Enfilade

Ken Gonzales-Day, Panorama of Museum West Pavilion, 2015, chromogenic print, 20.32 x 99 cm, taken in the West Pavilion, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, ©Ken Gonzales-Day.

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British Art Studies recently launched with an impressive premier issue and an exemplary commitment to free and open access, as detailed in the initial issue’s editorial statement. Congratulations! –CH

British Art Studies is free and open access: there are no subscriptions, no passwords, and no fees to pay. All content will be preserved as a free-to-use resource. The ethos of open access is one that YCBA and PMC have adopted for all their digital efforts, in the recognition that conventional proprietary models represent a major obstacle to scholarship. It is published under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC licence, meaning that you are free to share and re-use its contents for non-commercial purposes, provided that appropriate credit is given to the author/s. No permissions are needed. . . .

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The eighteenth century in BAS 1:

British Art Studies 1 (Autumn 2015)

Conversation Piece coordinated by Richard Johns, “There’s No Such Thing as British Art.”

‘Conversation Piece’ is a British Art Studies series that draws together a group of contributors to respond to an idea, provocation or question. The conversation will develop as more respondents enter the debate. Readers can also join in by adding a response.

Thomas Gainsborough, Charity Relieving Distress, ca. 1784, oil on canvas, 127.6 x 102.2 cm (Indianapolis Museum of Art).

Georgina Cole, “ ‘A Beautiful Assemblage of an Interesting Nature’: Gainsborough’s Charity Relieving Distress and the Reconciliation of High and Low Art.”

In the competitive environment of the eighteenth-century London art scene, Thomas Gainsborough and Sir Joshua Reynolds were often perceived as great rivals. While they shared patrons, sitters, and a stake in the future of British art, their differing artistic approaches caused considerable friction, indeed Gainsborough seceded from the Royal Academy of Art in 1784, boycotting its exhibitions and activities. This essay, however, argues that Gainsborough’s Charity Relieving Distress, painted in the year of his secession, proposes a charitable resolution of their aesthetic attitudes. The complex interrelation of allegorical and anecdotal form is interpreted as a pictorial attempt to reconcile their approaches through the concept of charity, a virtue of powerful artistic lineage in the western tradition, and of contemporary social importance.

Cyra Levenson and Chi-ming Yang, with a photo-essay by Ken Gonzales-Day, “Haptic Blackness: The Double Life of an 18th-Century Bust.”

‘One Object’ is a British Art Studies series that uses an object from a collection as a starting point for collaborative research. Cyra Levenson and Chi-ming Yang have co-authored this essay which is followed by a photo-essay by artist Ken Gonzales-Day and an interview between him and the authors.

We are delighted to announce the launch of Journal18—a new digital publication entirely dedicated to eighteenth-century art and material culture.

Journal18 is an online, open access, peer-reviewed journal devoted to art and culture of the long eighteenth century from around the globe. Inspired by the rich and exciting state of the field of eighteenth-century art history, Journal18 has been founded as a scholarly forum to support and extend that richness. Taking form as a digital publication, Journal18 embraces the accessibility and flexibility of its format, seeking the widest possible engagement with the latest research in the field.

Journal18 will be the first journal dedicated to the field of eighteenth-century art history, and one of the few online and fully open access journals for the discipline of art history more broadly. Appearing twice a year, Journal18 will publish thematic issues of articles investigating all aspects of eighteenth-century visual and material culture. Throughout the year, Journal18 will also offer a forum for intellectual exchange in the Notes & Queries section: a space for short notes, reviews, archival discoveries, or scholarly musings.

Journal18 will launch in Spring 2016 with Issue #1—Multilayered. This inaugural issue of Journal18 will explore the multilayered nature of eighteenth-century art. Contributions will focus on artworks that bear traces of multiple hands as a result of workshop production, cross-cultural exchange, re-use, restoration, vandalism, or other factors.

We are currently accepting submissions for Notes & Queries, but we are no longer accepting submissions for Issue #1—Multilayered. For all inquiries including proposals for contributions to Notes & Queries please contact the editors at: editor@journal18.org. Keep up to date with Journal18 by following us on Twitter @Journal18  and Facebook.

J18 Founding Editors
Noémie Etienne (Getty Research Institute)
Meredith Martin (NYU and Institute of Fine Arts)
Hannah Williams (Queen Mary University of London)

Editorial Board
Nebahat Avcioglu (Hunter College/CUNY); Finbarr Barry Flood (Institute of Fine Arts/NYU); Esther Bell (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco); Daniela Bleichmar (University of Southern California); Jeffrey Collins (Bard Graduate Center, New York); Thomas Crow (Institute of Fine Arts, New York); Craig Hanson (Calvin College); Anne Higonnet (Barnard College/Columbia University); Kristina Kleutghen (Washington University, St Louis); Anne Lafont (INHA, Paris); Ewa Lajer-Burcharth (Harvard University); Mark Ledbury (University of Sydney); Katie Scott (Courtauld Institute of Art); Charlotte Vignon (Frick Collection); Michael Yonan (University of Missouri)

From the latest posting at Homes Subjects:

Catherine Roach, “Working-Class Interpreters of Elite Collections,” Home Subjects: A Working Group Dedicated to the Display of Art in the Private Interior, c. 1715–1914 (4 June 2015).

A Greenwich Pensioner showing the Thornhill decorations in the Painted Hall to a family of visitors. Coloured etching by T. Rowlandson after [J. N.] Esq, 1807
(London: The Wellcome Institute)

Historic collections (and their present-day avatars, historic homes) are seductive. This field of study offers imaginative possession of desirable ensembles. In this, we are all like Eliza Bennet at Pemberley, imagining what we could have been mistress of, if things had been different. But, as curators of historic homes have come to realize in recent years, history need not be sanitized to interest visitors, or to interest us. Displays in historic homes have begun, haltingly but laudably, to grapple with the social systems that made such dwellings possible, including the enslavement of millions of people. The history of collecting can do the same. . . .

Catherine Roach is Assistant Professor of the History of Art at Virginia Commonwealth University.  Her first book, Pictures-within-Pictures in Nineteenth-Century Britain, is forthcoming from Ashgate Press.  She is currently working on a history of the British Institution.

The full posting is available here»

The eighteenth century in The Art Bulletin:

The Art Bulletin 97 (March 2015)

Joshua Reynolds, Studio Experiments in Colour and Media, ca. 1770–1790? (London: Royal Academy of Arts)

A R T I C L E S

• Matthew C. Hunter, “Joshua Reynolds’s ‘Nice Chymistry’: Action and Accident in the 1770s,” pp. 58–76.

The first president of Britain’s Royal Academy of Arts, Joshua Reynolds was described by contemporaries as a dangerously misguided chemist. Using a secretive laboratory of fugitive materials, he crafted visually striking images that came together quickly and stopped audiences dead in their tracks. But, just as rapidly, those paintings began to deteriorate as objects—flaking, discoloring, visibly altering in time. When framed around the “nice chymistry” he prescribed for aspiring artists in his famous Discourses, Reynolds’s risky pictorial enterprise can be situated within a broader problematic of making and thinking with temporally evolving chemical images in the later eighteenth century.

Marie-Denise Villers, Une étude de femme d’après nature, 1802 (Paris: Louvre)

• Susan L. Siegfried, “The Visual Culture of Fashion and the Classical Ideal in Post-Revolutionary France,” pp. 77–99.

In her little-known painting A Study of a Woman after Nature (1802), Marie-Denise Villers exploited a conjuncture between masculine-inflected ideals of Neoclassical art and feminine-inflected ideas of fashionability in the post-Revolutionary period in France by making a feature of female dress while emulating the standards of history painting. The artist’s confident synthesis of idioms is examined in the context of Albertine Clément-Hémery’s memoir of a women’s art studio. Walter Benjamin’s notion of gestus is enlisted as a means of understanding how the quite different image cultures invoked in this work communicated social ideas.