Lecture at the Louvre: The Sculpture of Pierre-François Berruer
From the Louvre:
Guilhem Scherf (Department of Sculpture, Louvre)
Louis XV récompense la Peinture et la Sculpture de Pierre-François Berruer
Musée du Louvre, Paris, 9 February 2011
Pierre-François Berruer Paris, "Louis XV récompense la Peinture et la Sculpture." 1770 © Musée du Louvre/P. Philibert
Ce petit bas-relief en marbre fut sculpté en 1770 par Pierre-François Berruer (1733-1797), au moment de son entrée à l’Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture. Par le traitement élaboré des draperies et la gradation subtile des plans dont il fait preuve, ce morceau de réception témoigne d’une réflexion sur l’esthétique du bas-relief dans le contexte académique. Également intitulée parfois Louis XV prenant sous sa protection l’Académie royale, cette œuvre est aussi l’occasion de revenir sur le rôle du souverain et de la politique royale en faveur des arts.
UCL Seminar for Early Modern Visual Culture, Spring 2011
From UCL:
University College London, Seminar for Early Modern Visual Culture
UCL Department of History of Art, 20-21 Gordon Square, London, 6pm
Organized in collaboration with the Courtauld Institute of Art
24 January
Mary Sheriff (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Calypso’s Island and the Lure of Enchantment in the Art of the French Regency
7 February
Miles Ogborn (Queen Mary University of London)
The Freedom of Speech: Talk and Slavery in the Early Modern Caribbean
21 February
Judy Loach (Cardiff University)
Engraving and Printing, Visibility on Matter and Invisibility on Hearts and Souls
14 March
Rose Maria San Juan (University College London)
Unavailable Knowledge: Eve in the Wax Anatomical Cabinet
YCBA Lecture: Fordham on ‘British Art and the Seven Years’ War’
Lecture and Book Signing: Douglas Fordham, British Art and the Seven Years’ War
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, 26 January 2011, 5:30pm
Between the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 and the American Declaration of Independence, London artists transformed themselves from loosely organized professionals into one of the most progressive schools of art in Europe. In British Art and the Seven Years’ War, Douglas Fordham argues that war and political dissent provided potent catalysts for the creation of a national school of art. Over the course of three tumultuous decades marked by foreign wars and domestic political dissent, metropolitan artists — especially the founding members of the Royal Academy, including Joshua Reynolds, Paul Sandby, Joseph Wilton, Francis Hayman, and Benjamin West — creatively and assiduously placed fine art on a solid footing within an expansive British state. Copies of British Art and the Seven Years’ War signed by the author will be available for purchase.
Lecture Series at the Louvre: Ancients and Moderns
From the Louvre:
Conférences d’histoire de l’art: Pourquoi l’antique chez les modernes?
Musée du Louvre, Paris, January-February 2011
L’antinomie entre Antiquité et Modernité est une question qui préoccupe depuis la Renaissance jusqu’aux grands débats esthétiques des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Elle en implique une autre qui traverse l’histoire des arts et qui est au cœur même de la création artistique : comment réconcilier l’imitation et l’originalité ? Winckelmann, le fondateur de l’histoire de l’art et du paradigme grec, avait donné une réponse à ces questions : « La seule manière pour nous de devenir grands, et même, si cela se peut, inimitables, c’est d’imiter les Anciens » (Histoire de l’art dans l’Antiquité, 1764). Mais ce rêve d’appropriation de l’origine retrouvée est-il possible ? Par ailleurs quelles sont les conditions de la survie et des nombreux retours à l’antique à partir de la Révolution, alors même que les esprits cherchent à se libérer des autorités qui régissent la vie politique, artistique et littéraire de leur temps ? Pourtant, depuis le XVIIIe siècle, tout au long du XIXe et jusqu’au début du XXe siècle, on continue dans ces domaines à explorer l’Antiquité de manière passionnée et les styles formellement plus novateurs, tant en peinture qu’en sculpture, se tournent à nouveau vers ce modèle.
Ce cycle entend répondre à ces questions, en abordant des époques et des contextes différents: le retour à l’antique dans la France monarchique de Louis XV, la postérité du monde classique dans la Rome du XVIIIe siècle, mais aussi l’idéal du « vivre à l’antique » dans l’Europe des Lumières. Pour Ingres, comme pour Rodin, il s’agit plutôt d’une Antiquité sacrée les unissant autour d’un idéal grec qui s’impose comme fondateur, indispensable et catalyseur de modernité. Enfin, le « retour au style » des sculpteurs français au début du XXe siècle annonce les nouveaux styles modernistes.
6 January 2011, 6:30pm
Le retour à l’antique français et la crise de l’image de Louis XV
Marc Fumaroli (de l’Académie française, Collège de France)
13 January 2011, 6:30pm
Rome et l’antique : pour l’amour des Muses au XVIIIe siècle
Carolina Brook (Università degli Studi, Pise) et Valter Curzi (Università degli Studi “La Sapienza”, Rome)
20 January 2011, 6:30pm
Paraître à l’antique. Portraits et fantasmes au XVIIIe siècle
Daniela Gallo (université de Grenoble-II / Pierre-Mendès-France)
3 February 2011, 6:30pm
Ingres et Rodin ou les métamorphoses de l’antique
Pascale Picard (musée de l’Arles et de la Provence antiques, Arles)
10 February 2011, 6:30pm
Le « frein du style » à Paris au début du XXe siècle : la sculpture libérée par la rigueur ?
Édouard Papet (musée d’Orsay, Paris)
Exhibition of Boxes at The Met
Press release from The Met:
Thinking Outside the Box: European Cabinets, Caskets, and Cases from the Permanent Collection
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 7 December 2010 — 21 August 2011
Organized by Daniëlle O. Kisluk-Grosheide
James Cox, Nécessaire, ca. 1770–72. Case: moss agate, mounted in gold and set with diamonds, rubies, and emeralds; silver; Dial: white enamel, with frame pavé-set with paste jewels (NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art) Gift of Mrs. Florence Schlubach, 1957 (57.128a–o).
Thinking Outside the Box: European Cabinets, Caskets, and Cases from the Permanent Collection (1500–1900) will feature 100 works selected from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts. The objects featured in this installation will range from strongboxes to travel cases and from containers for tea or tobacco to storage boxes for toiletries or silverware. These lidded pieces, some of which have not been on display for many years, are made in a large variety of shapes and sizes, and of many different materials, and were created by mostly unknown artists, craftsmen, and amateurs. Viewed together, these works reflect changes in social customs as well as the evolution of styles over four centuries. Many are precious works of art that were collected in their own right.
The objects in Thinking Outside the Box will be displayed according to the materials they are made of or embellished with, including tortoiseshell, carved or veneered wood, porcelain, hard stones and natural substances, embroidery, various metals, leather, enamel, pastiglia, and straw. Craftsmen ranging from silversmiths to furniture makers and from metalworkers to enamellers created the boxes, which are utilitarian in nature and were used either for the shipping of goods or the safekeeping of specific objects or ingredients. Boxes were also exchanged as presents—valuable snuffboxes mounted with diamonds and other precious stones often served as diplomatic gifts, and Italian white lead pastiglia caskets, scented with musk and civet, and thought to have aphrodisiacal qualities, were deemed suitable as bridal presents.
Although it is not always possible to determine what each object was originally meant to contain—such as the 16th–century Italian cases made of boiled, embossed, and tooled leather (cuir bouilli)—it has become clear that many of the elaborately wrought boxes played a role in the dressing rituals of the past. The desire to keep various beautifying implements together goes back to ancient Egypt and led to the creation of special chests. Since the 16th century, the daily grooming ritual known as the toilette (from the toile or cloth spread on the table during the various dressing activities) was taken very seriously and formed, in fact, a kind of semi-public ceremony. The importance of this custom was expressed in the creation of costly toilette services comprising numerous matching pieces, including a variety of boxes and caskets. Exquisite examples of necessaries, small travel cases containing objects deemed necessary for toilette, writing, or needlework or a combination of these three, will be on view. A particularly splendid example—the 18th–century English nécessaire by James Cox, made of moss agate mounted in gold and set with diamonds, rubies, and emeralds—not only includes dressing implements, but also a clock and automaton, and was probably intended for export to India.
These personal objects are fascinating not only for their shape and decoration but for the treasures and possible secrets they may contain.
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Sunday at the Met Lecture Series—Thinking Outside the Box
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 27 February 2011
Boxes, caskets, cabinets, and chests played an important role in everyday life in Europe and were frequently much more than simple receptacles. This program, presented in conjunction with the installation Thinking Outside the Box: European Cabinets, Caskets, and Cases from the Permanent Collection (1500–1900), explores how the objects’ form and decoration reflected changes in different social customs and manners as well as the latest stylistic developments in Europe. It concludes with music performed on cabinet organs, hidden keyboards, and not-so-ancient voice boxes. Free with Museum admission, in the Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium.
- 2:oo Danielle O. Kisluk-Grosheide (curator, Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, MMA), Thinking Outside the Box: Placing European Cabinets, Caskets, and Cases in Context
- 2:45 Charles Truman (art historian and independent scholar, London), The Eighteenth-Century Gold Box: The Ultimate Fashion Accessory and a Microcosm of All the Arts
- 3:30 ARTEK, Gwendolyn Toth (director and keyboards), Jukeboxes of Old: Music from Past Centuries
Goya’s ‘Los Caprichos’ at The Taft in Cincinnati
From The Taft’s website:
Francisco Goya: Los Caprichos
The Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati, 4 December 2010 — 30 January 2011
Francisco José de Goya, "And So Was His Grandfather." ("Caprichos, no. 39: Asta su abuelo."), 1796–1797, aquatint, 1799.
For those who feel a secret empathy with Scrooge and the Grinch, the Taft offers an antidote to Yuletide’s good cheer this winter. The full set of Francisco Goya’s 80 haunting images from Los Caprichos (“The Whims” or “The Fantasies,” published in 1799) confront human hypocrisy, pretense, fear, and irrationality, picturing them in every conceivable form. Goya’s singularly original visions of monsters, specters, corpses, and other bitter or callous beings enact challenges to authority of all kinds, including that of the church and state. Los Caprichos are likely the great Spanish artist’s most influential works and continue to inspire artists to this day. As both prints and images, they are decades ahead of their time. In them, Goya pioneered astonishingly innovative etching techniques, visual forms, and artistic themes, anticipating the later movements known as Realism, Post-Impressionism, Symbolism, and Surrealism. The etchings on view are from an early first edition, one of four sets acquired directly from Goya, and belong now to an American private collector. The exhibition is organized by Landau Traveling Exhibitions. Goya (1746–1826) is one of the world’s greatest artists, as famous for portraits that seemingly penetrate his sitters’ souls as he is for portrayals of the brutality of
the Napoleonic Wars in Spain (1808–14). The Taft Museum of Art owns an
important oil portrait by Goya, Queen Maria Luisa of Spain, of about 1800.
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Edited by Janis Tomlinson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), ISBN: 9780300094930, $75
Janis Tomlinson, “The Changing Face of Women in Goya’s Art”
The Taft Museum of Art, Cincinnati, 27 January 2011
Throughout his career, the Spanish artist Francisco Goya (1746-1828) explored the wide-ranging roles of women in Spanish society–from good mothers to prostitutes, seductive sirens to victims of war. Dr. Janis Tomlinson will explore the changing face of women in Goya’s paintings and prints, with special emphasis on their portrayal in the etchings of Los Caprichos. Tomlinson is director of University Museums at the University of Delaware and has written and spoken extensively on Goya.
Domestic Life in England
Upcoming lecture at the University Paris Diderot:
Amanda Vickery — Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England
University Paris Diderot, 26 November 2010
Amanda Vickery (University of Royal Holloway) will present her book, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (Yale University Press, 2009), on Friday, November 26 at 4:30 at the University Paris Diderot, 10 rue Charles V 75004 Paris (Metro St Paul/Sully-Morland/ Bastille).
Professor Vickery, of the Department of History at Royal Holloway, University of London, lectures on British social, political and cultural history from the 17th century to the present. She is the Director of Royal Holloway’s Bedford Centre for the History of Women. Vickery’s first book, The Gentleman’s Daughter (Yale, 1998), won the Whitfield prize, the Wolfson prize, and the Longman-History Today prize and is considered a reference in 18th-century studies. Professor Vickery’s latest monograph, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England, was published by Yale University Press in December 2009.
The book unlocks the homes of Georgian England to examine the lives of the people who lived there. She introduces us to men and women from all walks of life: gentlewoman Anne Dormer in her stately Oxfordshire mansion; bachelor clerk and future novelist Anthony Trollope in his dreary London lodgings; genteel spinsters keeping up appearances in two rooms with yellow wallpaper; and, servants with only a locking box to call their own. Professor Vickery makes ingenious use of upholsterer’s ledgers, burglary trials, and other unusual sources to reveal the roles of house and home in economic survival, social success, and political representation during the long 18th century. Through the spread of formal visiting, the proliferation of affordable ornamental furnishings, the commercial celebration of feminine artistry at home, and the currency of the language of taste, even modest homes turned into arenas of social campaign and exhibition.
The book has received rave reviews from critics. Michael Kerrigan from The Scotsman calls it a “beautifully textured exploration of domestic life,” and Frances Wilson from The Sunday Times says: “We see the Georgians at home as we have never seen them before in this ground-breaking book. Behind Closed Doors is both scholarly and terrifically good fun.” The book has been adapted to form a 30-part radio series on BBC Radio 4 on the “history of private life” (aired in autumn 2009) and is soon to be turned into a BBC 2 documentary series (to be broadcast in December 2010).
For further information, please contact: ariane.fennetaux@univ-paris-diderot.fr
Blogging in the Eighteenth Century
Robert Darnton, “Blogging, Now and Then (250 years ago)”
Columbia University, New York, 16 November 2010
Long before the Internet, Europeans exchanged information in ways that anticipated blogging. The key element of their information system was the “anecdote,” a term that meant nearly the opposite then from what it means today. Anecdotes, dispensed by “libellistes” and “paragraph men,” became a staple in the daily diet of news consumed by readers in eighteenth-century France and England. They were also pilfered, reworked, and served up in books. By tracking anecdotes through texts, we can reassess a rich strain of history and literature.
This event is free and open to the public. Please note special time & location:
16 November 2010, 8:00PM, 501 Schermerhorn Hall
Map: www.columbia.edu/about_columbia/map/schermerhorn.html
Avenues in the Garden
From The Garden History Society’s website:
Sarah Couch, “Avenues in the Landscape in the 17th and 18th Centuries”
Glasite Meeting House, Barony Street, Edinburgh, 1 November, 6:30pm
Couch has expertise in heritage landscape, horticulture and architecture, with a particular interest in historic avenues and their planting.
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As noted at Couch’s website:
Sarah is part of Historic Environment Associates, a new interdisciplinary consultancy, specialising in the conservation of historic buildings and landscapes. As an architect, Sarah is also qualified in heritage landscape and horticulture. She has worked on many historic landscape projects, either on her own account or as part of a team, combining this with teaching and lecturing. . . She has undertaken conservation work for English Heritage and the Garden History Society.
Her publications on avenues include:
- “Avenue Planting 1660-1850: A Framework for Conservation Practice,” thesis, London, Architectural Association, 1991.
- “The Practice of Avenue Planting in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Garden History 20 (Autumn 1992): 173-200.
- “Trees in Line for Conservation,” Landscape Design (October 1992): 43-46.
- “Conservation of Avenue Trees,” Arboricultural Journal 18 (1994): 307-20.
- “The Conservation of Avenues in the Historic Landscape: Issues, Method, and Practice,” in Giardini, contesto, paesaggio (Milan 2005).
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