Call for Articles | Valuing Luxury
From ArtHist.net:
Valuing Luxury: Controversial Collections, Divisive Displays, and Ethical Exhibits
Collection of essays edited by Elisabetta Maistri and Robert Hanson
Proposals due by 15 March 2024; complete essays due by 1 November 2024
In an era concerned with social and historical injustices, of wealth inequality and exploitation, and increasing awareness of the anthropogenic ecological impact, the vast collections of luxury goods that fill museums seem at odds with the current political mood. Whilst luxuries have driven much of human development, our attitude towards justice compels us to ask the question: how should museums present their collections in a manner that celebrates humanity’s triumphs without erasing the injustices that fuelled them? This interdisciplinary anthology focuses on the dark side of luxuries from early modern empires, exploring the questions of how we should acknowledge, respond to, and represent their problematic legacies in the contemporary era in public and private collections. The book investigates the role and responsibilities of museums, our relationship with luxuries, and our duties to historical legacies, both good and bad.
We invite scholars to contribute case-study driven chapters which will see authors discuss the history, concept, and normativity of luxury status through the following thematic lenses:
1 Conceptualising Luxury
2 Decolonisation and Social Justice
3 Environment and Sustainability
4 Negative Heritage
5 Inequality and Excess
6 Appropriation and Repatriation
7 Luxury and Desperation
Abstracts should be no more than 500 words and should be submitted to rwhem19@gmail.com by 15th March 2024. Authors should state which theme their paper should be associated with. Please name the file as follow: Surname_THEME NUMBER_TOPIC
Successful abstracts will be called to submit the complete paper to the same email address by 1 November 2024, and will be subject to double-blind peer review prior to the submission of the anthology to the publishing house. Priority given to submissions on objects created prior to the 20th century and to objects associated with the global south. We are also particularly keen to promote the work from underrepresented demographics in the scholarship, particularly women and scholars from the global south.
More information is available here»
Exhibition | Within Reach of Asia
Eight-leaf screen, depicting a Palace Scene with the Arrival of a Delegation and Festivities in Honor of Tang General Guo Ziyi 郭子儀, Qing dynasty, Kangxi (1662–1722) or Qianlong (1736–1795) period, late 17th or 18th century; wood, ‘Coromandel’ lacquer, 135 × 346 cm (Dijon: Musée des beaux-arts). In the 18th century, the screen was part of the collection of Jehannin de Chamblanc (1722–1797).
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A review of the exhibition (in French) by Gilles Kraemer, with excellent installation photographs, is available at Le Curieux des Arts:
Within Reach of Asia: Asian Art Collectors and Dealers in France, 1750–1930
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon, 20 October 2023 — 22 January 2024
Curated by Catherine Tran-Bourdonneau, Pauline d’Abrigeon, and Pauline Guyot
On 20 October 2023, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Dijon opened its new exhibition À portée d’Asie: Collectors, Collectors and Dealers of Asian Art in France, 1750–1930, labelled of national interest by the Ministry of Culture. In partnership with the Institut National de l’Histoire de l’Art (INHA), the exhibition highlights two centuries of enthusiasm for Asian arts in France, from the royal collections of Louis XV and Marie-Antoinette, to collections gathered for commercial and scientific purposes between 1850 and 1930, along with the vogue for Japonism shared by artists, collectors, and simple amateurs of the bibelotage in the 19th century.
Extending a research program of INHA, the exhibition brings together national collections and Far Eastern collections of regional museums, which include multiple objects brought from Asia over the ages. With more than 300 works—diverse technically (with lacquers, porcelains, ivories, bronzes, screens, prints and illustrated books, silk paintings, and theater masks), as well as historically and geographically (with objects from China, Japan, Korea, and Cambodia)—the exhibition draws on prestigious loans from important national institutions, including the Musée Guimet, the Louvre, the Palace of Versailles, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, and the Musée du Quai Branly. Also well represented are the Asian collections of the region (those of Florine Langweil in Colmar and Strasbourg, Jules Adeline in Rouen, and Adhémard Leclère in Alençon) and especially those of Dijon’s Musée des Beaux-Arts. Moreover, through a participatory sponsorship campaign, €10,000 was raised for the museum’s restoration of a Coromandel lacquer screen from the 18th-century collection of Jehannin de Chamblanc.
Organized by the City of Dijon, in partnership with the National Institute of Art History (INHA), the exhibition is recognized as being of national interest by the Ministry of Culture, which provides exceptional financial support. The label ‘Exhibition of National Interest’ (Exposition d’intérêt national) was created by the Ministry of Culture in 1999 to support remarkable exhibitions organized by French museums in different regions. Such exhibitions highlight themes that reflect the richness and diversity of the collections of museums in France. The label rewards an innovative museum discourse, a new thematic approach, a scenography and a mediation device with the aim of reaching various audiences.
Pauline d’Abrigeon, Pauline Guyot, and Catherine Tran-Bourdonneau, eds., À portée d’Asie: Collectionneurs, collecteurs et marchands d’art asiatique en France, 1750–1930 (Paris: Lienart éditions, 2023), 320 pages, ISBN: 978-2359064049, €35.
Exhibition | Shopping in Canton
Opening this month at the Hong Kong Museum of Art:
Shopping in Canton: China Trade Art in the 18th and 19th Centuries (Phase II) / 廣州購物誌──18至19世紀外銷藝術（第二期）
Hong Kong Museum of Art, 13 January — 15 November 2024
Barber’s basin with floral design in painted enamel, mid 18th century, copper, 36 × 28 × 7 cm (Hong Kong Art Museum, C1987.0010).
During the 18th and 19th centuries, Canton (Guangzhou) was the centre of foreign trade in China. There were some busy shopping streets near the Thirteen Factories district in the southwest suburbs of the Canton city along the Pearl River, with rows of stores selling various crafts and curiosities, tea leaves, local products, snacks and drinks. The target customers were mostly foreign merchants. This exhibition showcases a wide variety of China trade art collections to reconstruct scenes of the bustling shopping paradise in Canton. Visitors will immerse themselves in the interactive animations created by local animators the Tsui Brothers, as they go window-shopping down the memory lane while discovering the art and history of this thriving neighbourhood.
New Book | Pierrot and His World
From Manchester UP (and currently discounted dramatically at Amazon). . . .
Marika Takanishi Knowles, Pierrot and His World: Art, Theatricality, and the Marketplace in France, 1697–1945 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2024), 264 pages, ISBN: 9781526174093, £85 / $130.
Pierrot, a theatrical stock character known by his distinctive costume of loose white tunic and trousers, is a ubiquitous figure in French art and culture. This richly illustrated book offers an account of Pierrot’s recurrence in painting, printmaking, photography and film, tracing this distinctive type from the art of Antoine Watteau to the cinema of Occupied France. As a visual type, Pierrot thrives at the intersection of theatrical and marketplace practices. From Watteau’s Pierrot (c. 1720) and Édouard Manet’s The Old Musician (1862) to Nadar and Adrien Tournachon’s Pierrot the Photographer (1855) and the landmark film Children of Paradise (1945), Pierrot has given artists a medium through which to explore the marketplace as a form for both social life and creative practice. Simultaneously a human figure and a theatrical mask, Pierrot elicits artistic reflection on the representation of personality in the marketplace.
Marika Takanishi Knowles is a Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University of St Andrews.
c o n t e n t s
Introduction
1 Antoine Watteau and the fête marchande
2 Pierrot-co-co
3 New Paris, Old Pierrot (New Pierrot, Old Paris)
4 Nadar Charlatan
5 Old Clothes and the Dreams of the Artist
Conclusion
Index
New Book | The Art of the Actress
Part of the Elements in Eighteenth-Century Connections series from Cambridge UP (digital downloads are available for free until 25 January!).
Laura Engel, The Art of the Actress: Fashioning Identities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2024), 75 pages, ISBN: 978-1009486811 (hardcover), $65 / ISBN: 978-1108977906 (paperback), $22. Also available digitally through Cambridge UP.
The Art of the Actress: Fashioning Identities considers how eighteenth-century visual materials across genres, such as prints, portraits, sculpture, costumes, and accessories, contribute to the understanding of the nuances of female celebrity, fame, notoriety, and scandal. The ‘art’ of the actress refers to the actress represented in visual art, as well as to the actress’s labor and skill in making art ephemerally through performance and tangibly through objects. Moving away from the concept of the ‘actress as muse,’ a relationship that privileges the role of the male artist over the inspirational subject, Laura Engel focuses instead on the varied significance of representations, reproductions, and re-animations of actresses, female artists, and theatrical women across media. Via case studies, this Element explores how the archive charts both a familiar and at times unknown narrative about female performers of the past.
Laura Engel is a Professor in the English Department at Duquesne University, where she specializes in eighteenth-century British literature and theater. She is the author of Women, Performance, and the Material of Memory: The Archival Tourist, 1780–1915 (2019); Austen, Actresses, and Accessories: Much Ado about Muffs (2015); and Fashioning Celebrity: Eighteenth-Century British Actresses and Strategies for Image Making (2011). She also co-edited, with Elaine McGirr, Stage Mothers: Women, Work, and the Theater, 1660–1830 (2014).
c o n t e n t s
Introduction: The Art of the Actress in the Eighteenth Century
1 The Paradox of Pearls
2 The Actress as Artist and the Artist as Actress: Anne Damer and Angelica Kauffman
3 Mary Anne’s Muff: Actresses and Satire
4 Epilogue: Unfinished Business: Elizabeth Inchbald, Lady Cahir, Sir Thomas Lawrence, and the Aftermath of the Art of the Actress
References
Philippe Halbert Named Associate Curator at the Wadsworth Atheneum
From the press release, via Art Daily:
The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut has named Dr. Philippe Halbert as Richard Koopman Associate Curator of American Decorative Arts. A graduate of the College of William and Mary and the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, Halbert earned his PhD in the history of art from Yale University, where he studied the intersections of art, empire, race, and self-fashioning in the Atlantic world. His academic work centers American decorative arts and material culture broadly, from its Indigenous roots to interconnected phenomena of diaspora, creolization, and settler-colonialism. Halbert has served as Interim Curator of American Decorative Arts at the Wadsworth since November 2022.
“I am committed to telling dynamic, object-centered stories of people and place that transcend geographic, ethnic, linguistic, and temporal bounds,” Halbert said, explaining that his academic interdisciplinary research and professional endeavors are grounded in a desire to encourage appreciation of American decorative arts by specialists and general audiences of all ages.
Proficient in French and Spanish, Halbert has been involved in the development of numerous exhibitions and special installations at the Wadsworth. Oversight responsibilities include over 3,000 decorative arts objects (circa 1650–2020) at the Wadsworth, with duties ranging from daily care of the collection and related research to overseeing rotations in the permanent collection galleries, developing special exhibits, volunteer training, and building partnerships with other institutions and constituents in Hartford and beyond.
Special projects underway and upcoming include New Nation, Many Hands, a special exhibition of federal-era decorative arts and material culture drawn from the permanent collection (on view from June 2023 until September 2024); reinterpretation of the Wetmore parlor, a painted and paneled room from a circa 1746 Middletown, Connecticut, house; and reevaluation of the Wadsworth’s American decorative arts holdings in anticipation of their reinstallation in 2025.
“Philippe is an outstanding scholar and curator of the Atlantic world, especially the interaction between France and North America. His passion for the material culture of vast early America is infectious and his love of curatorial work, breadth of knowledge, and extensive scholarship are incredible assets for the Wadsworth,” said Matthew Hargraves, Director of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. “We are delighted that he has assumed this new role and look forward to his continued stewardship of our remarkable American Decorative Arts collection.”
Previously in his career, Halbert served as a curatorial intern at various museums, including at the Yale University Art Gallery, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Colonial Williamsburg. He has earned numerous awards and fellowships and been an adjunct lecturer and consultant for various institutions, including at the Embassy of the United States in Paris. He is a resident of West Hartford, CT.
Conference | Visualizing Antiquity, Part II
From ArtHist.net:
Visualizing Antiquity: On the Episteme of Early Modern Drawings and Prints — Part II: Find and Display / Fragment and Whole
Bildwerdung der Antike: Zur Episteme von Zeichnungen und Druckgrafiken der Frühen Neuzeit — II. Fund und Aufstellung / Fragment und Ganzes
Online and in-person, Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte Munich, 31 January 2024
Organized by Ulrich Pfisterer, Cristina Ruggero, and Timo Strauch
The academy project Antiquitatum Thesaurus: Antiquities in European Visual Sources from the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, hosted at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (thesaurus.bbaw.de), and the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte Munich (zikg.eu) are organizing a series of colloquia in 2023–2025 on the topic Visualizing Antiquity: On the Episteme of Drawings and Prints in the Early Modern Period. The significance of drawings and prints for ideas, research, and the circulation of knowledge about ancient artifacts, architecture, and images in Europe and neighboring areas from the late Middle Ages to the advent of photography in the mid-19th century will be examined. The second colloquium will explore how the various states and contexts of ancient objects, in the broadest sense, between their discovery and their ‘final’ display, were captured and documented in images. Later study days will focus on Collectors, Artists, Scholars: Knowledge and Will in Collection Catalogs and Fake News? Fantasy Antiquities. Participation in the event is free of charge, and the talks will also be broadcast via Zoom (Meeting-ID: 856 5934 5839 | Password: 148258).
p r o g r a m
11.00 Begrüßung & Einführung
11.15 Dokumentation
Moderation: Arnold Nesselrath (Rom)
• Francesco Benelli (Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna), ‘Che no sia tondo e che abia dello aovato’: Uffizi U1132A, a stratification of meanings and strategies within the Sangallo’s workshop
• Barbara Sielhorst (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), Pars pro toto. Zur visuellen Dokumentation des Palatins in Rom vom Beginn des 18. bis zur Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts
• Alessia Zambon (UVSQ-University Paris-Saclay), Thomas Burgon’s Excavations in Athens in 1813: Fieldwork and Finds’ Recording
13.00 Mittagspause
14.00 Restaurierung – Rekonstruktion
Moderation: Elena Vaiani (ZIKG München)
• Elena Efimova (Lomonossow-Universität Moskau), Dessins des détails d’ordres: entre un livre de modèles et une collection antiquaire
• Lena Demary (Ruhr-Universität Bochum), Transparenz und Verschleierung – Ambivalenzen früher restauratorischer Dokumentationen in Katalogen antiker Bildwerke
• Annie Maloney (Oberlin College), Reconstructing the Fragments of Pietro Santi Bartoli’s Reproductive Corpus
• Koenraad Vos (University of Cambridge), Restorations of Ancient Sculpture as Epistemic Images: Filippo Aurelio Visconti on the Benefits of Intervention
16.20 Kurze Pause
16.30 Aufstelling
Moderation: Henri de Riedmatten (Université de Genève)
• Anna Degler (Freie Universität Berlin), Auf unsicherem Grund. Der sog. Torso Belvedere und die Körperdiskurse in der ersten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts
• Daniela Picchi (Museo Civico Archeologico di Bologna), Giovanni Nardi and Ancient Egypt at the Medici Court
• Sophie Kleveman (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen), Kommissarisches Antikenwissen und die Regulation des Antikenmarktes im 17. Jahrhundert
• Henri de Riedmatten (Université de Genève), Zusammenfassung und Leitung Abschlussdiskussion
Exhibition | Thomas Frye: An Irish Artist in London
From Ireland’s Office of Public Works:
Neglected Genius — Thomas Frye: An Irish Artist in London
Dublin Castle, 1 December 2023 — 19 March 2024
Curated by William Laffan
The Office of Public Works is pleased to announce the opening of a major exhibition dedicated to Ireland’s most successful design-entrepreneur of the eighteenth century, Thomas Frye (1710–1762).
Born in 1710, most likely in Edenderry, County Offaly, Thomas Frye moved to London as a young man, where he quickly established himself as a successful portrait painter. From the mid-1740s, he ran a factory in Bow, just east of the City of London, set up to recreate Chinese porcelain, which had been admired in Europe for centuries. Under Frye’s management the Bow factory thrived, producing inexpensive ceramics both decorative and utilitarian in a variety of designs.
Frye was among the earliest European artists to collapse the distinction between ‘high’ art and factory-produced design. In an age of increasing specialisation, the manner in which he ranged freely across multiple techniques and media was unique. Although his name is scarcely known today outside specialist circles, Frye has a strong claim to the title of Ireland’s most successful printmaker, industrial artist, and design entrepreneur. At the same time, Frye’s career in London illustrates the incipient globalization of the period. Frye attempted to emulate Chinese technology with raw materials from north America.
This exhibition sets side-by-side Frye’s portraiture in oil, his enamel miniatures, his mezzotints, and the production of the Bow porcelain factory under his management. For the first time equal emphasis is afforded to each facet of this supremely gifted and highly innovative Irish artist. Included are loans from the Victoria and Albert Museum; The Foundling Museum, London; the Holburne Museum, Bath; and the National Gallery of Ireland, along with leading private collections.
William Laffan, the curator of the exhibition states: “Frye must be acknowledged as a pioneering figure in portraiture, porcelain and printmaking, and as one of the most inventive and ‘ingenious’ artists of the Georgian era.”
The Decorative Arts Trust’s Emerging Scholars Colloquium, 2024
The Decorative Arts Trust’s Emerging Scholars Colloquium takes place this Sunday, on the heels of the group’s Antiques Weekend, an annual foray into New York’s Americana Week:
The Decorative Arts Trust’s Emerging Scholars Colloquium
Park Avenue Armory, New York, 21 January 2024
Photo from the 2023 Emerging Scholars Colloquium in the Park Avenue Armory’s Board of Officers Room (via the Instagram account of The Decorative Arts Trust).
The Decorative Arts Trust is excited to host its 8th Annual Colloquium featuring young scholars in the decorative arts field. The registration fee for the colloquium is $25; Decorative Arts Trust membership is not required to attend. The event is generously sponsored by Classical American Homes Preservation Trust and Mr. & Mrs. Donald B. Ayres III. Registration is available here.
p r o g r a m m e
9.00 Coffee and bagels
9.30 Welcome by Benjamin Prosky, President, Classical American Homes Preservation Trust
Introductions by Catherine Carlisle, Manager of Educational Programs, Decorative Arts Trust
• Follow the Hearth: Retracing the Spatial History of Edgewater’s Dining Room Mantelpiece — Lauren Drapala (PhD candidate, Bard Graduate Center, and William L. Thompson Collections Fellow, Classical American Homes Preservation Trust)
• An Artifact of Afro-America: A Blanket Chest by Brooks Thompson — Neil Grasty (Undergraduate Student, Morehouse College, and Curatorial Intern, High Museum of Art)
• Loud and Clear: Glass and Obscured Narratives at the New Orleans Museum of Art — Laura Ochoa Rincon (Decorative Arts Trust Curatorial Fellow, New Orleans Museum of Art)
• Does Architecture Move? The Mahadol Palanquin of 18th-Century Gujarat and Marwar — Krishna Shekhawat (PhD Student, University of California, Berkeley)
• ‘Dressing Up’ Egypt: Performing Race and Late 19th-Century Egyptomania — Lea Stephenson (PhD Candidate, University of Delaware)
11.30 Concluding remarks by Matthew Thurlow, Executive Director, Decorative Arts Trust
The Burlington Magazine, December 2023
The eighteenth century in the December issue of The Burlington, which focuses on Spain:
The Burlington Magazine 165 (December 2023)
Francisco de Goya, Self-Portrait with Dr Arrieta, 1820, oil on canvas, 115 × 77 cm (Minneapolis Institute of Art, 52.14).
a r t i c l e
• Mercedes Cerón Peña, “Goya’s Self-Portrait with Dr Arrieta,” pp. 1300–04.
In 1820 Goya painted a portrait of himself as he had appeared during his serious illness of the year before, attended by his doctor, Eugenio García Arrieta. Newly discovered biographical information about Arrieta suggests that the painting’s red and and green colour scheme may allude to the political views he shared with Goya.
r e v i e w s
• Michael Hall, Review of the new Galería de las Colecciones Reales (Royal Collections Gallery) in Madrid (opened 28 June 2023), pp. 1339–43.
• Stephen Lloyd, Review of the exhibition Return of the Gods (World Museum, Liverpool, (April 2023 — February 2024), pp. 1343–45. “Britain’s largest assemblage of Classical sculpture outside London belongs to National Museums Liverpool . . . In 1959 Liverpool City Council and its museums were gifted the entirety of the Ince Blundell collection—approximately six hundred heavily restored Roman marbles . . . collected by . . . Henry Blundell (1724–1810), a wealthy Catholic landowner, between 1776 and 1809.”
• Humphrey Wine, Review of the catalogue raisonné by Joseph Assémat-Tessandier, Louis Lagrenée, dit l’Aîné (1725–1805) (Arthena, 2022), pp. 1364–65.
Louis-Michel van Loo, Portrait of Isabel Farnese, 1737, oil on canvas, 341 × 264 cm (Madrid: Galería de las Colecciones Reales).
• Rebeka Hodgkinson, Review of Stephanie Barczewski, How the Country House Became English (Reaktion, 2023), pp. 1370–71.
• Peter Humfrey, Review of Eveline Baseggio, Tiziana Franco, and Luca Molà, eds., La chiesa di Santa Maria dei Servi e la comunità veneziana dei Servi di Maria, secoli XIV–XIX (Viella, 2023), pp. 1374–75. “The demolition of the great fourteenth-century church of the Servi in about 1812–13 represents one of the most grievous of the many losses suffered by Venice’s artistic heritage during the Napoleonic period.”
o b i t u a r y
• Saloni Mathur, Obituary for Kavita Singh (1964–2023), pp. 1379–80.
Professor of art history and Dean of the School of Arts and Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Kavita Singh became internationally known for her publications on the history and politics of museums and the pre-modern art of South Asia. An authority on Indian court paintings, she was an inspiring colleague and teacher who publicly championed both her university and the study of Mughal art in the subcontinent.
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