Enfilade

From the full Call for Papers, which includes the French Appel à communication) . . .

Visual Culture of Gastronomy, 16th–20th Century

La culture visuelle de la gastronomie, XVIe–XXe siècles

Galerie Colbert, Paris, 18–19 December 2025

Organized by Frédérique Desbuissons and Ryan Whyte

Proposals due by 1 June 2025

This international conference addresses the visual dimension of gastronomy, whose study surpasses traditional disciplinary limits for historical research (Allen Weiss, Déborah L. Krohn, Marcia Reed). In contrast to the logocentric definition that prevails in most of the work on gastronomy of the last century (Jean-Louis Flandrin, Pascal Ory, Priscilla Ferguson, Jean-Robert Pitte), we propose to consider gastronony as a qualitative relationship to food (Julia Csergo) constituted not least by images in their sensory and material manifestation. Whether as visual perception or material representation in the visual arts, printed matter, consumer goods such as games and toys, or popular and mass culture more broadly, images have played an active role in the construction and experience of the “art of eating well” [art de bien-manger] (Brillat-Savarin). Due to their quantity and ubiquity, such images, whether traditional or more often “popular,” are as essential to gastronomy as those of the fine arts, usually more difficult to access due to their socially restricted sites, relative rarity, and elite visual language. Visual culture, far from being subordinated to or dependant on text as mere illustration, commentary or archival record, immediately and directly defines “eating well.” D’abord l’à bord [first of all the on (the) bo(a)rd(er)], in the formula of Jacques Derrida, the very immediacy of gastronomic images defines the perimeters of gastronomy, thereby to furnish foundational models of experience and desire. In this way images, inseparable from other forms of signification, testify to the composite nature of gastronomy.

In the early modern period, the culture of the table began to free itself from both the rules of dietetics and the religious morality stigmatizing sensual pleasures that Louis de Jaucourt, in the Encyclopédie, evoked in defining cuisine as “lust for good food” [cette luxure de bonne chere dont on fait tant de cas], perpetuating its denigration by Michel de Montaigne as the “science of the gullet” [science de gueule] two centuries earlier. Meanwhile, banquets abandoned the ostentatious symbolism that prevailed before the Renaissance. Cuisine became a product of intellectual exchange in which images played a key role, including frontispieces and other images for cookbooks, reference books and other works relating to domestic economy. In urban spaces, images of consumer products were disseminated in the form of shopsigns, window displays, and trade cards. In France, on the eve of the Revolution, “eating well” no longer necessarily meant eating to maintain physical and moral health according to the precepts of medicine and religion, but also eating good things, with the right table setting, in an appropriate environment, and in good company. All these dimensions of table culture are described, not without irony, in the poem of Joseph de Berchoux, “Gastronomy: Or the Rural Philosopher Dines” [La gastronomie, ou l’homme des champs à table] (1801), whose title would furnish the term for the “art of good cheer” finally accepted by the Académie française in its Dictionary of 1835.

Like the various prints published in successive editions of Berchoux’s poem, images participated in the diffusion of the knowledge, practice, and social imaginary of gastronomy well beyond the narrow social and geographic limits of the table culture of the Old Regime. The multiplication of images and print technologies in the nineteenth century emancipated gastronomy from the houses and restaurants accessible only to those capable of employing the services of great chefs, consuming luxury products, and frequenting good tables. In addition to the fine grocery stores, caterers, and restaurants emblematic of the urban spectacularization of food from the nineteenth century, representations disseminated in books, journals, and posters revealed the labour, implements, stagings, uses, and forms of conviviality once inaccessible to most people.

If images established a new visual regime of gastronomy, they also fixed and standardized norms transcending local and regional variations and facilitating their broader recontextualization. This is why this conference will focus on developments in Europe in the early modern period and following the French Revolution, as well as on other gastronomic cultures and geographies, whether in themselves or operating in the context of colonial empires and other forms of globalization of food products, standards, and practices. How, in particular, may one describe and conceptualize qualitative relationships to food in non-European cultures using emic images and terms rather than the etic discourses of European gastronomy? And how can subaltern communities create visual cultures as vectors of resistance and emancipation, as in the exemplary case of Soul Food? We invite proposals from all disciplines on the visual dimensions of gastronomy, whether international or local, elite or popular. Possible themes include, but are not limited to:

Physiology, psychology
• Food synesthesias
• Ephemeral consumption and visual memory

Presentation, representation, conservation
• Representing taste
• Staging the table
• Gastronomical exhibitions (displays, markets, shop windows, museums and galleries …)
• Museums and heritage

Media and technologies
• Print culture and gastronomy: almanacs, newspapers, magazines, posters, pamphlets, etc.
• Design, packaging, labels
• Food and image technologies

Geographies, spaces, sites
• Perimeters and geographies of the gastronomic image
• Sites of production and consumption: kitchen, pantry, dining room, restaurant
• Empire and gastronomy

Values, customs, ideologies
• Images, egos, personifications: eaters, chefs, critics, gastronomes, servants, merchants
• Moralities of food
• Political and gastronomic economies
• Gastronomic laughter: satire, burlesque, comedy

Please submit proposals in French or English, including an abstract of maximum 700 words and a brief curriculum vitae by 1 June 2025 to frederique.desbuissons@univ-reims.fr and rwhyte@ocadu.ca.

Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne / OCAD University, Toronto) / Bibliothèque des Arts Décoratifs
Frédérique Desbuissons (université de Reims) & Ryan Whyte (OCAD University, Toronto)

Scientific Committee
James Benn, McMaster University, Hamilton
Valérie Boudier, université de Lille
Gwenhael Cavanna-Kernemp, Les Arts Décoratifs, Paris
Julia Csergo, Université du Québec à Montréal
Michael Garval, North Carolina State University
Jérémie Koering, Université de Fribourg
Camille Paulhan, École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Lyon

Bibliographie indicative / Preliminary Bibliography

L’Art de manger. Rites et traditions en Afrique, Insulinde et Océanie, exh. cat. Paris, musée Dapper, 2014–2015.
L’Art gourmand, exh. cat. Bruxelles, Galerie du Crédit communal, 1996–1997.
Atelier + Küche = Labore der Sinne, cat. exp. Hertford, Marta Herford, 2012.
Victoria Avery (ed.), Feast & Fast: The Art of Food in Europe, 1500–1800, exh. cat. Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, 2019
Sylvette Babin (ed.), Eating the Universe : vom Essen in der Kunst, exh. cat. Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 2009–2011
Kate Baldwin, The Racial Imaginary of the Cold War Kitchen: From Sokol’niki Park to Chicago’s South Side, Chicago, Dartmouth College Press, 2015
Judith A. Barter (ed.), Art and Appetite: American Painting, Culture, and Cuisine, exh. cat. Chicago, Art Institute, 2013–2014.
Daniel Bender (ed.), Food Mobilities: Making World Cuisines, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2024
Diane Bodart and Valérie Boudier (ed.), Le banquet de la Renaissance : images et usages, Prédella. Journal of Visual Arts, n° 33, 2013.
Nicolas Bourriaud (ed.), Cookbook. Quand l’art passe à table, exh. cat. Paris, Palais des Beaux-Arts, 2013–2014.
Susan Bright, Feast for the eye. The Story of Food in Photography, New York, Aperture, 2017.
Germano Celant (ed.), Arts & Foods. Rituali da 1851, exh. cat. Milano, Triennale di Milano, 2015.
Germano Celant (ed.), Cucine & Ultracorpi, exh. cat. Milano, Triennale design Museum, 2015.
Julia Csergo, La gastronomie est-elle une marchandise culturelle comme une autre ?, Chartres, Menu fretin, 2016.
Julia Csergo and Frédérique Desbuissons (eds), Le cuisinier et l’art. Art du cuisinier et cuisine d’artiste (XVIe-XXIe siècle), Chartes, Menu Fretin ; Paris, Institut national d’histoire de l’art, 2018.
Jörg Dürrschmidt and York Kautt (eds.), Globalized Eating Cultures: Mediation and Mediatization, Cham (Switzerland), Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.
Zilkia Janer, The Coloniality of Modern Taste: A Critique of Gastronomic Thought, London, Routledge, 2023.
Shana Klein, The Fruits of Empire: Art, Food, and the Politics of Race in the Age of American Expansion, Oakland, University of California Press, 2020.
Jonatan Leer and Karen Klitgaard Povlsen (eds), Food and Media: Practices, Distinctions, and Heterotopias, London, Routledge, 2016.
Nina Levent and Irina D. Mihalache (eds), Food and Museums, London [etc.], Bloomsbury, 2017.
Deborah Lupton and Zeena Feldman (eds) Digital Food Cultures, New York, Routledge, 2020.
Simeon Magliveras (ed.), Odysseys of Plates and Palates: Food, Society, and Sociability, Oxford, Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2015
Marcia Reed (ed.), The Edible Monument: The Art of Food for Festivals, exh. cat.. Los Angeles, The Getty Research Institute, 2015.
Jérémie Koering, Les iconophages, une histoire de l’ingestion des images, Arles, Actes Sud, 2021.
Deborah L. Krohn, Food and Knowledge in Renaissance Italy: Bartolomeo Scappi’s Paper Kitchens, London and New York, Ashgate Publishing, 2015.
Linda Roodenburg, Food is fictie verhalen over voedsel en vormgevin / Food is fiction. Stories about food and design, Rotterdam, nai010 Publisher, 2018.
Nancy K. Stalker (ed.), Devouring Japan: Global Perspectives on Japanese Culinary Identity, New York, Oxford University Press, 2018.
Nelleke Steughels and Peter Scholliers (eds), A Taste of Progress: Food at International and World Exhibitions in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, London, Ashgate, 2017.
John Varriano, Tastes and Temptations: Food and Art in Renaissance Italy, Oakland, University of California Press, 2009.
Kim M. Williams and Warwick Frost, Gastronomy, Tourism, and the Media, Bristol, Channel View Publications, 2016.