Call for Articles | Anachronisms in Art History
From the Call for Papers / Appel à contributions:
Anachronisms in Art History / Anachronismes en histoire de l’art
Special issue of Perspective: Actualité en histoire de l’art
Edited by Thomas Golsenne, Hélène Leroy, and Hélène Valance
Proposals due by 17 June 2024, with finished articles due by 1 December 2024
Perspective will explore, in its 2025.2 issue—co-edited by Thomas Golsenne (INHA), Hélène Leroy (Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris), and Hélène Valance (université Bourgogne-Franche-Comté/InVisu)—the question of anachronisms in art history.
Since at least the 1960s, a number of critical approaches have emerged with regard to sweeping Western approaches that classified artworks and artists in successive stylistic periods, and even based the discipline on these temporal and formal categories. They made it possible to call into question the 19th-century ‘historism’ that confused the scholars’ temporal categories with the historical phenomena themselves, just as they have redefined periods as designations of time, objects of history. In practice, however, it is clear that the period remains more than ever the temporal unit within which we conceive art history and study it. Even if the subject of anachronism in art history emerged much earlier, for reasons that merit further consideration, it genuinely became worthy of interest for the epistemology of the historical sciences at the turn of the 21st century. What about art history?
To this end, three main topics emerge for proposed articles:
1 Disciplinary Anachronisms
2 Methodological Anachronisms
3 Historical Anachronisms
Additional information (including a bibliography) is available from the full Call for Papers»
Taking care to ground reflections in a historiographic, methodological, or epistemological perspective, please send your proposals (an abstract of 2,000 to 3,000 characters/350 to 500 words, a working title, a short bibliography on the subject, and a biography limited to a few lines) to the editorial email address (revue-perspective@inha.fr) no later than 17 June 2024.
Perspective handles translations; projects will be considered by the committee regardless of language. Authors whose proposals are accepted will be informed of the decision by the editorial committee in July 2024, while articles will be due on 1 December 2024. Submitted texts (between 25,000 and 45,000 characters/ 4,500 or 7,500 words, depending on the intended project) will be formally accepted following an anonymous peer review process.
Published by the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA) since 2006, Perspective is a biannual journal which aims to bring out the diversity of current research in art history, highly situated and explicitly aware of its own historicity.
Call for Papers | A Legacy of Landscape Study
From ArtHist.net:
A Legacy of Landscape Study
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 5–6 December 2024
Proposals due by 1 July 2024
The Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) and Oak Spring Garden Foundation (OSGF) share a legacy of landscape study rooted in the collections of Paul and Rachel Lambert ‘Bunny’ Mellon. While the Mellons’ collecting practices differed, they both gathered significant materials in the history of British environments, horticulture, and landscapes. Notable examples include Paul Mellon’s paintings and prints by George Stubbs and J. M. W. Turner and Bunny Mellon’s garden treatises and Humphrey Repton Red Books. From these origins, the YCBA’s extensive collection of British art has encouraged generations of new scholarship on British landscape art, while OSGF has become a leading research institution for the global histories and futures of gardens, landscapes, and plants. Inspired by this legacy of collecting and scholarship, the YCBA and OSGF are hosting a symposium at Yale to bring together new interdisciplinary research on British landscape studies.
By commingling the diversity of approaches to the histories and depictions of landscapes and environments represented by the two institutions, this symposium aims to generate new scholarly conversation about the intersections of British culture, ecology, and land. We invite papers exploring new topics in the study of British landscapes, from art history to cultural geography to environmental studies, and we particularly welcome work exploring the relationship of cultural output to physical landscapes and ecologies. We encourage broad definitions of ‘landscape’ and ‘British’ to open the potential for discussions of the global context of Britain and its former empire, and to consider an international exchange of landscape art, design, and horticulture.
Proposed subjects might include, but are not limited to:
• Extractive, industrial, urban, and neglected landscapes
• Histories of collecting and display (whether art or plants)
• Interconnections of landscape and garden history and art history
• New critical approaches to environments, landscapes, and British identity
• Plant history and humanities broadly, including related subjects such as food history and agrarian history
Please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words and a short biography by 1 July 2024, 5pm (ET). The YCBA will provide travel and accommodations for successful applicants.
Call for Papers | The Shape of Things: Still Life in Britain
From ArtHist.net:
The Shape of Things: Still Life in Britain
Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, 27–28 September 2024
Proposals due by 31 May 2024
This summer, Pallant House Gallery presents The Shape of Things: Still Life in Britain (11 May – 20 October), a major exhibition exploring the continuing and fundamental relevance of the genre of still life to British art and art history. Historically still life has been viewed as the lowest genre of art, but in fact it has been employed by leading British artists to grapple with some of the most profound themes relating to the human condition, and as a vehicle for experimentation with new forms and ideas. In keeping with Pallant House Gallery’s mission to explore new perspectives on British art from 1900 to now, the exhibition demonstrates how artists working in the 20th and 21st centuries have continually reimagined traditional still life. It questions how still life has been used to explore themes such as mortality and loss, fecundity and love, the uncanny and subconscious, the domestic environment and questions of gender, abundance and waste. Today these themes also extend to climate change and to the legacy of colonialism and empire.
Starting with the introduction of still life in Britain by émigré artists in the 17th century, the exhibition reveals how modern and contemporary artists have engaged with and reinterpreted traditional art history. It then presents a history of modern and contemporary British art as understood through the lens of the still life, showing how the genre sits at the heart of groups and movements including the Bloomsbury Group, Scottish Colourists, Seven & Five Society, Unit One, Surrealism, St Ives and post-war abstraction, Neo-romanticism, pop art, post-war figurative art, conceptual art, and the YBAs. Encompassing painting, prints, photography, sculpture, and installation, The Shape of Things: Still Life in Britain includes over 150 works by more than 100 leading artists working in Britain. The exhibition is accompanied by a site-specific installation by Phoebe Cummings.
This symposium will seek to draw out connections between historic and contemporary art, and will provide an opportunity to further explore key themes in the exhibition. The keynote lecture will be delivered by a leading British artist. The two sessions will include papers by art historians and curators concerning artists and themes in historic, modern, and contemporary British art, and artists talking about themes in their work.
We seek contributions that investigate, though are not limited to:
• the reinterpretation and renewal of this traditional genre
• the exploration of gender identity through still life
• how the world’s underlying uncertainties are expressed through a genre traditionally perceived as domestic
• still life as an art form that goes beyond reality to explore symbolism, the sub-conscious, and the uncanny
• the connections between still life and global commerce and its connections to colonialism and the British Empire
• the contribution of émigré and Diaspora artists to the enduring significance of the genre
• still life as a site for the exploration of materiality
To be considered as a speaker, please send an abstract of up to 400 words to curatorial@pallant.org.uk, including your name, affiliation, contact details (phone number and email address), and a short biography with details of any recent publications. The deadline for submissions is 31 May 2024 (12pm). We will aim to contact successful candidates by Monday, 1 July.
The symposium has been generously supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. Speakers will be paid a fee of £150. Speakers will be able to claim travel expenses (up to £100) and accommodation costs (up to £100) for the Friday evening. There will be no delegate fee for speakers. Delegate tickets will be £50 full price (£30 for students) and will include refreshments and lunch. Tickets will go on sale via the Pallant House Gallery website nearer the time of the conference.
Call for Articles | Fall 2025 Issue of J18: Clean
From the Call for Papers:
Journal18, Issue #20 (Fall 2025) — Clean
Issue edited by Maarten Delbeke, Noémie Etienne, and Nikos Magouliotis
Proposals due by 1 October 2024; finished articles will be due by 1 April 2025
This issue of Journal18 asks: what we might see if we regard the eighteenth century as possessed by a cleaning frenzy? Cleaning, as a process of removing excess matter to get to the essential or the original, engaged an eighteenth-century obsession with origins and etiology. This type of removal took place in a time of formulations and nebulous debates about race, class, and ethnicity and intersected with attempts to ‘purify’ the urban and rural environment as well as society itself. Cleanliness suggested a particular aesthetic that resonated with the tenets of neoclassicism but also with racialized notions of whiteness, as the opposite of ‘impure’, non-white races, cultures, and objects. In the increasingly disenchanted worldview of elites, cleaning artworks was also a way to annihilate any living presence connected to these objects, from bugs and microorganisms to ancestral spirits to immanent beliefs.
In eighteenth-century Europe, political, cultural, and religious authorities sought to clean artworks and monuments from anything that ‘soiled’ them, whether that was actual dirt, natural traces of use and time, or (hu)man-made ephemera, immaterial rituals, and ideological beliefs. These actions were symptoms of a power struggle between religious institutions and the state and between different cultures and countries, but also between local populations and an increasingly centralized administration. Even when presented as neutral measures of maintenance, such acts of cleaning often led to conflict. This was the case, for example, in late eighteenth-century Naples, when the German painter Jacob Philip Hackert was accused by local artists of disrespecting a number of Italian paintings he had cleaned. What for one cultural milieu diminished artistic value could be, for another, an integral part of the artwork.
This issue of Journal18 invites essays on acts of and discourses around cleaning in the long eighteenth century, particularly cases that address issues of authority and ownership. Who was entitled to touch, handle, modify, or clean an artwork, relic, building, or monument? What/who was allowed to reside within such buildings and objects, and what/who had to be erased or exterminated? What was the significance of defining the ‘pure’ or ‘original’ state of such artworks? What line of separation did actors draw between cleaning and destruction? Was cleaning gendered, and, if so, how? Who was expected to do the cleaning, and who was allowed to produce dirt? What are the connections between racialized ideologies that led to the devastations of ethnic cleansing and eighteenth-century aesthetics of cleaning and cleanliness? Is there a way to contrast the ‘messiness’ of the early modern multi-modal ‘entangled’ historiography with the streamlined ‘cleanliness’ of eighteenth-century historical writing?
Proposals for issue #20 Clean are now being accepted. The deadline for proposals is 1 October 2024. To submit a proposal, please send an abstract (250 words) and brief biography to editor@journal18.org and nikolaos.magouliotis@gta.arch.ethz.ch. Articles should not exceed 6000 words (including footnotes) and will be due by 1 April 2025. For further details on submission and Journal18 house style, see Information for Authors.
Issue Editors
• Maarten Delbeke, ETH, Zurich
• Noémie Etienne, University of Vienna
• Nikos Magouliotis, ETH, Zurich
Call for Papers | The Secularization of Religious Assets
From the Call for Papers, which includes the French Appel à communication:
The Secularization of Religious Assets in Enlightenment Europe: Urban Development, Architecture, and Art Works
La sécularisation des établissements religieux dans l’Europe des lumières: Ville, architecture et œuvres d’art
Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, Paris, 27 November 2024
Organized by Ronan Bouttier, Gernot Mayer, and Raluca Muresan
Proposals due by 30 June 2024
The suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773 marks the last step of the Order’s progressive dissolution initiated fifteen years earlier, in Europe and in its colonies. This act of suppression was the culmination of a broader secularisation movement concerning religious congregations across Europe, from the 1760s to the French Revolution. In most cases, the State intended to take over the management of properties belonging to religious congregations described as useless for the common interest. Whether driven by reformatory or by economic interests, all acts of suppression and secularisation had the same consequences: a large number of movable assets and real property, estates and art works were either reallocated to other religious congregations or put on sale, when not confiscated altogether.
Several studies have already investigated the dispersal of abolished congregations’ assets in different parts of Enlightened Europe, but a broader overview is yet to be drawn. Furthermore, it is necessary to define common characteristics of confiscation procedures and real properties’ functional transformations during the three decades before the nationalisation of Church property undertaken in France in 1789. Besides, change of religious buildings’ ownership often led to their reconversion, and eventually to their architectural transformation. Rehabilitation, dispersal or destruction procedures of seized properties also must be taken into consideration. It is also important to broaden this inquiry to the transformation of the surroundings of these former religious properties because this process precipitated changes in the overall urban fabric as well as in the appropriation of urban space. Eventually, these changes of ownership involved movable assets and art works of the dissolved religious congregations. In this regard, one need also pay attention to works’ functional alterations, as they were attributed to other religious communities or to secular institutions and individuals. Therefore, our inquiry extends to the consequences of the largescale sales of art works on the collecting market.
We welcome proposals on following themes:
• Issues and procedures of architectural property confiscation in Europe and in its overseas territories
• Inhabiting and exploiting seized religious properties
• Dismantling seized properties and movable assets: procedures of architectural dismantling, networks and procedures of sale
Each paper should be 20 minutes long; the accepted languages are French and English. The conference will take place on 27th November in Paris, at the INHA (Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art). We look forward to reading your submissions of a maximum of 250 words, along with a CV and publications list. We require the contributors to send their submissions to secularisations@gmx.fr, and to entitle their submitted files as following: NAME_FORNAME_prop secularisations and NAME_FORNAME_CV. The submission deadline is 30 June 2024.
Organizers
• Ronan Bouttier, Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
• Gernot Mayer, University of Vienna
• Raluca Muresan, Sorbonne Université
Scientific Committee
• Jean-Philippe Garric, Professor, Université Panthéon-Sorbonne, HiCSA
• Richard Kurdiovsky, Interim Director of the Department of Art History, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna
• Olga Medvedkova, Director of Research, CNRS, Centre André Chastel
• Émilie d’Orgeix, Director of Research, École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE)
Call for Papers | Discovering Dalmatia X
From the Institute of Art History – The Cvito Fisković Centre in Split:
Discovering Dalmatia X: Travel Narratives and the Fashioning of a Dalmatian Artistic Heritage in Modern Europe, c. 1675–1941
Online and in-person, Split City Museum – Old City Hall, 12–14 December 2024
Proposals due by 15 July 2024
Travel narratives encompass travel experiences presented in books, illustrated books, magazines, personal or official reports, diaries, letters, drawings, paintings, prints, and photographs. These are among the most frequently used sources in history, literature, art history, anthropology, and a range of other disciplines. But, due to their diversity and complexity as texts, travel narratives have tended to elude definition or easy categorisation across the spectrum of disciplines that draw on travel as valuable primary source materials.
Travelogues about Dalmatia, both visual and textual, have played a considerable role in the construction of its European identity, grounded in a curiosity about the region’s unique artistic heritage. The reasons for this lie with Dalmatia’s geographical position on the border between East and West, between the Christian and Islamic cultural worlds—the long history of which is richly recorded in the art and cultural expression of the region. The dichotomy of ‘East’ and ‘West’ in Dalmatia has meant a hybridisation of cultural, artistic, and geographical borders, all of which have made Dalmatia a particularly attractive destination for study trips from the early modern period.
The key period for the diffusion of travelogues about Dalmatia in Europe began in the late seventeenth century, and lasted until the mid-twentieth century. This era saw extraordinary popularisation and internationalisation of the travel genre in Europe, prior to the rise of organised tourism. This was likewise a crucial period for modern art history, during which processes of disciplinary transition and modernisation took place, both in Dalmatia and throughout the continent of Europe as a whole. Dalmatia was ‘exotic’ and yet simultaneously accessible to the classically-oriented Western European cultural imaginary.
With this conference, we aim to bring together historical and theoretical research on the travel genre as experiences transformed into textual and visual forms (irrespective of the geographical area), with a re-evaluation of the role of travel narratives in shaping the cultural identity of Dalmatia.
We, therefore, pose, two key questions:
• What does ‘travel narrative’ encompass?
• How did travelogues influence perceptions of Dalmatia’s artistic heritage in modern Europe?
Historians and theorists of art, architecture, urbanism, literature, anthropology, ethnology, and those engaged with travel narratives, are warmly invited to participate in scholarly presentations and discussion at the conference. We hope to contribute, on the one hand, to fostering an understanding of travel as an autonomous multidisciplinary and multimedia practice, and, on the other, to understanding the formation of perceptions of Dalmatia in the European imaginary. We are looking forward to considering a wide range of travel narratives for the conference—varying in genre characteristics, recording media, authors’ origins, and travel motives.
We welcome proposals for 20-minute papers. Proposals consisting of a 250-word abstract and a short CV in Croatian or English should be sent via email as a PDF attachment to discoveringdalmatia@gmail.com by 15 July 2024.
We plan to enable participation at the conference both in person in Split and via online platforms to facilitate international involvement. Registration will take place on the evening of the 11th of December, the closing address will take place on the 14th of December, and the hosts will organise coffee and refreshments for the conference participants during breaks. No participation fee will be charged for this conference. The organisers do not cover travel and accommodation costs. The organisers can help participants to find reasonably-priced accommodation in the historical city centre. Papers and discussion will be conducted in English. The duration of a spoken contribution should not exceed 20 minutes. Presentations will be followed by discussions. We propose to publish a collection of selected papers from the conference.
The conference is organized as part of the Croatian Science Foundation project Travelogues Dalmatia IP-2022-10-8676.
Scientific Committee
Basile Baudez (Princeton University, Department of Art and Archaeology)
Joško Belamarić (Institute of Art History – Cvito Fisković Centre Split)
Mateo Bratanić (University of Zadar, Department of History)
Iain Gordon Brown (Honorary Fellow, National Library of Scotland)
Hrvoje Gržina (Croatian State Archives)
Katrina O’Loughlin (Brunel University London)
Cvijeta Pavlović (University of Zagreb, Department of Comparative Literature)
Frances Sands (Sir John Soane’s Museum)
Marko Špikić (University of Zagreb, Department of Art History)
Ana Šverko (Institute of Art History – Cvito Fisković Centre Split)
Elke Katharina Wittich (Leibniz Universität Hannover)
Organizing Committee
Joško Belamarić (Institute of Art History – Cvito Fisković Centre Split)
Tomislav Bosnić (Institute of Art History – Cvito Fisković Centre Split)
Mateo Bratanić (University of Zadar, Department of History)
Ana Ćurić (Institute of Art History)
Matko Matija Marušić (Institute of Art History)
Katrina O’Loughlin (Brunel University London)
Cvijeta Pavlović (University of Zagreb, Department of Comparative Literature)
Ana Šverko (Institute of Art History – Cvito Fisković Centre Split)
Call for Papers | The Expert’s Eye
From the Call for Papers, which includes the Spanish version:
El ojo experto: Método, límites y la disciplina de la Historia del Arte
The Expert’s Eye: Method, Limitations, and the Practice of Art History
Museo Arqueológico Nacional, Madrid, 24–25 October 2024
Organized by Pilar Diez del Corral Corredoira and David Ojeda Nogales
Proposals due by 15 June 2024
The work of the art historian revolves around the art object, and the need to tailor one’s methodology to that object gives the discipline its variety and richness. Yet paradoxically, to stress that art works are the centre of art history feels almost transgressive at a time when basic questions of identification and dating are increasingly deemphasized in training new generations of scholars and curators. Perhaps as a result, recent years have seen a proliferation of news about masterpieces that have gone unnoticed until some expert (typically from the art market rather than the university or the museum) has recognized the hand of a leading artist. Among Old Master paintings, it is common knowledge that Caravaggio final canvas, an Ecce Homo, almost left Spain after having been confused with a lesser work. The numerous Rembrandts that have emerged in recent years, as well as the complex case of Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi or the dubious Goyas that regularly appear, seem to confirm a decline in traditional expertise.
The new art history, by contrast, has shown itself perfectly capable of conducting research without having to study or even look at the art object. Without discrediting the results, which are sometimes more characteristic of departments of history or anthropology, the ease with which art-historical fact is blurred can be surprising. Over the last fifty years, the notable decrease in studies that examine the most fundamental problems of dating and authorship has raised questions about the usefulness of prevailing methodologies, leading to extreme cases in which a trained or expert eye is considered unnecessary, or at least insufficient, to deal with objects lacking documentary or other external proof of origin, creator, or date. By contrast, having an educated eye implies knowing the difference between a Roman bust from the first century AD and a modern copy, between discovering the hand of Leonardo and detecting an excellent falsification. Not all reattributed works will be first rate, but by returning anonymous or misidentified objects held in the depths of the world’s museums and collections to their rightful place, the astute art historian helps reconstruct the story of their creators.
In light of these trends, this conference aims to interrogate and challenge the abandonment of visual, material, and historical expertise among art historians. Key questions include:
• When, where, and why have works of art lost their place the centre of art history? Has this been uniform across the discipline, or does it vary by field?
• How have conservators, collectors, and academics fostered or resisted a repudiation of material knowledge of the art work?
• What forms does the ‘expert eye’ take across media and art forms, including drawing, sculpture, painting, ceramics, metalwork, etc.?
• Is an emphasis on attribution essential or dispensable? What are its limits and limitations, and how does it apply to different times, places, and artistic media?
• Can older notions of ‘connoisseurship’ be reconciled with developments in technical art history? How do ever-expanding methods of scientific testing challenge or enhance the ‘expert eye’?
• How can art history ensure that it is not limited to the study of objects that have a documentary trail?
• (How) can we aspire to a holistic history of art that links questions of dating, authorship, condition, and authenticity to the broader contextual and interpretive issues that have dominated recent scholarship?
Our intention in this conference is to gather experts from different areas of art history to wrestle with these questions. We welcome historical and methodological reflections as well as object-based case studies that engage the issues outlines above. We invite you to send your proposal with a short CV (no more than 10–15 lines) before 15 June 2024. If you have any questions or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We will be delighted to help. The conference will take place in Madrid, in-person, at the Museo Arqueológico Nacional. It is our intention to publish a selection of papers, in an anthology, by a publisher with peer-review.
Technical coordination
• Marta I. Sánchez Vasco, misanchezvasco@gmail.com
Scientific coordination
• Pilar Diez del Corral Corredoira, diezdelcorral@geo.uned.es
• David Ojeda Nogales, dojeda@geo.uned.es
Scientific committee
• Amaya Alzaga Ruiz (UNED)
• Jeffrey L. Collins (Bard Graduate Center, Nueva York)
• Ana Diéguez Rodríguez (Instituto Moll)
• Pilar Diez del Corral Corredoira (UNED)
• David Ojeda Nogales (UNED)
• Markus Trunk (Universität Trier)
Call for Papers | Watercolour & Weather, 1750–1850
Louis Ducros, View of the Grand Port of Valette, detail, ca. 1800–01, black ink (pen), watercolor, heightened with gouache and oil on paper, 78 × 127 cm (Lausanne: MCBA).
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From the conference website:
Watercolour & Weather, 1750–1850 / Aquarelle & phénomènes météorologiques, 1750–1850
Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, 5–6 June 2025
Organized by Bérangère Poulain and Desmond Kraege
Proposals due by 15 June 2024
Simultaneously with a resurgence of landscape painting, the period 1750–1850 in European art witnessed an increased interest in the weather, not only as concerns its momentary states (clouded skies, lightning), but also the broader study of meteorological phenomena and of their unfolding over time. Besides the more radical events—such as storms—that were frequently represented, this period thus developed a keen observation of subtle moments of changing weather, allowing artists to combine varied effects of light. This is true not only of the most famous British painters (Joseph Mallord William Turner, John Constable, Alexander and John Robert Cozens) but also of figures from further afield, such as Giovanni Battista Lusieri, Caspar David Friedrich, and Abraham Louis Rodolphe Ducros.
In close connection to this artistic evolution, the period under scrutiny also witnessed the development of meteorology and climatology as scientific disciplines. This led both to Luke Howard’s classification of clouds (1804) that remains in use to this day, and to the theorisation of the greenhouse effect by Joseph Fourier in 1824. A new consciousness of the atmosphere and of its complexities, leading directly to present concerns regarding climate change, can thus be traced back to this cultural environment.
Luke Howard’s study of clouds rested partly upon watercolour sketches representing nebulous formations, revealing that the multiplication of weather-related images extended beyond the professional field of landscape painting to encompass works by scientists. Likewise, architects were not to be excluded: Pierre François Léonard Fontaine, chiefly known for his role in Napoleon I’s ambitious construction projects, chose to cover his design for a monumental cemetery on Montmartre with a stormy sky (Paris, ENSBA, PC 82161); whereas in Joseph Gandy’s cutaway view of Sir John Soane’s Bank of England (London, Sir John Soane’s Museum, P267), rays of sunlight part the clouds to illuminate the sprawling structure. These works confirm that watercolour, together with closely related techniques such as wash drawing, gouache, and hand-coloured etching, constituted the chief medium for the pictorial exploration of weather conditions by figures hailing from varied disciplinary horizons. As a water-based technique, comparatively rapid in uptake and highly adapted to outdoor use, it was particularly suitable for capturing fleeting atmospheric variations on the spot. Professional painters’ preparatory watercolor sketches for oil paintings also ensured that a strong connexion was maintained with this more highly specialised technique. More generally, parallels emerge between representations of the weather in watercolour and in other media such as oil and pastel, each technique furthermore being used to produce both studies and finished works.
While considerable attention has been paid to representations of meteorological conditions by the most famous British landscape painters, the broader development of this phenomenon remains to be studied, both in British, Continental, and non-Western art: how can Swiss painter Abraham Louis Rodolphe Ducros’s sudden interest in increasingly dramatic skies around 1790 be explained, and what impact did his work exert on his younger contemporaries? Likewise, what interactions emerge between the works of Indian artist Sita Ram and the evolving British watercolour? What role was performed by the exchange of ideas and artworks in connection with the Grand Tour or other travels?
This conference will attempt to elucidate some of these questions, along axes of enquiry that might include—but are not limited to—the following:
• The evolving concern for the representation of weather conditions in watercolour painting (or wash drawing, gouache, or hand-coloured etching) between 1750 and 1850
• Convergences or divergences between the practice of watercolour painting and the development of meteorology as a science
• Watercolour representations of weather conditions outside the field of professional landscape painting; for instance in works by amateurs, architects, scientists, or their draughtsmen
• Individual painters’ evolving engagement with the weather, including their affinity or familiarity with specific meteorological phenomena
• Interactions between representations of the weather in watercolour and in other pictorial techniques (including oil painting, oil studies, and pastel), and between open-air and workshop-based practice
• Weather conditions and (traces of) human presence in a landscape
• Reflections in watercolour painting of broader cultural (including literary) pairings between weather and emotion
• Continuities and/or distinctions between topographical representation (including the veduta tradition) and the integration of weather conditions in the image, particularly as regards historical perceptions of the ‘objectivity’ or ‘subjectivity’ of these representations
• Women artists’ contributions to the pictorial exploration of meteorological phenomena
• The possible impact on watercolour painting of maritime knowledge and of seafarers’ preoccupations regarding weather conditions
This conference forms part of a broader research and teaching project at the Universities of Lausanne and Geneva concerning Swiss watercolour artist Abraham Louis Rodolphe Ducros, whose personal collection forms the original nucleus of the Lausanne MCBA Museum. The conference will include a viewing of a selection of his works.
The conference will be held on 5 and 6 June 2025 at the Lausanne MCBA Museum. We look forward to receiving proposals (max. 400 words) for 20-minute papers until 15 June 2024 at the following addresses: berangere.poulain@unige.ch and desmond-bryan.kraege@unil.ch. Accommodation in Lausanne will be provided, as well as reimbursement of travel expenses within Europe. The primary conference language is English, though proposals in French will also be accepted. A collective publication is planned.
Organisers
Bérangère Poulain (University of Geneva)
Desmond Kraege (University of Lausanne)
Scientific Committee
Basile Baudez (Princeton University)
Jan Blanc (University of Geneva)
Werner Busch (Freie Universität Berlin)
Ketty Gottardo (The Courtauld Gallery, London)
Catherine Lepdor (Lausanne MCBA Museum)
Camille Lévêque-Claudet (Lausanne MCBA Museum)
Constance McPhee (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
Christian Michel (University of Lausanne)
Perrin Stein (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
Call for Papers | Hand-Colouring of Natural History Illustrations
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From ArtHist.net:
The Hand-Colouring of Natural History Illustrations in Europe, 1600–1850
In-person and online, University of Konstanz, 26–27 February 2025
Organized by Joyce Dixon and Giulia Simonini
Proposals due by 21 June 2024
From the first instances of coloured engravings depicting botanical and zoological subjects, the usefulness and effectiveness of the printed image was transformed. In the seventeenth century the practice of hand-painting prints in watercolour was pioneered in luxurious and costly works such as Basilius Besler’s Hortus Eytettensis (1613). A century later this technique allowed for the publication of Maria Sibylla Merian’s exquisite Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (1705), and the first British collection of hand-coloured zoological engravings, A Natural History of English Insects (1714–1720) by Eleazar Albin. Color, pictorially represented, had become crucial to the project of natural knowledge-making: as Mark Catesby commented in 1731, “a clearer Idea may be conceiv’d from the Figures of Animals and Plants in their proper Colours, than from the most exact Description without them.”
The proliferation of hand-coloured impressions continued into the nineteenth century and yielded a highly-productive cottage industry. Even with the advent of colour printing, chromatic details of biological subjects were usually finished by hand (Friedman, 1978). Yet despite their vital role in the formation and dissemination of natural knowledge, the activities of hand-colourers—known also as ‘colourists’, ‘afzetters’ (in Dutch), and ‘illuminist’ (in German)—remain poorly understood (Jackson, 2011; Oltrogge 2000). This workshop aims to shed light on this vital aspect of European image-making and hopes to attract researchers investigating diverse areas of natural history.
The workshop will take place at the University of Konstanz on Thursday–Friday, 26–27 February 2025, with Dr. Alexandra Loske delivering a keynote address. We are accepting proposals for 20-minute papers in English. We welcome contributions on the following themes and topics:
• Materiality: paints and pigments, colouring techniques, equipment
• Semantics: methods of image replication, proofing processes, modes of pictorial translation
• Economy: working conditions and wages, guilds, case studies of individual enterprises
• Afterlife: consumption and circulation, amateur colourers, reception and significance
Please send your title, a 200-word abstract, and a short biography (150 words) to Joyce Dixon, joyce.dixon@ed.ac.uk, and Giulia Simonini, giulia.simonini@tu-berlin.de, by Friday, 21 June 2024. Papers can be given in person or virtually; please indicate your preferred method of delivery when submitting your abstract.
Call for Articles | Casting Art
From ArtHist.net:
Casting Art
Volume published by De Gruyter and edited by Yaëlle Biro and Noémie Etienne
Proposals due by 1 September 2024, with full articles due by February 2025
Plaster casts molded from artworks are ubiquitous in museum and university collections. In the art history department at the university of Vienna, for instance, a small vitrine surrounded by plants displays old plaster casts of medieval ivories. The installation functions simultaneously as an educational tool from the past, an archive of the department history, and a decorative ensemble. The German anthropologist Leo Frobenius had multiple plaster casts made of several terracottas he excavated in 1910 in Ife, Nigeria, marked them with his name and donated them to European ethnographic museums. He thus transformed masterpieces of an ancient West African civilization into his own vanity pieces-carte de visite and subjects of scientific research.
As can be seen in many museum storage and gypsotheques, over centuries, plaster casts have been molded on art works, architectural elements, and even human beings. The Italian Renaissance and the 19th century are two contexts often discussed in the framing of the importance of casting as part of broader creative processes but their presence and impact goes beyond. Since the 1990s and the work by Georges Didi-Huberman (e.g. L’empreinte, 1997), plaster casts have stimulated art historical research and have expanded thinking about heritage.
In this edited volume from De Gruyter (new series Traces), we propose to redefine collectively what plaster casts are across different geographies and time periods, focusing mainly on the reproduction of objects. As the use of 3D printing of works of art is becoming common practice as a tool to the current debate on restitution of cultural patrimony, we would like to interrogate how this replication practice differs conceptually from the earlier one. We will explore what plaster casts were upon production and what they have become, what they enable, and how they impact original productions as well as discourses surrounding them.
Topics of interest can include
1. Past: Plaster copies were highly circulated between institutions and continents. How were they traded, commercialized, and commodified? How did plaster cast enable the forging of specific disciplines, in which context and for whose profit? How were plaster casts used in teaching and study collections? How were they produced, circulated, and exhibited?
2. Present: We believe that plaster casts, and casts in general, need to be better defined in a global theoretical framework. Despite the numerous single studies focusing on specific contexts, in both art history and anthropology, the topic per se lacks broader conceptualization. How should this type of object be defined? What do they convey? How do they transform the casted original, be it an artwork (or even sometimes a human being)? Topics can also include the connection between artistic and anthropological castings, as well as the use of casts in contemporary art.
3. Future: Plaster is a very sensitive material prone to degradation. What are the specific challenges of exhibiting and preserving plaster cast today? Should they be preserved at all as parts of the museums’ collections? Does today’s proliferation of 3D printing of works of art, and their possible use in the context of restitution practices, present similar challenges and should these processes be submitted to better control?
Guest editors: Yaëlle Biro and Noémie Etienne
Publisher: De Gruyter
In the New Series: Traces. Public History and Cultural Heritage Studies
Publication date: 2026
Abstracts expected (c. 300 words): September 1st 2024
Please send your abstracts to: yaellebiro@gmail.com and noemie.etienne@univie.ac.at
Full articles (if abstracts are accepted): February 2025
A peer-reviewed evaluation will take place
Final versions of the articles are expected for April 2025
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