Enfilade

Now on view at Versailles:

Les Animaux du Roi / The King’s Animals
Château de Versailles, 12 October 2021 — 13 February 2022

Curated by Alexandre Maral and Nicolas Milovanovic

From its location in the heart of a vast forest in the Île-de-France region, the Palace of Versailles has always fostered a dynamic relationship with the animal kingdom. From animals as objects to be studied or collected to those used as political attributes and symbols of power, the exhibition explores the bond between the court of Versailles and animals—whether ‘companion animals’ (primarily dogs, cats, and birds), exotic beasts, or ‘wild’ creatures. It also brings two long-lost areas of the estate back to life: the Royal Menagerie and the Maze. Once the pride and joy of Louis XIV’s gardens, they can still be admired today in drawings, paintings and testimonies from the period.

The Royal Menagerie, which the Sun King had installed close to the Grand Canal, was home to the rarest and most exotic animals—from coatis to quaggas, cassowaries to black-crowned cranes (nicknamed the ‘royal bird’)—constituting an extraordinary collection in which the king took ever greater pride. The animals in the menagerie were also a great source of inspiration for the artists of the time: they helped Claude Perrault with his Histoire naturelle, as well as serving the Royal Academy of Sciences as subjects for dissections and, later, Louis XV and Louis XVI, in their naturalism pursuits.

In addition to decorative items from the interior of the menagerie—particularly the paintings by Nicasius Bernaerts—on display are well-known garden sculptures, such as those in the Latona Fountain and the Maze. The latter comprised no fewer than 300 animals made from lead, arranged into a scene from Aesop’s fables and depicting a vision of the world in which animals make political, often moralising, always educational, pronouncements. In all, 37 sculptures recovered from the erstwhile grove will be on display.

More information about the Labyrinth (in French) is available here»

As well as the actual animals that were collected and studied, animal symbolism was used to represent power. The exhibition illustrates the link between the establishment of Versailles as a seat of power—from the construction of the palace itself on the site of Louis XIII’s old hunting lodge—and animal symbolism. Part of the exhibition is devoted to the daily hunt—a key activity pursued by warrior kings in times of peace as a form of training and demonstration of power. The hunt, consequently, features prominently in royal iconography.

The animals themselves will return in droves to Versailles, because they never disappeared completely. They live on in the work of the king’s top painters; from Bernaerts, Boel and Le Brun, to Desportes and Oudry, many artists produced portraits of these exotic, wild and more familiar animals. As well as paintings, on view are portraits woven by the Gobelins Manufactory plus animals that were dissected, engraved, then preserved at the Academy of Sciences and in the King’s Garden, which is now the National Museum of Natural History. The exhibition also includes the skin of the Asian elephant gifted to Louis XV, which was donated to the Pavia Museum by Napoleon, and the skeleton of the very first elephant at Versailles, which was presented to Louis XIV by the king of Portugal and lived at Versailles for 13 years.

Finally, the exhibition addresses the role at court of companion animals for both the royal family and courtiers. As is evident from many portraits, companion animals were present everywhere, enlivening the royal apartments and brightening up the daily lives of children and adults alike. Many of the sovereigns, such as Marie Lesczcynska, wife of Louis XV, chose to surround themselves with their favourite animals. The court’s interest in the animal world led to greater sensitivity towards animals, in direct contrast to the Cartesian theory of animal-machines. Madame Palatine and, later, Madame de Pompadour, were particularly passionate about them.

Exhibition Curators
• Alexandre Maral, Curator General, Head of the Sculpture Department of the Musée National des Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon
• Nicolas Milovanovic, Head Curator of the Paintings Department of the Louvre Museum

Alexandre Maral and Nicolas Milovanovic, eds., Les Animaux du Roi (Paris: Lienart éditions / musée national des châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, 2021), 464 pages, ISBN: 978-2359063455, 49€.

From Dublin’s Kevin Kavanagh gallery and Dürer Editions:

Simon Watson: Portrait of a House
Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin, 14–30 October 2021

In Portrait of a House, Watson explores an eighteenth-century Georgian house on Dublin’s storied Henrietta Street. The house (Number Twelve) has a history of transformation, from the grand city home of wealthy merchants to the inner-city tenement dwelling for the poverty stricken. In a gentle Proustian fashion, the house reveals a quiet melancholy and the slow passing of time. The photographs were made over several years. The work is intended to be a poetic and intimate portrait.

For over 30 years Simon Watson has exhibited his photographs in Europe and the U.S. including solo shows at the late Richard Anderson Gallery in New York and the Auschwitz Museum in Poland. More recently he has shown his paintings at the Galerie Rideau de Fer in France. His work is included in museums and in public and private collections worldwide. Watson has been a regular contributor to The New York Times T Magazine, W Magazine, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. His recent book The Lives of Others was published by Rizzoli in 2020.

Simon Watson, Portrait of a House (Dürer Editions, 2021
), 64 pages, ISBN: 978-1838314309
, first edition of 1000 copies, €45; special edition of 50, €350; limited edition of 10, €750; collector edition of 5, €1850.

From the press release for the exhibition:

On Stage! Costume Designs from the Edmond de Rothschild Collection
Louvre, Paris, 28 October 2021 – 31 January 2022

Curated by Jérôme de La Gorce, Mickaël Bouffard, and Victoria Fernández Masaguer

The Edmond de Rothschild Collection boasts 1,644 sumptuous costume designs for balls, ballets, masquerades, and operas given in France from the reign of François I to that of Louis XIV. Acquired in the late 19th century by Baron de Rothschild, they constitute an extraordinary resource for understanding the world of spectacle during the Ancien Régime. The exhibition showcases a hundred of the finest pieces from this unique corpus.

Cette exposition réunit une sélection d’une centaine de feuilles provenant de l’un des plus importants fonds de dessins d’habits de spectacle, celui des volumes de Costumes de fêtes, de ballets et de théâtre au temps de Louis XIV offerts par le baron Edmond de Rothschild (1845–1934) au musée du Louvre. Leur richesse permet de dévoiler la diversité d’invention des artistes qui habillèrent les divertissements montés à la Cour de France et de Lorraine du milieu du XVIe siècle à l’aube du XVIIIe siècle : le Primatice, Jacques Bellange, Daniel Rabel, Henri Gissey et Jean Berain notamment. Les véritables ouvrages textiles ayant disparu pour la plupart, ces dessins sont des sources inestimables pour l’histoire du costume, de la danse, de la musique et des spectacles en France durant cette période.

Divisée en quatre sections, cette exposition consacre une première salle à l’atelier du dessinateur de costumes qui entend explorer la transmission de modèles entre les différentes générations d’artistes et les spécificités techniques propres à ce type de dessin. Le parcours propose ensuite de suivre les principaux genres spectaculaires représentés dans ces recueils, qui correspondent aux intérêts de l’un des plus grands collectionneurs de dessins de fêtes et divertissements de la fin du XVIIe et du début du XVIIIe siècle, Claude Pioche, sieur Du Rondray (1660/1665–1733), à qui une partie des feuilles assemblées dans ces volumes aurait appartenu :

Les divertissements équestres : les costumes des cavaliers et des chevaux deviennent l’un des attraits majeurs de ces compétitions destinées tant à prouver la valeur que la galanterie des concurrents dans la lice. Par leur magnificence et l’émerveillement qu’ils suscitent, ils contribuent à l’affirmation du pouvoir.

Les bals, ballets et mascarades : dans la seconde moitié du XVIe siècle, un caractère à la fois bizarre et poétique guide les artistes qui produisent des « habits de masques » pour les bals et mascarades. Au temps de Louis XIII, le sérieux et le grotesque se mêlent aux influences mythologiques, exotiques et bucoliques, codes que le ballet de Cour et la comédie-ballet se réapproprient au cours du XVIIe siècle.

Les tragédies en musique : ce nouveau genre musical français réunit une multitude de chanteurs, danseurs, musiciens et acrobates qu’il est nécessaire d’habiller harmonieusement. C’est le défi que relève le créateur des Menus Plaisirs Jean Berain, en faisant preuve d’une invention sans pareil dans la variation des coupes, des couleurs et des ornements.

Grâce à une campagne de restauration conduite par l’atelier de restauration du département des Arts graphiques du musée du Louvre, l’ensemble du corpus de dessins de costumes, soit 1644 feuilles, a été restauré et remonté dans des papiers de conservation neutre.

Commissaires de l’exposition
• Mickaël Bouffard, chargé de recherche, Centre d’Étude de la Langue et des Littératures Françaises (CELLF)
• Jérôme de La Gorce, directeur de recherche émérite, CNRS
• Victoria Fernández Masaguer, chargée d’études documentaires, département des Arts graphiques, musée du Louvre

Jérôme de La Gorce, Mickaël Bouffard, et Victoria Fernández Masaguer, En scène! Dessins de costumes de la collection Edmond de Rothschild (Paris: Louvre éditions / Lienart, 2021), 232 pages, ISBN: 978-2359063240, 29€.

Opening next month at the The Getty:

La Surprise: Watteau in Los Angeles
The Getty Center, Los Angeles, 23 November 2021 — 20 February 2022

Graceful scenes of courtship, music and dance, strolling lovers and theatrical characters: this is the imaginary world conjured by the greatest French painter and draftsman of the 18th century, Antoine Watteau (1684–1721). Los Angeles is home to an extraordinary group of Watteau’s works. This focused exhibition, marking the 300th anniversary of the artist’s death, brings together a dozen of them from public and private collections and celebrates the Getty’s recent acquisition of an exquisite example: the painting La Surprise. The picture belongs to what was a new genre of painting invented by the artist himself—the fête galante. These works do not so much tell a story as set a mood: one of playful, wistful, nostalgic reverie. Esteemed by collectors in Watteau’s day as a work that showed the artist at the height of his skill and success, La Surprise vanished from public view in 1848, reemerging only in 2007. The Getty Museum acquired the painting in 2017.

Emily Beeny, Davide Gasparotto, and Richard Rand, Watteau at Work: La Surprise (Los Angeles:‎ J. Paul Getty Museum, 2021), 88 pages, ISBN: ‎978-1606067352, $25.

La Surprise by Antoine Watteau has never before been the subject of a dedicated publication. Marking the three hundredth anniversary of Watteau’s death, this book considers the painting within the context of the artist’s oeuvre and discusses the surprising history of collecting works by the artist in Los Angeles.

Emily A. Beeny, former associate curator of drawings at the J. Paul Getty Museum, is curator in charge of European paintings at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Davide Gasparotto is senior curator of paintings and chair, curatorial affairs, at the J. Paul Getty Museum. Richard Rand is associate director for collections at the J. Paul Getty Museum.

C O N T E N T S

Timothy Potts, Director’s Foreword
Acknowledgments

Richard Rand, Jean Antoine Watteau, Three Hundred Years Later
Davide Gasparotto, Rediscovering a Masterpiece: Watteau’s La Surprise
Emily Beeny, Quelle Surprise! Watteau in Los Angeles

Plates
Works in the Exhibition

References
Index

The catalogue for the exhibition is now available:

Nicolas Party, ed., Pastel (New York: The FLAG Art Foundation, 2021), 216 pages, ISBN: ‎978-1949172522, $50. Contributions by Nicolas Party and Dodie Kazanjian; conversation with artists Louis Fratino, Loie Hollowell, Billy Sullivan, Robin F. Williams, moderated by FLAG Founder Glenn Fuhrman; essay by Melissa Hyde, “‘Dust From a Butterfly’s Wing’: The Gentle Art of Pastel, A Short History.”

In 2019, Nicolas Party transformed The FLAG Art Foundation in New York into a rose-colored stage set for a suite of soft pastel, Rococo-inspired murals that serve as a foil to, and occasional backdrop for, a selection of pastels from the 18th century to the present. Pastel commemorates the exhibition, its celebration of the pastel medium, and the range of contemporary artists who are giving new energy to this uniquely fragile medium. Artists in the exhibition included Rosalba Carriera, Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, Louis Fratino, Marsden Hartley, Loie Hollowell, Julian Martin, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Chris Ofili, Jean-Baptiste Perronneau, Billy Sullivan, Wayne Thiebaud, and Robin F. Williams.

Nicolas Party (b. 1980, Lausanne, Switzerland) is an artist living and working in Brussels and New York. He earned a BA in Fine Art at the Lausanne School of Art in 2004 and an MA at The Glasgow School of Art in 2009. More information is available here.

From the NGA:

Aquatint: From Its Origins to Goya
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 24 October 2021 — 21 February 2022

Curated by Rena Hoisington

A new printmaking technique—aquatint—swept through 18th-century Europe, yielding an extraordinary range of works, from images of erupting volcanoes, amorous couples, and mysterious tombs, to Russian exotica, biting caricatures, and moonlit vistas. The first American exhibition to survey the medium’s development in France, England, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain, Aquatint: From Its Origins to Goya presents some 100 early and exceptional impressions, many of which have recently been acquired by the National Gallery of Art. By supplementing the line work of etching, aquatint offered an exciting method for multiplying ink-and-wash drawings that render tone in subtle ways.

Aquatint flourished outside the official circles of European art academies in the hands of three kinds of artists—professional printmakers, amateurs (art lovers), and peintre-graveurs (painter-printmakers). Each played a distinctive and significant role in publicizing, disseminating, and advancing the aquatint medium. Professional printmakers combined it with other intaglio printmaking techniques to reproduce highly prized drawings by old master and contemporary artists. Amateurs, an elite group of like-minded collectors, embraced drawing, etching, and aquatint to not only expand their art-historical and connoisseurial knowledge, but also cultivate relationships with artists. Peintre-graveurs revisited, re-created, and circulated their designs through aquatint to build their reputations and broaden their audiences, dramatically expanding the formal vocabulary and expressive potential of the medium.

Rena Hoisington, Aquatint: From Its Origins to Goya (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), 288 pages, ISBN: ‎ 978-0691229799, $60.

Supported by the Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw Charitable Trust and written by Rena M. Hoisington, curator and head of old master prints at the National Gallery of Art, a book illustrated with rare works from the National Gallery’s collection of early aquatints accompanies the exhibition. It provides an engaging narrative about the medium’s flourishing as a cross-cultural and cosmopolitan phenomenon that contributed to the rise of art publishing, connoisseurship, leisure travel, and drawing instruction as well as the spread of neoclassicism.

Francisco de Goya, Still Life with Golden Bream (Besugos), 1808–12, oil on canvas, 45 × 63 cm
(The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 94.245)

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Press release (via Art Daily) for the exhibition:

Goya
Fondation Beyeler, Basel, 10 October 2021 — 23 January 2022

Curated by Martin Schwander and developed by Isabela Mora and Sam Keller

275 years after his birth, the Fondation Beyeler presents one of the most significant exhibitions ever devoted to Francisco de Goya—one of modern art’s major trailblazers. For the first time, rarely displayed paintings from Spanish private collections will be shown alongside key works from distinguished European and American museums and private collections. The exhibition brings together around 70 paintings and more than 100 masterful drawings and prints. Today, as during the artist’s lifetime, Goya’s works present viewers with a unique sensory and intellectual experience. For the past two centuries, his complex and ambiguous oeuvre has acted as a beacon and a landmark for many artists. The exhibition is organised by the Fondation Beyeler in collaboration with the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid.

Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828) occupies a paradoxical position in European art history as one of the last great court painters and a forerunner of the figure of the modern artist. In order to convey the uniqueness of Goya’s work, which spans a period ranging from Late Rococo to Romanticism, and do justice to the formal and thematic wealth of his painted, drawn, and printed oeuvre, the exhibition presents the full spectrum of genres and recurring motifs. Arranged chronologically, it features large-scale stately paintings as well as sketchbook pages, focussing on Goya’s late work.

The exhibition at the Fondation Beyeler presents both the established court painter and the inventor of enigmatic and disturbing pictorial worlds, his religious and his secular images, his depictions of Christ and of witches, portraits and history paintings, still lifes and genre scenes. Next to paintings commissioned by the royal family, the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, the show features works created by Goya within a self-conquered space of artistic freedom, among them cabinet paintings often intended only for highly private display. With rebellious resolve, Goya was one of the first artists in the history of European art to push back against the rules and dogmas that constrained artistic creation, instead making a stand for artists’ impulse and inventiveness (‘capricho’ and ‘invención’). Highlights of the exhibition include the portrait of the Duchess of Alba (1795) and the iconic Clothed Maja (La maja vestida, 1800–07), as well as the rarely displayed Maja and Celestina on a Balcony and Majas on a Balcony (1808–12), the latter two on loan from European private collections.

Francisco Goya y Lucientes, María Amalia de Aguirre y Acedo, marquesa de Montehermoso, 1810, oil on canvas, 170 × 103 cm (Private Collection).

The exhibition will further feature small-format genre scenes, held for the most part in Spanish private collections and hitherto only rarely shown outside Spain. In these paintings—as in his drawings and prints—Goya gave free rein to his innermost inspiration. For the first time since their only display to date at the Museo Nacional del Prado, the Fondation Beyeler will thus show the full series of eight remaining history and genre pictures from the Madrid collection of the Marqués de la Romana. They will be joined by the four celebrated, rarely loaned panels with genre scenes from the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid.

In his genre scenes and history paintings, Goya depicts events from everyday life in Spain around 1800—socially, politically, and religiously troubled times. Recurring settings include markets and bullrings, prisons and ecclesiastical institutions, lunatic asylums, and the courts of the Inquisition. Depictions of witches are another key motif, used by Goya to expose the superstition of his time. Next to a group of etchings from The Disasters of War (Los desastres de la guerra, 1811–14), the exhibition will also feature a selection of prints from the 1799 Caprichos series, among them the celebrated plate no. 43, programmatically titled The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, which displays Goya’s resigned and melancholy realisation that neither reason nor irony and sarcasm can fight off irrationality. Goya’s enigmatic and unfathomable pictorial worlds have been held in high regard ever since the age of early 19th-century French Romanticism. Among modern artists, Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró, Francis Bacon and the Surrealists viewed Goya as a kindred spirit. And he remains a major reference for many contemporary artists, among them Marlene Dumas and Philippe Parreno.

Commissioned by the Fondation Beyeler, renowned French artist Philippe Parreno (b. 1964) has created a film based on Goya’s iconic Black Paintings series (Pinturas negras, 1819–24), which will premiere at the exhibition. The 14 murals were originally painted in Goya’s residence on the outskirts of Madrid and were most likely not intended for public viewing. Now in the collection of the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, the paintings are so fragile that they cannot leave the museum.

For the first time, seldom seen paintings from Spanish private collections, some of which have not changed hands since the artist’s lifetime, are shown alongside key works from the most prestigious European and American museums and private collections. Works will be on loan from major museums such as the Museo Nacional del Prado, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, the Fundación Lázaro Galdiano and the Fundación Casa de Alba, all in Madrid, the Musée du Louvre in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery in London, the Gallerie degli Uffizi in Florence, the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin, the Sammlung Oskar Reinhart ‘Am Römerholz’ in Winterthur, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston.

Martin Schwander, ed., with text by Andreas Beyer, Helmut C. Jacobs, Ioana Jimborean, José Manuel Matilla, Gudrun Maurer, Manuela B. Mena Marqués, Colm Tóibín, Bodo Vischer, Francisco de Goya (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz, 2021), 288 pages, ISBN: 978-3775746571 (English edition), $90. Also available in German.

Nicolas de Largillierre, La Belle Strasbourgeoise , detail, ca. 1703, oil on canvas, 132 × 106 cm. The painting sold at Christie’s in Paris on 15 September 2020 (Sale 19158, Lot 212) for €1.57million, surpassing its high estimate of €1million.

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Now on view at the Musée d’art Hyacinthe Rigaud:

Portraits en Majesté: François de Troy, Nicolas de Largillierre, Hyacinthe Rigaud
Musée d’art Hyacinthe Rigaud, Perpignan, 26 June — 7 November 2021

Curated by Pascale Picard, Dominique Brême, and Ariane James-Sarazin

S’inscrivant naturellement dans la programmation du musée d’art Hyacinthe Rigaud dont les collections accordent une large place à l’enfant du pays, Portraits en majesté bénéficie d’un partenariat exceptionnel avec le musée national des châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon.

Portraits en majesté valorise de façon inédite—puisque c’est la première fois qu’un tel rapprochement est proposé—les trois artistes français qui, de Louis XIV à Louis XV ont révolutionné l’art du portrait : François de Troy (1645–1730), Nicolas de Largillierre (1656–1746) et Hyacinthe Rigaud (1659–1743), au travers d’une sélection généreuse et exigeante de leurs plus belles œuvres qui transcendent le genre et s’imposent avant tout pour leur esthétique. Chaque salle souligne tant la singularité de la matière des trois peintres que les éléments de vocabulaire (format, veine, modèle, composition…) relevant d’une inspiration commune. Le rapprochement de leurs œuvres met en exergue le fait que le portrait, tels que de Troy, de Largillierre et Rigaud le conçurent, se voulait une création d’art total, réunissant en son sein tous les genres.

La commissaire générale
• Pascale Picard, Directrice du musée d’art Hyacinthe Rigaud de Perpignan

Les commissaires scientifiques
• Dominique Brême, Directeur du musée du Domaine départemental de Sceaux
• Ariane James-Sarazin, Conservatrice générale du patrimoine, Directrice adjointe du musée de l’Armée de Paris

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Dominique Brême and Ariane James-Sarazin, eds., Portraits en Majesté: François de Troy, Nicolas de Largillierre, Hyacinthe Rigaud (Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2021), 296 pages, ISBN: 978-8836644209, €35.

Au cours de son règne—le plus long de l’histoire de France—Louis XIV accorda aux arts une place centrale dans l’accompagnement de son projet politique : architecture, peinture, sculpture, musique ou danse bénéficièrent ainsi d’un mécénat royal quasiment sans limite. Représentant les acteurs de cet âge d’or, le portrait peint trouva particulièrement à s’y épanouir, surtout à partir des années 1680, lorsque trois artistes, concurrents mais amis, entreprirent de renouveler le modèle trop sage du portrait classique en lui insufflant un élan baroque inattendu. Francois de Troy (1645–1730), Nicolas de Largillierre (1656–1746) et Hyacinthe Rigaud (1649–1753) révolutionnèrent ainsi la syntaxe du portrait français et, plus généralement, du grand portrait d’apparat européen. Habiles à varier incessamment sur un schéma de composition très contraignant—celui du triangle de base de la figuration humaine—ils donnèrent au genre ses lettres de noblesse en le hissant à un niveau de difficulté de conception et de qualité d’exécution au moins égal à celui des grands tableaux d’histoire. Accompagnant l’exposition d’une centaine de chefs-d’œuvre, ce livre étudie les modalités pratiques, théoriques et esthétiques de l’art du portrait français à son apogée.