Enfilade

From BGC:

Pascal Bertrand | Boucher and the Decorative Arts: Promoting and Maintaining His Fame
A Françoise and Georges Selz Lecture on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Decorative Arts and Culture
Bard Graduate Center, New York, 20 September 2023, 6.00pm

One of a pair of perfume vases, Chelsea Porcelain Manufactory (British, Gold Anchor Period, 1759–69), ca. 1761, soft-paste porcelain, burnished gold ground, 36 cm high (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 64.101.509a, b). The vase depicts three nymphs after the painting La Source by Francois Boucher.

In this lecture, Pascal Bertrand will explore the role of the decorative arts in the process of making and maintaining an artist’s fame, using the example of the quintessentially Rococo painter François Boucher. Boucher’s art was translated to a wide range of mediums—primarily tapestry and porcelain, but also gold and lacquer objects as well as printed fabrics and fans. How did he use these decorative arts to build his own reputation? And how did the decorative arts transmediate his paintings, prints, and drawings to disseminate them during his lifetime and preserve them after his death, right up to the present day? While the first question has been the subject of specific in-depth studies in one medium or another (porcelain in particular), Dr. Bertrand’s lecture considers the second question and the significance of intermediality.

Registration is available here»

Pascal Bertrand is Professor of Art History at the Université Bordeaux Montaigne in Pessac. His areas of research include the history of European tapestries, furniture, and the decorative arts generally.

Bard Graduate Center is grateful for the generous support of the Selz Foundation.