Enfilade

I’ve included here a selection of talks most relevant to the 18th century, but the whole series looks terrific.–CH From the Sartorial Society Series:

Looking Back: The Historicisms, Hauntings, and Heritage of Dress
Sartorial Society Series, Summer Semester 2021

A digital seminar series exploring the history of dress, fashion, and bodily adornment.

“The past has to be taken apart. Old themes are worn as new details.” –Judith Clark

When introduced to histories of dress, we are often met with timelines of fashion that imply a neat, progressive evolution of fashionable styles through the years. Clothing is framed as an index to history. Yet dress does not conform to an orderly chronology. It is full of disruptive reverberations, re-interpretations, and revivals. The fashions of the past are repeatedly dismantled and reimagined, sending sartorial echoes through time.

The historic resonance of dress can also carry an emotional weight on a personal level. Clothes can serve as welcome memories of loved ones, or less-welcome spectres of the past. Memories of clothes can be deeply nostalgic, while the garments not-worn can serve as ‘sliding-door’ moments, causing us to dwell on the parallel lives we did not live or bodies unlike our own. This has been explored, for example, by Shahidha Bari, who describes “spectral visions of ourselves [that] haunt these garments like all things that are romanticised and never realised.”

Dress maintains its capacity to ‘haunt’ in the setting of the museum or archive. Elizabeth Wilson described museums of dress as ‘mausoleums of culture’: haunted and eerie. She stated that ‘there are dangers in seeing what should have been sealed up in the past. We experience a sense of the uncanny when we gaze at garments that had an intimate relationship with human beings long since gone to their graves.’ Carol Tulloch has written of the power of archives to access personal fashion histories that may otherwise have been lost, suggesting that: “archives enable a lived experience to be revived and reassessed time and time again.”

The Sartorial Society Series is organised by a group of dress historians and curators with the aim of celebrating the diverse, innovative, and excellent research emerging in the field of dress history. We want to create a space that welcomes and supports dress historians from all backgrounds, and fosters positive connections within our field. The series will encourage collegiality and will be an open, inclusive, and friendly space to meet others interested in dress history. We encourage BYO wine, tea or soft drink of choice and invite you to join the post-talk Q&A.

All sessions are held on Thursday evenings at 6pm UK time (BST/GMT). Most talks are 20 minutes; some are 10 minutes. Registration links are available here.

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Week 1 | Nostalgia and Nationalism
20 May 2021

• Cecilia Gunzburger, French Revolutionary Dress in the Bourbon Restoration: The Political Uses of Historic Dress
• Sabine Wieber, Vienna’s 1879 Festzug and the Habsburg Empire’s ‘Glorious’ Past
• Alison Toplis, An Exploration of the Smock as a Nostalgic Spectre of Rural England

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Week 3 | Reconstruction and Reproduction
10 June 2021

• Amber Pouliot, Serena Partridge’s ‘Accessories’ Collection for the Brontë Parsonage Museum: Haunting the Heritage Context
• Jordan Mitchell-King​, Reanimating Dress: Interpreting Historical Clothing through Experimental Wearing
• Cynthia Chin Kirk, ‘I Am Only Fond of What Comes from the Heart’: Memory and Trauma in Martha Washington’s Purple Silk Gown

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Week 4 | Performance and Performativity
24 June 2021

• Ella Hawkins, The Time is Out of Joint: ‘Haunted’ Costuming at Shakespeare’s Globe
• Hilary Davidson, Looking Back Through Fashion: Regency Romanticisms
• Anouska Lester, ‘Item, One Ghost’s Crown’: Haunting and Loss in Philip Henslowe’s 1598 Theatrical Inventories

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Week 7 | Historicism, Revival, and Re-Use
29 July 2021

• Serena Dyer, Sartorial Chronology and Fashionable Anachronism: Historicism, Temporality, and the Making of Dress Histories
• Sarah Hodge, A Fancy for the Past: Historical Style in Britain, 1800–1851
• Ruby Hodgson, Robe a la Grand-Mere: Re-Use of 18th-Century Silk in Romantic Era Dress
• Jane Hattrick, Queering the Hartnell Crinoline: Reinventing Second Empire French Fashions, Fantasy, Gender Performativity, and the Royal Body

The keynote talk for this year’s New York Workshop of Etruscan Art, given by Maurizio Harari, addresses reception history, including the eighteenth century:

Maurizio Harari, Imagining the Etruscans: Modern European Perceptions of an Ancient Italian Civilization
Online, Thursday, 29 April 2021, noon (ET)

Since the late rise of humanism and through a real crescendo in the 18th to 20th centuries, the Etruscans, an ancient people of pre-Roman Italy, became (and remain) a subject of lively discussions among scholars, as they saw a wide popularity in pseudo-scientific exploration and publication. This lecture aims to explore the ideological features of the foundation process of a highly specialized, but often self-referential discipline, so-called ‘Etruscology’, which only saw its real scholarly development in the first half of the 20th century. In that context, this major branch of scholarship was created with its roots in the rather complicated connections between the Italian territorial situation of Etruscan civilization and the European dimension of its reception and popularization.

Maurizio Harari is Professor of Etruscan and Italic Archaeology and Director of the Archaeological Museum at the University of Pavia, Italy. Author of over 200 publications, his reach focuses on Etruscan and Italic art and archaeology, especially issues of image making and meaning, wall painting, Etruscans of the Po-River region, and the sacred and political institutions of Etruscan cities. Co-Director of excavations at the Italian site of Verucchio since 2011, he is also a specialist in the historiography of Etruscology and its situation within the archaeological disciplines of Europe and the Mediterranean. He has collaborated widely across Europe, including with the European Research Council and on publication of the Enciclopedia dell’arte antica classica e orientale and the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae, and he is fellow and member of multiple institutions, including the Istituto Nazionale di Studi Etruschi ed Italici.

The New York Workshop of Etruscan Art is an initiative promoted jointly by Columbia University and New York University. The ambition of the workshop is to advance our understanding of the artistic and visual dimensions of pre-Roman Italy by promoting discussion and sustained reflection on their role within the field of Etruscan studies, but it does not prescribe a specific intellectual agenda. This year, the workshop will: advance discussion of buildings, their roofs and decoration and the avenues they provide to investigate production processes, networks of interaction and creation, the sacred image and the porousness of Italic arts; reflect on the impact of 3D-modeling and reconstructions on our understanding of Etruscan aesthetics; present new findings from the Corpus Speculorum Etruscorum; present unpublished bronze figurines of subordinate characters; explore the relation with comedy of the imagery of Praenestine cistae.

Please join us for the keynote talk of this year’s New York Workshop of Etruscan Art given by Maurizio Harari. The event will be live-streamed; RSVP to receive the webinar link.

François-Joseph Bélanger, Château de Bagatelle, 1777, Bois de Boulogne, Paris.

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This upcoming talk is the final installment of the Attingham Trust Spring Lecture Series. Annabel Westman—after more than 40 years of being involved with Attingham—recently announced that she is retiring from her position as executive director, to be succeeded by Helen Jacobsen. (You’re able to stage a virtual passing of the baton by watching a recording of Annabel’s March 8 talk for the lecture series— “What tone is salmon-coloured? Interpreting documentation in historic textile furnishing schemes” —just before you tune in for Helen’s.)

Helen Jacobsen, The Château of Bagatelle: The Story of a Remarkable House and Its Collections
Online, Wednesday, 28 April 2021, 6pm (BST)

Helen Jacobsen, the Director of the Attingham French Eighteenth-Century Studies course, looks at the absorbing story of the Château of Bagatelle, the former hunting lodge in the Bois de Boulogne that was transformed into a jewel of French neoclassicism as the result of a bet between Marie-Antoinette and her brother-in-law, the Comte d’Artois. Much more than a plaything, Bagatelle survived the Revolution and became the much-loved home of two more of the greatest patrons of French art, the 4th Marquess of Hertford and Sir Richard Wallace. Helen, who is also the Curator of French 18th-century decorative art at the Wallace Collection, will chart the life of the house under all three owners, and investigate the continuing connections between Bagatelle and Hertford House.

HECAA Emerging Scholars Showcase
Online, Saturday, 17 April 2021, 2:00–3:30pm (EST)

Our next HECAA Emerging Scholars Showcase is on Saturday, April 17, 2–3:30pm EST. Please join us via zoom to hear our final seven emerging scholars present their research. Each participant will present for 3–5 minutes, and after the presentations, we will host a question-and-answer session. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact Dani Ezor (dezor@smu.edu).

Best regards,
HECAA Board

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Zoom: https://smu.zoom.us/j/96125021098

• Carla Hermann (Rio de Janeiro State University), Robert Barker’s Panoramas and Virtual Images of Places
• Chih-En Chen (SOAS, University of London), Trompe l’Oeil Porcelain and Feminine Space in High Qing China
• Jed Surio (Tulane University), A Kingdom of Curious Beasts: Charles Le Brun’s Drawings from the Royal Menagerie
• Megan Baker (University of Delaware), Crayon Rebellion: The Politics of Pastel Portraits in Colonial North America
• Tori Champion (University of Washington), Pinceau à la main: The Intertwined Lives and Careers of Madeleine Françoise Basseporte and Marie-Thérèse Reboul Vien
• Kaitlin Grimes (University of Missouri-Columbia), The Material Politics of Ivory in Early Modern Europe
• Aleksander Musiał (Princeton University), Immersion: Classical Reception and Eastern-European Transformations of Hygiene Architecture, 1680–1830

Next month from Waddesdon Manor, from the programme flyer:

Juliet Carey, Storing and Staging: Baron Edmond’s Boxes
Online, Monday, 10 May 2021, 6pm

Join Senior Curator Juliet Carey to explore the surprising, beautiful boxes in which some of Waddesdon’s most precious objects live when out of the public eye.

We still use the boxes that Baron Edmond de Rothschild (1845–1934) commissioned for the storage of Sèvres porcelain and small sculptures and antiquities. Their unusually sophisticated fabrication relates to bookbinding, the covers of scientific instruments, etuis for princely treasures, and longstanding Parisian expertise in the protection and transportation of precious things. Far from being neutral or invisible spaces, Edmond’s boxes construct new ways of experiencing their contents—from those that help one to study and categorise vases, Roman glass, and even furniture, to a box that transforms into a stage, creating a private drama of enclosure and revelation around a little marble nymph.

For all their aesthetic and tactile appeal, the protective role of these boxes is underlined by the turbulence of the times that they survived, from revolutions and siege in 19th- century Paris to the Nazi occupation. A recent work by Edmund de Waal responds to this history and provides an intriguing postscript.

Standard registration is £10. Students, please email enquiries@waddesdon.org.uk from your academic email to register for a free place. A zoom link will be emailed to participants 24 hours before the event.

From the roundtable flyer:

Teaching the ‘Long’ 18th Century
Online, Friday, 23 April 2021, 9–11am (EST)

Organized by Sarah Betzer and Dipti Khera

After Thomas Baldwin, A Balloon-Prospect from above the Clouds, plate from Thomas Baldwin, ‘Airopaidia’ (London, 1786), opposite p. 154.

Roundtable featuring:
• Anna Arabindan-Kesson, Princeton University
• Nebahat Avcıoğlu, Hunter College, City University of New York
• Emma Barker, The Open University, London
• Ananda Cohen-Aponte, Cornell University
• Prita Meier, Art History and Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
• Nancy Um, Binghamton University, State University of New York
• Stephen Whiteman, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London

This roundtable brings together scholars from a broad array of geographical foci and institutional perspectives who have been at the forefront of efforts to rethink approaches to thinking, researching, and, crucially, teaching the art and material culture of an interconnected ‘long’ eighteenth century. Convened in conjunction with a session at the 2021 College Art Association conference, the roundtable will appear in distilled form in a dedicated issue of Journal18, forthcoming in Fall 2021. Two key aims animate the roundtable and its afterlife in Journal18: 1) to reflect upon teaching the ‘long’ eighteenth century, particularly in light of renewed debates on the reparation of objects, revision of histories, and inclusion of colonized and enslaved voices in museums, plantation sites, and public squares; and 2) to compile a list of resources and open-access supporting materials that are pragmatically useful for colleagues engaged in teaching the ‘long’ and ‘broad’ eighteenth century.

Organized by Sarah Betzer, University of Virginia, and Dipti Khera, Art History and Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

Register here»