Enfilade

From Routledge:

Sonia Coman, Vasile-Ovidiu Prejmerean, and Michael Yonan, eds., Art and Artifice in Visual Culture, Eighteenth Century to the Present (New York: Routledge, 2025), 210 pages, ISBN (hardback): 978-1032756783, $180 / ISBN (ebook): 978-1003478898, $50.

This edited volume explores the notion of ‘artifice’ in modern visual culture, ranging from the eighteenth century to the present, in countries around the globe.

Artifice has been regarded as a primarily Western phenomenon, playing as it does a central role in European art theory since the Renaissance. This volume proposes that artifice is better understood as a transcultural artistic phenomenon and requires far broader conceptualization across international contexts. It acquaints readers with works of art, visual modes of communication, and concepts originating in France, Germany, the United States, Japan, and China, and includes painting, sculpture, drawings, prints, photographs, film, and virtual reality/augmented reality (VR/AR) objects. Contributors demonstrate how practices of artifice function as both symbol and form, in parallel and divergent ways, in multiple cultural settings.

Sonia Coman, PhD is a Contributor and Consultant at Smarthistory and Director of Digital Engagement at Washington National Cathedral. Vasile-Ovidiu Prejmerean is a PhD candidate at Université de Fribourg, Switzerland. Michael Yonan, PhD is a Professor of Art History and Alan Templeton Endowed Chair in the History of European Art, 1600–1830, at the University of California, Davis.

c o n t e n t s

List of Illustrations
List of Contributors

Introduction: Art and Artifice in a Transcultural Perspective — Sonia Coman, Vasile-Ovidiu Prejmerean, Michael Yonan

Part 1 | Artifice and Spectatorship
1  Fractured Perception: Drawings, Prints, and Verres Casses — J. Cabelle Ahn
2  Rococo Aesthetics and the Problem of Trompe l’Oeil — Michael Yonan
3  Degas’s ‘Histories’ and the Foreshadowing Artifice of Self-Candaulism — Vasile-Ovidiu Prejmerean

Part 2 | Haptic Illusions
4  Suggestive Surfaces: The Self-Referential Texture of Woodgrain in Japanese Woodblock Prints — Kit Brooks
5  Reconsidering the Origins of Yongzheng Guwantu: From the Aniconic Period to Vimalakīrtinirdeśa Sūtra — Chih-En Chen
6  Fooling Art History: John F. Peto and William Harnett — Yinshi Lerman-Tan

Part 3 | Alternative Realities
7  First Nations’ Wampum Belts: A Colonial Vision of Artifice in Eighteenth-Century New France — Clémence Fort
8  ‘An Opportunity to Grapple with the Picture Plane…’: The Stereo-Illusion’s History of Frustration — Eszter Polonyi
9  Self-Reference and Medium-Reference in Virtual Reality and Trompe l’Oeil — Sonia Coman

Index