Symposium on William Birch in Philadelphia
From the conference brochure:
The Landscapes of William Birch: Providing a Context
The Athenaeum of Philadelphia, 3 December 2010
Coming to Philadelphia in 1794, William Russell Birch (1755-1834) would become the first artist successfully to publish engraved view books in the United States. He arrived with a letter from Benjamin West and with a successful 1791 publication, Delices de la Grande Bretagne, a series of 36 engraved views of picturesque settings after such artists as West, Joshua Reynolds, and Thomas Gainsborough. Although Birch immediately found some success as a copyist of portraits, he never lost his desire to create picturesque views based upon the American experience, and in 1800 he published The City of Philadelphia, a series of 28 views which would become the touchstone for future artists, engravers, and architects desiring to present images of the city. The success of this set of large-format prints encouraged Birch to undertake The Country Seats of the United States of North America, published in 1808. Birch’s reputation has chiefly rested on these two publications, but there is much more to learn about his life and career.
Symposium Presentations
- John Dixon Hunt, “Picturesque: ‘The Singular Excellence of Britain for Picture Scenes.’”
- Wendy Bellion, “Expanding the Scope of Painting in the 1790s”
- Michael J. Lewis, “Birch’s Philadelphia: An Architectural Perspective”
- Emily T. Cooperman, “‘Another Fifty Years May Lay a Foundation’: The Legacy of Birch’s Landscape Art”
- Lea Carson Sherk, “The Birch ‘Lives’ and the Carson Collection.”
To register for the conference, please visit The Athenaeum’s website»
The Image of the Black in Western Art
At the appearance of the first four volumes of a ten-volume series on the theme of The Image of the Black in Western Art, Harvard is hosting a symposium next week (largely focused on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). Volume III, Part 3: From the “Age of Discovery” to the Age of Abolition / The Eighteenth Century: Court, Enlightenment, Slavery, and Abolition is scheduled to be published next fall.
From the Harvard Art Museums website:
M. Victor Leventritt Symposium: The Image of the Black in Western Art
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 15 November 2010
"Portrait of a Black Boy," formerly attributed to Christopher Wren, 1680s (British Museum)
David Bindman, University College London and Harvard University; Paul Kaplan, State University of New York at Purchase; Joseph Koerner, Harvard University; Elmer Kolfin, University of Amsterdam; and Jeremy Tanner, University College London. Henry Louis Gates Jr., Harvard University, will moderate. Held in conjunction with the exhibition Africans in Black and White: Images of Blacks in 16th- and 17th-Century Prints, this symposium will feature five presentations followed by a panel discussion concerning the perception and representation of people of African descent in Western art.
Organized by the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research and David Bindman, Emeritus Professor of the History of Art, University College London, and a 2010 Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow, W. E. B. Du Bois Institute, with Anna Knaap, former Theodore Rousseau Postdoctoral Fellow, Division of European and American Art, Harvard Art Museums, and current Visiting Fellow, Jesuit Institute, Boston College. . . .
CAA Registration Now Open
The upcoming conference, taking place February 9–12, 2011, at the Hilton New York in midtown Manhattan, begins the celebration of CAA’s one-hundredth anniversary. Online registration is now open, and hotel reservations can be made. Register before the early deadline, December 10, to get the lowest rate and to ensure your place in the Directory of Attendees. You may also purchase tickets for special events, such as the reception at the Metropolitan Museum of Art following the presentation of the annual Awards for Distinction, as well as for professional-development workshops on a variety of topics for artists and scholars. CAA will regularly update the conference website over the next few months, with additional details on the program, awards, tours, and more. Session titles and chairs’ names are available now, and all presenters’ names and papers will follow in the coming weeks.
The CAA Annual Conference is the world’s largest international forum for professionals in the visual arts, offering more than two hundred stimulating sessions, panel discussions, roundtables, and meetings. CAA anticipates more than five thousand artists, art historians, students, curators, critics, educators, art administrators, and museum professionals to attend the Centennial event.
Symposium: New Research on Giuseppe Vasi
Program for the upcoming Vasi symposium, held in conjunction with the Vasi exhibition:
Una Roma Visuale: New Research on Giuseppe Vasi and the Art, Architecture and Urbanism of Eighteenth-Century Rome
Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon, Eugene, 12-13 November 2010
A symposium planned in conjunction with the special exhibition Giuseppe Vasi’s Rome: Lasting Impressions from the Age of the Grand Tour, this two-day event will gather together scholars of national and international reputation, each of whom will present new research on Vasi and eighteenth-century Rome. Sponsored by the Oregon Humanities Center and the Departments of Architecture and Art History, School of Architecture and Allied Arts Organized by the exhibition curators James Harper and James Tice, the symposium will encompass such topics as prints, painting, sculpture, architecture, urbanism and cartography in Vasi’s Rome. A guided tour of the exhibition, with the curators, is included in the program.
F R I D A Y, N O V E M B E R 1 2
Pre-Symposium Presentation (4 p.m.)
Sarah Murray and Molly Taylor-Poleskey (Stanford University), ‘Travelers to Vasi’s Rome: Mapping Eighteenth-Century Mobility’
An introduction to Stanford University’s “Mapping the Republic of Letters” Project’.
Symposium Keynote Lecture (5:30 p.m.)
John Pinto (Princeton University), ‘”The Most Glorious Place in the Universal World”: Architecture and Urbanism in the Rome of Giuseppe Vasi’
This overview of Rome, as defined by architecture, urban design, and city representations in the eighteenth century, addresses the appearance of the papal capital, systematically recorded by Giuseppe Vasi in the Age of the Grand Tour.
S A T U R D A Y, N O V E M B E R 1 3
Morning Sessions (9:45 a.m.–12:00 p.m.)
Mario Bevilacqua (Università degli Studi di Firenze), ‘Etched Towns and Architecture: Vasi and Piranesi in the Italian Eighteenth-Century Print World’
Operating within a tradition of architectural illustration, Vasi and Piranesi were both influenced by scholars and intellectuals who promoted print production as visual documents of a decaying cultural heritage. This paper compares and contextualizes their methods of compiling city views, including their use of texts, indexes and maps to summarize and give order and scope to the individual monuments illustrated in their sheets.
Allan Ceen (Director, Studium Urbis, Rome), ‘Vasi and Urban Space’
This paper examines Vasi’s attitude toward public spaces—the streets and piazzas that appear throughout his Magnificenze—to reveal the artist’s concept of the living city as an urban whole and not merely a collection of discrete monuments.
Katherine Rinne (California College of the Arts, Oakland), ‘The Tiber’s Flow in Mid-Eighteenth Century Rome’
In mid-eighteenth century Rome the Tiber was still the lifeblood of the city, as it had been in antiquity. It was also a site of experimentation, scientific investigation, and the display of wealth, as revealed in the maps and vedute of Vasi and other artists and engineers of his time.
Afternoon Sessions (1:20-4:20 p.m.)
Heather Hyde Minor (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), ‘Piranesi’s Lost City’
This talk will illuminate the precise nature of the scholarly and artistic practices that were used to create Piranesi’s great map of Rome, the “Ichnographiam Campi Martii antiquae urbis,” which appeared in his 1762 book Il Campo Marzio dell’Antica Roma (The Campus Martius of Ancient Rome), accompanied by a sixty-seven page essay and forty-eight figural prints.
Jessica Maier (University of Oregon), ‘Giuseppe Vasi as Cartographer: Influence and Innovation in Early Modern Maps of Rome’
Vasi’s 1778 map of Rome tends to be regarded as derivative by scholars of early modern cartography, overshadowed as it is by the radical innovation of Nolli’s Grande Pianta (1748). This talk proposes a reevaluation of Vasi’s map in light of the practice of cartography in the eighteenth century, when “borrowing” was commonplace and originality a relative term.
Susan Dixon (University of Tulsa), ‘Vasi and Arcadia’
In the 1740s through the 1760s, the Accademia degli Arcadi flourished in Rome, serving as a neutral landscape in which those interested in restoring Italian culture to a position of supremacy gathered to listen to poetic recitations. Those with intense political, theological and social differences flocked pacifically enough to the Bosco Parrasio, the Arcadians’ garden. Vasi found patrons and supporters in Arcadia to help him create the Magnificenze di Roma, among other works.
John Moore (Smith College), ‘Giuseppe Vasi’s “Prospetto dell’Alma Città di Roma”’
First published in December 1765, Vasi’s enormous etched panorama of Rome went together with a guidebook in which one expression unexpectedly provoked complaints from the papal authorities. The resolution of this matter casts light on the diplomatic relationships among the courts of Rome, Naples, and Madrid.
A guided tour of the exhibition with its curators follows at 4:20 p.m.
Conference: Art in Roman Palaces
Display of Art in Roman Palaces, 1550-1750
The Getty Center, Los Angeles, 2-3 December 2010
Rome—with its cardinals and international ambassadors to the papal court, its ancient barons and its newcomers trying to appear as if they descended from Caesar, all building, expanding, remodeling, and furnishing magnificent palaces, or trying to rent quarters befitting their needs and status—provided a powerful model for how the elites of Europe and beyond should live with an abundance of art. Here, display of art was calibrated to the ceremony of life and work in these great houses, to an etiquette and hierarchy that applied to every person, space, and thing.
This two-day conference is part of a Getty Research Institute research project on display in Roman houses from 1550 to 1750, two centuries that encompass the beginnings of collecting, as it is generally understood today, and the end of the “baroque,” by which time a very different concept of the interior had taken shape. Different media categories, moveable and immoveable—such as frescoes, cabinet pictures, tapestries, sculpture, and architecture—have been studied, yet little attention has been given to their integration into ensembles in which people conducted their lives. The wealth of microhistories on collecting allows for a broad-gauged analysis of display, and how it informed emerging concepts of art and art history. Conference presentations will explore the social and cultural context for display, the circuitry of production and the art market, access to interiors, and the processes by which desire was negotiated into concrete aesthetic environments that responded to the contingencies of life and change.
Admission is free. Reservations required for each day.
For more information or to make a reservation, visit the Getty website»
Colloquium on French Agrarian Architecture
From the INHA website:
L’art de bâtir aux champs: Modernité du patrimoine rural et théorie des constructions agricoles
Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris, 14-15 October 2010
Vue aérienne d’ensemble de la ferme de Platé d’Armand Moisant. Archives départementales d’Indre-et-Loire.
Le colloque L’art de bâtir aux champs, organisé en partenariat par l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art et la Direction des patrimoines du ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, rassemble des chercheurs ayant contribué aux travaux des services de l’Inventaire, dans le domaine du bâti rural et agricole, et des chercheurs participants au programme de l’INHA sur la théorie et la bibliographie du livre d’architecture français.
Il s’agit de mettre en exergue une période durant laquelle, à partir de la fin du XVIIIe siècle, l’architecture agricole donne lieu à un nombre croissant de publications. Celles-ci témoignent à la fois de l’actualité de ce domaine et de l’intérêt que lui portent des auteurs variés, architectes, ingénieurs ou propriétaires souvent rassemblés au sein des sociétés d’agriculture. Elles défi nissent également le cadre d’une production qui abandonne les pratiques traditionnelles, au profi t de méthodes plus rationnelles.
Aux marges du domaine qui était alors celui de l’art architectural, cette production imprimée coïncide avec une certaine démocratisation de la maîtrise d’ouvrage : les édifices « propres à loger les animaux » ou les granges et les hangars construits avec soin dans quelques demeures aristocratiques depuis la Renaissance italienne, étaient désormais un enjeu, pour un nombre croissant de commanditaires.
The colloquium program is available here»
Symposium: Arts of Spanish America and Early Global Trade
From the Denver Art Museum:
At the Crossroads: The Arts of Spanish America and Early Global Trade, 1492–1850
Mayer Center for Pre-Columbian and Spanish Colonial Art, Denver Art Museum, 12-13 November 2010
During the era of early global trade instigated by the voyages of Columbus, Spanish America served as a crossroads for trade between Europe and Asia. Trade goods were exchanged between all areas and inspired artists to appropriate motifs, styles, and techniques previously unknown to them. The impact of trade on the arts of all regions and the transmission of objects and ideas between Spanish America, North America, Europe, and Asia will be included.
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S P E A K E R S
Karina Corrigan (Peabody-Essex Museum – Salem, MA), Chinese Export Silver to the Americas
Claire Farago & James Cordova (University of Colorado – Boulder), Casta Painting and Self-Fashioning Artists in New Spain
Dana Leibsohn (Smith College – Northampton, MA), Made in China / Made in Mexico
Jaime Mariazza F. (Universidad de San Marcos – Lima, Peru), Royal Funerary Rites in 17th-Century Lima: The Catafalque of Margaret of Austria
Maria Bonta de la Pezuela (Sotheby’s – New York), The Perils of Porcelain: Chinese Export Porcelain in the Mexican Colonial Market
Donna Pierce (Denver Art Museum), Asian Trade Goods in Colonial New Mexico
Sara Ryu (Yale University – New Haven), Transatlantic Icons of Conquest: Cristos de caña in New Spain and the Canary Islands
William Sargent (Peabody-Essex Museum – Salem, MA), Asian Ceramics in New England
Suzanne Stratton-Pruitt (Independent Scholar – New York), From Spain to Peru: Paintings by the Dozen
Charlene Villasenor Black (University of California – Los Angeles), Saints’ Cults and Conversion in the Global Hispanic World
Rare Books Workshop in Bloomington — Latin for Title Pages
RBMS Regional Workshop: Latin for Rare Materials Catalogers
Indiana University Bloomington, 22 October 2010, 9:00-4:30
Registration deadline: 1 October 2010
This Rare Books and Manuscripts Sections regional workshop is intended for rare materials catalogers with little or no familiarity with Latin. The workshop will provide tools for navigating the title page, including identifying the key verbs and inflected forms of nouns for persons, places, and things in order to accurately record title and remainder of title information, author(s) and other names, editions, and publication information (i.e. DCRM(B)/AACR2 descriptive areas 1, 2, and 4), and any related notes. Among the issues addressed will be identifying and expanding contracted forms, Latin terminology used for publishing, and other issues unique to Latin materials.
Presenters: Jennifer MacDonald (University of Delaware) and Jennifer Nelson (The Robbins Collection, University of California Berkeley School of Law). Registration materials are available online. Registration is limited to 30 participants. Fees: ACRL member – $189; Nonmember – $239. Join ACRL today to take advantage of valuable members-only discounts, professional connections, and community. Questions: Contact Tory Ondrla at tondrla@ala.org, or call 312-280-2515.
Reynolds Conference in Geneva
Sir Joshua Reynolds: What’s New?
Université de Lausanne / Musée d’art et d’histoire de Genève, 16-18 September 2010
Colloque Internation organisé par Jan Blanc (Université de Genève) et Pascal Griener (Université de Neuchâtel)
Ce colloque est le premier événement scientifique organisé en Suisse autour de la carrière, de l’œuvre et de l’univers de Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792). Il est aussi l’un des premiers, depuis la dernière grande exposition rétrospective consacré au premier Président de la Royal Academy, à Londres et à Paris (1986), à faire le point des recherches et des travaux les plus récents sur le peintre et son temps. Dans le cadre d’un lieu de rencontres et d’échanges entre les chercheurs et le grand public, il s’agira de permettre aux spécialistes confirmés ainsi qu’aux jeunes chercheurs de se rencontrer, de comparer leurs analyses et de croiser leurs réflexions autour d’un peintre autour duquel de nombreuses questions restent en suspens ou discutées.
Thursday, 16 September 2010
2:00 Jan Blanc et Pascal Griener, Accueil – Ouverture
R E Y N O L D S E N S O C I É T É
2:30 Bénédicte Miyamoto-Pavot, Reynolds en contexte: l’acquisition des arts en Grande-Bretagne au XVIIIe siècle
3:00 David Spurr, Authorial gestures: Reynolds’ literary portraits
Discussion – Pause
4:00 Frédéric Ogée, Hogarth et Reynolds
4:30 Christopher Martin Vogtherr, The Hertford family painting by Reynolds: A case study in British collecting patterns
Discussion – Pause
5:30 Georges Starobinski, Esprit d’enfance et ton pastoral: un contrepoint musical aux fancies de Joshua Reynolds
Discussion
Fin de la première journée
Friday, 17 September 2010
R E Y N O L D S E N P R A T I Q U E S
9:00 Giovanna Perini, Reynolds in Rome: Notes from the New York and family sketchbooks
9:30 Donato Esposito, Drawn to drawings: Reynolds and the drawn line
10:00 Rica Jones, «Some new stratagem of painting the face all red or all blue or all purple at the first sitting» : Reynolds and the world of portraiture in the 1740s
Discussion – Pause
11:00 Colin Harrison, Reynolds in miniature
11:30 Martin Postle, «New light on an old war horse » : Reynolds’s equestrian portrait of Lord Ligonier
12:00 Cristina S. Martinez, Reynolds and Ramsay: On Tradition, the Nation and the Law
Discussion – Déjeuner
R E Y N O L D S E N T H É O R I E S
2:00 Une table ronde avec Olivier Knechciak et Patrick Vincent, Reynolds, Blake, Wordsworth: Reynolds romantique?
Discussion – Pause
3:30 Iris Wenderholm, The President as reader: Sir Joshua Reynolds and his library
4:00 Elisabeth Martichou, Reynolds and Abbé Du Bos: Towards art criticism?
Discussion – Pause
5:00 James A. W. Heffernan, History, portraiture, landscape: The unruly trio of Reynolds’ Discourses
5:30 Iris Wien, Joshua Reynolds: Myths and metaphors
Discussion
Saturday, 18 September 2010
L É G E N D E S E T S U R V I V A N C E S
10:00 Renate Prochno, Reynolds and Gainsborough: The creation of a legend
10:30 Karen Junod, « A Picture of the Mind » : Biography, Portraiture, and Edmund Malone’s An Account of the Life and Writings of the Author Sir Joshua Reynolds (1797)
Discussion – Pause
11:30 Sam Smiles, Turner’s debt to Reynolds
12:00 Camilla Murgia, Du modèle à l’anti-modèle: la perception de la théorie artistique de Reynolds chez les Préraphaélites
Discussion
The program is available here as a PDF file.
Symposium Examines Classicism and Buen Gusto in Latin American Art
On the heels of the exhibition on Charles IV as patron and collector, comes this University of North Texas Symposium. From the conference website:
The Politics of Taste in 18th- and 19th-Century Latin America
Meadows Museum, Dallas, 17 September 2010 (organized by the University of North Texas)
As the Bourbon monarchy took the Spanish throne in 1700, the art, architecture, and visual culture of Latin America began a gradual transformation. A defining moment in this evolution was the establishment of the Royal Academy of San Carlos in 1785 in Mexico City, a time that corresponded to the escalation of the Bourbon Reforms across the Indo-Hispanic Americas. The new academy set standards of neoclassicism and buen gusto (good taste) and sought to impose these protocols on colonial society. In Latin America, however, these two domains existed in an ambiguous relationship to one another. For example, good taste did not necessarily refer to neoclassical style. To complicate matters further, the results of artistic reform were not as expected by the proponents of the Academy. Rather than sweeping transformation in the visual arts, Latin American artists and institutions produced works that reveal cultural hybridity, the persistence and assimilation of traditional colonial styles and genres, as well as the transformation of European neoclassical forms themselves into American expressions.
This symposium poses a number of questions to interrogate this period of stylistic transition. By what processes were academic and/or neoclassical art, conforming to standards of buen gusto in Spain, transformed in Latin America? As the term “neoclassical” is not period language, what can examining period notions of buen gusto tell us about the American assimilation of European academic and/or neoclassical styles and genres? How was possessing buen gusto consciously political in Latin American contexts? What are the issues in contexts beyond Mexico City and New Spain, such as Cuba? How was neoclassicism deployed with respect to forced labor in the countryside? How did American antiquity enter discourses about neoclassicism and taste? How were the arts of taste expressed in early national contexts in Latin America? This symposium seeks more contextual understandings of this complex phenomenon in Latin American art history.
Program
9:00 Introduction
9:15 Susan Deans-Smith, University of Texas at Austin
10:00 Ray Hernández-Durán, University of New Mexico
10:45 Kelly Donahue-Wallace, University of North Texas
11:30 Paul Niell, University of North Texas
12:15 Luncheon
1:30 Charles Burroughs, Case Western Reserve University
2:15 Robert Bradley, University of Texas Pan American
3:00 Magali Carrera, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth
3:45 Stacie G. Widdifield, University of Arizona
4:30 Discussion
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