Enfilade

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)

Recently added to caa.reviews:

Ross Parry, ed., Museums in a Digital Age (New York: Routledge, 2009), 496 pages, ISBN: 9780415402620, $52.95.

Reviewed by Craig Saper, Texts and Technology Doctoral Program and Department of English, University of Central Florida; posted 5 August 2010.

This useful collection of previously published essays appears in a series of course readers in museum studies edited by Simon Knell. The goal of this particular anthology is to illuminate the impact of digital media on museum exhibitions and on the conserving of digital artifacts in museums. Knell’s explanation of the general goals of the series ends with a citation from Michel Foucault as a guide to each volume’s efforts to update museum studies curricula. With that directive, it is inevitable that the series will have to navigate between the most mundane practical concerns, in this case how to run a museum’s digital collections and exhibitions, and more theoretical issues involving the implications of conserving an ephemeral digital heritage and putting exhibitions online. The two overlapping conflicts, or contradictions, of museum studies (i.e., practical versus theoretical and the virtual versus actual objects) challenge Museums in a Digital Age to get these concerns to address each other or at least to speak the same language.

Ross Parry, who edited the anthology, organizes the chapters into seven sections (prefaced by his useful introductions) that loosely correspond to the history and management of information, the real and virtual spaces of exhibitions, access and usability, interpretive and educational services, the status of museum artifacts (including digital), sustainability and technical production issues, and speculations on the future of museums. That organization certainly fits neatly with courses in museum studies, but, in following Parry’s description of the volume as a collage, one might also cross-index the chapters into four categories: history of practices, new gadgets and practices, usability of technological resources, and appealing to a wider (and different) audience. . .

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

Recently added to caa.reviews:

David Bindman, ed., The History of British Art, Volume 2: 1600–1870 (New Haven and London: Yale Center for British Art and Tate Britain, 2008), 248 pages, ISBN: 9780300116717, $50.

Reviewed by Brian Lukacher, Department of Art, Vassar College; posted 21 July 2010

In his magisterial survey of British art, commissioned for the gold standard Pelican History of Art and first published in 1953, Ellis Waterhouse paused in his discussion of Thomas Gainsborough and made the following admission: “Unpleasant as it still is for some of us to introduce the shade of Marx into the history of art, it may contribute to the understanding of Gainsborough” (261). This passage attests to the anxiety of the art historian in introducing even the most innocuous hint of social analysis into the study of art during the post-war period. Waterhouse’s colleague and contemporary Anthony Blunt would find another, more furtive, way around this problem. This squeamishness over allowing “the shade of Marx” to haunt so fleetingly the pages of his survey book itself shows Waterhouse’s sensitivity to one of the most powerful and renowned images in Marxist political discourse—the “specter of communism” with which the Communist Manifesto opened and that would later be exorcised through the deconstructive logic of Derrida’s “specters of Marx.”

A couple of generations later and the history of British art finds itself still contending with “the shade of Marx.” But this shade has become considerably more tangible and omnipresent—in fact, it has now become mainstreamed. This is surely evident in the second volume from the recent three-volume survey entitled “The History of British Art.” Under the capable and expert editorial direction of David Bindman, who is also a contributor to this volume, which covers the Restoration period to the Victorian age, the series seeks to incorporate recent currents in art-historical academic research and cultural theory in its sweeping overview of large swathes of British art and society. Co-sponsored by the Yale Center for British Art and Tate Britain (not exactly cultural bastions of revolutionary discontent), this new survey wants to shake off the dusty tedium associated with older forms of British art history that were structured around the chronology of royal patronage, the tyranny of genre, and the evolution of artistic style. The challenge, which is not without peril and contradiction, is to present a more theoretically complex and politically engaged art history of the kind that has been flourishing in academic circles for the last two decades in a manner that would be accessible to the museum-going public visiting the Yale Center and the Tate.

It is a difficult balancing act, but one carried off with admirable success in volume two of this series. . . .

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

From The New York Times Book Review (30 July 2010) . . .

Julie Flavell, When London Was Capital of America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), ISBN: 9780300137392, $32.50.

Reviewed by Andrea Wulf

In the decades before the Declaration of Independence, thousands of American colonists visited London. Wealthy Southern plantation owners and New England merchants, husbands and wives, children and slaves all arrived in what was thought to be the most exciting city in the world. Some went shopping for exquisite silver, fashionable furniture and the latest books; others traded their goods and engaged in political arguments in noisy coffee houses. A sojourn in London was part of the education of the sons (and sometimes daughters) of wealthy colonial families because, as one contemporary observed, “more is learnt of mankind here in a month than can be in a year in any other part of the world.”

Julie Flavell’s “When London Was Capital of America” illuminates this fascinating chapter of London’s — and North America’s — past, showing how the metropolis functioned as a magnet for colonists from across the Atlantic (including the West Indies) who sought accomplishment, opportunity and commerce. An American-born scholar who is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Flavell has unearthed a host of stories that bring alive a previously neglected aspect of the colonial experience. . . .

The full review is available here»

It’s been exciting to see the recent expansion of The Art History Newsletter, as Jon Lackman has been joined by a number of contributors. On July 5th, Lackman himself reports on catching up on “The Glorious 18th Century,” with pieces from The New York Review of Books: Willibald Sauerländer on the Houdon exhibition at Montpellier (April 8 issue) and Ingrid Rowland on Roberto Calasso’s Tiepolo Pink (March 11 issue).

Meanwhile the June 24 issue of the London Review of Books includes a review of Jason Kelly’s book The Society of Dilettanti: Archaeology and Identity in the British Enlightenment by Rosemary Hill.

From Apollo Magazine:

Rachel Stewart, The Town House in Georgian London (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), ISBN 9780300152777, $65.

Reviewed by Conor Lucey, the editor of Irish Architectural and Decorative Studies.

On 16 May 1775, a notice in The Public Advertiser advised its readers that ‘the Right Hon. the Earl Temple is again much indisposed with an inflammatory Disorder in his Bowels, at his house in Pall Mall’. As a means of identifying the singular association between Britain’s aristocracy and their London residences, this very public announcement of the Earl Temple’s unfortunate medical circumstances, and the crucial specificity of location, represents a decisive example of the significance of West End property within the Georgian social arena. Deftly synthesising such illuminating anecdotal evidence with documentary fact, Rachel Stewart’s study of the 18th-century London town house provides valuable new description and interpretive analysis of this representative building type.

Critical of how architectural historiographies have underestimated both the practical and conceptual importance of town residences for the owner/occupier, Stewart’s narrative sets out to examine and, indeed, complicate the role, function and meaning of the city dwelling for those ‘who may have had some choice as to whether or not to take a town house, rather than the London-based middling classes whose town home was their principal and most often sole residence’. . . .

The full review can be found here»

Recently added to caa.reviews:

Göran Blix, From Paris to Pompeii: French Romanticism and the Cultural Politics of Archaeology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 320 pages, ISBN: 9780812241365, $59.95.

Reviewed by Pamela J. Warner, Department of Art and Art History, University of Rhode Island; posted 3 June 2010.

. . . readers looking for a history of archaeology in the nineteenth century should look elsewhere, as should those looking for detailed accounts of the actual archaeological site of Pompeii. As Blix writes in the introduction, his book is not “about the rise of archaeology . . . but about its broader mythical impact” (4). Thus the ancient site of Pompeii serves him as a repeating melody, a common but far from unique point of reference from which to cull evidence of a much broader archaeological gaze. Pompeii features as a figure that inspires a more diffuse range of approaches to not just the archaeological past but also the present and the future. Within that large compass, Blix concentrates on the myths and methods that determined the cultural practices of French Romanticism. . . . in making his case for the archaeological imaginary, Blix analyzes an impressive array of examples from a wide range of discourses, seeing in them underlying desires and fantasies that fueled archaeology as a science and allowed it to deeply permeate the Romantic mentality. His own prose, rich and filled with metaphors, makes the book a model of literary accomplishment, mirroring in this the hybrid qualities of the period it studies. . . .

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

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Richard Wittman, Architecture, Print Culture, and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France (New York: Routledge, 2007). 304 pages, ISBN: 9780415774635, $165.

Reviewed by Freek Schmidt, Faculty of Arts, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam; posted 2 June 2010.

There was a time when architecture existed mainly in the physical reality of the built environment and in the imagination. That was before it became a standard ingredient of the contemporary media, and a subject attracting the interest of historians, travelers, writers, and the general population. Exactly how this happened is not easy to reconstruct, but it seems very likely that some major changes took place in the eighteenth century with the emergence of the modern public and its attendant configuration of public and private spheres.

In this important book, Richard Wittman suggests that many of the defining characteristics of modern architectural culture have their origins in the transformations of architectural publicity in eighteenth-century France. He does so at the end of Architecture, Print Culture, and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France, a clever reworking of his doctoral dissertation of 2001, after having presented the reader with a chronological study in four parts, consisting of twelve chapters, over the course of which he painstakingly unfolds his story of the emergence of the public as an extremely influential party in the development of French architecture and architectural debate. . . .

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

From Apollo Magazine:

Marcel Roethlisberger and Renée Loche, Liotard: catalogue, sources et correspondance, 2 vols. (Doornspijk: Davaco, 2008), ISBN 907028808, £503.

Reviewed by Robert Oresko.

On 30 September 1762, 24-year-old Bostonian John Singleton Copley wrote to Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702-1789), by then aged nearly 60, whom he had previously met in London, asking for help in procuring ‘a sett of the best Swiss Crayons for drawing of Portraits’. Liotard’s cosmopolitanism was a hallmark of his career as an artist, but a request from pre-revolutionary Boston indicates how widely his fame had spread. This telling anecdote emerges from the section – of nearly 150 pages – of Liotard’s letters in the second volume of Marcel Roethlisberger and Renée Loche’s “Liotard,” a monumental, archivally-based study of the Genevan-born artist’s life and work.

Over 900 folio pages of text, spread over two volumes, document the career of one of the greatest of painters in pastel and establish
his position as a key figure in 18th-century cultural life. . . .

The full review can be found here»