Enfilade

From De Gruyter:

Yaëlle Biro and Noémie Étienne, eds., Rhapsodic Objects: Art, Agency, and Materiality, 1700–2000 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022) 236 pages, ISBN: 97-83110656640, $80. Also available as a free PDF file from the publisher.

Circulation and imitation are key factors in shaping the material world. The authors in this volume explore how technical knowledge, immaterial desires, and political agendas impact the production and consumption of visual and material culture across times and places. Their essays map multidirectional transactions for cultural goods in which source countries can be positioned at the center. Rhapsodic—literally to stitch or weave songs—paired with objects—from thrown against—intertwines complexity and action. Rhapsodic objects thus beckons to the layered narratives of the objects themselves, their making, and their reception over time. The concept further underlines their potential to express creativity, generate emotion, and reveal histories—often tainted with violence.

Edited by Yaëlle Biro (Metropolitan Museum of Art) and Noémie Étienne (Universität Bern).

C O N T E N T S

Yaelle Biro and Noemie Etienne, Introduction

Part 1 | Interlaced Patterns
• Dorothy Armstrong, Wandering Designs: The Repossession of the ‘Oriental’ Carpet and Its Imaginary
• Aziza Gril-Mariotte, The Art of Printed Textiles: Selecting Motifs in the Eighteenth Century
• Chonja Lee, Chintzes as Printed Matter and Their Entanglement within the Transatlantic Slave Trade around 1800

Part 2 | Embedded Relationships
• James Green, Interpretations of Central African Taste in European Trade Cloth of the 1890s
• Helen Glaister, The Picturesque in Peking: European Decoration at the Qing Court
• Rémi Labrusse and Bernadette Nadia Saou-Dufrêne, Cultural Intersections and Identity in Algeria on the Eve of the French Invasion: The Case of the Bey Palace in Constantine

Part 3 | Crafted Identities
• Ashley V. Miller, ‘What Is Colonial Art? And How Can It Be Modern?’: Design and Modernity in France and Morocco, 1925
• Victoria L. Rovine, Crafting Colonial Power: Weaving and Empire in France and French West Africa
• Thomas Grillot, A World of Knowledge: Recreating Lakota Horse Effigies
• Gail Levin, Frida Kahlo’s Circulating Crafts: Her Painting and Her Identities

Authors
Picture Credits

On this day (10 January) in 1706, Luisa Roldán died, as both a celebrated and impoverished artist. From the Getty Store:

Catherine Hall-van den Elsen, Luisa Roldán (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2021), 144 pages, ISBN 978-1606067321, $40.

This initial book in the groundbreaking new series Illuminating Women Artists is the first English-language monograph on the extraordinary Spanish Baroque sculptor Luisa Roldán.

Luisa Roldán (1652–1706), also known as La Roldana, was an accomplished Spanish Baroque artist, much admired during her lifetime for her exquisitely crafted and painted wood and terracotta sculptures. Roldán trained under her father and worked in Seville, Cádiz, and Madrid. She even served as sculptor to the royal chambers of two kings of Spain. Yet despite her great artistry and achievements, she has been largely forgotten by modern art history. Written for art lovers of all backgrounds, this beautifully illustrated book offers an important perspective that has been missing—a deeper understanding of the opportunities, and the challenges, facing a woman artist in Roldán’s time. With attention to the historical and social dynamics of her milieu, this volume places Roldán’s work in context alongside that of other artists of the period, including Velázquez, Murillo, and Zurbarán, and provides much-needed insight into what life was like for this trailblazing artist of seventeenth-century Spain.

Catherine Hall-van den Elsen studied Spanish art at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. She completed her MA and PhD on the life and work of Luisa Roldán.

C O N T E N T S

Series Foreword
Preface
Introduction

1  Women in Early Modern Spain
2  Sculpture in Early Modern Seville
3  Andalucía: Building a Career
4  Madrid: Challenge and Opportunity
5  Luisa Roldán through the Lenses of History

Chronology
Notes
List of Extant Works in Public and Church Collections
A Selection of Further Reading
Image Credits
Index