Enfilade

From Ashgate’s website:

Denise Amy Baxter and Meredith Martin, eds., Architectural Space in Eighteenth-Century Europe: Constructing Identities and Interiors (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), ISBN: 9780754666509.

Architectural Space in Eighteenth-Century Europe: Constructing Identities and Interiors explores how a diverse, pan-European group of eighteenth-century patrons – among them bankers, bishops, bluestockings, and courtesans – used architectural space and décor to shape and express identity. Eighteenth-century European architects understood the client’s instrumental role in giving form and meaning to architectural space. In a treatise published in 1745, the French architect Germain Boffrand determined that a visitor could “judge the character of the master for whom the house was built by the way in which it is planned, decorated and distributed.”

This interdisciplinary volume addresses two key interests of contemporary historians working in a range of disciplines: one, the broad question of identity formation, most notably as it relates to ideas of gender, class, and ethnicity; and two, the role played by different spatial environments in the production – not merely the reflection – of identity at defining historical and cultural moments. By combining contemporary critical analysis with a historically specific approach, the book’s contributors situate ideas of space and the self within the visual and material remains of interiors in eighteenth-century Europe. In doing so, they offer compelling new insight not only into this historical period, but also into our own.

Contents: Introduction: constructing space and identity in the 18th-century interior, Denise Amy Baxter; Section I Crossing Boundaries, Making Space: The ascendancy of the interior in 18th-century French architectural theory, Meredith Martin; ‘Très belle, agréable, et bien meublée’: the Electoral palace at Saint-Cloud in the early 18th century, Max Tillman; In the right place at the right time: political propaganda in the Archiepiscopal palace of Würzburg, Csongor Kis; Getting plastered: ornamentation, iconography, and the ‘desperate faction’, Katherine R.P. Clark. Section II The Interior as Masquerade: Salon as stage: actress/courtesans and their homes in late 18th-century Paris, Kathryn Norberg; Fashioning bluestocking conversation: Elizabeth Montagu’s Chinese room, Stacey Sloboda; The space of the mask, from stage to ridotto, Marc J. Neveu. Section III The Politics of Display: Improving taste in the private interior: gentlemen’s galleries in post-Napoleonic London, Anne Nellis Richter; A nation of statues: museums and identity in 18th-century Rome, Jeffrey Collins; (Re)constructing an 18th-century interior: the value of interiority on display, Daniel Brewer; Bibliography; Index.

About the Editors: Denise A. Baxter is an Assistant Professor in the School of Visual Arts at the University of North Texas. Meredith S. Martin is Assistant Professor of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Art in the History of Art Department at Wellesley College.

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John Potvin and Alla Myzelev, eds., Material Cultures, 1740–1920: The Meanings and Pleasures of Collecting (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), ISBN: 9780754661443.

Interweaving notions of identity and subjectivity, spatial contexts, materiality and meaning, this collection makes a significant contribution to debates around the status and interpretation of visual and material culture. Material Cultures, 1740–1920 has four primary theoretical and historiographic lines of inquiry. The first is how concepts of otherness and difference inform, imbricate, and impose themselves on identity and the modes of acquisition as well as the objects themselves. The second concern explores the intricacies of how objects and their subjects negotiate and represent spatial narratives. The third thread attempts to unravel the ideological underpinnings of collections of individuals which inevitably and invariably rub up against the social, the institutional, and the political. Finally, at the heart of Material Cultures, 1740–1920 is an intervention moving beyond the disciplinary ethos of material culture to argue more firmly for the aesthetic, visual, and semiotic potency inseparable from any understanding of material objects integral to the lives of their collecting subjects. The collection argues that objects are semiotic conduits or signs of meanings, pleasures, and desires that are deeply subjective; more often than not, they reveal racial, gendered, and sexual identities. As the volume demonstrates through its various case studies, material and visual cultures are not as separate as our current disciplinary ethos would lead us to believe.

Contents: Introduction: the material of visual cultures, John Potvin and Alla Myzelev; Porcelain bodies: gender, acquisitiveness and taste in 18th-century England, Stacey Sloboda; Women’s home-crafted objects as collections of culture and comfort 1750–1900, Clive Edwards; Spatializing the private collection: John Fiott Lee and Hartwell House, Anastasia Filippoupoliti; ‘Everyone to his taste’ or ‘truth to material’?: the role of materials in collections of applied arts, Nadine Rottau; Collecting/painting harem/clothing, Joan DelPlato; ‘Chinamania’: collecting Old Blue for the house beautiful c 1860–1900, Anne Anderson; From specimen to scrap: Japanese textiles in the British Victorian interior, 1875–1900, Elizabeth Kramer; Indian crafts and imperial policy: hybridity, purification and imperial subjectivities, Julie F. Codell; Collecting peasant Europe: peasant utilitarian objects as museum artifacts, Alla Myzelev; Collecting intimacy one object at a time: material culture, perception and the spaces of aesthetic companionship, John Potvin; Collecting the sublime and the beautiful: from romanticism to revolution in Celtic revival jewellery, Joseph McBrinn; Index.

About the Editors: John Potvin is Assistant Professor of European Art and Design History at the University of Guelph, Canada. He is the author of Material and Visual Cultures Beyond Male Bonding, 1880–1914: Bodies, Boundaries and Intimacy (2008) and editor of The Places and Spaces of Fashion, 1800–2007 (2009).  Alla Myzelev is an Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Guelph, Canada. She has published on the relationship between Russian and Ukrainian avant-garde and craft, the role of women in the Arts and Crafts Movement as well as the representation of material culture in museums and private collections.

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Tom Dunne and William Pressly, eds., James Barry, 1741–1806: History Painter (Ashgate, 2010), ISBN: 9780754666349.

Bringing into relief the singularity of Barry’s unswerving commitment to his vision for history painting despite adverse cultural, political and commercial currents, these essays on Barry and his contemporaries offer new perspectives on the painter’s life and career. Contributors, including some of the best known experts in the field of British eighteenth-century studies, set Barry’s works and writings into a rich political and social context, particularly in Britain.

Among other notable achievements, the essays shed new light on the influence which Barry’s radical ideology and his Catholicism had on his art; they explore his relationship with Reynolds and Blake, and discuss his aesthetics in the context of Burke and Wollstonecraft as well as Fuseli and Payne Knight. The volume is an indispensable resource for scholars of eighteenth-century British painting, patronage, aesthetics, and political history.

Contents: Foreword: Barry studies from a bicentennial perspective, William L. Pressly; Introduction: James Barry’s ‘moral art’, and the fate of history painting in Britain, Tom Dunne; From oddity to odd man out: James Barry’s critical legacy, 1806–66, David H. Solkin; James Barry’s ‘hairbreath niceties’: risk, reward, and the reform of culture around 1770, Martin Myrone; James Barry: a history painter in Paris in the 1760s, Fionnuala McManamon; ‘Glowing thoughts on glowing canvas’: James Barry’s Venus Rising from the Sea, Margaret W. Lind; Barry, Reynolds and the British school, Martin Postle; Barry and Fuseli: Milton, exile and expulsion, Asia Haut; The politics of envy: Blake and Barry, David Bindman; Reform and revolution: James Barry’s writings in the 1790s, John Barrell; History painting and aesthetics: Barry and the politics of friendship, Liam Lenihan; No 36 Castle Street East: a reconstruction of James Barry’s house, painting and printmaking studio, and the making of The Birth of Pandora, Michael Phillips; Crowning the Victors at Olympia: the great room’s primary focus, William L. Pressly; Barry’s Bosseut in Elysium: Catholicism and counter-revolution in the 1790s, Daniel R. Guernsey; ‘A monument to perpetuate his memory’: James Barry’s Adelphi cycle revisited, David G.C. Allan; Select bibliography; Index.

About the Editors: Tom Dunne is Professor Emeritus of History at University College Cork, Ireland. William Pressly is a Professor in the Department of Art History & Archaeology at the University of Maryland, College Park.

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Alden Cavanaugh and Michael Yonan, eds., The Cultural Aesthetics of Eighteenth-Century Porcelain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), ISBN: 9780754663867.

During the eighteenth century, porcelain held significant cultural and artistic importance. This collection represents one of the first thorough scholarly attempts to explore the diversity of the medium’s cultural meanings. Among the volume’s purposes is to expose porcelain objects to the analytical and theoretical rigor which is routinely applied to painting, sculpture and architecture, and thereby to reposition eighteenth-century porcelain within new and more fruitful interpretative frameworks. The authors also analyze the aesthetics of porcelain and its physical characteristics, particularly the way its tactile and visual qualities reinforced and challenged the social processes within which porcelain objects were viewed, collected, and used.

The essays in this volume treat objects such as figurines representing British theatrical celebrities, a boxwood and ebony figural porcelain stand, works of architecture meant to approximate porcelain visually, porcelain flowers adorning objects such as candelabra and perfume burners, and tea sets decorated with unusual designs. The geographical areas covered in the collection include China, North Africa, Spain, France, Italy, Britain, America, Japan, Austria, and Holland.

Contents: Introduction, Alden Cavanaugh and Michael Yonan; Rethinking the Arcanum: porcelain, secrecy, and the 18th-century culture of invention, Glenn Adamson; The nature of artifice: French porcelain flowers and the rhetoric of the garnish, Mimi Hellman; Igneous architecture: porcelain, natural philosophy, and the rococo cabinet chinois; Michael Yonan Marketing Celebrity: Porcelain and Theatrical Display; Heather McPherson; Balancing act: Andrea Brustolon’s ‘La Forza’ and the display of imported porcelain in 18th-century Venice, Erin J. Campbell; The Queen’s nécessaire, Alden Cavanaugh; Porcelain, print culture and mercantile aesthetics, Dawn Odell; Sugar boxes and blackamoors: ornamental blackness in early Meissen porcelain, Adrienne L. Childs; Ties that bind: relations between the Royal Academy of San Fernando and the royal porcelain factory of the BuenRetiro, Andrew Schulz; Selected bibliography; Index.

About the Editors: Alden Cavanaugh is Associate Professor of Art History at Indiana State University. Michael E. Yonan is Assistant Professor of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Art at the University of Missouri-Columbia.

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Nebahat Avcioglu, Turquerie and the Politics of Representation, 1728-1876 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010), ISBN: 9780754664222.

In this first full-length study of Turkish-inspired architecture in Western Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Nebahat Avcioglu offers a new reading of the notion of cultural frontiers as rapport of heterogeneities rather than separations. Reclaiming turquerie from the confines of inconsequential exoticism and reframing it as cross-cultural art in its own right, Avcioglu analyses hitherto neglected images, designs and constructions linking Western interest in the Ottoman Empire to issues of self-representation and national politics. Investigating how and why Europeans turned to the Turks for inspiration she provides a far-reaching reinterpretation of architectural thought and culture in this period.

Organised as a series of case studies focusing on three specific buildings types — kiosks, mosques, and baths — each representing the first manifestation of their genre to be erected in Western Europe, the study delves into the politics of architectural forms and styles. Avcioglu argues that the appropriation of these types was neither accidental nor merely reflected European domination of another culture but that its process was essentially dialectical and contributed to transculturation in both the West and the East.

Contents: Introduction: toward a cross-cultural interpretation of art; Part I The Kiosk: Stanislas Leszczynski as Ahmed III or the union of the crown and the turban; ‘The Turkish Paradise or Vaux-hall Gardens’. Part II The Mosque: Kew Gardens: the Turkish mosque and the representation of empire. Part III The Hammam: The Turkish bath in Europe. Conclusion: Turquerie from imperial gardens to the Exposition Universelle; Bibliography; Index.

About the Author: Nebahat Avcioglu is Research Coordinator at Columbia University Institute for Scholars in Paris. And Maître de conférence at Sciences-Po (Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris).

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