Exhibition | Ingenious Women, 16th to 18th Centuries
Angelika Kauffmann, Clio, Muse of History, detail, ca. 1770–75 (Augsburg: Schaezlerpalais–Deutsche Barockgalerie; photo by Andreas Brücklmair).
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Opening this fall at the the Bucerius Kunst Forum:
Ingenious Women: Women Artists and Their Companions
Geniale Frauen: Künstlerinnen und ihre Weggefährten
Bucerius Kunst Forum, Hamburg, 14 October 2023 — 28 January 2024
Kunstmuseum Basel, 2 March — 30 June 2024
With the exhibition Ingenious Women: Women Artists and Their Companions, the Bucerius Kunst Forum traces the careers of outstanding women artists (Künstlerinnen) from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. For the first time, the family context in which the women artists pursued their careers is addressed and made visible through juxtaposition with works by their fathers, brothers, husbands, and fellow painters. Today often forgotten, female artists of their time were able to achieve extraordinary success in a wide variety of family constellations: they became court painters, teachers, entrepreneurs, and even publishers and were awarded the highest honours.
The exhibition presents around 140 works by 26 women artists, including Sofonisba Anguissola, Judith Leyster, Marietta Robusti (Tintoretto’s daughter), and Angelika Kauffmann. Masterful portraits, still lifes, and historical scenes in painting, along with drawings and prints from across Europe, ranging from the Renaissance and Baroque periods to early Neoclassicism, will be brought together in Hamburg. For the first time, works by women artists will be juxtaposed with those of their male colleagues in such a pointed way that both formal and stylistic similarities and differences will come to the fore.
In the early modern period it was not altogether impossible for women to pursue a career as an artist, but it was definitely outside the norm and therefore always subject to special challenges. Anyone wishing to practice a freelance profession had to join a guild, but some regions denied membership to women, and in others it entailed considerable hurdles and costs. A conspicuous number of women artists of this period came from or married into artistic families. They worked for their fathers, brothers, and husbands, and often in secret. At the royal courts of Europe, the situation was different: with an open mind to artistic achievement—regardless of origin or gender—women were able to work openly as artists at court. Women such as Lavinia Fontana, Anna Dorothea Therbusch, and Rachel Ruysch asserted themselves against social norms, capturing the attention and earned the esteem of their contemporaries. The fact that they fell into oblivion is also due to the history of art scholarship, in which a male gaze dominated until the advanced twentieth century.
The exhibition shows the unique careers of these pioneering women artists and offers new insights into their lives and work, as well as thought-impulses on contemporary issues such as equality and the reconciliation of work and family.
Bodo Brinkmann and Katrin Dyballa, eds., with contributions by Beiträge von B. Brinkmann, K. Dyballa, S. Engel, A. Mensger, R. Müller, S. Salomon, A. Tacke, S. Pisot, I. Wenderholm, and S. Werthemann, Geniale Frauen: Künstlerinnen und ihre Weggefährten (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2023), 300 pages, ISBN: 978-3777442365, €45.
Exhibition | Out of the Shadows: Women Artists
Installation view, Out of the Shadows: Women Artists from the 16th to the 18th Century, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister at Dresden’s Zwinger, 2023.
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This installation on view at the Zwinger closes in a few weeks:
Out of the Shadows: Women Artists from the 16th to the 18th Century
Aus dem Schatten: Künstlerinnen vom 16. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert
Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Zwinger, Dresden, 12 May — 20 August 2023
With this cabinet exhibition, the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister turns its attention to women artists (Künstlerinnen) from the 16th to the 18th century, who for a long time have been overshadowed by the ‘Great Masters’ of art history. With their works represented in the collection, they are a minority, and to this day their names are far less familiar than those of their male counterparts. This is not due to inability, but to a structural discrimination that is perpetuated in art historiography.
Women generally were not allowed formal academic training nor drawing from live (nude) models. Only a few women were lucky enough to grow up and be promoted in an artistic environment, so that institutional and social structures did not necessarily hinder their advancement. In many cases, they were the daughters of artists trained in their father’s workshop.
The cosmopolite Angelika Kauffmann (1741–1807) achieved widespread recognition in her lifetime and is also represented here with five works. In a time when only men were seen as true artists and women were credited, at most, with talent but never genius, the painter managed to assert herself by also being a shrewd strategist and self-promotor. She produced numerous history paintings with references to antiquity in which women take the leading roles.
Lavinia Fontana (1552–1614) was one of the first women of the modern period to work as an independent artist. She painted numerous portraits and history paintings of mythological and biblical themes, some of them in large format. The devotional painting in Dresden, The Holy Family, is an early work by the Bolognese artist which, after undergoing restoration, will be included in the show in mid-August.
This concentrated presentation also features copperplate engravings by Diana Scultori from the holdings of the Kupferstich-Kabinett as well as paintings and prints by other noteworthy women artists such as Elisabetta Sirani, Barbara Longhi, Rachel Ruysch, Maria van Oosterwijck, and Theresa Concordia Mengs.
Stephan Koja and Iris Yvonne Wagner, Out of the Shadows: Women Artists from the 16th to the 18th Century (Dresden: Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, 2023), 144 pages, ISBN: 978-3954987559 (German edition) / ISBN: 978-3954987696 (English edition), €34.
Call for Essays | The Material History of the Visually Altered Book
Extra-illustrated copy of Johann Amos Comenius, Orbis Sensualium Pictus, translated by Charles Hoole, 12th edition, (London, 1777) in Bodleian Library, Vet.A6.e.2518.
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Extra Extra: The Material History of the Visually Altered Book
A collection of essays edited by Julie Park and Adam Smyth
Proposals due by 31 August 2023
Julie Park and Adam Smyth invite proposals for essays to be included in an edited collection on the long history of the extra-illustrated book. Extra-illustration had a vital flowering in late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century culture, but what are the earlier roots of this practice in medieval and early modern cultures and what are the legacies today? The editors welcome proposals by contributors from different backgrounds, career stages, disciplines, and fields (art historians, book historians, book artists, book sellers, curators and librarians, media studies scholars, and more) to consider the methods, materials, forms, and consequences of extra-illustration as a transhistorical medium and activity. Long before and well after Richard Bull’s pivotal act of reconstructing James Granger’s Biographical History of England (1769) by affixing engraved prints to illustrate its textual body, book readers and makers have added images to pre-existing works of writing, fundamentally altering their physical design and composition, and destabilizing categories of book, art and object in doing so. How might we consider, for instance, medieval books, continually modified by their owners with added images and text, or the contemporary artist’s book, frequently an alteration of a previously printed book object through added visual elements, as forms of extra-illustration?
How might we think of extra-illustration in terms of a series of tensions: between amplification (the book extrapolated) and destruction (the book blown up); between the classificatory logic of James Granger and chaos; between order and flux; between the iconophilic and the iconoclastic. Is extra-illustration an erotic, libidinal process? Is it a respectable activity for a quiet drawing room, or is it, in Holbrook Jackson’s words, “a singularly perverted idea”? What is the extra-illustrated volume’s relationship to the codex: tribute, or parody? What is the politics of extra-illustration? Is extra-illustration connected to retreat and consolation, or is it driven by a grasping, colonial ambition? Is it a radical upending of ideas of order and convention, or is it an assertion of hierarchy? How do we read—or how did readers read—these combinatory texts? And are there extra-illustrators who occupy a particularly important place in this tradition—figures like Charlotte and Alexander Sutherland, perhaps, or Richard Bull, or John Kitto?
Please submit proposals of 175–250 words, with a brief (one-page) CV, to Julie Park (jvp6261@psu.edu) and Adam Smyth (adam.smyth@ell.ox.ac.uk) by 31 August 2023.
The Burlington Magazine, June 2023
The eighteenth century in the June issue of The Burlington (with apologies for being so slow to post, –CH) . . .
The Burlington Magazine 165 (June 2023)
e d i t o r i a l
• “The Future of the RIBA Drawings Collection,” p. 583.
a r t i c l e s
• Tessa Murdoch, “Roubiliac and Sprimont: A Friendship Revisited,” pp. 600–11.
Recent research into the circles of Huguenot artists and craftsmen working in London in the mid-eighteenth century has provided new evidence about the friendship and working relationship between the sculptor Louis-François Roubiliac and the goldsmith Nicholas Sprimont. This lends weight to the belief that Roubiliac provided small models for casting in silver and bronze as well as for the porcelain manufactory co-founded by Sprimont in Chelsea in 1745.
• Perrin Stein, “Liotard and Boucher: A Question of Precedence,” pp. 612–19.
There has been much debate about whether Liotard or Boucher invented the motif of a woman in Turkish costume reading a book while reclining on a sofa, which appears in both their work in the 1740s. New evidence that resolves the question highlights the very different ways these two artists constructed exoticism.
• Ann Gunn, “Titian’s Perseus and Andromeda: A Missing Link in the Chain of Provenance,” pp. 620–22.
• Simon Spier and Judith Phillips, “Joséphine Bowes’s Gift to Napoleon III: Antoine-Jean Gros’s Napoleon Distributing the Cross of the Legion of Honour to Artists during His Visit to the Salon of 1808,” pp. 626–29.
r e v i e w s
• Alexandra Gajewski, “The New Museum in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris,” pp. 630–37.
When in 1995–98 the books of the Bibliothèque nationale, Paris, were moved to their monumental new home in the west of the city, the library’s historic collections of antiquities, coins, medals, and other precious objects remained in the original complex of buildings in central Paris where they had been shown since the eighteenth century. Their reinstallation in the library’s newly restored museum rooms was opened last year.
• Kirstin Kennedy, Review of the exhibition Treasures from Faraway: Medieval and Renaissance Objects from The Schroder Collection (Strawberry Hill, 2023), pp. 641–43.
• Aileen Dawson, Review of the exhibition English Delftware (Bristol Museum and Art Gallery (from February 2023), pp. 652–54.
• Belinda Thomson, Review of the exhibition Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism (Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2023), pp. 654–57. [In Paris, the show is entitled Berthe Morisot et l’art du XVIIIe siècle: Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard, Perronneau]
• J. V. G. Mallet, Review of Lilli Hollein, Rainald Franz, and Timothy Wilson, eds., Tin-Glaze and Image Culture: The MAK Maiolica Collection in its Wider Context (Arnoldsche Art Publishers, 2022), pp. 660–62.
• Clare Hornsby, Review of Andrew Robinson, Piranesi: Earliest Drawings / I primi disegni (Artemide Edizioni, 2022), pp. 666–67.
• G. A. Bremner, Review of Gauvin Alexander Bailey, The Architecture of Empire: France in India and Southeast Asia, 1664–1962 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022), pp. 667–68
o b i t u a r y
• Peter Hecht, Obituary for Ger Luijten (1956–2022), pp. 675–76.
s u p p l e m e n t
• Recent Acquisitions (2016–22) of European Works of Art at the Detroit Institute of Arts
Colloquium | A Multifaceted Rococo
From the conference programme:
A Multifaceted Rococo / Un Rococo Multiforme
Musée de Grenoble and MSH Alpes, Grenoble, 21-22 September 2023
Organized by Marlen Schneider and Michael Yonan, with Joëlle Vaissiere
Né à Paris sous l’Ancien Régime en réponse à la culture artistique du règne de Louis XIV, le rococo semble évocateur de toute une ère de l’histoire française : un art dédié aux surfaces et à la sensualité, doté d’une complexité formelle et visuelle et d’une abondance ornementale. Or, le rococo a eu un impact sur l’évolution de l’art du XVIIIe siècle à une échelle globale, et certaines nations ont même vu naître des variations capables de rivaliser avec les exemples parisiens. Le colloque permettra d’aborder à la fois le rococo dans sa dimension transnationale, mais aussi sa culture matérielle, prenant en compte les formes et usages multiples de l’art rocaille. Cette approche mettra en lumière un large éventail d’utilisations, d’expressions formelles, de choix stylistiques, de significations culturelles et de pratiques, qui dépassent grandement nos connaissances actuelles.
t h u r s d a y , 2 1 s e p t e m b e r 2 0 2 3
14.30 Accueil
15.00 Introduction — Michael Yonan (University of California) and Marlen Schneider (Université Grenoble Alpes/LARHRA)
15.30 Redéfinir le rococo
Modération: Marlen Schneider (Université Grenoble Alpes/LARHRA)
• Carl Magnusson (Université de Lausanne) — Réduire le foisonnement artistique du XVIIIe siècle en style
• Michael Yonan (University of California) — The Ecological Rococo of 18th-Century Bavaria
• Philippe Halbert (Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art) — Canada’s Spiritual Rococo
f r i d a y , 2 2 s e p t e m b e r 2 0 2 3
9.00 Accueil
9.15 Géographies du rococo
Modération: Michael Yonan (University of California)
• Philippe Bordes (Université Lyon II / LARHRA) — Du Rococo européen à Paris dans les années 1780: Johann Julius Heinsius et Gaetano Merchi
• Vladimir Simic (University of Belgrade) — Transcending Borders: Rococo Artistic Synthesis in Southeast Europe and the Habsburg Influence
• Marlen Schneider (UGA / LARHRA) — Le Rococo frédéricien fut-il français? Les sources et enjeux multiples de l’art de cour sous Frédéric II en Prusse
• Stacey Sloboda (UMass Boston) — Making Lines Matter: Carving in 18th-Century London
14.00 Matérialités
Modération: Sophie Raux (Université Lyon II / LARHRA)
• Thomas Wilke (Universität Greifswald) — Rocaille in the Making: François Antoine Vassé’s Designs for the French Navy
• Agata Dworzak (Jagiellonian University) — Expressive Rococo: Lviv Rococo Sculpture between Emotions and Form
• Sandra Costa Saldanha (Universidade de Coimbra) — The Rise of Rococo: Approaches on a Long-term Sensibility in 18th-Century Portuguese Sculpture
• Joana Mylek (Munich) — An Abundance of Everything: The Bohemian Rococo in the 19th Century
17.30 Conclusions
Call for Papers | Collecting and Knowledge Production through Travel
A reminder that a few sessions at RSA push the ‘Renaissance’ well into the early modern period. The full Call for Papers is available here.
Collecting and Knowledge Production through Travel (The Society for the History of Collecting)
Renaissance Society of America Conference, Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, 21–23 March 2024
Proposals due by 8 August 2023
The importance of travel in the circulation of ideas and goods in the early modern period cannot be overemphasized. Travel—whether for commercial, private, or public purposes—was a source of information and experience, and travellers collected at every level, bringing back new and rare objects as well as commercially important goods. Travellers might return with works of art, which they then organised and arranged into their collections, while traders negotiated and acquired rarities to be sold on the European markets. However, collectors created imaginary worlds in their collections as they gathered information, ideas, descriptions, and literary texts from cultures other than their own, or employed ekphrasis to relate new narratives and new art works.
The proposed sessions at RSA 2024 aim to investigate the intellectual contexts in which objects were collected, the relationships between travel accounts, whether published or unpublished, and the creation of new understandings of worlds beyond the immediate world of the collector. We intend to explore the dynamic relationships between trade and collectibles, the perceptions created by travelogues and travel manuscripts, and travels of the imagination, which could transcend the voyages made and recounted. We invite new research into any aspect of these topics as we aim to recover the intellectual environment created by travel in early modern Europe that influenced collectors. Equally important were the networks created by travellers who voyaged to different centres in Europe and beyond, possibly through previous contacts but equally creating new contacts and new networks in which collections were discussed and exchanged. We are also interested in papers that delve into the question of travel from a non-European perspective.
As an associate organization of RSA, the Society for the History of Collecting can sponsor up to four sessions. Proposals are invited for 20-minute papers. They must include a title, an abstract of no more than 150 words, keywords, and a one-page CV (including PhD completion year or expected completion). Speakers will need to be members of RSA at the time of the conference, and we strongly encourage them to be members of the Society for the History of Collecting. Proposals should be sent to session convenors Sophia McCabe, Adriana Turpin, and Lisa de Zoete at info@societyhistorycollecting.org with the heading “RSA 2024 Proposal” by 8 August 2023.
Conference | Listening In: Architectures, Cities, and Landscapes
From the conference website:
Listening In: Conversations on Architectures, Cities, and Landscapes, 1700–1900
ETH Zürich, Hönggerberg and Zentrum campus, 13–15 September 2023
Who do we listen to when we write histories of architectures, cities, and landscapes? How many women authors can we find among our sources? How many of them are cited by those whose research we read? We argue that women and other marginalised groups have always been part of conversations on architectures, cities, and landscapes—but we have not had the space to listen to them. This conference is an invitation to reconstruct such conversations, real, imagined, and metaphorical ones, taking place in the 18th and 19th centuries, in any region, in order to diversify the ways we write histories. Taking the art of conversation, integral as both practice and form to the period in Western thought, and repurposing it to dismantle the exclusivity of historiography, this conference calls for contributions which bring women into dialogue with others.
Listening In proposes a new approach to the ‘canon’ and its protagonists. Rather than either fighting its existence or expanding it by means of ‘exceptions to the rule’, we call for the setting up of productive conversations. We acknowledge that the canon never exists on its own; instead, it is shaped by what Griselda Pollock has called “that which, while repressed, is always present as its structuring other” (1999, 8). This conference is envisaged as a listening exercise. We regard a conversation as both codified practice as well as a specific act of verbal exchange, spoken or written, on a particular subject—here architectures, cities, and landscapes—occurring in a specific site, from street to salon, kitchen to court, construction site to theatre, field to church, or book to newspaper, to name but a few.
Listening In is organised in the context of two externally funded research projects based at gta, ETH Zurich. Women Writing Architecture, 1700–1900 (WoWA) is funded by the ERC, led by Anne Hultzsch, and studies female experiences of architecture and landscapes as recorded in women’s writings from South America and Europe. The SNSF-funded project Building Identity: Character in Architectural Discourse and Design, 1750–1850, led by Sigrid de Jong and Maarten Delbeke, focuses on the uses and meaning of the notion of ‘character’ in architectural criticism and practice. Both projects share an interest in the experiences of marginalised groups, especially those who identified as women, and strive to have them heard not in a niche, but in the centre of our field. With this conference we wish to open up our approaches to a wider field of research, going beyond our respective geographical frameworks.
There will be a limited number of free audience tickets for our two-day conference. To register and for more information please visit our website.
This conference is part of a project that has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No.949525).
Key Note Speakers
• Prof Mabel O. Wilson
• Prof Jane Rendell
Organised by
Group Anne Hultzsch and Professor Maarten Delbeke Chair, Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta), ETH Zürich
Scientific Committee
Prof Maarten Delbeke, PD Dr Anne Hultzsch, Dr Sigrid de Jong, Dr Sol Pérez Martínez, Dr Nikos Magouliotis
Orginising Committee
Prof Maarten Delbeke, PD Dr Anne Hultzsch, Dr Sigrid de Jong, Dr Sol Pérez Martínez, Dr Nikos Magouliotis, Dr Noelle Paulson, Elena Rieger, Alejandra Fries
Call for Papers | Women Making Space in South America, 1400–1900
Women Making Space in South America, 1400–1900 (#S11)
Session at EAHN, Athens, 19–23 June 2024
Chairs: Anne Hultzsch and Dr Sol Pérez Martínez, ETH Zurich
Proposals due by 8 September 2023
The period between 1400 and 1900 in South America is characterised by a set of transitions and processes of transculturation as indigeneity emerged from the clash with colonisation. Empires competed, indigenous cultures grappled with European colonisation, and both later fed into American nation building. This session focuses on the period between the creation of the Tawantinsuyu, the Incan Realm of the Four Parts, in 1438, thus the definition of Andean territory as a continuous region, to the 1880s when the Mapuche people in Southern Chile and Argentina were the last indigenous group to lose control over their territories. The session aims to address gaps in the architectural historiography of the Andean region especially regarding moments of transition where “cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other,” creating “contact zones” (Pratt, 1991). We seek to start these new histories through the perspective of women—from any class or ethnicity—as one of the groups often excluded from scholarship on the period. We ask how those identifying as women influenced, shaped, critiqued, and made spaces within and alongside the force field of the contact zone, with its asymmetrical power relations, its struggles, pains, and opportunities?
Challenging linear Euro-American architectural narratives of styles imported to the supposed new world, we invite contributions exploring the role of women in shaping public and private spaces in the Andean territories—from home and convent to street and plaza. Practices to be examined for female space-making opportunities could include, for example, building, homemaking, designing, writing, patronage, financing, teaching, lobbying, gardening, or farming, even mothering. Contributions should explore questions emerging from the triangle between gender, architectures, and South America as a contact zone. What are the spatial categories most useful when exploring women ‘making space’ in the period and region (Matrix, 1984)? Does the public-private dichotomy of separate spheres serve here? What sources provide evidence how women made space? Which writing techniques yield the best results, from archival tracing to historical fiction? How can we fill gaps when there are few traces (Hartman, 2021)?
Besides a methodological appeal for new approaches, the session also queries key terminologies of architectural history: Who is the space-maker during this period? What is the relationship between space-making and the architect? Did the professionalisation of architecture during the 19th century further the exclusion of women from space-making practices? Was there a period of increased access colonial or institutional transitions closed doors to women? Are there comparable developments in other regions?
This session hopes to facilitate a pivotal change to how we look at the formation of architectural cultures in the past through the eyes of women and their lived experiences, considering questions of race, class, or religion, besides those of gender. As scholarship in the field of Latin American architectural history has so far often been dominated by isolated time periods defined by the male coloniser—such as pre-colonial, colonial, post-colonial, modernism—the proposed period between c. 1400 and 1900 invites cross-readings based on dynamic approaches to historical moments, places, and protagonists.
Information about the session can be found here.
Abstracts are invited by September 8, 2023, and should consist of no more than 300 words. Please submit your proposal following the instructions on the conference website. Submit at eahn2024@gmail.com along with the applicant’s name, email address, professional affiliation, address, telephone number, and a short curriculum vitae, all included in one single PDF file. The file must be named as follows: session or round table number, hyphen, surname e.g. S11-Tsiambaos.pdf.
Display | Works by José Campeche and Francisco Oller at MFA, Boston
From the press release (20 June 2023) . . .
José Campeche y Jordán, Lady on Horseback, 1785, oil on panel, 40 × 30 cm (Museo de Arte de Ponce, Luis A. Ferré Foundation).
Paintings by legendary Puerto Rican artists José Campeche and Francisco Oller are presented in dialogue with art from the same period in the MFA’s collection. The Museo de Arte de Ponce continues to share its collection with museums worldwide as it rebuilds its Edward Durell Stone-designed building damaged by the January 2020 earthquakes.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (MFA) and the Museo de Arte de Ponce (MAP) jointly announce that important works by José Campeche y Jordán (1751–1809) and Francisco Oller y Cestero (1833–1917)—the most influential Puerto Rican artists of the 18th and 19th centuries—are now on display at the MFA (as of 29 June 2023). This special installation features five paintings by Campeche and Oller from MAP’s collection, including one of the most iconic works in the history of Puerto Rican art, Campeche’s Lady on Horseback (1785). Oller’s famed Hacienda Aurora (1898), as well as two rare paintings on ceramic plates, open conversations about histories of the Puerto Rican landscape and artistic exchanges across Europe and the Americas.
“This partnership with the Museo de Arte de Ponce creates an unprecedented opportunity for us to introduce our audiences to Campeche and Oller, two deeply significant Puerto Rican painters who remain understudied outside of the island,” said Matthew Teitelbaum, Ann and Graham Gund Director. “Displayed in our Art of the Americas Wing alongside important works of colonial art and landscape painting from our collection, these special loans from MAP will highlight the contributions of Puerto Rican artists and offer a new point of connection for Boston’s vibrant Puerto Rican community.”
The paintings will be highlighted during tours at the MFA’s annual Latinx Heritage Night on September 21 as well as through additional programs.
The collection of the Museo de Arte de Ponce consists of approximately 4,500 works of art and is recognized for important examples of Baroque, Pre-Raphaelite, and Victorian art. The renowned collection of Puerto Rican art makes up about one-third of the museum’s holdings, including works from the 18th to 21st centuries. Following a catastrophic series of earthquakes in January 2020 that damaged the internationally recognized Edward Durell Stone-designed building, the main galleries of MAP have remained closed to the public.
As the galleries are rebuilt, MAP remains committed to keeping the collection accessible through collaborations with institutions on the island and beyond. In New York City, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is currently displaying five Victorian masterpieces, including Flaming June by Frederic Leighton, John Everet Millais’s The Escape of a Heretic, 1559, and Edward Burne-Jones’s Small Briar Rose series. From September 2022 to June 2023, Chicago’s National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture exhibited Nostalgia for My Island: Puerto Rican Painting from the Museo do Arte de Ponce (1786–1962). Additional loans are expected to be announced in other major cities in the United States, as well as in Europe.
“Not only is the museum a cultural institution ingrained in the fabric of Puerto Rican society, but it is also internationally renowned because of the extraordinary collections it houses, “said Cheryl Hartup, Director of the Museo de Arte de Ponce. “When the works travel, a conversation is created within the ecosystem of international art institutions and their collections and audiences. We couldn’t be more thrilled to share iconic paintings by Puerto Rican artists with the MFA, Boston as the museum is repaired.”
The Museo de Arte de Ponce expects to fully reopen in 2024.
New Book | Textile in Architecture
From Routledge:
Didem Ekici, Patricia Blessing, Basile Baudez, eds., Textile in Architecture: From the Middle Ages to Modernism (Routledge, 2023), 240 pages, ISBN: 978-1032250441 (hardback), $136 / ISBN: 978-1032250427 (paperback), $39.
This book investigates the interconnections between textile and architecture via a variety of case studies from the Middle Ages through the twentieth century and from diverse geographic contexts.
Among the oldest human technologies, building and weaving have intertwined histories. Textile structures go back to Palaeolithic times and are still in use today and textile furnishings have long been used in interiors. Beyond its use as a material, textile has offered a captivating model and metaphor for architecture through its ability to enclose, tie together, weave, communicate, and adorn. Recently, architects have shown a renewed interest in the textile medium due to the use of computer-aided design, digital fabrication, and innovative materials and engineering. The essays edited and compiled here, work across disciplines to provide new insights into the enduring relationship between textiles and architecture. The contributors critically explore the spatial and material qualities of textiles as well as cultural and political significance of textile artifacts, patterns, and metaphors in architecture.
Textile in Architecture is organized into three sections: “Ritual Spaces,” which examines the role of textiles in the formation and performance of socio-political, religious, and civic rituals; “Public and Private Interiors” explores how textiles transformed interiors corresponding to changing aesthetics, cultural values, and material practices; and “Materiality and Material Translations,” which considers textile as metaphor and model in the materiality of built environment. Including cases from Morocco, Samoa, France, India, the UK, Spain, the Ancient Andes and the Ottoman Empire, this is essential reading for any student or researcher interested in textiles in architecture through the ages.
Didem Ekici is Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture and Built Environment at the University of Nottingham. She is the co-editor of Housing and the City (Routledge, 2022). Healing Spaces, Modern Architecture, and the Body (Routledge, 2017) as well as the author of numerous articles on modern architecture culture. She is currently working on her monograph titled Body, Cloth, and Clothing in Architecture from the Age of Mass Manufacture to the First World War.
Patricia Blessing is Assistant Professor of Islamic Art History in the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University. Her first book, Rebuilding Anatolia after the Mongol Conquest: Islamic Architecture in the Lands of Rūm, 1240–1330 (Ashgate, 2014) investigates the relationship between patronage, politics, and architectural style after the integration of the region into the Mongol empire. Her second book, Architecture and Material Politics in the Fifteenth-Century Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2022) analyses how transregional exchange and the use of paper shaped building practices across the Ottoman realm.
Basile Baudez is Assistant Professor of architectural history in the Art & Archaeology department at Princeton University. His first book Architecture et Tradition Académique au Siècle des Lumières (2012) questions the role of architects in early modern European academies. He co-edited several volumes dedicated to French architecture and curated exhibitions on architectural drawings at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Courtauld Institute of Art. His latest book, Inessential Colors: Architecture on Paper in Early Modern Europe (Princeton University Press, 2021) questions the role of color in Western architectural representation from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century. He currently works on an urban history of textiles in 18th-century Venice.
c o n t e n t s
Part 1 | Ritual Spaces
Introduction to Part One — Didem Ekici
1 The Red Tent in the Red City: The Caliphal Qubba in Almohad Marrakesh — Abbey Stockstill
2 ‘He will Lift off the Covering Which is Over All the Peoples’: Seeing Through Medieval Lenten Veils — Clare Frances Kemmerer
3 Architectural Space and Textiles: Tying Samoan Society Together — Anne E. Guernsey Allen
Part 2 | Public and Private Interiors
Introduction to Part Two — Basile Baudez
4 Le Rideau Tire: Interior Drapery, Architectural Space, and Desire in Eighteenth-Century France — Mei Mei Rado
5 The Fabric of the New: Mediating Architectural Change in Late Colonial India — Abigail McGowan
6 Contrast and Cohesion: Textiles and Architecture in 1930’s London — Emily M. Orr
Part 3 | Materiality and Material Translations
Introduction to Part Three — Patricia Blessing
7 Textiles by Other Means: Seeing and Conceptualizing Textile Representations in Early Islamic Architecture — Theodore Van Loan
8 The Textility of the Alhambra — Olga Bush
9 The Textile Foundations of Ancient Andean Architecture — Andrew James Hamilton
10 The Ruler’s Clothes and the Manifold Dimensions of Textile Patterns on Muslim Funeral Architecture in the Mausoleum of the First Crimean Khans — Nicole Kancal-Ferrari
11 A Tented Baroque: Ottoman Fabric (and) Architecture in the Long Nineteenth Century — Ashley Dimmig
Enfilade 
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