Yale Launches LUX to Search Collections
As announced earlier this summer, from Yale News:
Mike Cummings, “17 Million Reasons to Love ‘LUX,’ Yale’s New Collections Search Tool,” Yale News (1 June 2023). Yale introduces LUX, a groundbreaking custom search tool for exploring the university’s unparalleled holdings of artistic, cultural, and scientific objects.
Yale University’s museums, libraries, and archives contain vast troves of cultural and scientific heritage that fire curiosity and fuel research worldwide. Now there’s a simple new way to make astonishing connections among millions of objects.
Starting today, anyone can explore the university’s unparalleled holdings online through LUX: Yale Collections Discovery—a groundbreaking discovery and research platform that provides single-point access to more than 17 million items, including defining specimens of dinosaur fossils, illuminated medieval manuscripts, paintings by Vincent van Gogh and J. M. W. Turner, and the archives of Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, and other renowned literary figures.
Free and easy to use, the platform—a powerful kind of database that maps relationships—helps users find clear pathways through the collections and uncover links between objects that might otherwise seem unconnected, such as a fish fossil and an 18th-century sketch of a young woman. Previously there was no easy way to search multiple collections at once or discern associations among the objects within them.
Developed by Yale over the past five years, LUX encompasses the collections of the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA), the Yale University Art Gallery, the Yale Peabody Museum, and Yale University Library, which includes the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, the Lewis Walpole Library, and specialized collections devoted to the arts, music, film, history of medicine, and religion. The Mellon Foundation, the nation’s largest funder of the arts and humanities, funded key aspects of the project and was instrumental in its completion. . . .
Ayesha Ramachandran, associate professor of comparative literature in Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, has experimented with LUX, and calls it a “terrific tool” for teaching and conducting research.
“I was struck by the way LUX is constructed to be a tool of exploration and not just a database,” Ramachandran said. “It is extremely intuitive and conceptually organized to allow you to drill down to learn more about the object of your search.”
Call for Papers | 2024 Wallace Seminars in the History of Collecting
From the Call for Papers:
Seminars in the History of Collecting, 2024
The Wallace Collection, London, last Monday of the Month
Proposals due by 1 September 2023
The seminar series was established as part of the Wallace Collection’s commitment to the research and study of the history of collections and collecting, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries in Paris and London. We are keen to encourage contributions covering all aspects of the history of collecting, including:
• Formation and dispersal of collections
• Dealers, auctioneers, and the art market
• Collectors
• Museums
• Inventory work
• Research resources
The seminars, which are normally held on the last Monday of every month during the calendar year, excluding August and December, act as a forum for the presentation and discussion of new research into the history of collecting. Seminars are open to curators, academics, historians, archivists, and all those with an interest in the subject. Papers should generally be 45–60 minutes long. Seminars take place between 5.30 and 7.00pm. The seminars will take place jointly at the Wallace Collection and Bonhams, and online.
If interested, please send a short text (500 words), a brief CV, and indicate any months when you would not be available to speak, by Friday 1 September 2023. Please note: if your paper is accepted, you will need to send us your paper’s title (maximum 90 characters with spaces), a 200-word abstract, a 50-word bio, and one image with its caption for promotional purposes. For more information and to submit a proposal, please contact: History.OfCollecting@wallacecollection.org
Please note that we are able to contribute up to the following sums towards speakers’ travelling expenses on submission of receipts:
• Speakers within the UK – £100
• Speakers from Continental Europe – £180
• Speakers from outside Europe – £300
The series is supported by Bonhams.
Laure Marest Named Curator of Ancient Coins at Harvard Art Museums
From the press release (4 August 2023) . . .
Laure Marest’s research interests include ancient Greek art, especially coins, engraved gems, and Hellenistic portraits, as well as the reception of antiquity in the 18th and 19th centuries. Photo by Mike Ritter.
Martha Tedeschi, the Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot Director of the Harvard Art Museums, today announced the appointment of Laure Marest as the new Damarete Associate Curator of Ancient Coins—one of the few numismatic positions based at a U.S. university museum. Marest will lead the charge in rethinking the presentation of the museums’ sizable collection of ancient Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and other coins, as well as related objects, and in proposing fresh perspectives for the field through programs and publishing. She will begin her new role at Harvard on 18 September 2023.
Marest is currently the Cornelius and Emily Vermeule Associate Curator of Greek and Roman Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where she was previously assistant curator from 2017 to 2022. While at the MFA, she co-curated The Marlborough Gem (2023) and worked with colleagues to renovate and install five new permanent collection galleries featuring the art of ancient Greece, Rome, and the Byzantine Empire, which opened in December 2021. Marest was the lead curator for the Gods and Goddesses Gallery, a major display of large-scale sculptures of ancient Greek and Roman deities—including the MFA’s monumental Juno—and more intimate objects used for religious rituals. She also is author of a forthcoming publication on the collection of ancient Greek and Roman engraved gems at the MFA.
In her role at the Harvard Art Museums, Marest will join the Division of Asian and Mediterranean Art and oversee the museums’ numismatic collection. Working with colleagues across the museums and the Harvard campus, as well as with community stakeholders, she will participate in a museum-wide rethinking and reframing of the museums’ permanent collections galleries and contribute to exhibitions and publications. She will research the current numismatic holdings and make acquisitions to diversify the collection. She will also work closely with students and faculty to continue to expand use of the collection in undergraduate and graduate teaching across disciplines; she will mentor students and curatorial fellows, training and nurturing the next generation in her field.
“We are delighted to welcome Laure to the Harvard Art Museums,” said Tedeschi. “Harvard students and our public audiences have long been fascinated with ancient coins, which feature prominently in our collection galleries. Laure’s expertise across different media and her wide-ranging interests and passion for inclusive storytelling will further expand our efforts to connect visitors to the peoples and cultures of the ancient Mediterranean and Middle East.”
“I am excited to join the Harvard community and to work closely with colleagues across the museums and faculty to animate the numismatic collection and rethink the permanent displays,” said Marest. “And it is a great honor to succeed Carmen Arnold-Biucchi, a grande dame in the field, in this position, which itself was named after Damarete, an exemplary female ruler of Syracuse whose deeds were praised in antiquity.”
Marest has previously held teaching positions at the University of California, Berkeley, and California State University, Northridge, as well as curatorial assistant and intern positions in the Department of Antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. At the Getty, she assisted with several exhibitions, including Modern Antiquity: Picasso, De Chirico, Léger and Picabia in the Presence of the Antique (2011–12), The Art of Ancient Greek Theater (2010–11), Collector’s Choice: J. Paul Getty and His Antiquities (2009–10), and Carvers and Collectors: The Lasting Allure of Ancient Gems (2009).
Marest received her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, and holds degrees from California State University, Northridge, and the Sorbonne, Paris. She has participated in excavations in Albania and Italy and was previously involved as a researcher and photographer for the Pompeii Artifact Life History Project and as a gem specialist and photographer for the Pompeii Archaeological Research Project: Porta Stabia. Her research interests include ancient Greek art, especially coins, engraved gems, and portraiture of the Hellenistic period, as well as the reception of antiquity in the 18th and 19th centuries. She has presented at numerous conferences throughout the United States and has published in the American Journal of Numismatics and contributed to Hellenistic Sealings & Archives: Proceedings of The Edfu Connection, an International Conference (2021) for the Studies in Classical Archaeology series, and to Proceedings of the XV International Numismatic Congress (2017).
Comprising over 20,000 coins, the numismatic collection of the Harvard Art Museums is comprehensive and ideally suited for teaching. Greek, Roman, and Byzantine coins from c. 630 BCE to 1453 CE form the core of the collection, but it also features examples of (west) Asian, Islamic, western medieval, and later coins. Thanks to the long-term loan of the Arthur Stone Dewing Collection, the museums’ holdings of Greek coinage are particularly strong and include the world’s largest collection of Syracusan decadrachms. The coin collection has grown steadily through bequests, gifts, and purchases over the last 125 years. Among these, the Thomas Whittemore bequest of Byzantine coins is especially notable. The bequest of Frederick M. Watkins contains Greek and Roman coins of exceptional quality. The 2005 acquisition of the collection of Margarete Bieber, the 2008 acquisition of the Zvi Griliches Collection, and the transfer of the Alice Corinne McDaniel Collection from Harvard University’s Department of the Classics have significantly enriched the holdings of ancient Greek, Roman, and Jewish coins.
The Magazine of the Decorative Arts Trust, Summer 2023
The Decorative Arts Trust has shared select articles from the summer issue of their member magazine as online articles for all to enjoy. The following pieces are relevant to the eighteenth century:
The Magazine of the Decorative Arts Trust, Summer 2023
The magazine cover features Ickworth Hall, a site which Decorative Arts Trust members visited during a recent study trip to East Anglia.
• Matthew A. Thurlow, “Hervey Silver at Ickworth” Link»
• Debbie Miller, “Privies, Puzzles, and Pots: The Archaeology of Philadelphia Ceramics” Link»
• Jorge F. Rivas Pérez, “The Material World of the Spanish Colonial Estrado” Link»
• Foong Ping, “Chronicles of a Global East: Seattle Art Museum Exhibition Examines Silk Roads and Maritime Routes” Link»
• William Keyse Rudolph, “Luxury and Passion: Inventing French Porcelain at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art” Link»
• Bethany McGlyn, “Completing the Picture: New Research into Craft, Slavery, and Servitude in Early Lancaster” Link»
• Susan Eberhard, “Chinese Metalwork and English Restoration Silver in the ‘Chinese Taste’” Link»
The print Magazine of the Decorative Arts Trust is mailed to Trust members twice per year. Memberships start at $50, with $25 student memberships.
Exhibition | Luxury and Passion: Inventing French Porcelain
Now on view at The Nelson-Atkins:
Luxury and Passion: Inventing French Porcelain
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, 13 August 2022 — 12 August 2024
Designed by Louis Poterat, made by Louis Poterat Manufactory (Rouen, France, 1690–1696), potpourri jar, ca. 1690–96, soft-paste porcelain with underglaze enamel decoration, 12.4 × 11.4 cm (Kansas City, Missouri: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2021.10).
Luxury and Passion celebrates the debut of a new acquisition, one of the earliest pieces of soft-paste porcelain made in France in the late 17th century. A potpourri jar, one of the handful of experimental pieces made by the Poterat Manufactory in Rouen, France, is one of only about a dozen surviving works by this brief-lived company, and only the second example in a US museum–only four exist in museums worldwide. The new acquisition gives us the opportunity to feature almost the entire collection of the museum’s important 18th-century French porcelain holdings. In this focus installation, the Nelson-Atkins explores how France launched itself into the domestic porcelain industry in the 17th and 18th centuries. This beautiful, durable type of ceramic was the focus of intense competition among European superpowers, all who raced to discover how to make this ‘white gold’ for themselves, after falling in love with imported Asian wares.
New Book | Brittle Beauty
Published by Paul Holberton and distributed by The University of Chicago Press:
Andreina d’Angeliano, Claudia Lehner-Jobst, Errol Manners, Rosalind Savill, Selma Schwartz, and Jeffrey Munger, Brittle Beauty: Reflections on 18th-Century European Porcelain (London: Ad Ilissvm, 2023), 560 pages, ISBN: 978-1912168293, £90 / $110.
Brittle Beauty presents a superlative private collection of European porcelain—radical, rare, and in many cases unique pieces assembled over thirty years. Lavishly illustrated and insightfully researched, the book showcases eighty vessels and sculptures and includes accounts of their patrons and former owners, many as eccentric as the works themselves.
One striking attribute of porcelain is its reflective glaze. Mirror-like in a wider sense, Brittle Beauty: Reflections on 18th-Century European Porcelain examines the context in which this porcelain was created—including cultural, political, topographical, and ceremonial aspects. It also looks at related materials such as silver, textiles, and glass.
The 18th century was the golden age of porcelain in Europe, which had previously been dependent on precious imports from the Far East. The discovery of the formula for hard-paste porcelain in Dresden in 1709 inspired the establishment of manufactories throughout the Continent. However, its popularity was not purely commercial: porcelain—with its meld of art and science, beauty and intellect, East and West—became a symbol of Enlightenment culture for every princely court. Oriental motifs and European forms were synthesised with deceptive subtlety; later, creations of pure fantasy emerged, often based on travellers’ accounts of exotic lands. Familiar Occidental themes such as nature, hunting, or archaeology were paralleled by ironic narratives of love and vanity. Porcelain, with its fragile allure, is uniquely expressive of the human comedy, yet its destiny has often been brutal and tragic. This book features essays from several eminent scholars. It also showcases a wealth of stunning imagery from Sylvain Deleu, who expertly photographed the pieces, many for the first time.
Andreina d’Agliano art historian and curator, is a specialist in porcelain from Turin and Florence and has published various private and public collections.
Claudia Lehner-Jobst is an art historian specializing in European decorative arts, notably du Paquier porcelain, and Director of the Augarten Porcelain Museum, Vienna.
Errol Manners, FSA is a dealer in antique ceramics based in London and the former Chair of The French Porcelain Society and of the Ceramics Vetting Committee at TEFAF (Maastricht) and Masterpiece (London).
Dame Rosalind Savill, DBE, FBA, FSA, worked at the Victoria and Albert Museum and at the Wallace Collection (where she was Director from 1992 until 2011), and has published widely on Sèvres porcelain.
Selma Schwartz, an independent scholar, was Deputy Keeper and Curator of Porcelain at the Rothschild Collection, Waddesdon Manor for over 25 years.
Jeffrey Munger is a former curator in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
New Book | My Dark Room
From The University of Chicago Press:
For 30% off US orders, visit http://www.press.uchicago.edu and enter code MDR30 at checkout (expires 31 December 2023). For 30% off UK and European orders, call +44 (0) 1243 843291 or email chicago.csd@wiley.com and redeem with promo code MDR30 (expires 7 September 2023).
Julie Park, My Dark Room: Spaces of the Inner Self in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2023), 344 pages, ISBN: 978-0226824758 (cloth), $105 / ISBN: 978-0226824765 (paper), $35. Also available as a PDF.
Examines spaces of inner life in eighteenth-century England to shed new light on interiority in literature and visual and material culture.
In what kinds of spaces do we become most aware of the thoughts in our own heads? In My Dark Room, Julie Park explores places of solitude and enclosure that gave eighteenth-century subjects closer access to their inner worlds: grottos, writing closets, landscape follies, and the camera obscura, that beguiling ‘dark room’ inside which the outside world in all its motion and color is projected. The camera obscura and its dreamlike projections within it served as a paradigm for the everyday spaces, whether in built environments or in imaginative writing, that generated the fleeting states of interiority eighteenth-century subjects were compelled to experience and inhabit.
My Dark Room illuminates the spatial and physical dimensions of inner life in the long eighteenth century by synthesizing material analyses of diverse media, from optical devices and landscape architecture to women’s intimate dress, with close readings of literary texts not traditionally considered together, among them Andrew Marvell’s country house poem Upon Appleton House, Margaret Cavendish’s experimental epistolary work Sociable Letters, Alexander Pope’s heroic verse epistle Eloisa to Abelard, and Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela. Park also analyzes letters and diaries, architectural plans, prints, drawings, paintings, and more, drawing our attention to the lively interactions between spaces and psyches in private environments. Park’s innovative method of ‘spatial formalism’ reveals how physical settings enable psychic interiors to achieve vitality in lives both real and imagined.
Julie Park is Paterno Family Librarian for Literature and professor of English at the Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of The Self and It: Novel Objects in Eighteenth-Century England and coeditor of Organic Supplements: Bodies and Things of the Natural World, 1580–1790.
c o n t e n t s
Introduction
1 Country House: Making Storylines at Nun Appleton
2 Closet: Margaret Cavendish’s Writing Worlds
3 Grotto: Design and Projection in Alexander Pope’s Garden
4 Pocket: Pamela’s Mobile Settings and Spatial Forms
5 Folly: Fictions of Gothic Space in Eighteenth-Century Landscapes
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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Note (added 8 August) — The posting was updated to include the discount code.
Exhibition | UFO 1665
So Sehr War Nei Erzürnet Gott / Never Was God So Full of Wrath, detail, emblematic representation from Daniel Meisner, Politica – Politica, Newes Emblematisches Büchlein, I–VIII (Nürnberg, ca. 1700), engraving (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kunstbibliothek).
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I was fortunate to see this exhibition a few weeks ago and can’t recommend it highly enough: it’s thoughtfully conceived, brilliantly installed, incredibly engaging, and deeply satisfying. It’s also just a lot of fun! A model for how to make the history of visual conventions (overlapping with history of ideas generally) broadly accessible (my thirteen-year-old daughter was riveted). It’s a reminder of how many of our categories for making sense of the world emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The catalogue is certainly worth ordering. –CH
UFO 1665: The Air Battle of Stralsund / Die Luftschlacht von Stralsund
Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, 5 May — 3 September 2023
Curated by Moritz Wullen
In April 1665, six fishermen witnessed an unexplained celestial phenomenon: an aerial battle in the skies above the Baltic Sea near Stralsund. As evening broke, a dark-grey disk appeared high above the city centre. UFO 1665 is the first exhibition of its kind to focus on this historical UFO sighting. With reference to contemporaneous visual and textual sources, the exhibition reconstructs the way this event was portrayed in the media and exposes certain paradigms and communications strategies that are still used today to determine how we report on ‘unexplained aerial phenomena’ (UAPs).
The exhibition takes visitors on an expedition into a strange and unfamiliar world of images that otherwise remains concealed from the museum’s general audience in archives or between the pages of old books. Those who are familiar with 17th-century art only from the grand galleries of paintings may be taken aback: upon entering the exhibition space, visitors might feel they are entering a baroque parallel universe with strange symbols in the sky, airships, space rockets, and flying saucers. Everything is centred around one of the most spectacular celestial phenomena of the modern era: at 2pm on 8 April 1665, six men fishing for herring off the coast of Stralsund watch as great flocks of birds in the sky morph into warships and engage in a thunderous air battle. The decks teem with ghostly figures. When, at dusk, “a flat, round shape like a plate” appears above the St. Nicholas Church, they flee. The following day, they find that they are trembling all over and complain of pain.
Media Transformation
The media spread the news like wildfire, with the publishers of various leaflets and newspapers locked in fierce competition with each other to concoct the most colourful versions and interpretations of events. It was religious convictions in particular that were most responsible for determining how the event was transformed by the media. The general public could not have known that what had actually been witnessed was an atmospheric reflection of a sea battle that was raging just beyond the horizon. Instead, they were convinced that the universe was ruled by a god who had the power to project visions of impending disaster into the sky. The air battle was likewise perceived as a prodigium (Latin for ‘omen’ or ‘portent’).
The visual themes of the 17th century were likely also decisive in terms of determining how the media shaped depictions of the air battle, with futuristic visions of airships—which the people of the 17th century were incredibly enthusiastic about—playing a special role. More than 100 years before the first manned hot air balloon flight was conducted, Francesco Lana Terzi (1631–1687) had published his design for a flying boat borne aloft by vacuum spheres, which caused a great sensation throughout Europe. The fact that the project could never actually be realised did little to detract from the general fervour. Humankind continued to dream of conquering the skies.
The Power of Myths
Another theme of the exhibition is the power of myths: when, on 19 June 1670, lightning struck—of all places—the St. Nicholas Church, the building above which the grey disc had loomed so ominously five years earlier, the celestial phenomenon was subsequently interpreted as a sign of God’s wrath. The descriptions and accounts of the day invoked a mystical link to the destruction of Babylon at the hands of a great millstone, as it is described in the Book of Revelation. However, the popular perception of the air battle over Stralsund was not only shaped by the media, beliefs, designs, and myths of the baroque era; it also reveals the kinds of things that humans of the era were unable to envisage and comprehend. There are no 17th-century sources, for example, that mention extraterrestrials in connection with the unexplained aerial phenomena. Yet at the same time, the human imagination was already so far advanced that it could well conceive of expeditions to other inhabited planets and the kinds of propulsion systems that would be required to carry these out. Why nobody considered for a moment that extraterrestrials might appear in our skies with their own flying machines is one of the many mysteries this exhibition endeavours to solve.
An Excursion into the Present
This cultural and media-historical investigation culminates in an excursion into the present, which focuses on the videos and accounts of sightings of mysterious ‘Unidentified Aerial Phenomena’ (UAPs) made by the US military that went viral in 2019 and even made their way onto the front cover of an issue of Der Spiegel two years later. The sightings in question have given rise to a maddeningly broad spectrum of interpretations. Are they physically explicable natural phenomena, sophisticated high-tech drones made in China or Russia, extraterrestrials, or even visitors from the future? Even NASA and the Pentagon seem completely baffled. We can, however, be sure of one thing: the factors that were so crucial to the media success of the UFO of 1665 lack none of their that same potency today.
The exhibition is curated by Moritz Wullen, director of the Kunstbibliothek.
Moritz Wullen, UFO 1665: The Air Battle of Stralsund / Die Luftschlacht von Stralsund (Cologne: Wienand Verlag, 2023), 112 pages, ISBN 978-3868327502 (bilingual edition, German and English), €24.
New Book | Piranesi’s Candelabra and the Presence of the Past
From Oxford UP:
Caroline van Eck, Piranesi’s Candelabra and the Presence of the Past: Excessive Objects and the Emergence of a Style in the Age of Neoclassicism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-0192845665, £70 / $90.
Near the end of his life, Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–1778) created three colossal candelabra mainly from fragments of sculpture excavated near the Villa Hadriana in Tivoli—two of which are now in the Ashmolean Museum, with the other one in the Louvre. Although these objects were among the most sought-after and prestigious of Piranesi’s works and fetched enormous prices during his lifetime, they suffered a steep decline in appreciation from the 1820s onwards, and even today they are among the least studied of the artist’s works. Piranesi’s Candelabra and the Presence of the Past uncovers the intense investment around the start of the nineteenth century—by artists, patrons, collectors, and the public—in objects that made Graeco-Roman antiquity present again. Caroline van Eck’s study examines how objects make their makers, or viewers feel that they are again in the presence of antiquity, that not only antiquity has been revived, but that classical statues become alive under viewers’ gaze. The book considers the three candelabra in depth, providing the biography of these objects, from the excavation of the Roman fragments to their entry into private and public collection. Van Eck considers the context that Piranesi gave them by including them in his Vasi, Candelabri e Cippi (1778), allowing us to rethink the processes that led to the development of neoclassicism from the perspective of the objects and objectscapes that came into being in Rome at the end of the eighteenth century.
Caroline van Eck studied art history at the Ecole du Louvre in Paris, and classics and philosophy at Leiden University. She obtained a PhD in aesthetics at the University of Amsterdam in 1994. She has held teaching positions at the Universities of Amsterdam, Groningen, and Leiden, where she was appointed Professor of Art and Architectural History in 2006. She has been a Visiting Fellow at the Warburg Institute and the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art at Yale University, a Visiting Professor in Ghent, Yale, York, and the Ecole Normale Supérieur in Paris, and in 2018 held the Panofsky Chair at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich. In September 2016, she was appointed Professor of Art History at the University of Cambridge. She delivered the 2017 Slade Lectures in Oxford.
c o n t e n t s
List of Illustrations
Introduction
1 ‘A Neoclassical Dream and an Archaeologist’s Nightmare’: Piranesi’s Colossal Candelabra in the Louvre and Ashmolean Museum
2 Candelabra in Antiquity, Their Rediscovery, and Reception
3 Making Antiquity Materially Present
4 Animal Features
5 Animation, Immersion, and the Revival of Antiquity
6 Movement, Animation, and Intentionality
Conclusion: ‘Antiquity Is Only Now Coming into Being’. The Origins of the Style Empire and the Turn towards the Object, 1770–1820
References
Index
Exhibition | Making Her Mark
Opening this fall at the BMA:
Making Her Mark: A History of Women Artists in Europe, 1400–1800
Baltimore Museum of Art, 1 October 2023 — 7 January 2024
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 30 March — 1 July 2024
Curated by Andaleeb Badiee Banta and Alexa Greist
For centuries, women artists in Europe were considered rare and less talented than their male counterparts. Women who achieved professional artistic careers were deemed anomalous or exceptional, while those who engaged in creative pursuits in the home were dismissed as amateurs, and their works were categorized as material culture rather than art.
Making Her Mark: A History of Women Artists in Europe, 1400–1800, the BMA’s much anticipated major exhibition opening 1 October 2023, aims to correct these broadly held but mistaken beliefs through more than 200 works of diverse media and scale. From royal portraits and devotional sculptures to embroidered objects, tapestries, costumes, wax sculptures, metalwork, ceramics, graphic arts, furniture, and more, Making Her Mark will feature objects from the 15th to 18th centuries that reflect the multifaceted and often overlooked ways that women contributed to the visual arts of Europe.
The exhibition’s focus on displaying exclusively objects made by women or toward which women contributed their labor distinguishes this project by putting women makers of all social levels in conversation with each other through their works. Examples by artistic heroines such as Sofonisba Anguissola, Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Leyster, Luisa Roldán, Rosalba Carriera, Rachel Ruysch, and Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun will join exceptional products of female artisanal collectives and talented amateurs who operated outside of the male-dominated professional arena and often remained anonymous in the historical record. Further, sublime examples of ceramics, metalwork, and cabinetmaking from this era will reflect women’s involvement in major manufactories and workshops.
Organized by the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Making Her Mark is curated by Andaleeb Badiee Banta, Senior Curator and Department Head, Prints, Drawings & Photographs at the BMA, and Alexa Greist, Curator and R. Fraser Elliott Chair, Prints & Drawings at the AGO. The exhibition is generously supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, and Sheela Murthy/MurthyNAYAK Foundation.
Andaleeb Badiee Banta and Alexa Greist, with Theresa Kutasz Christensen, Making Her Mark: A History of Women Artists in Europe, 1400–1800 (Fredericton, New Brunswick: Goose Lane Editions, 2023), 264 pages, ISBN: 9781773103181, $60.
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