Enfilade

From the Krannert Art Museum:

Early Modern Global Political Art
In-person and online, Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 20–21 October 2022

Romeyn de Hooghe, Marriage of William and Mary, 1677, etching (Krannert Art Museum, 2019.7.7).

Featuring emerging scholarship on the art of this period against the backdrop of the exhibition Fake News & Lying Pictures: Political Prints in the Dutch Republic, Krannert Art Museum hosts a symposium on Early Modern Global Political Art.

In the early modern period, nations, nobles, corporations, religious groups, and others found dynamic and innovative ways to use the visual arts for a wide range of political purposes. Nations dispatched elaborate diplomatic gifts to initiate and consolidate alliances. Aristocratic powers and individual collectors alike amassed collections to convey and enhance their political and economic power. Courts and cities produced ephemeral decorations to assert and display ideal political relations between nobility and their subjects, and between regional and outside authorities. Broadsheets addressing factional conflicts within and among institutions proliferated with the expansion of affordable print media. This symposium will investigate visual media that communicated political ideas, arguments, positions, and forms of resistance in the early modern period.

The event will be hybrid, blending in person presentations with online presentations via Zoom to facilitate greater accessibility and wider participation. All virtual components will be live captioned in English via Zoom. If you have a question or an accessibility request, please email us at kam-accessibility@illinois.edu. Registration is required for virtual and in-person components of the symposium.

Keynote Speakers

Dawn Odell (Lewis & Clark College) — Dr. Odell studies artistic exchange between China and northern Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. She is currently writing a book on Andreas Everardus van Braam Houckgeest, an 18th-century Dutch Immigrant to the newly formed United States whose travelogues and Chinese porcelain collection were leveraged for social and political power.

Liza Oliver (Wellesley College) — Dr. Oliver’s research focuses on 18th- and 19th-century India, Europe, and the West Indies. Her current projects include the book Empire of Hunger: Representing Famine, Land, and Labor in Colonial India and work about British prints about abolition and the Haitian Revolution.

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9.00  Catholic Rulership around the World, Part One
• Moyun Zhou (PhD Candidate, University of Hong Kong), Can You Feel Me? The Global Space of St. Paul’s in Macao, 1592–1644
• Maria Vittoria Spissu (Senior Assistant Professor, University of Bologna and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow), Bonds and Tenets in the Wider Iberian Catholic Universe: Fostering Political Unanimity by Means of Early Modern Altarpieces and Books
• Małgorzata Biłozór-Salwa (Curator of Old Master Drawings, University of Warsaw Library), Let’s Make A Crusade! Power of Images Under Louis XIII

10.20  Fashion, Part One
• Isabel Escalera (PhD Candidate, University of Valladolid), Jewelry as A Political Instrument: Renaissance Women and the Transmission of Their Power
• Diana Lucía Gómez-Chacón (Faculty, Complutense University of Madrid), Fashion as A Political Art: Gender, Monarchy, and Spectacle in Early Modern Castile

11.15  Negotiating Political Power in Republics
• Răzvan-Iulian Rusu (Graduate Student, Utrecht University), Global Gifts of Johan Maurits: Patronage, Image-Formation, Art & Material Culture
• Laura Blom (Postdoctoral Fellow, Dutch University Institute for Art History, Florence), Death as Dissent: The Macabre and the Medici in Renaissance Florence

5.30  Keynote Lecture
• Liza Oliver (Associate Professor of Art, Wellesley College), An Economy of Sentiment: The Shared Language of Abolitionists and the West India Interest in Late 18th-Century British Print Culture  link»
This talk considers how spectatorial sympathy, a governing principle of 18th-century British art and literature, was deployed by opposing sides of the debate on Britain’s slave trade in the decades preceding its abolition. Considering broadsides, travel narratives, and caricatures, it argues for the ways in which sentiment became a common visual currency among both abolitionists and the pro-slavery lobby, with each side respectively seeking to sever or reaffirm the connection between morality on the one hand and self-interest and economic prosperity on the other.

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9.30  Coffee

10.00  Catholic Rulership around the World, Part Two
• Rachel Wise (2020 PhD in Art History, University of Pennsylvania), A Royal Devotion: Printed Habsburg Propaganda and the 80 Years’ War
• Angela Ho (Associate Professor, George Madison University), Risks and Payoffs: Ferdinand Verbiest’s World Map for Kangxi in Political Context

11.00  Fashion, Part Two
• Heather Hughes (Curator of Prints, Philadelphia Museum of Art), Recognizing the Enemy: The Spaniard in Dutch and Flemish Costume Prints
• Nancy Karrels (2022 PhD in Art History, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), Women for Bonaparte: Political Prints and Female Self-Fashioning in France’s Cultural Conquests

12.00  Lunch Break

1.30  Keynote
• Dawn Odell (Associate Professor of Art History, Lewis & Clark College), The Politics of Personhood in A.E. Van Braam Houckgeest’s China Memoir  link»
Following his participation in the Dutch East India Company’s last embassy to the Chinese court (1794–95), A.E. van Braam Houckgeest moved to Philadelphia with an enormous personal collection of Chinese art. This talk explores van Braam’s self-fashioning through his collaboration with two unnamed Guangzhou artists and the French émigré printer and defender of race-based slavery, M.L.E. Moreau de Saint-Méry. The illustrated memoir these men produced places van Braam’s textual narrative within an expansive visual environment of Chinese landscape paintings and other works of Asian art, conjuring artistic presences as testaments to the author’s self-proclaimed virtue, prestige, and republican ideals.

3.00  Tour of Fake News and Lying Pictures: Political Prints in the Dutch Republic

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From the Krannert:

Fake News & Lying Pictures: Political Prints in the Dutch Republic
Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 25 August — 17 December 2022

Curated by Maureen Warren

Comedians, editorial cartoons, and memes harness the power of satire, parody, and hyperbole to provoke laughter, indignation—even action. These forms of expression are usually traced to eighteenth-century artists, such as William Hogarth, but they are grounded in the unprecedented freedom of artistic expression in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic.

Maureen Warren, ed., with contributions by Wolfgang Cillessen, Meredith McNeill Hale, Daniel Horst, Maureen Warren, and Ilja Veldman, Paper Knives, Paper Crowns: Political Prints in the Dutch Republic (Champaign: Krannert Art Museum, 2022), 184 pages, ISBN: ‎978-1646570294, $40.