Exhibition | The Art of the Site: Building and Demolishing
Now on view at the Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine:
The Art of the Site: Building and Demolishing from the 16th to the 21th Century
Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine, Paris, 9 November 2018 — 11 March 2019
Curated by Valérie Nègre and Marie-Hélène Contal
The exhibition juxtaposes different viewpoints, bringing together a collection of works and documents produced by artists, journalists, and amateurs, as well as those who work in situ: engineers, architects, contractors, and—what is rarer—labourers, through votive offerings or masterpieces produced by the Compagnons charpentiers des Devoirs du Tour de France. The exhibition ends with the statements of three contemporary architect-engineers: Patrick Bouchain, Marc Mimram, and Martin Rauch, for whom the building site is ever increasingly the space where architecture meets complexity, inventiveness and the aspirations of the modern-day world.
As the result of close collaboration between specialists of art and specialists of techniques, the exhibition offers a diverse interpretation of the theme: it casts a light on the technical dimension, as well as the social, political, and artistic dimensions. The path begins with what you would expect to find on a site: construction processes, machines, and men at work. It then highlights the political and social issues about the place that is being built. Even though the site is a highly technical area, it is also a theatre for those in charge, who like to show themselves there, and for the labourers, who are sometimes viewed as oppressed masses, sometimes viewed as heroes.
L’Art du chantier: Construire et démolir du 16e au 21e siècle (Paris, Snoeck, 2018), 283 pages, ISBN: 978-9461614728, 42€.
New Book | Classical Art: A Life History
From Princeton UP:
Caroline Vout, Classical Art: A Life History from Antiquity to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 376 pages, ISBN: 978-0691177038, $40.
How did the statues of ancient Greece wind up dictating art history in the West? How did the material culture of the Greeks and Romans come to be seen as ‘classical’ and as ‘art’? What does ‘classical art’ mean across time and place? In this ambitious, richly illustrated book, art historian and classicist Caroline Vout provides an original history of how classical art has been continuously redefined over the millennia as it has found itself in new contexts and cultures. All of this raises the question of classical art’s future.
What we call classical art did not simply appear in ancient Rome, or in the Renaissance, or in the eighteenth-century Academy. Endlessly repackaged and revered or rebuked, Greek and Roman artifacts have gathered an amazing array of values, both positive and negative, in each new historical period, even as these objects themselves have reshaped their surroundings. Vout shows how this process began in antiquity, as Greeks of the Hellenistic period transformed the art of fifth-century Greece, and continued through the Roman empire, Constantinople, European court societies, the neoclassical English country house, and the nineteenth century, up to the modern museum. A unique exploration of how each period of Western culture has transformed Greek and Roman antiquities and in turn been transformed by them, this book revolutionizes our understanding of what classical art has meant and continues to mean.
Caroline Vout is Reader in Classics at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Christ’s College. Her books include Sex on Show: Seeing the Erotic in Greece and Rome, The Hills of Rome: Signature of an Eternal City, and Power and Eroticism in Imperial Rome.
C O N T E N T S
Preface
Acknowledgments
1 Setting the Agenda, or Putting the Art into Heritage
2 Finding the Classical in Hellenistic Greece
3 Making Greek Culture Roman Culture
4 Roman Art, the Building Blocks of Empire
5 Reviving Antiquity in Renaissance Italy
6 European Court Society and the Shaping of the Canon
7 ‘Neoclassicisms’ and the English Country House
8 Seeing Anew in the Nineteenth Century
9 The Death of Classical Art?
10 And the Moral of the Story . . .
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Conference | Art and Power, the Power of Art, Part III
From H-ArtHist:
Art et pouvoir, le pouvoir de l’art, III
Le séminaire annuel de l’équipe Histara, EA 7347, École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE)
Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA), Paris, 5 December 2018
P R O G R A M M E
9.30 Sabine Frommel (EPHE) Introduction
9.45 Matin
Présidence: Rachel Lauthelier-Mourier (EPHE)
• Emilie d’Orgeix (EPHE), Dessiner le vide: Vues de villes et matérialisation du pouvoir, XVIIe–XVIIIe siècles
• Marina Viallon (EPHE), Les tournois à la cour de France à la Renaissance
11.15 Pause café
11.30 Matin
Présidence: Rachel Lauthelier-Mourier (EPHE)
• Kristina Deutsch (Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster), Le décor du pouvoir entre la France et l’Allemagne vers 1700: Le pavillon des bains du château de Nymphenburg à Munich
• Jean-Michel Leniaud (EPHE), Les peintures de Delacroix à la bibliothèque du Sénat
13.00 Pause déjeuner
14.15 Après-midi
Présidence: Isabelle Saint-Martin (EPHE)
• Rachel Lauthelier-Mourier (EPHE), Les monarchies de l’âge classique confrontées au dévoilement du site de Persépolis et à l’obsédante question de la décadence
• Emmanuel de Waresquiel (EPHE), La prise de la Bastille et les métamorphoses de la liberté, 1789–1830
• Barbara von Orelli (Université de Zurich), Le préventorium Le Rosaire à Les Sciernes-d’Albeuve (Suisse): Un monument Art déco entre législation, administration et philanthropie
16.30 Pause café
16.45 Après-midi
Présidence: Isabelle Saint-Martin (EPHE)
• Florence Descamps (EPHE), Bercy. Décors ministériels
• Agnès Callu (CNRS), Domination(s): Histoire politique des commandes aux artistes, de 1980 à nos jours
• Jean-Miguel Pire (EPHE), L’histoire de l’art dans le débat public: Une ‘discipline active dans la cité’ (Chastel)?
19.00 Fin des travaux
Print Quarterly, December 2018
The eighteenth century in the current issue of Print Quarterly:
Print Quarterly 35.4 (December 2018)
François Vivares after Samuel Wale, Trade Card of Henry Scott, Gardener and Fruitseller, Weybridge, Surrey, 1754, etching and engraving, 281 × 211 mm (London: The British Museum).
A R T I C L E S
• Bryony Bartlett-Rawlings, “Jonathan Richardson (1667–1745) as Etcher,” pp. 392–406.
On the basis of the 1772 auction catalogue for the sale of Jonathan Richardson Jr’s collection, the article sheds light on Richardson’s activity as a printmaker, his working method, and intended audience. By quoting contemporary correspondence by and on the artist, the article also places Richardson’s etchings within the context of his life and work.
• Martin Hopkinson, “Gardeners’ Trade Cards by William Kilburn and François Vivares,” pp. 420–26.
Deservedly famous for his outstanding textile designs and illustrations to William Curtis’s Flora Londinensis, Kilburn also etched a trade card for the gardener Thomas Greening, an image of great botanical precision. A comparison is drawn with two elaborate trade cards for gardeners by François Vivares.
N O T E S A N D R E V I E W S
• Jean-Gérald Castex, Review of the exhibition catalogue, A Kingdom of Images: French Prints in the Age of Louis XIV, 1660–1715 (Getty Research Institute, 2015; and Bibliothèque National de France, 2015–16), pp. 430–32.
• An Van Camp, Review of Ad Stijnman and Simon Turner, ed., The New Hollstein Dutch & Flemish Etchings, Engravings, and Woodcuts, 1450–1700: Johannes Teyler and Dutch Colour Prints, parts 1–4 (Sound and Vision Publishers, 2017), pp. 432–34.
• Ger Luijten, Review of Nico Boerma, Aernout Borms, Alfons Thijs, and Jo Thijssen, eds., Kinderprenten, Volksprenten, Centsprenten, Schoolprenten: Populaire grafiek in de Nederlanden 1650–1950 (Uitgeverij Vantilt, 2014), p. 434.
“At more than a thousand pages,” this volume “is a reference work that deserves a place in any library striving to cover the history of printmaking … Written and compiled by Dutch and Flemish specialists of popular prints over a period of some ten years, it provides a mine of information that is nowhere else to be found … The book has a useful summary in English and German.”
• Anthony Dyson, Review of Richard Goddard, ‘Drawing on Copper’: The Basire Family of Copper-Plate Engravers and Their Works (Maastricht University Press, 2016), pp. 437–39.
• Notice of the exhibition catalogue, Marcela Vondráčková, Norbert Grund (1717–1767): Půvab všedního dne / The Charm of the Everyday, Czech and English (National Gallery in Prague, 2017), p. 459.
“This handsomely-illustrated exhibition catalogue gives a survey of the work of the delightful rococo painter Norbert Grund (1717–1767), who is scarcely known outside Central Europe … We look forward to learning more … in a comprehensive monograph on Grund’s oeuvre, which is due to be published by Marcela Vondráčková.”
• Patricia Emison, Review of Susanna Berger, The Art of Philosophy: Visual Thinking in Europe from the Late Renaissance to the Early Enlightenment (Princeton University Press, 2017), pp. 471–74.
“Berger’s readable and well-illustrated account tackles the topic of logic’s contribution to the history of visualization, and of scholastics’ interest in transmitting knowledge via images … Berger has dug deep in unusual places,” including a mnemonic treatise of 1725 and eighteenth-century student notebooks from Paris and Leuven. “This is fascinating material.”
• Sarah Grant, Review of April Calahan, Fashion Plates: 150 Years of Style (Yale University Press, 2015), pp. 474–78.
Exhibition | Georges Focus: The Madness of a Painter
From the communiqué de presse:
Georges Focus (1644–1708): La folie d’un peintre de Louis XIV
Palais des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 13 October 2018 — 6 January 2019
Curated by Emmanuelle Brugerolles
La découverte de l’œuvre de Georges Focus produite lors de son enfermement aux Petites Maisons suscite aujourd’hui l’étonnement, pour ne pas dire un choc, qui nous bouleverse. Elle nous inspire le sentiment de l’inédit, du jamais vu, et remet en cause nos idées reçues. Georges Focus, membre de l’Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture sous Louis XIV, eut une double production artistique, académique d’une part, personnelle et intime, d’autre part. L’étonnant corpus réuni en France pour la première fois au Palais des Beaux-Arts, soit environ 80 dessins ainsi que des estampes et des peintures provenant de l’université d’Édimbourg, de collections particulières et d’institutions publiques dont les Beaux-Arts de Paris, rend compte de sa trajectoire unique. Une occasion d’explorer l’oeuvre exceptionnelle et singulière d’un artiste de l’époque de Louis XIV, atteint de folie.
Emmanuelle Brugerolles, ed., Georges Focus: La Folie d’un Peintre de Louis XIV (Paris: Beaux-Arts de Paris Editions, 2018), 447 pages, ISBN: 978-2840565444, $80.
The full press release is available here»
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