Enfilade

From De Gruyter:

Elisa Ambrosio, Francine Giese, Alina Martimyanova, and Hans Bjarne Thomsen, eds., China and the West: Reconsidering Chinese Reverse Glass Painting (Berlin: De Gruyter for the VitroCentre Romont, 2022), 292 pages, ISBN: 978-3110711752, $58. With contributions by Thierry Audric, Kee Il Choi Jr., Patrick Conner, Karina H. Corrigan, Elisabeth Eibner, Patricia F. Ferguson, Lihong Liu, William H. Ma, Alina Martimyanova, Christopher L. Maxwell, Rupprecht Mayer, Jessica Lee Patterson, Michaela Pejčochová, Jérôme Samuel, Hans Bjarne Thomsen, Jan van Campen, and Rosalien van der Poel. Now digitally available for free as open access.

With contributions from outstanding specialists in glass art and East Asian art history, this edited volume opens a cross-cultural dialogue on the hitherto little-studied medium of Chinese reverse glass painting. The first major survey of this form of East Asian art, the volume traces its long history, its local and global diffusion, and its artistic and technical characteristics. Manufactured for export to Europe and for local consumption within China, the fragile artworks studied in this volume constitute a paramount part of Chinese visual culture and attest to the intensive cultural and artistic exchange between China and the West. This book is volume 1 in the series Arts du verre / Glass Art / Glaskunst.

C O N T E N T S

Preface — Danielle Elisseeff

Introduction — Francine Giese, Hans Bjarne Thomsen, Elisa Ambrosio, and Alina Martimyanova

Chinese Reverse Glass Painting and Its Materiality
1  From Virtuosity to Vernacularism: Reversals of Glass Painting — Lihong Liu
2  People in Glass House: The Polite and Polished in Georgian Britain — Christopher L. Maxwell
3  Illusionistic Practices among les Arts du Feu in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Canton — Kee Il Choi Jr.
4  Light, Reflection, and Reverse Glass Painting at the Nguyên Court — William H. Ma

Trasnfer and Transmediality
5  Glass Painting in the Collection of Andreas Everardus Van Braam Houckgeest (1739–1801) — Jan van Campen
6  The Governor of Surat and the Apotheosis of Washington Cantonese Reverse Glass Paintings for Early Nineteenth-Century American Markets — Karina H. Corrigan
7  Regarding the Transfer of Vernacular Motifs and Other Common Features of Chinese New Year Prints and Chinese Reverse Glass Painting — Alina Martimyanova
8  The Nightmare Case Study of a Deliberately Inaccurate Transmission to Glass — Elisabeth Eibner

Contextual Studies of Reverse Glass Painting
9  Varieties of Replication in Chinese Reverse Glass Painting — Jessica Lee Patterson
10  Reflecting Asia: The Reception of Chinese Reverse Glass Painting in Britain, 1738–1770 — Patricia F. Ferguson
11  Japanese Reverse Glass Painting: The Other East Asian Tradition — Hans Bjarne Thomsen
12  ‘In All of Beijing, There Are No More than Four Paintings on Glass That Would Fall within Our Consideration’: Chinese Reverse Glass Paintings from Czech Collections and Their Contexts — Michaela Pejčochová

Regional Receptions of Reverse Glass Painting
13  Reflections in a Chinese Mirror: Westerners Reinterpreted in Early Cantonese Glass Painting — Patrick Conner
14  Eighteenth-Century Chinese Reverse Glass Painting in a Dutch Collection: Art and Commodity — Rosalien van der Poel
15  China and Its South Chinese Ladies on Glass and Other Topics in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Java and Bali — Jérôme Samuel

Pioneering Research in Chinese Reverse Glass Painting
16  A Brief History of Chinese Reverse Glass Painting — Thierry Audric
17  Some Styles in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Chinese Glass Painting: A First Approach — Rupprecht Mayer

List of Authors
Index of Places and People
Credits

Published by Hirmer and distributed by The University of Chicago Press:

Stanley Abe, Imagining Sculpture: A Short Conjectural History (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2023), 384 pages, ISBN: 978-3777437583, $45.

A new critical approach to understanding sculpture across cultures.

Imagining Sculpture is the story of the absence of a powerful European idea: Sculpture. In China statues, stele, and other figural objects were made for millennia but were not categorized as Sculpture. Imagining Sculpture explains how they were seen in China as objects beyond the category of Sculpture. The book is a series of short vignettes—historical and fictional. Travellers, scholars, collectors, and antiquarians encounter statues, figures, and effigies in China, Japan, England, Germany, France, Italy, and the United States from the fourteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century. The book is visual, cinematic, and sumptuous—told with rare photographs, paintings, sketches, letters, and ephemera. With little text, images propel the narrative, offering a different way of seeing and knowing.

Stanley Abe is associate professor in the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University. He is the author of Ordinary Images and served as editor in chief of Archives of Asian Art from 2011 to 2018.

From Aarhus UP:

Jan Zahle, Thorvaldsen: Collector of Plaster Casts from Antiquity and the Early Modern Period (Copenhagen: Thorvaldsens Museum and Aarhus University Press, 2020), 3 volumes, 828 pages, ISBN: 978-8771843590, $112.

The Danish neoclassical sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770–1844), who lived most of his life in Rome, was not only one of Europe’s most sought-after artists; he was also a collector. In addition to his own works and drawings, he built extensive collections of paintings, prints, drawings, and books—and of ancient artefacts from Egyptian, Greek, and Roman antiquity: coins, lockets, containers, vases, lamps, fragments of sculpture, and more. He also acquired a large collection of plaster casts, primarily after ancient sculptures and reliefs, but also of works dating from the Renaissance and up until his own lifetime. Thanks to Thorvaldsen’s bequest to the city of Copenhagen, his birthplace, all of these collections are still largely intact and well preserved at his museum.

Home to a total of 657 plaster casts, the Thorvaldsen Museum’s cast collection is unique for several reasons: The collection offers us insight into the sculptor’s working methods and the development of his work because it served a clear function as an image bank of forms, motifs and subjects for Thorvaldsen’s own endeavours. Furthermore, the dual fact that the collection is so well preserved and was established over a relatively brief period of time makes it a valuable example illuminating the trade and distribution of plaster casts during the first half of the nineteenth century.

These areas of study form the central focal point of Volume I of this publication. Volume II contains a catalogue of the individual objects in the cast collection, while Volume III collects the overviews, inventories, concordances, and primary sources referred to in the first two volumes. Arising out of many years of study of Thorvaldsen’s cast collection conducted by their author, the classical archaeologist Jan Zahle, these books contain comprehensive source material from the period, much of it previously unknown.

The table of contents is available as a PDF file here»

Distributed by Yale UP:

Katia Johansen, Ten Kings’ Clothes: Royal Danish Dress, 1596–1863 (Denmark: Aarhus University Press, 2022), 496 pages, ISBN: 978-0300266764, $80.

A richly illustrated glimpse into the magnificent collection of seventeenth-century men’s dress from the Danish kings’ wardrobes

Ten Kings’ Clothes: Royal Danish Dress, 1596–1863 presents the unparalleled collection of male dress belonging to the Danish kings from Christian IV to Frederik VII. The incomparable research showcases the collection of each monarch, put into context against the backdrop of pivotal moments in Danish history, the networks of supply, and the production and circulation of luxury goods. Richly illustrated with portraits, prints, and the stunning garments, extended entries and hand-drafted patterns allow a detailed and technical appreciation of each item. The historical garments tell the story not only of the kings’ coronations and weddings but also of everyday life at court, including the contributions of tailors, embroiderers, valets, portrait artists, castle stewards, and laundresses. The book includes a foreword written by Her Majesty Queen Margrethe II of Denmark.

Katia Johansen is a renowned author, lecturer, and teacher of textile conservation, exhibition techniques, and costume history. She is the former textile conservator and costume curator at The Royal Danish Collections at Rosenborg Castle, Denmark, where she worked for over 35 years.

From Toronto UP:

Joseph Monteyne, Media Critique in the Age of Gillray: Scratches, Scraps, and Spectres (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022), 316 pages, ISBN: ‎978-1487527747, $75.

In the late 1790s, British Prime Minister William Pitt created a crisis of representation when he pressured the British Parliament to relieve the Bank of England from its obligations to convert paper notes into coin. Paper quickly became associated with a form of limitless reproduction that threatened to dematerialize solid bodies and replace them with insubstantial shadows. Media Critique in the Age of Gillray centres on printed images and graphic satires which view paper as the foundation for the contemporary world. Through a focus on printed, visual imagery from practitioners such as James Gillray, William Blake, John Thomas Smith, and Henry Fuseli, the book addresses challenges posed by reproductive technologies to traditional concepts of subjective agency.

Joseph Monteyne shows that the late eighteenth-century paper age’s baseless fabric set the stage for contemporary digital media’s weightless production. Engagingly written and abundantly illustrated, Media Critique in the Age of Gillray highlights the fact that graphic culture has been overlooked as an important sphere for the production of critical and self-reflective discourses around media transformations and the visual turn in British culture.

Joseph Monteyne is an associate professor in the Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory at the University of British Columbia.

C O N T E N T S

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction: Making and Unmaking the Paper World

1  Dark Media and the Materiality of Nothing
Dark Media and Graphic Materiality
Smoked Images and Night Pieces: Touching Nothing
Form and Formlessness in Blake’s Embedded Media

2  Haunted Media
Conjuring Dead Painters
The Baseless Fabric of Print
Dematerializing Media

3  Good Copies, Bad Copies
Counterfeit Masks
Repetition with Difference
Pairs of Portraits

4  Social Detritus, Paper Detritus
Blind Beggars and Printed Images
Cobbling, Patching, Translating
The Gatherer of Scraps

Notes
Bibliography
Index