Call for Papers | Art and Work, A Graduate Symposium
Art and Work, A Graduate Symposium
Northwestern University, Evanston, 8 February 2018
Proposals due by 1 October 2017
The Department of Art History at Northwestern University will hold a one-day graduate symposium on Thursday, 8 February 2018 on the topic of art and work. The symposium will span historical periods and geographic regions to investigate the history, politics, and aesthetics of artistic labor. Our proposal is grounded by historical and theoretical concerns with the social positions of art making, the artist, and work more generally. How do the social and technical conditions of labor in a given society determine the possibilities of its art, and how do artistic imaginaries of work help shape struggles around these very social conditions? What kinds of skills, expertise, discourses, or knowledge come to distinguish an artist from an artisan, engineer, or maker, or from a teacher, political official, or social worker? How and where do these distinctions emerge or dissolve both visually and historically, and how do they relate to other predominant social markers such as race, gender, and class? We see these questions as resonating across boundaries of period and national tradition, and are excited to see what might be learned from thinking within a wide historical frame wherein both art and work are contested terms.
We welcome papers that consider, among other topics, the aesthetics of work and/or non-work; the social position of the artist; the problem of aesthetic autonomy; or spaces of production and their representations—from the artist’s studio to the collaborative workshop, the laboratory, the home, the factory, and beyond. We are also interested in how representations of artistic production and exercises in (or negations of) artistic technique mediate ongoing processes of social transformation. We invite papers from any time period or geographic region by graduate students in art history as well as related disciplines.
Possible topics might include
• Depictions of studio, workshops, factories, spaces of production
• Craft labor and handwork
• Treatises and technical manuals
• Artistic readymades or the absence of work
• Histories of deskilling and automation
• Aesthetics and political economy
• Anti-work politics and aesthetics
• Global precarity and flexible labor regimes
• Reproductive labor, domestic work
• Affective and care-based labor
• Post-Marxist approaches to ‘immaterial labor’
• Community and public art
Symposium speakers who do not reside locally will receive roundtrip economy airfare to Chicago/Evanston, accommodation for two nights in Evanston, and a travel stipend to cover ground transportation to and from the airport. Please email proposals to laurelgarber2015@u.northwestern.edu and brianleahy2020@u.northwestern.edu by October 1, 2017. Include in your proposal a 300-word abstract and a brief CV in a single PDF file. Selections will be announced in mid-October.
Keynote lecture by Jasper Bernes, author of The Work of Art in the Age of Deindustrialization (Stanford University Press, 2017).
Symposium | Saint-Cloud to Bernardaud: French Porcelain, 1690–2000
From The French Porcelain Society:
Saint-Cloud to Bernardaud: New Horizons in French Porcelain, 1690–2000
The French Porcelain Society Symposium
The Wallace Collection, London, 20–21 October 2017
Organized by Aileen Dawson
From top left: Saint-Cloud Vase, 1695–1710 (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art); Bastien & Bugeard Clock, 1848–58 (Paris: Musée des Arts décoratifs); Mennecy Jug, 1760 (London: Victoria and Albert Museum); Villeroy Monkey, 1745 (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art); Guérhard & Dihl Vase, 1797–1804 (Clandon Park, National Trust); and Bernardaud Vase, 2015, by Hervé Van Der Straeten.
The symposium will present ground-breaking new research on a broad range of French porcelain factories operating from the late 17th century up to the present day. Many of these factories have at times been unjustly neglected in favour of the royal factory at Sevres, even though their productions could at times rival its splendid output, and all were responding to the same changes in taste and fashion. Papers will focus on Saint-Cloud, Chantilly, Mennecy, and factories in Eastern France, such as Strasbourg and Niderviller, those operating in Paris in the late 18th and 19th centuries, such as Dihl, Shoelcher and Dagoty, and the Limoges factories in production in the 19th century and up to the present day. The location, capitalisation, techniques of manufacture, employment of artists, sculptors and designers, marketing and clientèle will be explored by some twenty leading international scholars.
The symposium is organized by Dr Aileen Dawson, former curator at The British Museum. It is open to members and non-members of The French Porcelain Society, and bursaries may be available for scholars who wish to attend. The registration fee is £100 (non-FPS members £110, students £70) with additional fees for lunches and an evening reception. Please contact FPSenquiries@gmail.com.
P A P E R S
17th and 18th Centuries
• Errol Manners, The Porcelain of Villeroy
• Nicole Duchon, Mennecy Villeroy: Some Surprising New Discoveries
• Pamela Roditi, Two Travellers: Robinson and Clara
• John Whitehead, The Painter Piat-Joseph Sauvage: his work on porcelain at Dihl
• Iris Moon, Use Your Illusion: Niderviller Ceramics and Rococo Aesthetics at the 18th-Century French Border
19th Century
• Tamara Préaud, Brongniart and the ‘Exposition des Produits de l’industrie (1819–1844)
• Audrey Gay-Mazuel, Parisian Porcelain Makers and the Mid-19th-Century Rococo Revival
• Sonia Banting, A Little-Known Maker of pâte-sur-pâte: Charles Pillivuyt (1810–1872) and His Porcelain Factory in the Berry Region
• Virginie Desrante, Jules Lesme and Limoges in the Style of Bernard Palissy
• Howard Coutts, Paris and Other French Porcelain in the Bowes Museum
• Régine de Plinval de Guillebon, Dagoty, Porcelain Manufacturer to the Empress Josephine: Designs and Their Realisation
20th Century
• Hélène Huret, Arists and Designers at Bernadaud, Limoges, from Kees Van Dongen to Jeff Koons, Know-How and Invention
Exhibition | Basic Instincts
Joseph Highmore, The Angel of Mercy, ca. 1746; oil on canvas, 59.7 × 48.3 cm (New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B1981.25.362).
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Press release from The Foundling Museum:
Basic Instincts
The Founding Museum, London, 29 September 2017 — 7 January 2018
Curated by Jacqueline Riding
A highly successful artist and Governor of the Foundling Hospital, Joseph Highmore (1692–1780) is best known as a portrait painter of the Georgian middle class. However, during the 1740s Highmore’s art radically shifted as he turned his focus to societal attitudes towards women and sexuality. Curated by Highmore expert, Dr Jacqueline Riding, Basic Instincts explores this ten-year period and his disruptive commentary, reflecting his engagement with the work of the new Foundling Hospital and its mission to support desperate and abused women. On public display in the UK for the first time is a remarkable painting that still retains the power to shock.
In 1744 Highmore created a series of 12 paintings on his own initiative inspired by Samuel Richardson’s international bestseller, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded. First published in 1740, the novel’s sixth edition of 1742 included illustrations by Hubert Gravelot and Francis Hayman. However, unlike the commissioned illustrations, Highmore’s paintings explicitly make reference to the abuse and sexual violence at the heart of Richardson’s story of a virtuous young maidservant fighting off the unwanted advances of her predatory master. Highmore and Richardson became friends, and Highmore subsequently illustrated Richardson’s masterpiece, Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady, whose tragic heroine avoids a forced marriage, but dies having been abandoned by her family, duped by an admirer, drugged and raped.
Unlike William Hogarth, Highmore’s representation of Georgian society favoured realism over broad humour and theatricality, so his nuanced articulation of social attitudes towards women and sexuality means that modern audiences can miss his challenging commentary. However, at the heart of Basic Instincts is a remarkable painting that has never before been publically displayed in the UK and which does not fail to shock. The Angel of Mercy (c.1746) depicts a desperate mother in the act of killing her baby, with the distant Foundling Hospital presented as an alternative solution. This painting is unique in western art for showing maternal infanticide as a contemporary reality. The fashionably dressed mother is free from direct biblical or mythological allusion, unlike Hagar and Ishmael (1746) the large canvas Highmore donated to the newly established Hospital, which represents an Old Testament story of maternal abandonment. Instead The Angel of Mercy confronts the ‘elephant in the room’ in terms of the Hospital’s campaign; that without Christian compassion and practical support, even respectable women will be driven to murder.
Basic Instincts curator Jacqueline Riding said: “This is the first major Highmore exhibition for 50 years and nowhere can his life and work have greater resonance than at the Foundling Museum: an organisation at the forefront of the public display, interpretation and appreciation of early-Georgian art. Setting The Angel of Mercy, the Pamela paintings and Hagar and Ishmael among Highmore’s most tender portraits of mothers and children, family and friends, uniquely demonstrates the artist’s depth and variety, while indicating the true breadth of British Art in a period still labelled ‘The Age of Hogarth’.”
Foundling Museum director Caro Howell said: “Basic Instincts demonstrates that in the eighteenth century, the Foundling Hospital’s impact on contemporary artists went far beyond a simple donation of art. For Joseph Highmore it sparked a radical engagement with the issue of women’s vulnerability to sexual assault and society’s unwillingness to support them, culminating in a work of quite exceptional power.”
Basic Instincts explores the limits and narratives around female respectability in Georgian society, and reveals the complexity of Highmore’s engagement with issues surrounding women’s vulnerability to male exploitation. The first major publication dedicated to Joseph Highmore and written by Dr Riding will be published by Paul Holberton publishing to coincide with the exhibition. The exhibition is supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.
On display in the Museum’s historic rooms, a series of nine previously unseen sculptures by acclaimed contemporary artist Rachel Kneebone provide a highly charged counterpoint to Basic Instincts. Exploiting porcelain’s history as a material of refinement and rococo exuberance, Kneebone subverts viewers’ expectations by creating works that are simultaneously delicate and visceral. Raft of the Medusa’s tumbling limbs and fractured swags are at once coquettish and sinister; their gleaming white surfaces and exquisite detail belie scenes of collapse and dismemberment. Displayed amongst the Museum’s historic Collection, these works distil and abstract the Foundling Hospital’s suppressed narratives of sexual desire, emotional damage, and female strength.
Jacqueline Riding specialises in Georgian history and art. She read History and Art History at the universities of Leicester, London, and York and has over twenty-five years’ experience working as a curator and consultant within a broad range of museums, galleries, and historic buildings, including the Guards Museum, Tate Britain, and Historic Royal Palaces. From 1993 until 1999 she was Assistant Curator of the Palace of Westminster and later founding Director of the Handel House Museum in London. She has published widely on early-Georgian art and history, including her major book Jacobites: A New History of the ’45 Rebellion (Bloomsbury 2016). She is currently writing a biography of William Hogarth (Head of Zeus). She was the consultant historian and art historian on Mike Leigh’s award-winning film Mr. Turner (2014) and is the consultant historian on his next feature film, Peterloo. Jacqueline Riding is Associate Research Fellow in the School of Arts, Birkbeck College, University of London and a Fellow of the Clore Leadership Programme.
Rachel Kneebone (b. 1973) lives and works in London. Recent solo exhibitions include Rachel Kneebone at the V&A, London (2017); 399 Days, White Cube Bermondsey (2014) and London; and Regarding Rodin, Brooklyn Museum, New York (2012). Group exhibitions include Obsession, Maison Particulière, Brussels and Flesh, York Art Gallery (2016); Lust for Life, Galleri Anderson Sandstrom, Stockholm and Ceramix at Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht (2015); 3am: Wonder, Paranoia and the Restless Night, The Bluecoat, Liverpool and Chapter, Cardi (2013–14); The Surreal House, Barbican Centre, London (2010); Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Arts, London (2008); and Mario Testino at Home, Yvon Lambert, New York (2007). In 2005, Kneebone was nominated for the MaxMara Art Prize and this year has been nominated for the breakthrough award for the 2017 South Bank Show Sky Arts Award.
The accompanying book is published by PHP:
Jacqueline Riding, Basic Instincts: Love, Passion, and Violence in the Art of Joseph Highmore (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2017), 120 pages, ISBN: 978 1911300 281, £25.
Published to coincide with the exhibition at the Foundling Museum in London, this fascinating book will re-introduce Joseph Highmore (1692–1780), an artist of status and substance in his day, who is now largely unknown. It takes as its focus Highmore’s small oil painting known as The Angel of Mercy (ca. 1746, Yale), one of the most shocking and controversial images in 18th-century British art.
The painting depicts a woman in fashionable mid-18th-century dress strangling the infant lying on her lap. A cloaked, barefooted figure cowers to the right as an angel intervenes, pointing towards the Foundling Hospital, the recently built refuge for abandoned infants, in the distance. The image attempts to address one of the most disturbing aspects of the Foundling Hospital story—certainly a subject that many (now as then) would consider beyond depiction. But if any artist of the period had attempted such a subject it would surely be William Hogarth, not the portrait painter Joseph Highmore? In fact, the painting was attributed to Hogarth for almost two centuries, until its reattribution in the 1990s. Even so, it is surprising that despite the wealth of scholarship associated with Hogarth and the ‘modern moral subject’ of the 1730s and 1740s, The Angel of Mercy has received little attention until now. The book and exhibition seeks to address this, while encouraging greater interest in, and appreciation for, this significant British artist.
Jacqueline Riding sets this extraordinary painting within the context of the artist’s life and work, as well as broader historical and artistic contexts. This includes exploration of superb examples of Highmore’s portraiture, such as his complex, monumental group portrait The Family of Sir Eldred Lancelot Lee and the exquisite small-scale ‘conversations’ The Vigor Family and The Artist and his Family, juxtaposed with analysis of key subject paintings, including the Foundling Museum’s Hagar and Ishmael and Highmore’s Pamela series, inspired by Samuel Richardson’s bestselling novel. Collectively they tackle relevant and highly contentious issues around the status and care of women and children, master/servant relations, motherhood, abuse, abandonment, infant death, and murder.
Call for Papers | New Orleans, Global City, 1718–2018
Gerard Van Keulen, Carte de la Nouvelle France ou se voit le cours des Grandes Rivieres de S. Laurens & Mississippi…
(Amsterdam, 1720)
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
From the 18th- and 19th-Century Studies Network:
New Orleans, Global City, 1718–2018: The Long Shadow of John Law and the Mississippi Company
Inaugural Conference of the 18th- and 19th-Century Studies Network
University of Colorado Boulder, 26–28 April 2018
Proposals due by 17 September 2017
It has been almost three hundred years since the first international stock market crash took place in France, Britain, and the Netherlands. A spate of cross-disciplinary conferences and publications have added greatly to our understanding of the impact of the Mississippi and South Sea Bubbles and the Dutch windhandel (trade in wind) on European economies and cultures. The colonial, global, and oceanic dimensions of these events have not been studied as closely. Meant to coincide with the foundation of New Orleans in 1718 by the Compagnie des Indes (aka the Mississippi Company), this interdisciplinary conference will focus on the immediate to long-term impact of Law’s System and the Mississippi Company on the cultures, economies, and environments of New Orleans and surrounding areas. The focus will be on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but we shall also consider proposals that deal with earlier or later developments so long as they take into account their broader historical context.
We particularly welcome proposals that
• consider the direct and indirect impact of French (and other) joint-stock companies and state-sponsored monopolies on the economies, cultures, ecologies, soundscapes, and sensescapes of New Orleans and the Mississippi River Delta;
• bring into dialogue indigenous, European, and American economic and cultural studies; and/or
• approach the history of New Orleans and the Mississippi River Delta from a global or oceanic perspective.
Sub-topics might include
• Global capitalism and the making of New Orleans
• New Orleans in the global imagination
• The impact of colonial settlements on indigenous and on metropolitan and colonial French, Spanish, and British economies and cultures
• Relations among indigenous peoples, Spaniards, Canadians, Acadians, French, Africans, and Germans
• Relations with France, Britain, Spain, and their colonies
• Trade routes and migration patterns
• Cross-cultural / comparative studies of slavery and colonialism
Linguistic creolization
• 1718 / 1720 as origin myth in French and American cultures
• The impact of the Mississippi Bubble on New Orleans, Lower Louisiana, New France, and the West Indies
• Economic, ecological, and cultural dimensions of natural and financial disasters
The deadline for the submission of individual paper proposals is September 17, 2017. Please send an abstract (300–600 words) along with a brief curriculum vitae (2–3 pages) to catherine.labio@colorado.edu. Abstracts and cv may be in English or French, although all presentations will be in English. If you do not receive an acknowledgment by September 22, please email catherine.labio@colorado.edu. Proposals will be selected by an interdisciplinary scientific committee. Notifications will go out by October 15, 2017. Papers (due April 9) will be pre-circulated. Presentations will be brief to leave plenty of time for discussion.
The 18th- and 19th-Century Studies Network was created in Fall 2016 with support from the Department of English at the University of Colorado Boulder. Its core mission is to foster intellectual exchanges within the University of Colorado and at the regional, national, and international levels. The Network is open to faculty and students from across the CU System and to all other scholars in the area. All geographical, disciplinary, and methodological approaches are welcome.
Call for Papers | Crafting an Enlightened World: Patronage & Pioneers
Grinling Gibbons, detail from the King David panel, ca. 1670, boxwood
(York: Fairfax House)
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
2017 Fairfax House Georgian Studies Symposium
Crafting an Enlightened World: Patronage & Pioneers
Fairfax House, York, 19–20 October 2017
Proposals due by 8 September 2017
York, from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth century, was amongst the key centres in Britain where ideas, innovation, experimentation, and invention flourished, contributing to what is now referred to as the ‘era of Enlightenment’. Indeed, York was to play host to nationally and internationally celebrated astronomers, historians, clockmakers, scientists, painters, sculptors, architects, and cabinet-makers, as well as leading anti-slavery campaigners and enlightened mental health providers. The interdisciplinary nature of the talent which converged in vibrant hubs across the country such as York, reflected the spirit of the age in which scholars could simultaneously delve into religion, philosophy, natural sciences, mathematics, history, and the arts, seemingly without conflict. These progressive environments were key in sustaining and nurturing talented—often providing vibrant nexus points through which talented thinkers, scientists, artists, and craftspeople traversed, trained, worked, and often decided to permanently reside.
Crafting an Enlightened World: Patronage and Pioneers will be Fairfax House’s Fifth Symposium in Georgian Studies. Held in conjunction with the exhibition Made in York: Inventing & Enlightening the Georgian City, it aims to delve deeper into the theme of ‘Crafting an Enlightened World’ during the long eighteenth century (c.1680–1830), examining its roots and legacy. The symposium will focus on the driving forces behind creating an enlightened world and in turn how the Enlightenment fed and helped forge the environment in which pioneering craftsmanship in Britain during this period took flight.
Drawing on the breadth and diversity of enlightened talent which flourished in Britain during the era, the symposium hopes to offer a re-examination of the period, moving away from the London-centric narratives which have dominated analysis of the era, to a more nuanced yet holistic view of this period which also takes account of the regional Georgian urban realm.
The symposium will take place over two days. Day One will explore the contexts which emerged and fostered ‘enlightened’ creativity in the period. Echoing the eclectic interests of enlightened polymaths, we hope this first day will be broad and varied in the range of topics discussed and may include (though not limited to): studies focusing on the ‘enlightenment’ in the public, private and urban realms, clubs and societies, intellectual networks, the tools used in the dissemination of ideas and inventions, patronal networks, collecting, connoisseur and antiquarianism, issues of class and gender in Enlightenment practice, taxonomy, the historiography of the enlightenment, or the enlightenment as a literary phenomenon.
Building upon this, Day Two will primarily focus on ‘enlightened craftsmanship’, in its many varied forms and expressions. We hope to examine the processes of invention, creation, and crafting which gave physical expression to the phenomenon of the ‘enlightenment’. Considering its pioneers and patrons, topics could include but are not limited to: the influence of ‘enlightenment’ ideas on the arts, the synergy which existed between the sciences and the arts, the emergence of academies and centres of excellence, the role of religion, and regionality.
In the light of Fairfax House’s recent acquisition of Grinling Gibbons’s first-known, made-in-York artwork, the King David panel, a key part of Day Two will be devoted to his work, and we encourage in particular papers which look at the intersection of Gibbons, pioneering craftsmanship, and the Enlightenment.
Contributions in the form of papers not exceeding 20 minutes in length are invited addressing relevant topics. We are keen to encourage participation from the widest possible range of disciplines and backgrounds: museum professionals and volunteers, scholars and students in higher education, artists, craftspeople, and other practitioners. Please send proposals of around 200 words, accompanied by a brief one-paragraph biography, to fairfaxhousesymposium@gmail.com by Friday 8 September 2017. Any queries about the symposium should be sent to the same email address.
For the past five years Fairfax House has brought together world-class researchers from the academic and museum worlds for its annual Symposium in Georgian Studies. The symposia have provided a forum for the sharing of new and emerging scholarship into the long eighteenth century and the collaboration of academics and museum professionals in presenting this research to a public audience. As part of this ongoing commitment to expanding the reach of eighteenth-century scholarship, Fairfax House is excited to present its Cabinet of Curiosities. This addition to Fairfax House’s public-facing website will encompass fully-credited scholarly articles based on content from past exhibitions held at Fairfax House as well as articles from academics and museum professionals with interests in the long eighteenth century. A wide range of aspects of eighteenth-century life are to be covered from national to regional levels including consumption, fashion, revolution, urban life, Georgian households, architecture, enlightenment, and leisure. It is anticipated that the scholarship shared at the symposia will be disseminated through this site to a broader public audience and we therefore hope that speakers will consider contributing their papers to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
Exhibition | Made in York: Inventing & Enlightening the Georgian City
Now on view at Fairfax House:
Made in York: Inventing & Enlightening the Georgian City
Fairfax House, York, 5 May — 12 November 2017
Pioneering ideas, great inventions, ground-breaking discoveries, objects of beauty, innovation, artistry and craftsmanship and the people behind their creation…. These products of York’s age of Enlightenment are as rich as their impact is far-reaching. Made in York celebrates the wealth of this Georgian city’s inventive and enlightened output through the long eighteenth century (1670–1830).
York’s pages of history are strewn with astronomers, mathematicians, horologists, and zoologists through to world-class scholars, celebrated painters, sculptors, architects, and cabinetmakers. This is the story of those people who made this city a crucible for enlightened thought, intellectual creativity, and a centre for exquisite craftsmanship throughout the Georgian age. York nurtured some of the greatest names such as Grinling Gibbons, Thomas Chippendale, Laurence Sterne, John Goodricke, John Flaxman, and Joseph Rose, leaders in each of their metiers. But behind these icons are some lesser-known pioneers; Made in York rediscovers their rich and eclectic legacy and the rare objects and often forgotten triumphs that they have left for future generations. For the first time, this landmark exhibition will be showcased throughout the townhouse, vividly animating both Fairfax House’s beautiful period rooms and its exhibition gallery.
New Book | Chevening: A Seat of Diplomacy
From Paul Holberton Publishing:
Julius Bryant, Chevening: A Seat of Diplomacy (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2017), 96 pages, ISBN: 978 191130 0113, £30.
A welcome introduction to the handsome architecture, splendid decoration, notable collections, and glorious gardens of Chevening, the grand country residence used for several decades by Britain’s Foreign Secretary.
Chevening stands in a magnificent park below the wooded escarpment of the North Downs in Kent. It has a history dating back around 800 years, but the Chevening we see today we see today is almost entirely the creation of seven generations of the Stanhope family, building on the original Inigo Jones house of 1630. For 250 years the Stanhopes served their country as soldiers and statesmen, and at Chevening as patrons of architecture and art. This new guide highlights the contributions of the Earls and Countesses Stanhope to the building, furniture, pictures, gardens and landscape of Chevening. It also gives a short account of the family in the wider world in order to set their creations in context.
The decoration and architectural features of each of the rooms—from the Entrance Hall with its spectacular swirling staircase of c. 1721 to the sumptuous Tapestry Room with its rare Berlin tapestries woven by Huguenot craftsmen in 1708—are described and illustrated, and significant and unusual works of art highlighted, such as important portraits by Allan Ramsay, Thomas Gainsborough, and Sir Thomas Lawrence.
The Estate consists of some 3,000 acres, and the gardens include a lake, maze, parterre and a double-walled hexagonal kitchen garden. The history of the garden is explored, from the extensive landscaping in the formal style by the 1st and 2nd Earls in the early 18th century, to the naturalistic style created in 1775–78—much of the character of which survives today—to the re-formalizing in the 19th century, with the creation of the ‘Italian’ gardens, a maze and hedged allées. The wonderful restoration of recent decades and the replanting to the designs of Elizabeth Banks is celebrated with new photography.
Published to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Chevening Act coming into effect with the death of the last Earl Stanhope and the 300th anniversary of his family’s acquisition of the Chevening estate.
Julius Bryant is Keeper of Word and Image at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Call for Participation | Objects in Motion
British Art Studies Open Call for Participation: Objects in Motion
A digital publishing initiative by British Art Studies and the Terra Foundation for American Art
Proposals due by 1 September 2017
Postage stamp commemorating the Anglo-American Exposition, London, May to October 1914.
We invite proposals from academics, museum scholars, and artists to participate in a new digital publishing initiative supported by the Terra Foundation for American Art and the peer-reviewed, open-access journal British Art Studies (BAS), which is jointly published by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Yale Center for British Art. This initiative calls for a series of interdisciplinary articles and features centered on the broad theme of “Objects in Motion” to appear in future issues of BAS.
The movement of objects and ideas across cultures represents a growing field of art historical research. The aim of this series is to explore the physical and material circumstances by which art is transmitted, displaced, and recontextualized, creating new markets, audiences, and meanings. We seek proposals that consider cross-cultural dialogues between Britain and the United States, focusing on any period and any aspect of visual and material culture. Proposals should outline the ways in which the project/article will take advantage of the possibilities offered by the digital platform.
Authors of accepted proposals will be invited to a think-tank workshop at the Terra Foundation’s property in Giverny, France, 3–5 May 2018. The workshop will offer the opportunity to discuss the intellectual rationale of the projects in tandem with the digital tools entailed in their realization. Building on these discussions, BAS will work with a small group of selected authors to develop a series of single-authored or collaboratively written articles and features that examine cross-cultural dialogues between Britain and the United States. All articles will be subject to peer review, as is standard for BAS.
Proposals should include the following:
• A description of no more than one thousand words that outlines the intellectual premise of the project and how it speaks to the theme of “Objects in Motion.”
• The description must include details of how the project will take advantage of the digital platform. We are not looking for technical specifications but for a vision statement of how the digital platform will support or enhance the development and/or presentation of the project.
• Names and short CVs (no more than two pages) for all co-authors and contributors.
Funding for travel and accommodation in Giverny will be provided to authors selected to participate in the workshop. Inquiries and completed application materials in the form of PDFs should be sent to journal@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk. The deadline for applications is 11:59 pm GMT on Friday, September 1, 2017.
Conference | Early Modern Collections in Use
From the conference flyer:
Early Modern Collections in Use
The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, 15–16 September 2017
Ferrante Imperato, Dell ’Historia Naturale, 1599, detail from a double plate (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute).
From cabinets of curiosities, auction houses, and libraries to stables, menageries, and laboratories, early modern collections played a key role in the creation and transmission of knowledge. But how were these collections used in their own time? Speakers will explore the relationships between space and knowledge through the discussion of a range of themes in the history of collecting: from management to performance, from visitation to dissemination. Cumulatively, the papers will offer a new basis for thinking not only about the origins and content, but also about the functions and dynamics of early modern collections.
Conference registration and optional lunches by reservation only. The registration fee is $25 (students free), with buffet lunches for $20 each day. Please visit The Huntington website for more information. Funding provided by The Huntington’s William French Smith Endowment and The USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute.
F R I D A Y , 1 5 S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 7
8:30 Registration and coffee
9:30 Welcome by Steve Hindle (The Huntington) and remarks by Elizabeth Eger and Anne Goldgar (King’s College London)
10:00 Session 1 | Conceptualizing
Moderator: Anne Goldgar
• Paula Findlen (Stanford University), Why Put a Museum in a Book? Ferrante Imperato and Natural History in Sixteenth-Century Naples
• Peter Mancall (University of Southern California and The USC-Huntington, Early Modern Studies Institute), Birds of (Early) America
12:00 Lunch
1:00 Session 2 | Displaying
Moderator: Elizabeth Eger
• Vera Keller (University of Oregon), Johann Daniel Major (1634–1693) and the Experimental Museum
• Mark Meadow (University of California, Santa Barbara), Quiccheberg, Prudence, and the Display of Techne in the Brueghel/Rubens Allegories of the Senses
2:45 Break
3:00 Session 3 | Performing
Moderator: Arnold Hunt (University of Cambridge)
• Dániel Margócsy (University of Cambridge), Stables as Collections for Breeding: The Production of Knowledge and the Reproduction of Horses
• Anne Goldgar (King’s College London), How to Seem a Connoisseur: Learning to Perform in Early Modern Art Collections
S A T U R D A Y , 1 6 S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 7
9:00 Registration and coffee
9:30 Session 4 | Hiding
Moderator: Peter Mancall
• Jessica Keating (Carleton College), Hidden in Plain Sight: The Kunstkammer of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II
• Victoria Pickering (The British Museum), Sealed and Concealed: The Visible and Not-so-Visible Uses of a Botanical Collection
11:30 Lunch and time to view exhibition, Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin (led by exhibition curator Daniela Bleichmar)
1:00 Session 5 | Visiting
Moderator: Kim Sloan (The British Museum)
• Elizabeth Eger, Collecting People
• Felicity Roberts (King’s College London), Sir Hans Sloane’s Museum and Animal Encounters
2:45 Break
3:00 Session 6 | Disseminating
Moderator: Miles Ogborn (Queen Mary University of London)
• Alice Marples (The John Rylands Research Institute, University of Manchester), ‘Raised to High Eminence By the Excitement’: Collections and the Creation of ‘Provincial’ Medical Education
• Daniela Bleichmar (University of Southern California), The Interpretation of Mexican Indigenous Objects in Collections in Early Modern Europe and New Spain
4:45 Concluding Roundtable
Arnold Hunt (University of Cambridge), Miles Ogborn (Queen Mary University of London), Kim Sloan (The British Museum), and Mary Terrall (University of California, Los Angeles)
Exhibition | Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature
Press release from The Huntington:
Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin
The Huntington Art Gallery, San Marino, 16 September 2017 — 8 January 2018
Curated by Catherine Hess and Daniela Bleichmar
A sweeping international loan exhibition at The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens will explore how the depiction of Latin American nature contributed to art and science between the late 1400s and the mid-1800s. Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin, on view in the MaryLou and George Boone Gallery from September 16, 2017 to January 8, 2018, will feature more than 150 paintings, rare books, illustrated manuscripts, prints, and drawings from The Huntington’s holdings as well as from dozens of other collections. Many of these works will be on view for the first time in the United States.
Visual Voyages will be complemented by a richly illustrated book, along with an array of other programs and exhibitions, including a sound installation by Mexican experimental composer Guillermo Galindo. The exhibition is a part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative, an exploration of Latin American and Latino art that involves more than 70 arts institutions across Southern California.
“Despite notorious depredation of people and resources during the period, the brilliant work of a number of Latin Americans and Europeans helped to illuminate our understanding of the natural world,” said Catherine Hess, chief curator of European art at The Huntington and co-curator of Visual Voyages. “We aim to shed light on this relatively unexamined piece of the story—to show how beautiful, surprising, and deeply captivating depictions of nature in Latin America reshaped our understanding of the region and, indeed, the world—essentially linking art and the natural sciences.”
Visual Voyages looks at how indigenous peoples, Europeans, Spanish Americans, and individuals of mixed-race descent depicted natural phenomena for a range of purposes and from a variety of perspectives: artistic, cultural, religious, commercial, medical, and scientific. The exhibition examines the period that falls roughly between Christopher Columbus’s first voyage in 1492 and Charles Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species in 1859, a work based largely on Darwin’s own voyage to the region in the 1830s.
“Information and materials circulated at an unprecedented rate as people transformed their relationship to the natural world and to each other,” said Daniela Bleichmar, associate professor of art history and history at the University of Southern California (USC) and co-curator of the exhibition. “Images served not only as artistic objects of great beauty but also as a means of experiencing, understanding, and possessing the natural world. These depictions circulated widely and allowed viewers—then and now—to embark on their own ‘visual voyages’.”
Bleichmar, who was born in Argentina and raised in Mexico, is an expert on the history of science, art, and cultural contact in the early modern period. Her publications include the prize-winning book Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (The University of Chicago Press, 2012).
The Huntington’s three collection areas—library, art, and botanical—all contribute to Visual Voyages. Its Library is one of the world’s greatest research institutions in the fields of British and American history, art, and the history of science, stretching from the 11th century to the present, and includes such riches as the first European depiction of a pineapple and a rare 16th-century manuscript atlas that includes three stunning maps of the Americas. From The Huntington’s art holdings, Frederic Edwin Church’s monumental painting Chimborazo (1864) will be on display, depicting a Latin American landscape both real and imaginary. The Huntington’s 120 acres of gardens include several thousand plant species from Latin America, including pineapple, vanilla, cacao, and various orchids and succulents.
Designed by Chu+Gooding Architects of Los Angeles, Visual Voyages engages visitors through an evocative installation that includes interactive media, display cases of specimens and rare materials, and two walls almost completely covered with grids of visually arresting depictions of botanical specimens and still lifes.
The exhibition opens with a playful display of taxidermy mounts to make vivid the rare animals that captured the imagination of Europeans and were avidly collected during the period. Visual Voyages then begins with a section on “Rewriting the Book of Nature,” in which manuscripts, maps, and publications show how nature came to be reconsidered in the first century of contact. This section includes a copy of the 1493 letter Christopher Columbus wrote to the King and Queen of Spain while on the return leg of his first voyage to the New World. He writes that the region is “so fertile that, even if I could describe it, one would have difficulty believing in its existence.” This section highlights the many contributions of indigenous Americans to the exploration of New World nature, among them two large-scale maps painted by indigenous artists in Mexico and Guatemala; a volume from the Florentine Codex, a 16th-century Mexican manuscript on loan from the Laurentian Library, Florence; and a spectacular feather cape created by the Tupinambá of Brazil.
Next, a gallery called “The Value of Nature” explores the intertwining of economic and spiritual approaches to Latin American nature. Commercial interests resulted in the investigation, depiction, and commercialization of such natural commodities as tobacco and chocolate. Indigenous religions considered the natural world to be infused with the divine, while Christian perspectives led observers to envision Latin American nature as both rich in signs of godliness as well as marked with signs of the devil—and needing eradication. Various depictions of the passion flower, a New World plant, show how the flower’s form recalled to missionaries the instruments of Christ’s Passion.
A third section, “Collecting: From Wonder to Order,” shows how the ‘wonder’ that European collectors held for the astonishing material coming from the New World became a desire to possess and, later, to “order” this material, following systems of taxonomy and classification. On view will be a spectacular set of large paintings depicting Brazilian fruits and vegetables by the Dutch painter Albert Eckhout (ca.1610–1665) as well as 30 artful, vivid, and detailed drawings of botanical specimens painted by artists from New Granada (present-day Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Venezuela, Peru, northern Brazil, and western Guyana), never before seen in the United States.
The final section of the exhibition, called “New Landscapes,” examines scientific and artistic perspectives on Latin America created in the 19th century, a period when a new wave of voyagers explored the region and independence wars resulted in the emergence of new nations. The Romantic and imperial visions of artists and scientists from Europe and the U.S. are juxtaposed with the patriotic and modernizing visions of artists and scientists from Latin America, who envisioned nature as an integral part of national identity. This juxtaposition can be seen visually in the pairing of The Huntington’s monumental Chimborazo by Church with the equally monumental Valley of Mexico (1877) by Mexican painter José María Velasco, on loan from the Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico City.
Gallery text is in Spanish and English.
Daniela Bleichmar, Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 240 pages, ISBN: 978 030022 4023, $50.
Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin is accompanied by a hardcover book of the same title written by Daniela Bleichmar, co-curator of the exhibition. In a narrative addressed to general audiences as well as students and scholars, Bleichmar reveals the fascinating story of the interrelationship of art and science in Latin America and Europe during the period.
More information is available from Yale UP.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
The Huntington will present an array of public programs to complement Visual Voyages, including a lecture, a curator tour, and focused exhibitions.
Guillermo Galindo Installation and Performance
16 September 2017 — 8 January 2018
Experimental composer, sonic architect, and performance artist Guillermo Galindo will create an outdoor sound installation and performance at The Huntington during the run of the exhibition. The program is part of USC Annenberg’s Musical Interventions, a series of public events organized for Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA by Josh Kun, historian of popular music and recently named a MacArthur Fellow.
Nuestro Mundo
16 September 2017 — 8 January 2018
About two dozen paintings by students of Art Division make up this installation of works inspired by Visual Voyages. Art Division is a non-profit organization dedicated to training and supporting underserved Los Angeles youth who are committed to studying the visual arts. Flora-Legium Gallery, Brody Botanical Center (weekends only).
In Pursuit of Flora: Eighteenth-Century Botanical Drawings
28 October 2017 — 19 February 2018
European exploration of other lands during the so-called Age of Discovery revealed a vast new world of plant life that required description, cataloging, and recording. By the 18th century, the practice of botanical illustration had become an essential tool of natural history, and botanical illustrators had developed strategies for presenting accurate information through exquisitely rendered images. From lusciously detailed drawings of fruit and flowers by Georg Dionysius Ehret (1708–1770), a collaborator of Linnaeus, to stunning depictions of more exotic examples by the talented amateur Matilda Conyers (1753–1803), In Pursuit of Flora reveals the 18th-century appreciation for the beauty of the natural world.
Symposium: Indigenous Knowledge and the Making of Colonial Latin America
The Getty Center, Los Angeles, 8-10 December 2017
This symposium will bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to explore the ways in which indigenous knowledge contributed to the making of colonial Latin America. A dozen talks will examine practices related to art, architecture, science, medicine, governance, and the study of the past, among other topics. Curator-led visits to two related exhibitions—Visual Voyages at The Huntington and Golden Kingdoms: Luxury and Legacy in the Ancient Americas at The J. Paul Getty Museum—will allow participants to view magnificent examples of work by indigenous artists and authors, including more than half a dozen rare pictorial manuscripts (codices). The symposium is organized by Daniela Bleichmar, co-curator of Visual Voyages and Kim Richter, co-curator of Golden Kingdoms and senior research specialist at the Getty Research Institute, with funding from the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute, the Seaver Institute, and the Getty Research Institute
Enfilade 
leave a comment