Enfilade

Recently posted at H-Albion:

Robin Simon, Hogarth, France and British Art (London: Greenhill Books/Lionel Leventhal, 2007), 313 pages, ISBN 978-0-9554063-0-0, $90.

Reviewed by Douglas Fordham, Assistant Professor of Art History, University of Virginia; published on H-Albion, January 2010.

Since his death in 1764, William Hogarth has become a protean figurehead for a great many impulses in British culture. John Trusler’s “Hogarth Moralized” (1768) was an early and overt instance of the ends to which Hogarth’s life and oeuvre could be put, and Hogarth continues to be, if not moralized, then at least channeled into a disparate series of voices and roles. While the “New Art History” of the past two decades has turned its pragmatic sights on Hogarth the calculating businessman, it has also tended to reduce the artist to a somewhat bland spokesman for a polite and commercial age.[1] In the writings of David Solkin and David Bindman, in particular, Hogarth has been cast as a cultural latitudinarian, mainstream in his preoccupations and eager to please. To the extent that Hogarth’s works reveal contradictions, unpleasant truths, or impolite expressions they tend to be viewed as apt reflections of an anxious age. This view of the artist offered a calculated response to Ronald Paulson’s towering contribution to Hogarth scholarship, beginning in the 1970s, which emphasized the artist’s antinomian impulses and his empathetic eye for the sub-cultural. If Hogarth merges seamlessly into hegemonic discourses in the former, he activates a dizzying array of allusions and a daunting density of meaning in the voluminous writings of Paulson.[2] While each of these accounts, and a great many others, have transformed our understanding of the artist and his age, readers are ultimately tasked with choosing which Hogarth they prefer. For it hardly seems possible for one individual to embody so many contrary impulses.

Robin Simon makes a welcome contribution to this debate in “Hogarth, France and British Art,” where he offers a surprisingly fresh iteration of the artist and his milieu. Simon’s Hogarth is cosmopolitan in his understanding of European Old Masters and contemporary French art, sophisticated in his handling of oil paints, and a friend to “Tory wits” and Whig politicians alike. Hogarth emerges in Simon’s account as an intellectually serious artist and a deeply gifted painter who almost single-handedly elevated British art to a Continental level of refinement. In his desire to translate French theories and standards into a uniquely English vernacular, “Hogarth demands to be ranked with the literary giants of the ‘Augustan’ age in England” (p. 8). Simon shares with Paulson a propensity for making analogies between English literature and art, and some of Simon’s most compelling observations entail comparisons between Hogarth’s paintings and the English stage. . . .

The paradox latent in Simon’s approach is that Hogarth already had an English visual vernacular at his disposal in London printshops, on painted street signs, and in countless urban spectacles. While Simon deliberately challenges the “determinedly insular” (p. 3) quality of recent Hogarth scholarship, at what cost does Hogarth the cosmopolitan painter become divested from Hogarth the graphic satirist as Diana Donald and Mark Hallett, for example, have presented him?[3] This is a question of synthesis, however, rather than a legitimate critique of Simon’s stated aims. On its own terms, Simon’s book deserves to be read by everyone with an interest in British culture in the first half of the eighteenth century, and it dramatically improves our understanding of Anglo-French relations. It also manages to present us with yet another incarnation of the artist from which to choose. This is a significant accomplishment in itself, and if this new Hogarth sits uncomfortably alongside his forebearers, then it can only encourage us to look anew at Hogarth’s astonishingly diverse and provocative career.

For the full review, click here»

Notes (more…)

Recently added to caa.reviews:

Nigel Aston, Art and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Europe (London: Reaktion Books, 2009), 320 pages, ISBN: 9781861893772, $45.

Reviewed by Michael Yonan, University of Missouri–Columbia; posted 25 February 2010.

. . . Among crossdisciplinary connections, perhaps none is so elusive, so fraught with traps, as the boundary between history and art history. It is a boundary all the more striking for its invisibility. Art historians typically assume that they are partaking in historical study, that the tools they bring to cultural artifacts from the past illuminate an understanding comparable to that of their historian colleagues. All the greater their surprise, then, when they attend a history seminar or delve into historical journals and discover that their colleagues actually speak a different language and reach sometimes strikingly unfamiliar conclusions. Confusion and misunderstanding can happen in the opposite direction, too.  Historians create knowledge about the past typically from texts, and it can seem a small step to translate that knowledge to images and spaces, visual constructions that likewise are products of the past and which ostensibly engage the same concerns. Nigel Aston recognizes the divide between his discipline, history, and art history and notes their differences in the introduction to his book “Art and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Europe.” He begins by registering his own interdisciplinarity, but reminds his readers that as a historian he brings a disciplinary perspective to the material at hand. That material is this period’s plentiful religious art, and he adds that in being fascinated by it he has been more or less alone among Anglo-American scholars. Certainly he is correct in noting that religious imagery desperately requires additional study and greater emphasis in our growing discourse on eighteenth-century art. . . .

For the full review, click here»

The following review appeared at caa.reviews in December (I’m sorry it slipped my notice earlier — C.H.).

Kay Dian Kriz, Slavery, Sugar, and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies, 1700–1840 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press in association with Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2008), 288 pages, ISBN: 9780300140620, $75.

Reviewed by Stephanie Shestakow, College of New Jersey; posted 15 December 2009.

A statue of Sir Hans Sloane stands at the center of London’s Chelsea Physic Garden where all variety of plants vie for attention. Sloane demonstrated his talent for gathering specimens (like those over which his statue presides) in his resplendently detailed title, ‘Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers, and Jamaica, with the Natural History of the Herbs and Trees, Four-footed Beasts, Fishes, Birds, Insects, Reptiles Etc. of the Last of those Islands’ (vol. 1, 1707; vol. 2, 1725) which serves as both travel log and visual natural history, a manifestation of the eighteenth-century desire to index the world. Kay Dian Kriz begins ‘Slavery, Sugar and the Culture of Refinement: Picturing the British West Indies, 1700–1840’ with Sloane’s folio in order to explore the visual strategies used to represent the West Indies in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. In contrast to the abundance of scholarship addressing icons like the kneeling slave and the slave ship, Kriz’s study is aimed at the imagery designed to promote the colonial project in the West Indies, and it makes a remarkable new contribution to this area of study.

Through five chapters plus an introduction and afterword, Kriz charts both high and low artistic attempts to convey competing views of the Caribbean to the English public. She draws on a rich array of glossy color and black-and-white images ranging from graphic satires to natural history illustrations (and other images generally categorized outside the realm of “art”) as she discusses paintings and prints associated with the British West Indies that were produced around the campaign to abolish the slave trade. Just as raw sugar cane was refined into white crystals, artists portrayed island inhabitants as an often savage, overly sexualized, and unruly people who could be refined through colonials. Yet Kriz’s work also transcends the binary of metropolitan center and colonial outpost (the polite society of London versus the impolite colonial settlement) by addressing representations that confirmed and contested what she deems the dominant spatial model. These include paintings and prints that “proffered the possibility of social refinement in these British island colonies, not just economic profit and sexual pleasure” (4). . . .

For the full review click here»

At The Long Eighteenth, Laura Rosenthal (Professor of English at the University of Maryland) reviews Michèle Lamont’s How Professors Think: Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment, which studies how grants in multi-disciplinary committees are assessed:

In this well-written and relentlessly object study (in the sense that Lamont has no ax to grind as far as I can tell and treats her subjects with respect), the author mainly I think is offering a counterpoint to Pierre Bourdieu’s argument that academic awards constitute a system of self-reproduction. Instead, Lamont finds that even though evaluators certainly see the application through particular lenses, they nevertheless in general make a sincere effort to discover quality. This process, however, takes place contextually through a series of negotiations in which a variety of factors shape decisions. . .

For Rosenthal’s full review, click here»

Reviewed by Graham Perry in the February issue of Apollo Magazine:

Cinzia Sicca, ed., John Talman: An Early Eighteenth-Century Connoisseur (New Haven: Yale University Press/Paul Mellon Centre, 2009), ISBN: 978-0300123357 ($75).

Misfortune hangs over the Talman family like a cloud. William Talman the architect had a flourishing practice in the time of William III, but most of his work has perished. His son John formed one of the greatest collections of drawings ever seen in Britain, but was forced by financial necessity to begin dispersing it before he died. He designed architectural schemes for All Souls, Oxford, and for a new Whitehall Palace, all of which remained unbuilt. He knew more about contemporary Italian art than any man in England, and was mentor to William Kent, whom he took with him to Italy in 1709; yet his name remains virtually unknown. Only recently has his significance begun to be recognised, with an Italian team of scholars, headed by Cinzia Sicca, taking the lead in producing an on-line reconstruction of his dismembered collections, and now producing a volume that clearly illustrates his position in the early-18th-century art world. . .

For the full review, click here»

Recently added to caa.reviews:

Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 568 pages, $24.50 (9780231139090)

Reviewed by Jennifer Roberts, Department of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University; posted 14 January 2010

. . . Standard accounts of print culture in the early national period stress the role of print as a telecommunication device; print networks connected people in time and space, forged communities out of disparate groups of disconnected citizens, and permitted something like a coordinated nation-state to develop and persist. Loughran’s brilliant and counterintuitive argument overturns this assumption. She argues instead that the illusion of national unification (the “virtual nation,” as she puts it) could take hold in reality only because the actual capacities of print dissemination networks were severely limited. . . .

What can art historians take from Loughran’s study? While the book devotes considerable attention to visual culture (more on which in a moment), its most profound potential as an art-historical contribution lies in its broad realignment of traditional ways of thinking about media and materiality. First: Loughran persistently redirects the definition of “print media” from their typical scope—ink, paper, etc.—to the broader geographical field through which print artifacts had to move. She emphasizes this in order to overturn persistent models of telecommunicative print culture that tend to ignore the actual heft of printed texts, imagining that they disseminate themselves weightlessly and simultaneously through space. . . .

Second: Loughran elegantly probes the relationship between the virtual spaces evoked by printed texts and the real spaces that they occupied and through which they were hauled and handled. She demonstrates that much of the historical power of these texts as both representations and performances emerged precisely in the cleavage between their “two bodies”: “On one hand, they served as symbols of unity; on the other, they were actual objects with limited circulations” (22). . .

For the full review, click here»