Conference | Fragile Things
From Yale’s Program in Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies at the MacMillan Center:
Fragile Things: Material Culture and the Russian Empire
Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center, Yale University, New Haven, 12–13 April 2024
In February 2022, Russian forces set ablaze the Museum of History in Ivankiv, Ukraine. Locals struggled to save paintings by the celebrated folk artist Maria Primachenko, but other collections were lost: cutlery, textiles, fossils, stamps. In the museum’s burnt-out frame, metals, fibers, and bones mixed in the self-same gray of ashy heaps. Plucked from homes, factories, and workshops, these humbler objects so redolent of 19th- and 20th-century life in Ivankiv became the target of imperial erasure.
Today’s imperial violence highlights the fragility of objects like these, and urgently asks us to reconsider the frameworks by which we study the material culture of the Russian empire. How might such a landscape of endangered things resist the traditional presumptions with which we approach historical objects? In place of tactility, materiality, and presence, this conference offers a slipperier view. Objects can be hidden, stolen, destroyed. But such physical precarity belies other, intangible, mutabilities: ideologies shift, meanings elude, objects slip from our scholarly grasp. What would it mean to see material culture—and our study of it—as fragile? Fragility can be the threat of collapse or loss; it is also the gleam of volatile possibility. Where recent literary and art historical trends see matter as ‘vibrant’ or ‘powerful’, this conference proposes fragility as a model and a mood for understanding the Russian empire’s things.
In the past two decades the humanities has experienced a marked ‘material turn’, a new materialism that has brought fresh methods and theories to the study of objects. With amplified attention not only to matter itself, but to the ideological, social, economic, political, and ecological dimensions of material objects, historians and theorists of culture have imagined the deep human and environmental networks that make, shape, and mediate things. This conference will explore these materialities as defining of the Russian empire, comprised as it was not only of matryoshka nesting dolls and Faberge eggs, but of the artistic, industrial, and religious objects of the imperial peripheries, Central Asia, the Baltic region, the Caucasus, and Ukraine. How, for example, are stories of colonial expansion or class violence retained in the crumbling relics of imperial everyday life? Can we discern shifting social and political ideologies in the migration of ornamental forms across the decorative arts? In which materials might we seek inscriptions of ecological transformation and vulnerability? And how does the researcher engage materiality when objects are lost or made inaccessible by geopolitical upheaval? In asking these and other questions, Fragile Things will attend to three main goals: to propose the concept of ‘fragility’ as generative for material cultural scholars across a range of disciplines and methodologies; to explore the potential of new materialism to excavate previously overlooked objects, experiences, and frameworks of the Russian empire; and to leverage the framework of materiality in the project of decolonizing the study of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Eurasia.
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2.00 Welcome
2.15 Panel 1 | Animal Materialities
Moderator: Emily Ziffer
• Matthew Romaniello — Creation through Destruction: Animal Materials and their Afterlives in the 18th Century
• Philippe Halbert — ‘There’s no Rushia in Town’: Rethinking Russia’s Leather Empire
• Bart Pushaw — Otter Offerings: The Materials of Indigenous Insurgency in Russian-Occupied Alaska
4.30 Conference Keynote
• Michael Yonan — From Material Culture to Materiality: Conceiving Meaning for Historical Things
6.00 Reception
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9.00 Welcome
9.15 Panel 2 | Migrating Orientalisms
Moderator: John Webley
• Michael Kunichika — Ornament and Orient: Migration and the Fragility of National Identity
• Mary Roberts — The Fragile Things of Stanisław Chlebowski’s Epistolary Interiors
• Mollie Arbuthnot — Museums against Fragility: Material Heritage and Imperial Legacies in Revolutionary Turkestan
11.15 Panel 3 | Fragile Icons
Moderator: Molly Brunson
• Christine Worobec — The Ukrainian Okhtyrka/Akhtyrka Icon of the Mother of God: A Russian Imperial Project
• Wendy Salmond — The Fragile Icon
1.30 Panel 4 | Tastemaking
Moderator: Liliya Dashevski
• Margaret Samu — Fragile Clay, Firm Aspirations: A Safronov Teapot
• Karen Kettering — How ‘Russian’ Is a ‘Fabergé Egg’ and What Can They Actually Tell Us?
• Wilfried Zeisler — ‘You may rest assured that we will take the best care of them.’ – Marjorie Post to Colonel Serge Cheremeteff, 1964
3.30 Panel 5 | Peripheries Centered
Moderator: Emily Cox
• Christianna Bonin — Konstantin Korovin’s Borderline Modernism
• Ismael Biyashev — Mobile Pasts//Tethered Poetics: Archaeology, Nomadism, and Material Culture in Late Imperial Siberia
• Rosalind Blakesley — Vasily Surikov and the Precarity of Materializing History
5.15 Concluding Remarks
Telescope by James Short on Display at the Herschel Museum
On a day when many of us are looking to the skies . . . Press release from Bath’s Herschel Museum of Astronomy:
James Short, Gregorian reflector telescope, 1738–68 (Collection of Richard Blythe, on loan to the Herschel Museum of Astronomy).
The Herschel Museum of Astronomy recently revealed a new display: a Gregorian Reflector telescope created by James Short, the preeminent telescope maker of the 18th century. The brass telescope, on long-term loan to the museum from Richard N. Blythe of Shropshire, was created between 1738 and 1768. It has a focal length of 18 inches and sits on an equatorial mount. Similar telescopes made by Short were used to observe the transit of Venus in 1761 and 1769.
Gregorian Reflector telescopes are constructed with two concave mirrors. The primary mirror collects incoming light and brings it to a focal point. This focused light is then reflected off the secondary mirror, after which the light passes through a central aperture within the primary mirror. Ultimately, the light emerges from the bottom of the instrument, facilitating observation through the eyepiece.
In his 30-year career, Short made at least 1300 telescopes. Considered the finest available, they were sought after by observatories and customers all over the world. Short had no assistant, and when he died in 1768 his method of polishing mirrors was lost. Separately, William Herschel started experimenting with making telescopes in 1773 and went on to produce telescopes of even greater quality than those by Short.
Herschel Museum of Astronomy, 19 New King Street, Bath (Photo by Nick Veitch, Wikimedia Commons, August 2005). Brother and sister, William and Caroline Herschel moved into what was then a new town house in 1777, just a few years before William discovered Uranus (in March 1781). The Herschel museum was established in 1981.
Patrizia Ribul, Director of Museums for Bath Preservation Trust says: “The story of the Herschel siblings William and Caroline is very special, and our acquisitions policy is focused on objects that either belonged to them, or that add important context from the time. The James Short telescope provides visitors with an excellent example of the type of telescope that would have been known to William Herschel. The fact that William, with Caroline’s assistance, went on to create telescopes superior even to this excellent example by James Short, really underlines his expertise and dedication in the field of astronomy.”
The James Short telescope is the latest in a line of exciting long-term loans and acquisitions at the museum, including Caroline’s visitor book, a full-sized replica of William’s seven-foot reflecting telescope, and Caroline’s original memoir manuscript.
The Herschel Museum of Astronomy is dedicated to the achievements of the Herschels: distinguished astronomers and talented musicians. It was from this house that William discovered Uranus in 1781.
Conference | Edo Outsiders: Ainu and Ryūkyūan Art
From ArtHist.net:
Edo Outsiders: Ainu and Ryūkyūan Art
University of California, Los Angeles, 19 April 2024
Panoramic Map of the Tōkaidō Highway, Shōtei Kinsui, drawn by Kuwagata (better known as Keisai). Published by Sanoya Ichigorō, Izumiya Hanbei, and Izumoji Manjirō, n.d. (likely 1810). Polychrome xylography, 52 × 24 inches (Los Angeles: Richard C. Rudolph Collection of Japanese Maps, Special Collections, UCLA Library).
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
On Friday, April 19, the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at UCLA will host Edo Outsiders: Ainu and Ryūkyūan Art, the third of three conferences at UCLA this year on the theme of Edo-period art. The conference is free and open to the public. If interested in attending, please do register, as space is limited in the Clark Library (also, note that the Clark is housed in a villa in West Adams, some ten miles east of the main UCLA campus in Westwood). Parking is free, and lunch is provided. To register, follow this link. While there will be no livestream or recording, an edited volume should follow.
p r o g r a m
9.30 Coffee and Registration
10.00 Welcome and Opening Remarks
• Bronwen Wilson (UCLA) and Kristopher Kersey (UCLA)
10.15 Panel 1 | Ainu Material and Visual Cultures: History, Materiality, and Practice
Moderator: Julia H. Clark (UCLA)
• Christina M. Spiker (St. Olaf College), Carving Identity: Early Ainu Woodcarving, Cultural Revitalization, and the Patchwork of History
• Fuyubi Nakamura (The University of British Columbia), Art and Sinuye with Ainu Artist Mayunkiki
• Katsuya Hirano (UCLA), The Eye of Kelp: Ainu-Japanese Trade and the Formation of a Culinary Culture in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
12.15 Lunch — Display of Clark Library materials in the North Book Room
1.15 Panel 2 | The Circulation and Dynamism of Ryūkyūan Textiles and Lacquerware
Moderator: Kristopher Kersey (UCLA)
• Setsuko Nitta (Okinawa Prefectural University of Arts), The Dyeing in Ryūkyū: The Relationship with Overseas
• Monika Bincsik (The Metropolitan Museum of Art), Lacquer Art at the Crossroads: Ryūkyū Ware
2.45 Coffee Break
3.15 Panel 3 | Ryūkyūan Painting: Heritage, Afterlives, and Restorations
Moderator: Rika Hiro (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)
• Eriko Tomizawa-Kay (University of East Anglia and University of Michigan), Tracing the Artistic Heritage: The Development of Ryūkyūan Painting from the Seventeenth to the Early Eighteenth Century
• Heeyeun Kang (UCLA), Ryūkyū Royal Portraits: Restoring and Contextualizing Lost Ryūkyū Art
4.45 Break
5.00 Plenary Discussion (all speakers and moderators)
5.30 Reception
Exhibition | Glamorous Women: Gender and Fashion in Chinese Art
Now on view at The Nelson-Atkins:
Glamorous Women: Gender and Fashion in Chinese Art
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, 18 November 2023 — 19 May 2024
Curated by Ling-en Lu
Jingju Losing His Mind upon Seeing Golden Lotus, from the album Illustrations of Scenes from ‘The Plum in the Golden Vase’, Chinese, 18th century, album leaf, ink and color on silk, 39 × 32 cm (Kansas City: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2006.18.7).
As early as 600 BCE, Chinese women’s roles in society were primarily centered within the home. These roles were informed by Confucianism, which promoted their view of a harmonious societal order, elevating men as the household authorities and assigning women to domestic roles. As a result, women’s contributions to society were largely overlooked.
However, art depicting women and fashions created by and for women underscore their crucial impact as tastemakers in visual culture from the 1100s to 1800s. Early works like shinühua (painting of gentlewomen) portrayed women as exemplary models of beauty and femininity. Artists later revamped this tradition to illustrate women as provocative seductresses in popular Chinese stories. By the 1800s, women used fashion and accessories to transform themselves from muted muses to fashionable trendsetters in Chinese society.
By looking closely at visual clues and symbolism embedded within these works, we can learn more about women’s lives, their beauty ideals, and their overall influence on art and culture. Viewed together, we see how women impacted Chinese art and culture much more fully than what we know from written history.
Organized by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Generous support provided by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation.
New Book | Chinese Dress in Detail
From Thames & Hudson:
Sau Fong Chan, with photographs by Sarah Duncan, Chinese Dress in Detail (London: Thames & Hudson, 2023), 224 pages, ISBN: 978-0500480939, £30 / $40.
A head-to-toe exploration of Chinese dress through sumptuous, detailed photography of some of the most fascinating historic and contemporary pieces in the V&A’s outstanding collection (part of the V&A Fashion in Detail series)
Chinese Dress in Detail reveals the beauty and variety of Chinese dress for women, men, and children, both historically and geographically, showcasing the intricacy of decorative embroidery and rich use of materials and weaving and dyeing techniques. The reader is granted a unique opportunity to examine historical clothing that is often too fragile to display, from quivering hair ornaments, stunning silk jackets and coats, festive robes, and pleated skirts, to pieces embellished with rare materials such as peacock-feather threads or created through unique craft skills, as well as handpicked contemporary designs. A general introduction provides an essential overview of the history of Chinese dress, plotting key developments in style, design, and mode of dress, and the traditional importance of clothing as social signifier, followed by eight thematic chapters that examine Chinese dress in exquisite detail from head to toe. Each garment is accompanied by a short text and detail photography; front-and-back line drawings are provided for key items.
Sau Fong Chan is a curator in the V&A’s Asian department and looks after the textiles and dress collections from China and Southeast Asia.
c o n t e n t s
Introduction
1 Headwear
2 Necklines and Shoulders
3 Sleeves
4 Pleats
5 Edgings
6 Buttons
7 Embroidery
8 Footwear
Glossary
Further Reading
Acknowledgments
Picture Credits
Index
Conference | Imaging Religious Ceremonies in Early Modern Europe
From ArtHist.net:
Performing Theatricality and Imaging Religious Ceremonies in Early Modern Western Europe
Centre for Architecture and Art, Ghent University, Vandenhove, 15–17 May 2024
Registration due by 8 May 2024
Bernard Picard, Le Bairam ou la Paque des Mahometans (The Bairam or the Passover of the Muhammadans), from Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde, volume 5: Cérémonies des mahométans, &c. (1737).
2023 marks the 300th anniversary of the publication of the early eighteenth-century book series Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde, a work on all the world’s religions known to Europe at that time and originally published in seven volumes between 1723 and 1737 in Amsterdam. Edited by the exiled French Huguenot Jean Frederic Bernard, the original seven volumes of the Cérémonies knew a vast distribution across European readers in the Netherlands, France, England, and the Holy Roman Empire, among other countries. Its popularity was at least partly due to the impressive set of prints included within the books. After all, the engravings were for the most part manufactured by the exiled Parisian artist, Bernard Picart, who was known as one of Europe’s most distinguished engravers at that time.
More than ten years after the publication of some pioneering studies on the project—Religionsbilder der frühen Aufklärung (2006), The Book That Changed Europe (2010), and The First Global Vision of Religion (2010)—the intriguing ceremonies and customs of the various religions depicted in the books still capture the imagination. This is not only caused by their ingenuity regarding the comparative method of inquiry into religion in general, as earlier research widely acknowledged, but also because of their importance as an early modern compendium of imaging religious ceremonies. After all, as the title already indicates, the Cérémonies discusses global religious ceremonies and customs. It focuses on performing religion, instead of on religion as such.
In line with Picart and Bernard’s project, this conference aims to focus on the ways in which early modern Europeans related to religious ceremonies of all kinds, ranging from customs that were familiar to Western Europe’s everyday religious life, to rituals from peoples across the globe that were still rather alien to early modern Europeans. How did early modern Europeans perceive religious rituals practiced in other parts of the world, particularly those in overseas territories? To what extent did early modern knowledge production on religious customs contribute to the development of early anthropology and ethnography in the latter half of the eighteenth century? How did representations of religious rituals either endorse or challenge existing knowledge on various religious practices? In what ways did the early modern period witness a shift toward a more encyclopedic approach to representing the ceremonies and customs of various religions, and how did this reflect broader intellectual trends of the Enlightenment era?
Registration is available here»
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9.00 Keynote
• Inger Leemans (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) — Bernard Picart, Nil Volentibus Arduum, and the Concept of Imagineering
10.30 Panel 1 | Imag(in)ing Religious ‘Otherness’
1 Katherine Kelaidis (National Hellenic Museum / Center for Orthodox Christian Studies) — The Familiar Other: Re/Imagining Eastern Christian Religious Ceremony in Richard Chandler’s Journey to Mount Athos
2 Alexander McCargar (University of Vienna) — A Fascinating Enemy: Ottoman Depictions in the Work of Lodovica Ottavio Burnacini
3 Matthieu Guy Michel Somon (UC Louvain) — Scenes from the Religious Life according to Alessandro Magnasco
1.30 Panel 2 | Switching up Perspectives
4 Daniel Purdy (Pennsylvania State University) — The Spectacle of Chinese Idolatry: Dutch Book Illustrations contra Jesuit Accommodation
5 Philipp Stenzig (Institut für Geschichtswissenschaften) — Jean-Baptiste Le Brun des Marettes (1651–1731)
3.30 Panel 3 | Religious Ceremonies in New Spain
6 Luis Javier Cuesta Hernandez (Universidad Iberoamericana) — A Global History of Funeral Ceremonies for Philip IV of Spain: America and Africa
7 Tomas Macsotay (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) — Between Concealing and Domesticizing: Ceremony and Community in Dominican Spaces of the Viceroyalty of New Spain (Mexico)
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9.00 Keynote
Agnès Guiderdoni (Université Catholique de Louvain) — The Hagiographic Spectacle in Seventeenth-Century France
10.30 Panel 4 | Ceremony, Festivity, and Cultures of Commemoration
8 Maria João Pereira Coutinho (Universidade Nova de Lisboa) — Fiat Ignatio, Fida Ignatio: Visual and Performative Culture of Ignatius of Loyola’s Beatification Festivals in Brussels and Douai (1610)
9 Marek Walczak (Jagiellonian University) — ‘It Is a Memorial to Posterity that All These Adornments Have Been Set Up’: Glorification of the Past in the Celebrations Commemorating the Canonisation of St. John Cantius Held in Cracow in 1775
10 Ivo Raband (University of Hamburg) — 100 Years of Faith: The Festivities for the Centennial of the Recatholicization of Antwerp (1685)
1.30 Panel 5 | The Dramaturgy of the Pilgrimage
11 Barbara Uppenkamp and Anke Naujokat (Muthesisu Kunsthochschule Kiel & RWTH Aachen University) — The Heptagonal Pilgrimage Church in Scherpenheuvel and Its Three Image Programs
12 Jaroslaw Pietzrak (Pedagogical University of Kraków) — The Spectacle of Power: Religious Ceremonies and Rituals on the Court of Queen Maria Kazimiera d’Arquien Sobieska (1699–1714)
3.30 Panel 6 | Rituality and Ceremoniality in Late Medieval and Early Modern France
13 Margaret Aziza Pappano (Queen’s University) — The Priest in the Execution Ritual: Performing Pain and Penance in Late Medieval France
14 Joy Palacios (University of Calgary) — The Mass and Entertainments in Seventeenth-Century France’s Courtly Ritual System
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9.00 Keynote
Paola Von Wyss-Giacosa (University of Zurich) — Staging Religion(s) in the Early Enlightenment: Bernard Picart’s Frontispiece for Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde
10.30 Panel 7 | Re-considering Picart and Bernard’s Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses I
15 Steff Nellis (Ghent University) — Aspects of Theatricality in Picart and Bernard’s Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses
16 Margaret Mansfield (University of California) — Encore! Encore! Picart’s Repetitions of Religious Excess and Austerity in India
17 Sara Petrella (University of Fribourg) — Embodying Americas: From Western Representations to Indigenous Material Culture
1.30 Panel 8 | Re-considering Picart and Bernard’s Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses II
18 Rachel Kupferman (Bar Ilan University) — The Twin Sets of The Kehilot Moshe Bible
19 Nicolas Kwiátkowski (UPF) — From the Son of Adam and Eve to an All-Devouring Deity: Ganesha in Early Modern European Culture
20 Pascal Rihouet (Rhode Island School of Design) — The Pope’s Triumph: Plagiarized Prints from Rome to Amsterdam
Maratti’s Birth of the Virgin Arrives at Notre Dame
From the press release (via Art Daily) . . .
Carlo Maratti, The Birth of the Virgin, ca. 1684, oil on canvas, 254 × 159 cm (South Bend: Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, Notre Dame: On loan from the Cummins Collection L2024.001).
The Raclin Murphy Museum of Art announced the arrival and installation of a major altarpiece, The Birth of the Virgin, by the Italian Baroque painter Carlo Maratti. The painting is a long-term loan from the Cummins family.
Originally commissioned in 1681 or 1682 by the canons of the Church of Santa Maria dell’Anima in Rome, the painting shows attendants caring for the newborn Mary, who turns to look at us. In the background, Anne rests in bed, her husband Joachim at her side, his hands clasped in prayer. The church for which it was commissioned is and remains the German parish in Rome.
“Impressive for both its masterful execution and grand scale, Carlo Maratti’s Birth of the Virgin adds significantly to the collection of sacred art featured at the Raclin Murphy Museum,” said Cheryl Snay, curator of European and American Art before 1900. “Seventeenth-century patrons admired the baroque artist’s sensitive handling of this favorite subject matter, making him one of the leading painters in Rome. We are fortunate to be able to present such a coveted example to our community.”
Maratti is often seen as the last major artist of the classical tradition in Rome, which originated with Raphael and Michelangelo. From his studio in Rome, he executed numerous international commissions. In 1664, he became the director of the Accademia di San Luca, Rome.
The altarpiece hung in the church until 1685, when the canons decided to decline the commission as too costly. Maratti then sold the painting to Count Friedrich Christian von Schaumburg-Lippe, who moved it to his home in Germany. Numerous preparatory sketches for the altarpiece survive in Madrid, Windsor, and Düsseldorf.
“This extraordinary work of art by one of the great masters of the late Roman Baroque is an exquisite opportunity for all visiting the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art,” shares Museum Director Joseph Antenucci Becherer. “The generosity of the Cummins family celebrates the newly opened Museum and the ever-increasing role of the life of the arts at the University of Notre Dame and the entire region.”
The monumental altarpiece is installed on the balcony flanked by the entrances to the Gallery of European Art before 1700 and the Mary, Queen of Families Chapel. Although the origins of a museum collection at the University date to 1875 and include many liturgical images, the scale and grandeur of this altarpiece is an exceptional addition.
Call for Papers | Beauty and Aesthetic Canons within Hispanic Painting
From Le Blog de l’ApAhAu:
A Beautiful Painting? Aesthetic Canons and Pictorial Production within Spanish Crown Territories, 16th–19th Centuries
Lo bello en la pintura? Cánones estéticos y producción pictórica en los territorios de la Corona española, siglos XVI–XIX
Une belle peinture? Canon(s) esthétique(s) et production picturale dans les territoires de la Couronne d’Espagne, XVIe–XIXe siècle
Paris, 9–11 December 2024
Proposals due by 30 April 2024
The beautiful in the field of Hispanic painting (in the sense of painting produced in the territories of the Spanish Crown) is a notion that is not precisely defined and debated regarding its fundamental character in art history in general, and this in favor of an approach that focuses mainly on the realistic canon of this painting. The Spanish Golden Age, religious painting, still life and its great names (Velázquez, Zurbarán, Ribera, etc.) are all linked to a form of realism or naturalism presented as the most characteristic feature of Spanish painting.
However, some recent publications on the Golden Age itself show a renewed interest and a new approach to the subject, which are also evidenced by the new directions of young researchers in the field of Hispanic painting of the 15th–19th centuries. Moreover, exciting works have already been devoted to the painting produced within colonial America, which highlight the importance of adopting a periodization in which 1700 is not a breaking point for American territories, research on painting in the colonial Philippines is hardly sketched out, and for the other territories of the Crown also it seems obvious that periodization cannot be a fixed given. Finally, a renewed interest in a historiographical approach to Spanish art history has emerged in the last decade. The history of Hispanic art is therefore undergoing a period of change.
This symposium is devoted to the question of the beautiful in painting produced within the territories of the Spanish Crown (Spain, but also Sicily, Naples, Milan, South Netherlands, Artois, Franche-Comté, as well as the American and Filipino territories) from the 16th century to the early 19th century. It aims to question both the way in which an ideal has been forged in the painting produced in these territories, often associated in historiography with a «realistic» or «naturalist» canon, with all the problems that these terms imply, and the way in which this canon was perceived and received, or even adapted, transformed to the different periods. What was considered beautiful in the paintings produced in the territories under Spanish rule during modern times? What was the aesthetic ideal of the painter and the viewer? Was beauty really the painters’ first objective? What about the 18th century, particularly after the dynastic change, and the arrival at the Court of artists from France and Italy? What about the 16th century?
From the historiographic point of view, have the paradigms of Beauty been so modified that they have made Spanish painting lose its signs of recognition (realism, predominance of the religious), and have made it forget? What place should be given in this context to the greatest names in painting (Morales, Ribera, Zurbarán, Velázquez, Goya, etc.)? Can we think of the history of Spanish art by giving them less space in the aesthetic canons associated with it?
This event is dedicated to young researchers, and more specifically to doctoral and postdoctoral students working on one of the aspects described above. These French researchers will be able to enter into dialogue with foreign doctoral students, in particular Spanish ones, who are of course also expected: their presence will make it possible to assess whether there are gaps in their approaches, particularly because of the historiographic traditions on which they are based.
Contribution proposals in the form of an abstract of a maximum of 200 words and a brief biographical profile must be sent before the 30th April 2024 to clemence.raccah@inha.fr, iris.romagne@louvre.fr, and cecile.vincent-cassy@cyu.fr. Travel and living expenses (3 nights) will be covered by the organization of the meeting.
Places
Maison du Patrimoine et de la Photographie, Charenton (9th December), Institut national d’histoire de l’art, Paris, Vasari room (10th December), Centre Dominique-Vivant Denon, Paris (11th December)
Organization Committee
• Clémence Raccah (INHA)
• Iris Romagné (CY Université and Musée du Louvre)
• Cécile Vincent-Cassy (CY Cergy Paris Université)
Scientific Committee
• Luisa Elena Alcalá (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid)
• Charlotte Chastel-Rousseau (Musée du Louvre)
• Elsa Espin (CY Cergy Paris Université)
• Pablo González Tornel (Museo de Bellas Artes de Valencia)
• Álvaro Molina Martín (UNED)
• Felipe Pereda (Harvard University)
• Cécile Vincent-Cassy (CY Cergy Paris Université)
Call for Papers | Historically Free African Americans in Representation
From ArtHist.net:
Historically Free African Americans in Visual and Spatial Representation
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, 2–3 September 2024
Proposals due by 20 April 2024
Organized by Andrea Frohne
Art historians have overwhelmingly focused on representations of enslavement. In her 2015 book Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth Century, Jasmine Nichole Cobb calls for a “disentangling [of] Blackness from slavery within the shared space of the nation” (6). This workshop focuses on free African American people through art, visual culture, and studies of space. It investigates circumstances of freedom and the disconnection from slavery prior to the Civil War, representations of free people of colour and descendants in visual culture and studies of space into the 21st century, and 17th- and 18th-century White European immigration into Black America.
For pre-Civil War processes and circumstances of legalising freedom, presentations may address free Black life from birth, manumission, or the Underground Railroad. Freedom at birth occurred when children born of free mothers were immediately free at birth regardless of racial categorisation. Second, manumission processes included documents or wills written by enslavers and enslaved people purchasing their and their family members’ own freedom. Third, freedom seekers escaped on the Underground Railroad into lands where slavery was illegal. Once liberated or free at birth, descendants of all of the above remained free through the centuries.
Presentations may focus on artworks made by free people of colour, such as sculptor Edmonia Lewis, portrait photographer J.P. Ball, landscape artist Robert S. Duncanson, and painters Henry Ossawa Turner and Edward Mitchell Bannister. How did their status as free play a role in their artistic careers or impact the content of their artworks? Papers may also focus on mobility and migration into free Black settlements across the United States and Canada. Topics include visual and spatial analyses of Black churches and schools, ownership of property shown in land surveys, rural roads named after free families of colour, or cemeteries in areas such as Black Philadelphia, Seneca Village in Manhattan, the Ohio River Valley (Lett Settlement, Tablertown, Berlin Crossroads, Cutler, Blackfork, Barnett Ridge), Beech Settlement in Indiana, Nicodemus in Kansas, Mecosta County in Michigan, Chestnut Ridge in West Virginia, Amherstburg in Ontario, Buxton in Ontario, etc.
Finally, with our location in Germany for the workshop, we seek to explore European migration into enslaving territories. What are the through lines of White families who become Black in the new world? They may have become enslavers who bore liberated children of colour. Or they may be indentured servants who bore free children of colour. Some free people of colour in the United States descended from German, British, Irish, and Scottish forebears. What are the global ramifications of such disrupted, disconnected genealogies? Overall, the workshop seeks to contribute new scholarship to the underrecognised subject of free African Americans and descendant populations in visual and spatial representation.
Please note that the language of the workshop is in English. Abstracts (fewer than 250 words) with short bio-notes (fewer than 150 words) for 25-minute presentations are invited for this in-person event at the Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. Accommodations in Munich and meals during the workshop will be provided, and some support for travel may be available.
Andrea Frohne, Fellow Alumna of the Käte Hamburger Centre and Professor at Ohio University, is the workshop convener. To apply, please email Dr Frohne at frohne@ohio.edu by 20 April 2024. Decisions will be conveyed by 1 May.
Conference | American Historical Print Collectors Society
From the AHPCS website.:
American Historical Print Collectors Society 48th Annual Meeting
Williamstown, MA, 15–17 May 2024
Registration due by 15 April 2024
The 48th annual meeting of the American Historical Print Collectors Society—open to both members and non-members—will take place in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
Williamstown, a charming college town, located in the shadow of Mount Greylock, the highest point in the Berkshire Mountains of northwestern Massachusetts, is home to Williams College and the Clark Art Institute. The surrounding area abounds historic associations and cultural attractions, including the homes and studios of artists Daniel Chester French and Norman Rockwell and authors Hermann Melville, William Cullen Bryant, and Edith Wharton. Nathaniel Hawthorne completed The House of the Seven Gables while living in a little red house now located on the grounds of the Tanglewood Music Center, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Other nearby attractions include Hancock Shaker Village, the Berkshire Atheneum, and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MassMOCA). The AHPCS has arranged special tours of several of the region’s outstanding cultural collections for this year’s annual meeting, as well as lining up a program of first-rate speakers, including Georgia Barnhill, Robert Emlen, Michael McCue, Rebecca Szantyr, and Christina Michelon.
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Historic Deerfield
The meeting will begin on Wednesday with a full-day trip to Deerfield, Massachusetts, to visit Historic Deerfield, an outdoor museum that interprets the history and culture of western Massachusetts from the earliest English settlers through the arts and crafts movement. The visit will include special tours of the Flynt Center of New England Life and the Henry N. Flynt Library to view highlights of those collections, a buffet lunch at the Deerfield Inn, and ample time to explore the twelve historic buildings on the site.
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Williams College, Williams College Museum of Art
A continental breakfast will be provided before the morning session at the Williams Inn.
Morning session:
• Georgia Barnhill on illustrated books
• Robert Emlen on prints of the Shakers
• Michael McCue on Louis Harlow
• Christina Michelon on the Great Boston Fire
The session will be followed by a buffet lunch at the Inn. The afternoon will be spent at Williams College, a liberal arts college founded in 1793. While primarily an undergraduate institution, the college offers a graduate program in art history in conjunction with the Clark Art Institute and MassMOCA. The Williams College Museum of Art began collecting in the mid-nineteenth century and is especially well known for its collection of works by Maurice and Charles Prendergast, the largest collection of the Prendergasts’ works in existence. In addition to the WCMA, there will be a curator-led program at the Chapin Library, featuring its extensive collection of Americana, including prints, illustrated books, and ephemera. Back at the Williams Inn, a buffet dinner will be preceded by the Print Mart.
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The Clark Art Institute
Friday’s program at the Williams Inn will begin with a continental breakfast, followed by the annual business meeting. Following the meeting:
Rebecca Szantyr will deliver a talk on Atmosphere in Prints, focusing on the collections at the Clark Art Institute
Immediately after Rebecca’s talk, there will be a buffet lunch at the Clark, where the afternoon will be spent in curator-led tours of the exhibition Paper Cities, visits to the Manton Study Center to view a selection of American prints, and tours of the Williamstown Art Conservation Center (WACC).
The Clark Art Institute, which opened to the public in 1955, has expanded greatly through the years, adding to the collections donated by Sterling and Francine Clark, renovating the original museum building and adding the Manton Research Center and two new buildings designed by Tadao Ando, the Clark Center and the Lunder Center at Stone Hill.
That evening, the meeting will culminate with a plated dinner at the Williams Inn, followed by the annual auction to benefit the AHPCS.
For more information and to register, please visit the AHPCS website.
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