Enfilade

Print Quarterly, June 2023

Posted in books, catalogues, journal articles, reviews by Editor on June 12, 2023

Left: Edmé Jeaurat after Antoine Watteau, Talagrepo, Monk of Pégou, ca. 1731, etching and engraving, 24 × 17 cm (Cambridge, MA, Harvard Art Museums / Fogg Museum). Right: Gabriel Huquier after François Boucher, Flautist and Child Timpanist, ca. 1742, etching and engraving, sheet, trimmed 30 × 24 cm (New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art).

◊    ◊    ◊    ◊    ◊

The long eighteenth century in the latest issue of Print Quarterly:

Print Quarterly 40.2 (June 2023)

A R T I C L E S

Roger Vandercruse Lacroix, Secretaire with Marquetry, ca. 1765, tulipwood, stained marquetry with bronze mounts and marble top, 114 × 73 × 38 cm (Private collection, Image courtesy Christie’s, London).

• Kee Il Choi Jr., “Watteau and Boucher Conjoined: Imagining China in Marquetry,” pp. 138–49.

This article examines the previously unknown pairing of Chinoiserie prints based on designs by Antoine Watteau (1684–1721) and François Boucher (1703–70) to create the pictorial marquetry veneered onto two nearly identical writing desks (secrétaires en armoire) attributed to the cabinetmaker Roger Vandercruse called La Croix or Lacroix (1727–99). Each cabinet retains traces of either the original engraving or the colour deployed to bring these ‘paintings in wood’ to life. This discovery not only exemplifies the role of prints in disseminating the chinoiseries of both Watteau and Boucher but also sheds light on the working practices of marqueteurs in eighteenth-century Paris.

• Lesley Fulton, “Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein’s Album of Prints in the British Museum,” pp. 150–69.

Fulton explores the Homeric subject matter and scenes depicted in the British Museum’s album of 81 previously unidentified etchings and engravings. Intended for Tischbein’s Vases and Homer projects, the etchings and engravings were prepared in Naples towards the end of the eighteenth century. Connections are made to motifs derived from painted vases and their relationship to Tischbein’s project for Sir William Hamilton’s Collection of Engravings from Ancient Vases (Naples and Germany, 1791–1803). Further analysis links the prints to the artist’s massive Illustrated Homer project in the first quarter of the 19th century. The paper highlights the discrepancy between the identification of an antique motif made in the late eighteenth century and how it is interpreted today. A contemporary document—probably a stocklist—from the Tischbein archive at Oldenburg in Germany, undated but drawn up between 1799 and 1808, has made it possible to identify the subject of each print and also to explain its original place in the album. The Appendix correlates the British Museum prints with their description as given in the Oldenburg document and also their correspondence with Tischbein’s various publication projects. Fulton concludes that the British Museum album probably served as a sales catalogue to which new material could be added as it arrived in the artist’s workshop.

N O T E S  A N D  R E V I E W S

• An Van Camp, Review of Gitta Bertram, Nils Büttner, and Claus Zittel, eds., Gateways to the Book: Frontispieces and Title Pages in Early Modern Europe (Brill, 2021), pp. 175–76. This edited volume presents fifteen essays on frontispieces and title-pages found in books printed between 1500 and 1800. Written by established academics as well as PhD candidates, the contributions explore how frontispieces intersect art and literature and how the printed images can be interpreted (contributions by Malcolm Baker, Martijn van Beek, Miranda L. Elston, Alison C. Fleming, Daniel Fulco, Lea Hagedorn, Constanze Keilhoz, Fabian Kolb, Hole Rößler, Delphine Schreuder, Alice Zamboni, and Cornel Zwierlein).

• Séverine Lepape, Review of Małgorzata Łazicka, ed., Old Master Prints from the 15th Century to the 1820s: German School, Barthel Beham and Sebald Beham. The Print Room of the University of Warsaw Library, Catalogue of the Collection (University of Warsay Library, 2019), pp. 176–78.

• Michael Matile, Review of the exhibition catalogue, Kurt Zeitler, ed., Venedig, La Serenissima: Zeichnungen und Druckgraphik aus vier Jahrhunderten (Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2022), pp. 180–83. The Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in Munich recently presented a cross-section of its rich treasures of Venetian prints and drawings from the late fifteenth to the eighteenth century.

• Antony Griffiths, Review of Joyce Zelen, Blinded by Curiosity: The Collector-Dealer Hadriaan Beverland (1650–1716) and his Radical Approach to the Printed Image (Primavera Pers, 2021), pp. 186–89. The book focuses on Hadriaan Beverland’s activities during his last years, from 1680, which he spent as a ‘paranoid alcoholic drifting through the pubs and brothels of London’. He also assembled at least two little known manuscripts with new images composed of cut-out fragments of prints. The review highlights two portrait prints seemingly commissioned by Beverland himself which Griffiths believes ‘stand far outside the traditional canons of portraiture’, as well as the discovery by Zelen of a major sale of Beverland’s print collection held in 1690.

• Kristel Smentek, Review of Marianne Grivel, Estelle Leutrat, Véronique Meyer and Pierre Wachenheim, eds., Curieux d’Estampes. Collections et collectionneurs de gravures en Europe, 1500–1815 (Universitaires de Rennes, 2020), pp. 189–91. This review presents a swift overview of newly found documentary insights relating to individual and institutional collections of prints, largely focusing on French collectors and on the eighteenth century. Of the latter, mention is made of Albert Duke of Saxe-Teschen correspondences, Joseph-Dominique d’Inguimbert’s display practices, which included mounting between rollers, the collecting and marketing of French fashion prints, and the formation of print collections documenting the history of France, as was the case with Charles-Marie Fevret de Fontette.

• Mark McDonald, Review of Jessica Maier, The Eternal City: A History of Rome in Maps (University of Chicago Press, 2020) pp. 192–94. This review highlights interesting anachronistic features in topographical depictions of a reinvented Rome, for example, in Leonardo Bufalini’s woodcut map from 1551, the Baths of Trajan are depicted as a complete structure when it was in fact ruinous at the time. Further analysis pertains to the functions of printed maps, often as guides for pilgrims and secular tourists visiting important churches and historic sites.

• Christian Rümelin, Review of the exhibition catalogue, Celia Haller-Klinger, and Anette Michels, eds., Graphiksammler Ernst Riecker (1845–1918) und Otto Freiherr von Breitschwert (1829–1910) (Graphik-Kabinett Backnang, 2018), pp. 194–95. A review relating to two German collections formed around the turn of the nineteenth century, one of which focused on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century regional artists.

• Michael Matile, Review of the exhibition catalogue, Anne Buschoff, Marcus Dekiert and Sven Schütte, eds., Linie lernen: Die Kunst zu zeichnen (Wallraf-Richartz Museum & Fondation Corboud, 2021), pp. 195–96. This review pertains to a catalogue illustrating the history of drawing education from Cennino Cennini to their depictions in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century prints.

◊    ◊    ◊    ◊    ◊

Note (added 12 June 2023) — The original posting was updated to include reproductions of the two prints after Watteau and Boucher.

 

The Burlington Magazine, May 2023

Posted in books, obituaries, reviews by Editor on June 3, 2023

The eighteenth century in the May issue of The Burlington . . .

The Burlington Magazine 165 (May 2023)

E D I T O R I A L

John Webber, A View Looking up the Vaitepiha River with Two Tahitians in a Canoe in the Foreground and Two Others on the Bank with Tahitian Houses to the Right. August 1777, 1777, pen, wash, and watercolour, 45 × 63 cm (London: British Library, Add. 15513, No.13).

• Digitizing the Conway and Witt Libraries, p. 491.

L E T T E R S

• Peter Barber, “The Background of Portrait of Mai,” pp. 492–93.
“Given Reynolds’s lack of interest in landscape painting, but the special place of the portrait of Mai in his oeuvre, it is at least possible that Reynolds may have decided to paint an authentically Tahitian background in order to add further ‘authenticity’. Given his high opinion of [John] Webber, it would have been natural to have copied the scene from one of his friend’s ‘excellent’ paintings of Vaitepiha Bay” (493).

• Christina Strunck, “Laguerre’s Painted Hall at Chatsworth,” p. 493.
“Since in his article ‘A Modello by Louis Laguerre and the Programme of the Painted Hall at Chatsworth’, published in The Burlington Magazine in August 2022 (pp. 760–67), François Marandet came to the same conclusions [that I did in my 2021 monograph Britain and the Continent, 1660–1727: Political Crisis and Conflict Resolution in Mural Paintings at Windsor, Chelsea, Chatsworth, Hampton Court and Greenwich], I thought your readers might like to be referred to the more extended analysis of the programme in both my book and an article I published in January 2022 that discusses the channels through which the two versions of Maratta’s painting may have been known to Laguerre and his patron, William Cavendish.”

Jean Massard, after Jean Baptiste Greuze, A Woman (Madame Greuze) with a Fur-trimmed Hood Drawn over Her Head, Detail from Greuze’s ‘La Dame de Charité’ above a Sketch of the Painting, 1772, etching and engraving, 24 × 16 cm (London: British Museum, 1978,0121.291).

R E V I E W S

• Mark Evans, Review of Leopoldine van Hogendorp Prosperetti, Woodland Imagery in Northern Art, c.1500–1800: Poetry and Ecology (Lund Humphries, 2022), pp. 568–69.

• Alastair Lang, Review of Yuriko Jackall, Jean-Baptiste Greuze et ses têtes d’expression: La fortune d’une genre (CTHS and INHA, 2022), pp. 569–71.

• Lisa Monnas, Review of Michael Peter, Gewebtes Gold: Eine Kleine Geschichte der Metallfadenweberei von der Antike bis um 1800 (Abegg-Stiftung, 2022), p. 576.

• Alexandre Maral, Review of Christopher Tadgell, The Louvre and Versailles: The Evolution of the Proto-Typical Palace in the Age of Absolutism (Routledge, 2020), pp. 576–77.

• Wim Nys, Review of Beatriz Chadour-Sampson, Sandra Hindman, and Carla Van De Puttelaar, eds., Liber Amicorum in Honour of Diana Scarisbrick: A Life in Jewels (Ad Ilissvm, 2022), p. 577.

O B I T U A R Y

• Elizabeth Pergam, Obituary for Duncan Robinson (1943–2022), p. 578–79.
Successively the Director of the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Duncan Robinson had a major influence on the appreciation, study, and collecting of historic and modern British art in both the United States and the United Kingdom.

 

New Book | Blinded by Curiosity

Posted in books, reviews by Editor on April 8, 2023

Kate Heard’s review of Zelen’s book (published online in August 2022) appears in the latest issue of the Journal of the History of Collections 35.1 (March 2023). From Primavera Pers:

Joyce Zelen, Blinded by Curiosity: The Collector-Dealer Hadriaan Beverland (1650–1716) and His Radical Approach to the Printed Image (Leiden: Primavera Pers, 2022), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-9059973305, €35.

This book explores a phenomenon in the history of print collecting that has never been extensively investigated: the cutting and pasting of prints in the early modern period. The book focuses on the colourful Dutch classical scholar and libertine Hadriaan Beverland (1650–1716). Beverland was banished from the Dutch Republic in 1679 for publishing blasphemous, heterodox, and provocative scholarly texts on sex and sin. Books that dealt with prostitution in ancient times, original sin as the first act of sexual intercourse, and the sexual lust of women, were considered dangerous to Dutch public morality. In 1680, Beverland fled to England, where his friend Isaac Vossius took him in. It was here that Beverland began cutting (nowadays) costly etchings and engravings and arranging the cuttings into collages. These collages, which again demonstrated his interest in sexual matters, survived in two illustrated manuscripts, now in the British Library in London and the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

This study aims: 1) to reconstruct Beverland’s life in England, primarily concentrating on his interests and dealing in art and books; 2) to map the early modern practice of cutting and pasting prints, on the basis of remaining cuttings as well as textual sources from Beverland’s day; and 3) to present a comprehensive analysis of the two illustrated Beverland-manuscripts in terms of form and function.

Joyce Zelen is a Jacoba Lugt-Klever Research Fellow at the RKD (Dutch Institute for Art History) in The Hague and the Fondation Custodia in Paris.

C O N T E N T S

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part I | Hadriaan Beverland: A Passionate Man with a Passion for Art
1  The Life of Hadriaan Beverland: A Biographical Sketch
2  ‘Fair and Candid in all his Dealings’: Beverland as Agent and Collector of Art, Books, and Curiosities
3  The Self-Promotion of a Bad Boy: Beverland’s Portraits

Part II | Beverland’s Manuscripts with Prints
4  Early Modern Print Collecting: A Context for Beverland’s Manuscripts with Prints
5  Prints, Scissors, and Antiquarian Aspirations: Beverland’s Inscriptiones Singulares Manuscript
6  ‘Dirty’ Notes and Print Collages: Beverland’s Crepundia Lugdunensia Manuscript

Conclusion

Appendices
Abbreviations, Transcriptions, and Translations
Notes
Bibliography
Index

◊   ◊   ◊   ◊   ◊

Note (added 11 April 2023) — Also see Karen Hollewand’s recent book The Banishment of Beverland: Sex, Sin, and Scholarship in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic (Leiden: Brill, 2019), reviewed by Benjamin Bernard in the latest issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies 56 (Spring 2023), pp. 473–79.

The Burlington Magazine, March 2023

Posted in books, catalogues, exhibitions, journal articles, reviews by Editor on March 30, 2023

The eighteenth century in the March issue of The Burlington . . .

The Burlington Magazine 165 (March 2023)

Magazine cover featuring two drawings by Delacroix.E D I T O R I A L

• “Omai,” p. 219.

Given his undisputed central place in the history of British art, it is surprising that the three-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Joshua Reynolds is not being celebrated this year with more éclat. The principal tribute will be an exhibition Reframing Reynolds: A Celebration (24 June – 29 October 2023) at the Box in Plymouth, the city where Reynolds made his reputation—he was born on 16th July 1723 at Plympton, on its outskirts. The exhibition will explore the patronage he enjoyed from the Eliot family of Port Eliot, St Germans, and will be supplemented by the museum’s collection of paintings by Reynolds, the largest outside London.

Reynolds’s reputation rests largely on his portraits, so it might have been expected that the museum that contains the largest number, the National Portrait Gallery, London (NPG), would have marked the occasion with an exhibition of its own, but given that it has been closed for the past three years for a comprehensive redevelopment and redisplay, due to be unveiled on 22nd June, it has had other priorities. Yet any disappointment that the NPG is neglecting Reynolds in his anniversary year was allayed by the announcement last August that it is seeking to raise £50 million to acquire one of his greatest paintings, the full-length portrait of Omai, the first Polynesian to visit Britain. Universally praised ever since it was first seen in public, at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1776, it is a work both of great beauty and of compelling historic interest as a document of the earliest European encounter with Pacific cultures. . . Keep reading here»

Jean-Baptiste Greuze, A Young Woman Praying at the Altar of Love (Votive Offering to Cupid), 1767, oil on canvas, 146 × 113 cm (London: The Wallace Collection).

A R T I C L E S

• Yuriko Jackall, Barbara H. Berrie, John K. Delaney, and Michael Swicklik, “Greuze’s Greens: Ephemeral Colours, Classical Ambitions,” pp. 268–79.

Jean-Baptiste Greuze was criticized in his lifetime for the unduly muted palette of some of his paintings. New technical analysis, combined with the recent discovery of a list in his handwriting of pigments he used, has revealed that his greens have faded because they incorporate fugitive yellow lakes, a practice Greuze continued even after its disadvantages were obvious.

R E V I E W S

• Roko Rumora, Review of the exhibition Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2022–23), pp. 312–15.

• Desmond Shawe-Taylor, Review of the newly opened, expanded Gainsborough’s House (Sudbury), pp. 322–25.

• Friso Lammertse, Review of the newly renovated Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp (KMSKA), pp. 332–35.

• Simon Swynfen Jervis, Review of Jean-Pierre Fournet, Cuirs dorés, ‘Cuirs de Cordoue’: un art européen (Éditions d’art Monelle Hayot, 2019), pp. 342–43.

• Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Review of Aaron Hyman, Rubens in Repeat: The Logic of the Copy in Colonial Latin America (Getty Research Institute, 2021), pp. 343–44.

• Stephen Bann, Review of Joanthan Ribner, Loss in French Romantic Art, Literature, and Politics (Routledge, 2022), pp. 344–45.

• Charlotte Gere, Review of Julius Bryant, Enriching the V&A: A Collection of Collections, 1862–1914 (Lund Humphries and V&A Publishing, 2022), pp. 345–46.

• Jennifer Johnson, Review of Sam Rose, Interpreting Art (UCL Press, 2022), p. 350.

 

New Book | Scripts of Blackness

Posted in books, reviews by Editor on March 23, 2023

From Penn Press—and see Ellen Welch’s recent review for Journal18 . . .

Noémie Ndiaye, Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), 376 pages, ISBN: 978-1512822632, $65. RaceB4Race: Critical Race Studies of the Premodern series

Book cover with visual reference to a costume print by Henri Bonnart depicting a woman (the print is entitled L'Afrique) partially covered by a red theater curtain and holding a dark-colored mask in her right hand away from her face.Scripts of Blackness shows how the early modern mass media of theatre and performance culture at-large helped turn blackness into a racial category, that is, into a type of difference justifying emerging social hierarchies and power relations in a new world order driven by colonialism and capitalism. Noemie Ndiaye explores the techniques of impersonation used by white performers to represent Afro-diasporic people in England, France, and Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, using a comparative and transnational framework. She reconstructs three specific performance techniques―black-up (cosmetic blackness), blackspeak (acoustic blackness), and black dances (kinetic blackness)―in order to map out the poetics of those techniques, and track a number of metaphorical strains that early modern playtexts regularly associated with them. Those metaphorical strains, the titular scripts of blackness of this book, operated across national borders and constituted resources, as they provided spectators and participants with new ways of thinking about the Afro-diasporic people who lived or could/would ultimately live in their midst. Those scripts were often gendered and hinged on notions of demonization, exclusion, exploitation, animalization, commodification, sexualization, consensual enslavement, misogynoir, infantilization, and evocative association with other racialized minorities. Scripts of Blackness attempts to grasp the stories that Western Europeans told themselves through performative blackness, and the effects of those fictions on early modern Afro-diasporic subjects.

Noémie Ndiaye is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Chicago.

C O N T E N T S

Introduction: Performative Blackness in Early Modern Europe
1  A Brief History of Baroque Black-Up: Cosmetic Blackness and Religion
2  A Brief History of Baroque Black-Up: Cosmetic Blackness, Gender, and Sexuality
3  Blackspeak: Acoustic Blackness and Accents of Race
4  Black Moves: Race, Dance, and Power
Post-Script: Ecologies of Racial Performance

Appendix: Selection of Early Modern Plays Featuring Black Characters
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments

Print Quarterly, March 2023

Posted in books, catalogues, exhibitions, journal articles, reviews by Editor on March 19, 2023

Juan Francisco Rosa, Equestrian Monument to Philip V, ca. 1738–45, engraved copper-plate, 26 × 36 cm (Chicago: Carl and Marilynn Thoma Foundation). The plate was cut into an oval, likely from what was originally a rectangle, and used as a support for an oil painting; on the other side is The Christ Child with St Joseph.

◊   ◊   ◊   ◊   ◊

The long eighteenth century in the latest issue of Print Quarterly:

Print Quarterly 40.1 (March 2023)

A R T I C L E S

• Emily C. Floyd with Suzanne Stratton-Pruitt, “Juan Francisco Rosa: Engraver to the Elite in Eighteenth-Century Lima,” pp. 33–51.

This article explores the life and works of the limeño engraver Juan Francisco Rosa (active in Lima, Peru, 1735–1756), with in-depth discussions pertaining to popular themes in his prints, patrons and contributions to the historic documentation of events and lost works in Lima. It adds two remarkable works to his oeuvre—a copperplate, now cut in two, and an illumination associated with a patent of nobility. The plate documents a famous statue of Philip V that was placed in 1738 on the bridge over the river Rímac and soon destroyed in the 1746 earthquake. The article demonstrates that Rosa produced important commissions for powerful organizations and individuals in the viceregal hierarchy, suggesting his prominence as an artist in mid-eighteenth-century Lima.

N O T E S  A N D  R E V I E W S

• Antony Griffiths, “Altered Plates,” pp. 63–66. Drawing attention to an anecdote in a 1726 biography of the London publisher, newspaper editor, and controversialist Abel Roper, this note charts the chronology of an altered plate by William van de Passe depicting the Duke of Buckingham on horseback in the first state, published 1625. The plate was then modified around 1630/32 in the second state to represent James, 1st Duke of Hamilton, before being transformed again in the third state of 1654–58 to portray Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector. The plate is documented to have been subjected to a fourth “very profitable” change, altered to portray William III, though no impression has yet been found.

Romeyn de Hooghe, Les Monarches Tombants (James II falls off the back of a unicorn at left, Louis XIV on a globe at right, while William III is raised on a shield in the background), 1689, etching, sheet includes letterpress text below the image (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum).

• Peter van der Coelen, Review of Meredith McNeill Hale, The Birth of Modern Political Satire: Romeyn de Hooghe (1645–1708) and the Glorious Revolution (Oxford University Press, 2020), pp. 66–68. Peter van der Coelen is persuaded by Hale’s argument that the satires De Hooghe produced between 1688 and 1690 were decisive for the development of political satire as a genre and that the birth of the genre should therefore be located not in eighteenth-century England but in the Dutch Republic of the late seventeenth century.

• Helmut Gier, Review of Eckhard Leuschner and Friedrich Polleross, eds., “Der Augsburger Kupferstecher und Verleger Johann Ulrich Kraus (1655–1719),” in Frühneuzeit-Info 32 (2021), pp. 68–71. A review of nine conference papers addressing Johann Ulrich Kraus, one of whose most important contributions to the history of art was the reception and dissemination in central Europe of the art favoured at the court of Louis XIV.

• Stephen Salel, Review of Timothy Clark, Hokusai: The Great Picture Book of Everything (British Museum Press, 2021), pp. 71–73.

• Janis A. Tomlinson, Review of the exhibition catalogue, Véronique Gerard, ed., Goya: Génie d’Avant-Garde. Le Maître et son École (Musée des Beaux-Arts and Éditions Snoeck, 2020), and “Goya peintre,” in Technè 53 (2022), pp. 73–75. Did Goya have a workshop? Whereas Goya’s prints seem to be a well-defined body of work, whose technique has been well-studied, as have their preparatory drawings and visual and historical sources, the paintings are another matter. Imitations, copies and forgeries began to circulate within a decade of Goya’s death and continue to complicate our understanding of his oeuvre. . . [These] two contributions . . . address some of these questions in very different ways.

• Heather Hyde Minor, Review of Ginevra Mariani, ed., Giambattista Piranesi: Matrici incise 1743–1753 (Edizioni Gabriele Mazzotta, 2010); Giambattista Piranesi: Matrici incise 1756–1757. Le Antichità Romane Lettere di giustificazione 2 (Edizioni Gabriele Mazzotta, 2014); Giambattista Piranesi: Matrici incise 1761–1765 (Editalia, 2017); and Giambattista Piranesi: Matrici incise 1762–1769 (De Luca Editori d’arte, 2020), pp. 102–06. This review explores the four-volume series of publications dedicated to cataloguing and discussing the 964 autograph printing plates by Giovanni Battista Piranesi in the collection of the Istituto Centrale per la Grafica in Rome. Further Matrici incise volumes are expected to be published in due course.

• Roger Kneebone, Review of the exhibition catalogue, Monique Kornell, ed., Flesh and Bones: The Art of Anatomy (Getty Research Institute, 2022), pp. 106–11. This review highlights the complex intersections between artists, engravers, anatomists and clinicians over four centuries. Worthy of note are the ways multiple perspectives from different kinds of parties informed the appearance of anatomical illustrations depending on their purpose and audience, resulting in images that were not always neutral in their ‘factual’ representations.

The Art Bulletin, December 2022

Posted in books, journal articles, reviews by Editor on January 29, 2023

The eighteenth century in the latest issue of The Art Bulletin 104 (December 2022), along with the methodological ‘perspective’ conversation from Fricke and Flood:

A R T I C L E S

Journal cover• Beate Fricke and Finbarr Barry Flood, “Premodern Globalism in Art History: A Conversation,” pp. 6–19.

A conversation took place in 2021 between two art historians whose research focuses on different regions of the premodern world and who have recently collaborated on a project dealing with early histories of globalism. The discussion considers the potential archival value of ‘flotsam’—that is, extant artifacts and images lacking extensive textual metadata—for (re)constructing transcultural and transregional histories of circulation and reception. It addresses divergences in the nature of the available archival materials and the ethical and methodological challenges this poses. The discussants consider the need to move beyond earlier, largely celebratory narratives of the global to engage the ways in which transregional and transcultural networks intersected with more rooted or regional traditions of art making and material culture.

• Paris A. Spies-Gans, “Why Do We Think There Have Been No Great Women Artists? Revisiting Linda Nochlin and the Archive,” pp. 70–94.

In 1971 Linda Nochlin published her quickly canonical “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” (ARTnews 69, no. 9). She offered a powerful narrative, claiming that Western institutional structures and a lack of access to vital educational opportunities had historically prevented women from becoming ‘great’ artists—indeed from even having the potential to achieve greatness. I suggest new visual and textual lenses through which we can update Nochlin’s narrative and reconsider women artists on their own societies’ terms, arguing that by returning to the archive, we can identify greatness and professionalism where they have eluded us before.

R E V I E W S

• Amy Knight Powell, Review of Aaron Hyman, Rubens in Repeat: The Logic of the Copy in Colonial Latin America (Getty Publications, 2021), pp. 120–23.

• Amanda Lahikainen, Review of Joseph Monteyne, Media Critique in the Age of Gillray: Scratches, Scraps, and Spectres (University of Toronto Press, 2022), pp. 123–26.

New Book | Buddhist Art of Tibet: In Milarepa’s Footsteps

Posted in books, reviews by Editor on January 10, 2023

With postings, I typically aim for editorial invisibility, allowing the marketing materials of an exhibition or book to do the talking. In this case, however, I would also point readers to Erin Thompson’s review “Sex Tourism with Statues: Buddhist Art of Tibet: In Milarepa’s Footsteps Is a Cringe-worthy Display of ‘Spiritual Colonialism’,” Hyperallergic (3 January 2023). As an associate professor of art crime at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY), Thompson holds a JD from Columbia Law School and a PhD in art history from Columbia University (both 2010). Lots of interesting questions about lots of things; I can imagine using the review in class next time I teach my introduction to Chinese art. CH

From Rizzoli:

Etienne Bock, Jean-Marc Falcombello, and Magali Jenny, Buddhist Art of Tibet: In Milarepa’s Footsteps, Symbolism and Spirituality (Paris: Flammarion, 2022), 288 pages, ISBN: 978-2080280947, $50.

Book coverFascinated by Buddhist art and Asian spirituality, Alain Bordier has spent more than forty years building a unique collection of religious objects from the Himalayas (Tibet, Nepal, and Bhutan). On display today at the Tibet Museum in the heart of the medieval city of Gruyères, Switzerland, some six hundred works offer visitors the rare opportunity to discover an endangered world heritage. This volume presents a general historic and artistic framework of Tibetan art through narratives, anecdotes, and commentary from Bordier on the different subjects and the collection itself. Beyond the artistic aspect, this work demonstrates the symbolism and spirituality that emerge from each object and offers an interpretation of the themes from a Buddhist viewpoint. The highlight of the book is the presentation of an unpublished manuscript retracing the life of Milarepa, the great eleventh-century Tibetan yogi, whose analysis provides an excellent introduction to the great Buddhist principles.

Etienne Bock is a specialist in Himalayan art and literature. Jean-Marc Falcombello is a cultural journalist and a disciple of Lama Teunsang, one of the oldest living Tibetan masters, for four decades. Magali Jenny is an ethnologist.

Note: The image used for the cover of the book is a Tibetan depiction of Milarepa, from the 18th century, pigment on cloth, 24 × 16 inches (Gruyères: Tibet Museum: Fondation Alain Bordier).

Print Quarterly, December 2022

Posted in books, catalogues, journal articles, reviews by Editor on December 4, 2022

The long eighteenth century in the latest issue of Print Quarterly:

Print Quarterly 39.4 (December 2022)

A R T I C L E S • Antony Griffiths and Giorgio Marini, “Some Italian Importers of British Prints in the 1780s,” pp. 412–22. “There is little evidence of interest or awareness of British printmaking in Italy before the last quarter of the eighteenth century. In those years, however, things began to change with remarkable speed. The purpose of this article is to draw attention to five importers of British prints—Molini in Florence, Micali in Livorno (Leghorn), Montagnani in Rome, and Viero and Wagner, both in Venice—all of whom produced catalogues of their imported stock within the five years between 1785 and 1789. When considered as a group, these catalogues give evidence of how quickly dealers were able to import newly published stock and how varied tastes were in these years” (412). N O T E S  A N D  R E V I E W S • Giorgio Marini, Note of the exhibition catalogue Delfín Rodríguez Ruiz and Helena Pérez Gallardo, eds., Giovanni Battista Piranesi en la Biblioteca Nacional de España (Biblioteca Nacional de España, Madrid, 2019), pp. 444–46. • Laurence Lhinares, Note on the Print Collection of Horace His de La Salle (1795–1878), occasioned by the exhibition Officier et Gentleman: La Collection Horace His de La Salle (Louvre, 2019–20) and the recent purchase by the Fondation Custodia of a copy of the 1856 sale catalogue of the collector’s prints, pp. 446–50. • Paul Coldwell, Note on Elizabeth Jacklin, The Art of Print: Three Hundred Years of Printmaking (Tate, 2021), pp. 450–51. • Rachel Sloan, Note on Kinga Bódi and Kata Bodor, eds., The Paper Side of Art: Eight Centuries of Drawings and Prints in the Collections of the Museum of Fine Arts – Hungarian National Gallery, Budapest (2021), pp. 451–52. • Anne Leonard, Review of the exhibition catalogue, Rena Hoisington, Aquatint: From Its Origins to Goya (National Gallery of Art / Princeton University Press, 2021), pp. 466–71. The catalogue won the 2022 IFPDA book award and discusses many notable innovators in the aquatint medium, including Giovanni David and Maria Catharina Prestel.

The Burlington Magazine, November 2022

Posted in books, catalogues, exhibitions, journal articles, reviews by Editor on December 3, 2022

The eighteenth century in the November issue of The Burlington . . .

The Burlington Magazine 164 (November 2022) — Sculpture

Massimiliano Soldani Benzi, Lamentation over the Dead Christ, 1690–92(?), gilded bronze, 57 × 40 cm (Córdoba Cathedral).

E D I T O R I A L

• The Parthenon Sculptures, p. 1063.

A R T I C L E S

• Fernando Loffredo, “Soldani’s Lamentation in Córdoba,” pp. 1118–22.

R E V I E W S

• Colin Bailey, Review of the exhibition catalogue, Renoir: Rococo Revival (Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, 2022), pp. 1150–53.

• Joseph Connors, Review of Livio Pestilli, Bernini and His World: Sculpture and Sculptors in Early Modern Rome (Lund Humphries, 2022), pp. 1160–62. [Pestilli “mines the correspondence of the directors of the Académie de France and sorts through student drawings in the Accademia de San Luca to find that well into the eighteenth century Bernini was copied more than any other artist” (1162).]

• Jamie Mulherron, Review of Alexandre Maral and Valérie Carpentier-Vanhaberbeke, Antoine Coysevox (1640–1720): Le sculpteur du Grand Siècle (Arthena, 2020), pp. 1165–66.

• Hugo Chapman, Review of Carel van Tuyll van Serooskerken, The Italian Drawings of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries in the Teyler Museum (Primavera Pers, 2021), pp. 1166–67.

• Christopher Martin Vogtherr, Review of Sarah Salomon, Die Kunst der Außenseiter: Ausstellungen und Künstlerkarrieren im absolutistischen Paris jenseits der Akademie (Wallstein Verlag, 2021), pp. 1167–68. [Salomon’s book focuses on four institutions: the Académie de Saint-Luc, the Colisée, the Salon de la Correspondence, and the Exposition de la Jeunesse.]

• Stephen Lloyd, Review of Magnus Olausson, Miniature Painting in the Nationalmuseum: A World-Class Collection (Nationalmuseum Stockholm, 2021), pp. 1168–70.

O B I T U A R I E S

• Michael Hall, Obituary for Mark Girouard (1931–2022), pp. 1171–72.