The Burlington Magazine, June 2018
As the June 2018 issue of The Burlington launches a new design (the work of Studio Frank), editor Michael Hall provides a brief overview of the history of the journal’s design in his editorial comments, noting that “many readers now access the magazine in its digital edition and for most people the first sight of the cover is likely to be on the screen of a tablet or smartphone, meaning that it has to work on a small scale” (453).
The eighteenth century in The Burlington:
The Burlington Magazine 160 (June 2018)
A R T I C L E S
• Tessa Murdoch, “A Set of Silver-Gilt Waiters by Benjamin Pyne for the Courtenay Family of Powderham Castle, Devon,” pp. 478–89.
R E V I E W S
• Xavier F. Salomon, Review of the exhibition Tiepolo Segreto (Vicenza: Palladio Museum, 2017–18), pp. 495–97.
• Sanda Miller, Review of the exhibition Fashioned from Nature (London: V&A, 2018), 497–99.
• Steven Jaron, Review of John Onians, European Art: A Neuroarthistory (Yale UP, 2016), 516–17.
• Antoine Maës, Review of Alexandre Maral, François Girardon (1628–1715): Le Sculpteur de Louis XIV (Arthena, 2015), p. 519.
• Clare Hornsby, Review of Paola Bianchi and Karin Wolfe, eds., Turin and the British in the Age of the Grand Tour (Cambridge UP, 2017), pp. 520–21.
• Jonathan Brown, Review of Elena Santiago Páez, ed., Ceán Bermúdez: Historiador del arte y coleccionista ilustrado (Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica, 2016), p. 521.
• Timothy Wilcox, Review of Ann Gunn, The Prints of Paul Sandby (1731–1809): A Catalogue Raisonné (Brepols, 2016), pp. 521–23.
• Caroline Finkel, Review of Francis Russell, 123 Places in Turkey: A Private Grand Tour (Bitter Lemon Press, 2017), p. 527.
Exhibition | Fashioned from Nature
Press release for the V&A exhibition:
Fashioned from Nature
Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 21 April 2018 — 27 Jan 2019
Curated by Edwina Ehrman
A pineapple fibre clutch-bag, Emma Watson’s Calvin Klein dress made from recycled plastic bottles, and a cape of cockerel feathers are amongst the 300 beautiful, intriguing and unsettling objects from the V&A’s most recent major fashion exhibition. Fashioned from Nature traces the complex relationship between fashion and the natural world since 1600. It shows how fashionable dress recurringly draws on the beauty and power of nature for inspiration, with exquisite garments and accessories from Christian Dior, Dries van Noten, and Philip Treacy. It explores how fashion’s processes and constant demand for raw materials damage the environment, featuring campaigners and protest groups that have effectively highlighted this issue such as Fashion Revolution and Vivienne Westwood. It looks at the role of design in creating a better, more sustainable fashion industry.
Waistcoat, 1780–89, France (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, T.49-1948).
The exhibition showcases contemporary designers of desirable, creative and sustainable popular fashion. Menswear and womenswear from Stella McCartney, known for a commitment to and success in developing new alternative sustainable materials, is displayed alongside an upcycled dress by Christopher Raeburn. At the 2016 Met Gala, actor Emma Watson wore a Calvin Klein look made from recycled plastic bottles. With separate parts, it was intended to be re-worn in different ways. The look was created as part of the ‘Green Carpet Challenge’ with Eco-Age, an initiative to pair sustainability with glamour. It is shown with a floral dress from Erdem’s Green Carpet Challenge collection. Fashioned from Nature draws attention to the use of innovative fabrics. Vegea use grape waste from the wine industry to form a leather-substitute and their Grape gown is on show, as is a Ferragamo ensemble made from ‘Orange Fiber’ derived from waste from the Italian citrus industry and an H&M Conscious dress made from recycled shoreline plastic.
The exhibition looks to the past 400 years of fashion to explore what we can learn from fashion practice in the past, with objects dating to the early 1600s. Items include an 1875 pair of earrings formed from the heads of two real Honeycreeper birds—a hugely popular item sold in enormous volume at the time—and a 1860s muslin dress decorated with the iridescent green wing cases of hundreds of jewel beetles. They are shown alongside natural history specimens to indicate the ways fashion has used animal materials in its designs and production.
The natural world has always provided rich inspiration for beautiful fashion. This is shown in displays of exquisite garments from the historic to the contemporary. They range from a 1780s man’s waistcoat, expertly embroidered with a pattern of playful Macacque monkeys, to Gucci’s contemporary bag decorated with stag beetle motifs. One of the earliest pieces in the exhibition, a women’s jacket from the early 1600s, is intricately embroidered with designs of pea-shoots and flowers. A 2016 Giles Deacon haute-couture dress features a pattern of delicate bird’s eggs, whilst gowns from Jean Paul Gaultier (1997) and Busvine (1933–34) both feature leopard print.
The exhibition also focuses closely on the raw materials used in the production of fashion. Arranged chronologically, it introduces the main fibres used in the 17th and 18th centuries—silk, flax, wool, and cotton—as well as now controversial materials like whalebone, demonstrated by an x-ray by Nick Veasey of a pair of 1780s stays, and turtle shell, used in a fan from 1700. It goes on to chart the expansion in international trade, import of precious materials, and later introduction of man-made materials, which brought fashionable dress to the masses but also contributed to the air and water pollution to which the textile industry is such a significant contributor.
A bold display of posters, slogan clothes, and artworks show how protest movements have helped draw attention to the harmful side of fashion. Figures like Vivienne Westwood have popularised these issues and a mannequin pays homage to an outfit worn by her whilst protesting against climate change. A man’s outfit from Katharine Hamnett’s 1989 ‘Clean Up or Die’ collection is on show alongside posters from Fashion Revolution, a collective aiming to change the way clothes are sourced, produced and consumed. Customising and re-wearing clothes are highlighted through a vintage outfit and a jacket customised by London designer Katie Jones for fashion writer and editor Susie Lau to wear during Fashion Revolution Week 2015.
The exhibition presents a range of solutions to reducing fashion’s impact on the environment from low water denim and using wild rubber to more conceptual and collaborative projects. These include a dress grown from plant roots by the artist Diana Scherer, who uses seed, soil, and water to train root systems into textile-like material, a bio-luminescent genetically- engineered silk dress created by Sputniko!, the MIT Lab and the National Institute of Agricultural Science (NIAS), South Korea, and a tunic and trousers made from synthetic spider silk from Bolt Threads x Stella McCartney.
Fashioned from Nature is curated by Edwina Ehrman, Curator of Textiles and Fashion at the V&A. She also curated the exhibition The Wedding Dress: 300 Years of Bridal Fashions. She was a co-author of The London Look: Fashion from Street to Catwalk (2004) and a contributor to The Englishness of English Dress (2002).
Centre for Sustainable Fashion (CSF) at London College of Fashion, UAL, present two interactive installations which explore ‘Fashion Now’ and ‘Fashion Future.’ ‘Fashion Now’ takes five iconic contemporary fashion pieces and using sensors, visitors are able to explore the unseen impact on nature of the construction, making, wearing and discarding of each item. ‘Fashion Future’ immerses viewers into the fashion world of the future, inviting us to question what fashion means and show us a future we are yet to imagine. The CSF installations are curated by Professor Dilys Williams, founder and Director of CSF, and Ligaya Salazar, Director, Fashion Space Gallery with help from London College of Fashion MA Fashion Futures students.
Edwina Ehrman, Fashioned From Nature (London: V&A Publishing, 2018), 192 pages, ISBN: 978-1851779451, £25 / $40.
Mantua, 1760s, France (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, T.252 to C-1959).
Exhibition | To Rome and Back
Now on view at LACMA:
To Rome and Back: Individualism and Authority in Art, 1500–1800
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 24 June 2018 — 17 March 2019
Ludovico Mazzanti, The Death of Lucretia, ca. 1730 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of The Ahmanson Foundation).
Over the course of its 2,000-year history, Rome has been alternatively held as the epitome of republic, the decadence of empire, the force of Catholicism, the artistic and literary birthplace of naturalism, and above all, the source of classicism. Despite these various, and ostensibly conflicting associations, its classical epithet—the Eternal City—reflects the symbiosis of these qualities and their lasting influence on republics, nations, religions and even continents beyond. For while Rome’s significance waxed and waned through plagues and progress, conflict and collaboration, its political, social, cultural, and religious power remained consistently strong throughout its history.
Assembled entirely from LACMA’s permanent collection, this examination of a significant moment in early Modern Europe reflects the donations and gifts from years of support to the museum’s departments of Costume and Textiles, Decorative Arts and Design, Latin American Art, and Prints and Drawings, in addition to European Paintings and Sculpture. These works reveal the depth of Rome’s impact from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, before rising individualism, internationalism, and the optimistic equilibrium between secular and religious forces caused the city’s ultimate marginalization.
Exhibition | Sense of Humor
Opening next month at the NGA in Washington:
Sense of Humor
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 15 July 2018 — 6 January 2019
Curated by Jonathan Bober, Judith Brodie, and Stacey Sell
James Gillray, Midas, Transmuting All into Paper, 1797, etching with hand-coloring in watercolor on laid paper, Wright and Evans 1851, no. 168, National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2015.49.1.
Humor may be fundamental to human experience, but its expression in painting and sculpture has been limited. Instead, prints, as the most widely distributed medium, and drawings, as the most private, have been the natural vehicles for comic content. Drawn from the National Gallery of Art’s collection, Sense of Humor celebrates this incredibly rich though easily overlooked tradition through works including Renaissance caricatures, biting English satires, and 20th-century comics. The exhibition includes major works by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Jacques Callot, William Hogarth, James Gillray, Francisco Goya, and Honoré Daumier, as well as later examples by Alexander Calder, Red Grooms, Saul Steinberg, Art Spiegelman, and the Guerrilla Girls.
The exhibition is curated by Jonathan Bober, Andrew W. Mellon senior curator of prints and drawings; Judith Brodie, curator and head of the department of American and modern prints and drawings; and Stacey Sell, associate curator, department of old master drawings, all National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Exhibition | Jean Cotelle (1646–1708): Gardens and Gods
From Versailles:
Jean Cotelle (1646–1708): Gardens and Gods
Grand Trianon, Château de Versailles, 12 June — 16 September 2018
Curated by Béatrice Sarrazin with Clara Terreaux
Jean Cotelle (1646–1708): Gardens and Gods, the first exhibition dedicated to the painter, will honour an artist who was very popular in his time, featuring some 120 works: paintings, drawings, engravings, miniatures, and sculptures from public and private collections. Jean Cotelle the Younger belonged to the generation of painters called upon by Louis XIV to decorate the Grand Trianon, a pleasure palace secluded from the hustle and bustle of the court.
For the Trianon Gallery, which overlooks the gardens and connects the Cool Room and the Garden Room, Cotelle was entrusted with the largest portion of the commission: twenty-one paintings. In order to adapt to the setting, he painted in vertical format, rather unusual for landscape painting, to create topographical representations of the Versailles gardens. He adorned the scenes with characters from mythology or fables arranged in two registers (earthly and heavenly), modelled upon the bucolic landscapes of Bolognese painter Albani.
This cycle, completed by three paintings by Jean-Baptiste Martin and Etienne Allegrain, represents a unique ensemble, providing insight into the king’s taste for his gardens which had recently been created by André Le Notre. Hidden by vegetation, the groves served as a backdrop for the portrayal of the loves and pleasures of the gods.
The exhibition will feature the twenty-four restored paintings following a restoration campaign that lasted several years. Along with the large format canvases, the fifteen gouaches created by the artist, masterpieces of miniature painting, will also be displayed. Additionally, a selection of lead sculptures will be included in the exhibition to evoke the decoration of the groves which have since disappeared, in relation to Cotelle’s paintings.
While the Trianon commission represents one of the highlights of Cotelle’s career, retracing the various stages of his work nevertheless reveals different aspects of his talent and his varied career in Saint-Cloud and Versailles as well as in Provence.
Jean Cotelle, Fountain Scene with Alpheus Pursuing Arethusa, 1689–91 (Château de Versailles, Dist. RMN/Jean-Marc Manaï).
Jean Cotelle the Younger was born into a cultured family in Paris in 1646. He grew up in the company of artists, especially painters, including his father Jean Cotelle the Elder, painter to the King, decorator and ornamental painter. He most likely received his early training from the portrait painter Claude Lefèvre. Jean Cotelle the Younger then visited Rome, where he stayed from 1665 until 1670 at his own expense.
His notable works from 1675 and the years which followed include miniatures to illustrate The Campaigns of Louis XIV as well as a large-format May for Notre-Dame in 1681 representing The Marriage at Cana. Cotelle also worked on other decorative commissions, in particular in Saint-Cloud where he created the jewellery cabinet as part of the decoration depicting the story of Venus and Aeneas.
The most important commission he received was a commission in 1688 from Louis XIV to decorate the Trianon gallery also called the Cotelle gallery. Cotelle painted twenty-one topographical representations of the gardens of Versailles, which he adorned with mythological and literary characters. At the same time, he carried out a series of twenty gouaches representing the Trianon Gallery in miniature.
In 1693, he left Paris for Provence, first making a stop in Lyon, where he created the decoration on the ceiling of the great hall for the Château de la Damette. From 1695 to 1700, he lived in Marseille and became the co-director of the opera with Duplessis. He also created ephemeral decorations such as The Entry of the Duke of Burgundy and the Duke of Berry into the City of Avignon. Jean Cotelle the Younger returned to Paris in 1703 where he continued his work for the Academy until his death in 1708.
Beatice Sarazin, ed., Jean Cotelle (1646–1708): Des Jardins et des Dieux (Paris: Liénart, 2018), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-2359062366, 39€ / $68.
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In preparation for the exhibition on Jean Cotelle, the Palace of Versailles launches a research notice for three works attributed to the painter: two gouaches and a drawing. These works disappeared from the public eye in the 1980s for two of them and soon after the year 2000 for the last one. However, reproductions and publications confirm that they exist (see the Château de Versailles website for images).
The works are:
• La Toilette de Vénus, drawing
• Vue du Château de Choisy du côté des parterres et la famille de Louvois, gouache
• Eliezer et Rebecca au Puits, gouache
Once found, their identification would enrich the corpus of the artist and the value of these works, which could be displayed in the exhibition. Internet users are invited to spread this search as far as possible with the hashtag: #ExpoCotelle. People having information about these works can contact the Palace of Versailles through: cotelle@chateauversailles.fr.
Early Modern French Studies 40 (2018)
Three of the articles focus specifically on the eighteenth century:
Early Modern French Studies 40 (2018)
Anticipated Afterlives: Envisaging Posterity in Early Modern France
• Oliver Wunsch, “Diderot and the Materiality of Posterity,” 63–78.
• John Leigh, “Posterity and Progeny: Memoirs and Autobiographical Writing in the Late Eighteenth Century,” 79–92.
• Olivier Ritz, “La Postérité Littéraire à l’Epreuve de la Révolution,” 93–101.
An excerpt from Jessica Goodman’s introduction to the issue:
Much work has been done on the questions of reception history, literary influence, commemoration, and life writing. Rather than treading over the same ground, however, this volume, in a self-reflexive twist, addresses what we have called ‘anticipated afterlives’: the different ways in which early modern individuals are aware that they stand to ‘live on’ in some sense after their biological death, and how they attempt to manage this transition to posterity. This focus on the ‘before’ of anticipation rather than the ‘after’ of posthumous reputation derives from the idea that posterity, in its purest sense, can only ever be anticipated. It is almost always a projection into an unknown future, a continually receding vanishing point. The individual, standing Janus-like between a lived but disappearing past, and a future that retreats as he approaches it attempts nonetheless to fix a version of that past (whether his own, or that of another) for those to come, whose interpretations he can only guess at.
New Book | Unfabling the East
From Princeton UP:
Jürgen Osterhammel, Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment’s Encounter with Asia, translated by Robert Savage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 696 pages, ISBN: 9780691172729 (hardcover), $35 / ISBN: 9781400889471 (ebook).
During the long eighteenth century, Europe’s travelers, scholars, and intellectuals looked to Asia in a spirit of puzzlement, irony, and openness. In this panoramic and colorful book, Jürgen Osterhammel tells the story of the European Enlightenment’s nuanced encounter with the great civilizations of the East, from the Ottoman Empire and India to China and Japan.
Here is the acclaimed book that challenges the notion that Europe’s formative engagement with the non-European world was invariably marred by an imperial gaze and presumptions of Western superiority. Osterhammel shows how major figures such as Leibniz, Voltaire, Gibbon, and Hegel took a keen interest in Asian culture and history, and introduces lesser-known scientific travelers, colonial administrators, Jesuit missionaries, and adventurers who returned home from Asia bearing manuscripts in many exotic languages, huge collections of ethnographic data, and stories that sometimes defied belief. Osterhammel brings the sights and sounds of this tumultuous age vividly to life, from the salons of Paris and the lecture halls of Edinburgh to the deserts of Arabia, the steppes of Siberia, and the sumptuous courts of Asian princes. He demonstrates how Europe discovered its own identity anew by measuring itself against its more senior continent, and how it was only toward the end of this period that cruder forms of Eurocentrism–and condescension toward Asia—prevailed.
A momentous work by one of Europe’s most eminent historians, Unfabling the East takes readers on a thrilling voyage to the farthest shores, bringing back vital insights for our own multicultural age.
Jürgen Osterhammel is professor of modern and contemporary history at the University of Konstanz. He is a recipient of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, Germany’s most prestigious academic award. His books include The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century and, with Jan C. Jansen, Decolonization: A Short History (both Princeton). He lives in Freiburg, Germany.
Kee Il Choi, On Johannes Kip and Export Landscape Painting
Johannes Kip, A Prospect of West-minster & A Prospect of the City of London, Netherlands, ca. 1720; two engravings, printed from two plates on four sheets of paper, 51 × 234 cm overall (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2017.128a,b).
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In the latest issue of The Rijksmuseum Bulletin, a paper that emerged from a 2017 ASECS session on Art Markets organized by Wendy Roworth.
The Rijksmuseum Bulletin 66.2 (2018)
Dish, or Plate, ca. 1730, hard paste porcelain, 28.4 cm (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Joseph V. McMullan, 58.126).
Kee Il Choi, Jr., “‘Partly Copies from European Prints’: Johannes Kip and the Invention of Export Landscape Painting in Eighteenth-Century Canton,” pp. 120–43.
This paper introduces the way Johannes Kip’s A Prospect of Westminster & A Prospect of the City of London (c. 1720) furnished the design for a handscroll of the Thames River enamelled on the rim of a renowned armorial porcelain service made around 1730–40. Having thus situated an important exemplar of northern European landscape art in China by 1750, it further suggests that Kip’s topographic print may well have played an influential, not to say seminal role in the conceptualization of monumental, panoramic handscrolls of the foreign factories from which ultimately the iconic landscape genre emerged. Descriptive of the site of both commerce and aesthetic exchange, these export paintings have exercised a lasting hold on the historical imagination. In as much as export porcelain signified the China trade for Westerners, export paintings came to represent Canton, if not the whole of China for a global audience.
Enfilade Turns Nine! Buy an Art Book! Donate to HECAA!
From the Editor
As Enfilade turns nine (22 June 2018), I’m glad to write with my usual observations and admonitions. The site exists because you—along with lots of others reading alongside you—continue to tune in. We’ve just surpassed 920,000 views. Thanks so much! And so to celebrate . . .
1) Buy an art book this weekend. In the world of academic art history publishing, several hundred books sold over a few days is stellar. It’s an important way to communicate that the eighteenth century is a thriving field with a vital, engaged audience. The more people who buy books addressing the eighteenth century, the easier it will be to publish your next book on the eighteenth century.
2) Renew your HECAA membership. In the normal world $30 doesn’t really count as philanthropy. For a small academic society it does. Because HECAA is registered as a 501c3, all donations are tax deductible in the United States. So send in a contribution of $100 or $5. But donate something. We accept PayPal.
3) Register for the HECAA conference in November. Early registration rates apply until July 1. More information is available here.
4) Finally, send in news you’d like to see reported! I’m glad to post announcements about conferences, forthcoming books, journal articles, exhibitions, fellowship opportunities, &c. Just about anything except job listings. The postings readers most enjoy are inevitably original content, reports of interesting collections, house museums, resources, and the like. No reason to be shy.
Again, thanks to all of you and all the best!
Craig Hanson
Nationalmuseum Sweden Acquires Per Krafft’s ‘Belisarius’
Press release (19 June 2018) from Sweden’s Nationalmuseum:
Per Krafft the Younger, Belisarius, 1799, oil on canvas, 125 × 94 cm (Stockholm: Nationalmuseum, NM 7468).
Nationalmuseum has acquired a painting by Per Krafft the Younger (1777–1863) depicting the blind former general Belisarius. This painting ought to be regarded as one of the most prominent Swedish works executed in the French Neoclassical style.
In 1796, at the age of nineteen, Per Krafft the Younger was awarded a travel scholarship by the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, in part because Jonas Åkerström (1759–1795), who had used the scholarship to spend time in Rome, had suddenly died the year before at the early age of 36. Krafft went to Paris where as the only Swede he spent three years studying under Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825). David had a large number of pupils, and his teaching, which in those days was held at the Louvre, laid emphasis on painting and drawing technique, modelling, and nature studies in order to depict only the ideal subject matter: themes from antiquity.
David’s influence is evident in Krafft’s painting, which ought to be regarded as one of the most prominent Swedish works executed in the French Neoclassical style. It shows the strict lines of classical architecture in the background and a sculptural approach to the figure drawing. The palette is also a reminder of David’s work, with fine contrasts between their clothing—white and green and red—worn by Belisarius and the boy, their skin tone, and the shiny surface of the reflective metal on the belt and helmet. The figures almost stand out in relief against the light brown, yellow, and blue-grey tones of the background. The work was executed in 1799 and sent together with three other paintings—Phrygian Lyre Player Meditating, Paris, and Love—to Stockholm for exhibiting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 1801.
The motif showing the successful Byzantine general Belisarius who was reduced to beggar status proved popular in the latter part of the 18th century as a result of the novel Bélisaire by Jean-François Marmontel (1723–1799), which was published in 1767. As a punishment for the general who was suspected of having conspired against him, the Byzantine emperor Justinian I is alleged to have put out Belisarius’s eyes, after which Belisarius was forced to beg by the gates of Rome. This choice of motif gave Krafft the opportunity to direct criticism in allegorical form at the tyrannical rulers of his day. Nor is it altogether surprising that Krafft’s teacher, the Republican David, had used the motif in a famous painting from 1781, now on display in the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille. A further famous example was executed by another of David’s pupils, François-Pascal-Simon Gérard (1770–1837), now on display in the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
Krafft emphasises the pathos of his subject in the sober mood that permeates his work in general and in the detail in particular, such as the way the old soldier uses his helmet to collect the alms received. Per Krafft the Younger enjoyed a long life. He was appointed court painter and professor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. During his career he was to become primarily a portrait painter.
Nationalmuseum receives no state funding for art acquisitions; rather, the collections benefit from donations and funding from private trusts and foundations. This acquisition has been made possible by a generous donation from the Hedda & N.D. Qvist Memorial Fund.
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