Enfilade

The latest issue of J18:

Journal18, Issue #17 (Spring 2024) — Color
Issue edited by Ewa Lajer-Burcharth and Thea Goldring

Color has been at the center of artistic debates at least since the seventeenth century, and it has remained a key issue in the historiography of art. Recent research has largely pursued two directions. First, color has been studied as a material substance and a technology. Scholars have documented the relation between technological, industrial, and commercial developments and the quality, range, and availability of pigments and colorants available to artists, manufacturers, and consumers. A second approach has focused on the key role of color in the construction of social, racial, colonial, and gender hierarchies. Recent scholarship has revealed the intimate connection between aesthetic debates on chroma and the development of the modern discourse of race. The eighteenth century’s feminization of color, linked to make-up and artifice, has also been reexamined. Clearly, it is no longer viable to think of color or its materials, technologies, and processes in purely aesthetic, ideologically innocent terms. This issue of Journal18 considers what is at stake now in reconsidering color in its historical dimensions by bringing these two lines of research together.

The four articles and two notes in this issue explore how the current interest in materiality and the matter of art might be harnessed to alter—enrich, complicate, or challenge—our understanding of the historical functions and socio-cultural meanings of color in the long eighteenth century. . . .

Keep reading»

a r t i c l e s

Andrea Feeser — When Blue and White Obscure Black and Red: Conditions of Wedgwood’s 1787 Antislavery Medallion

Caroline Culp — Embalming in Color: John Singleton Copley’s Vital Portraits at the Edge of Empire

Tong Su — Color in Taxidermy at the Eighteenth-Century Qing Court

Melissa Hyde — Men in Pink: The Petit-Maître, Refined Masculinity, and Whiteness

s h o r t e r  p i e c e s

Tori Champion — Catherine Perrot: Color, Gender, and Medium in the Seventeenth-Century Académie

Philippe Colomban — The Quest for the Western Colors in China under the Qing Emperors