Enfilade

The following feature drawn from David Wondrich’s new book on punch aired on NPR’s Morning Edition on 30 December 2010.

David Wondrich, Punch: The Delights (and Dangers) of the Flowing Bowl (London: Perigee, 2010), ISBN: 978-0399536168, $23.95.

. . . The punch cocktail has a long history that starts with British sailors (who drank a lot), says liquor historian David Wondrich. Sailors were entitled to 10 pints of beer per day — but when they sailed into the tropics, the beer spoiled, and that’s when they turned to punch.

“They made it with local ingredients in India and Indonesia in the early 1600s,” Wondrich tells NPR’s Linda Wertheimer. “They were 13,000 miles away from any source of English beer or wine, and they had nothing to drink. And English sailors . . .  respond very poorly to that.”

Wondrich, who is also a mixologist, has paid homage to what he calls “the monarch of mixed drinks”; his book, ‘Punch: The Delights (and Dangers) of the Flowing Bowl’, features 40 historical punch recipes for the ambitious drink mixer. . . .

But even for Dickens in the mid-1800s, punch was something of a throwback. “By his day,” Wondrich explains, “punch had gotten kind of old-fashioned. Queen Victoria was very opposed to the lax moral standards that the upper classes in particular had held to in her predecessor’s days. And she didn’t like their habit of getting grossly drunk on punch and champagne and wine.”

So punch was out of style — but that was part of the fun. “[Dickens] was a great antiquarian,” Wondrich says. “He liked to collect all the old customs and habits of old England.” So he’d invite his friends over, concoct a big bowl of punch, and then describe the punch-making process for his guests.

The Dickens punch in Wondrich’s book (see the recipe here) is taken from a detailed letter the novelist wrote to his friend’s sister — and it’s a “classic 18th-century brandy rum punch,” Wondrich says. “This is punch from its golden age.”  . . .

The full feature (including the audio version) is available at NPR’s website. In addition, Eileen Reynolds offers a charming discussion with the author for the online edition of The New Yorker (15 December 2010), while New York Magazine profiled Wondrich’s food and drink consumption for a week back in November for the feature “New York Diet.”

From Histara-les comptes rendus (a site useful, in particular, for reviews of European publications) . . .

William Eisler, Lustrous Images from the Enlightenment: The Medals of the Dassiers of Geneva (Milan: Skira, 2010), ISBN: 9788857205076, $60.

Reviewed by Jan Blanc, University of Geneva; posted 22 November 2010.

Ce livre, consacré aux artistes-médailleurs Jean Dassier (1676-1763) et à ses deux fils, Jacques-Antoine (1715-1759) et Antoine (1718-1780), représente sans nul doute une contribution essentielle à l’histoire des arts à Genève, au XVIIIe siècle, mais aussi, plus largement, à celle des arts européens, durant le Siècle des Lumières. Comme ne cessent de le souligner les auteurs de ce livre, William Eisler, assistant scientifique au Musée monétaire cantonal de Lausanne, et Matteo Campagnolo, conservateur du Cabinet de numismatique de Genève et chargé d’enseignement à l’Université de Genève, les Dassier ont construit une véritable carrière internationale qui, tout au long du XVIIIe siècle, les a amené à Genève, Paris, Amsterdam, Londres et Rome. L’édition bilingue (français et anglais) de cet ouvrage permettra, il faut l’espérer, une large diffusion et réception d’un ouvrage, qui s’ingénie, avec succès, à souligner la dimension européenne du travail des Dassier, et dont l’importance, de ce fait, dépasse, de loin, le strict cadre genevois des productions artistiques du XVIIIe siècle. . . .

The full review is available here»

Recently added to caa.reviews:

Tom Dunne and William L. Pressly, eds., James Barry, 1741–1806: History Painter (Burlington: Ashgate, 2010), 300 pages, ISBN: 9780754666349, $114.95.

Reviewed by Jonathan Rinck, Department of Art, Spring Arbor University; posted 10 November 2010.

The writing of ‘James Barry, 1741–1806: History Painter’ was occasioned by the bicentennial of Barry’s death, an event commemorated by the exhibition ‘James Barry (1741–1806): “The Great Historical Painter”’ at the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork, Ireland, in 2005, and followed by a related symposium in February 2006. This book contains fourteen papers given at that conference, presented by a uniformly capable cross-section of scholars ranging from the graduate student to the seasoned authority. The expressed intent of the collection is to help correct the regrettably scant corpus of scholarship devoted to this Irish painter. The topics of the essays are diverse, but the book is cohesive in its enlightening and informative narrative of Barry as, if not the greatest of British eighteenth-century history painters, then as one of its most fascinating and fervent proponents. . . .

For the full review, click here» (CAA membership required)

Recently added to caa.reviews:

Reed Benhamou, Regulating the Académie: Art, Rules and Power in “ancien régime” France (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2009), 308 pages, ISBN: 9780729409728, $100.

Reviewed by Elizabeth C. Mansfield, Department of Art History, New York University; posted 27 October 2010.

Few institutions have influenced the course of European art or the writing of art history as decisively as the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. Its pulse animated the visual extravagance of Versailles, the popularity of public art exhibitions, the emergence of art criticism, and the codification of an approach to arts instruction that persists to this day. The Academy’s legacy extends even to the enduring assumption that a centralized system of arts administration distinguishes a functioning nation-state. It is no surprise, then, that the Academy should cast a strong shadow in so many histories of post-Renaissance European art. Yet, for all this, art historians rarely allow the Academy to assume more than a vaguely adumbrated role as a monolithic force bent on enforcing conservative artistic values and practices. To be sure, some scholars have succeeded in bringing to life the Academy’s complex institutional operation. Thomas Crow’s ‘Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris’ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) and ‘Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France’ (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), for instance, exemplify the capacity for subtle institutional analysis to yield compelling art-historical interpretations. Reed Benhamou’s ‘Regulating the Académie: Art, Rules and Power in ancien régime France‘ offers both a prompt and an aid to scholars who seek to engage in a similarly careful study of the French Royal Academy. Drawing from archival as well as published sources, Benhamou has crafted a satisfyingly detailed account of the administrative history of the Academy. . . .

For the full review, click here» (CAA membership required)

In 1939, London’s National Gallery was closed, and some 1800 works of art were evacuated from the city. Suzanne Bosmann tells the story . . . Recently added at Cercles:

Suzanne Bosman, The National Gallery in Wartime (London: National Gallery, 2008), 127 pages, ISBN 9781857094244, $24.95.

Reviewed by Antoine Capet, Université de Rouen.

. . . . Why the Gallery came to be emptied of its permanent collections, how this was effected, where the collections were re-located and what ideas the enterprising Kenneth Clark found to partially fill it and continue to give it an active life – these are the guiding threads of this profusely-illustrated, very attractive large-size paperback. . . .

The full review is available here»

Recently added to caa.reviews:

Victor I. Stoichita, The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock, translated from the French by Alison Anderson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 232 pages, ISBN: 9780226775210, $45.

Reviewed by Alison Syme, Department of Art, University of Toronto; posted 26 August 2010.

In ‘The Pygmalion Effect’ Victor Stoichita makes the astonishing claim that there is a libidinal component to mimetic production. Western art history—taken here to be a history of mimesis, of copies—has a dark, disavowed, erotic heart: the simulacrum. The simulacrum differs from the copy in that it is magical rather than mimetic, invites touch rather than merely looking, and is autonomous rather than merely derived from a model; Pygmalion’s statue is its founding myth. Arguing that “the simulacrum was not completely banished by Platonism” (3), Stoichita explores the “reverberations” (5) of the Pygmalion myth through Western art, paying close attention to shifts in iconography, animating tropes, and materials. Unsurprisingly he finds echoes of the work of one great male artist after another (van Eyck, Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, etc.) in the work of lesser artists in a triumphal tale of the legacy of original creation. The author’s contention that “the ‘evolution’ of the Pygmalion Effect duplicates, in a significant way, the path taken by various methods for simulating movement, or even life” (6), while hardly new (this idea has been explored in the work of Kenneth Gross, Hillel Schwartz, Michael Cole, and Allison Muri, for example), is certainly borne out by the examples he uses. But Stoichita does not deliver on his claim that he is concerned “with the ‘imaginary woman’ and her place in a phallocentric universe” (6). . .

Chapter 5, “The Nervous Statue,” is devoted to the eighteenth century, a period “haunted” by the Pygmalion myth (111), which is explored in dance, literature, painting, and sculpture. Rather than the blush or the pulse, which had hitherto dominated Pygmalionian iconography, in the Enlightenment the statue’s power of movement becomes the key proof of life. The statue moves and even dances. Stoichita argues that its steps must be considered “in dialectical relation” to the plinth (113), for the sculpted works depicting the Pygmalion myth that appear are faced with a challenge unique to the medium: how can animate, inanimate, and becoming-animate figures be differentiated in sculpture? Falconet solved the problem with a double plinth. The contemporary understanding of the nervous system also informs representations of the myth. Louis Lagrenée’s 1770s paintings emphasize the characters’ actions and reactions—their responsiveness to physical stimuli and the circulation of vital energy through a network of touch and sight—which create “a veritable interaction” (143). Later, Girodet’s 1819 ‘Pygmalion in Love with His Statue’ takes “the idea of a network of energies already authoritatively suggested by someone like Lagrenée” (151) and extends it to the idea of magnetism: the importance of touch gives way to the idea of mesmeric fluids. Such changes in the representation of the myth reflect the materialism of the age, but religious iconography does not vanish from the scene: following Rousseau’s conflation of “artistic creation and religious adoration” (120) . . . .

For the full review, click here» (CAA membership required)