Registration is open for a limited in-person audience. Bard Graduate Center requires proof of vaccination and photo identification to enter the building. Guests are required to wear masks regardless of vaccination status. This talk will also be available on Zoom (register here). A link will be circulated to registrants by 4pm on the day of the event. This event will be live with automatic captions.
New Book | Domestic Space in Britain, 1750–1840
From Bloomsbury:
Freya Gowrley, Domestic Space in Britain, 1750–1840: Materiality, Sociability, and Emotion (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-1501343360, £80.
Between 1750 and 1840, the home took on unprecedented social and emotional significance. Focusing on the design, decoration, and reception of a range of elite and middling class homes from this period, Domestic Space in Britain, 1750–1840 demonstrates that the material culture of domestic life was central to how this function of the home was experienced, expressed, and understood at this time. Examining craft production and collection, gift exchange and written description, inheritance and loss, it carefully unpacks the material processes that made the home a focus for contemporaries’ social and emotional lives.
The first book on its subject, Domestic Space in Britain, 1750-1840 employs methodologies from both art history and material culture studies to examine previously unpublished interiors, spaces, texts, images, and objects. Utilising extensive archival research; visual, material, and textual analysis; and histories of emotion, sociability, and materiality, it sheds light on the decoration and reception of a broad array of domestic spaces. In so doing, it writes a new history of late 18th- and early 19th-century domestic space, establishing the materiality of the home as a crucial site for identity formation, social interaction, and emotional expression.
Freya Gowrley is Lecturer in History of Art and Liberal Arts at the University of Bristol.
C O N T E N T S
List of Plates
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part I: Representation
1 ‘My Anecdotes of This Social Neighbourhood’: The Thick Description of Caroline Lybbe Powys
2 Publishing John Wilkes’s ‘Villakin’: Reception and Reputation at Sandham Cottage
Part II: Movement
3 Material Translations, Biographical Objects: Craft(ing) Narratives at A la Ronde
4 ‘A Little Temple, Consecrate to Friendship and the Muses’: Romantic Friendship and Gift-Exchange at Plas Newydd, Llangollen
Part III: Ownership
5 ‘I Love Her as My Own Child’: Inheritance, Extra-Illustration, and Queer Familial Intimacies at Strawberry Hill
Conclusion: Materialising Loss
Bibliography
Index
Exhibition | Nuestra Casa
Installation view of Nuestra Casa: Rediscovering the Treasures of the Hispanic Society Museum & Library (2022). Shown is Francisco de Goya’s The Duchess of Alba, 1796–97.
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From the press release for the exhibition (with dates listed for variations of the exhibition in other locations). . .
Nuestra Casa: Rediscovering the Treasures of The Hispanic Society Museum & Library
Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, 4 April — 10 September 2017
Palacio de Bellas Artes, Mexico City, 25 June — 25 September 2018
Albuquerque Museum, 10 November 2018 — 31 March 2019
Cincinnati Art Museum, 25 October 2019 — 19 January 2020
Museum of Fine Arts Houston, 1 March 2020 — 3 January 2021
The Hispanic Society Museum & Library, New York, 17 February — 17 April 2022
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, 8 June — 10 October 2022
Royal Academy of Arts, London, 21 January — 10 April 2023
Curated by Madeleine Haddon
The Hispanic Society Museum & Library (HSM&L) is pleased to present Nuestra Casa: Rediscovering the Treasures of The Hispanic Society Museum & Library, revealing hidden gems from the expansive, permanent collection of the museum that includes more than 750,000 objects. Curated by Dr. Madeleine Haddon, the exhibition is on view from 17 February until 17 April 2022. The objects featured in Nuestra Casa help to illuminate the wide array of arts, literature, and history of the Iberian Peninsula and Latin America from antiquity to modern day. During the museum’s recent renovation, a selection of these works toured the world, from the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid and the Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City to the Albuquerque Museum, the Cincinnati Art Museum, and most recently the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Now, with the opening of the HSM&L’s newly renovated exhibition space in the East Building Gallery, these objects will come home for the first time in five years before many of them continue on to the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Royal Academy of Art in London.
The return of these objects to the HSM&L has prompted a re-examination of the works within the collection that have been historically defined as its masterpieces. The exhibition comes during a moment in which it is necessary for our traditional art historical and aesthetic hierarchies to be reassessed in order to make way for a new art history that fully incorporates the diverse populations to whom our public institutions belong. Nuestra Casa: Rediscovering the Treasures of The Hispanic Society Museum & Library shows that the HSML’s collection extends much beyond the artwork of El Greco, Goya, and Sorolla, for which it has historically been known, to masterpieces within a range of mediums by relatively unknown Latin American artists, at times still unidentified, who have previously received little recognition.
To evaluate and present these works through a new lens, the HSM&L brought on a guest curator for this exhibition, Dr. Madeleine Haddon has also written essays for the forthcoming exhibition catalogues Murillo: From Heaven to Earth (2022) at the Kimbell Art Museum and Travel, Respond, Assemble: Isabella Stewart Gardner (2023) at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Prior to MoMA, she was a Teaching Fellow at the University of Edinburgh in Edinburgh, Scotland. Dr. Haddon completed her PhD at Princeton University where her dissertation, “Local Color: Race, Gender, and Spanishness in European Painting, 1855–1927,” focused on the preoccupation with the intersection between race and color in 19th- and early 20th-century Spanish and French painting. Dr. Haddon received a Fulbright Award in support of her dissertation research in Madrid at the Museo del Prado and Museo Reina Sofia.
“Nuestra Casa only scratches the surface in terms the breadth of treasures that visitors will be able to come to the HSM&L to see once the museum fully reopens it doors, says Dr. Haddon. “Visitors will leave with an understanding of the HSM&L as the most significant collection in the United States in which to encounter and learn about the rich and diverse cultural heritage of the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking world.”
The works featured in Nuestra Casa—many of which have previously not been featured regularly at the Museum—range in origin from Spain and Mexico to Puerto Rico, Peru, and beyond, all in chronology from the 10th to 20th centuries. These works include the 19th-century watercolors of Pancho Fierro and Miguel Viladrich Vilá’s The Man from Montevideo (1923–25), which represent people of color and the racial diversity of colonial Latin America. Additionally, the exhibition will showcase works that have always been considered among HSM&L’s masterpieces, such as Francisco de Goya’s Duchess of Alba (1797) and Diego Velázquez’s Portrait of a Little Girl (c. 1638–42).
Nuestra Casa shows that the HSM&L is itself as a treasure to be discovered within New York City’s vibrant Washington Heights neighborhood. The exhibition will leave visitors with a better understanding of the museum and its unparalleled collection that addresses nearly every aspect of cultures in Spain, Portugal, Latin America, and the Philippines, while also providing a rare opportunity to encounter and learn about the rich, diverse cultural heritage of the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking world through art and object.
Gloria de España: Tesoros del museo y la biblioteca de la Hispanic Society
Tesoros de la Hispanic Society of America (Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2017), 448 pages, ISBN: 978 -8484804079, 35€.
Mitchell Codding, Treasures From the Hispanic Society Museum & Library (Madrid: Ediciones El Viso, 2019), 376 pages, ISBN: 978-0875351643, £50 / $65.
Art Market | Court, Epic, Spirit: Indian Art, 15th–19th Century
Return of the Unfaithful Lover, Khandidta Nayika, ca. 1720, Nurpur, opaque pigment and gold on paper, 20 × 26 cm.
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From Luhring Augustine:
Court, Epic, Spirit: Indian Art, 15th–19th Century
Luhring Augustine Tribeca, New York, 26 January — 24 March 2022
Luhring Augustine, in association with Francesca Galloway, is pleased to present Court, Epic, Spirit: Indian Art, 15th–19th Century, a show of historical artworks from India opening on January 26. It marks the first time that Luhring Augustine has partnered with the London-based gallery Francesca Galloway, internationally renowned in the field of Indian art. Court, Epic, Spirit presents a variety of artworks including textiles, paintings, and courtly objects. The title of the exhibition refers to three key lenses through which to view the arts of India. With these organizing principles as a guide, these exceptional and iconic works of art can be more fully considered and understood.
A fine and grand 17th-century panel from a lavish royal tent is among the exhibition’s featured objects. The panel is part of an important group thought to have been produced in the Deccan, a region of central India. For both Rajput and Mughal rulers, tents were immensely important, especially to the latter given the nomadic lifestyle required to govern their vast empire.
Indian painting is above all a storytelling medium, created to illustrate epic texts. These narratives, and the paintings that accompanied them were an integral aspect of the region’s cultural traditions throughout this period. A work of particular importance in the exhibition is a recently discovered 16th-century painting from the early Imperial Mughal manuscript of the great epic, the Hamzanama (‘Story of Hamza’), one of the supreme achievements of Indian art. Commissioned by a young Emperor Akbar, it is the only known folio depicting this episode and represents a significant addition to the scholarship, not least because it was painted by Dasvant, a master artist in the Imperial atelier.
Also significant to the artistic output of the region were artworks focusing on worship—some depicting and enabling acts of revery, and some imbued with spiritual power. Hindu ragamala paintings depict verses that in turn evoke a mode of music. Through a very unusual group of 17th-century ragamala paintings, most likely from the northern Deccan, the connection between sound, image, and spirit can be explored. Their wild sense of color and proportion, coupled with stark architecture and sumptuous textiles, lend these paintings an assured and individual aesthetic. Another highlight of the show will be a masterpiece of painting on cloth illustrating Dana Lila, or Krishna playfully demanding a toll from the gopis. This type of Deccani pichhvai, a painted cotton temple cloth, is rare, with only a handful of examples in museum collections around the world.
An additional highlight of the exhibition is the facade of a magnificent late 18th- or early 19th-century Mughal-style pleasure pavilion, a large-scale architectural marvel. The pavilion, installed at our Bushwick location, is available to view by appointment. Court, Epic, Spirit: Indian Art, 15th–19th Century will be on view at the Tribeca location through 24 March 2022 and will be accompanied by an illustrated catalogue.
Exhibition | Falcons: The Art of the Hunt
A Mounted Man Hunting Birds with a Falcon, early 18th century, Mughal Dynasty
(Washington, DC: National Museum of Asian Art, gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1907.212)
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Now on view at the Freer Gallery:
Falcons: The Art of the Hunt
National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington: DC, 15 January — 17 July 2022
Swift, fierce, and loyal, falcons have been celebrated for millennia. In ancient Egypt, they were closely associated with Horus, the god of the heavens. By the early eighth century in Syria, falcons were being trained to become skillful hunters at the royal courts. The art of falconry soon spread across the rest of the Islamic world, to the Byzantine empire in the west, and to the east as far as China. It is still practiced in many societies today, especially in the Arab world. A selection of paintings and objects from ancient Egypt to China offers a glimpse into the fascinating world of falcons.
New Book | Pictorial Silks: Chinese Textiles
Distributed by The University of Chicago Press:
Kikki Lam, ed., Pictorial Silks: Chinese Textiles from the UMAG Collection (Hong Kong: HKU Museum and Art Gallery, 2021), 96 pages, ISBN: 978-9887470717, $25.
A showcase of silks from the Qing dynasty to the mid-twentieth century.
Prized by Chinese and foreign merchants as an essential commodity along a vast trade network, silk served multiple roles throughout the ancient world: as fabric for garments, as a form of currency and method of tax payment, and as a medium and subject matter for artists and the literati. Over the centuries, silk fabrics have remained synonymous with beauty and are still intertwined throughout Chinese art and literature. As showcased in this highly illustrated book, the Hong Kong University Museum and Art Gallery’s silk textile collection encompasses a diverse range of subjects and formats that include hanging scrolls, framed panels, banners, and robes from the Qing dynasty to the mid-twentieth century. Each artwork exemplifies the sophisticated craftsmanship of the artisan, as well as the collective stories of the Qing dynasty’s textile industry.
Kikki Lam is a research assistant at the University Museum and Art Gallery at the University of Hong Kong.
C O N T E N T S
Foreword
Threading Colour: Chinese Silk Textiles from the UMAG Collection
Kesi Silk Tapestry
Cixiu Embroidery
Glossary
Bibliography
Exhibition | From Afar: Travelling Materials and Objects
Now on view at the Louvre, a wide-ranging exhibition (geographically and temporally) that includes eighteenth-century objects:
From Afar: Travelling Materials and Objects
Musée du Louvre, Paris, 22 September 2021 — 4 July 2022
Organized by Philippe Malgouyres and Jean-Luc Martinez
Ivory Statuette of a Peddler, German, 1702–03, elephant tusk, diamond, silver gilt, and enamel, 8.4 cm high (Paris: Musée du Louvre). More information, with additional views, can be found here.
For its sixth season, the Petite Galerie offers a journey through time and around the world with the exhibition From Afar: Traveling Materials and Objects—complementing a cycle of exhibitions at the museum dedicated to discoveries and explorations of lands near and far: Paris–Athens: The Birth of Modern Greece, 1675–1919 in September and Pharaoh of the Two Lands: The African Story of the Kings of Napata in the spring.
Through materials and objects, the exhibition describes exchanges between distant worlds—including ancient exchanges often more extensive than explorations in the 16th century. From deepest antiquity, carnelian, lapis lazuli, ebony, and ivory circulated along trade routes, and these materials were even more precious because they came from afar. Their value was enriched by the myths surrounding their origins. Not only stones, shells and plants travelled between continents; so did live animals, often for political ends. The populace as well as artists discovered ostriches, giraffes, and elephants. Man-made objects followed the same routes. Beyond Europeans’ well-known yen for the exotic, the exhibition shows that these multiple round trips wove a more complex history: forms, techniques, and themes intertwined to create new objects, reflecting all the complexity of our world as it could be perceived in Europe from the late Middle Ages on.
The exhibition was organized by Philippe Malgouyres, curator at the Department of Decorative Arts, Musée du Louvre, and Jean-Luc Martinez, honorary president of the Musée du Louvre.
Philippe Malgouyres and Jean-Luc Martinez, with Florence Dinet, Venus d’ailleurs: Matériaux et objets voyageurs (Paris: Musée du Louvre / Éditions du Seuil, 2021), 192 pages, ISBN: 978-2021456264, €32.
New Book | Danish Silver, 1600–2000
Distributed by The University of Chicago Press:
Lise Funder, Danish Silver, 1600–2000 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2021), 292 pages, ISBN: 978-8763545853, $60.
An illustrated catalog of Denmark’s cutlery through the ages. Replete with nearly four hundred images, Danish Silver 1600–2000 is the first international collection to showcase the rich artistry of Danish cutlery.
C O N T E N T S
Preface
About the Catalogue
Danish Silver: 17th, 18, and 19th Centuries
Silver Marking
Catalogue
17th Century
18th Century
19th Century
Danish Silver: 20th Century
Catalogue
20th Century
Select Bibliography
Exhibitions of Danish Silver in the Danish Museum of Decorative Art
Index of Names
Lecture | Charlotte Vignon on the Renovation of the Sèvres Museum
From the BGC:
Charlotte Vignon, Rebuilding the City of Ceramic: Projects for the Renovation of the Sèvres Museum
The Françoise and Georges Selz Lectures on 18th- and 19th-Century French Decorative Arts and Culture
Online and in-person, Bard Graduate Center, New York, 1 March 2022
Charlotte Vignon will be speaking in the Françoise and Georges Selz Lectures on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Decorative Arts and Culture on Tuesday, March 1 at 6 pm. Her talk is entitled “Rebuilding the City of Ceramic: Projects for the Renovation of the Sèvres Museum.”
The Sèvres Museum was created in 1824 by Alexandre Brongniart (1770–1847), then the director of the Porcelain Manufactory of Sèvres. At its beginning, it was considered as a technical resource, a conservatory of materials and techniques intended to inspire craftsmen and artists working at the prestigious French manufactory by providing them with varied examples of ceramic from many periods and places. Thanks to further acquisitions from the second half of the nineteenth century, the collection gradually became an encyclopedic museum offering a comprehensive overview of the history of ceramics.
Today, the Sèvres Museum brings together a collection of more than 50,000 ceramic objects from prehistory to the present, principally from Europe but also including important examples from Asia, America, Africa, and Oceania. This lecture will unveil current plans for a major renovation of the museum, which will both transform its displays and highlight its historical and physical links to the Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory. A true national treasure, Sevres seeks to contribute to the world of tomorrow by balancing today’s quest for instantaneity and start-ups with a new art of living that affirms the values of artistic creativity, scientific experimentation, and cultural diversity.
Charlotte Vignon is Director of the French National Museum of Ceramics located at Sèvres, just outside Paris (Musée national de céramique de Sèvres). Previously, she was Curator of Decorative Arts at The Frick Collection in New York for more than ten years. She has held fellowships at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cleveland Museum of Art, and The Frick Collection, where she was an Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow. Vignon organized several exhibitions at The Frick Collection: Exuberant Grotesques: Renaissance Maiolica from the Fontana Workshop (2009); Turkish Taste at the Court of Marie-Antoinette (2011); White Gold: Highlights from the Arnhold Collection of Meissen Porcelain (2011); Gold, Jasper, and Carnelian: Johann Christian Neuber at the Saxon Court (2012); Precision and Splendor: Clocks and Watches at The Frick Collection (2013); Pierre Gouthière: Virtuoso Gilder at the French Court (2016); Fired by Passion: Masterpieces of Du Paquier Porcelains from the Sullivan Collection (2017); Masterpieces of French Faience: Selections from the Sidney R. Knafel Collection (2018); and Elective Affinities: Edmund de Waal at The Frick Collection (2019). She is the author of numerous articles and essays on European decorative arts, including sixteenth- to nineteenth-century ceramics, tapestries, furniture, and architecture, as well as the history of the art market and collecting in the United States. Vignon is also the author of Duveen Brothers and the Market for Decorative Arts, 1880−1940, as well as Gouthière’s Candelabras, with Edmund de Waal, both published in 2019.
Exhibition | Jacques Louis David: Radical Draftsman
Jacques Louis David, The Death of Socrates, ca. 1786, pen and black ink, over black chalk, touches of brown ink, squared in black chalk, sheet: 11 × 16 inches (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2015.149).
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From the press release for the exhibition:
Jacques Louis David: Radical Draftsman
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 17 February — 15 May 2022
Organized by Perrin Stein
Regarded in his time as the most important painter in France, Jacques Louis David (1748–1825) produced major canvases that shaped the public’s perceptions of historical events in the years before, during, and after the French Revolution. Drawings were the primary vehicle by which he devised and refined his groundbreaking compositions. Jacques Louis David: Radical Draftsman is the first exhibition devoted to works on paper by this celebrated and influential artist. Through some 80 drawings and sketches from the collections of The Met and numerous private and institutional lenders from the United States and abroad—including rarely loaned or newly discovered works—visitors will see the progress of his ideas as he worked to create his masterful paintings. A highlight of the exhibition will be a work in The Met collection, The Death of Socrates (1787)—David’s most important painting in America—which will be displayed along with preparatory drawings that reveal his years-long thought process and planning.
The exhibition—the first to focus on David’s preparatory studies—looks beyond his public successes to chart the moments of inspiration and the progress of ideas, both artistic and psychological. The works will be presented chronologically, starting with David’s early training in Rome. Sketches from this period represent the vast store of motifs that he mined for decades thereafter, including for his most famous paintings.
The works David submitted to the Salons after returning to France heralded a powerful new neoclassical style that drew its inspiration from classical antiquity. Paintings like The Oath of the Horatii (1784) and The Death of Socrates (1787) won instant acclaim and buttressed his growing reputation as leader of the French school. Several drawings on view demonstrate the artist’s struggles to heighten the psychological impact and create a more powerful overall composition.
Rebelling against the constraints of France’s centralized monarchy in its waning days, David embraced the changes wrought by the Revolution of 1789. His most ambitious project—a depiction of the Oath of the Tennis Court, the event in which representatives of different classes of French society pledged to draft a constitution to counterbalance the absolute authority of the king—was never completed. The exhibition will feature a large presentation drawing that is one of David’s supreme achievements, deftly redeploying the language of the classical past to imbue a contemporary event with the drama and gravitas of a history painting.
David’s support of the more radical faction of the fledgling Republic led to his imprisonment. After his release, he attempted to regain dominance of the French school by exploring themes of national reconciliation through historical subjects like The Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799). Eventually, David reclaimed the spotlight through his support of Napoleon Bonaparte. David’s magisterial canvas memorialized the glittering spectacle in Notre Dame cathedral that marked Napoleon’s ascent from successful general to crowned emperor of France in 1804.
After a string of military defeats led to Napoleon’s downfall and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in 1816, David—a former regicide who had lent his talents to gilding the emperor’s image—was banished. He went into exile and spent his final decade working in Brussels.
Jacques Louis David: Radical Draftsman was organized by Perrin Stein, Curator in the Department of Drawings and Prints. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue, published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and distributed by Yale University Press. A related installation, In the Orbit of Jacques Louis David: Selections from the Department of Drawings and Prints, on view 20 January – 10 May 2022, focuses on David’s legacy through works by his pupils and contemporaries (Gallery 690).
Perrin Stein, with contributions by Daniella Berman, Philippe Bordes, Mehdi Korchane, Louis-Antoine Prat, Benjamin Peronnet, and Juliette Trey, Jacques Louis David: Radical Draftsman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022), 308 pages, ISBN: 978-1588397461, $65.
Display | In the Orbit of Jacques Louis David
Anne Louis Girodet-Trioson, The Mourning of Pallas (detail), ca. 1790–93, pen and brown ink, brush and gray and brown wash, heightened with white (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1996.567).
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Now on view at The Met:
In the Orbit of Jacques Louis David: Selections from the Department of Drawings and Prints
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 20 January — 31 May 2022
The Department of Drawings and Prints boasts more than one million drawings, prints, and illustrated books made in Europe and the Americas from around 1400 to the present day. Because of their number and sensitivity to light, the works can only be exhibited for a limited period and are usually housed in on-site storage facilities. To highlight the vast range of works on paper, the department organizes four rotations a year in The Robert Wood Johnson, Jr. Gallery. Each installation is the product of a collaboration among curators and consists of up to one hundred objects grouped by artist, technique, style, period, or subject.
This installation highlights the broad range of accomplishments of artists working at the same time as French painter Jacques Louis David (1748–1825). Whether they emulated his manner or sought their own paths, shared his political beliefs or condemned them, artists of this period could hardly escape the impact of David’s work.
Works on view by David’s peers, pupils, and rivals explore the creativity and capacity for transformation that marked this vital period that spanned the last years of the French monarchy, the Revolution, the rise of Napoleon, and ultimately, the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. The fast pace of political change accentuated the intertwined nature of art and politics, which permeated all levels of artistic production—from large-scale paintings to the decorative arts and fashion—as this selection of drawings and prints attests.
This display complements the exhibition Jacques Louis David: Radical Draftsman (17 February – 15 May 2022).
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