Exhibition | Threads of Power
Opening this week at BGC:
Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen
Bard Graduate Center, New York, 16 September 2022 — 1 January 2023
Curated by Emma Cormack, Ilona Kos, and Michele Majer
“I love lace for evening dresses … for a cocktail frock … or for a blouse… . When a fabric is fancy in itself it needs simplicity of design to show it to its best advantage.” —Christian Dior
Point de France needle-lace frelange with lappets, Orne, France, ca. 1695, linen (Textilmuseum St. Gallen, acquisition from the John Jacoby Collection, 1954,01246; photo by Michael Rast).
Lace—delicate, sumptuous, enigmatic—takes over the Bard Graduate Center Gallery this fall. Trace the development of European lace from its sixteenth-century origins to the present day. See more than 150 examples of lace from the renowned collection of Switzerland’s Textilmuseum St. Gallen, including some of the world’s finest examples of handmade needle and bobbin lace that were favored by the wealthy and powerful of Bourbon France and Habsburg Spain. Learn about the women who crafted this sought-after status symbol by hand and about the evolution of Swiss chemical lace, known as guipure lace, made on embroidery machines. Explore new innovations in lace production, like laser-cut and 3D-printed lace, used in contemporary haute couture.
Curated by Emma Cormack, associate curator, Bard Graduate Center; Ilona Kos, curator, Textilmuseum St. Gallen; and Michele Majer, assistant professor, Bard Graduate Center. Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen is organized by Bard Graduate Center and the Textilmuseum St. Gallen. The exhibition will open at Bard Graduate Center Gallery in New York in September 2022 and will be available to tour after closing in January 2023.
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Emma Cormack and Michele Majer, eds., Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen (New York: Bard Graduate Center, 2022), 432 pages, ISBN: 978-0300263497, $75.
Tracing the history of lace in fashion from its sixteenth-century origins to the present, Threads of Power: Lace from the Textilmuseum St. Gallen offers a look at one of the world’s finest collections of historical lace. The book explores the longstanding connections between lace and status, addressing styles in lace worn at royal courts, including Habsburg Spain and Bourbon France, as well as lace worn by the elite ruling classes and Indigenous peoples in the Spanish Americas. Featuring new research, the publication covers a range of topics related to lace production, lace in fashion and portraiture, lace revivals, the mechanization of the lace industries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and contemporary innovations in lace. With a focus on lace techniques, women lace makers, and lace as a signifier of wealth and power, this richly illustrated book includes wide-ranging contributions by curators and experts from major museums and academic institutions.
C O N T E N T S
Director’s Foreword, Susan Weber
Editor’s Note
Introduction, Emma Cormack and Michele Majer
The Emergence of Lace in Early Modern Europe
1 Barbara Karl — Lace and Status: Luxury, Power, and Control in Early Modernity
2 Femke Speelberg — Putting a Name to Lace: Fashion, Fame, and the Production of Printed Textile Pattern Books
3 Paula Hohti Erichsen — ‘Monstrous’ Ruffs and Elegant Trimmings: Lace and Lacemaking in Early Modern Italy
4 Frieda Sorber — Antwerp, A Center of Lace Making and Lace Dealing, 1550–1750
Lace in Spain and the Americas, 1500–1800
5 Amalia Descalzo Lorenzo — The Triumph of Lace: Spanish Portraiture of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
6 Mariselle Méléndez — ‘A desire of being distinguished by an elegant dress is universal’: Clothing, Status and Convenience in Eighteenth-Century Spanish America
7 James Middleton — A Prodigious Excess: Lace in New Spain and Peru, ca. 1600–1800
8 Laura Beltrán-Rubio — ‘Covered in much fine lace’: Dress in the Viceroyalty of New Granada
The Dominance of France, 1660–1790
9 Denis Bruna — Lace and Economy under Louis XIV
10 Lesley Miller — Lace à la Mode, ca. 1690–1790
Mechanization and Revivalism: The Nineteenth Century Lace Industries
11 Emma Cormack and Michele Majer — Fashion and the Lace Industries in France, Belgium, and England, 1800–1900
12 Annabel Bonnin Talbot — Ahead of the Curve: A. Blackbourne & Co. and the Late-Nineteenth Century British Lace Industry
13 Emily Zilber — Italy to New York: Making Historic Textiles Modern at the Scoula d’Industrie Italiane
14 Anne Wanner-JeanRichard and Ilona Kos — Imitation and Inspiration: The Leopold Iklé Collection in St. Gallen
Innovations in Lace, 1900 to Today
15 Catherine Örmen — Fashion and Lace since 1900
16 Annina Dosch, Interview with Tobias Forster, Hans Schreiber, and Martin Leuthold — Lace in St. Gallen Today: Tradition and Innovation at Forster Rohner and Jakob Schlaepfer
Illustrated Checklist of the Exhibition
Glossary, compiled by Kenna Libes
Bibliography
Contributors
Index
Lecture | Charles Kang on Antoine Benoist’s Portraits of Louis XIV
From BGC:
Charles Kang | From Wax to Paper: Antoine Benoist’s Portraits of Louis XIV
A Françoise and Georges Selz Lecture on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Decorative Arts and Culture
Bard Graduate Center, New York, 28 September 2022, 6.00pm
Antoine Benoist (1632–1717), Portrait of Louis XIV, ca. 1705, colored wax with a natural wig. 52 × 42 cm (Musée national des châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon).
Painter and sculptor Antoine Benoist is best known for a profile relief portrait of Louis XIV in polychrome wax. The striking verisimilitude of this work and his other wax creations readily evoke the popular wax statues at Madame Tussauds. In this lecture, Charles Kang explores the outer limits of royal portraiture at the time of Louis XIV, beyond oil paintings, marble busts, bronze statues, and medals. Kang also looks at two other works that Benoist produced towards the end of his career: a group of grisaille miniature portraits in elaborate gilt bronze frames and a manuscript biography of Louis XIV decorated with similar miniatures in gouache. Through these works, Benoist attempted to reposition himself as a chronicler of royal likeness rather than as a wax portraitist.
Charles Kang is Curator of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Drawings at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. Responsible for the museum’s collection of Dutch and European drawings, he is currently working on several projects, including one on the rise of private drawing societies in the Netherlands and another on the relationship between artistic drawing and early ethnography. He trained in eighteenth-century French art and visual culture and holds a PhD from Columbia University and an MA from Williams College in the history of art.
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