New Book | François Boucher: Sociability, Mondanité, and the Academy
From Artbooks.com:
Christoph Vogtherr and Leda Cosentino, eds., François Boucher: Sociability, Mondanité, and the Academy in the Age of Louis XV (Oakville: Mosaic Press, 2017) 360 pages, ISBN: 9780993658839, $50.
This volume assembles a group of interrelated thought-provoking essays from leading international scholars originally presented at the conference Boucher and the Enlightenment, held at the Wallace Collection in London in 2005. The conference was one of a series of extraordinary events celebrating the tercentenary of the artist’s birth: exhibitions were held in Paris, Dijon, London, and New York, a conference was dedicated to the artist’s work at The Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, and a number of associated ground-breaking publications were published. All were agreed on the significance of Boucher’s achievement, his contemporary success, and the startlingly rapid critical decline. Yet, although much valuable new research was presented elsewhere regarding the connoisseurship, interpretation, and critical reception of Boucher’s work, the Wallace Collection conference was outstanding in its emphasis on the essentially social nature of Boucher’s artistic enterprise, the seriousness of his artistic ambition, and how the artistic relationships he forged both influenced his artistic practice and affected his critical reputation for both good and bad.
Subsequent research in eighteenth-century studies has confirmed many of the ideas first posited at the conference, but no other major publication on the artist has appeared in the intervening ten-year period that has been able to present or benefit from the advances made at the Wallace Collection. It has thus become increasingly obvious that the original conference papers, unpublished at the time, should be issued. The papers have been revised and enriched with further original research, incorporating important recent discoveries and trends in Boucher scholarship. Taken as a whole, the essays present a wealth of new material concerning Boucher’s social and professional relationships to his patrons, dealers, and fellow artists, which in turn illuminate, as no subsequent publication has done, his extraordinary position at the crossroads of the fine, decorative, literary and musical arts of his time. The book includes a variety of inter-disciplinary topics including new biographical information regarding Boucher’s life, artistic practices, and relationships, while new research is also published regarding the detailed connoisseurship and dating of his work alongside new interpretations of its iconography and critical and commercial reception. The diverse subject matter and variety of art-historical approach of the essays open up new perspectives in our understanding not only of François Boucher but also of the wider cultural and social context of his time. Together they shed new light on Boucher’s significance as one of the most original and controversial artists of the eighteenth century.
The Burlington Magazine, November 2017
The eighteenth century in The Burlington:
The Burlington Magazine 159 (November 2017)
A R T I C L E S
• Oronzo Brunetti, “A Nymphaeum for the Villa Salviati at Ponte alla Badia in Florence,” pp. 893–99.
R E V I E W S
• Jeremy Warren, Review of Mark Gregory d’Apuzzo, La collezione dei bronzi del Museo Civico Medievale di Bologna (Libro Co. Italia, 2017), pp. 912–13.
• François Marandet, Review of Hannah Williams, Académie Royale: A History in Portraits (Ashgate, 2015), pp. 918–19.
• Peter Murray, Review of Jane Fenlon, Ruth Kenny, Caroline Pegum, and Brendan Rooney, eds., Irish Fine Art in the Early Modern Period: New Perspectives on Artistic Practice, 1620–1820 (Irish Academic Press, 2016), p. 923.
• David Cowan, Review of the exhibition Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobites (National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2017), pp. 930–31.
• Xavier F. Salomon, Review of the exhibition Caroline Murat, Sister of Napoleon, Queen of the Arts / Caroline, Soeur de Napoléon, Reine des Arts (Palais Fesch, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Ajaccio, Corsica, 2017), pp. 940–41.
New Book | The East India Company at Home
From UCL Press:
Margot Finn and Kate Smith, eds., The East India Company at Home, 1757–1857 (London: University College London Press, 2018) 500 pages, ISBN: 978 178735 0281 (hardback), £50 / ISBN: 978 178735 0298 (paperback), £30 / ISBN: 978 178735 0274 (open access PDF), free.
The East India Company at Home, 1757–1857 explores how empire in Asia shaped British country houses, their interiors, and the lives of their residents. It includes chapters from researchers based in a wide range of settings such as archives and libraries, museums, heritage organisations, the community of family historians, and universities. It moves beyond conventional academic narratives and makes an important contribution to ongoing debates around how empire impacted Britain.
The volume focuses on the propertied families of the East India Company at the height of Company rule. From the Battle of Plassey in 1757 to the outbreak of the Indian Uprising in 1857, objects, people and wealth flowed to Britain from Asia. As men in Company service increasingly shifted their activities from trade to military expansion and political administration, a new population of civil servants, army officers, surveyors and surgeons journeyed to India to make their fortunes. These Company men and their families acquired wealth, tastes and identities in India, which travelled home with them to Britain. Their stories, the biographies of their Indian possessions and the narratives of the stately homes in Britain that came to house them, frame our explorations of imperial culture and its British legacies.
Margot Finn is Professor of Modern British History at UCL. The author of After Chartism (1993) and The Character of Credit (2003), she has published extensively on the families and material culture of the East India Company. A former editor of the Journal of British Studies, she is President of the Royal Historical Society.
Kate Smith is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century History at the University of Birmingham. Kate specialises in material culture in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. She published Material Goods, Moving Hands: Perceiving Production in England, 1700–1830 in 2014.
New Book | Cultivating Commerce
From Cambridge UP:
Sarah Easterby-Smith, Cultivating Commerce: Cultures of Botany in Britain and France, 1760–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017) 252 pages, ISBN: 978 131641 1339, $99.
Sarah Easterby-Smith rewrites the histories of botany and horticulture from the perspectives of plant merchants who sold botanical specimens in the decades around 1800. These merchants were not professional botanists, nor were they the social equals of refined amateurs of botany. Nevertheless, they participated in Enlightenment scholarly networks, acting as intermediaries who communicated information and specimens. Thanks to their practical expertise, they also became sources of new knowledge in their own right. Cultivating Commerce argues that these merchants made essential contributions to botanical history, although their relatively humble status means that their contributions have received little sustained attention to date. Exploring how the expert nurseryman emerged as a new social figure in Britain and France, and examining what happened to the elitist, masculine culture of amateur botany when confronted by expanding public participation, Easterby-Smith sheds fresh light on the evolution of transnational Enlightenment networks during the Age of Revolutions.
New Book | The Social Life of Maps in America, 1750–1860
From UNC Press:
Martin Brückner, The Social Life of Maps in America, 1750–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 384 pages, ISBN: 978 14696 32605, $50.
In the age of MapQuest and GPS, we take cartographic literacy for granted. We should not; the ability to find meaning in maps is the fruit of a long process of exposure and instruction. A ‘carto-coded’ America—a nation in which maps are pervasive and meaningful—had to be created. The Social Life of Maps tracks American cartography’s spectacular rise to its unprecedented cultural influence. Between 1750 and 1860, maps did more than communicate geographic information and political pretensions. They became affordable and intelligible to ordinary American men and women looking for their place in the world. School maps quickly entered classrooms, where they shaped reading and other cognitive exercises; giant maps drew attention in public spaces; miniature maps helped Americans chart personal experiences. In short, maps were uniquely social objects whose visual and material expressions affected commercial practices and graphic arts, theatrical performances and the communication of emotions. This lavishly illustrated study follows popular maps from their points of creation to shops and galleries, schoolrooms and coat pockets, parlors, and bookbindings. Between the decades leading up to the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, early Americans bonded with maps; Martin Bruckner’s comprehensive history of quotidian cartographic encounters is the first to show us how.
Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press
Martin Brückner is professor of English and material culture studies at the University of Delaware.
C O N T E N T S
Acknowledgments
List of Illustrations
Preface: Introducing the Social Life of American Maps
Part One: American Mapworks
1 The Artisanal Map, 1750–1815: Workshops and Shopkeepers from Lewis Evans to Samuel Lewis
2 The Manufactured Map, 1790–1830: Centralization and Integration from Mathew Carey to John Melish
3 The Industrial Map, 1820–1860: Innovation and Diversification from Henry S. Tanner to S. Augustus Mitchell
Part Two: The Spectacle of Maps
4 Public Giants: Re-Staging Power and the Theatricality of Maps
5 Private Properties: Ornamental Maps and the Decorum of Interiority
6 Self-Made Spectacles: The Look of Maps and Cartographic Visualcy
Part Three: The Mobilization of Maps
7 Looking Small and Made To Go: The Atlas and the Rise of the Cartographic Vade Mecum
8 Cartographic Transfers: Education and the Art of Mappery
Epilogue: Cartoral Arts and Material Metaphors
Appendix 1: Price Table—Maps and Their Sales Prices, 1755–1860
Appendix 2: Inventory of “John Melish Geographer and Map Publisher”
Graphs
Index
New Book | The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America
From Harvard UP:
S. Max Edelson, The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America before Independence (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017), 480 pages, ISBN 978 067497 2117, $35.
After the Treaty of Paris ended the Seven Years’ War in 1763, British America stretched from Hudson Bay to the Florida Keys, from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River, and across new islands in the West Indies. To better rule these vast dominions, Britain set out to map its new territories with unprecedented rigor and precision. The New Map of Empire pictures the contested geography of the British Atlantic world and offers new explanations of the causes and consequences of Britain’s imperial ambitions in the generation before the American Revolution. Under orders from King George III to reform the colonies, the Board of Trade dispatched surveyors to map far-flung frontiers, chart coastlines in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, sound Florida’s rivers, parcel tropical islands into plantation tracts, and mark boundaries with indigenous nations across the interior. Scaled to military standards of resolution, the maps they produced sought to capture the essential attributes of colonial spaces—their natural capacities for agriculture, navigation, and commerce—and give British officials the knowledge they needed to take command over colonization from across the Atlantic.
Britain’s vision of imperial control threatened to displace colonists as meaningful agents of empire and diminished what they viewed as their greatest historical accomplishment: settling the New World. As London’s mapmakers published these images of order in breathtaking American atlases, Continental and British forces were already engaged in a violent contest over who would control the real spaces they represented.
Accompanying Edelson’s innovative spatial history of British America are online visualizations of more than 250 original maps, plans, and charts.
S. Max Edelson is Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia.
C O N T E N T S
List of Maps*
A Note on the Maps
Introduction
1 A Vision for American Empire
2 Commanding Space after the Seven Years’ War
3 Securing the Maritime Northeast
4 Marking the Indian Boundary
5 Charting Contested Caribbean Space
6 Defining East Florida
7 Atlases of Empire
Conclusion
Abbreviations
Notes
Map Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
* Maps
• Detail from Emanuel Bowen, An Accurate Map of North America (London, 1763). From The National Archives of the UK, Open Government License v3.0
• Detail from Daniel Paterson, “Cantonment of His Majesty’s Forces in N. America,” 1767, Library of Congress Geography and Map Division, Washington, DC, gm72002042
• Detail from [Samuel Holland] and John Lewis, “A Plan of the Island of St. John in the Province of Nova Scotia,” 1765, The National Archives of the UK, Open Government License v3.0
• Detail from John Pickens, “Boundary Line between the Province of South Carolina and the Cherokee Indian Country,” 1766, The National Archives of the UK, Open Government License v3.0
• Detail from M. Pinel, Plan de l’Isle de la Grenade ([London], 1763). From Baldwin Collection, Toronto Public Library, 912.72984 J24
• Detail from William De Brahm, “Special Chart of Cape Florida” [1765], Library of Congress Geography and Map Division, Washington, DC, 75693274
• Detail from J. F. W. Des Barres, [Chart of Hell Gate, Oyster Bay and Huntington Bay,] 1778, in The Atlantic Neptune (London, 1777–[1781]). Map reproduction courtesy of the Norman B. Leventhal Map Center at the Boston Public Library, Richard H. Brown Revolutionary War Map Collection
Exhibition | The Sweat of Their Face: Portraying American Workers
Lewis Wickes Hine, Child Labor, ca. 1908; gelatin silver print
(Bank of America Collection)
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Press release (17 October 2017) for the exhibition:
The Sweat of Their Face: Portraying American Workers
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian, Washington, D.C., 3 November 2017 — 3 September 2018
Curated by Dorothy Moss and David Ward
The National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition The Sweat of Their Face: Portraying American Workers presents nearly 100 portrayals of laborers by some of the nation’s most influential artists. The multifaceted exhibition includes paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, media art and photographs that reveal how American workers have shaped and defined the United States over the course of its history—from the Colonial era to the present day. The exhibition examines the intersections between work, art, and social history. The fully bilingual (English and Spanish) display is on view from November 3 until September 3, 2018.
John Rose, Miss Breme Jones, 1785–87, watercolor and ink on paper (Williamsburg: Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum, museum purchase, the Friends of Colonial Williamsburg Collections Fund).
The Sweat of Their Face includes portraits by Winslow Homer, Dorothea Lange, Elizabeth Catlett, Lewis Hine, Jacob Lawrence, and other renowned American artists. Power House Mechanic, a photograph by Lewis Hine, and The Riveter, by Ben Shahn, are significant works in their own right, but they also highlight the artist’s ability to recognize the vast population of anonymous workers and the contributions that their subjects have made. Furthermore, those depicted in The Sweat of Their Face—many of whom now appear as anonymous workers—draw attention to the relationships that exist between viewers, artists, and subjects.
“In The Sweat of Their Face, we explore who works, why, and how their surrounding conditions have changed and evolved over time,” said Kim Sajet, Director of the National Portrait Gallery. “In the early years of the 21st century, crucial questions persist over issues of jobs and workers’ rights, as well as larger issues of economic equality and social mobility. As we grapple with these questions, we might reflect on the labor of the workers from past epochs who have been brought out of anonymity and given the fullness of their humanity by some of America’s great fine artists.”
Spanning centuries and encompassing various genres, each of the artists in The Sweat of Their Face depicts an individual at a specific moment amidst America’s changing landscape, but as the exhibition reveals, some laborers remain the same. For example, migrant workers have always been a part of American labor’s story, and portraits such as Jean Charlot’s Tortilla Maker and photographs from the California fields are reminders that with immigration, the United States has benefited from cultural exchange, innovation, and economic growth.
This exhibition displays loans from such notable institutions as the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Phillips Collection, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, among others. The Sweat of Their Face is organized by curator of painting and sculpture, Dorothy Moss and historian emeritus, David C. Ward. An accompanying catalog presents essays by Moss, Ward, and British art historian John Fagg.
David Ward and Dorothy Moss, with an essay by John Fagg, The Sweat of Their Face: Portraying American Workers Hardcover (Smithsonian Books, 2017), 224 pages, ISBN: 978 158834 6056, $40.
Work always has been a central construct in the United States, influencing how Americans measure their lives and assess their contribution to the wider society. Work also has been valued as the key element in the philosophy of self-improvement and social mobility that undergird the American value system. Yet work can also be something imposed upon people: it can be exploitative, painful, and hard. This duality is etched into the faces of the people depicted in the portraits showcased in The Sweat of Their Face: Portraying American Workers. This companion volume to an exhibition at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery examines working-class subjects as they appear in artworks by artists including Winslow Homer, Elizabeth Catlett, Danny Lyon, and Shauna Frischkorn. This richly illustrated book charts the rise and fall of labor from the empowered artisan of the eighteenth century through industrialization and the current American business climate, in which industrial jobs have all but disappeared. It also traces the history of work itself through its impact on the men and women whose laboring bodies are depicted. The Sweat of Their Face is a powerful visual exploration of the inextricable ties between American labor and society.
David C. Ward is the National Portrait Gallery’s senior historian. He has curated exhibitions on Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, American poetry, and the award-winning Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture. He has also authored several books, including Charles Willson Peale: Art and Selfhood in the Early Republic. Dorothy Moss is director of the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition and curator of painting and sculpture at the National Portrait Gallery. She has contributed to numerous exhibition catalogues, and her articles and essays have been published in The Burlington Magazine, Gastronomica, and American Art.
New Book | Francis Towne’s Lake District Sketchbook
Timothy Wilcox, Francis Towne’s Lake District Sketchbook: A Facsimile Reconstruction (Birmingham: The Winterbourne Press, 2017), 200 pages, ISBN: 978 099548 5709, £40.
The watercolours of Francis Towne (1739–1816) are among the most admired in eighteenth-century British art. After his trip to Italy and the Alps, it was his subsequent tour, to the Lake District in 1786, which marked the true climax of his career. He created a series of 40 views in a single sketchbook, which he then dismantled and exhibited separately. The scattered pages are here reassembled and reproduced at their original size for the first time. The sketchbook itself is accompanied by an introduction, along with detailed notes on the individual subjects, which include classic locations such as Windermere, Ambleside and Coniston, along with far less familiar Buttermere and Bassenthwaite. The result is a unique document of British watercolour painting, and a testament both to the artistic discovery of the Lake District and to the great age of Picturesque travel.
Timothy Wilcox is a leading authority on British painting, especially the watercolour and landscape artists of the Romantic era. He is a writer, lecturer and the curator of exhibitions on Constable, John Sell Cotman, and the bicentenary celebration of the Royal Watercolour Society in 2005. His books include Samuel Palmer (2005), Turner and His Contemporaries: The Hickman Bacon Watercolour Collection (2012), and contributions to The Solitude of Mountains: Constable in the Lake District (2006).
New Book | Writing Britain’s Ruins
Michael Carter, Peter Lindfield, and Dale Townshend, eds., Writing Britain’s Ruins (London: British Library Publishing, 2017), 240 pages, ISBN: 978 07123 09783, £30.
Over the course of the long eighteenth century, Britain’s ruined medieval or ‘Gothic’ abbeys, castles, and towers became the objects of intense cultural interest. Turning their attention away from Classical to local and national sites of architectural ruin, antiquaries and topographers began to scrutinise and sketch, record, and describe the material remains of the British past, an expression of interest in domestic antiquity that was shared by many contemporary painters, poets, writers, politicians, and tourists. This book traces the ways in which a selection of English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish ruins served as the objects of continuous cultural reflection between 1700 and 1850, drawing together essays on the antiquarian, poetic, visual, oral, fictional, dramatic, political, legal, and touristic responses that they engendered. Writing Britain’s Ruins provides an accessible and engaging interdisciplinary account of the ways in which Britain’s ruins inspired writers, artists, and thinkers during a period of extraordinary cultural richness.
Michael Carter is Senior Properties Historian at English Heritage. Peter N. Lindfield is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow based at the University of Stirling. Dale Townshend is Professor of Gothic Literature in the Centre for Gothic Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University.
Exhibition | Animals: Respect, Harmony, Subjugation
Press release for the exhibition:
Animals: Respect, Harmony, Subjugation
Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, 3 November 2017 — 4 March 2018
Animals are a frequent subject of debate these days. Do they have a soul? How much do they suffer? Are we under any obligation to protect their individuality by granting them rights? Are human beings morally authorized to do as they want with animals, to consume them, rob them of their freedom and train them for the purposes of entertainment? Scientific discussion takes the relationship between animal and human being very seriously. In the everyday life of our consumption-oriented society, on the other hand, that relationship oscillates between unreflecting exploitation and sentimental anthropomorphization. Against the background of these contrasts, the exhibition Animals at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg has been geared primarily towards informing visitors and sensitizing them to ways and means of respectful co-existence. With a view to the visual and applied arts but also to science, the show undertakes to re-evaluate the common history of man and animal from the perspective of a wide range of epochs, cultures and media. Loans from museums as well as natural history and ethnology-oriented institutions of Germany and the world will enhance the objects from the MKG’s own abundant and diverse collection. The chief focus is on works of the visual arts in which the interaction between animal and man gives rise to something altogether new. So-called thematic islands unite creations of high culture with those from popular contexts, while also integrating examples from indigenous cultures and natural history. The exhibition features some 200 objects dating from antiquity to the present, including paintings, sculptures, prints, photographs, video art, large-scale installations and films. In addition to the 1,200 square metres exhibition there are 14 satellite locations throughout the entire museum that focus on animals. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue published by Hirmer Verlag.
This exhibition explores the relationship of animals and mankind with a view on the arts and focusses on ethical, spiritual and emotional questions. The centre for Natural History (CeNak) at the University of Hamburg, as a cooperation institution of the MKG, completes the perspective with a scientific view of mankind in the animal world. Beside the joint projects with the Zoological Museum, CeNak presents a special exhibition Vanishing Legacys: The world as a Forest (10 November 2017 – 29 March 2018) addressing the current research results regarding species extinction, deforestation and climate change.
Origins and Inspiration
The oldest known depictions of animals date to over 30,000 years ago—carved out of bones or painted on the walls of caves. Ever since humans started making artworks, animals have been one of the main sources of inspiration. The earliest object in the exhibition, the engaging amber sculpture of a moose from Weitsche, dates back to the Ice Age. Just like a falcon sculpture found in Egypt, a jade deer from China, a bull from the ancient Orient, and a golden boar from Greece, it bears witness to the encounter between human and animal. All of these works tell us something about how humans viewed the animals around them, how the particular society saw itself and about its religious and moral constitution, its attitude to creation and to nature. The exhibition examines how artists across the ages envisioned animals and the aesthetic developments that influenced their interpretations.
Longing and Distance
Paradise! A return to Arcadia is not possible, but the arts can play a vital role on the way to a better future. The selection of works on view is not based on chronology or specific species; instead, two renderings of elephants form thematic bookends for a wide range of animal depictions ranging from early civilizations to the present. The cave was the birthplace of both magic and enlightenment, as our ancestors began to develop a first impression of themselves and the world. Humans did not yet dominate their world; on a painting in the Mutoko Cave in Zimbabwe, fleet stick figures seek their place in the vast animal kingdom. Two majestic elephant silhouettes stand watch over the scene teeming with flora and fauna. They are the rulers of the visible world and the mediators between it and transcendental spheres. The life-size copies made by art students in 1929 on an expedition to Zimbabwe with the ethnologist Leo Frobenius spread word of the prehistoric rock and cave paintings. The seven-meter-wide drawing of the Big Elephants and further sheets convey in the exhibition a connection between human and animal in prehistoric times, in a society whose organization we still know very little about. But they stand above all for modern man’s longing for a harmonious consensus with nature, a primordial state that we presume prevailed in many early civilizations.
It is for this reason that Franz Marc’s Dog Lying in the Snow (1911) and The Goldfish (1925) by Paul Klee are juxtaposed with the cave paintings in the show. Both artists tried in their work to picture an authentic world that had in the meantime been lost. Klee’s Goldfish visualizes the beginnings of life emerging from the primordial soup of the waters. Marc’s metaphysical view of a resting animal at peace with itself and the world imagines an early state of innocence, which must then yield to the exigencies of civilization. Joseph Beuys, too, evoked melancholy at the loss of an edenic unity of man and animal. He sought closer contact with the animal spirit in ceremonial acts. Just as the ‘animalization’ of the world represented for Marc a vision of the future, for Beuys, recovering the communication between human and animal was an integral part of a new, environmentally motivated social movement.
A contemporary response to the elephants from the cave is provided in a video installation by Douglas Gordon from 2003: the elephant cow Minnie was brought from the circus to New York’s Gagosian Gallery. We see her there laying down—or falling—and awkwardly getting up again in a clinical white room. In Play Dead; Real Time, Gordon doesn’t summon thoughts of a common origin but instead reflects on the changed balance of power in the course of thousands of years of co-evolution of humans and elephants. Forced to assume unusual poses for the camera, Minnie looks both powerful and vulnerable at the same time. In her clumsy movements, she lends a face to all the anonymous trapping, training, and exploitation of elephants perpetrated by so many humans. The impressive work combines admiration for the beauty and dignity of the animal with empathy for a subjugated and drilled creature, and finally grief over the dying out of an endangered species.
Insight and Appropriation
We can never really know what it feels like to be an animal, nor can we say with any certainty how an animal feels about us. The desire to understand animals is an ancient one. Insights have been sought using all conceivable means. Scientific developments in this field and innovations in technical media have also influenced artistic practice. Over the centuries, paintings and graphic art techniques have shaped our basic concepts about the animal world. In the Renaissance, animals were made the sole subjects of depictions. Durer’s Young Hare is still today an iconic animal image. A contemporary copy by Hans Hoffmann is on view in the exhibition. Dürer’s Rhinoceros, on the other hand, originally printed as a leaflet, brought an animal worldwide fame that normally lies outside our horizon of experience. The combination of the fantastical, factual, and direct observation is characteristic of bestiaries and zoological encyclopedias that map the myriad species of the animal kingdom; exotic and mythical beasts are rendered here just as realistically as domestic animals. The deceptively true-to-life images are not an end in themselves, however, but are above all testimonies to the skills of the artists who made them. In the mid-18th century, George Stubbs’s gaze penetrated right under the animal’s skin. In five layers, he dissected the body of a horse down to the bare skeleton. This knowledge-oriented deconstruction reveals not only the anatomical facts but also a fundamental realization: The horse, like the human, is a creature of flesh and blood, vulnerable and capable of feeling pain. In the 19th century, the new media of photography and film brought previously hidden phenomena to light, and X-rays laid bare the internal structure of animals. Etienne-Jules Marey’s chrono-photographic experiments captured motion sequences in slow motion, in order to find new answers to the ageold question: Why does a cat always fall on its paws?
Animals can do many things humans can’t: they can rise into the air and maneuver safely through the dark night, like the bat. Bats sleep upside down while we are awake, and then unfurl their wings at dusk. A watercolor from the Dürer school depicts the bat’s flight apparatus in detail, the animal’s wingspan spreading beyond the margins of the sheet. Detailed anatomical studies were meant to make the ‘fantastic’ world of animals understandable. Ernst Haeckel, for example, ventured in his 1904 Art Forms in Nature thirteen taxonomic descriptions of various bat faces. In the exhibition, a contemporary study of the bat’s abilities is contributed by Bat Bot from 2017. An American research team succeeded in mimicking the fascinating bat aeronautics, complete with complex movement sequences and a whisper-thin flight membrane.
Subjugation and Fascination
Do animals have a soul? Are we really entitled to eat them, imprison them, and drill them to do our bidding? In an image cosmos made up of 177 individual photographs made between 2006 and 2010 in various European food production locations, Michael Schmidt shows matter-of-factly, without sentiment or any moral appeal, the reality of the processing of animals for food. The very objectivity of this presentation of an everyday practice prompts us to critically reflect on the mass exploitation of animals. A rejoinder to the tableau Food is posed by an 18th-century Boar’s Head Tureen from the collection of MKG. In that era, hunting wild animals was still a dangerous feat, and their consumption not yet commonplace and hence associated with special ceremonies. While in the Middle Ages the bloody animal corpse would be placed directly on the table, the etiquette of the European courts banished the evisceration and cutting up of the animal to the kitchen. The deceptively realistic porcelain boar’s head contains not an identifiable animal but rather a steaming pot of game meat ragout.
Tethart Philipp Christian Haag, Orangutan Eating Strawberries, 1776, oil on canvas, 109 × 89 cm (Braunschweig, Herzog Anton Ullrich-Museum, Kunstmuseum des Landes Niedersachsen).
The young female orangutan that was brought to The Hague from the Dutch East Indies in 1776 caused a sensation. Speculations about the nature and appearance of the great apes and the boundaries between human and animal could finally be tested on a living specimen. The orangutan was clever, could break free of her chains, open a bottle of wine, take a swig, and then put it back. She was always in a good mood and didn’t like sleeping alone. On the first oil painting of a great ape, this orangutan eats strawberries from a porcelain plate with a silver fork. Despite these civilized traits, however, her abode is still a barren pen lined with straw. Human superiority is substantiated. Two generations later, Charles Darwin would characterize the ape as man’s closest relative, arguing for its ability to feel and empathize with others. Since then, humans have been forced to acknowledge that they are not the crowning achievement of all creation but merely one animal among others. Only recently there have been discussions in the USA and Turkey about banning Darwin’s theory of evolution from school curricula—demonstrating how disturbing this realization can still be even today.
No animal has preoccupied man as much as the ape. This is evident from a variety of exhibits: For the Egyptians, the baboon was the incarnation of Thot, the god of wisdom. The medieval world view banished the apes to the kingdom of the devil. On the stage of the Baroque courts, the ape wore a wig and inspired laughter with his vain attempts as an artist. In the wake of Darwin’s theorizing about evolution, Gabriel von Max showed a rhesus monkey confronting the skeleton of a fellow ape in a painting from around 1900—does the ape realize upon this sight its own mortality? As late as the 1920s, apes in the zoo were still being presented dressed in human clothing. The constellation of ape and woman became a hot topic in the 1930s with the movie hero King Kong, a subject of lasting fascination. The chilling realism of the monstrous giant ape and the breathtaking chase scenes and views of the beast scrambling up New York’s Empire State Building contrasted the savage beast with the contemporary ideal of the progress of civilization. In the bloody end, however, pity for the unrequited lover triumphs over the fear of untamed nature.
Myth and Desire
Ancient mythology provided some disturbing answers to the question of where human nature ends and animality begins. From the constellation of god—human—animal, it developed hybrid creatures that challenge boundaries and taxonomies. How close or how far apart are human and animal? These composite creatures are unsettling because they make us sense that the boundaries are fluid … Out of the countless anthropomorphic creatures that lie outside the accepted systems, the exhibition has chosen to focus on feathered changelings. The femme fatale decked out in feathers is dangerous! The Sphinx with her riddles about the world is featured on Sigmund Freud’s ex libris for good reason … Medusa’s gaze can kill, no man alive can resist the song of the sirens, and vampires subsist on the blood of humans. As erotic temptresses, they make men their victims, arousing desire even today. Amidst ancient sculptures and paintings by Fernand Khnopff, Franz von Stuck, and Max Beckmann, the exhibition circuit also presents a modern-day siren: a bolero covered in parrot feathers from Jean Paul Gaultier’s first haute couture collection, in 1997, animated by a multimedia projection created at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg that lends the seductive feathered object a voice.
Johann Heinrich Füssli, The Nightmare, oil on canvas (Freies Deutsches Hochstift / Frankfurt Goethe Museum, photo: David Hall).
Humans do not appear physically in this exhibition; they are presented instead by way of their desires and fears as mirrored in the depiction of animals. After their physical bearings have been lost and their faculty of reason switched off, however, we do encounter humans in two memorable images: Francisco Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters from 1799 shows a man in an ‘exceptional state’, beset by owls and bats. The most famous scene of animals taking command is Johann Heinrich Füssli’s Nightmare, whose animal protagonists give rise to a wide range of interpretations: incest fantasy, the processing of unfulfilled passions, a moral panorama of the revolutionary age, or an encoded expression of violence. Because it lends itself to so many possible readings, the painting with its trio of white horse, apelike incubus, and woman’s body lasciviously draped upside-down across the bed has become an iconic image of the unfathomable relationship between human and animal. In the age of Enlightenment, animals insist in this picture on having a life of their own, which humans try to suppress and dominate without being able to fully comprehend it. When the dreamer awakes, her nighttime companions have vanished. This is why the physical weight of these chimeras so disturbs the subconscious mind. They point to the connection between animals and sexuality, an association already anchored in ancient mythology, which was taken up by Sigmund Freud and then appears in various forms in the erotic fantasies of the 20th century. Max Ernst painted the motif of the Bride of the Wind in 1927 as something he had seen in a dream, under the influence of psychoanalysis. Two amorphous horse bodies writhe in love play, under the sway of a magical star. The concept of the ‘uncanny’ that Freud formulated in 1919, which acknowledges a feeling of strangeness, repulsion, and fear as part of what we find aesthetic, applies exceptionally well to the animals people encounter in their dreams.
Reconciliation and Respect
The exhibition ends on a conciliatory note with the video installation Raptor’s Rapture by Allora & Calzadilla. A musician and an Old World vulture sit opposite one another, and aggressive tones fill the room. The music is played on a prehistoric flute, a replica of the oldest surviving musical instrument, which came to light in 2008 in the Hohle Fels Cave. It was carved 35,000 years ago from the wing bone of a griffon vulture, an ancestor of our protagonist. Through the music, the bird and woman symbolically come into contact with their ancestors. They communicate in this way, the vulture responding to the sound of the flute with guttural calls and spanning its powerful wings. ‘Kak, kak’, calls the flute just like the vulture, sounds from a distant world. If the ability to express oneself artistically is part of being human, then it was apparently the animal that triggered this creativity in the first place. The vulture contributed the material for the flute not only with its wing bone, also sending the impulse to create sound and conveying to humans a sense of musicality. Raptor’s Rapture shows human and animal wrapped up in a dialogue and thus awakens the longing for harmonious co-existence—a desire that is presumed to have prevailed in primitive society but which has now been lost and must be regained in order to confidently face a common future.
Sabine Schulze and Dennis Conrad, eds., Tiere: Respekt, Harmonie, Unterwerfung (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2017), 288 pages, ISBN: 978 37774 29571, 40€.
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