Enfilade

François-Joseph Bélanger, An Elevation for the Projected Mill at Méréville, ca. 1786 (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Charles Wrightsman, 2003)

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Basile Baudez (Paris-Sorbonne University), Histoire de la couleur dans le dessin d’architecture, XVIe–XIXe siècles / History of Color in Architectural Drawing, 16th–19th Centuries
Centre André Chastel, Paris, 11 May 2016

Architectural historians have focused on the history of drawing as one of project design tools.  By applying the methods of art history, this paper traces color as a key player in the long history of rivalry and exchange between European traditions in architectural drawing and practice.  While Italian Renaissance drawings were largely monochrome and developed their conventions under pressure from engravers, the seventeenth-century European situation is characterized by a contrast between a colorful German and Dutch world around architect-painters’ designs and a still largely monochrome tradition in Italy and England.  At the end of Louis XIV’s reign, French architects adopted a series of color conventions taken from the engineers, largely for informational purposes. In the middle of the eighteenth century, however, a color revolution took place, one in which a new generation of architects who were working alongside painters developed a wide chromatic range that was no longer limited to informing the worker but to persuading academic juries and gain commissions. This eighteenth-century French employment of color laid the foundation for Beaux-Arts architectural drawings in the first half of the nineteenth century, at a moment when English architectural drawings, too, adopted color in response to the English watercolor movement. Wednesday, 11 May 2016, 6:30–8:00pm, Galerie Colbert, 2 rue Vivienne, 75002 Paris, salle Ingres (2nd floor).

Maurice Blot, after Jean Honoré Fragonard, Le Verrou (The Bolt, or The Lock), etching, second state, sheet: 41.8 × 49 cm, image: 36.8 × 45 cm (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1974.652). Fragonard’s painting is in The Louvre.

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Satish Padiyar, Surprises: Fragonard and Temporality
The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 21 April 2016

Arguably, Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806) was a painter at odds with late-eighteenth-century bourgeois notions of progressive time and the Enlightenment concept of historical and material progress. In this talk, Satish Padiyar asks how Fragonard marks time and what is the time and the timing of his quasi-expressionist marks.

In an oeuvre eminently about love, it is the particular moment of ‘surprise’ that Fragonard obsessively returns to: a moment of temporal suspense in which the human subject is taken by storm and which resurrects a quasi-infantile sense of un-control and openness to the unexpected. Through the “spontaneous gesture” (Winnicott), Fragonard seeks to throw the subject outside the received norms of time and social courtesies. The surprise attack characterizes both his technical audacity and his psychology of love, corporeal attraction and violence. Thursday, 21 April 2016, 6:00pm, Institute of Fine Arts, Lecture Hall, New York University, 1 East 78th Street.

Satish Padiyar is a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Fine Arts and Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century European Art at The Courtauld Institute of Art.

RSVP here»

The lecture is scheduled to be live-streamed.

Upcoming talks at The Frick:

David Pullins, Shared Practices: Painting and Decoration in Eighteenth-Century France
The Frick Collection, New York, 20 April 2016

Motifs after François Boucher and other leading painters populate the surface of Sèvres porcelain, including pieces in The Frick Collection. David Pullins considers what it was about academic painters’ training and working methods that encouraged the adaptation of their motifs from canvas to porcelain, textiles, and other media. Wednesday, 20 April, 6pm, in the Music Room. Free, though seating is on a first-come, first-served basis; a live webcast will also be available.

David Pullins, The French Dialogue with Chinese Porcelain
The Frick Collection, New York, 21 April 2016

Focusing on examples from The Frick’s permanent collection, learn how France became familiar with Chinese culture through its porcelain, which traveled around the globe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We will also ask how a foreign material was repackaged into a symbol of French cultural identity, one that was considered a necessary part of Gilded Age collections. Thursday, 21 April, 5:30pm. Advance registration is required; courses are free with a $25 student membership or a full membership for recent graduates.

Thursday at The Nelson-Atkins:

Catherine Futter, Reflecting on 17th- and 18th-Century Dutch Design in the Global Marketplace
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, 31 March 2016

In this series, connected with the exhibition Reflecting Class in the Age of Rembrandt and Vermeer, four Nelson-Atkins curators reflect on themes presented in the exhibition, including the importance and legacy of 17th-century Dutch painting and depictions of the social classes in art. Works from across art-historical periods and the museum’s collections will be discussed.

With the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and the reach of the Dutch East India Company, Dutch designs spread to distant lands as far away as the American colonies and China. Join Catherine Futter, Director, Curatorial Affairs, for this talk that explores Dutch influence in ceramics, furniture, silver and other decorative arts.

Thursday, March 31
6-7 pm | Atkins Auditorium
Tickets required

I noted this small exhibition a week ago but failed to include the programming details. The first lecture takes place on Monday. –CH

Benjamin West at Spencer House
Spencer House, London, 31 January 2016 — 29 January 2017

In celebration of the 25th anniversary of the restoration of the State Rooms at Spencer House, James ‘Athenian’ Stuart’s early neo-classical interiors will showcase work of Benjamin West, a central figure in the development of neo-classical painting. Central to the exhibition is West’s Milkmaids in St. James’s Park, Westminster Abbey Beyond (ca. 1801, oil on panel, Paul Mellon Fund), which is on special loan to the Rothschild Foundation from the Yale Center for British Art. . . .

To complement the exhibition, a series of three lectures about Benjamin West will take place at Spencer House, followed by drinks:

• Loyd Grossman, How to Paint History: Benjamin West and the Death of General Wolfe, 14 March at 6.30pm
• Desmond Shawe-Taylor (The Surveyor of The Queen’s Pictures), Benjamin West and George III, 18 July at 6.30pm
• Lars Kokkonen (Assistant Curator of Paintings and Sculpture, Yale Center for British Art), Evaporations: Milkmaids in St. James’s Park No More, 14 November at 6.30pm

Booking information is available here»

Giorgio Riello, Towards a Global Cultural History? Gifts,
Commodities and Diplomacy in the First Global Age
Deutsches Haus, Columbia University Department of History, New York, 23 March 2016

Columbia University Department of History is pleased to present the Dr. S. T. Lee Annual Lecture in History: Towards a Global Cultural History? Gifts, Commodities and Diplomacy in the First Global Age, presented by Professor Giorgio Riello (University of Warwick, Department of History), Wednesday, March 23rd, Deutsches Haus (420 West 116th Street, between Amsterdam Avenue and Morningside Drive), 6:00–7:30pm. Reception to follow.

Giorgio Riello was trained as an economic historian, with a focus on material culture and the history of technology. After his work on the transformation of Italian and European industry in the eighteenth century, he began publishing on global history, becoming founding director of the Centre for Global History and Culture at Warwick University, one of the world’s leading programs focusing on the global history of material culture. His multiply award-winning publications have ranged from the global history of cotton to south Asian textile production, to the global industry of shoe production.