Online Seminars | O Gosto neoclássico: A Dimensão americana
I’m sorry for not posting news of these seminars much sooner. –CH
O Gosto neoclássico — A Dimensão americana: instituições, atores e obras
Online, 8–22 March 2021
O seminário O Gosto neoclássico — A Dimensão americana: instituições, atores e obras será realizado de 8 a 22 de março de 2021, às 2ª-feiras e 4ª-feiras, às 15h, em transmissão remota. É promoção do grupo de pesquisa “O gosto neoclássico”, conduzido pela Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa e o leU/Prourb/FAU/UFRJ, com o apoio do Instituto Rui Barbosa de Altos Estudos – IRbae.
O evento dá continuidade a uma agenda sistemática de discussões públicas sobre arte, arquitetura, cidade e cultura sob o impacto da circulação das ideias neoclássicas no período compreendido entre o final do século XVIII e meados do XIX. Já foram discutidas temáticas relativas aos contextos brasileiro, português e francês. Em 2021, propõe-se uma pauta ainda inédita e que permita uma visão articulada e comparada sobre o fenômeno também nas Américas.
O Gosto neoclássico — A dimensão americana, se organiza em cinco sessões compostas por palestras e mesas redondas com especialistas brasileiros e estrangeiros. As palestras serão voltadas para aspectos da questão no México, França, Brasil, Portugal, Estados Unidos e Caribe. As mesas-redondas irão enfocar quatro eixos principais: as questões de ensino das artes nas academias: visões estéticas, padrões de gosto e formas de transmissão; mudanças e permanências nas culturas acadêmicas; as práticas projetuais e construtivas e o campo das visualidades, suas inovações e continuidades. O encerramento se dará com uma palestra concerto em torno das questões da música no período.
O evento será coordenado por Ana Pessoa (FCRB) e Margareth Pereira (leU/Prourb/UFRJ) e organizado por Ana Lúcia V. Santos (EAU/UFF), Karolyna Koppke (PROARQ-UFRJ/Ibmec RJ), Luiza Xavier (leU/Prourb/UFRJ), Ornella Savini (PIC-FCRB/CNPq). Arte e diagramação: Luiza Xavier (leU/Prourb/UFRJ). Fotografia: Ana Claudia P. Torem.
O seminário ocorrerá através da plataforma Zoom.
8 M A R C H 2 0 2 1
15.00 (BRT) Palestra
• Kelly Donahue-Wallace (CVAD-UNT, EUA), Good Taste within Reach: The Mexican Medals of Jerónimo Antonio Gil
16.00 (BRT) Mesa Redonda
• Renata Baesso (PUC-Campinas), O lugar do gosto, do gênio e da invenção nas preceptivas arquitetônicas
• Elaine Dias (UNIFESP), François-René Moreaux na Galeria e Escola de Pintura: a exposição da coleção italiana e a afirmação do artista
• Sonia Gomes Pereira (EBA-UFRJ), A Academia Imperial de Belas Artes e a longa duração da tradição clássica
1 0 M A R C H 2 0 2 1
15.00 (BRT) Palestra
• Jean Philippe Garric (Univ.Paris 1-França), Grandjean de Montigny et la polychromie architecturale à l’école de Percier
16.00 (BRT) Mesa Redonda
• Maria Luiza Zanatta (UFSM), O “tratado das ordens” de Vignola em S. Paulo: do Neoclassicismo ao Ecletismo
• Gustavo Rocha-Peixoto (PROARQ-UFRJ), Uma questão de gosto
• Karolyna Koppke (PROARQ-UFRJ/Ibmec RJ), A urbe imaginada: a Academia e o projeto para os paços Imperial e do Senado
1 5 M A R C H 2 0 2 1
15.00 (BRT) Palestra
• Margareth da Silva Pereira (PROURB-UFRJ), A ressignificação da ideia de arquitetura: A cena americana e a educação dos sentidos
16.00 (BRT) Mesa Redonda
• Ana Lucia V. dos Santos (EAU-UFF), A casa do Passeio – estudo de um edifício residencial de Grandjean de Montigny
• José Pessôa (PPGAU-UFF), A Praça Municipal de Grandjean de Montigny
• Nelson Pôrto (DAU/UFES), Os engenheiros e o neoclassicismo
1 7 M A R C H 2 0 2 1
15.00 (BRT) Palestra
• Helder Carita (FCSH-UNL), Neoclassicismo tardio em Portugal: da arquitectura às artes decorativas
16.00 (BRT) Mesa Redonda
• Paulo Knauss (UFF), O desafio da pedra: o gosto neoclássico e a escultura no Brasil
• Ana Pessoa (PPGMA/FCRB) e Ornella Savini (PIC/FCRB), Uma arcádia tropical? Vassouras, RJ, sec. XIX
• Júlio Bandeira (BN/MTur), Do Capitão Carlos Julião a Mauricio Rugendas, a camisola neoclássica no Brasil
2 2 M A R C H 2 0 2 1
15.00 (BRT) Palestras
• Dell Upton (AH-UCLA, CASVA/NGA), Politics of Neoclassicism in the United States
• Paul Niell (AH-FSU, USA), No Taste for Thatching: Value, Aesthetics, and Urban Reform in the Bohíos of Nineteenth-Century Puerto Rico
16.20 (BRT) Palestra-Concerto
• Rosana Lanzelotte (Musica Brasilis), Clássica: a nova música
Exhibition | The Great Divide: Footwear in the Age of Enlightenment
Woman’s Shoe, 1730–40, English (Toronto: Bata Shoe Museum). One way working women acquired footwear was through the cast-off clothing given to them by the people they served. These ‘gifts’ would often be altered by the new wearer. This shoe originally had thin latchets that most likely were tied with a bow over the tongue but were updated to feature more fashionable straps by a later wearer.
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From the press release (12 August 2020) for the exhibition at Toronto’s BSM (the museum is currently closed, but stay tuned). And a very happy International Women’s Day to everyone!
The Great Divide: Footwear in the Age of Enlightenment
Bata Shoe Museum, Toronto, 12 August 2020 — 28 February 2022
The Bata Shoe Museum is excited to announce its newest exhibition, The Great Divide: Footwear in the Age of Enlightenment. The first of three exhibitions in the museum’s 25th anniversary lineup, The Great Divide explores several timely issues from gender and race to imperialism and colonization. Featuring extraordinary 18th-century artefacts from the permanent collection, the exhibition highlights complex stories about privilege, oppression, danger, desire, revolution, and resistance that are as relevant today as they were 300 years ago.
The Age of Enlightenment was a period in European history from the end of the 17th to the end of the 18th century when Western philosophers and scientists wrestled with concepts of ‘human nature’ and ‘natural rights’. Some argued that all people had inherent social and political rights, but many more advocated for the reordering of social hierarchies using ‘scientific’ proof to divide people through the identification of ‘natural’ differences such as gender and race. Much of the oppression and imperialism that marked the period was supported by these ideas.
“Throughout the 18th century, Western fashion, including footwear, was central to the ‘naturalization’ of difference in Europe,” says Elizabeth Semmelhack, Creative Director and Senior Curator at the Bata Shoe Museum. “Distinctions between men and women, children and adults, Europeans and ‘Others’ became increasingly codified through clothing. Yet, European fashion was also used to blur the lines between classes as social mobility and access to consumable goods grew as a result of imperialism.”
The exhibition was thoughtfully designed by the award-winning designers Arc + Co who focused on creating a space that engages with the powerful themes and issues of the 18th century explored in this gallery. With loans from Toronto’s Gardiner Museum, the design also includes a look at contemporary footwear, asking visitors to reflect on shoes and society today.
Highlights include:
• Moccasins said to have belonged to Myaamia leader Mishikinawa, also known as Little Turtle, who resisted the incursion into Myaami territory by delivering one of the worst defeats in U.S. history at the Battle of Wabash in 1791.
• Late 18th-century shoes that began as Indian jutti but were transformed into a pair of English women’s shoes that embody British Imperialism in India.
• An early 18th-century silver side-saddle stirrup made for a woman from a powerful colonial Spanish family in Peru. Roughly 85 percent of the world’s silver was mined by conscripted Indigenous people and imported enslaved Africans in Spanish-held South America.
Man’s Shoe, 1760–80, English (Toronto: Bata Shoe Museum). This shoe would have been used to express both gender and class. Its low heel conveyed that it was masculine and the expensive fabric and ostentatious bow conveyed that it was upper class. The use of pink might confuse us today, but in the 18th century pink was not gendered.
Call for Papers | Work, Rest, and Power
From the Call for Papers:
Work, Rest, and Power: Architecture, Space, and Political Life, 1500–1815
Online Workshop Hosted by the Humanities Research Centre at the University of York, 27 May 2021
Proposals due by 12 April 2021
Joseph Goupy, Sir Robert Walpole Addressing the Cabinet, 1723–42, drawing, 36 × 29 cm (London: The British Museum, 1920,0214.4).
This workshop explores the role of the home in politics and political life, taking a broad view to explore the lived space of political figures, materiality, and the role of women and the household. The workshop will commence with a keynote paper from Dr Manolo Guerci, University of Kent, before leading into a series of panel discussions and optional thematic breakout sessions for those who wish to continue the discussion.
Interested scholars are invited to submit abstracts of no more than 250 words by 12 April 2021. We are seeking abstracts that relate to the home as a political space, broadly conceived, in any place or time period within the early modern era. We welcome submissions from all scholars, but particularly encourage postgraduate and early career researchers.
Topics may include, but are by no means limited to:
• Definitions: what makes a home political?
• Homes of political figures or homes located in political institutions
• Political sociability
• Materiality, art, architecture, and archaeology
• The household: wives, family, and servants
• Uses of space: orientation, gendered space, public and private
• Town and country houses
• Social history of the home: class, economics, and ritual
Please submit abstracts and any questions via email to the organisers Kirsty Wright (kmw532@york.ac.uk) or Murray Tremellen (mat550@york.ac.uk). For further information, please see our website.
New Book | The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680–1790
(The cover for the British edition, from Allen Lane, looks much ‘happier’ to me.–CH). From Harper Collins:
Ritchie Robertson, The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680–1790 (New York: Harper, 2021), 1008 pages, ISBN: 978-0062410658, £40 / $45.
A magisterial history that recasts the Enlightenment as a period not solely consumed with rationale and reason, but rather as a pursuit of practical means to achieve greater human happiness.
One of the formative periods of European and world history, the Enlightenment is the fountainhead of modern secular Western values: religious tolerance, freedom of thought, speech and the press, of rationality and evidence-based argument. Yet why, over three hundred years after it began, is the Enlightenment so profoundly misunderstood as controversial, the expression of soulless calculation? The answer may be that, to an extraordinary extent, we have accepted the account of the Enlightenment given by its conservative enemies: that enlightenment necessarily implied hostility to religion or support for an unfettered free market, or that this was ‘the best of all possible worlds’. Ritchie Robertson goes back into the ‘long eighteenth century’, from approximately 1680 to 1790, to reveal what this much-debated period was really about.
Robertson returns to the era’s original texts to show that above all, the Enlightenment was really about increasing human happiness—in this world rather than the next—by promoting scientific inquiry and reasoned argument. In so doing Robertson chronicles the campaigns mounted by some Enlightened figures against evils like capital punishment, judicial torture, serfdom and witchcraft trials, featuring the experiences of major figures like Voltaire and Diderot alongside ordinary people who lived through this extraordinary moment.
In answering the question ‘What is Enlightenment?’ in 1784, Kant famously urged men and women above all to “have the courage to use your own intellect.” Robertson shows how the thinkers of the Enlightenment did just that, seeking a well-rounded understanding of humanity in which reason was balanced with emotion and sensibility. Drawing on philosophy, theology, historiography, and literature across the major western European languages, The Enlightenment is a master-class in big picture history about the foundational epoch of modern times.
Ritchie Robertson is Professor of German at Oxford University, a fellow of the British Academy, and a lead reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement.
Call for Papers | Buying Art and Antiquities in Eighteenth-Century Italy
From the Call for Papers, which also includes the Spanish version:
Buying Art and Antiquities in Eighteenth-Century Italy
La compra de arte y antigüedades en la Italia del siglo XVIII
Online and/or Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), Madrid, 4–5 November 2021
Proposals due by 31 May 2021
Jean-François Sablet, In the Antiquities Shop, Rome, 1788 (Private Collection)
The third meeting of the international conference series Transnational Relations and the Arts will address the issue of art and antiquities markets in eighteenth century. With the Grand Tour at its peak, men from all over Europe and beyond flooded into the cities of Italy, mainly Rome but also Naples, Venice, and Florence. These grand tourists fed an already flourishing art market and were also active agents of the spread of ancient marbles and vases, Old Master paintings, ancient coins, and medals back to their homelands, not to mention the diffusion of an international ‘buon gusto’ among the middling and upper classes.
We are interested in proposals that address any aspect related to this phenomenon. Especially welcome are cross-disciplinary contributions, proposals that deal with different cases studies in a comparative way, or studies focused in a city/country, as well as discussions around a particular period acquired at that period.
Topics may include, but are not limited to:
• Commercial hubs
• Agents: merchants, clients, antiquarians, dealers, etc.
• Logistics of buying art in the eighteenth century
• Forgeries and fakes of antiquities
• Copies of Old Masters for profit
• Classical art collections in the eighteenth-century (from the individual object to the whole collection)
Scientific coordination
Pilar Diez del Corral Corredoira (Eighteenth Century), diezdelcorral@geo.uned.es
David Ojeda Nogales (Classical Antiquity), dojeda@geo.uned.es
Please submit your proposal and an abbreviated CV to both organizers by 31 May 2021. And do not hesitate to write with any questions you have related to your proposal; we will be happy to discuss the details with you. Depending upon health conditions, the conference may take place online, but we will try our best to host it in Madrid. In the event that the conference will proceed online, we will assist with any technical support you may need in order to give the paper as easily as possible. There are plans for publishing the outcomes as a volume of selected papers in a prestigious print and the contributions will go through a peer-review system.
Online Lecture | Wendy Wassyng Roworth on Angelica Kauffman
Dr. Roworth’s talk, originally slated for last spring in St. Louis, has been rescheduled for later this month; from the Saint Louis Art Museum:
Wendy Wassyng Roworth, Angelica Kauffman: An Enterprising Artist in 18th-Century Britain
Mary Strauss Women in the Arts Lecture, Saint Louis Art Museum
Online, 25 March 2021, noon–1 pm (CDT)
Angelica Kauffman, Woman in Turkish Dress, 1767, oil on canvas, 25 × 20 inches (Saint Louis Art Museum, Funds given by Dr. E. Robert and Carol Sue Schultz 704.2018).
Angelica Kauffman (1741–1807) was an Austrian-Swiss artist who began her career in Italy, where her clients included British tourists who encouraged the young painter to pursue her profession in England. Over the 15 years she worked in London, Kauffman achieved fame and fortune and returned to Italy as an international celebrity. This lecture celebrates a portrait recently acquired by the Museum. Wendy Wassyng Roworth will discuss Kauffman’s life and work in England as a fashionable painter and member of the Royal Academy of Arts, a rare distinction for a woman, and how the artist used her talents to her advantage.
Wendy Wassyng Roworth is Professor Emerita of Art History, University of Rhode Island.
This free, virtual program will take place on Thursday, 25 March 2021, via Zoom, and will include opportunities for participants to ask questions with the Q&A feature. Attendees’ mics and cameras will not be activated. Attendees must register to receive the Zoom link. Capacity for the live program is limited. A closed-captioned recording of the program will become available on the Museum’s YouTube channel in the weeks following. This program is supported by the Mary Strauss Women in the Arts Endowment.
4th Annual Ricciardi Prize from Master Drawings
James Mcbey, Girl Writing A Letter, watercolor and pencil on paper (The Clark Art Institute, MA).
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From Master Drawings:
Fourth Annual Ricciardi Prize from Master Drawings
Submissions due by 15 November 2021
Master Drawings is seeking submissions by scholars under the age of 40 for our Fourth Annual Ricciardi Prize! The winning submission will be awarded $5,000, with a publication date in 2022. This year’s deadline is November 15, 2021. Remember, only essays on drawings topics will be considered. Finalists are also recognized with a prize and publication in the journal. You can read this year’s winning article in the June 2021 issue of Master Drawings. More information on how to apply is available here.
Reading Unopened Letters via X-ray Microtomography
An unopened letter, dated 31 July 1697, from Jacques Sennacques to his cousin Pierre Le Pers, virtually unfolded and read for the first time
(Photograph: Unlocking History Research Group)
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The latest from the Unlocking History Research Group, as published in Nature Communications:
Jana Dambrogio, Amanda Ghassaei, Daniel Starza Smith, Holly Jackson, Martin L. Demaine, Graham Davis, David Mills, Rebekah Ahrendt, Nadine Akkerman, David van der Linden, and Erik D. Demaine, “Unlocking History through Automated Virtual Unfolding of Sealed Documents Imaged by X-ray Microtomography,” Nature Communications 12 (2 March 2021), article number 1184.
Abstract: Computational flattening algorithms have been successfully applied to X-ray microtomography scans of damaged historical documents, but have so far been limited to scrolls, books, and documents with one or two folds. The challenge tackled here is to reconstruct the intricate folds, tucks, and slits of unopened letters secured shut with ‘letterlocking’, a practice—systematized in this paper—which underpinned global communications security for centuries before modern envelopes. We present a fully automatic computational approach for reconstructing and virtually unfolding volumetric scans of a locked letter with complex internal folding, producing legible images of the letter’s contents and crease pattern while preserving letterlocking evidence. We demonstrate our method on four letterpackets from Renaissance Europe, reading the contents of one unopened letter for the first time. Using the results of virtual unfolding, we situate our findings within a novel letterlocking categorization chart based on our study of 250,000 historical letters.
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New outlets—including The Art Newspaper, CNN, and The New York Times—have taken up the story. Here’s coverage from The Guardian:
In a world first for the study of historic documents, an unopened letter written in 1697 has been read by researchers without breaking the seal. The letter, dated 31 July 1697 and sent from French merchant Jacques Sennacques in Lille to his cousin Pierre Le Pers in The Hague, had been closed using ‘letterlocking‘, a process in which the letter is folded to become its own envelope, in effect locking it to keep it private. It is part of a collection of some 2,600 undelivered letters sent from all over Europe to The Hague between 1689 and 1706, 600 of which have never been opened.
The international team of researchers from universities including MIT, King’s College London, Queen Mary University London, Utrecht and Leiden, worked with X-ray microtomography scans of the letter, which use X-rays to see inside the document, slice by slice, and create a 3D image. They applied computational flattening algorithms to the scans to enable them to virtually unfold the letter without ever opening it, and discovered that Sennacques had been asking his cousin for a certified copy of a death notice of one Daniel Le Pers.
“It has been a few weeks since I wrote to you in order to ask you to have drawn up for me a legalised excerpt of the death of sieur Daniel Le Pers, which took place in The Hague in the month of December 1695, without hearing from you,” runs the letter. “I am writing to you a second time in order to remind you of the pains that I took on your behalf. It is important to me to have this extract & you will do me a great pleasure to procure it for me & to send me at the same time news of your health & of all the family.” . . . [as translated by the research team.]
The full article, by Alison Flood (2 March 2021), is available here»
Online Talk | Fortune and Folly in 1720
Wednesday evening on Zoom, from the BGC:
Nina Dubin, Meredith Martin, and Madeleine Viljoen | Fortune and Folly in 1720: Picturing the World’s First Bubble Economy
Françoise and Georges Selz Lectures on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Decorative Arts and Culture
Online, Bard Graduate Center, New York, 3 March 2021, 6.00pm
This talk will explore The New York Public Library’s upcoming exhibition Fortune and Folly in 1720 (Fall 2021) and its accompanying publication Meltdown! Picturing the World’s First Bubble Economy (Harvey Miller/Brepols, 2020). Co-curated and co-authored by Dubin, Martin, and Viljoen, they tell two parallel stories: one of the spectacular rise and fall of the first bubble economy, and another of the enterprising art industry that chronicled its collapse. The Mississippi and South Sea Bubbles, spawning the invention of French banknotes as well as joint-stock companies built on fantasies of New World trade, imposed on everyday Europeans a crash course in new financial products. In turn, a bubbling print market relentlessly caricatured the meltdown of 1720, offering viewers an entertaining primer on the otherwise bewildering realities of modern economic life. Three hundred years later, our current moment offers a uniquely fitting vantage point from which to reconsider the significance of the bubbles and of the artworks that channeled the fears and desires they unleashed.
The event will be live with automatic captions. It will be held via Zoom; a link will be circulated to registrants by 3pm on the day of the event.
Nina L. Dubin is an associate professor of Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Specializing in European art since 1700, she has published widely on the production of art within an economy of risk.
Meredith Martin is an associate professor of Art History at New York University and the Institute of Fine Arts. Specializing in European art of the long eighteenth century, she has published widely on gender and architectural patronage as well as maritime art, mobility, and exchange in the early modern world.
Madeleine C. Viljoen is Curator of Prints and the Spencer Collection at The New York Public Library. Responsible for the Library’s collection of prints and rare illustrated books, she has published widely on early modern printed images, with special attention to the goldsmith-engraver, the reproductive print, and ornament.
Exhibition | History in Motion: Tom Judd’s Subway Mural
Installation photo of Tom Judd’s Portal to Discovery mural, 2020, produced for Philadelphia’s 5th Street-Independence Hall Station on the Market-Frankford Line.
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The Woodmere Art Museum hosts a virtual opening reception with the artist this evening (Tuesday) at 7pm, ET:
History in Motion: Tom Judd’s Subway Mural
Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, 27 February — 13 June 2021
In connection with the reconstruction of Philadelphia’s 5th Street-Independence Hall Station on the Market-Frankford Line, and as part of SEPTA’s Art in Transit program, artist Tom Judd was selected to create a permanent installation for the station. Titled Portal to Discovery, Judd’s mural on the eastbound and westbound platforms presents figures who contributed to the founding of the United States as well as those who fought for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for all. The mural includes portraits of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Philadelphians such as Frances E. W. Harper, one of the first African American women to be published in the United States, and Absalom Jones, an African American abolitionist and clergyman who founded the Free African Society with Richard Allen in 1787. Juxtaposed with these figures are familiar landscape views of Philadelphia, windows, doors, and other architectural elements of the city. The experience is one of a great historical dreamscape that poses questions and promotes civic dialogue.
The Museum’s exhibition includes preparatory studies for the mural as well as in-process photographs of the installation; the panels were fabricated by Ben Volta Studios and the installation was managed by James Shuster. The project was realized with help from graphic designer Wenlu Bao; David W. Seltzer, transit consultant and catalog producer; SEPTA; Burns Engineering, Inc.; Converse Winkler Architecture; and Marsha Moss, public art curator and consultant. The mural is an important addition to Philadelphia’s rich landscape of public art.
Judd grew up in Salt Lake City and attended the University of Utah from 1970 to 1972. He received his bachelor of fine arts degree in painting from the Philadelphia College of Art (now the University of the Arts). His work has been exhibited in museums and galleries across the United States, and is in the collections of numerous museums, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Birmingham Museum of Art, and Woodmere Art Museum. Judd works in a variety of media, including painting, collage, photography, and installation.
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