Enfilade

The exhibition, on view at the Musée des Beaux-arts, Orléans, closed January 9. Philip Bordes’s review of the show appeared in the January issue of The Burlington. Here’s the information for the catalogue, published by Le Passage.

Mehdi Korchane, ed., Ingres avant Ingres: Dessiner pour peindre (Paris: Le Passage, 2021), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-2847424638, 35€.

Catalogue d’exposition sous la direction de Mehdi Korchane, responsable des arts graphiques des musées d’Orléans, avec une préface d’Adrien Goetz et des contributions de Laurence Clivet, Yvan Coquinot, Sidonie Lemeux-Fraitot, François-René Martin, Éric Pagliano, Louis-Antoine Prat, Alice Thomine-Berrada et Florence Viguier-Dutheil.

Ce livre examine la production graphique du jeune Ingres et, ce faisant, propose de suivre l’éclosion progressive de son génie, de l’enfance jusqu’à son départ pour Rome, en 1806. La maestria éblouissante du peintre du XIXe siècle est telle que ses premières années retiennent rarement l’attention. Or, elles constituent une aventure artistique en soi, au cours de laquelle la singularité de l’artiste se manifeste principalement dans l’exercice du dessin. Si la formation académique se fonde depuis toujours sur cette pratique, premier moyen de connaissance et de perfectionnement dans l’imitation de la nature, son expérimentation par Ingres prend une dimension exhaustive révélatrice de son ambition. Première œuvre de virtuosité, le portrait de Jean Charles Auguste Simon (1802-1803), conservé au musée des Beaux-Arts d’Orléans, montre comment l’élève de David se prépare à être peintre au moyen du crayon. Mais le dessin est aussi accompli comme une discipline autonome aux finalités multiples et dans laquelle la modernité se fait jour jusque dans les plus insignifiantes expressions. En analysant ce parcours, l’ouvrage tente de redonner une cohérence à un corpus souvent parasité par les attributions abusives et le dilemme des datations. Il examine aussi les fonctions du dessin dans la pratique du peintre en devenir.

Installation view of the exhibition À la mode: L’art de paraître au 18e siècle at the Musée d’arts de Nantes.

◊   ◊   ◊   ◊   ◊

Now on view at the Musée d’arts de Nantes; see particularly the ‘Exhibition in Pictures’:

À la mode: L’art de paraître au 18e siècle
À la mode: The Art of Appearance in the 18th Century
Musée d’arts de Nantes, 26 November 2021 — 6 March 2022
Musée des Beaux-arts de Dijon, 13 May — 22 August 2022

Curated by Sophie Lévy

The exhibition À la mode: The Art of Appearance in the 18th Century juxtaposes iconic textile and pictorial items to reveal the reciprocal influences at play between the world of art and the birth of fashion in the 18th century. The exhibition brings together over 200 objects dating from the 18th century from major textile and fine art museums. Iconic paintings are displayed alongside precious textiles, never previously seen drawings, garments, and accessories, some of which have been restored especially for the exhibition.

The exhibition is a special collaboration with the Palais Galliera, musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris, Paris Musées, and co-produced with the Musée des Beaux-arts de Dijon, which will host the exhibition from 13 May to 22 August 2022.

Chief Curator
• Sophie Lévy, Director and Curator of the Musée d’arts de Nantes

Scientific Curators
• Adeline Collange-Perugi, Curator of early art collections, Musée d’arts de Nantes
• Pascale Gorguet Ballesteros, Chief curator, 18th-Century Fashion and Dolls Department, Palais Galliera, musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris
• Sandrine Champion-Balan, Chief curator, Collections Development Centre manager, Collections manager, head of modern collections for the curatorial team of the exhibition at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon

À la mode: L’art de paraître au 18e siècle (Ghent: Éditions Snoeck, 2021), 327 pages, ISBN: 978-9461617101, €35.

William Blake, Hecate or The Night of Enitharmon’s Joy, 1795, planographic color print with pen and ink and watercolor on wove paper, 16 3/8 × 22 inches (San Marino: The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens).

◊   ◊   ◊   ◊   ◊

The exhibition opens this summer; the catalogue is scheduled to appear this month from Lund Humphries. From the press release (13 December 2021) . . .

100 Great British Drawings
The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, 18 June — 5 September 2022

Curated by Melinda McCurdy

Rarely seen highlights from The Huntington’s premier collection of British drawings and watercolors spotlight top artists working in the medium from the 17th to the mid-20th century.

100 Great British Drawings, a major exhibition at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, will trace the practice of drawing in Britain from the 17th through the mid-20th century, spotlighting The Huntington’s important collection of more than 12,000 works that represent the great masters of the medium. On view from June 18 until September 5, 2022, in the MaryLou and George Boone Gallery, the exhibition will feature rarely seen treasures, including works by William Blake, John Constable, Thomas Gainsborough, and J. M. W. Turner, as well as examples by artists associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and early 20th-century modernism. A fully illustrated catalog accompanies the exhibition, examining for the first time the strength and diversity of The Huntington’s British drawings collection, a significant portion of which has never been published before. The Huntington is the sole venue for the exhibition.

Paul Sandby, Band Box Seller, ca. 1760, brush and black ink and wash with red and yellow watercolor over traces of graphite on laid paper, 8 × 6 1/4 inches (San Marino: The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens).

“The Huntington is renowned for its incomparable collection of British art, ranging from 15th-century silver to the graphic art of Henry Moore, with the most famous works being, of course, our grand manner paintings,” said Christina Nielsen, Hannah and Russel Kully Director of the Art Museum at The Huntington. “Thomas Gainsborough’s Blue Boy and Thomas Lawrence’s Pinkie often serve as the poster boy and poster girl for the whole institution. But what most visitors do not realize is that The Huntington is also home to an extensive and remarkable collection of British drawings. This exhibition and catalog, the first to show the range of our British works on paper on such a scale, seek to fill that knowledge gap.”

Most of The Huntington’s British drawings collection, with a few notable exceptions, was established after the time of the institution’s founders, Henry and Arabella Huntington. Henry was an avid collector of rare books and manuscripts, and his wife, Arabella, was the force behind their collection of paintings and decorative art, but drawings did not factor largely into their art purchases. It was Robert R. Wark, curator of the art collections from 1956 to 1990, whose vision and tenacity established The Huntington as an outstanding repository of drawings made in Britain, where the art form was especially well developed, particularly in the late 18th to mid-19th century.

“Drawing is the most spontaneous and intimate of art forms, revealing the thoughts and mood of the artist through the stroke of a pen or touch of a brush dipped in watercolor,” said Melinda McCurdy, curator of British art, curator of the exhibition, and author of the catalog. “It is a practice especially associated with British artists, whose serious engagement with the medium is on vibrant display in the works we highlight in this exhibition.”

Matilda Conyers, Wallflower and Tulip, 1767, watercolor and opaque watercolor over traces of graphite with brown ink (est. iron gall) inscriptions on vellum, 9 × 6 1/4 inches (San Marino: The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens).

Organized chronologically, 100 Great British Drawings will explore portraiture, historical subjects, landscape, still life, botanical illustration, and caricature. The works on view will represent a full range of styles, including quick pencil sketches that candidly reveal artists’ creative processes, fluid pen-and-ink studies that approach the quality of finished works, and highly refined watercolor paintings.

The art of drawing first flourished in Britain in the late 17th century with an influx of artists coming from continental Europe, where the practice was commonly a part of artistic training. British artists also traveled abroad to view and copy the works of Europe’s old masters and contemporary artists. While portraiture was the most popular British art form at the time (as polished works by John Greenhill and Edmund Ashfield demonstrate in the exhibition), British artists eventually embraced a wide range of subjects, from landscape painting to history painting, a genre that appealed to such 18th-century titans as Thomas Gainsborough and George Romney.

Romney was unique among his peers in that he saw drawing as an end in and of itself, rather than merely a tool in preparation for oil painting. His Cimon and Iphigenia (early 1780s) was inspired by a tale from Boccaccio’s Decameron, and it captures the moment at which shepherd Cimon first spies his love, Iphigenia, asleep with two other women. Romney chose to depict Iphigenia in a sensual embrace with one of the women, using sweeping strokes of ink to imbue the scene with energy and passion. Cimon is barely present—cut off on the left of the frame—adding a suggestion of erotic voyeurism to Romney’s interpretation.

Even William Blake, famous for his unique imagination, betrays his European influences in Hecate or The Night of Enitharmon’s Joy (1795). Made by using a complex mix of printing techniques, drawing, and watercolor, Hecate depicts the witchlike mythological figure with musculature that recalls Michelangelo’s female forms, which were sketched from male nudes. By applying Michelangelo’s approach, Blake gives Hecate a powerful physique that suggests an unnatural, occult strength. The large-scale work is drawn from The Huntington’s William Blake collection, which was established by Henry Huntington himself and easily ranks among the most important Blake collections in the world.

Most of the works in The Huntington’s British drawings collection are from the 18th and 19th centuries, when drawings and watercolors became popular commodities. Watercolors, though less forgiving than oil, allow artists to create luminous effects and are well suited to capturing the misty English climate. J. M. W. Turner was a master of these atmospheric effects. His Beaumaris Castle, Anglesey (ca. 1825–36) uses layered washes of color to create a soft fog that obscures people, horses, buildings, and ships, blending the line between sea and land. In its exploration of artistic techniques, the exhibition will look at the pigments and paper that artists used. Turner, for example, required a strong paper that could withstand his method, described by an eyewitness as first saturating the paper with wet paint. Then, “he tore … scratched … scrabbled at it in a kind of frenzy” until the image emerged as if by “magic … with all its exquisite minutia.”

By the mid-19th century, transparent watercolor technique gave way to an interest in opaque pigments or gouache, in keeping with a Victorian-era taste for sharp-focus realism. Many of the Victorian works in the exhibition were created as illustrations to poems or stories, including Samuel Palmer’s watercolor and gouache Lonely Tower (ca. 1881), which was inspired by John Milton’s Il Penseroso, and popular children’s book illustrator Kate Greenaway’s watercolor and graphite Now All of You Come Listen (ca. 1879). Some works from this period—such as those by artist Edward Burne-Jones, who was associated with the Pre-Raphaelites and collaborated with designer William Morris—demonstrate a turn away from realism toward pure “art for art’s sake,” a notion affiliated with the Aesthetic movement.

Drawings from the first half of the 20th century reveal the extraordinarily wide array of artistic styles that were emerging at the time. Many of The Huntington’s works from the period are by artists from the Slade School of Fine Art in London, where students studied abstraction, French Impressionism, Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. A highlight of this group is Gwen John’s Two Hatted Women in Church (1920s), a work in water-based transparent paint that she made when living in France. John attended church there regularly, where she would draw the congregation, focusing less on the individuals and more on the shapes she saw in their clothing, their varying postures, and the chairs they sat on. John asserts her modernism in the painting, said McCurdy, as she “wittily juxtaposes two differently shaped hats, abbreviating such descriptive details as facial features and composing the image with bold black outlines and broad washes of muted tones.” The exhibition includes several other arresting 20th-century works on paper in various styles by such artists as David Bomberg, Paul Nash, and John Piper.

The 20th-century works combine with the others in 100 Great British Drawings to create a display that reveals the infinitely diverse aspects of “mark making,” said Ann Bermingham, professor emeritus of the history of art and architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in her essay for the exhibition catalog. She concludes, “If The Huntington drawings speak to us over the distances of time and space, it is because they still hold in their linear grasp the thrill and promise of endless creativity.”

Originally part of The Huntington’s Centennial Celebration, this exhibition has been made possible by the generous support of Avery and Andrew Barth, Terri and Jerry Kohl, and Lisa and Tim Sloan. Support for this exhibition is provided by the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. Support for the catalog is provided by Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund.

Melinda McCurdy, Ann Bermingham, and Christina Nielson, Excursions of Imagination: 100 Great British Drawings from The Huntington’s Collection (London: Lund Humphries, 2022), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-1848224483, $45.

Alison Watt, Centifolia, detail, 2019, oil on canvas, 76 × 62cm
(Collection of the Artist, © Alison Watt)

◊   ◊   ◊   ◊   ◊

Closing this month at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery:

Alison Watt: A Portrait without Likeness
Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, 17 July 2021 — 9 January 2022

Curated by Julie Lawson

Alison Watt (born 1965) is widely regarded as one of the leading painters working in the UK today. This significant body of new work consists of sixteen paintings made in response to the practice of the celebrated eighteenth-century portrait artist Allan Ramsay (1713–1784) and are on show for the first time.

Left: Allan Ramsay, Portrait of the Artist’s Wife, Margaret Lindsay of Evelick, 1758–60, 74 × 62 cm (National Galleries of Scotland). Right: Allan Ramsay, Portrait of the Artist’s Wife, Anne Bayne, ca.1739, 68 × 55 cm (National Galleries of Scotland).

Alison Watt | A Portrait Without Likeness explores the artist’s continuing fascination with Ramsay’s portraits. Watt, most known for her beautiful and intricate large-scale paintings of drapery and folds, has long been an admirer of Ramsay’s portraits of women, in particular the intensely personal images of his first and second wives, Anne Bayne (died 1743) and Margaret Lindsay of Evelick (1726–1782). Both portraits reside in the Gallery’s collection and will be shown alongside Watt’s new work.

The exhibition is the fruit of a long period of study of Ramsay paintings, in addition to the drawings and sketchbooks from his extensive archive held by National Galleries of Scotland. Watt has said, “Looking into an artist’s archive is to view the struggle that takes place to make a work of art. A painting is a visual record of the inside of the artist’s mind. A painting is something that takes place over time; it is not static. To look at a work of art is to engage with an idea, and that is not a one sided activity. It’s more of a conversation.”

Alison Watt, Fortrose, 2019, oil on canvas, 61 × 46 cm (Collection of the Artist © Alison Watt).

A Portrait Without Likeness is accompanied by a publication featuring conversations between the artist and Julie Lawson, the Chief Curator of European, Scottish Art, and Portraiture at National Galleries of Scotland, who has curated the exhibition, as well as an essay from art historian Dr Tom Normand and a new work of short fiction by Booker Prize-nominated novelist Andrew O’Hagan.

Normand writes: “The fascination with flowers is uncommon within Watt’s oeuvre, but she has recently been engaged with the works of Allan Ramsay held in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Most particularly she has reflected upon his painting The Artist’s Wife, Margaret Lindsay of Evelick, painted between 1758 and 1760. This is an exquisite and mysterious portrait. At one level a tender study of his second wife, some thirteen years younger than the artist, at another a poignant essay on the enigma of human passion.”

Alison Watt, Julie Lawson, Tom Normand, and Andrew O’Hagan, Alison Watt: A Portrait without Likeness (Edinburgh: National Galleries of Scotland, 2021), 96 pages, ISBN: 978-1911054450, £20.

Pierre-François Drais, snuffbox, made in Paris between 1776 and 1789, with portraits added sometime between 1814 and 1830; gold, enamel, and lapis lazuli, mounted with miniatures in watercolour on ivory (London: V&A, 905-1882). The portraits depict Marie Antoinette and her children Marie-Thérèse-Charlotte (1778–1851), the Dauphin Louis (1781–1789), and Louis-Charles the future Louis XVII (1785–1795), along with a sculptured bust of Louis XVI.

◊    ◊    ◊    ◊    ◊

From the press release for the exhibition:

France and Russia: Ten Centuries Together / Франция и Россия: 10 веков вместе
Exhibition Halls of the Patriarch’s Palace and the Assumption Belfry, Moscow, 7 September 2021 — 9 January 2022

The Moscow Kremlin Museums present the exhibition France and Russia: Ten Centuries Together as part of the cross-cultural year between Russia and France, highlighting their interregional cooperation. The project, dedicated to the centuries-long history of cultural and diplomatic relations between the two countries, showcases over two hundred artifacts: memorial objects, archival documents, and artworks from national Russian and European museums. The exhibition explores the history of Russian-French relations through intertwining fates of outstanding personalities including prominent statesmen, scientists, writers, artists, and craftsmen. The chosen approach aims at reconstructing the character of the relationship between the two countries as an immediate, multifaceted, somewhat contradictory, but an ultimately fruitful process for both parties.

The show opens with a unique charter, dating back to 1063 and recalling the important political event of the 11th century: the dynastic marriage of Princess Anna Yaroslavna, daughter of the Great Prince Yaroslav the Wise, to King Henry I of France. The charter, provided by the National Library of France, is believed to be the only surviving document that bears the handwritten sign of the cross and monogram of King Philip I with his mother’s authentic signature ‘ANA RHNA’ (Queen Anne) placed underneath in Cyrillic letters. Visitors are also afforded the rare opportunity of seeing the Reims Gospel—a unique illuminated manuscript of great cultural and historical significance. Generously offered for the exhibition by the Municipal Library of Reims, it will take centre stage among the key objects on display.

Among the later period pieces featured in the exhibition is a drawing by artist J. Desmarets capturing Peter I and Louis XV in Paris on 11 May 1717 and presented to the Soviet leaders as a diplomatic gift in 1944 to commemorate the visit of Charles de Gaulle, the Chairman of the Provisional Government of the French Republic, to Moscow. The development of the 18th-century political dialogue between Russia and France is chronicled through paintings and sculptures, weapons, textiles, and jewellery commissioned for the Russian Imperial Court from famous French masters or created by prominent French artists invited to Russia. The passion for French art is evidenced by luxurious tapestries, the ceremonial dress of the young Emperor Peter II, the exquisite lacework adorning the gowns of Russian monarchesses, the pieces from the silver Paris set owned by Empress Elizaveta Petrovna, and magnificent weapons, including a pair of pistols belonging to Emperor Peter II and made by the Arquebusier du Roi (royal gunmaker) Jean-Baptiste Laroche.

J. Desmarets, Peter I and Louis XV in Paris on 11 May 1717, 1717, ink, watercolour, red chalk, and gouache on tinted paper (Moscow Kremlin Museums)

Portraits from the collection of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts recreate a gallery of outstanding political and cultural figures from the reigns of Empresses Elizaveta Petrovna and Catherine the Great. The section on Catherine the Great’s reign showcases pieces from the legendary Orlov porcelain service executed by the Parisian silversmiths Jacques and Jacques-Nicolas Roettiers along with the precious desk clock with inkstand—the work of a Parisian master—that belonged to the Empress. Unique pieces from the collection of the Pavlovsk Museum and Heritage Site will hark back to Grand Duke Pavel Petrovich and Grand Duchess Maria Feodorovna’s tours of Europe. The years preceding the Great French Revolution are epitomised by the rare memorial objects and are captured in the portraits painted by Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun, Queen Marie-Antoinette’s favourite artist.

A special section of the exhibition is devoted to relations between Russia and France during the reign of Emperor Alexander I. Here, visitors will see a magnificent cased set of weapons made by the famous French gunsmith and bladesmith Nicolas-Noël Boutet—the gift presented to the Russian governor-general of Paris, Baron Fabian Gottlieb Fürst von der Osten-Sacken from the grateful Parisians. Another highlight is the Olympic porcelain service produced at the Sèvres porcelain factory and presented in 1807 by Napoleon to the Emperor Alexander I in commemoration of the Treaty of Tilsit. The star of the Order of the Holy Spirit, awarded to Alexander I by King Louis XVIII after the former’s victory over Napoleon and the restoration of the monarchy in France, is another showpiece not to miss! The exhibition introduces visitors to the history of ‘Russian Nice’ and feature stories of the World Exhibition that took place in Paris in 1867. It also offers insights into the process of strengthening of Franco-Russian friendship and formation of the Franco-Russian Alliance at the turn of the 19th century.

Participating Institutions
The Moscow Kremlin Museums, the Palaces of Versailles and Trianon, Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Museums of Castles Malmaison and Bois-Préau, National Library of France, the Reims Municipal Library, the State Tretyakov Gallery, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, the Shchusev State Museum of Architecture, the State Hermitage, Museum and Heritage Site ‘Pavlovsk’, the Russian State Library, the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Russian State Archive of Ancient Documents

Svetlana Amelekhina et al. Frantsiia i Rossiia: Desiat’ vekov vmeste / Франция и Россия: 10 веков вместе (Moscow: Muzei Moskovskogo Kremlia, 2021), 383 pages, ISBN: 978-5886783872. Available here»

Now on view at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nancy:

Les Adam: La Sculpture en Héritage
Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nancy, 18 September 2021 — 9 January 2022

Curated by Pierre-Hippolyte Pénet and Guilhem Scherf

Originally from Nancy, the Adam family is the largest dynasty of French sculptors of the 18th century. Over three generations, its members worked in Rome, Paris, Versailles, and Berlin in the service of the Pope and European monarchs such as Louis XV, Louis XVI, Frederick II of Prussia, and Catherine II of Russia. This the first retrospective devoted to them brings together one hundred masterpieces from national and international institutions as well as from private collections, bearing witness to the Adam family’s virtuosity at the heart of Europe during the Enlightenment.

Originaire de Nancy, la famille Adam est la plus grande dynastie de sculpteurs français du XVIIIe siècle. Sur trois générations, ses membres déploient leurs talents auprès des plus grands mécènes et participent à plusieurs chantiers majeurs. Formés en Lorraine dans le contexte d’essor artistique des règnes des ducs Léopold et Stanislas, Jacob Sigisbert Adam, ses trois fils Lambert Sigisbert, Nicolas Sébastien et François Gaspard ainsi que leurs neveux Sigisbert François, Pierre Joseph et Claude Michel dit Clodion, œuvrent à Rome, Paris, Versailles ou Berlin au service du pape et des monarques européens comme Louis XV, Louis XVI, Frédéric II de Prusse ou Catherine II de Russie. Première rétrospective à leur être consacrée, l’exposition réunit cent chefs-d’œuvre issus d’institutions nationales, internationales mais aussi de collections particulières. Permettant de dévoiler plusieurs sculptures prestigieuses inédites qui témoignent de la virtuosité de la famille Adam au cœur de l’Europe des Lumières, elle est accompagnée d’un catalogue de référence sur le sujet.

Commissariat: Pierre-Hippolyte Pénet, conservateur du patrimoine chargé des collections du XVe au XVIIIe siècle, palais des ducs de Lorraine – Musée lorrain, et Guilhem Scherf, conservateur général du patrimoine, adjoint au directeur du département des Sculptures, musée du Louvre.

The full press packet is available here»

Pierre-Hippolyte Pénet and Guilhem Scherf, eds., Les Adam: La Sculpture en Héritage (Paris: Snoeck Édition, 2021), 343 pages, ISBN: 978-9461616234 35€.

Chapuy after Bonfin, Vue des Bains Orientaux à Bordeaux, ca. 1798, engraving
(Archives Bordeaux Métropole)

◊    ◊    ◊    ◊    ◊

Now on view at the Bordeax Archives, along with this online component:

Bordeaux-les-Bains: Les bienfaits de l’eau, 18e–20e siècle
Archives Bordeaux Métropole, 19 May 2021 — 25 February 2022

Tour à tour convoitée, redoutée, maltraitée, domestiquée, l’eau—un des quatre éléments naturels de la culture occidentale—redevient au XVIIIe siècle un élément fondamental de l’hygiène. Ce bien naturel précieux multiplie les usages au fil du temps : l’eau qui lave, l’eau qui soigne, l’eau qui fortifie, l’eau qui délasse. Et si l’histoire de Bordeaux est intimement liée à celle de son fleuve, c’est bien l’eau qui en constitue l’essence même.

Depuis l’Antiquité, les Bordelais se baignent dans la Garonne. Au XVIIIe siècle, les pratiques évoluent et les techniques se développent : des bains flottants sur le fleuve aux bains-douches dans les quartiers, des établissements d’hydrothérapie à la natation en piscine. C’est à la découverte de cette histoire méconnue que vous invitent les Archives Bordeaux Métropole autour d’une sélection de documents de toutes natures, témoignages d’une incroyable aventure humaine et collective. L’artiste Laurent Valera propose un contrepoint contemporain avec une nouvelle série d’œuvres en dialogue avec les documents d’archives.

Frédéric Laux and Jean-Cyril Lopez, Bordeaux-les-Bains: Les bienfaits de l’eau, XVIIIe–XXe siècle (Archives Bordeaux Métropole, 2021), 96 pages, ISBN: 978-2360622870, 12€.

From left to right: Eva Aira and Inga Lajla Aira Balto in gávttit from Jåhkåmåhkke and Kárášjohka; Sven Roos in Gagnefsdräkt and Lars-Erik Backman in Leksandsdräkt; Fatima Aakhus and Randi Myrum in Setesdalsbunader. (Photos by Carrie Hertz).

◊   ◊   ◊   ◊   ◊

From the Museum of International Folk Art:

Dressing with Purpose: Belonging and Resistance in Scandinavia
Museum of International Folk Art, Santa Fe, 12 December 2021 — 19 February 2023

Dress helps us fashion identity, history, community, and place. Dress has been harnessed as a metaphor for both progress and stability, the exotic and the utopian, oppression and freedom, belonging and resistance. Dressing with Purpose examines three Scandinavian dress traditions—Swedish folkdräkt, Norwegian bunad, and Sámi gákti—and traces their development during two centuries of social and political change across northern Europe.

By the 20th century, many in Sweden worried about the ravages of industrialization, urbanization, and emigration on traditional ways of life. Norway was gripped in a struggle for national independence. Indigenous Sami communities—artificially divided by national borders and long resisting colonial control—rose up in protests that demanded political recognition and sparked cultural renewal. Within this context of European nation-building, colonial expansion, and Indigenous activism, traditional dress took on special meaning as folk, national, or ethnic minority costumes—complex categories that deserve reexamination today. In this exhibition, visitors will be introduced to individuals who adapt and revitalize dress traditions to articulate who they are, proclaim personal values and group allegiances, strive for sartorial excellence, reflect critically on the past, and ultimately, reshape the societies they live in.

This project is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. Additional support comes from Barbro Osher Pro Suecia Foundation and Swedish Council of America.

Carrie Hertz, ed., Dressing with Purpose: Belonging and Resistance in Scandinavia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021), 258 pages, ISBN: 978-0253058577, $30.

Dedication
Acknowledgements
Map of Scandinavia
A Note on Terms and Place Names

Foreword, Khristaan Villela
Introduction: Can We Talk about Traditional Dress?, Carrie Hertz

Part I. Folkdräkt in Sweden
1  Swedish Folkdräkt, Carrie Hertz
2  They Are at Peace Here, Like Old Friends in Their Caskets: Traditional Dress Collections as Heritage-making, Lizette Gradén

Part II. Bunad in Norway
3  Norwegian Bunad, by Carrie Hertz
4  Headdress and Hijab: Bunad in Multicultural Norway, Camilla Rossing
5  The Transnational and Personalized Bunad of the Twenty-First Century, Laurann Gilbertson

Part III. Gákti in Sápmi
6  Sámi Gákti, Carrie Hertz
7  The Legacy of Ládjogahpir: Rematriating Sápmi with Foremother’s Hat of Pride, Eeva-Kristiina Harlin and Outi Pieski

Conclusion: The Future of Traditional Dress, Carrie Hertz

Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index

From the press release (21 October 2021) for the exhibition:

Afro-Atlantic Histories
Museu de Arte de São Paulo, 28 June — 21 October 2018
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 24 October 2021 — 17 January 2022
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 10 April — 17 July 2022
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, TBD

U.S. Tour Curated by Kanitra Fletcher

This fall the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, will debut the U.S. tour of Afro-Atlantic Histories, an unprecedented exhibition that visually explores the history and legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. Initially organized and presented in 2018 by the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (Histórias Afro-Atlânticas), the exhibition comprises more than 130 artworks and documents made in Africa, the Americas, the Caribbean, and Europe from the 17th to the 21st centuries.

In collaboration with MASP and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the MFAH will present Afro-Atlantic Histories at its Caroline Wiess Law Building from Sunday, 24 October 2021, through Monday, 17 January 2022. The exhibition will then travel to the National Gallery of Art to be on view in its West Building from Sunday, 10 April, through Sunday, 17 July 2022, with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and additional venues confirmed to follow.

“Afro-Atlantic Histories recasts the traditional telling of the colonial history of the Western hemisphere within the vast web of the transatlantic slave trade over three centuries,” commented Gary Tinterow, Director, Margaret Alkek Williams Chair, MFAH. “It is an essential reexamination, one that the MFAH and the National Gallery have distilled from its expansive, original presentation in Sao Paulo in 2018 to focus on forgotten perspectives under the theme of histórias.”

“The National Gallery is honored to partner with the Museu de Arte de São Paulo and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, to bring Afro-Atlantic Histories to the United States. In the nation’s capital, this exhibition will shed light on the many histories that are crucial to our understanding of the legacy of slavery across the Americas,” said Kaywin Feldman, Director of the National Gallery of Art. “Through works made by artists across five centuries, Afro-Atlantic Histories will also celebrate the ongoing influence of the African diaspora on both sides of the Atlantic.”

Afro-Atlantic Histories dynamically juxtaposes works by artists from 24 countries, representing evolving perspectives across time and geography through major paintings, drawings and prints, sculptures, photographs, time-based media art, and ephemera. The range extends from historical paintings by Frans Post, Jean-Baptiste Debret, and Dirk Valkenburg to contemporary works by Ibrahim Mahama, Kara Walker, and Melvin Edwards.

The U.S. tour further builds on the exhibition’s overarching theme of histórias—a Portuguese term that can encompass both fictional and non-fictional narratives of cultural, economic, personal, or political character. The term is plural, diverse, and inclusive, presenting viewpoints that have been marginalized or forgotten.

The exhibition unfolds through six thematic sections that explore the varied histories of the diaspora:

• Maps and Margins illustrates the beginnings of the slave trade as it unfolded across the Atlantic between Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Highlights include artworks that reference the widely reproduced British Abolitionist document Description of a Slave Ship (1789), an illustration that clinically detailed a slave ship’s cargo hold; Aaron Douglas’s painting Into Bondage (1936), a powerful portrayal of the moment when a group of Africans are taken to a slave ship bound for the Americas.

• Enslavements and Emancipations examines how the abuses of commercial slavery triggered rebellion, escape, and Abolitionist movements. Theodor Kaufmann’s On to Liberty (1867) portrays women and children fleeing through the woods—a scene that Kaufmann, who served as a Union Solider during the American Civil War, witnessed firsthand. Torturous practices are addressed in works that range from The Scourged Back, the widely published 1863 photograph by McPherson & Oliver, to the 2009 etching Restraint, a powerful image of a silhouetted figure in an iron brindle, by American artist Kara Walker. Samuel Raven’s Celebrating the Emancipation of Slaves in British Dominions, August 1834 (c. 1834) presents a romanticized tribute to emancipation; Ernest Crichlow’s portrait of Harriet Tubman honors the fearless liberator and ‘conductor’ of the Underground Railroad.

• Everyday Lives features images of daily life in Black communities during and after slavery, in realistic and romanticized views. Among 20th-century artists, American Clementine Hunter and Brazilian Heitor dos Prazeres depict field work and friendships. American Romare Bearden draws inspiration from the rhythmic and improvised staccato of jazz and the blues, using shifts in scale, breaks in color, and disarranged perspectives for his depiction of a sharecropper in the monumental collage Tomorrow I May Be Far Away (1967). The pastoral painting Landscape with Anteater (c. 1660), by the Dutch artist Frans Post, places enslaved laborers and indigenous peoples in an idyllic Brazilian landscape.

• Rites and Rhythms features works about celebrations and ceremonies in the Americas and the Caribbean. Often re-creating African traditions, these rites became channels for worship and communication. Twentieth-century Uruguayan artist Pedro Figari frequently portrayed his country’s Candombe dances, which originated with descendants of enslaved Africans. Dominican artist Jaime Colson’s lively Merengue (1938) pays homage to his country’s national dance and music, a blend of Afro-Caribbean rhythms and African movements. Other works in this section of the exhibition explore Carnival, African-based religions, and the historical Black presence in Christianity.

Dalton Paula, Zeferina, 2018.

• Portraits spotlights Black leaders of the 18th and 19th centuries who have not traditionally been memorialized in historical American and European portraiture. Dalton Paula’s Zeferina (2018), commissioned for the original presentation at MASP, provides a face to an influential slave rebellion leader who was arrested and sentenced to death before she could be commemorated. Other historical and more contemporary works feature ordinary people, invented figures, and the artists themselves, including Self-Portrait (as Liberated American Woman of the ’70s) (1997) by Cameroonian photographer Samuel Fosso, an unconventional work that challenges our understanding of self-portraiture.

• Resistances and Activism examines the continuing fight for freedoms. Banners, flags, and textiles referring to histories of resistance across the Afro-Atlantic invoke cultural, political, religious, and artistic identities. Me gritaron negra (They shouted black at me) (1978), a video by Venezuelan artist Victoria Santa Cruz, is a powerful renunciation of colorism and racism through poetry and dance inspired by the artist’s own history. Other works in this section draw attention to Black activism, including Glenn Ligon’s painting Untitled (I Am a Man) (1988), inspired by signs carried in the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike, which protested unsafe working conditions and low wages; and March on Washington (1964), a rare figurative painting by Alma Thomas that recalls her experience attending the storied demonstration.

The U.S. tour is curated by Kanitra Fletcher, Associate Curator of African American and Afro-Diasporic Art at the National Gallery of Art. Adriano Pedrosa, Artistic Director; Ayrson Heráclito, Curator; Hélio Menezes, Curator; Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, Adjunct-Curator of Histories; and Tomás Toledo curated the exhibition at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo. At the National Gallery, the curatorial team also includes Molly Donovan, Curator of Contemporary Art, and Steven Nelson, Dean of the Center for the Advanced Study in the Visual Arts.

In Washington, DC, the curators are working closely with an external advisory group of local leading historians and art historians: Ana Lucia Araujo, Professor of History, Howard University; Nicole Ivy, Assistant Professor of American Studies, George Washington University; Kevin Tervala, Associate Curator of African Art, Baltimore Museum of Art; Kristine Juncker, Special Assistant to the Director, National Museum of African Art; and Michelle Joan Wilkinson, Curator, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Adriano Pedrosa and Tomás Toledo, eds., with additional contributions by Ayrson Heráclito, Deborah Willis, Hélio Menezes, Kanitra Fletcher, Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, and Vivian Crockett, Afro-Atlantic Histories (New York: DelMonico Books / Museu de Arte de São Paulo, 2021), 400 pages, ISBN: 978-1636810027, $70.