Exhibition | Eternal Medium: Seeing the World in Stone
From the press release for the exhibition:
Eternal Medium: Seeing the World in Stone
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 20 August 2023 — 11 February 2024
Snuffbox in the Shape of a Dog, ca. 1740–50, Dresden (LACMA, gift of The Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation and the 2022 Decorative Arts and Design Acquisitions Committee).
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art presents Eternal Medium: Seeing the World in Stone, an exhibition that focuses on the role of the imagination in perceiving images in the natural markings of stones. The product of a collaboration between LACMA, the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Collection, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, this exhibition brings together objects that utilize the natural features of stones and places them alongside similar works in other mediums for context and comparisons. Objects range from historical to contemporary, from ca. 2200–1800 BCE to recent pieces by Analia Saban, Alma Allen, and Ben Gaskell. Featuring a selection of 125 works, the exhibition is drawn from LACMA’s collection with loans from the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Collection on loan to the V&A and the V&A’s own collections, as well as public and private collections in California.
“Making sense of enigmatic visual phenomena such as the moon, clouds, and inkblots is a fundamental human ability that excites curiosity and inspires creativity,” said Rosie Mills, The Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation Associate Curator, Decorative Arts and Design. “Stone, especially vividly colored and richly patterned stone, is an impressive medium because the right stone can be difficult to source and carve. Eternal Medium: Seeing the World in Stone invites visitors to look for themselves as well as consider the works in their cultural and historical contexts.”
“This exhibition is the result of a meaningful collaboration between LACMA, the Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Collection, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London,” said Michael Govan, LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director. “Through the sharing of collections and expertise, this partnership has facilitated new approaches to established subjects. The LACMA/V&A Staff Exchange Program was created in 2017, thanks to the generous support from The Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Foundation in Los Angeles, and the Gilbert Trust for the Arts in London. This exchange program is intended to encourage the exploration of new models for research, audience engagement, and scholarship. Eternal Medium is the result of this groundbreaking program.”
Dagger of Emperor Aurangzeb, India, Mughal Empire, 1660–61, nephrite (LACMA).
Tristram Hunt, Director of the V&A and Gilbert Trust for the Arts Trustee said, “The Gilbert collection of works of art made of stone is iconic and comprehensive. It is wonderful to see so many of these treasures come back to LACMA for this exhibition, alongside other works of art from the V&A, and all set in a wider context where visitors can understand the visual and artistic power of stones across continents and centuries.”
The exhibition is comprised of nine interrelated sections: ‘Hard’ stones, Sourcing Specimens, Manipulating Multicolored Stones, Seeing Images in Stones, Fooling the Eye, Flora and Fauna, Heaven and Earth, Stone for Stone, and Transcending Stone. Each section considers where the materials came from, demonstrates how their innate characteristics were translated into illusionistic stone pictures and coloristic stone sculptures, and encourages visitors to understand the works in relation to similar images in other media as well as use their own imaginations to complete the imagery suggested by the stones and their markings.
Claus Benjamin Freyinger and Andrew Holder of The Los Angeles Design Group (LADG) have created an immersive and contemplative installation design that supports an intimate viewing of the sumptuous and detailed artworks in the exhibition. The collaboration between LACMA and LADG is one of many examples of the museum working with renowned L.A. architects on exhibition design.
Exhibition Highlights
Dagger of Emperor Aurangzeb, India, Mughal empire, 1660–61
Imperial khanjars, like this one belonging to the Mughal Emperor, were typically made of precious materials. This particular specimen of nephrite jade retains its burnt-orange skin to add contrast to the horse’s meticulously delineated mane.
Snuffbox in the Shape of a Dog, Germany, ca. 1740–50
In the 18th century, Dresden’s lapidary artists incorporated the naturally occurring patterns of Saxony’s unusually rich and varied minerals into some of the most ingenious designs. For this exquisite snuffbox in the shape of a dog, the stone specimen was carefully selected for the shape and distribution of its dark inclusions that evoke the hound’s spotted fur.
Table, Italy, ca. 1870
Contoured stone mosaics are pieced together like a jigsaw puzzle, except that each piece is individually shaped to correspond to the image’s outlines (making the joins invisible). The still life on this tabletop demonstrates the extraordinary illusionism achieved using this technique.
Ben Gaskell, Breakbox with Split Crystal, United Kingdom, London, 2016
The exceedingly beautiful fracture in the transparent rock crystal cube was achieved by applying immense force at just the right angle. It celebrates the material’s physical properties as well as the artist’s technical mastery.
New Book | The Book of Marble
From Taschen:
Jan Christiaan Sepp, Marmora / The Book of Marble, edited by Geert-Jan Koot (Cologne: Taschen, 2023), 312 pages, ISBN: 978-3836594349 (English, French, and German), $125.
An exhaustive compendium of marble, Afbeelding der Marmor Soorten (A Representation of Marble Types) depicted 570 samples across 100 colour plates, accompanied by texts in five languages. Published in 1776 at the peak of the Enlightenment, it is regarded, rightly, as one of the finest illustrated scientific books of the era.
Over the course of the 18th century, beautiful books that categorised, annotated, and illuminated the Enlightenment pursuit of learning across Europe had become increasingly popular. Knowledge was everything and everywhere, and these books provided it for those not wealthy enough to build their own personal collections of rare and exotic objects. Marmor Soorten, one such edition, took the standards of both aesthetics and categorisation to a whole new level.
Jan Christiaan Sepp and his father Christian—himself a respected collector—had already earned a reputation for luxury publications on scientific themes, starting with Christian’s own Nederlandsche Insecten (Insects of the Netherlands). But it was his son who created the visual masterpiece Marmor Soorten, revising an existing German publication from 1775 by Adam Ludwig Wirsing. The result, published in 11 installments to a print run of around 100, was among the finest examples of its kind.
Featuring new photography to depict the intricate details of the marble samples, this edition brings an unknown treasure back to relevance. The plates, each meticulously hand-coloured and arranged with painstaking precision, have an abstract-art feel that gives this volume an almost modern slant. This edition reproduces the pages from two copies of Marmor Soorten held at the State and University Library in Dresden and the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Reprinting the work in full for the first time, The Book of Marble brings that rare blend of beauty and encyclopedic knowledge to a wider audience.
Geert-Jan Koot holds an MA in Art History and Archaeology from the Radboud University, Nijmegen. From 1988, he was the head of the Rijksmuseum’s Research Library and curator of library collections, as well as chair of the Working Group for Specialist Academic Libraries (Werkgroep Speciale Wetenschappelijke Bibliotheken), until his retirement in 2021. Koot now works as a consultant for book collectors and auction houses. He has also spearheaded the WorldCat Art Discovery project, a new search tool for art libraries hosting over 250 million articles.
New Book | The Wood that Built London
From Sandstone Press:
C. J. Schüler, The Wood that Built London: A Human History of the Great North Wood (Sheffield: Sandstone Press, 2021), 368 pages, ISBN: 978-1913207496 (hardcover) / ISBN: 978-1914518164 (paperback), £20.
It is hard to imagine that the busy townscape of South London was once a great wood, stretching almost seven miles from Croydon to Deptford or that, scattered through the suburbs, from Dulwich to Norwood, a number of oak woodlands have survived since before the Norman Conquest. These woods were intensively managed for a thousand years, providing timber for construction, furniture and shipbuilding, and charcoal for London’s blacksmiths, kilns, and bakeries. Now they afford important green space, a vital habitat for small mammals, birds, and insects. Drawing on a wealth of documents, historic maps, and environmental evidence, The Wood That Built London charts the fortunes of the North Wood from its earliest times: its ecology, ownership, management, and the gradual encroachment of the metropolis.
Chris Schüler is the author of three illustrated histories of cartography: Mapping the World, Mapping the City, and Mapping the Sea and Stars and co-author of the best-selling Traveller’s Atlas. His most recent book, Writers, Lovers, Soldiers, Spies: A History of the Authors’ Club of London, 1891–2016 was published in 2016. He has also written on literature, travel, and the arts for The Independent, The Independent on Sunday, The Tablet, The Financial Times, and New Statesman.
C O N T E N T S
Foreword by Rachel Licthenstein
Introduction
Measurements, Money, and Other Matters
1 Taming the Wildwood, ca. 8000 BC–1485
2 Surveys, Ships, and Statutes, 1485–1600
3 The World Turned Upside Down, 1600–1700
4 Faith or Science? 1700–1790
5 Industry and Enclosure, 1790–1850
6 The Palace and the Railway, 1850–1910
7 The Home Front, 1910–1945
8 A Design for Living, 1945–1970
9 Save the Woods! 1970–1997
10 A New Millennium, 1997–2021
11 A Tour of the Woods Today
12 Ways through the Woods, 2021–?
Acknowledgments
A Woodland Glossary
Notes
Bibliography
Chris Schüler on the Wood that Built London
An evening lecture at the Society of Antiquaries:
Chris Schüler, The Wood That Built London
In-person and online, Society of Antiquaries of London, 12 October 2023, 5pm
Drawing on historic documents, maps and environmental evidence, The Wood That Built London charts the fortunes of the Great North Wood that once covered much of what is now South London [‘north’ relative to Croydon]. It records its botany, ecology, ownership and management, the gradual encroachment of the metropolis, and the battles fought by locals and the London Wildlife Trust to save what remained.
The lecture will discuss the documentary research into historic land ownership and management in the medieval and early modern periods that informed the book, which draws on a wide range of primary sources, some never previously cited. These include 16th-century Court of Exchequer depositions in a dispute over land ownership in the National Archives at Kew; Archbishop Morton’s 1492 survey of the Manor of Croydon and a 1678 plan of the Archbishop’s woods in Croydon Museum; Archbishop Cranmer’s 1552 survey of the Manor of Croydon in the Bodleian Library; estate maps in the British Library and London Metropolitan Archives; parish accounts; and records of woodland management in Dulwich College Archive and Lambeth Palace Library. Considered together, these scattered records combine to create a picture of the former extent of the wood, which stretched from Deptford to Croydon, its ownership by religious bodies such as Bermondsey Abbey and the Archbishopric of Canterbury, and its management by rotational coppicing, which generated income for its owners over several centuries. Tudor Acts of Parliament and the publications of 16th– and 17th-century agronomists such as Thomas Tusser and Barnaby Googe are examined to provide insight into the theory and practice of woodland management at this period.
The book also records how that income dwindled as the Industrial Revolution rendered many woodland products obsolete, leading landowners to grub up coppices, at first for farmland and then, as the railways brought the area within commuting distance of London, for housing development, to the fury of commentators such as John Ruskin and John Stuart Mill.
Presented both in-person at Burlington House and online, the event is free and open to the public. Please reserve tickets here.
Conference | Dressing the Interior
From the conference programme:
Dressing the Interior in the Early Modern Period: Textiles in Domestic Settings
Dressing the Early Modern Network Conference
Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS), 23 September 2023
Organised by Jola Pellumbi, Sara van Dijk, and Alexander Dencher
Registration due by 20 September 2023
Length of velvet, 16th century, Spanish or Italian; pile on pile cut, voided, and brocaded velvet of silk and gold metallic thread with bouclé details (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 46.156.120).
Textiles, wall and furniture coverings played an important role in dressing interiors in the early modern period. From curtains to chairs, tables and beds, a variety of textiles were needed to protect, adorn, and transform rooms, homes, and palaces. They were an important part of the dwelling as they linked the interiors together and showcased the taste and material means of the owners. Different rooms served diverse purposes, from more public spaces such as waiting rooms, reception rooms, and ballrooms, to more private rooms such as the bedroom with its antechambers. In other households, rooms had multiple functions, and in many cases the distinctions between private and public spaces were more flexible. Textiles played an important role in distinguishing and modifying these spaces while giving a glimpse of the relationships that owners had with those interiors.
While extant textiles have been frequently altered to fit new purposes denoting both their durability and the costly aspects of this medium, ledgers provide further examples of repairs and replacements. On the other hand, inventories give a more accurate picture of the changes in fashion over time. Fashions played an important role in the dressing of interiors, from certain more desirable fabrics and colours being favoured over others, while also being altered according to seasons. This conference aims to generate a discussion about the use of various textiles in early modern interiors, focusing on their function, durability, colour, texture and pattern, and how they were made to fit a specific purpose and give meaning to every room.
The conference is organised by Jola Pellumbi and Sara van Dijk of Dressing the Early Modern Network and by Alexander Dencher of Leiden University and the Rijksmuseum.
Registration is available here»
p r o g r a m m e
10.00 Registration
10.30 Welcome
10:45 Session 1 | Interior and Experience
• Dangerous Liaisons Revisited: Drapery and Dress in 18th-Century French Interiors — Mei Mei Rado (Bard Graduate Center, New York)
• Tiny Textiles: Dressing the Interiors of 18th-Century English Baby Houses — Amy Craig (Cambridge University)
• 18th-Century Global Domesticity — Valeria Viola (University of Palermo)
12.15 Lunch Break
13.00 Session 2 | Objects’ Pasts and Futures
• Reduce, Reuse, Recycle ….Restore? A Case Study of Re-Using ‘Original’ Fabrics in the Collection of the Rijksmuseum — Marjolein Koek (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)
• Bed of White Satin with Silk Embroidery and Bobbin Made Silver Edgings — Lena Dahrén (affiliated with Uppsala University)
• Title to be confirmed — Alexander Dencher (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)
14.30 Coffee and Tea
15.00 Session 3 | Materials and Materiality
• Strong Weave, Soft Texture, Crisp White: The Unravelling of Fustian in Dutch Interiors in the Early 17th Century — Sara Wieman (University of Amsterdam)
• Re-Materialising Walls through Intermedial Design: Chinese Silk and Paper Wall Hangings in 18th-Century European Interiors — Erika Riccobon (Leiden University)
16.00 Keynote Lecture
• The Seemingly Original Interior — Anna Jolly (Abegg-Stiftung, Riggisberg)
16.45 Closing Remarks
New Book | The Jesuits: A History
From Princeton UP:
Markus Friedrich, The Jesuits: A History, translated by John Noël Dillon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022), 872 pages, ISBN: 978-0691180120 (hardback), $40 / ISBN: 978-0691226200 (paperback), $28.
The most comprehensive and up-to-date exploration of one of the most important religious orders in the modern world.
Since its founding by Ignatius of Loyola in 1540, the Society of Jesus—more commonly known as the Jesuits—has played a critical role in the events of modern history. From the Counter-Reformation to the ascent of Francis I as the first Jesuit pope, The Jesuits presents an intimate look at one of the most important religious orders not only in the Catholic Church, but also the world. Markus Friedrich describes an organization that has deftly walked a tightrope between sacred and secular involvement and experienced difficulties during changing times, all while shaping cultural developments from pastoral care and spirituality to art, education, and science.
Examining the Jesuits in the context of social, cultural, and world history, Friedrich sheds light on how the order shaped the culture of the Counter-Reformation and participated in the establishment of European empires, including missionary activity throughout Asia and in many parts of Africa in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He also explores the place of Jesuits in the New World and addresses the issue of Jesuit slaveholders. The Jesuits often tangled with the Roman Curia and the pope, resulting in their suppression in 1773, but the order returned in 1814 to rise again to a powerful position of influence. Friedrich demonstrates that the Jesuit fathers were not a monolithic group and he considers the distinctive spiritual legacy inherited by Pope Francis. With its global scope and meticulous attention to archival sources and previous scholarship, The Jesuits illustrates the heterogeneous, varied, and contradictory perspectives of this famed religious organization.
Markus Friedrich is professor of early modern history at the University of Hamburg. His books include The Birth of the Archive. He lives in Hamburg, Germany.
C O N T E N T S
List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
Prologue: Ignatius Loyola Founds an Order
1 The Inner Life and Structure of the Society
2 The Society, the Churches, and the Faithful
3 Saeculum and the Kingdom of God: The The Jesuits ‘in the World’
4 The Global Society
5 A World without the Society of Jesus: Hostility, Suppression, Revival
Epilogue: The Modern Society
Acknowledgments
Afterword to the English Edition
Translator’s Note
Notes
Works Cited
Names Index
Subject Index
New Book | The Image of the Black in Latin American and Caribbean Art
From Harvard University Press:
David Bindman, Alejandro de la Fuente, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds., The Image of the Black in Latin American and Caribbean Art, Book 1: From Colony to Nation (Cambridge, MA: Hutchins Center for African and African American Research, 2024), 400 pages, ISBN: 978-0674248861, £87 / €91 / $100.
The Image of the Black in Latin American and Caribbean Art is the first comprehensive survey of the visual representation of people of African descent in Latin America and the Caribbean, some twelve million of whom were forcibly imported into the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade. This first volume spans four centuries, from the first Spanish occupation of Latin America and the Caribbean in the fifteenth century; through the establishment of slave colonies on the mainland and islands by the British, French, and Danish; to the revolutionary emergence of independence, first in Haiti in 1804, and then across Latin America. Essays by leading scholars and superb illustrations bring to light a remarkable range of imagery that provides vivid insights into the complex racial history of the period.
The two volumes complement the vision of Dominique and Jean de Menil, art patrons who, during the 1960s, founded an archive to collect images depicting the myriad ways that people of African descent have been represented in Western art from the ancient world to modern times. The Image of the Black in Latin American and Caribbean Art continues the de Menil family’s original mission and brings to the fore a renewed focus on a rich and understudied area.
David Bindman is Professor of the History of Art, Emeritus, at University College London.
Alejandro de la Fuente is Robert Woods Bliss Professor of Latin American History and Economics, and Professor of African and African American Studies and History, at Harvard University.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the author of numerous books and has written extensively on the history of race and anti-Black racism in the Enlightenment. His most recent works include Stony the Road and The Black Church. He is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.
Exhibition | Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance
Barbara Walker, Vanishing Point 29 (Duyster), 2021 / © Barbara Walker, 2023.
More information on the Vanishing Point series is available here»
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Opening soon at The Fitzwilliam:
Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance
The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 8 September 2023 — 7 January 2024
Curated by Jake Subryan Richards
A landmark exhibition exploring the impact of the Black Atlantic staged in the Museum’s historic Founder’s Galleries, which were built using the profits from enslavement and exploitation.
Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance brings together significant national and international loans with collections from across the University of Cambridge’s museums, libraries, and colleges to tell both a Cambridge story and a global one. Using as its starting point the story of the Museum’s founder, Viscount Richard Fitzwilliam, whose family wealth came in part from the South Sea Company and East India Company, the exhibition charts a history from pre-colonial Africa and the Caribbean, the rise and racialisation of Atlantic enslavement, and histories of resistance by enslaved people and their allies. Artworks and other objects illustrating the financial, scientific, and commercial transformations in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain that came about because of enslaved labour are shown in dialogue with modern and contemporary artworks by artists including Donald Locke, Barbara Walker, Keith Piper, and Jacqueline Bishop that respond to hidden histories and reveal stories of courage, resistance, hope, and repair.
Black Atlantic is curated by Dr Jake Subryan Richards, acclaimed early career historian of law, empire, and the African diaspora in the Atlantic world at the London School of Economics. It is the first in a series of exhibitions and gallery interventions planned for 2023–2026.
The catalogue is published by Bloomsbury:
Victoria Avery and Jake Subryan Richards, eds., Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance (London: Philip Wilson Publishing, 2023), 192 pages, ISBN: 978-1781301234, £30 / $40.
Published to accompany the landmark exhibition on view at the Fitzwilliam Museum in autumn 2023, the catalogue contains contributions by curators, historians, and artists.
Black Atlantic: Power, People, Resistance brings together significant national and international loans with exhibits from the Fitzwilliam’s collection and from other University museums, colleges, and libraries. Objects and artworks illustrating the financial, scientific, and commercial transformations in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain that came about because of enslaved labour are shown in dialogue with modern and contemporary artworks by artists including Donald Locke, Barbara Walker, Keith Piper, and Jacqueline Bishop that respond to hidden histories and reveal stories of courage, resistance, hope, and repair.
c o n t e n t s
Contributor Biographies
Acknowledgements
Foreword by Luke Syson
Introduction
Section 1 | Before Atlantic Enslavement
• Africa: Akan Region
• Indigenous Islands in the Caribbean Sea
• Europe: Slavery before Racism, Blackness before Slavery
Section 2 | Cambridge Wealth from Atlantic Enslavement
• Royal Patronage
• Making Money: Dutch Connections
• Technology for the Transatlantic Trade
• Warfare between the British, Dutch, and Spanish Empires
Section 3 | Fashion, Consumption, and Racism
• Blackness in European Art
• Enslavement and Fashion
Section 4 | Plantations: Production and Resistance
• Production, Knowledge Generation, and Exploitation
• Plantation Violence
• Remembering
Further Reading
Image Credits
Index
New Book | Transpacific Engagements
From The Getty:
Florina Capistrano-Baker and Meha Priyadarshini, eds., Transpacific Engagements: Trade, Translation, and Visual Culture of Entangled Empires, 1565–1898 (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2022), 320 pages, ISBN: 978-6218028258 (hardback), $55 / ISBN: 978-6218028227 (paperback), $45.
This wide-ranging collection of scholarly essays explores the hybrid cultures, intellectual clashes, and dynamic exchanges of the transpacific region in the age of imperialism.
Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, competing European empires vied for commercial and political control of oceanic routes between Asia and the Americas. Transpacific Engagements addresses the resulting cultural and artistic exchanges with an emphasis on the Spanish and American enterprises in the Asia-Pacific region. This volume explores artistic expressions of imperial aspirations and imaginaries in the Philippines, Spain, Japan, and Hawaii; the transformations of texts, images, and culinary practices as they moved from one cultural context to another; and the movement of objects and people across the transpacific, with particular attention to the Manila Galleon trade that flourished from 1565 to 1815. Featuring contributions by art historians, anthropologists, historians, and cultural studies scholars, Transpacific Engagements gathers groundbreaking investigations of objects and histories to illustrate the role of East, South, and Southeast Asian polities and dynasties in these multilateral exchanges.
Published by the Ayala Foundation, Inc. in association with the Getty Research Institute and Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (Max-Planck-Institut).
Florina H. Capistrano-Baker is the former director of the Ayala Museum and its current consulting curator and project consultant for international operations. Meha Priyadarshini is assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Edinburgh.
New Book | Pet Revolution
From Reaktion Books and The University of Chicago Press:
Jane Hamlett and Julie-Marie Strange, Pet Revolution: Animals and the Making of Modern British Life (London: Reaktion Books, 2023), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-1789146868, £20 / $35.
Pet Revolution tracks the British love affair with pets over the last two centuries, showing how the kinds of pets we keep, as well as how we relate to and care for them, has changed radically. The book describes the growth of pet foods and medicines, the rise of pet shops, and the development of veterinary care, creating the pet economy. Most importantly, pets have played a powerful emotional role in families across all social classes, creating new kinds of relationships and home lives. For the first time, through a history of companion animals and the humans who lived with them, this book puts the story of the ‘pet revolution’ alongside other revolutions—industrial, agricultural, political—to highlight how animals contributed to modern British life.
Jane Hamlett is professor of modern British history at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her books include Material Relations: Middle-Class Families and Domestic Interiors in England, 1850–1910.
Julie-Marie Strange is professor of modern British History at Durham University. Her books include The Invention of the Modern Dog: Breed and Blood in Victorian Britain.
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