Enfilade

From Getty Publications:

David Pullins, The Mobile Image from Watteau to Boucher (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2024), 208 pages, ISBN: 978-1606068885, $60.

Reframing long-held assumptions about what distinguishes fine from decorative art, this innovative study explores a mode of making, seeing, and thinking that slices across eighteenth-century visual culture.

This book provides a new way of thinking about eighteenth-century French art and visual culture by prioritizing production over reception. Abandoning the ideologically driven discourse that distinguished fine from decorative art between the 1690s and 1770s, The Mobile Image reveals how the two have been inextricably bound from the earliest stages of artistic instruction through the daily life of painters’ workshops. In this study, author David Pullins defines artisanal and artistic means of learning, seeing, and making through a system of ‘mobile images’: motifs that were effectively engineered for mobility and designed never to be definitive, always awaiting replication and circulation. He examines the careers of Antoine Watteau, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, and François Boucher, situating them against a much broader cast of actors—such as printmakers, publishers, anonymous studio assistants, and architects, among others—to place eighteenth-century painting within a wider context of media and making.

David Pullins is Jayne Wrightsman Curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he is responsible for seventeenth-and eighteenth-century French, Italian, and Spanish painting.

From Amsterdam UP:

Barbara Laux, Claude III Audran, Arbiter of the French Arabesque (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2024), 252 pages, ISBN: 978-9463729284, €129 / $147.

Claude III Audran, Arbiter of the French Arabesque is the first substantial biographical study of Claude III Audran, a late 17th- and early 18th-century master of ornament and a proponent of cutting-edge design who took inspiration from contemporary sources. This work investigates Audran’s accomplishments and the factors that impacted the longevity and arc of his successful career, taking into consideration the contextual variables that influenced and shaped his work. Audran’s achievements bridge an important period with the eclipse of the Guild Maîtrise and the rise of the Académie royale. Audran subcontracted young artists, such as Watteau, Lancret, and Desportes, in order to circumvent restrictions on guild practice enacted by the crown. Looking at his commissions not only reveals the elite taste of his patrons, including Louis XIV, but also Audran’s ability to use elements from popular culture to animate his arabesques, which created hallmarks of rococo interior design.

Barbara Laux is an independent researcher and is currently Senior Curatorial Assistant at the Yale Center for British Art. She earned an MA in the History of Decorative Arts and in Art History prior to her PhD at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

c o n t e n t s

Acknowledgments
Introduction

1  Biography of Claude III Audran (1658–1734)
2  The French Arabesque as an Art Form, Audran as Master Ornamentalist and His Initial Commissioned Works
3  Claude III Audran and Jean de La Fontaine’s Fables: Maintaining the Social Hierarchy
4  Attracting New Patrons in the Eighteenth Century
5  Claude III Audran’s Competitors and His Legacies

Illustrations
Appendix
Bibliography
Index

From Penn State UP:

Mónica Domínguez Torres, Pearls for the Crown: Art, Nature, and Race in the Age of Spanish Expansion (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2024), 218 pages, ISBN: 978-0271096810, $100. Also available as an ebook.

In the age of European expansion, pearls became potent symbols of imperial supremacy. Pearls for the Crown demonstrates how European art legitimated racialized hierarchies and inequitable notions about humanity and nature that still hold sway today.

When Christopher Columbus encountered pristine pearl beds in southern Caribbean waters in 1498, he procured the first source of New World wealth for the Spanish Crown, but he also established an alternative path to an industry that had remained outside European control for centuries. Centering her study on a selection of key artworks tied to the pearl industry, Monica Dominguez Torres examines the interplay of materiality, labor, race, and power that drove artistic production in the early modern period. Spanish colonizers exploited the expertise and forced labor of Native American and African workers to establish pearling centers along the coasts of South and Central America, disrupting the environmental and demographic dynamics of their overseas territories. Drawing from postcolonial theory, material culture studies, and ecocriticism, Domínguez Torres demonstrates how, through use of the pearl, European courtly art articulated ideas about imperial expansion, European superiority, and control over nature, all of which played key roles in the political circles surrounding the Spanish Crown. This highly anticipated interdisciplinary study will be welcomed by scholars of art history, the history of colonial Latin America, and ecocriticism in the context of the Spanish colonies.

Mónica Domínguez Torres is Professor of Art History with a joint appointment in Latin American and Iberian Studies at the University of Delaware.

From Penguin Books and Harvard UP’s Belknap Press:

Oswyn Murray, The Muse of History: The Ancient Greeks from the Enlightenment to the Present (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2024), 528 pages, ISBN: 978-0674297456, £30 / $38.

The study of ancient Greece has been central to Western conceptions of history since the Renaissance. The Muse of History traces the shifting patterns of this preoccupation in the last three centuries, in which successive generations have reinterpreted the Greeks in the light of their contemporary worlds. Thus, in the eighteenth century, the conflict between Athens and Sparta became a touchstone in the development of republicanism, and in the nineteenth, Athens came to represent the democratic ideal. Amid the ideological conflicts of the twentieth century, the Greeks were imagined in an age of suffering, inspiring defenses against nationalism, Nazism, communism, and capitalism.

Oswyn Murray is an emeritus Fellow of Balliol College, University of Oxford, and a leading scholar of the ancient world. He has written widely translated books including Early Greece and The Symposion: Drinking Greek Style and is the coeditor of The Oxford History of the Classical World.

c o n t e n t s

Part One | The Muse of History

Introduction: Past and Present

The Republic of Letters
1  The Western Traditions of Ancient History
2  Enlightenment Greece: Sparta versus Athens
3  Ireland Invents Greek History: The Lost Historian John Gast
4  The Philhellenes and Marathon

Radical History
5  The Contested Reign of Mitford
6  Romantic History in Britain and Europe
7  Utilitarian History: Mill and Grote

The Triumph of Germany
8  Hegel, Niebuhr, and Critical History
9  Burckhardt and Cultural History
10  The Archaic Age
11  The Problem of Socrates
12  In Search of the Key to All Mythologies

Part Two | The Angel of History

The Crisis of the Republic of Letters
13  The Repentance of Gilbert Murray
14  Saving Civilization: The Warburg Institute and the SPSL
15  Momigliano on Peace and Liberty
16  Momigliano in England

The School of Paris
17  Fernand Braudel and the Mediterranean
18  The ‘École de Paris’

Unfnished Business
19  Dark Times: The Cold War and the Triumph of Capitalism 391
20  The Crisis of Theory in History

Acknowledgements
Notes
List of Illustrations
Index

From Scala:

Colin Bailey, Barry Bergdoll, Andrew Dolkart, Daria Rose Foner, Christine Nelson, and Brian Regan, J. Pierpont Morgan’s Library: Building the Bookman’s Paradise (London: Scala Arts Publishers, 2023), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-1785513992, £35 / $50.

This beautifully illustrated book celebrates the first-ever restoration of the exterior of J. Pierpont Morgan’s Library—the historic heart of the Morgan Library & Museum.

Morgan’s Library has stood as a significant cultural landmark ever since it was commissioned by J. Pierpont Morgan for personal use at the start of the twentieth century. Its transition to a public institution in the twenties has lent to an even greater flood of admiration and patronage, by both local and international audiences. The elegant design by Charles Follen McKim stands as one of the finest examples of neoclassical architecture in the United States, significant for its distinctive Italian Renaissance style and its opulent interior period rooms. The site has been designated both a National Historic Landmark and a New York City landmark, and it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The book, following on the heels of the completed restoration, will punctuate this latest milestone in the building’s storied history.

Colin B. Bailey, Director of the Morgan Library & Museum, is a specialist in eighteenth-century French art.
Barry Bergdoll is the Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History at Columbia University and the former chief curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Andrew Dolkart is a professor of historic preservation at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.
Daria Rose Foner is the former Research Associate to the Director of the Morgan Library & Museum and is now with the Old Masters Department at Sotheby’s, New York.
Christine Nelson is the former Drue Heinz Curator of Literary and Historical Manuscripts, The Morgan Library & Museum, now Fellowships Manager, the Library Company of Philadelphia.
Brian Regan is the architectural advisor to the Morgan Library & Museum.

From Arnoldsche Art Publishers:

Vanessa Sigalas and Jennifer Tonkovich, eds., Morgan―The Collector: Essays in Honor of Linda Roth’s 40th Anniversary at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (Stuttgart: Arnoldsche Verlagsanstalt, 2023), 288 pages, ISBN: ‎978-3897906792, $65.

The essays in this lavishly illustrated volume offer a multi-faceted portrait of American financier J. Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913) as a collector of art.

A riveting exploration of Morgan’s acquisitions from antiquities to medieval manuscripts, to Old Master paintings, and European decorative arts, Morgan―The Collector introduces the reader to how and why he amassed his vast collection. The book also serve as a tribute to Linda Roth, curator at Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut, who dedicated much of her forty-year career to researching Morgan and the over 1,500 works from his collection now in the museum. This volume is directed at both a scholarly audience and general readers interested in the history of collecting, European art, and America during the Gilded Age.

Distributed by Yale University Press:

Esther Chadwick, The Radical Print: Art and Politics in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain (London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2024), 248 pages, 9781913107437, $60.

The Radical Print argues for printmaking in Britain as the most exciting, innovative, and critically engaged field of artistic production in the late eighteenth century. Moving the print from the margins to the centre of the study of art history, this new critical study demonstrates how print responded to the acceleration of historical events, the polarisation of public discourse, and the sense of a world turned upside down in ways that traditional artistic media could not. Across five chapters, this book brings printmakers James Barry, John Hamilton Mortimer, James Gillray, Thomas Bewick, and William Blake together as artists of the ‘Paper Age’ for the first time. From Barry’s experiments in aquatint at the time of the American Revolution to Blake’s visionary engravings of the post-Napoleonic period, Esther Chadwick shows how the print medium provided artists with special purchase on the major political issues of their age. The Radical Print assembles a rich array of material, from the period’s best-known prints to unpublished ephemera, revealing print’s dynamic role in one of the most turbulent periods of British history.

Esther Chadwick is Lecturer in Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art.

From Amsterdam UP:

Carolina Brown, Comfortable Everyday Life at the Swedish Eighteenth-Century Näs Manor (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2024), 320 pagers, ISBN: 978-9048562374, €136.

During the eighteenth century, comfortable everyday life becomes a new ideal. The good life was no longer about grand representation or the manifestation of material opulence. The new luxury was instead the comfortably arranged life at home. This book is about the traces of this change, its approach and consequences, and its anchoring in the material and social life of the Swedish manor. The comfort revolution of the eighteenth century was clearly associated with both new types of furniture and new ways of furnishing. An important aspect of the development of comfort was the new mobility and flexibility in form and function that the home and its interior now showed. Through the home of the Wadenstierna family on the country estate of Näs, north of Stockholm, the comfortable everyday life is set by their various tables—at writing desks, sewing tables, dressing tables, coffee tables, and games tables.

Carolina Brown is associate professor and senior lecturer in art history at Uppsala University. For over three decades in her teaching and research, she has addressed the arts and culture of the early modern period—focusing on portraiture, interior design, and fashion.

c o n t e n t s

Introduction
1  Carl Eric Wadenstierna and Nas Manor
2  At the Sewing Table
3  At the Writing Table
4  At the Dressing Table
5  At the Games Tables
6  At the Coffee Table
Concluding Words

Bibliography and Sources
Index