Exhibition | The Orléans Collection
This fall at NOMA:
The Orléans Collection
New Orleans Museum of Art, 26 October 2018 — 27 January 2019
Curated by Vanessa Schmid
Guido Reni, The Meeting of David and Abigail, 1615–20, oil on canvas, 61 × 65 inches (Norfolk, VA: Chrysler Museum of Art).
At its founding in 1718, New Orleans was named for the French Regent, Philippe II, Duke of Orléans (1674–1723). A formidable personality, Philippe II’s legacy is his patronage of the arts: architecture, painting, furniture, music, dance, and theatre. In celebration of the tricentennial of the city that bears his regal title, NOMA will present an exhibition of selections from the Duke’s magnificent personal collection. This international loan exhibition will bring together masterpieces by Veronese, Valentin, Poussin, Rubens, and Rembrandt that formerly graced the walls of the Palais Royal in Paris.
The quality of the Orléans Collection was universally praised during Philippe II’s lifetime and its stature is attested by the astounding 772 paintings inventoried at his death. Although originally bequeathed to the duke’s heirs, in the 1790s the family hastily sold the collection to raise money during the French Revolution. The subsequent sales became a watershed event in the history of collecting and museology. The exhibition and its accompanying scholarly catalogue will explore exceptional aspects of the collection through four guiding themes: the Palais Royal and its grand redecoration as a center for the arts and exchange in Paris; the diplomatic and personal display of the collection in public and private spaces; the Duke of Orléans’ personal taste and psychology as a collector; and the fame and impact the collection had for contemporary visitors, artists, and collectors in Paris.
No exhibition of this fascinating subject has been undertaken and this project offers an exceptional opportunity for new scholarship, with a catalogue structured to maximize scholarly research and publish new research about Philippe II’s collection. The Orléans Collection will bring together, for the first time since its 1790s dispersal, a representative group of forty works that tell the story of its formation and character.
Vanessa Schmid with Julia Armstrong-Totten and essays by Jean-François Bédard, Kelsey Brosnan, Alexandre Dupilet, Nicole Garnier-Pelle, Françoise Mardrus, Rachel McGarry, and Xavier Salomon, The Orléans Collection (London: D. Giles Limited, 2018), 288 pages, ISBN: 978-1911282280, $55.
As described in John Kemp’s article for New Orleans Magazine (May 2018):
In addition to luxurious and historic artwork, the show also will explore the duke’s artistic tastes and psychology as a collector, the Palais-Royal as a center for the arts in Paris, how the duke displayed his collection in private and public spaces in the palace, the history of the collection, court life, the collection’s reputation based on earlier writings and Parisian guidebooks from the early 1700s, and, finally, the collection’s influences on 18th-century artists in Europe…
The full article is available here»
Call for Papers | The Orléans Collection
From the CFP:
The Orléans Collection: Tastemaking, Networks, and Legacy
New Orleans Museum of Art, 11–13 January 2019
Proposals due by 30 September 2018
Attributed to Guy Noël Aubry, Portrait of Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, 1715–23, oil on canvas, 248 × 160 cm (Orléans: Musée des Beaux Arts d’Orléans, François Lauginie).
The New Orleans Museum of Art and the Frick Center for the History of Collecting will host a
symposium in conjunction with The Orléans Collection exhibition dedicated to the collecting and collection of Philippe II duc d’Orléans (1674–1723) on view at the New Orleans Museum of Art 26 October 2018 through 27 January 2019.
Collecting over just over two decades, Philippe II d’Orléans amassed one of the most important collections of European paintings in the history of art, which he displayed in his Palais-Royal in Paris. This celebrated collection assembled over 500 masterpieces of European Art and this landmark exhibition reunites a representative group of forty works to tell the complex story of the collection’s formation and character and the impact of the sales of the collection in London during the French revolution, a watershed event in the history of collecting.
The Orléans Collection exhibition catalogue essays offer an overview of the collection, Philippe’s relationship with his court painter Antoine Coypel, the refurbishment of the Palais-Royal during the regency, his collecting of Venetian, Dutch and Flemish and Bolognese Art, contemporary artists studying the collection, and a review of the circumstances of the collection’s dispersal. The catalogue’s extensive Appendix transcribes the earliest 1727 publication of the collection tracing picture to their current locations.
The symposium seeks to expand beyond the scope of the catalogue and consider a wider range of relationships concerning Philippe d’Orléans’s taste and the impact the collection had for generations of collectors and artists, and an increasingly wider public throughout the eighteenth century. Subjects of interest might include: Philippe II’s patronage network; fellow collectors and trends in collecting in Paris; dealers and the art market in eighteenth-century Paris; connections with contemporary collections in the German principalities; the ‘Orléans Effect’ in Great Britain and later entrance in public collections.
Travel can be provided to a limited number of applicants. To propose a paper, please submit a message of interest and 300-word abstract by 30 September 2018 to: nomasymposium@noma.org.
Workshop | Heritage Revisited: Objects from Islamic Lands in Europe
As many of you will already know, H-ArtHist has returned from summer break:
Heritage Revisited: Rediscovering Objects from Islamic Lands in Enlightenment Europe
Kunsthistorisches Institut, University of Vienna, 20–21 September 2018
Registration due by 15 September 2018
Organized by Isabelle Dolezalek and Mattia Guidett
For centuries, objects from Islamic lands were unquestioned parts of the material and visual culture of pre-modern Latinate Europe. A textile from Fatimid Egypt, for instance, the so-called ‘Veil of Sainte Anne’, was kept in the cathedral treasury of Apt and venerated as a Christian relic.
The workshop Heritage Revisited: Rediscovering Objects from Islamic Lands in Enlightenment Europe is dedicated to the long eighteenth century, a period in which, so we believe, an important shift in the perception of such objects took place. Islamic provenances were rediscovered, objects were studied, drawn and discussed. Finally, they were subjected to the classificatory scheme of European modernity, which leaves little space for conceptions of a historically entangled heritage.
Object case-studies shed light on the networks of scholars and institutions involved in the rediscoveries and will be framed in the discussions within broader discourses on (European) cultural heritage. Ultimately, we wish to offer new perspectives on the history of scholarship, notably Islamic art history, but also on perceptions of cultural belonging, of ‘Europeanness’ and ‘Otherness’, which deeply resonate with current societal concerns.
Attendance is free. Please register by 15 September 2018, mattia.guidetti@univie.ac.uk. The workshop is kindly supported by the Fritz-Thyssen Foundation, the Chair of Islamic Art History and the Historisch-Kulturwissenschaftliche Fakultät of the University of Vienna.
T H U R S D A Y , 2 0 S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
10:00 Visit to the Dom Museum Wien with Gregor Pirgie (Universität Wien), Pia Razenberger (Tabadul Project), and Markus Ritter (Universität Wien). Places for the visit are limited; please register by 15 September 2018, mattia.guidetti@univie.ac.uk.
13:30 Welcome and Introduction — Isabelle Dolezalek (Technische Universität Berlin/SFB ‘Episteme in Bewegung’ Freie Universität Berlin) and Mattia Guidetti (Universität Wien)
14:00 Collections
Chair: Ebba Koch (Universität Wien)
• Elisabeth Rodini (Johns Hopkins University Baltimore), The Redaldi Inventory: A Prologue to Enlightenment Collecting
• Federica Gigante (Ashmolean Museum Oxford), Objects of a ‘Certain Antiquity’ and the Quest for Their Cultural Context
15:20 Coffee
15.50 Rediscovering Objects from Islamic Lands
Chair: Barbara Karl (Textilmuseum St. Gallen)
• Claire Dillon (Columbia University New York), The Many Dimensions of a Work of Art: The Mantle of Roger II as a Case Study in Imperial Representation, Origin Stories, and the Formation of Specific Others
• Michelina di Cesare (Sapienza Università di Roma), Four Eleventh and Twelfth-Century Islamic Tombstones Discovered in Pozzuoli in the Seventeenth Century
• Carine Juvin (Musée du Louvre Paris), The ‘Baptistère de Saint-Louis’ through the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: The Making of a ‘Historical Monument’
• Anna Contadini (School of African and Oriental Studies London), Changing Perceptions of the Pisa Griffin and Other Objects
19:00 Dinner
F R I D A Y , 2 1 S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8
9:30 Protagonists of the Rediscoveries
Chair: Johannes Wieninger (MAK Österreichisches Museum für angewandte Kunst Wien)
• Mattia Guidetti (Universität Wien), Reading Ottoman Flags in the Marches Region, 1684–1838
• Markus Ritter (Universität Wien), A Documentary Encounter with Medieval (Islamic) Art in Eighteenth-Century Vienna
• Tobias Mörike (Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg), Knowledge-Brokers and Object-Interpreters: Maronite Christians and the Redefinition of ‘Islamicate Objects’ by the 1800s
11:30 Coffee
12:00 Discussion Tables
Table 1 with Isabelle Dolezalek (TU/FU, Berlin), On the Concept of Cultural Heritage: What Is European and What Is Not?
Table 2 with Tobias Mörike (Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg), Art Market Networks and Their Role in Constituting ‘Islamic Art’ Objects
Table 3 with Barbara Karl (Textilmuseum St. Gallen), Object Biographies and Dynamics of Collecting
12:45 Plenum Discussion
13:30 Lunch
14:30 Classifiying, Framing, Exhibiting
Chair: Markus Ritter (Universität Wien)
• Sabine Du Crest (Université de Bordeaux), Islamic Border Objects in Seventeenth-Century Europe
• Gül Kale (McGill University Montreal), Image as Text: Fischer von Erlach’s Take on Guillaume Grelot’s Drawings of Islamic Monuments in the Eighteenth Century
• Ebba Koch (Universität Wien), Mughal Miniatures at Habsburg Vienna
16:30 Final Discussion
Enfilade 
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