Catalogue for a New Museum | Simone Handbag Museum
This new book from Yale UP is published in conjunction with the new Simone Handbag Museum in Seoul, opening 16 July 2012 (the catalogue is scheduled to appear in September). Yuri Chong writes about the museum for The New York Times Magazine (12 June 2012).
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Judith Clark, ed., Handbags: The Making of a Museum (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 272 pages, ISBN: 9780300186185, $50.
The history of the handbag—its design, how it has been made, used, and worn—reveals something essential about women’s lives over the past 500 years. Perhaps the most universal item of fashionable adornment, it can also be elusive, an object of desire, secrecy, and even fear. Handbags explores these rich histories and multiple meanings.
This book features specially commissioned photographs of an extraordinary, newly formed collection of fashionable handbags that date from the 16th century to the present day. It has been acquired for exhibition in the first museum devoted to the handbag, in Seoul, South Korea. The project is a commission undertaken by experimental exhibition-maker Judith Clark, whose innovative practices are revealed in Handbags.
Sweetmeat purse, French, ca. 1670–80. Silk and metal brocade, braid and ribbon.
Essays by leading fashion historians and an acclaimed psychoanalyst investigate the history of gesture, the psychoanalysis of bags, and the museum’s state-of-the-art mannequins and archive cabinets. In order to preserve the words that describe the unique qualities of each bag, a terminology of handbags has been compiled.
Judith Clark is professor of fashion and museology at London College of Fashion. Caroline Evans is professor of fashion history and theory at Central St. Martin’s College of Art & Design. Amy de la Haye is professor of dress history and curatorship, Rootstein Hopkins Chair, at London College of Fashion. Adam Phillips is a psychoanalyst and writer. Claire Wilcox is senior fashion curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Exhibition | Renaissance to Goya: Prints and Drawings in Spain
From The British Museum:
Renaissance to Goya: Prints and Drawings Made in Spain
The British Museum, London, 20 September 2012 — 5 January 2013
The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 31 August — 24 November 2013
New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, 14 December — 9 March 2014
Curated by Mark McDonald
Spanish prints and drawings is a subject that is little known outside Spain. It is generally assumed these were marginal arts practiced only by a few well-known artists, including José de Ribera, Bartolomé Murillo and Francisco de Goya. The aim of this project is to explore the largely unchartered territory of the origins, form and function of prints and drawings in Spain. It will present for the first time a coherent study, largely based on the collections of the British Museum, that looks at their history from around 1400 through to and including Goya (died 1828). It will also present new research on the subject of the graphic arts in Spain. The material will be published in a monograph to accompany an exhibition at the British Museum in late 2012.
It is the first time prints and drawings made in Spain have been studied together. A critical aspect of the project will be to consider the presence of foreign artists working in Spain and how they contributed to the artistic landscape. Particular attention will be given to the different types of prints and drawings and their many functions to convey the role they played in artistic practice and visual culture in Spain (architectural prints and drawings, reproductive prints, landscape, religious subjects, prints made for commemorative purposes, fans, playing cards and more).
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Due out in October from Ashgate:
Catalogue: Mark McDonald, Renaissance to Goya: Prints and Drawings Made in Spain (Aldershot: Lund Humphries, 2012), 320 pages, ISBN: 9781848221185.
The rich tradition of printmaking and drawing in Spain has rarely been examined, in part because of the misapprehension that Spanish artists did not draw and few turned their hand to printmaking. This spectacular study of prints and drawings will for the first time examine the history of graphic practice in Spain, providing an overview of more than 400 years of artistic production.
The story begins in the late 15th century with convergence of foreign artists in Spain who introduced new techniques and ideas. The most significant changes were brought about through the building of Philip II’s monastery of the Escorial near Madrid. Large numbers of foreign artists arrived to decorate the monastery. They included the Italians Pellegrino Tibaldi and Federico Zuccaro and the Flemish printmaker Pedro Perret, whose engravings of the Escorial are among the most remarkable architectural prints of the period. At the Escorial the international influences formed the basis of artistic practice and contributed to the distinctive appearance of art produced in Spain.
The ‘Golden Age’ — a dramatic flourishing of artistic and literary endeavour in Spain during the 17th century — is celebrated through discussion of key works by the most important visual artists of the period: Alonso Berruguete; the Carducho brothers; Murillo; Ribera; Zurbarán and the extraordinary drawings of Velázquez, about which very little is known. Each region of Spain is explored separately as independent centres of artistic activity during this time with prints and drawings examined together to demonstrate how their production was closely linked.
The book concludes with the Enlightenment and the 18th century, with a study of remarkable prints and drawings by Francisco de Goya. Goya’s important Spanish contemporaries are examined alongside the works of foreign artists who continued to come to Spain, such as the Tiepolo family who worked in Madrid.
Contents
Introduction
1. Prints and Drawings in Spain: Attitudes and Evidence
2. Drawings and Prints before 1500 and Early Collecting in Spain
3. Importing Graphic Practices: Castile 1550–1600
4. Madrid as Artistic Capital 1600–1700
5. Andalusia 1500–1700
6. Valencia 1500–1700 and Ribera in Naples
7. The Eighteenth-Century Reinvention of the Graphic Arts
8. Francisco de Goya
Appendix by Clara de la Peña McTigue, Spanish Paper and Papermaking
Bibliography
Mark McDonald is curator of Old Master prints and Spanish drawings at the British Museum. He has published widely on the subject of Old Master prints from the 15th to the 18th centuries, with special interest in the Renaissance period. He is the author of The Print Collection of Ferdinand Columbus (1488–1539): A Renaissance Collector in Seville (winner of the Mitchell Prize 2005).
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Note (added 1 September 2013) — The original posting did not include the Sydney venue; more information is available here»
Note (added 21 December 2013) — Earlier versions did not include Santa Fe venue; more information is available here».
New Title | Plumes et Pinceaux: Discours de femmes sur l’art en Europe
This new collection of essays, with a number of contributions from HECAA members, is published in memory of Anne Schroder and Angela Rosenthal. Now available in hard copy, it’s scheduled to appear online in three years, joining the second volume, an anthology of primary sources, already online at the INHA website.
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From the publisher:
Edited by Mechthild Fend, Melissa Hyde, and Anne Lafont, Plumes et Pinceaux: Discours de femmes sur l’art en Europe (1750-1850) – Volume 1 (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2012), 336 pages, ISBN: 9782840664574, €28.
Introduction
• Mary D. Sheriff — Portrait de l’artiste en historienne de l’art : à propos des Souvenirs de Mme Vigée-Lebrun
• Noémie Étienne — La pensée dans la pratique : le cas de Marie-Jacob Godefroid, restauratrice de tableaux au XVIIIe siècle
• Sarah Betzer — Marie d’Agoult : une critique d’art « ingriste »
• Anne L. Schroder — « Elle était née pour peindre les héros ! » : l’éducation artistique des filles et les femmes peintres vue par Mme de Genlis
• Isabelle Baudino — Les voyageuses britanniques à Paris : un point de vue féminin sur l’art ?
• Satish Padiyar — Les lettres de Mme Récamier à Canova (1813-1819) : une écriture féminine entre grâce et exil
• Heather Belnap Jensen — Quand la muse parle : Julie Candeille sur l’art de Girodet
• David Blankenstein, Nina Struckmeyer et Malte Lohman — Helmina von Chézy, une historienne de l’art (?) berlinoise à Paris sous l’Empire
• Susan L. Siegfried — Expression d’une subjectivité féminine dans les journaux pour femmes, 1800-1840
• Charlotte Foucher — Le bas-bleu artistique : portrait au vitriol de la femme critique d’art
• France Nerlich — Johanna von Haza, alias Heinrich Paris. De la critique d’art comme critique sociale
Index
Crédits photographiques
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The second volume, as described at Les presses du réel:
Edited by Anne Lafont, with Charlotte Foucher and Amadine Gorse, Plumes et Pinceaux: Discours de femmes sur l’art en Europe (1750-1850) – Volume 2, Anthologie (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel, 2012), 560 pages, ISBN: 9782840664581, €32.
Si Germaine de Staël et Marceline Desbordes-Valmore sont connues pour leurs réflexions sur l’art, d’autres écrits et pensées de femmes des années 1750-1840 en France, mais aussi en Angleterre et en Allemagne, le sont moins, ou pas du tout. C’est un florilège de ces voix qui est donné à lire dans ces pages : de Mme de Beaumer à Edmée de Syva, en passant par Félicité de Genlis (dont sont publiés ici deux textes inédits, Essai sur les arts et Catalogue pittoresque du cabinet de tableaux de Monsieur le comte de Sommariva), Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, Helmina von Chézy, Anne Plumptre, parmi une quinzaine d’autres. Journalistes, critiques d’art, artistes ou voyageuses curieuses et averties visitant les musées européens avec passion, elles usent de tous moyens littéraires, pour faire entendre des positions esthétiques, morales, voire politiques sur l’art et
son histoire. Elles portent un regard aigu, mais pourtant jamais univoque, sur les grands événements de leur temps – de la Révolution
française à la conquête napoléonienne et à ses conséquences –, et sur
l’art et la création artistique.
Exhibition | The Horse: From Arabia to Royal Ascot
While you probably wouldn’t know it from the description provided below, the eighteenth century is a major theme for this exhibition on horses at The British Museum — with a good showing of Stubbs, including Letitia, Lady Lade from the Royal Collection, but other treats, too. I found it immensely instructive, one of the most interestingly layered exhibitions I recall seeing in a long time. There’s something for everyone — antiquity and the role of the horses in early civilizations and empires of Mesopotamia and Egypt, extraordinary Persian and Mughal miniatures, textiles, equestrian rock art (photographed in stunning detail), paintings, books, portraiture, agrarian history, and sport. The challenge, however, is not simply putting together a varied exhibition but imparting coherence, and given just how much is covered in this relatively modest sized show, it succeeds brilliantly, appropriately acknowledging both the Diamond Jubilee and the Olympics without being obsequious to either one. It also offers, I think, an example of how projected photographs and video can be used effectively in an exhibition without taking over or supplanting the objects on display. For better or worse, I’m guessing we’ll see lots more moving images in the exhibitions of the future. Integrating that technology thoughtfully into the larger intellectual program of a show is a tall order. The Horse: From Arabia to Royal Ascot offers a start and plenty else besides.
-Craig Hanson
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From The British Museum:
The Horse: From Arabia to Royal Ascot
The British Museum, London, 24 May — 30 September 2012
Curated by John Curtis and Nigel Tallis
The history of the horse is the history of civilisation itself. The horse has had a revolutionary impact on ancient civilisations and this major exhibition explores the influence of horses in Middle Eastern history, from their domestication around 3,500 BC to the present day. Britain’s long equestrian tradition is examined from the introduction of the Arabian breed in the 18th century to present day sporting events such as Royal Ascot and the Olympic Games.
Important loans from the British Library, the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Royal Armouries, as well as rare material from Saudi Arabia, will be seen alongside objects from the British Museum’s exceptional collection, including famous pieces such as the Standard of Ur and Achaemenid Persian reliefs. Supported by the Board of Trustees of the Saudi Equestrian Fund, the Layan Cultural Foundation and Juddmonte Farms. In association with the Saudi Commission for Tourism & Antiquities. (more…)
Enfilade at Three — Buy a Book and Open a Door
From the Editor
Enfilade turns three today, and to celebrate, I’m announcing a campaign to establish June 22 as Buy-an-Art-Book Day. As I’ve said repeatedly, you deserve credit for making this site so much more than I could have possibly envisioned when I stepped on-board several years ago as newsletter editor. With more than 220,000 hits on some 1300 posts, Enfilade attests to the global depth of interest in eighteenth-century art — both among scholars and a wider, engaged public. The site now receives around 10,000 hits each month with some 1500 from returning visits. In short, there are hundreds of you who read Enfilade on a regular basis, and the site’s success depends on you. Thank you!
With these numbers in mind, it seems to me that Enfilade readers could mobilize to make an impact — modest perhaps but still an impact. In transitioning from traditional print formats to the digital realm, academic publishing, particularly art historical publishing, faces tremendous challenges. With the ‘business’ of the academy more generally plagued by questions of sustainability, it’s easy to see how hard decisions about budgets have wreaked havoc on the sales of books (when major universities are cutting whole departments, declining library budgets may seem relatively benign, but in both cases, fewer books will be sold). For most of us, such gloomy observations are all too familiar, and you don’t turn to Enfilade for more bad news. Today is after all a birthday celebration!
So as a gesture of positive action, I’m asking all of you to buy a book today (and fellow bloggers to spread the word). It’s easy to think that it won’t matter, but it does. Most people are astounded to learn just how small the circulation numbers are for art history books published by university presses. However humbling it may be for those of us who spend years of our lives producing a book, it’s not uncommon for only 400 or 500 copies to be sold. Surpass 1000 and you’re a superstar. There’s a tendency to assume that university presses receive generous funding from their host universities. It’s almost never the case. If they’re not in the business to turn huge profits, they must still be economically viable. Several years ago, I heard Susan Bielstein, executive editor at the University of Chicago Press, give a talk on the nuts and bolts of publishing. How did she begin? By asking members of her audience (almost entirely composed of art historians) to go buy a book. She was entirely serious. So am I.
Many of you buy lots of art history books already. Bravo! Buying a book today won’t be any major change for you. As I think about my own buying habits, they tend to go something like this: I buy discounted display copies at conferences, I buy things I need for an upcoming talk, I buy remaindered copies of books I should have bought a year or two earlier, or I buy used copies I need for an article via Amazon. None of that’s what I have in mind in launching Buy-an-Art-Book Day. Those used books do nothing to help the authors or the university presses who produced them. For that matter, new purchases through Amazon often result in smaller royalties than buying from the publisher directly. Ever wonder who shoulders the expense of that reduced price? Yes, the publisher and the writer.
If 200 or 300 of you buy an art history book this week — ideally one treating the eighteenth century and, better yet, one written by a HECAA member — it would send a strong message that there is an eager audience for such books. Whether you spend $6 or $1000, buy a book.
I like the metaphor of an enfilade because of the way it suggests an open — almost limitless — vista, with each room leading to a deeper, more intimate experience. But such a vision is premised on those doors being opened. Reading a book — buying a book — is one way we turn the handle, one way we open doors to the eighteenth century.
-Craig Hanson
Exhibition | Canaletto: The Venetian Notebook
Thanks to Stacey Sloboda for noting this one that almost slipped by me (a brief English description is available here). From the Palazzo Grimani:
Canaletto: Il Quaderno Veneziano
Palazzo Grimani, Venice, 1 April — 1 July 2012
Curated by Annalisa Perissa Torrini
Apre a Venezia il 1 aprile, nella cornice straordinaria delle sale di Palazzo Grimani, la mostra Canaletto. Il Quaderno veneziano dedicata al celebre Quaderno di schizzi di Canaletto, un unicum nella storia dell’arte del Settecento, codice mai visibile al pubblico, ora presentato assieme a ventiquattro disegni di antica provenienza veneziana, appartenenti a collezioni pubbliche e private, per la prima volta insieme.
Il progetto espositivo è a cura del Direttore del Gabinetto dei Disegni delle Gallerie dell’Accademia, Annalisa Perissa Torrini, programmato nell’ambito della valorizzazione del fondo grafico, promosso dalla Soprintendenza Speciale per il Patrimonio storico, artistico ed etnoantropologico e per il Polo Museale della città di Venezia e dei comuni della Gronda lagunare e prodotto da Venezia Accademia con il contributo di Save Venice Inc.
La mostra indaga il modus operandi dell’artista, definendone la concreta operatività nella fase di costruzione grafica e stabilisce il ruolo svolto dalla camera ottica nell’ideazione e realizzazione delle vedute di Venezia.
Il Quaderno di Canaletto è un prezioso piccolo volume (mm 175×235) formato da 7 fascicoli, rilegati nell’Ottocento, ma in origine sciolti, ricolmo di schizzi realizzati probabilmente in un breve arco di tempo, poi riutilizzato dal pittore veneziano negli anni. Ogni fascicolo racconta il processo creativo del suo lavoro: le tipiche annotazioni sui colori, sui materiali e sui luoghi ritratti, le correzioni e abrasioni, i cambi di inchiostro e di penna, lo sporadico uso del righello e l’impiego della punta metallica, la cui presenza è stata osservata nel corso degli studi e delle analisi delle tecniche e della carta.
Insieme al Quaderno, vengono esposti otto fogli, tra cui il cosiddetto “scarabotto” con il Canal Grande di fronte alla Salute e il Traghetto di San Moisé, della raccolta delle Gallerie, sette fogli della Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica di Trieste, sette fogli poco noti di collezione privata italiana di provenienza Corniani-Algarotti, il foglio della Fondazione Cini e quello del Museo Correr di Venezia. Importanti dipinti di collezioni pubbliche e private mostreranno poi la realizzazione pittorica di alcuni disegni esposti in mostra: capolavori delle Gallerie dell’Accademia, di Ca’ Rezzonico, degli Uffizi, di Castello Sforzesco e di importanti collezioni private italiane, mentre alcune incisioni, di Visentini e Smith, documentano l’importanza delle stampe sia nell’iter creativo dell’artista, che nella diffusione della sua opera.
In occasione della mostra verrà pubblicato un fac-simile del Quaderno di Canaletto, edito da Marsilio Editori, accompagnato da un saggio storico interpretativo di Annalisa Perissa Torrini e seguito da uno studio sulla fascicolazione e rilegatura condotto da Barbara Biciocchi, da un testo sulla camera ottica a cura di Dario Maran, e documenti sulla vita di Canaletto trovati da Alessandra Schiavon all’Archivio di Stato di Venezia.
Il progetto di allestimento, curato da Annunziata Genchi, comprende supporti audiovisivi e multimediali didattici, fra i quali una riproduzione digitale del Quaderno, realizzata da Mauro Tarantino, che permetterà al visitatore di sfogliare virtualmente tutte le pagine del prezioso codice, mentre diversi filmati illustreranno l’utilizzo e le finalità della camera ottica, i modi di fascicolazione del volume e le tecniche grafiche di esecuzione, un filmato in 3D con il confronto tra i disegni e i dipinti ed un altro sul funzionamento della camera ottica. Un modello funzionante di camera ottica, inoltre, è stato realizzato in collaborazione con il Musée Maillol di Parigi, dove il visitatore potrà guardare le “vedute” come faceva lo stesso Canaletto.
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From Marsilio:
Annalisa Perissa Torrini, ed., Canaletto. Il Quaderno veneziano (Marsilio, 2012), 236 pages, ISBN: 9788831713009, €33.
In occasione della mostra Canaletto. Il Quaderno veneziano, in programma a Venezia nella splendida cornice di Palazzo Grimani dall’1 aprile all’1 luglio, verrà pubblicato un fac-simile dell’affascinante manufatto, un unicum nella storia dell’arte del Settecento, solitamente non visibile al pubblico. Il prezioso volume formato da sette fascicoli, rilegati nell’Ottocento ma in origine sciolti, ricolmo di schizzi realizzati probabilmente in un breve arco di tempo, venne riutilizzato negli anni da Canaletto come strumento di lavoro. Ogni fascicolo racconta l’operare del maestro veneziano: racchiude le tipiche annotazioni sui colori, sui materiali e sui luoghi raffigurati, le correzioni e le abrasioni, i cambi di inchiostro e di penna, tutte quelle tracce che rappresentano la sua memoria grafica, la registrazione di dati veri, oggettivi, esatti da interpretare e rielaborare nella fase creativa della composizione della veduta. In apparato al fac-simile saranno inseriti, oltre agli interessanti risultati delle recenti analisi sulle cosiddette informazioni “nascoste” – non visibili a occhio nudo – e su fascicolazione e rilegatura dell’opera, anche un saggio storico interpretativo di Annalisa Perissa e un testo di Dario Maran che stabilisce il ruolo svolto dalla camera ottica nell’ideazione e realizzazione delle vedute di Venezia.
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Exhibition | Expanding Horizons: Lusieri and the Panoramic Landscape
From the National Galleries of Scotland, as noted by Hélène Bremer:
Expanding Horizons: Giovanni Battista Lusieri and the Panoramic Landscape
Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh, 30 June — 28 October 2012
Curated by Aidan Weston-Lewis
Giovanni Battista Lusieri, The Monument to Philopappos, Athens, ca. 1805-07
Giovanni Battista Lusieri (1754–1821) was hailed during his lifetime as one of the most gifted of all living landscape artists and his exquisitely crafted works were eagerly sought by collectors. But within a few years of his death his reputation descended into an obscurity from which it has only recently begun to re-emerge. His name will still be unfamiliar to all but a few specialists, a neglect which this exhibition, the first ever devoted to the artist, aims to redress.
Lusieri was one of very few Italian artists to have adopted watercolour as their favoured medium. From the outset his work exhibits the meticulous detail, precision and faultless perspective that remained the hallmarks of his style throughout his career, combined with a panoramic breadth of vision and an astonishing ability to render brilliant effects of light. The latter part of Lusieri’s career was spent mainly in Athens as Lord Elgin’s resident artist and agent. In that capacity he was closely involved in supervising the removal and shipping of the celebrated marbles from the Acropolis, now in the British Museum.
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Catalogue: Aidan Weston-Lewis with Fabrizia Spirito, Kim Sloan, and Dyfri Williams, Giovanni Battista Lusieri and the Panoramic Landscape: Expanding Horizons (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2012), 236 pages, ISBN: 9781906270469, £25 / $63 — available from Artbooks.com in August
This is the first publication in English devoted to the extraordinary work of the Italian landscape watercolourist Giovanni Battista Lusieri (1754-1821). His career took him from his native Rome to Naples, then to Sicily and finally to the eastern Mediterranean, where he spent twenty years in the service of the 7th Earl of Elgin as his resident artist and agent in Athens. In that capacity he was closely involved in the removal of the celebrated marbles from the Parthenon and other monuments in Greece. Lusieri’s watercolours combine a broad, panoramic vision, an uncanny ability to capture brilliant Mediterranean light and a meticulous, almost photographic attention to detail. He was widely acclaimed as one of the most accomplished landscape artists of his day, and his works were eagerly sought by British Grand Tourists, but after his death he was soon forgotten, and only recently have his exceptional gifts begun to be recognised once again.
Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgements
Aidan Weston-Lewis — ‘The most exact and eloquent transcriptions of nature I ever saw’: Giovanni Battista Lusieri, Life, and Work
Fabrizia Spirito — Lusieri and his Contemporaries | Drawing on the Spot around Rome and Naples
Aidan Weston-Lewis — Rome | An Early Patron: Philip Yorke; entries 1-13
Kim Sloan — Naples | ‘Naples, where the landscape painter is most truly in his element’; entries 14-59
Fabrizia Spirito — Sicily | Lusieri in Sicily; entries 60-66
Dyfri Williams — Greece | Lusieri in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1800-1821; entries 67-92
Bibliography
Notes and References
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Aidan Weston-Lewis is Chief Curator at the Scottish National Gallery with responsibility for the Italian and Spanish collections. He has organised numerous exhibitions at the Gallery and been closely involved with many major acquisitions. He has a particular interest in north Italian painting and drawing of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and has published widely in this area.
Forthcoming | French Funerary Arts and Tomb Cult, 1750-1870
Due out in September from Ashgate:
Suzanne Glover Lindsay, Funerary Arts and Tomb Cult: Living with the Dead in France, 1750–1870 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), 260 pages, ISBN: 9781409422617.
Even before the upheaval of the Revolution, France sought a new formal language for a regenerated nation. Nowhere is this clearer than in its tombs, some among its most famous modern sculpture-rarely discussed as funerary projects. Unlike other art-historical studies of tombs, this one frames sculptural examples within the full spectrum of the material funerary arts of the period, along with architecture and landscape. This book further widens the standard scope to shed new and needed light on the interplay of the funerary arts, tomb cult, and the mentalities that shaped them in France, over a period famous for profound and often violent change. Suzanne Glover Lindsay also brings the abundant recent work on the body to the funerary arts and tomb cult for the first time, confronting cultural and aesthetic issues through her examination of a celebrated sculptural type, the recumbent effigy of the deceased in death. Using many unfamiliar period sources, this study reinterprets several famous tombs and funerals and introduces significant enterprises that are little known today to suggest the prominent place held by tomb cult in nineteenth-century France. Images of the tombs complement the text to underline sculpture’s unique formal power in funerary mode.
Contents
Introduction: Revisiting 18th- and 19th-Century French Tombs
1. Reforming Funerary Cult in France, 1750–1870
2. 18th-Century France: Rethinking Sculpture and the Body
3. The Bonchamps Project: Reinventing the Effigy Tomb
4. Louis-Philippe’s Tombs: Burying a Modern Royal Family
5. The Poetics of the Exhumed Corpse I: A Tomb for Napoléon
6. The Poetics of the Exhumed Corpse II: The Cavaignac Tomb
Bibliography
Index
New Title | Treasures of Chinese Export Ceramics
From Yale UP:
William R. Sargent, with an essay by Rose Kerr, Treasures of Chinese Export Ceramics from the Peabody Essex Museum (New Haven: Yale University Press), 568 pages, ISBN: 9780300169751, $65.
Beginning in the sixteenth century when Portuguese traders started importing blue and white porcelain to Europe, Chinese ceramics manufacturers produced goods specifically for export to the West. The industry flourished through the early twentieth century as the market for fine porcelain expanded in Europe and the Americas. Among the Peabody Essex Museum’s founders in 1799 were sea captains and supercargoes involved in extensive trade with Asia, and many of the remarkable examples of export wares they brought back provided a foundation for the Museum’s world-renowned collection of Chinese export ceramics.
Written by William R. Sargent, a leading expert in the field, Treasures of Chinese Export Ceramics is one of the most authoritative sources on this topic. Its scholarly entries on 287 representative objects that date from the fifteenth to the twentieth century are divided into sections by type of ware. Although these examples only hint at the Museum’s vast holding, together they encompass its broad range of Chinese export ceramics. An essay on Jingdezhen, the “Porcelain City,” by Rose Kerr, a glossary of ceramics terminology, and appendix on armorials, and an extensive bibliography all contribute to making this an invaluable resource.
William R. Sargent is the former H. A. Crosby Forbes Curator of Asian Export Art at the Peabody Essex Museum. Rose Kerr is Curator Emeritus of the Far Eastern Collection of Chinese Ceramics at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Exhibition | Napoleon: Revolution to Empire
Press release from the NGV:
Napoleon: Revolution to Empire
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2 June — 7 October 2012
On 2 June 2012 the National Gallery of Victoria will opened this year’s spectacular Melbourne Winter Masterpieces exhibition, Napoleon: Revolution to Empire, examining French art, culture, and life from the 1770s to the 1820s. Its story runs from the first French voyages of discovery to Australia during the reign of Louis XV to the end of Napoleon’s transforming leadership as first Emperor of France.
Premier and Minister for the Arts Ted Baillieu said, “Now a well-established highlight of our major events calendar, the Melbourne Winter Masterpieces series has set the benchmark for blockbuster exhibitions in this country. I’m pleased to welcome the latest installment, Napoleon: Revolution to Empire. Through hundreds of priceless treasures, never before seen in Australia, this exhibition brings to life the legend one of history’s most extraordinary and complex figures. It’s another great Melbourne exclusive, another tourism drawcard for Victoria and another stunning exhibition for the NGV.”
This panoramic exhibition features nearly 300 works, dating from the 1770s to the 1820s, objects of breathtaking opulence and luxury – from paintings, drawings, engravings, sculpture, furniture, militaria, textiles, porcelain, gold and silver, fashion and jewellery.
Dr Gerard Vaughan, Director NGV, said, “Napoleon: Revolution to Empire continues the tradition of spectacular NGV exhibitions which have become a winter highlight in Victoria’s cultural calendar. This year visitors will be intrigued by the life of Napoleon, a man who held the world captive to his ambition. He had a vision of a united Europe, but a Europe controlled by France and united through conquest. Napoleon is well known as a master military strategist; this exhibition reveals that he was also a passionate lover and dedicated patron of the arts, sciences and literature.”
Napoleon: Revolution to Empire explores, amongst other themes, the stormy period of social change forced upon France through the outbreak of the French Revolution, the execution of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, and the rise to power of the young Napoleon Bonaparte and his new wife Josephine, as the couple worked to cement their place as France’s new political and social leaders.
Ted Gott, Senior Curator International Art, NGV said, “World leaders in the Age of Exploration, Napoleon and Josephine were a true power couple- famous and stylish. The stunning artworks and objects in this exhibition illustrate their belief that the advancement of knowledge was integral to social order; they welcomed scientists and artists to receptions and dinners where world affairs were reshaped under their rule.”
Personal items will give visitors a glimpse into an extravagant private world of the couple. Jewels owned by Josephine, Napoleon’s personal weapons, lavish furniture from private residences and a lock of Napoleon’s hair feature alongside spectacular decorative objects, bejewelled gifts given to dignitaries, military uniforms and a beautiful court dress- the only surviving garment worn at Napoleon’s coronation ceremony in 1804.
Napoleon: Revolution to Empire also considers the enormous cultural and scientific contact between Australia and France from the 1770s to the 1820s. This is a story that is not often told. Both Napoleon and Josephine were captivated by Australia, which had newly entered the world’s imagination following the publication of Captain Cook’s travels. The exhibition tells the story of how this fascination spurred Napoleon to fund a voyage in 1805 that collected information about the continent and produced the first map of the southern Australian coastline with the land we now know as Victoria, but which was at the time first named Terre Napoléon (Napoleon Land). French voyages to Australia returned with collection’s of Australian flora and fauna, much specifically earmarked for the hothouses and enclosures of Napoleon and Josephine’s country residence Malmaison. Captivating works in the exhibition show kangaroos, black swans and a range of native Australian plants in the grounds of this quintessentially French estate.
Organised in partnership with the Fondation Napoléon in Paris, who are lending many of their greatest works, the exhibition also features incomparable treasures drawn from Europe’s most important Revolutionary and Napoleonic collections, including the Château de Malmaison, Château de Versailles, Musée Carnavalet and Musée de l’Armée in France, the Napoleonmuseum Thurgau in Switzerland, and the Museo Napoleonico in Rome.
More information is available at the exhibition website.
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From the NGV:
Catalogue: Ted Gott and Karine Huguenaud with contributing authors, Napoleon: Revolution to Empire (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2012), 336 pages, ISBN: 9780724103560 (hardback) /978072410355-3 (paperback).
This panoramic volume tells the story of French art, culture and life from the 1770s to the 1820s: the first French voyages of discovery to Australia, the stormy period of social change with the outbreak of the French Revolution, and the rise to power of the young Napoleon Bonaparte and his wife Josephine. Together the couple defined taste for a new century, and in the age of exploration developed a particular fascination for Australia. As well as telling the remarkable story of France’s close involvement with Australia in the early 1800s, Napoleon: Revolution to Empire showcases hundreds of works of breathtaking opulence and luxury. Featuring insightful writing by world-renowned historians of Napoleonic art and design, this authoritative publication celebrates the vital contributions to the visual arts made by Napoleon as first Emperor of France.
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