Enfilade

The eighteenth century in the current issue of West 86th:

West 86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture 21 (Fall–Winter 2014).

Charles Alan Watkins, “The Tea Table’s Tale: Authenticity and Colonial Williamsburg’s Early Furniture Reproduction Program,” pp. 155–91.

The CW-8 Tea Table as it appeared in Kittinger’s 1940 catalogue Colonial Williamsburg Incorporated Approved Reproductions of Furniture by Kittinger Company.

In July 1936 Tomlinson of High Point, a mid-priced North Carolina furniture manufacturer, began a franchising and marketing concept called the Williamsburg Galleries that gained broad national acceptance in stores and among consumers. Outraged by Tomlinson’s actions and unwilling to abandon the retail market to those it felt were interlopers, Colonial Williamsburg set up a subsidiary corporation, Williamsburg Craftsmen, Inc., that licensed manufacturers to create reproductions of objects owned by the Restoration. Furniture was the most important part of the plan, and Williamsburg licensed the Kittinger Company of Buffalo, New York, as the manufacturer. Selected department stores were encouraged to build sales spaces that were period replicas of Raleigh Tavern rooms, and craft shops were developed in the historic area to promote the work of the various manufacturers. Because a number of stores sold both Tomlinson and Kittinger products, Williamsburg developed the concept of ‘authenticity’ to distinguish the copies being made by Kittinger from Tomlinson’s generic eighteenth-century adaptations. Virtually handmade, said the Restoration, these Kittinger pieces were line-by-line reproductions, inside and out, of originals on display in Williamsburg, Virginia. Regardless of what Colonial Williamsburg said and believed, however, recent examination of individual pieces of Kittinger furniture made for the Restoration reveals that the New York factory relied far more on modern machine production methods than on craft methods of the eighteenth century.

Charles Alan Watkins holds a PhD in American cultural history and museum studies from the University of Delaware. Until his recent retirement from teaching, he was professor and coordinator of Salve Regina University’s Cultural and Historic Preservation Program in Newport, Rhode Island, and, prior to that, was the director of the graduate and undergraduate public history programs at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina.

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Alain Schnapp, as translated by Martina Dervis, “The Birth of the Archaeological Vision: From Antiquaries to Archaeologists,” pp. 216–29.

Greek antiquities of Anne Claude Philippe, Comte de Caylus, Recueil d’antiquités égyptiennes, étrusques, grecques et romaines, vol. 1 (Paris: Desaint & Saillant, 1761), facing p. 85. INHA, Paris.

Focused on a series of French scholars and travelers, this article proposes that a distinct approach to history and antiquarianism developed in France during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries emphasizing the importance of artifacts as bearers of historical evidence. Beginning with the circle around Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc, the article introduces aspects of the work of the Marquis de Nointel, Jacob Spon, Bernard de Montfaucon, Michel Fourmont, the Comte de Caylus, and the scholars who accompanied Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt in 1798. The article concludes with a discussion of Abel Blouet’s expedition to the Peloponnese (Morea) in Greece in 1829–31 that, in its scientific management of fieldwork, can be regarded as a landmark in the development of modern archaeological research.

Alain Schnapp is professor of Greek archaeology at the University of Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne). In 1999, he was the founding director of the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA), the premier research center for art history in France. He has held many visiting professorships, including those at the universities of Princeton, Naples, Cambridge, and Heidelberg. The history of archaeology is one of his primary interests, on which he has published widely, including La conquête du passé: Aux origines de l’archéologie (Paris: Éditions Carré, 1993), which was translated into English as The Discovery of the Past (London: British Museum Press, 1994).

The eighteenth century in The Burlington:

The Burlington Magazine 156 (December 2014)

A R T I C L E S

• Pilar Dies del Corral, “The Beginnings of the Real Academia de España in Rome: Felipe de Castro and Other Eighteenth-Century Pioneers,” pp. 805–10.

R E V I E W S

• Marjorie Trusted, Review of David Bindman, Warm Flesh, Cold Marble: Canova, Thorvaldsen and their Critics (Yale University Press, 2014), pp. 824–25.

• Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, Review of Beth Fowkes Tobin, The Duchess’s Shells: Natural History Collecting in the Age of Cooke’s Voyages (The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2013), pp. 827–28.

• James Ayres, Review of the exhibition Silent Partners: Artist and Mannequin from Function to Fetish (The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 14 October 2014 — 25 January 2015; and Musée Bourdelle, Paris, 31 March — 12 July 2015), pp. 840–41.

• Xavier F. Salomon, Review of three Veronese exhibitions in the Veneto, including Veronese Inciso: Stampe da Veronese dal XVI al XIX Secolo (Museo della Stampa Remondini, Bassano del Grappa,14 September 2014 — 19 January 2015), pp. 842–43.

In the current issue of The Art Bulletin:

• Claudia Mattos, “Whither Art History? Geography, Art Theory, and New Perspectives for an Inclusive Art History,” pp. 259–64.

• Aaron Wile, “Watteau, Reverie, and Selfhood,” pp. 319–37.

Watteau’s fêtes galantes break with key aspects of academic art theory in early eighteenth-century France—particularly as put forward by Roger de Piles—to elicit an experience of reverie in the spectator. Watteau’s formal innovations inaugurated a new relationship between painting and beholder that opened up a new sphere of subjective experience, linking the artist’s enterprise with the rise of modern interiority.

• Ebba Koch, Review of Santhi Kavuri-Bauer, Monumental Matters: The Power, Subjectivity, and Space of India’s Mughal Architecture (Duke UP, 2011), pp. 362–65.

From Taylor & Francis:

Bulletin of Spanish Studies: Hispanic Studies and Researches on Spain, Portugal and Latin America 91.5 (2014).

Special issue on ‘The Baroque in the Construction of a National Culture in Francoist Spain’, edited by Paula Barreiro López, Carey Kasten and Tobias Locker.

The baroque was both praised and attacked by critics for overwhelming the viewer through art. Yet its indisputable importance in Hispanic tradition and its characteristic intensity made the baroque an important element of culture during the regime of Francisco Franco (1939–1975). Not only did the baroque anchor official Francoist culture, its influence was also apparent in the regime’s politics, which used the baroque as an ideological legitimising tool in intellectual discourses. This interdisciplinary special issue is the first single volume to examine the influence of baroque tradition on Francoist Spain, analyzing cultural and political examples of twentieth-century reinterpretations of the baroque. For example, the concept of hispanidad, which underpinned Spain’s foreign policy and influenced international perceptions of the country, contained many baroque elements. By analysing its imprint on Spain’s culture industry both at home and abroad this special issue demonstrates the essential role the baroque played in the creation of a national and cultural identity during the dictatorship in Spain.

• Tobias Locker, “The Baroque in the Construction of a National Culture in Francoist Spain: An Introduction,” pp. 657–71.

• Till Kössler, “Education and the Baroque in Early Francoism,” pp. 673–96.

• Carey Kasten, “Staging the Golden Age in Latin America: José Tamayo’s Strategic Ascent in the Francoist Theatre Industry,” pp. 697–714.

• Paula Barreiro López, “Reinterpreting the Past: The Baroque Phantom during Francoism,” pp. 715–34.

• Noemi De Haro-García and Julián Díaz-Sánchez, “Artistic Dissidence under Francoism: The Subversion of the Cliché,” pp. 735–54.

• Johannes Großmann, ” ‘Baroque Spain’ As Metaphor. Hispanidad, Europeanism and Cold War Anti-Communism in Francoist Spain,” pp. 755–71.

• Julio Montero and María Antonia Paz, “Lo barroco en la televisión franquista: tipos y temas; actores y escenarios,” pp. 773–92.

The eighteenth century in the current issue of The Art Bulletin:

The Art Bulletin 96 (June 2014)

Marcia Pointon, “Casts, Imprints, and the Deathliness of Things: Artifacts at the Edge,” pp. 170–95.

The practice of making death masks was extensive throughout Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, yet their interest to scholars has been confined to their preparatory role in the production of portrait sculpture, the dissemination of phrenology, and as a figure for the indexicality of photographic images. The meanings generated, past and present, by casts of faces and other body parts can be investigated by addressing their materiality. As three-dimensional artifacts, positives deriving from negatives, casts have been understood as deathly in that they present an absence. In what does this deathliness consist, and how is it communicated?

Joanne Rappaport, Review of Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (The
University of Chicago Press, 2012), pp. 241–43.