Enfilade

From Paul Holberton Publishing:

The Male Nude: Eighteenth-Century Drawings from the Paris Academy
The Wallace Collection, London, 24 October 2013 – 19 January 2014

Including artists such as Rigaud, Boucher, Nattier, Pierre, Carle van Loo, Gros and Jean-Baptiste Isabey, this catalogue of nearly forty French drawings of male nude figures, all drawn between the late seventeenth and the late eighteenth centuries, accompanies an exhibition that is unprecedented in Britain. All from France’s equivalent of the Royal Academy, the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, many of the extraordinary drawings are by artists represented in the Wallace Collection.

Painting in eighteenth-century France before the Revolution was centred on the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, which had been founded in 1648. The purpose of the Academy was to train the most important artists and to provide them with the raw materials for successful history painting, which was by far the most esteemed genre for an artist to practise. Budding painters or sculptors would be apprenticed to a master, but much of their training would take place at the Academy where the drawing of the male human figure was at the core of the curriculum. Only after mastering the copying of drawings and engravings, and then casts of antique sculptures, would the student be allowed to progress to drawing the nude figure in the life class. The drawings they produced there were so associated with the Academy that they came to be known as ‘académies’.

The male human figure was regarded as the very foundation of painting and sculpture; it had to be mastered by any aspiring artist of the highest class. No female artists were admitted to the Academy and all models were male. This practice in itself went on to create problems for artists, who lacking the necessary training to portray the female form, were compelled to search out models, not always in the most respectable and salubrious settings. Classes were complemented by courses on anatomy, perspective, geometry, literature and history. The Academy’s training was learned and structured, and, although it was sometimes criticized for its rigour and its insistence on discipline and uniformity, it produced superb draughtsmen. Some of the artists featured became painting Masters of their generation, focusing on historical and allegorical pictures. Others utilised their training in a variety of artistic fields, including Bachelier, who went on to assume the role of Director of Design and Decoration at the Sèvres porcelain factory, influencing many of the pieces exhibited in the Wallace Collection.

Variety and beauty are omnipresent in The Male Nude. The works show figures – sometimes single, sometimes two together – in an enormous variety of poses and in various degrees of light and shade. The study of physiognomic expression was also taught at the Academy, and the facial expressions of the figures always complement the poses they adopt, whether they show, say, serenity, exertion, pleasure or anger.

As a descendant of the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts owns an incomparable collection of these académies which have come down to it directly from the Academy’s teaching classes. It also owns an outstanding collection of drawings, second only to the Louvre in France, comprising not only a superb group of French drawings, but many works by some of the other great draughtsmen of European art, such as Raphael, Dürer and Michelangelo. This exhibition at the Wallace Collection will be an excellent opportunity for collections at ENSBA – which are open to anyone to visit – to become much better known to a British audience, as well as allowing visitors an insight into this influential, but now non-existent world.

The Wallace Collection displays one of the greatest collections of eighteenth-century French paintings in the world, and these drawings from Paris will make an excellent complement to them. The Hertfords collected almost no academic, or historical, works for which these drawings were the basis, favouring ‘pleasing pictures’: portraits and landscapes. In many ways, The Male Nude will offer the visitor a new dimension and complete the jigsaw. Seen alongside our world-class holdings of eighteenth-century furniture and decorative arts, they will provide a thorough understanding of the period.

Catalogue edited by Emmanuelle Brugerolles with Georges Brunel and Camille Debrabant, The Male Nude: Eighteenth-Century Drawings from the Paris Academy (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2013), 144 pages, £25.

Press release from The British Museum:

Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art, 1600–1900
The British Museum, London, 3 October 2013 — 5 January 2014

Curated by Tim Clark

Torii Kiyonaga, Sode no maki (Handscroll for the Sleeve), ca. 1785
(London: British Museum)

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In early modern Japan, 1600–1900, thousands of sexually explicit paintings, prints, and illustrated books with texts were produced, known as ‘spring pictures’ (shunga). Official life in this period was governed by strict Confucian laws, but private life was less controlled in practice. Often tender, funny and beautiful, shunga were mostly done within the popular school known as ‘pictures of the floating world’ (ukiyo-e), by celebrated artists such as Kitagawa Utamaro (died 1806) and Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849). This was very different from the situation in contemporary Europe, where religious bans and prevailing morality enforced an absolute division between ‘art’ and ‘pornography’.

Early modern Japan was certainly not a sex-paradise. However, the values promoted in shunga are generally positive towards sexual pleasure for all participants. Women’s sexuality was readily acknowledged and male-male sex recognised in particular social contexts.

Shunga is in some ways a unique phenomenon in pre-modern world culture, in terms of the quantity, the quality and the nature of the art that was produced. This exhibition — which features some 170 works of explicit shunga paintings, sets of prints and illustrated books drawn from collections in the UK, Japan, Europe and USA — explores some key questions about what is shunga, how it circulated and to whom, and why was it produced. In particular it begins to establish the social and cultural contexts for sex art in Japan.

During the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, shunga was all but removed from popular and scholarly memory in Japan and became taboo. The ambition of the exhibition is to reaffirm the importance of shunga in Japanese and world history. In conjunction with the exhibition, British Museum Press will publish a lavish scholarly catalogue of some 550 pages and with 400 colour illustrations, edited by Timothy Clark (British Museum), C. Andrew Gerstle (SOAS, University of London), Akiko Yano (SOAS) and Aki Ishigami (Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto), and with contributions from more than thirty authors worldwide.

The exhibition is part of Japan400, a nationwide UK series of events celebrating 400 years of Japan-British relations.

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Paul Holberton published the catalogue for this exhibition now on view at Waddesdon Manor:

Sacred Stitches: Ecclesiastical Textiles in the Rothschild Collection at Waddesdon Manor
Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire, 27 March – 27 October 2013

Curated by Rachel Boak

Sacred Stitches accompanies an exhibition that assembles together for the first time fragments of opulent and unique ecclesiastical textiles drawn from the stored collections at Waddesdon Manor, the astonishing Renaissance-style château that is one of the rare survivors of the splendour of the ‘goût Rothschild’. Dating from c. 1400 to the late 1700s, the textiles were acquired by several members of the Rothschild family, the greatest collectors of the 19th century, who sought the highest quality of workmanship with a keen sense of historical importance.

Although it might seem strange for a Jewish family to collect objects associated with the Christian Church, the textiles were prized for their technical and artistic brilliance. Parts of altar frontals, vestments and other church furnishings, they survive as fragments, cushions, banners, hangings and furniture upholstery, as their original purposes were altered to suit tastes and interior styles of the late 1800s. Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild used them in the Bachelors’ Wing at Waddesdon, the first part of the house to be completed in 1880. His sister, Alice, also had an eye for the finest ecclesiastical embroideries, displayed as decorative hangings in her own house nearby. A passionate collector of costume and textiles, Ferdinand and Alice’s niece, Baroness Edmond de Rothschild, shared their interest and added to the collection.

Dress fabric, now a chalice veil, ca. 1745-50, (Rothschild Collection at Waddesdon Manor, acc. #523). Photo by Mike Fear.

Rachel Boak, Curator at Waddesdon Manor, first considers the changing manufacture and style of vestments and furnishings for the Church in the Medieval and early Renaissance period, as well as the impact of the Reformation and the French Revolution, when many vestments and textile furnishings became redundant, were destroyed and their precious metal threads melted down. Her main focus, however, is the collecting habits of Ferdinand, Alice and Baroness Edmond in the context of 19th-century Britain, where George IV’s historicizing coronation of 1821, at which guests wore Tudor-style dress, had brought about a renewed interest in Medieval and Renaissance collecting, design and costume, and the Oxford Movement in 1833 meant a revival of vestments associated with the celebration of the Eucharist.

Each Waddesdon object – its iconography, manufacture and history – is considered individually, illustrated with beautiful new photography that captures all the detail, texture and intricate stitching.

Rachel Boak, Sacred Stitches: Ecclesiastical Textiles in the Rothschild Collection at Waddesdon Manor (London: Paul Holberton, 2013), 80 pages, ISBN: 978-0954731038, £15.