Enfilade

With CAA now behind us, ASECS is just around the corner in San Antonio, 22-24 March. More to come soon, but here’s HECAA’s New Scholar Session:

HECAA New Scholars Open Session
Chairs: Melissa Hyde (University of Florida) and Heidi Kraus (The University of Iowa)

1. Katherine Arpen (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), “Touch, Sensation, Imagination: Étienne-Maurice Falconet’s Bather“
2. Zirwat Chowduhry (Northwestern University), “Incongruously Indian: The Joke behind George Dance the Younger’s Guildhall Facade”
3. Amanda Strasik (The University of Iowa), “Portraying the (Future) Queen: Le Portrait de Marie-Joséphe de Saxe et Le Duc de Bourgogne“
4. Hyejin Lee (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), “The Language of Music in Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin’s Food Still Lifes”

From the PEM:

A Material World: The Art and Culture of Global Connections
Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, 22 March 2012

Join us for a dynamic symposium that explores how the global movement of objects — luxury goods, traded commodities and diplomatic gifts — created an increasingly interconnected world from the 1500s to the 1800s. How did these works shape people’s ideas about the wider world? What can these works continue to tell us about early global networks? Nine international speakers focus on different cross-cultural connections in this daylong program highlighting works of art from PEM’s collection.

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S P E A K E R S

Donna Pierce (Denver Art Museum), Chinese Export Silk and Porcelain in Colonial Mexico

Daniel Finamore (Peabody Essex Museum), Mexican Featherwork Fan for the Spanish Market, Early 1600s

Susan Stronge (Victoria and Albert Museum, London), Foreign Luxuries at the Mughal Court

Giorgio Riello (Warwick University), Portrait of Two English Boys in Asian Clothing by Tilly Kettle, 1780s

Jean Michel Massing (University of Cambridge, England), Luso-African Ivories: A New Provenance

Karina Corrigan (Peabody Essex Museum), Chinese Export Lacquer and Enamel Furniture, 1730s

Timon Screech (School for Oriental and African Studies, London), Linnaeus and the Origin of Japanese Numismatics

Christina Hellmich (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco), Alaskan Overcoat Owned by the King of the Hawaiian Islands, Given to PEM before 1821

Anne Gerritsen (Warwick University, England), Things in Global Context: Mr Nobody Comes Home

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Tilly Kettle (1734-1786), "Portrait of Two English Boys in Asian Clothing," 1780s (Peabody Essex Museum)

This daylong program concludes with a cocktail reception. Registrants will also have the opportunity to attend PEM’s mid-winter Evening Party and opening for FreePort [No. 005]: Michael Lin following the reception. Learn more about FreePort [No. 005]: Michael Lin

Reservations by March 15
Members $85, nonmembers $95, students with ID $20
For more information, call 978-542-1625 or email symposium@pem.org

Related lecture — Timothy Brook, Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World, Wednesday, March 21.

A Material World: The Art and Culture of Global Connections  is sponsored in part by a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK). The AHRC grant has funded a two-year international academic partnership exploring global commodities and the material culture of early modern connections, 1400-1800. Partner institutions include Warwick University, Coventry, England; The Victoria and Albert
Museum, London, England; Bilgi University, Istanbul, Turkey; and the
Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, USA.

As noted at H-ArtHist:

Morceau de reception, Dono, and Diploma Piece
Histories of a Self-reflective Genre of Sculpture
Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf, 18 May 2012

Organized by Tomas Macsotay and Johannes Myssok

Étienne-Maurice Falconet, "Milo of Croton," marble, 1754 (Paris: Louvre)

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the significance of a practice of sculpture was to a great extent determined by the incorporation of individual sculptors into royal academies and city guilds, powerful institutions of Ancien Régime society fueled by conflicting socio-economic interests, ethic convictions and aesthetic creeds. For sculptors, the centerpiece of such acts of consecration consisted in marble carvings executed in reduced scale and rendering noble subjects that ranged from the Saints to Ovid and Roman History. As guilds lost ground and influence to academies, the figures became an indispensable means of forging a reputation: they grew increasingly complex and in a few cases, as with Falconet’s Milo, Sergel’s Othryadès and Banks’ Falling Titan, strike the modern viewer as being strangely at odds with stylistic mainstreams of baroque and neo-classicism. What resulted is one of the first forms of sculpture produced independently from overt purposes of noble representation or religious experience, and therefore capable of being called ‘autonomous’. Often lodged within or close to the spaces where academy members convened and held seminars, academic marbles come closest to representing a programmatic statement on the nature of sculpture at the dawn of modernity.

The study day will examine the converging histories of the dono, the morceau de réception and the diploma piece. An international array of scholars will venture into the difficult task of identifying what (if anything) these pieces purport to teach the viewer about the art of sculpture. What are the origins of its typical conventions — among the
private genres of the reproductive bronze, the ivory and the ornamental relief, or among the public sculpture on permanent display in churches, townhouses and squares — and what support is provided modern scholars by academic theoretical discourses? The insistent three-dimensionality of the French morceau de réception seems particularly predictive of a now familiar paradigm of the medium, with its understanding that sculptural objects display non-pictorial properties that fuel a relationship with the beholder through modalities of hard, handled
substance, through the play of spatial presence and multiple viewpoints, and through quasi-architectural framing elements and supports such as pedestals and niches. But does this Ancien Régime embodiment of sculpture really anticipate a modern sensibility to sculptural form?

Admission to the study day is free. Registration is not required.

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P R O G R A M M E

9:00 Reception and coffee

9:25 Johannes Myssok, Welcome and introduction

SESSION 1: Between the Individual and the Institutional, chaired by Johannes Myssok
9:40 Susanne Adina Meyer (Rome): “Die Akademie in der ‘Akademie der Welt’: Wettbewerbe und bildhauerische Aufnahmestücke der Accademia di San Luca in Rom im 18. Jh.”
10:10 Marjorie Trusted (London), “The Beginnings of the Royal Academy in London: Diploma Pieces in the Eighteenth Century”

10:40 Discussion and coffee Break

SESSION 2: Falconet: Exception or Rule?, chaired by Guido Reuter
11:10 Kristina Dolata (Berlin): “Naturstudium und ‘horreur’. Falconets Milon von Kroton”
11:40 Tomas Macsotay (Barcelona), “The Free-standing Morceau de Réception and the Community of Experiment: Thoughts on De Piles and Falconet”

12:10 Discussion

12:30 Lunch

SESSION 3: Sculpture about Sculpture: An Academic Aesthetics, chaired by Tomas Macsotay
14:00 Ursula Ströbele (Berlin): “Vom bas-relief zum ronde-bosse. Narration und Zeitlichkeit bei den Bildhaueraufnahmestücken der königlichen Akademie in Paris”
14:30 Martin Myrone (London), “Extravagance, Excess, Expertise: Thomas Banks’s Falling Titan”

15:00 Discussion and break

15:40 Additional contribution by Magnus Olausson and/or respondent (to be confirmed); final discussion

A former Enfilade intern, Freya Gowrley, is organizing a session at this year’s AAH meeting at the Open University in Milton Keynes (29-31 March) with Viccy Coltman. The session, on ‘Conflicting Art Histories’, has its own website with presentation abstracts. The site raises an interesting question of how one might maximize the effectiveness of a conference session generally, along with the possibility that it might sometimes mean venturing beyond (or at least supplementing) the normal conference parameters of communication . . . -CH

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CONFLICTING ART HISTORIES: DIALOGUES OF COSMOPOLITANISM AND NATIONALISM IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITISH CULTURE (more…)

The Enlightenment Pope: Benedict XIV (1675-1758)
St. Louis, 30 April — 2 May 2012

Pierre Subleyras, "Benedictus XIV" (Château de Versailles), photo from Wikimedia Commons

The conference The Enlightenment Pope: Benedict XIV (1675-1758), hosted by Saint Louis University, Washington University and the Missouri History Museum, will bring together for the first time in the United States eminent international scholars expert in Pope Benedict XIV’s lifework and papacy. During a pontificate of eighteen years, Benedict advanced experimental and medical science, women’s authority in academic institutions, urbanism, museology, and the arts and culture to a remarkable degree.

One of the symposium’s chief goals is to help integrate ecclesiastical issues in general and the accomplishments of Benedict XIV in particular into the broader stream of research on the European Enlightenment. General themes of the conference include: the question of the compatibility of faith and science, women’s place in the realm of sanctity and the public sphere, the mission of the Church in the New World, church doctrine and liturgical reforms, and papal patronage of the arts.

More information, including a complete conference program, is
available here»

Early registration for CAA’s 100th Annual Conference, taking place February 22–25, 2012, in Los Angeles, ends this Friday, December 16, 2011. To secure the lowest rates, register for the conference and book your travel accommodations today!

From Colonial Williamsburg:

Working Wood in the Eighteenth Century: Furniture of George and Martha Washington
Colonial Williamsburg, 22-25 and 26-29 January 2012

George Washington’s Mount Vernon will partner with Colonial Williamsburg and Fine Woodworking to present the 14th annual Working Wood in the 18th Century conference at Colonial Williamsburg. Mount Vernon curators and restoration staff will explore Washington’s home and the furniture he and Martha acquired to furnish it. Cabinetmakers from Colonial Williamsburg’s Hay Shop will build two pieces at Mount Vernon today: a lady’s knee-hole dressing table made in Williamsburg at the Peter Scott shop, sold to Daniel Parke Custis, Martha Washington’s first husband, in 1754, and brought by Martha to Mount Vernon after she married Washington in 1759; and, an elaborate sculptural candle stand, or torchère, that George Washington purchased for £ 3.10 on December 2, 1759, from the Scottish cabinetmaker James Allan who was then working in Fredericksburg, Virginia.

Guest cabinetmakers Dan Faia of The North Bennet Street School and Jeff Headley and Steve Hamilton of Mack S. Headley and Sons will lead us into the Federal period. Jeff and Steve will reproduce one of the Washingtons’ dining chairs made by John Aitken of Philadelphia in 1797, and Dan will construct a delicate, inlaid Pembroke, or breakfast, table. Colonial Williamsburg’s joiners will demonstrate sash construction by reproducing the famous bull’s-eye window in the pediment of the Mansion.

Along with the conference in Williamsburg, Mount Vernon is planning special interest Mansion, museum, and behind-the-scenes tours for conference participants on January 26 and 30. More information to come as details are in place. If in the meantime, you want to take a look at some of the pieces, they can be viewed at the Mount Vernon website: www.mountvernon.org

Note: The program is the same number of days as previous years but is scheduled later in January and session one runs Sunday through Wednesday and session two Thursday through Sunday.

An event brochure is available here»