Enfilade

From the conference website:

Chinese Wallpaper: Trade, Technique and Taste
Coutts & Co / V & A, London, 7–8 April 2016

Detail of the painted wallpaper in the Chinese Bedroom, Belton House. ©National Trust Images/Martin Trelawny

A conference on the subject of Chinese wallpaper will take place in London on 7 and 8 April 2016, with an optional excursion to Brighton on 9 April. The event is being organised jointly by the National Trust and the Victoria and Albert Museum, with generous support from Coutts & Co and the Royal College of Art.

Chinese wallpaper is a product that is finely balanced between east and west, art and design, trade and taste. It has been an important component of western interiors for about 250 years, but it has sometimes been taken for granted, literally fading into the background. However, over the last few decades the conservation of Chinese wallpapers has developed considerably. It is now also the subject of increasing scholarly interest. Traditional-style hand-made Chinese wallpaper is still being produced today and is now also in demand in China itself.

The aim of this conference is to stimulate the momentum of the research into Chinese wallpaper and to capture some of the recent findings. The papers to be presented will include European, American and Chinese perspectives and will look at Chinese wallpaper as art, as design, as cross-cultural exchange, as commodity and as material object.

The first day of the conference will be hosted by Coutts at their premises in the Strand—still containing the Chinese wallpaper acquired by banker Thomas Coutts in the late eighteenth century. The second day will be held at the Victoria and Albert Museum and will include the viewing of actual Chinese export wallpapers from the museum’s collection—the largest in the world, but much of it not normally on display. On 9 April there will be an optional excursion to the Royal Pavilion in Brighton, where Chinese wallpaper formed an important component of the Prince Regent’s decorative vision.

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T H U R S D A Y ,  7  A P R I L  2 0 1 6
Coutts & Co.

9:00  Registration and coffee

9:30  Welcome

9:40  Introduction by Margot Finn, Chair in Modern British History, University College London

9:50  Session A
• Emile de Bruijn, ‘Chinese Wallpaper: a Global Product’
• Helen Clifford, ‘From Canton via Custom House to the Country House: Chinese Wallpaper in Transit and the Role of the East India Company, 1750–1850’
• Ming Wilson, ‘Chinese Paper as Commodity’

11:05  Coffee

11:25  Session B
• Xiaoming Wang, ‘Chinese Woodblock New Year Prints and Paintings Used as Wallpaper in Europe in the Eighteenth Century’
• Friederike Wappenschmidt, ‘”Talking Chinese”? Exotic Wall Coverings in German and Austrian Castles’
• Max Tillmann, ‘Chinese Wallpapers and Sensual Exoticism at the Badenburg, Munich’

12:40  Lunch

13:30  Session C
• David Skinner, ‘Using and Marketing “Indian Pictures” in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Dublin’
• Clare Taylor, ‘“A Large Assortment of Curious India Paper”: the Eighteenth-Century English Market for Chinese Wallpaper’
• Patrick Conner, ‘Chinese Wallpaper and Cantonese Export Painting: The Strathallan ‘Drummond’ Wallpaper (Peabody Essex Museum)’

14:45  Tea

15:05  Session D
• Anna Wu, ‘The Chinese Wallpapers at Coutts & Co., London: Mobilising Images of Chinese Life and Industry’
• Sarah Cheang, ‘Red, Black and Gold, and as Glossy as Possible: Modernism, Orientalism, Fashion and Wallpaper’
• Lizzie Deshayes, title TBC [Chinese wallpaper today as produced by Fromental]
• Dominic Evans-Freke, title TBC [Chinese wallpaper today as produced by De Gournay]

F R I D A Y ,  8  A P R I L  2 0 1 6
Victoria and Albert Museum

10:00  Registration and coffee

10:25  Welcome by Anna Jackson, Keeper, Asian Department, Victoria and Albert Museum

10:30  Session E
• Andrew Bush, ‘Early Full-Height Block-Printed Chinese Wallpapers in the United Kingdom’
• Thomas Brain, ‘Observations made during the Conservation Treatment of Chinese Landscape Wallpaper at Oud Amelisweerd’
• T. K. McClintock, ‘Chinese Export Wallcoverings: their Conservation as Western and Asian Works’

11:45  Coffee

12:05  Session F
• Allyson McDermott, ‘The Conservation of Chinese Wallpapers’
• Pauline Webber, ‘The Conservation and restoration of Chinese Wallpapers: an Overview’

13:10  Lunch

14:00 Viewing Sessions
Four sessions for viewing Chinese wallpapers (with change-overs)

17:10  Drinks

S A T U R D A Y ,  9  A P R I L  20 1 6
Royal Pavilion, Brighton

Optional excursion, travel under own steam, meeting at Royal Pavilion entrance at 11:30, where you will be met by curator Alexandra Loske and paper conservator Amy Junker-Heslip.

Abstracts and speakers’ biographies are available here»

Booking information is available here»

From the colloquium programme:

La Vraisemblance ou les enjeux de la représentation: Le théâtre
et la peinture dans les discours Académiques, 1630–1730
Deutsches Forum Für Kunstgeschichte Paris, Hôtel Lully, 9–11 February 2016

Organized by Markus Castor and Kirsten Dickhaut

Epouser son père ; recevoir de la nourriture directement tombée du ciel ou encore vaincre un dragon… Ces récits mythographiques sont-ils encore aujourd’hui les vecteurs d’une quelconque vraisemblance ? Tous les exemples mentionnés – qu’il s’agisse du Cid de Corneille, du tableau de Poussin, du Saint-Michel de Raphaël ou de la tragédie de Médée de Pierre Corneille mise en musique par Marc-Antoine Charpentier semblent aujourd’hui en être totalement dépourvus. Déjà au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècles, s’imposait la nécessité d’en rappeler les enjeux. La Querelle du Cid, qui agite les débats de l’Académie Française, a des répercussions au sein de l’Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture comme en témoigne ses conférences. Ces sujets doivent faire dorénavant l’objet d’une introduction préalable vis-à-vis du spectateur afin d’établir les supports cognitifs de cette vraisemblance. La vraisemblance constitue – conformément à la poétique aristotélicienne – l’ensemble des moyens rhétoriques qui permettent de représenter de manière crédible un évènement ou une action. Durant l’âge classique, l’exigence de vraisemblance ne prônait déjà plus une stricte application de ces codes. Au cours du XVIIe et du XVIIIe siècle, l’usage normatif de la vraisemblance ne se justifie pas non plus pleinement par le questionnement interprétatif du sujet. Seuls les sujets d’histoire religieuse échappent à cette révision comme en attestent les conférences académiques.

Cette journée d’étude interrogera les stratégies de relecture critique des œuvres théâtrales et artistiques à travers la réception des discours académiques. Ce sera l’occasion d’évaluer l’impact de certaines thèses jésuites et jansénistes sur les modes de représentation rhétoriques de la vraisemblance. Si au cours du XVIIe et du XVIIIe siècles, les normes de la vraisemblance prévalent à celles de la vérité en ce qui concerne les sujets d’histoire religieuse et mythologique, c’est parce qu’elles sont normalisées par un répertoire rhétorique et visuel intelligible par le public. Le principe de fonder ces normes d’après une appréciation rationnelle des faits et de leur déroulement est une conception qui se popularise progressivement tout au long de l’époque moderne. Au cours du XVIIIe siècle, s’opère un basculement entre deux types de vraisemblance: le premier se fonde sur la rhétorique et rejoint l’interprétation sensualiste des dispositifs scéniques et artistiques ; le second s’impose progressivement durant la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle et s’inscrit dans l’élaboration d’une perception rationaliste et mathématique de la représentation, pour aboutir à une projection abstraite de l’univers. La question épistémologique de la représentation est en fait la base de la discussion sur la qualité de toute vraisemblance. Dès la seconde moitié du XVIIe siècle, l’Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture à Paris revendique expressément la dimension intellectuelle de sa pratique des arts. Elle s’inspire des modèles des académies littéraires italiennes dans le but de se distinguer du corporatisme des fabriques artistiques. Cette démonstration s’exerce exclusivement par le biais du genre historique et l’élaboration d’une pédagogie de l’art fondée sur la conceptualisation des modèles artistiques. . . .

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104th Annual Conference of the College Art Association
Washington Marriott Wardman Park Hotel, 3–6 February 2016

The 2016 College Art Association conference takes place in Washington, D.C., February 3–6, at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park Hotel (2660 Woodley Rd NW, Washington, DC 20008).

Speaking for no one but myself, I’m frankly perplexed at how thin the eighteenth-century offerings are, indeed how little there is on any period prior to 1850! In 2010, I could identify eleven sessions with connections to the eighteenth century. This year, I came up with only four (out of 200 sessions). My sense is that CAA is beginning to understand how dissatisfied affiliates are. In any event, the format of the conference will apparently be substantially different next year (note the session on Wednesday addressing the changes). Will the changes matter? We’ll see. The call for submissions will be posted March 1. Stay tuned.

And yet for all that seems to be missing from this year’s schedule, I want to highlight the HECAA and ASECS sessions, both of which look fabulous! And so on Friday, at least, from 12:30 to 5:00, CAA will be a terrific conference.* –CH

* Wearing my hat as president of the Historians of British Art, I can vouch for affiliate frustration there, too. And yet, as with the eighteenth-century offerings, there will be a handful of treats for scholars in British studies, too. And for whatever things, I’ve overlooked, please feel free to note these in the comments section.

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Looking Ahead: Changes to the CAA Conference
Wednesday, 3 February 2016, 12:30—2:00, Wilson B, Mezzanine Level

Chair: Suzanne Preston Blier (Harvard University)

The CAA Annual Conference will undergo significant changes in future years, beginning with the 2017 conference. These changes will create more opportunities for participation. Among the changes:
a) The session grid will feature all 90-minute sessions.
b) The call for proposals will include not one but three main submission categories: sessions without panels, sessions with panels, and individual papers.
c) The call for submissions will be posted on March 1, 2016.
If you have questions about these important changes, please attend this session.

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Neatline for the Art Historian
Thursday, 4 February 2016, 2:30—4:30, Roosevelt 2, Exhibit Hall A, Exhibition Level

Lisa Reilly (University of Virginia) and Ronda Grizzle (Scholars’ Lab, University of Virginia Library). Limit: 25 Participants. $45 for members and $60 for non-members.

Using Neatline, anyone can create beautiful, interactive maps, timelines, and narrative sequences from collections of objects, architectural models, archives and artifacts, which tell scholarly stories in a whole new way. Neatline is a remarkable digital presentation tool that allows art and architectural historians to show change over time. Art historians can use it to create visual presentations which reveal building sequences, mapping of artistic influences and patterns of historic change. Join us for this hands-on introduction to Neatline which will also discuss applications for our discipline. This will be a hands-on workshop; attendees are encouraged to bring their own laptops to participate.

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The Mystery of Masonry Brought to Light:
Freemasonry and Art from the Eighteenth Century until Now
Friday, 5 February 2016, 9:30—12:00, Delaware Suite A, Lobby Level

Chair: Reva J. Wolf (State University of New York at New Paltz)

• David V. Bjelajac (George Washington University), Peter Pelham, Freemasonry and the Alchemical Cunning of John Singleton Copley
• Alisa L. Luxenberg (University of Georgia), Building Codes: New Light on F.*. Baron Taylor and Les Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France
• Talinn Grigor (University of California, Davis), Reveil de l’Iran: Freemasonry and Artistic Revivalism from Parsi Bombay to Qajar Tehran
• William D. Moore (Boston University), ‘To Consummate the Plan’: Solomon’s Temple in American Masonic Art, Architecture, and Popular Culture, 1865–1930
• David Martín López (University of Granada), What If Pombal, Goya and Lorca Were Freemasons? New Perspectives on the Masonic and Philo-masonic Presence in Portugal and Spain
Discussant: Aimee E. Newell (Scottish Rite Masonic Museum and Library)

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Eros and Enlightenment (ASECS Session)
Friday, 5 February 2016, 12:30—2:00, Washington 2, Exhibition Level

Chairs: Nina Dubin (University of Illinois at Chicago) and Hérica Valladares (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill)

• Susanna Caviglia (University of Chicago), Painting of Love as Ideology of Harmony
• Paul Holmquist (Carleton University), Centralizing Love: Eros and Politics in the Oikéma of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux
• Camille Mathieu (University of Oxford and St. John’s College), Eros amongst Eagles: Iconographies of Alliance in Napoleonic France
Discussant: Mary Sheriff (University of North Carolina)

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Pastel: The Moment of a Medium in the Eighteenth Century (HECAA)
Friday, 5 February 2016, 2:30—5:00, Washington 6, Exhibition Level

Chairs: Iris J. Moon (Pratt Institute) and Esther Bell (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco)

• Rochelle N. Ziskin (University of Missouri Kansas City), Pastel (and Other) Portraits Chez Mme Doublet
• Marjorie Shelley (The Metropolitan Museum of Art), Painting in Crayons: Pastel as an Artists’ Medium in the Cultural and Commercial Context of the Eighteenth Century
• Oliver Wunsch (Harvard University), Face Time: Permanence and Pastel Portraiture

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Taking Stock: Early Modern Art Now
Saturday, 6 February 2016, 9:30—12:00, Salon 1, Lobby Level

Chairs: Hanneke Grootenboer (University of Oxford) and Amy Knight Powell, University of California, Irvine

• Susan Dackerman (Getty Research Institute), The Paleontology of Print
• Itay Sapir (Université du Québec à  Montréal), Patterns of Attention: Early Modern Art and the Potential Deceleration of Looking
• Claudia  Swan (Northwestern University), Global Encounters Then and Now
• Marika T. Knowles (Harvard Society of Fellows), The Subject of History in the ‘Figures de différents caractères’ after Watteau
• Shira Brisman (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Hugo van der Goes and the Slip of Sin

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From the conference website:

Versailles in the World, 1660–1789
New York University, 29 January 2016

Organized by Jeffrey Collins, Meredith Martin, and Robert Wellington

Versailles is often seen as the epitome of ‘Frenchness’, yet the palace and its contents were profoundly shaped by encounters with people and objects from around the world. This symposium builds upon recent colloquia and exhibitions such as La Chine à Versailles: art et diplomatie au XVIIIe siècle (2014) and Voyageurs étrangers à la cour de France, 1589–1789 (2014) to emphasize the international character of Versailles between the reigns of Louis XIV and Louis XVI and to situate its art and architecture in a global context.

From ArtWatch UK; also see Brian Allen’s remarks in The Guardian (14 November 2015). . .

Art, Law and Crises of Connoisseurship
The Society of Antiquaries of London, 1 December 2015

Connoisseurship may be defined as expertise in art in the very narrowest of senses; surprisingly, however, it is also a definition in which many different disciplines intersect. In the public realms of law and the art world, a ‘connoisseur’ must be recognized as being an expert, as being capable of giving credible testimony regarding the subject, and as remaining actively engaged with the world in which attributions and authentications are made. This public recognition takes years of work and is hard-won. Yet, does this public recognition of expertise signify accuracy or truth in the claims that a connoisseur makes about art? This one-day conference investigates the always-interrelated and often mutually-troubled processes by which connoisseurship is constructed in the fields of art and law, and the ways in which these different fields come together in determining the scope and clarity of the connoisseur’s ‘eye’.

Art, Law and Crises of Connoisseurship is organized by ArtWatch UK, the Center for Art Law (USA) and the LSE Cultural Heritage Law (UK), to be held at The Society of Antiquaries of London, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1J 0BE. All inquiries to artwatch.uk@gmail.com. Admission is by ticket only. For ticket prices and to purchase tickets (exclusively through Eventbrite ), please click here.

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P R O G R A M M E

8.30  Registration

I | The Making of Art and the Power of Its Testimonies

9.00  Michael Daley — Like/Unlike, Interests/Disinterest
Michael Daley (UK), Director, ArtWatch UK, an artist who trained for twelve years (with post-graduate studies at the Royal Academy Schools) and taught in art schools for fifteen years before practicing as an illustrator (principally with Financial Times, The Times Supplements, The Independent and, presently, Standpoint magazine), will suggest that the principles of sound connoisseurship in making attributions and appraising restorations are implicit in fine art training and practice, and will discuss the trial in Italy of Professor James Beck on a charge of aggravated criminal slander brought in Italy by a restorer against the scholar but not against the newspapers which had carried his reported comments.

9.25  Euphrosyne Doxiadis — Perception, Hype and the Rubens Police
Euphrosyne Doxiadis (Greece), a painter/scholar whose 1996 book The Mysterious Fayum Portraits: Faces from Ancient Egypt won the won the Prix Bordin, the Prix d’ ouvrage by the Académie des Beaux-Arts, Institut de France, and, the 1997 ‘Prize of the Athens Academy’, will challenge the Rubens attribution given to the National Gallery’s oil on panel Samson and Delilah in the 28th year of her researches. Astonished at her first sighting of this painting in the National Gallery, the author will discuss both its manifest artistic disqualifications and the edifice of support that surrounds an attribution first made in 1930 by a leading Rubens scholar who today is notorious for his many excessively-generous certificates of authenticity.

9.40  Jacques Franck — Why the Mona Lisa Would Not Survive Modern Day Conservation Treatment
Jacques Franck (FR), an art historian and a painter trained in Old Master techniques, is the Permanent Consulting Expert to the Armand Hammer Center for Leonardo Studies at UCLA, and an editorial consultant to Academia Leonardi Vinci. He was a curator/exhibitor in the Uffizi’s exhibition La mente di Leonardo (2006) and will draw on experiences as an adviser to the Louvre’s restorations of Leonardo’s St Anne and Belle Ferronnière, and his current PhD investigations on Leonardo’s sfumato technique at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, to demonstrate the threats presently facing the Mona Lisa in a museum conservation system that he considers inadequate to preserve the masterpiece in the event of it being cleaned at the Louvre.

9.55  Ann Pizzorusso — Leonardo’s Geology: The Authenticity of The Virgin of the Rocks
Ann Pizzorusso (US) is a professional geologist and a Renaissance scholar whose work focuses on Leonardo da Vinci as a geologist. She has written numerous scholarly articles on Leonardo and his students, and the artists who preceded and followed him, analyzing the use of geology in their works. Her landmark article, “Leonardo’s Geology: The Authenticity of The Virgin of the Rocks” compared the two versions of the paintings. Demonstrating geology as a diagnostic tool—which was in fact Leonardo’s trademark—she will attribute only one of the two versions to Leonardo. Her new, four gold medals-winning book, Tweeting Da Vinci, discusses how the geology of Italy has influenced its art, literature, religion, medicine.

10.10  Discussion

10.30  Coffee

11.00  Segolene Bergeon-Langle — Can Science Deliver Its Promises to Art?
Segolene Bergeon-Langle (FR), France’s Honorary General Curator of Heritage, is both a scientist and an art historian. A former Head of Painting Conservation in the Louvre and the French National Museums, and a former Chair of the ICCROM Council (Rome), she is presently a member of the Louvre’s preservation and conservation committee. She will discuss various restoration cases showing how scientific analysis can fail properly to understand painters’ techniques and the deterioration of paint layers when questions are inadequately framed or when the interpretation of scientific reports is inadequate. Such difficulties can be overcome when connoisseurs themselves ask for scientific analysis to clarify some problem they have encountered, or when they can examine technical reports together with their scientific partners so as to avoid otherwise possible misinterpretations.

11.15  Michel Favre-Felix — Overlooked Witnesses: The Testimony of Copies
Michel Favre-Felix (FR) is a painter, the president of ARIPA (association for the respect of the integrity of artistic heritage), the director of the review Nuances, and the 2009 recipient of the ArtWatch International Frank Mason Prize, will present two restoration cases, studied from the French Museums’ scientific files, illustrating how restorations fail by not heeding the testimony of historical copies. He will stress the importance of disciplined arguments and of expert guidance from art historians, in a critical approach, rather than as the endorsement of ‘discoveries’ claimed during restorations by restorers. His cases will demonstrate how successive restorations can impose fresh and compounding misrepresentations on art when supposedly correcting previous errors.

11.30  Kasia Pisarek — How Reliable Are Today’s Attributions in Art? The Case of La Bella Principessa Examined
Kasia Pisarek (Poland/UK), an independent art historian and research specialist on attributions, took an MA at the Sorbonne and a PhD at the University of Warsaw. Her doctoral dissertation “Rubens and Connoisseurship: On the Problems of Attribution and Rediscovery,” identified many recently fallen Rubens attributions. She will set out a number of interlocking aesthetic, art historical and technical arguments against the recently claimed attribution to Leonardo of the drawing La Bella Principessa, which appeared anonymously and without provenance in New York in 1998. Her findings were published in the June 2015 Artibus et Historiae.

11.45  Discussion

12.15  Lunch

II | Righting the Record: Diverse Experts as Authority

1.15  Introduction by session moderator Tatiana Flessas

1.20  Brian Allen — Throwing the Baby out with the Bathwater: The Demise of Connoisseurship since the 1980s
Brian Allen (UK) is a former Director of Studies at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and is now Chairman of the London Old Master dealers Hazlitt Ltd. He will speak about the gradual demise of connoisseurship in academic art history (especially in the UK) over the past three decades and will consider the effect of this on the study of art history and the art market. Up to the early 1980s few questioned the importance for young art historians of acquiring the skills to determine authorship but as the discipline of art history evolved from its amateur roots in Britain so too did a determination to adopt the theoretical principles of other areas of study. Only now are we witnessing the consequences of this change of emphasis.

1.35  Peter Cannon-Brookes — Reconciling Connoisseurship with Different Means of Production of Works of Art
Peter Cannon-Brookes (UK) turned from natural sciences to art history and has been active as a museum curator with strong interests in conservation and security. Connoisseurship has been undermined by the decay of museum-based pre-Modern Movement scholarship leading to the growing corruption of reference collections and of connoisseurship enhanced by the detailed study of them. Can the systems of stylistic analysis evolved from the 1940s and social anthropology be reconciled with the actual processes of production of works of art throughout the ages? The business models adopted by Raphael, El Greco and Rubens are by no means exceptional, and the evident disdain of Rodin for those prepared to pay high prices for indifferent drawing-room marble versions of his compositions, encourage re-evaluation of connoisseurship as an essential tool.

1.50  Charles Hope — Demotion and Promotion: The Asymmetrical Aspect of Connoisseurship
Charles Hope (UK) is a former Director of the Warburg Institute and will discuss the tension that exists between connoisseurship as a type of expertise acquired by long experience and as an activity based on the use of historical evidence and reasoned argument. Will claim that, in practice, these two aspects are often in contradiction to one another, and that many connoisseurs have been unable or unwilling to provide clear arguments about how they have reached their opinions. Too often, judgements about authorship are decided by appeals to authority, and almost by vote, rather than by evidence.

2.05  Martin Eidelberg — Fact vs. Interpretation: The Art Historian at Work
Martin Eidelberg (US), professor emeritus of art history at Rutgers University, will discuss the reliability and fallibility of provenance and scientific analysis of pictures in determining the authenticity of paintings. Using case histories that he has gathered from his research in preparing a catalogue raisonné of the paintings of Jean Antoine Watteau (1684–1721), he will consider whether such supposedly factual data is reliable, or whether it is subjective and open to the interpretation of scholars.

2.20  Discussion

2.40  Robin Simon — Owzat! The Great Cricket Fakes Operation
Robin Simon (UK) is Editor of The British Art Journal and Honorary Professor of English, UCL. Recent books include Hogarth, France and British Art and (with Martin Postle) Richard Wilson and the Transformation of European Landscape Painting. He will report his discovery (in 1983) that many of the paintings depicting cricket in the MCC collection at Lord’s were fakes, most of them made by one person between 1918 and 1948 but purporting to date from the 16th century to the 20th. They had been presented to MCC by Sir Jeremiah Colman (of the mustard family) who acquired them from a variety of agents and dealers. It is quite a tale and turns, among other things, upon an ingenious manipulation of provenance.

2.55  Anne Laure Bandle — Sleepers at Auction: Boon or Bane?
Anne Laure Bandle (CH) is guest lecturer at the LSE, director of the Art Law Foundation, and a trainee lawyer at the law firm Froriep in Geneva. She wrote a PhD in law on the misattribution of art at auction and more specifically on the sale of sleepers. She will discuss the creation of sleepers at auction by means of different cases, and focus on the attribution process of auction houses and their liability when selling a sleeper.

3.10  Elizabeth Simpson — Connoisseurship: Its Use, Disuse, and Misuse in the Study of Ancient Art
Elizabeth Simpson (USA) is a professor at the Bard Graduate Center in New Yor, a consulting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia, and director of the project to study and conserve the collection of wooden objects excavated from the royal tumulus burials at Gordion, Turkey. She will address the use and misuse of connoisseurship in the study of ancient art, the scholarly and methodological divides between archaeology and art history, and the current trend away from connoisseurship in the study of ancient art and artifacts. She will also show how connoisseurship is used to fabricate narratives for looted objects in order to validate unprovenienced works in private and museum collections.

3.25  Round table discussion

3.45  Tea

III | Wishful Thinking, Scientific Evidence, and Legal Precedent

4.15  Introduction by session moderator, Charles Hope

4:20  Irina Tarsis — Reputation is no Substitute to Due Diligence: Lessons from the Closure of the Knoedler Gallery (1857–2011)
Irina Tarsis (USA), is an art historian and an attorney based in Brooklyn, NY. Founder and Director of Center for Art Law, Ms. Tarsis is an author of multiple articles on the subject of restitution, provenance research, book history and copyright issues. With degrees in International Business, Art History and Law, in her practice Ms. Tarsis focuses on ownership disputes surrounding tangible and intangible property. She will discuss the history of the Knoedler Gallery that closed after more than 160 years in business having sold a cache of misattributed forgeries. Short of a dozen lawsuits were brought against the principles and staff of the Gallery for selling works attributed to the blue chip artists. Ms. Tarsis will discuss the responsibilities of dealers, collectors and art advisors to their clients and the scholarship when handling art in business transactions.

4:35  Nicholas Eastaugh — The Challenge of Science: Does ‘Fine Art Forensics’ Really Exist?
Dr Nicholas Eastaugh (UK), Founder/Director, Art Analysis and Research Ltd., London, originally trained as a physicist before going on to study conservation and art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London, where he completed a PhD in scientific analysis and documentary research of historical pigments in 1988. Since 1989 he has been a consultant in the scientific and art technological study of paint and paintings. A frequent lecturer, he is also a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. In 1999 he co-founded the Pigmentum Project, an interdisciplinary research group developing comprehensive high-quality documentary and analytical data on historical pigments and other artists’ materials. This led to the publication of The Pigment Compendium in 2004, which quickly became a standard reference text in the field. In 2008 he identified the first of the forgeries to be recognised as by Wolfgang Beltracchi, the now infamous Red Painting with Horses.

4.50  Megan Noh — Trends in Authentication Disputes
Megan E. Noh (USA) is the Associate General Counsel of Bonhams, one of the world’s largest international auction houses. Based in the New York office, Ms. Noh practices in a global hub for art transactions, and is uniquely poised to observe the numerous transactions conducted by Bonhams which require its specialists’ assistance with the authentication process, as well as the growing body of caselaw and legislative efforts emerging from this key jurisdiction. Ms. Noh’s presentation will cover trends in authentication disputes, including the cessation of artists’ foundations and authentication boards to issue opinions confirming attribution, as well as increased litigation and reliance of parties on scientific evidence and testimony. She will also elucidate the position of auction houses as a liaisons or ‘middlemen’ in this process, facilitating the flow of information as between collectors (sellers and buyers) and third party authenticators.

5.25  Final discussion moderated by Charles Hope

5.50  Closing remarks by Irina Tarsis

From the conference website:

The Matter of Mimesis: Studies on Mimesis and Materials in Nature, Art, and Science
CRASSH, Cambridge, 17–18 December 2015

Adam Ludwig Wirsig, Marmora Et Adfines Aliquos Lapides Coloribus Suis Exprimi (Nürnberg 1775)

This interdisciplinary conference aims to bring together scholars from the sciences, social sciences and humanities in order to address material practices of mimesis. Aristotle, in one of the first definitions of the concept, argues that mimesis, or the imitation of nature, refers to both form and material. Thus far, scholarship has mostly focused on the role of form in mimetic practices, while the mimetic role of materials, despite the many disciplines in which these are central to making and knowing, remains significantly understudied.

Materials play a fundamental role in mimetic practices, from the earliest known examples to some of the most recent. Ancient ceramic vessels, for instance, some nearly four millennia old, imitate the visual appearance of other materials like metal or straw, while medieval artisans gave wood the costly appearance of marble, or made paper seem like gilded leather. The industrial revolution and chemical innovation created many new opportunities for material mimesis, crowned with the invention of plastics, which can be transformed into almost anything imaginable. Today, computer science allows us to flip pages of digital paper and navigate the visible world in three dimensions, while material science has invented biomaterials that replace the cells of our bodies, smart materials that can assume the appearance of their surroundings, and drugs that imitate the material of neurotransmitters, to name but a few. The role of materials in mimesis is by no means limited to the past: the practice will continue to have an impact in the future which cannot be foreseen.

Conveners
Emma Spary (University of Cambridge)
Marjolijn Bol (University of Amsterdam and Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)

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9.30  Registration and Coffee

10.00  Welcome and Introduction, Marjolijn Bol and Emma Spary

10.15  Session 1: Substitution
• Ann-Sophie Lehmann (University of Groningen), Closing the mimetic gap, or the galalithe problem: Material imitation as scientific, creative, and social practice
• Zuzanna Sarnecka (University of Cambridge), Firing porphyry in the Renaissance ceramic kiln
• Jenny Rampling (Princeton University), Substituting alchemy: the quid pro quo of experimental reconstruction
• Hanna Wirta Kinney (Oxford University), The fleshiness of bronze: eighteenth-century copies by Massimiliano Soldani Benzi and Pietro Cipriani

12.30  Lunch

13.45  Session 2: Making Material Knowledge
• Pamela Smith (Columbia University), Transforming matter and making art in a sixteenth-century workshop
• Marta Ajmar (Victoria and Albert Museum), A culture of material mimesis: thinking and making trans-materially in Italy, 1400–1600
• Lisbet Tarp (Aarhus University), Fertile stones: hybrid stones between matter and form in the collection of Ole Worm (1588–1654)

15.30  Coffee

16.00  Session 3: Added-value
• Erma Hermens (University of Glasgow), Mimicking the ‘real thing’:  material manifestations
• Richard Checketts (University of Leeds), ‘Without intellect or will’: materials and mimesis in the Cappella Altieri in S. Maria Sopra Minerva in Rome
• Jack Lynch (Rutgers University), Real fakes and fake fakes: materiality in literary forgery

18.00  Keynote Lecture
• Mark Miodownik (University College London), Bio-inspired materials

19.30  Conference Dinner

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10.00  Session 4: Materializing the Impossible
• Miri Rubin (Queen Mary, University of London), Title to be confirmed
• Valentina Pugliano (University of Cambridge), Fake specimens in the Renaissance
• Britta Dümpelmann (Freie Universität Berlin), ArtFiction. Materiality and material mimesis as the genuine language of nonpolychrome Northern Renaissance sculpture
• Maria Lumbreras (Johns Hopkins University), “Con el oro e matizes de la dicha ymagen”: sacred matter and its replicas in early modern Seville

12.15  Lunch

13.45  Session 5: Preservation
• Jeroen Stumpel (Utrecht University), Patterns of endurance: material and survival in the history of art
• Anna Maerker (King’s College London), Title to be confirmed
• Sophie Kromholz (University of Glasgow), Things aren’t what they seem: material compromises in the conservation of ephemeral art

15.00  Coffee

15.30  Session 6: Mimesis Beyond ‘Matter’?
• Pietro Conte (University of Lisbon), Excessive similarity? Hyperrealism and its materials in phenomenological perspective
• Emilie Gehl Skulberg (University of Copenhagen), The Illustris Project: mimesis and the simulation of the cosmos
• Erik Rietveld (University of Amsterdam), The skillful body and affordances for material mimesis
• Leah Anderson (l’École cantonale d’art du Valais), Reflections on place

17.30  Closing Remarks

From the conference program:

Fifth CAA / CWF International Carriage Symposium
Colonial Williamsburg, 28–30 January 2016

We hope you’ll join the Carriage Association of America (CAA) and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation (CWF) as we welcome fourteen leading European and North American scholars to our fifth biennial CAA / CWF International Carriage Symposium. You’ll hear lectures on a wide variety of topics that touch on horse- drawn transportation. And you’ll have several opportunities to explore everything that Colonial Williamsburg’s Revolutionary City has to offer and to meet the men and women who practice eighteenth-century trades.

To kick off the symposium, the CAA will hold its annual membership meeting and a welcome reception during the late afternoon on Wednesday, January 28. As a symposium attendee, you’ll enjoy thirteen educational lectures during the day on Thursday, Friday morning, and all day Saturday. You’ll have Friday afternoon free to explore Williamsburg’s Historic Area and to visit the stables and meet the CWF’s new director of the Coach & Livestock Department, Paul Bennett.

For more than fifty years, the CAA has studied, preserved, and shared the history and traditions of carriage driving. Through the CAA’s efforts, association members and the general public can learn about carriages and sleighs, harness, driving how-to, carriage- driving history, early American roads, traditional turnout and livery, carriage restoration and conservation, and so much more.

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• Monica Kurzel-Runtscheiner (Austria), And How the Visitors Gather: Equestrian Equipages at the Congress of Vienna, 1815
• David Sneed (United States), The Inside Story: An Overview of Technology in America’s Early Military Wagons and Western Vehicles
• Colin Henderson (Great Britain), From 4:00am to 5:00pm: The Royal Mews Undertakes a Grand Royal Event

Midday break

• Laurier Lacroix (Canada), Canadian Artist, Cornelius Krieghof: Immortalizing the Sleighs of the Canadian Habitant
• Andreas Nemitz (Germany), Alpine Adventures: Travels over the Alps by Coach and Five

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• Kenneth Wheeling (United States), The Mountain House Coaches: Tours through New Hampshire’s Leafy Glens
• Michael Sanborn (United States), Beckoning Avalon: The Banning Family Carriages of Catalina Island
• SSG John S. Ford (United States), To Carry the Honored Dead: The Army Caissons at Arlington National Cemetery

Lunch, with the afternoon to explore the Historic Area

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• Stephan Broeckx (Belgium), The Japanese Imperial Mews: The Emperor’s Ceremonial Horses and Carriages
• Alexander Sotin (Russia), On the Streets of Moscow: The Horse-drawn Turnouts of the Russian People
• Greg Hunt (United States), Military Tack: Harnesses for Army Escort Wagons and Artillery Teams

Midday break

• Josh Ruff (United States), Delancey Kane’s Tally-Ho: An Icon of American Road Coaching
• Bjørn Høie (Norway), Out and around the Norwegian Fjords: The Native Country Vehicles of Norway
• Richard C. V. Nicoll (United States), Address during the Banquet: Time I Hung up my Whip

From Historic Deerfield:

Yankee Ingenuity and New England Decorative Arts, 1790–1840
Historic Deerfield, Deerfield, Massachusetts, 13–15 November 2015

Join us for an in-depth examination of the decorative arts of New England’s inventors, merchants and peddlers during the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

When President Adams moved into the new White House in 1800, innovation and adaptation already drove the creative designs of many New England-made objects. Even as elite tastes maintained traditional ties to European styles and materials, the consumer demands of an expanding middle class fueled inventive entrepreneurial approaches to making and selling cheaper, attractive, American-made goods. At times protected or even encouraged by embargo, war, and westward expansion, New Englanders made and sold a profusion of wares including patent clocks, popular prints, glassware, stoneware, tinware, pewter, cast iron stoves, and stenciled and painted furniture. First competing with and ultimately replacing European manufactures for many families, they infused their products with artistic energy and excitement that spurred a national impulse to ‘Buy American’. Forum speakers and demonstrators will include Peter Benes, Deborah Child, David Jaffee, Amanda Lange, Ned Lazaro, William McMillen, Mary Cheek Mills, Sumpter Priddy, Andrew Raftery, Christine Ritok, and Philip Zea.

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Participants who arrive early are welcome to walk The Street and enjoy Deerfield’s historic houses. The museum exhibits ingenious examples of New England decorative arts in the Museum’s Attic of the Flynt Center of Early New England Life and in the exhibition Into the Woods: Crafting Early American Furniture. Before the Forum begins, four optional workshops (additional fee required) and one estate planning workshop (no fee) are offered on Friday afternoon, November 13.

1:00–2:30  Optional Workshop: “Connoisseurship of Antique Tinware: The Trade, Materials, Tradesmen, Tools, and Products,” William McMillen, Master Tinsmith, Glenmont, NY
1:00–2:30  Optional Workshop: “Yankee Potters: New England-Made Ceramics,” Amanda Lange, Curatorial Department Director, Historic Deerfield

3:00–4:30  Optional Workshop:  “Peddling Fashion: Accessories in Early New England, 1790–1840,” Ned Lazaro, Associate Curator of Textiles and Collections Manager, Historic Deerfield
3:00–4:30  Optional Workshop: “Glass in Early America: An Introduction to History and Technology,” Mary C. Mills, Historic Glass Specialist, Cultural Resources Management, AECOM

5:00  Opening Reception

6:00  Welcome by Philip Zea, President, Historic Deerfield, Inc.

6:10  Keynote Lecture: “Fashioning the New Nation in Post-Revolutionary New England,” David Jaffee, Professor and Head of New Media Research, Bard Graduate Center

7:30  Dinner on own or prix fixe dinner at the Deerfield Inn

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8:30  Registration, coffee, and refreshments

9:30  Lecture: “American Fancy and Rural New England Creativity,” Sumpter Priddy, Historic Furnishings Consultant, Alexandria, VA

10:30  Break

11:00  Lecture: “Elegance and Innovation in Early New England Glassmaking,” Mary C. Mills, Historic Glass Specialist, Cultural Resources Management, AECOM

12:15  Lunch

2:00  Lecture: “Richard Brunton—Engraver to Early America –Legitimate and Otherwise,” Deborah M. Child, Author, Lecturer and Independent Curator

3:00  Break

3:30  Demonstration: “The Art and Craft of Copperplate Engraving,” Andrew Raftery, Professor of Printmaking, Rhode Island School of Design

5:30  Reception

6:45  Dinner on own or prix fixe dinner at the Deerfield Inn

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8:30  Coffee and refreshments

9:30  Lecture: “’Rich and Tasty’ Vermont Furniture: Revolution to Reinvention,” Philip Zea, President, Historic Deerfield

10:30  Break

11:00  Lecture: “Inspiration/Innovation: Exemplary Furniture on The Street,” Christine Ritok, Associate Curator, Historic Deerfield

11:30  Lecture: “The ‘Yankee Peddler’: Notes Toward a Multicultural Perspective,” Peter Benes, Director of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife

Lunch

2:00  Optional Guided Tour: “Exploring Historic Deerfield’s Collection of New England Folk Portraiture: Paintings, Drawings, Watercolors, and Silhouettes,” Flynt Center of Early New England Life