Enfilade

From Bloomsbury:

Iris Moon and Richard Taws, eds., Time, Media, and Visuality in Post-Revolutionary France (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2021), 280 pages, ISBN: 978-1501348396 (hardback), £85 / $115. Digital formats also available.

The radical break with the past heralded by the French Revolution in 1789 has become one of the mythic narratives of our time. Yet in the drawn-out afterlife of the Revolution, and through subsequent periods of Empire, Restoration, and Republic, the question of what such a temporal transformation might involve found complex, often unresolved expression in visual and material culture.

This diverse collection of essays draws attention to the eclectic objects and forms of visuality that emerged in France from the beginning of the French Revolution through to the end of the July Monarchy in 1848. It offers a new account of the story of French art’s modernity by exploring the work of genre painters and miniaturists, sign-painters and animal artists, landscapists, architects, and printmakers, as they worked out what it meant to be ‘post-revolutionary’.

Iris Moon is Assistant Curator in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. She was awarded her PhD in 2013 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and was previously Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Getty Research Institute, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow and Assistant Director for Mellon Initiatives at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Visiting Assistant Professor at the Pratt Institute, New York. She is author of The Architecture of Percier and Fontaine and the Struggle for Sovereignty in Revolutionary France (2016).

Richard Taws is Reader in the History of Art at University College London. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Getty Foundation, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and the Bard Graduate Center, New York, and he was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2012. He is author of The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France (2013), and co-editor, with Genevieve Warwick, of Art and Technology in Early Modern Europe (2016). With a collective of scholars in various disciplines, he recently co-authored Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation, 1700–1900 (2018).

C O N T E N T S

List of Plates
List of Figures
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgments

Iris Moon and Richard Taws, Introduction
1  Jann Matlock — Miniature Style, 1789–1815
2  Iris Moon — Rupture, Interrupted: Rococo Recursions and Political Futures in Percier and Fontaine’s Napoleon Fan
3  Stephen Bann — A Draughtsman’s Contract: Court and Country in the work of Louis Lafitte
4  Katie Hornstein — Jean-Baptiste Huet’s Lions and the Look of the Captive in Post-Revolutionary France
5  Steven Adams — First as Farce, then as Tragedy: Art, Vaudeville, and Modern Painting after the French Revolution
6  Kathryn Desplanque — Monsieur Crouton, The Shop Sign Painter: The Unexceptional Artist in Early Nineteenth-Century Satirical Print
7  Daniel Harkett — Medium as Museum: Marie-Victoire Jaquotot’s Porcelain Painting and Post-Revolutionary Fantasies of Preservation
8  Susan L. Siegfried — The Cultural Politics of Fashion and the French Revolution of 1830
9  Richard Taws — A Storm is Coming: Georges Michel in the Wind

Index