Exhibition | Stan Douglas: The Enemy of All Mankind
Stan Douglas, Act II, Scene XII: In which Polly Convinces Pirates Laguerre and Capstern to Release their Captive, Prince Cawwawkee, for a Prize Rather than go to War Against His People with Morano, 2024, inkjet print mounted on Dibond aluminum, 150 × 200 cm, edition of 5.
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From the press release for the show, which was covered by Walker Mimms for The New York Times (17 October 2024). . .
Stan Douglas | The Enemy of All Mankind: Nine Scenes from John Gay’s Polly
David Zwirner, New York, 12 September — 26 October 2024
David Zwirner is pleased to announce an exhibition by Stan Douglas, on view at the gallery’s 525 West 19th Street location in New York. Featuring a new photographic series, The Enemy of All Mankind: Nine Scenes from John Gay’s Polly, this will be the artist’s eighteenth solo exhibition with the gallery. In this stand-alone group of nine images, Douglas stages scenes from the eighteenth-century comic opera Polly, written by English dramatist John Gay (1685–1732), using the narrative as a vehicle through which to engage a wide range of themes that remain highly relevant today, including race, class, gender, and media. One work from the series debuted in David Zwirner: 30 Years, on view in summer 2024 in Los Angeles, and this will mark the first presentation of the body of work in its entirety.
Since the 1980s, Douglas has created films, photographs, and other multidisciplinary projects that investigate the parameters of their respective mediums. His ongoing inquiry into technology’s role in image making, and how those mediations infiltrate and shape collective memory, has resulted in works that are at once specific in their historical and cultural references and broadly accessible. Since the beginning of his career, photography has been a central focus of Douglas’s practice, used at first as a means of preparing for his films and eventually as a powerful pictorial tool in its own right. The artist is influenced in particular by media theorist Vilém Flusser’s notion of the photographic image as an encoded language that is determined by a specific set of technological, social, cultural, and political circumstances.
Stan Douglas, Overture: In which Convicted Brigand Captain Macheath is Transported to the West Indies Where He will be Impressed into Indentured Labour, 2024, inkjet print mounted on Dibond aluminum, 150 × 200 cm, edition of 5.
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A sequel to Gay’s well-known The Beggar’s Opera (which was later adapted as The Threepenny Opera), Polly was censored by the British government for its embedded satire and critique, particularly of policies around the parceling out of land; as a result, it was never produced during Gay’s lifetime. Douglas further notes that Polly was ahead of its time, as it “satirizes imperial patriarchal hierarchies of race and class—as well as gender norms, which it depicts as performative” (Douglas, in correspondence with the gallery, March 2024).
Gay’s stage play follows the eponymous Polly Peachum, who travels to the West Indies to search out her estranged husband, Captain Macheath, who has disguised himself as a Black man known as Morano and adopted the life of a pirate. Upon her arrival on the island, Polly is, unbeknownst to her, sold to a wealthy plantation owner as a courtesan. After eventually securing her freedom, she is advised to disguise herself as a young man to ward off unwanted male attention, and as a result becomes entangled in a series of skirmishes between the colonial settlers, the native population, and the pirates.
To create the photographs—which were shot in Jamaica using Hollywood-level production effects—Douglas enlisted a cast of actors to read from a loose script that he adapted for the chosen scenes, modifying certain characters and elements to bring the themes in line with the present day. For example, in Douglas’s version, Captain Macheath was a Black man passing as white in London who, once in the West Indies, drops the disguise and lets his hair grow out. Rather than posing the players, he photographed them continuously as they acted out and improvised the dialogue, then selected as the final images those that best embodied the ideas put forth in the narrative. The resulting large-scale photographs are dynamically realized, taking the form of sweeping tableaux where dramatis personae and setting collide in vivid color. Retaining Gay’s sense of comedic folly and satire as well as the underlying pathos of the story, the images bear traces of the various forms of media through which they have been filtered, employing formal elements drawn from theatrical, cinematic, and photographic conventions alike. Accordingly, Douglas positions the viewer as a spectator—a voyeuristic witness to the various narrative turns and apparent absurdities in which relationships are transactional and enemies expendable.
Stan Douglas, Act II, Scene VI: In which the Wife of Pirate Captain Morano, Jenny Diver, Attempts to Seduce Polly, who is Disguised as a Man to Avoid Molestation, detail, 2024, inkjet print mounted on Dibond aluminum, 150 × 150 cm, edition of 5.
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Douglas’s use of Polly as the basis for this project arose out of his long-standing interest in maroon societies, large groups of enslaved persons who banded together to run away and start new, proto-democratic societies. Contrary to their depiction in popular media, pirate ships occasionally functioned as collaborative maroon societies in their own right. The title of the series, The Enemy of All Mankind, is taken from a doctrine of eighteenth-century maritime law (in Latin, hostis humani generis) under which pirates could be attacked by anyone since they fell outside the protection of any nation, but its core notion of defining certain groups as enemies or outsiders resonates broadly today. In Polly, the pirates—in contrast to the settlers and indigenous people—are meant to embody immorality and evil, yet in pulling out specific strands of the narrative, Douglas points to a more nuanced understanding of such sweeping generalities.
Stan Douglas (b. 1960) was born in Vancouver and studied at Emily Carr College of Art in Vancouver in the early 1980s. Douglas was one of the earliest artists to be represented by David Zwirner, where he had his first American solo exhibition in 1993—the second show in the gallery’s history.
Douglas’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at prominent institutions worldwide since the 1980s. In 2022, the artist represented his native Canada at the Venice Biennale, where he debuted a major video installation, ISDN (2022)—now in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York—and a related body of photographs. Subsequently, the exhibition Stan Douglas: 2011 ≠ 1848 traveled around Canada with stops at The Polygon Gallery, Vancouver (fall 2022); Remai Modern, Saskatoon (February–April 2023); and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa (September 2023–October 2024). A solo exhibition also titled 2011 ≠ 1848 was subsequently staged in 2023 at De Pont Museum, Tilburg, the Netherlands. In 2023, this body of work inaugurated David Zwirner’s new Los Angeles location, and it is currently on view at the Parque de Serralves in Porto, Portugal, through 12 January 2025.
Douglas has been the recipient of notable awards, including the Audain Prize for Visual Art (2019); the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography (2016); the third annual Scotiabank Photography Award (2013); and the Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, New York (2012). In 2021, Douglas was knighted as a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture, and in 2023 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Simon Fraser University, Greater Vancouver. Work by the artist is held in major museum collections worldwide.
Exhibition | French Neoclassical Paintings from the Horvitz Collection
Claude-Joseph Vernet, After the Storm, 1788.
(Wilmington: Horvitz Collection)
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Now on view at the AIC:
French Neoclassical Paintings from the Horvitz Collection
Art Institute of Chicago, 19 October 2024 — 6 January 2025
Curated by Emerson Bowyer and Andrea Morgan
This exhibition showcases 25 paintings from the preeminent private collection of French 18th-century art in the United States: the Horvitz Collection. The selection of works focuses on Neoclassicism, an artistic style that emerged in the later 1700s and flourished through the 1820s, a period of tremendous political and social upheaval in France. This time was also the heyday of ‘history painting’, a genre of painting characterized by large-scale compositions portraying scenes from history, mythology, and religion. Neoclassical painters looked to the art, architecture, and literature of ancient Greece and Rome for inspiration, often as a lens through which to depict and comment upon contemporary events, and several works included in the exhibition were displayed to a broad public at the annual Paris Salons.
While these works were created more than 200 years ago and often depict ancient or mythological events, they also reference social and political challenges that remain relevant today, from the overthrow of an absolutist government during the French Revolution—which saw the groundwork laid for modern democracies—through to Napoleon’s Empire and the eventual restoration of Bourbon monarchy. This period also coincided with the rise of Enlightenment ideals, the democratization of knowledge, the spread of printed materials, and the origins of industrialization and increased urbanization.
French Neoclassical Paintings from The Horvitz Collection is curated by Emerson Bowyer, Searle Curator, Painting and Sculpture of Europe and Andrea Morgan, research associate. The exhibition complements a major survey of drawings from the same period, Revolution to Restoration: French Drawings from The Horvitz Collection.
Exhibition | French Drawings from the Horvitz Collection
Étienne Barthélémy Garnier, Banquet of Tereus
(Wilmington: Horvitz Collection)
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Opening soon at the AIC:
Revolution to Restoration: French Drawings from the Horvitz Collection
Art Institute of Chicago, 26 October 2024 — 6 January 2025
Curated by Kevin Salatino and Emily Ziemba
The exhibition features approximately 90 drawings made from the 1770s through the 1850s, one of the most turbulent periods in French history. During this time, France abolished the monarchy, established a republic, terrorized perceived political enemies, waged war across the continent, imposed an empire, and eventually reinstated the monarchy—and these are only a handful of the tumultuous episodes that occurred across this 80-year period. Despite this profound instability, the country’s cultural environment flourished, spurring a significant stylistic shift in artistic production. Influenced by the rationalist ideas and moral seriousness of such Enlightenment thinkers as Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and inspired by important archaeological discoveries that radically altered contemporary ideas about the ancient Greco-Roman past, artists turned away from the playful, decadent Rococo style of the mid-18th century. In its place they adopted a more restrained and disciplined style, now known as Neoclassicism, a term invented only in the 19th century.
Henriette Lorimier, Female Nude, 1796, Black chalk, charcoal, and white crayon (Wilmington: Horvitz Collection).
Featuring works by the most accomplished and influential artists of the time, including Jacques-Louis David, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Pierre-Paul Prud’hon, and Théodore Géricault, the exhibition explores the impact of ancient Greek and Roman art, history, and mythology on artistic production, as well as the role of the Academy, changing social norms, and convulsive contemporary events.
The selected drawings showcase a variety of media—pen and ink, watercolor, chalk, and pastel—and highlight how artists of the period demonstrated a surprisingly modern combination of intellectual curiosity, political commitment, and graphic virtuosity. The presentation demonstrates the expressive versatility and powerful immediacy of drawing as a medium of persuasion, propaganda, and, above all, aesthetic stimulation.
Revolution to Restoration: French Drawings from The Horvitz Collection is curated by Kevin Salatino, Chair and Anne Vogt Fuller and Marion Titus Searle Curator, Prints and Drawings, and Emily Ziemba, director of curatorial administration and research curator, Prints and Drawings. The exhibition complements French Neoclassical Paintings from The Horvitz Collection in Gallery 223.
Exhibition | Drawn to Blue: Artists’ Use of Blue Paper
Now on view at The Courtauld:
Drawn to Blue: Artists’ Use of Blue Paper
The Courtauld Gallery, London, 4 October 2024 — 26 January 2025
Jonathan Richardson, the Elder (1665–1745), Self-Portrait (London: The Courtauld).
This display presents a selection of drawings on blue paper from The Courtauld’s collection, ranging from works by the Venetian Renaissance artist Jacopo Tintoretto to a watercolour by famed English artist Joseph Mallord William Turner.
Made from fibres derived from blue rags, blue paper first appeared in Northern Italy in the 14th century. It became a popular drawing support for artists, and its use spread across Western Europe by the late 16th century; it was widely used in England and France in the 18th century. Blue paper provided a nuanced mid-tone which allowed the creation of strong light and dark contrasts, an effect much sought after by draughtsmen. This exhibition project brought together a team of curators and paper conservators at The Courtauld and the J. Paul Getty Museum to explore the technical aspects and artistic richness of the use of blue paper.
New Book | Never Broken: Visualizing Lenape Histories
The exhibition was on view at the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania this time last year (September 2023 – January 2024); the catalogue is still available from Penn Press:
Joe Baker and Laura Igoe, eds., Never Broken: Visualizing Lenape Histories (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024), 96 pages, ISBN: 978-1879636163, $30.
Through a focus on Lenape art, culture, and history and a critical examination of historical visualizations of Native and European American relationships, Never Broken explores the ways in which art can create, challenge, and rewrite history. This richly illustrated volume features contemporary work by Lenape artists in dialogue with historic Lenape ceramics, beadwork, and other cultural objects as well as re-creations of Benjamin West’s painting Penn’s Treaty with the Indians by European American artists. Published in conjunction with the first exhibition in Pennsylvania of contemporary Lenape artists who can trace their families back to the time of William Penn, Never Broken includes essays by Laura Turner Igoe, Joel Whitney, and Joe Baker. Igoe argues that the plethora of prints, paintings, and decorative arts that incorporated imagery from West’s iconic painting over a century after the depicted event attempted to replace the fraught history of Native and Anglo-American conflict with a myth of peaceful coexistence and succession. Whitney’s essay provides an overview of the culture of the Lenape and their forced removal out of Pennsylvania and the northeast to Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario. Finally, Baker highlights how he and the other contemporary Lenape artists featured in the exhibition, including Ahchipaptunhe (Delaware Tribe of Indians and Cherokee), Holly Wilson (Delaware Nation and Cherokee), and Nathan Young (Delaware Tribe of Indians, Pawnee, and Kiowa), tell their own stories rooted in memory, ancestry, oral history. Their work underscores the continuing legacy and evolution of Lenape visual expression and cross-cultural exchange, reasserts the agency of their Lenape ancestors, and establishes that the Lenape’s ties to the area were—unlike Penn’s Treaty—never broken.
Joe Baker is an artist, educator, curator, and culture bearer who has been working in the field of Native Arts for the past thirty years. He is an enrolled member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma and co-founder and executive director of the Lenape Center in Manhattan. His work is included in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and numerous other museums and collections in the United States and Canada, including the American Museum of Art and Design.
Laura Turner Igoe is the Gerry and Marguerite Lenfest Chief Curator at the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. At the Michener, she curated Impressionism to Modernism: The Lenfest Collection of American Art (2019), Rising Tides: Contemporary Art and the Ecology of Water (2020), and she co-curated Through the Lens: Modern Photography in the Delaware Valley (2021) and Daring Design: The Impact of Three Women on Wharton Esherick’s Craft (2021–22).
c o n t e n t s
Foreword and Acknowledgements — Vail Garvin
Introduction — Joe Baker and Laura Turner Igoe
Penn’s Treaty with the Indians: Myth-Making across Media — Laura Turner Igoe
Violence and the Forced Removals of the Lenape — Joel Whitney
Nèk Elànkumàchi Maehëleyok: The Relatives Gathered — Joe Baker
Plates
Contributors
Exhibition | Colonial Crossings: The Spanish Americas
Unidentified workshop, Cuzco, Peru, Our Lady of the Rosary of Chiquinquirá with Female Donor, late 17th–early 18th century, oil and gold on canvas (Collection of Carl & Marilynn Thoma, 2013.046; photo by Jamie Stukenberg).
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Now on view at Cornell’s Johnson Museum of Art:
Colonial Crossings: Art, Identity, and Belief in the Spanish Americas
Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, 20 July 2024 — 15 December 2024
Curated by Andrew Weislogel and Ananda Cohen-Aponte, with students in the course Colonial Connectivities: Curating the Arts of the Spanish Americas
The artworks featured in this exhibition span more than three hundred years of history, five thousand miles of territory, and two oceans, introducing the rich artistic traditions of Mexico, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines during the period of Spanish colonial rule (approximately 1492–1830).
This first exhibition of colonial Latin American art at Cornell considers the profound impact of colonization, evangelization, and the transatlantic slave trade in the visual culture of the Spanish empire, while also manifesting the creative agency and resilience of Indigenous, Black, and mixed-race artists during a tumultuous historical period bookended by conquest and revolution.
At first glance, these religious images, portraits, and luxury goods might seem to uphold colonial structures that suggest a one-way flow of power from Europe to the Americas. Yet closer consideration of these artists’ identities, materials, techniques, and subjects reveals compelling stories about the global crossings of people, commodities, and ideas in the creation of new visual languages in the Spanish Americas. These artworks testify to entangled cultural landscapes—from paintings of the Virgin Mary with ties to sacred sites of her apparition, to lacquer furniture bearing the visual stamp of trade with East Asia, they embody a plurality of cultural, material, and religious meanings.
Unidentified workshop, Peru, Our Lady of Cocharcas, 1751, oiil and gold on canvas (Collection of Carl & Marilynn Thoma, 2011.040; photo by Jamie Stukenberg).
Colonial Crossings was curated by Dr. Andrew C. Weislogel, Seymour R. Askin, Jr. ’47 Curator of Earlier European and American Art at the Museum, and Dr. Ananda Cohen-Aponte, Associate Professor of the History of Art & Visual Studies, and the students in Colonial Connectivities: Curating the Arts of the Spanish Americas (ARTH 4166/6166):
Osiel Aldaba ’26
Miguel Barrera ’24
Daniel Dixon ’24
Juliana Fagua Arias, PhD student
Miche Flores, PhD student
Isa Goico ’24
Sara Handerhan ’24
Emily Hernandez ’25
Ashley Koca ’25
Maximilian Leston ’26
Maria Mendoza Blanco ’26
Lena Sow, PhD student
Nicholas Vega ’26
We are grateful to lenders Carl and Marilynn Thoma, the Denver Museum of Art, the Hispanic Society of America, and the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library; and to David Ni ’24, the 2023 Nancy Horton Bartels ’48 Scholar for Collections, for organizational support.
Unidentified artist, Quito, Ecuador, Noah’s Ark, detail, late 18th century, oil on canvas (Collection of Carl & Marilynn Thoma, 2000.004).
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The Johnson Museum will also present this symposium:
Symposium | Reimagining the Américas: New Perspectives on Spanish Colonial Art
Online and in-person, Saturday, 9 November 2024
At this free symposium, presented in conjunction with the exhibition, established scholars whose work encompasses a variety of regions and approaches to colonial Latin American art history will offer new methodologies, seeking to expand the boundaries of this visual culture. Presentations will explore the exhibition’s thematic emphases on materiality and sacredness, hybridity and cross-cultural exchange, colonial constructions of race, and recovering art histories marked by silence and erasure.
• Time-Warping the Museum: Temporal Juxtapositions in Displays of Spanish Colonial Art — Lucia Abramovich, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
• Framing Miracles for a New World: The Oval — Jennifer Baez, University of Washington
• Trent as Compass: Directions, Circuits, and Crossings of the Visual and Canonical in Spanish America — Cristina Cruz González, Oklahoma State University
• Splendor and Iridescence: Pearls in the Art of the Spanish Americas — Mónica Dominguez Torres, University of Delaware
• ‘Your Plenteous Grandeur Resides in You’: Asian Luxury in Spanish American Domestic Interiors — Juliana Fagua Arias, Cornell University
• Supplicant Africans: From Baptizands to Emblems of Abolition —Elena FitzPatrick Sifford, Muhlenberg College
• Voices of Influence: Exploring Power Dynamics in the Conservation of Musical Heritage in Colonial Latin America — Patricia García Gil, Cornell University
• Invisible Soldiers and Constant Servants: The Pre-Hispanic Roots of the Andean Cult of Angels — Maya Stanfield-Mazzi, University of Florida
A schedule will be posted soon. Please email eas8@cornell.edu to register in advance for in-person attendance. Click here to join the webinar.
Exhibition | Paris, 1793–1794
Opening at the Musée Carnavalet:
Paris, 1793–1794: A Revolutionary Year
Musée Carnavalet, Paris, 16 October 2024 — 16 February 2025
Musée de la Révolution française, Vizille, 27 June — 23 November 2025
Curated by Valérie Guillaume, Philippe Charnotet, and Anne Zazzo
For the first time, the Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris, renowned for its collections on the French Revolution, will single out one key year in the revolution—without a doubt the most complex: ‘Year II’ of the Republican calendar, covering the period from 22 September 1793 to 21 September 1794.
1789, the year of the Storming of the Bastille and The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, is often considered to be the glorious year of the Revolution and even to embody the French Revolution in its entirety. It is the year during which Paris established itself as the capital of the Enlightenment and Revolutions. But compared to the clarity of ’89’, ’93’ appears much darker and thornier. As it was just coming to an end, this long political year spanning from the spring of 1793 to the summer of 1794 had already found a name: the ‘Terror’. Fabricated for political reasons, the word points to the authoritarian transition that the republican regime had undergone. And yet, the years 1793–94 are also the years that some, confident in their ability to reinvent history, called ‘Year II’: a year defined by its breaking with the past and its revitalising of revolutionary utopias. The exhibition is a collection of more than 250 works of all kinds: paintings, sculptures, objects of decorative arts, historical and memorial objects, wallpaper, posters, pieces of furniture… And all translate collective histories and incredible individual fates. These varied objects reveal a context imbued with collective fears and state violence, but also with extraordinary daily activities, feasts, and celebrations.
Paris, 1793–1794: Une année révolutionnaire (Paris Musées, 2024), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-2759605903, €39.
Scientific commission
• Valérie Guillaume, director of the Musée Carnavalet – Histoire de Paris
• Philippe Charnotet, assistant curator and head of the numismatic collection at the Musée Carnavalet
• Anne Zazzo, chief curator, head of the historical and memorial objects collection at the Musée Carnavalet
Scientific committee
• Jean-Clément Martin, professor emeritus of History of the French Revolution at the University Paris I
– Panthéon-Sorbonne
• Alain Chevalier, director of the Musée de la Révolution Française – Domaine de Vizille
• Aurélien Larné, archivist at the Ministry of Justice – Department of the Archives, Documentation and Cultural Heritage
• Marisa Linton, professor of Modern History at the University of Kingston – London
• Guillaume Mazeau, senior lecturer of Modern History at the Université Paris I – Panthéon-Sorbonne
• Allan Potofsky, professor of Modern History at the Université Paris-Cité
• Charles Eloi Vial, curator of the Libraries for the Department of Manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France
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Note (added 7 July 2025)— The posting was updated to include the second venue, the Musée de la Révolution française, where the exhibition is titled 1793–1794: Un Tourbillon Révolutionnaire.
Exhibition | Figures of the Fool
Opening next month at the Louvre:
Figures of the Fool: From the Middle Ages to the Romantics
Musée du Louvre, Paris, 16 October 2024 — 3 February 2025
Curated by Élisabeth Antoine-König and Pierre-Yves Le Pogam
Fools are everywhere. But are the fools of today the same as the fools of yesteryear? This fall, the Musée du Louvre is dedicating an unprecedented exhibition to the myriad figures of the fool, which permeated the pictorial landscape of the 13th to the 16th centuries. Over the course of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the fool came to occupy every available artistic space, insinuating himself into illuminated manuscripts, printed books and engravings, tapestries, paintings, sculptures, and all manner of objects both precious and mundane. His fascinating, perplexing and subversive figure loomed large in the turmoil of an era not so different from our own.
The exhibition examines the omnipresence of fools in Western art and culture at the end of the Middle Ages, and attempts to parse the meaning of these figures, who would seem to play a key role in the advent of modernity. The fool may make us laugh, with his abundance of frivolous antics, but he also harbours a wealth of hidden facets of an erotic, scatological, tragic or violent nature. Capable of the best and of the worst, the fool entertains, warns or denounces; he turns societal values on their head and may even overthrow the established order.
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, Yard with Madmen, 1794 (Dallas: Meadows Museum).
Within the newly renovated Hall Napoléon, this exhibition, which brings together over 300 works from 90 French, European and American institutions, brings us on a one-of-a-kind journey through Northern European art (English, Flemish, Germanic, and above all French), illuminating the profane aspects of the Middle Ages and revealing a fascinating era of surprising complexity. The exhibition explores the disappearance of the figure of the fool with the Enlightenment and the triumph of reason, and its resurgence at the end of the 18th century and all throughout the 19th. The fool then became a figure with which artists identified, wondering: ‘What if I were the fool?’
The exhibition is curated by Élisabeth Antoine-König, Senior Curator in the Department of Decorative Arts, and Pierre-Yves Le Pogam, Senior Curator in the Department of Sculptures, Musée du Louvre.
With the support of the Cercle des Mécènes du Louvre, the Fondation Etrillard and the New York Medieval Society.
Élisabeth Antoine-König and Pierre-Yves Le Pogam, eds., Figures du Fou: Du Moyen Âge aux Romantiques (Paris: Musée du Louvre éditions / Gallimard, 2024), 448 pages, ISBN: 978-2073073037, €45.
Exhibition | An Actor with No Lines — Pierrot
Watteau, Pierrot, also known as Gilles, detail, ca. 1718–19, oil on canvas, 1.84 × 1.56 meters
(Paris: Musée du Louvre).
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This exhibition opens in October at The Louvre in conjunction with the The Fool . . .
A New Look at Watteau: An Actor with No Lines — Pierrot, Known as Gilles
Musée du Louvre, Paris, 16 October 2024 — 3 February 2025
Curated by Guillaume Faroult
Watteau’s Pierrot, formerly known as Gilles, is one of the most famous masterpieces in the Louvre’s collection. This enigmatic work, which has long raised questions for art historians, is currently undergoing conservation treatment at the Centre for Research and Restoration of the Museums of France, after which time it will be the focus of a spotlight exhibition.
Louis Crépy after Antoine Watteau, Self-Portrait (Paris: Bibliothèque nationale de France).
Nothing is known about the painting before it was discovered by the artist and collector Dominique Vivant Denon (1747–1825), Director of the Louvre under Napoleon. It soon came to be regarded as a Watteau masterpiece and garnered praise from renowned writers and art historians. It has often been seen as reflecting a certain image of the 18th century—mischievous, cynical, or melancholy, depending on the author and the era. Its fame boosted the return to favour of 18th-century art in the age of Manet and Nadar.
The exhibition will present the findings of the conservation project, approaching this wholly original work—whose attribution to Watteau has sometimes been questioned—both as part of the artist’s oeuvre and in the cultural and artistic context of the time. Alongside many other paintings and drawings by Watteau, there will be works by his contemporaries: painters, draughtsmen, engravers (Claude Gillot, Antoine Joseph Pater, Nicolas Lancret, Jean Baptiste Oudry, Jean Honoré Fragonard, etc.), and writers (Pierre de Marivaux, Alain-René Lesage, JeanFrançois Regnard, Evaristo Gherardi), with special emphasis on the rich theatrical repertoire of the time.
As soon as the painting entered the Louvre in 1869, via the bequest of Louis La Caze (1798–1869), it became a favourite with generations of viewers. Its powerful appeal is partly due to its outstanding quality, but also to its originality for the period and to the mystery surrounding its production.
The exhibition will also explore the painting’s rich and varied critical reception and its far-reaching artistic legacy. This powerful, enigmatic image has greatly inspired French writers, including Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, George Sand, the Goncourt brothers, and Jacques Prévert. The painting has also influenced photographers, filmmakers, and musicians (Nadar, Marcel Carné, Arnold Schoenberg), as well as visual artists (Edouard Manet, Gustave Courbet, Pablo Picasso, André Derain, Juan Gris, James Ensor, Georges Rouault, and Jean-Michel Alberola), driving them to new creative heights.
The show will explore the fascinating conversations between these great creative minds and Watteau’s enigmatic painting, even as it resonates harmoniously with the Figures of the Fool exhibition scheduled for the same dates in the Hall Napoléon.
Guillaume Faroult, Revoir Watteau: Un comédien sans réplique. Pierrot, dit le Gilles (Musée du Louvre Éditions and Liénart Éditions, 2024), 240 pages, €40.
Exhibition | Mary Robinson: Actress, Mistress, Writer, Radical
Now on view at Chawton House, as noted at Art History News:
Mary Robinson: Actress, Mistress, Writer, Radical
Chawton House, Hampshire, 2 September 2024 — 21 April 2025
Attributed to John Hoppner, Portrait of Mrs. Robinson as Perdita, 1782, oil on canvas, 79 × 66 cm (Chawton House, Hampshire).
“Her name is Robinson, … she is I believe almost the greatest and most perfect beauty of her sex.”
—Prince of Wales to Mary Hamilton, December 1779
“She is a woman of undoubted Genius … I never knew a human Being with so full a mind—bad, good, & indifferent, I grant you, but full, & overflowing.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge to Robert Southey, 25 January 1800
The first exhibition dedicated to the scandalous life and literary genius of Mary Robinson.
A star of the London stage, Mary Robinson (1757–1800) became notorious as a royal mistress. From treading the boards of London’s theatres, to gracing the gossip columns of newspapers, Robinson pioneered celebrity status. She lit up the fashion world, sparking trends with her choice of outfit or carriage, and she went on to light up the literary world with novels, poems, and essays. A talented poet, she developed her distinctive poetic style alongside some of the best-known writers of the day, and she honed her political ideas in the radical circle around William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft.
Long remembered only for her relationship with the Prince of Wales (later George IV)—who fell in love with her on stage as Perdita in The Winter’s Tale—Mary Robinson has in recent decades been reclaimed as one of the most important and overlooked writers of the late 18th century. This exhibition traces the extraordinary journey of her life and artistic development from the most famous woman in England to social outcast, exploring her hard-won second career as one of the most popular and influential writers of her day. Rare and early editions of her writing—from the debut novel that sold out by lunchtime on the day it was published to her impassioned argument for women’s rights—are brought together with scant surviving manuscript material from collections and archives across the UK. These will be interpreted alongside the portraits, engravings, and caricatures through which her image was circulated and her reputation both shaped and ruined. Her compelling biography enables reflections on the complexity of female celebrity and sexuality, at the time and in society today.
Chawton House is a Grade II-listed Jacobean manor house in the village of Chawton, adjacent to Alton, Hampshire that once belonged to Jane Austen’s brother, Edward. Chawton House is now a centre for early women’s writing with a collection of over 4,500 rare books and manuscripts written by women from 1660 to 1860. Since 2015 it has been open to the public as an historic house, telling the story of the Austen and Knight families and pioneering women writers.
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