Enfilade

From Ashgate:

Sally Webster, The Nation’s First Monument and the Origins of the American Memorial Tradition: Liberty Enshrined (Aldersthot: Ashgate, 2015), 254 pages, ISBN: 978-1472418999, $105.

The commemorative tradition in early American art is given sustained consideration for the first time in Sally Webster’s fascinating study of public monuments and the construction of an American patronymic tradition. Until now, no attempt has been made to create a coherent early history of the carved symbolic language of American liberty and independence. Establishing as the basis of her discussion the fledgling nation’s first monument, Jean-Jacques Caffiéri’s Monument to General Richard Montgomery (commissioned in January of 1776), Webster builds on the themes of commemoration and national patrimony, ultimately positing that like its instruments of government, America drew from the Enlightenment and its reverence for the classical past. Webster’s study is grounded in the political and social worlds of New York City, moving chronologically from the 1760s to the 1790s, with a concluding chapter considering the monument, which lies just east of Ground Zero, against the backdrop of 9/11. It is an original contribution to historical scholarship in fields ranging from early American art, sculpture, New York history, and the Revolutionary era. A chapter is devoted to the exceptional role of Benjamin Franklin in the commissioning and design of the monument. Webster’s study provides a new focus on New York City as the 18th-century city in which the European tradition of public commemoration was reconstituted as monuments to liberty’s heroes.

Sally Webster is Professor of American Art, Emerita at Lehman College and the Graduate Center, CUNY.

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C O N T E N T S

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction
1  New York’s De Lancey Family and the Origins of the American Memorial Tradition
2  Celebrating the Repeal of the Stamp Act: New York Tributes to William Pitt and George III
3  A Memorial to General Richard Montgomery: Commemorating the Death of an American Hero
4  Benjamin Franklin and the Commission of America’s First Monument
5  New York, Pierre-Charles L’Enfant, and a Monument for America

Bibliography
Index

From Ashgate:

Andrew Graciano, ed., Exhibiting Outside the Academy, Salon and Biennial, 1775–1999: Alternative Venues for Display (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2015), 308 pages, ISBN: 978-1472428271, $120.

In recent years, there has been increasing scholarly interest in the history of museums, academies, and major exhibitions. There has been, however, little to no sustained interest in the histories of alternative exhibitions (single artwork, solo artist, artist-mounted, entrepreneurial, privately funded, ephemeral, etc.) with the notable exception of those publications that deal with situations involving major artists or those who would become so—for example J. L. David’s exhibition of Intervention of the Sabine Women (1799) and The First Impressionist Exhibition of 1874—despite the fact that these sorts of exhibitions and critical scholarship about them have become commonplace (and no less important) in the contemporary art world. The present volume uses and contextualizes eleven case studies to advance some overarching themes and commonalities among alternative exhibitions in the long modern period from the late-eighteenth to the late-twentieth centuries and beyond. These include the issue of control in the interrelation and elision of the roles of artist and curator, and the relationship of such alternative exhibitions to the dominant modes, structures of display and cultural ideology.

Andrew Graciano is Associate Professor of Art History at the
University of South Carolina.

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C O N T E N T S

List of Illustrations
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements

Introduction: Alternative Venues, Andrew Graciano
1  Nathaniel Hone’s 1775 Exhibition: The First Single-Artist Retrospective, Konstantinos Stefanis
2  Branding Shakespeare: Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery and the Politics of Display, Heather McPherson
3  Fantasy and Rivalry: Jean-Baptiste Regnault’s Solo Exhibition, Paris 1800, Katie Hanson
4  Rereading ‘Court’ in the Touring Exhibition of Rembrandt Peale’s Court of Death (1820), Tanya Pohrt
5  ‘Plasmati dalle sue mani’: Canova’s Touch and the Gipsoteca of Possagno, Christina Ferando
6  Art History as Spectacle: Blockbuster Exhibitions in 1850s England, Amy M. Von Lintel
7  Merging Form and Formlessness: The 1892 Monotype Exhibition by Edgar Degas, Christine Y. Hahn
8  The Radical Work of Oskar Kokoschka and the Alternative Venues of Die Kunstschauen of 1908–1909, Vienna, Austria, Rosa J.H. Berland
9  Bringing the Boudoir into the Gallery: Florine Stettheimer’s ‘Failed’ Solo Exhibition, Karen Stock
10  Exhibiting the Museum-Function: Marcel Broodthaers and the Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, Julian Jason Haladyn
11  Georges Adéagbo: Between Artwork and Exhibition, Kathryn M. Floyd
Epilogue: Control Issues, Andrew Graciano

Select Bibliography
Index

From Kent State UP:

Susan W. Greene, Wearable Prints, 1760–1860: History, Materials, and Mechanics (Kent: Kent State University Press, 2014), 600 pages, ISBN: 978-1606351246, $100.

Wearable prints are not only a decorative art form but also the product of a range of complex industrial processes and an economically important commodity. But when did textile printing originate, and how can we identify the fabrics, inks, dyes, and printing processes used on surviving historical examples? In Wearable Prints, 1760–1860, Susan Greene surveys the history of wearable printed fabrics, which reaches back into the earliest days of the discovery of the delights of selectively patterned cloth and is firmly interwoven with the Industrial Revolution. The bulk of the book is devoted to the process of printing and dyeing. Greene brings together evidence from period publications and manuscripts, extant period garments and quilts, and scholarship on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century chemistry and technology. Greene includes some 1600 full-color images, showing an array of textile samples. Wearable Prints, 1760–1860 is a convenient encyclopedic guide, written in plain language accessible to even the most casual reader. Historians, students,
costumers, quilters, designers, curators, and collectors will find it an
essential resource.

Susan W. Greene is a collector, museum consultant, and independent scholar. Her collection of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century clothing now resides at the Genesee Country Village and Museum in Mumford, New York. She is the author of Textiles for Early Victorian Clothing and several entries in Valerie Steele’s Encyclopedia of Clothing and Fashion and Carol Kammen’s Encyclopedia of Local History.

From The University of Chicago Press:

Susan Lanser, The Sexuality of History: Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565–1830 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014), 344 pages, Cloth ISBN: 978-0226187563, $95 / Paper ISBN: 978-0226187730, $32.50 / E-book ISBN: 978-0226187877, $7–$30.

The period of reform, revolution, and reaction that characterized seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe also witnessed an intensified interest in lesbians. In scientific treatises and orientalist travelogues, in French court gossip and Dutch court records, in passionate verse, in the rising novel, and in cross-dressed flirtations on the English and Spanish stage, poets, playwrights, philosophers, and physicians were placing sapphic relations before the public eye.

In The Sexuality of History, Susan S. Lanser shows how intimacies between women became harbingers of the modern, bringing the sapphic into the mainstream of some of the most significant events in Western Europe. Ideas about female same-sex relations became a focal point for intellectual and cultural contests between authority and liberty, power and difference, desire and duty, mobility and change, order and governance. Lanser explores the ways in which a historically specific interest in lesbians intersected with, and stimulated, systemic concerns that would seem to have little to do with sexuality. Departing from the prevailing trend of queer reading whereby scholars ferret out hidden content in ‘closeted’ texts, Lanser situates overtly erotic representations within wider spheres of interest.  The Sexuality of History shows that just as we can understand sexuality by studying the past, so too can we understand the past by studying sexuality.

Susan S. Lanser is professor of comparative literature, English, and women’s and gender studies at Brandeis University. She is the author of Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice and The Narrative Act: Point of View in Prose Fiction.

From The University of Chicago Press:

Elizabeth Amann, Dandyism in the Age of Revolution: The Art of the Cut (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), 288 pages, ISBN: 978-0226187259, $45.

From the color of a politician’s tie, to exorbitantly costly haircuts, to the size of an American flag pin adorning a lapel, it’s no secret that style has political meaning. And there was no time in history when the politics of fashion was more fraught than during the French Revolution. In the 1790s almost any article of clothing could be scrutinized for evidence of one’s political affiliation. A waistcoat with seventeen buttons, for example, could be a sign of counterrevolution—a reference to Louis XVII—and earn its wearer a trip to the guillotine.

In Dandyism in the Age of Revolution, Elizabeth Amann shows that in France, England, and Spain, daring dress became a way of taking a stance toward the social and political upheaval of the period. France is the centerpiece of the story, not just because of the significance of the Revolution but also because of the speed with which its politics and fashions shifted. Dandyism in France represented an attempt to recover a political center after the extremism of the Terror, while in England and Spain it offered a way to reflect upon the turmoil across the Channel and Pyrenees. From the Hair Powder Act, which required users of the product to purchase a permit, to the political implications of the feather in Yankee Doodle’s hat, Amann aims to revise our understanding of the origins of modern dandyism and to recover the political context from which it emerged.

Elizabeth Amann is professor in the Department of Literary Studies at Ghent University, Belgium. She is the author of Importing Madame Bovary: The Politics of Adultery.

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C O N T E N T S

List of Illustrations

Introduction
1  Muscadins
2  Jeunes gens
3  Incroyables
4  Currutacos
5  Crops
Epilogue

Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Notes
Index