Enfilade

Press release (25 February 2013) from The Met:

Plain or Fancy? Restraint and Exuberance in the Decorative Arts
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 26 February — 18 August 2013

Curated by Luke Syson and Ellenor Alcorn

The tension in design between austerity and opulence—the simple and the ornate—is a long-standing one. Plain or Fancy? Restraint and Exuberance in the Decorative Arts, on view February 26 through August 18, 2013 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, invites visitors to consider their own preferences and suggests some of the cultural meanings that have been associated with the two words. The challenge is not to identify quality, or to determine “good taste” versus “bad taste.” Rather the exhibition touches on some historical moments when austerity and flamboyance in design were actively debated. In a departure from a conventional chronological presentation, the show raises a question, encouraging visitors to explore their own reactions. The 40 works of art on view are drawn from the Museum’s holdings of European decorative arts, and include ceramics, metalwork, and works in glass ranging in date from the late 14th to the early 20th century.

The word “fancy” is a shortened form of “fantasy,” which suggests that imagination and exuberance might be seen as prized formal qualities, equally present in a rustic pot and a treasury piece. Fanciness has sometimes been linked to the notion of luxury, and with it, expensive indulgences. In ancient Greece and Rome, costly imported commodities were sometimes seen as a threat to the local economy, and in later centuries condemned as a symptom of an unwelcome social mobility that challenged the existing power structure. But grandeur also had its place in securing the social hierarchy, for example, at the court of Louis XIV. Plainness, by contrast, has tended to be associated with moral virtue and purity.

A century after the Austrian architect Adolf Loos delivered his polemic “Ornament and Crime,” the Modernist aesthetic, which married form with function, remains a dominant influence. But this was not the first time that the merits of ornament had been debated. Court culture in Spain in the 16th century was permeated with the somber gravitas of King Philip II. A contemporary treatise promoting restraint in dress, comportment, and decoration argued: “…a quiet manner is the inevitable mark of a grave and dignified man, ruled by reason rather than by appetite…” These values are expressed in the architecture and metalwork of the period, which is characterized by a distinctive geometric simplicity. Implicit in this taste, which is often referred to as the “Severe Style,” is a rejection of what was seen as the sensuous decadence of Mannerist design.

Coffee and tea service, Sèvres Manufactory. Designer: Hyacinthe Régnier, 1855–61 (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art).

Another moment of debate occurred in the 18th century, when the Rococo style was derided by advocates of Neoclassicism. The English artist William Hogarth campaigned for spontaneity and asymmetry, writing in 1753, “Simplicity, without variety, is wholly insipid…” But the same year, the whimsical fantasies of Rococo designers, which were rooted in nature’s capriciousness, were ridiculed as excessive and depraved. The taste for fanciful Chinese subjects was mocked as the “monstrous offspring of wild imagination, undirected by nature and truth.”

Plain or Fancy? points out that aesthetic responses are never neutral. Our judgments have roots in our culture, socioeconomic status, generational values, and aspirations. For some, “plain” is sophisticated, while for others “plain” is dull. The exhibition does not aspire to settle the debate but encourages visitors to consider their own responses to this issue as they experience works of art throughout the Museum. To ask now if people like art “plain” or “fancy” is to ask whether they are aristocrats or revolutionaries, Protestants or Catholics, forward-looking or nostalgic. In looking at works of art, people look at themselves.

The exhibition features an in-gallery and web-based interactive component that encourages visitors to explore, consider, and share their own sensibilities in the decorative arts. Displayed on iPads in the exhibition and as a presentation in MetMedia, it features six works from the installation whose character—whether plain or fancy—can be debated. After viewing the objects, visitors are invited to share their personal opinions in a 120-character tweet (@PlainOrFancy), deciding for themselves whether a work is “plain” or “fancy” and if it suits their personal style.

Plain or Fancy? Restraint and Exuberance in the Decorative Arts is organized by Luke Syson, Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Curator in Charge, and Ellenor Alcorn, Associate Curator, both of the Metropolitan Museum’s Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts. Installation design is by Michael Langley, Exhibition Design Manager; graphic design is by Mortimer Lebigre, Graphics Designer; and lighting is by Clint Ross Coller and Richard Lichte, Lighting Design Managers, all of the Metropolitan Museum’s Design Department.

Education programs include exhibition tours and a Friday evening program during which visitors will participate in a multi-sensory exploration of the question of “Plain or Fancy?” through several collection galleries.

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Plain or Fancy? Restraint and Exuberance: A Conversation about Taste
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 15 May 2013

Wayne Koestenbaum, author, The Queen’s Throat and Humiliation, and Luke Syson, Iris and Gerald B. Cantor Curator in Charge, Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, MMA

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition Plain or Fancy? Restraint and Exuberance in the Decorative Arts culls highlights from the Met’s permanent collections to contrast restrained—plain—works of art with richly ornamented—fancy—ones, focusing on those moments in history when pendulum shifts made a sharp swing in one direction or another. Wayne Koestenbaum (The Queen’s Throat, Humiliation), one of today’s most influential and controversial cultural critics, joins Luke Syson, Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Curator in Charge, European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, for a conversation exploring the ways in which stylistic choices may also be moral ones—and how our aesthetic responses are shaped by shame and judgment. Do you like your art “plain” or “fancy”? And what does taste mean, really?

Details for this ticketed event are available here»

Press release from The British Museum:

In Search of Classical Greece: Travel Drawings of Edward Dodwell and Simone Pomardi, 1805–1806
The British Museum, London, 7 February – 28 April 2013

Curated by John Camp with Ian Jenkins and Kim Sloan

Edward Dodwell, Simone Pomardi, Panorama from the top of the Mousaion Hill, Athens, 1805.

This exhibition will look at Greece through the eyes of the classical scholar Edward Dodwell (about 1777–1832) and his Italian artist, Simone Pomardi (1757–1830). During their travels in 1805–06, they recorded the country and its people in a series of fascinating and spectacular drawings and watercolours. Kindly lent by the Packard Humanities Institute, these works have never been seen in public before. They represent a unique record of an important chapter in the rediscovery of ancient Greece on the eve of the creation of the modern Greek state.

Their landscapes, often featuring the ruins of classical sites, are peopled with modern Greeks and Turks at a time when Greece was under Ottoman rule. Especially fascinating and impressive are five rare surviving panoramas, measuring up to four metres in length, and providing 360 degree views of Corfu harbour, the Acropolis and of Athens and its surrounding countryside.

Dodwell and Pomardi’s travels were part of a great surge of interest in Greece at a time when Napoleon’s military occupation of Rome in 1796 had brought the age of the European Grand Tour to a sudden end. This exhibition will set Dodwell and Pomardi in the tradition of travel in Greece in the age of Enlightenment, examining the motivation and circumstance of such travel as well as its cultural consequences. It will be accompanied by a related display of drawings from the British Museum’s permanent collection exploring the theme of travel in Greece in the Ottoman era and just after the War of Independence.

Throughout the eighteenth century, generations of young men from Europe’s leading families had gone to Italy to complete an education that had comprised, in large part, the learning of Latin and Greek. Rome, Florence and Venice were the cities most visited and for the intrepid traveller there was also Naples. This was the principal city of southern Italy and the stopping-off point for viewing the newly discovered towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum, buried in the eruption of Mt Vesuvius in AD 79. When the occupation of Italy prevented Grand Tourists from visiting Italy, Dodwell and Pomardi, like many travellers, chose to go beyond the established Mediterranean regions of the Grand Tour. The understanding these travellers brought to the archaeological remains of ancient Greece encouraged the taste among British Hellenists for Greek architecture. This gave new vigour to the Greek Revival, already begun in the middle of the 18th century by the expeditions of the Society of Dilettanti. Hellenism, the love of ancient Greece, was to promote a new movement of Philhellenism, a sympathy for modern Greek people and a desire to realise the dream, as Byron put it, ‘that Greece might still be free’.

The beauty of its landscape and romance of its classical ruins were the primary reasons for travel to Greece under Ottoman rule. By the first decade of the nineteenth century a sympathy for the Greek-speaking peoples inspired European travellers to call for independence from Ottoman rule. In the years following the Greek War of Independence, many of the monuments recorded by Dodwell and his companions would change considerably as the new nation swept away the accretions of the late Roman, Christian and Ottoman eras and attempted to restore the purity of the classical remains. With hindsight these removals are controversial and they feed into a larger on-going debate around the creation of and the competing identities of modern Greece.

Dodwell was a talented amateur who signed many of the watercolours and drawings, even though some of them he worked on with Pomardi; others were Pomardi’s own work. Many of them were engraved in Dodwell’s own published accounts of his travels in 1819 A Classical and Topographical Tour Through Greece, During the Years 1801, 1805, and 1806. A few drawings exist in other collections, but the majority, over 800 in total, remained in the possession of Dodwell’s Irish descendants until they were purchased in 2002 by David Packard for the Packard Humanities Institute in Los Altos, California. He was advised by the distinguished American archaeologist John Camp, who has carefully catalogued the collection and made a representative selection of 67 works for the display here. He is the guest curator of this exhibition and the principal author of the accompanying publication which contains additional essays by the British Museum curators Ian Jenkins and Kim Sloan, and by Fani-Maria Tsigakou, Curator of Paintings, Prints and Drawings at the Benaki Museum, Athens.

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John McKesson Camp, with contributions by Ian Jenkins, Fani-Maria Tsigakou, and Kim Sloan, In Search of Greece: Catalogue of an Exhibit of Drawings at the British Museum by Edward Dodwell and Simone Pomardi from the Collection of the Packard Humanities Institute (Los Altos, CA: The Packard Humanities Institute, 2013), £25.

C H A P T E R S

• Introduction: The Road to Erudite Athens – Ian Jenkins
• Introduction to the Collection – John Camp
• Greece at the Eve of the Nineteenth Century: Poised between Myth and Reality – Fani-Maria Tsigakou
• Seen through a Glass Darkly: Dodwell and Pomardi’s Drawings and Watercolours of Greece – Kim Sloan

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John Camp — In Search of Classical Greece
The British Museum, London, 8 February 2013

Guest curator of the forthcoming Room 90 exhibition In Search of Classical Greece and Director of Athenian Agora Excavations, Professor John Camp, explores the reality of the Classical sites pre-independence, when well-to-do European travellers ‘re-discovered’ ancient Greece.

Friday 8 February, 18.30, BP Lecture Theatre (book early, as it’s expected to sell out)
Tickets £5 (Members/Concessions £3), book online here»

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Note (added 4 February 2013) — Additional information on programming for the exhibition is available (as a PDF) here»