum.
Salovey praised the tenure of Jock Reynolds, who will step down as director on June 30, noting that he had led the Yale University Art Gallery “with distinction, energy, and originality for 20 years.”
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