Book Talk | Simon Werrett on Fireworks
Simon Werrett, The History of Fireworks
Ealing Central Library, 8 November 2012
Simon Werrett will give talk on his book Fireworks: Pyrotechnic Arts and Science in European History at the Ealing Central Library on November 8, 2012 at 6:15pm. Enjoy a free glass of wine courtesy of Waterstones. Green Room, Ealing Central Library, Broadway Centre, Ealing W5 5JY. The event is free, but please book in advance at reading@ealing.gov.uk or in Ealing Waterstones.
New Title | Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China
From The University of Michigan Press:
Peter N. Miller and François Louis, eds., Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China, 1500-1800 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 440 pages, ISBN: 978-0472118182, $65.
This book is a project in comparative history, but along two distinct axes, one historical and the other historiographical. Its purpose is to constructively juxtapose the early modern European and Chinese approaches to historical study that have been called “antiquarian.” As an exercise in historical recovery, the essays in this volume amass new information about the range of antiquarian-type scholarship on the past, on nature, and on peoples undertaken at either end of the Eurasian landmass between 1500 and 1800. As a historiographical project, the book challenges the received—and often very much under conceptualized—use of the term “antiquarian” in both European and Chinese contexts. Readers will not only learn more about the range of European and Chinese scholarship on the past—and especially the material past—but they will also be able to integrate some of the historiographical observations and corrections into new ways of conceiving of the history of historical scholarship in Europe since the Renaissance, and to reflect on the impact of these European terms on Chinese approaches to the Chinese past. This comparison is a two-way street, with the European tradition clarified by knowledge of Chinese practices, and Chinese approaches better understood when placed alongside the European ones.
Peter N. Miller is Dean and Professor at the Bard Graduate Center. François Louis is Associate Professor at the Bard Graduate Center.
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This volume is the first to juxtapose the autochthonous traditions of antiquarianism of Early Modern Europe and Late Imperial China. Rather than asking only what the West might be able to learn about China, it self-consciously and quite successfully seeks to open up new perspectives on both sides of the comparison. It moreover breaks important ground in suggesting historically traceable links between evidential learning in China and European traditions of ‘Herodotean’ historiography. —Lothar von Falkenhausen, University of California, Los Angeles
This splendid collection of essays is at once a major addition to the literature on the history of scholarship in Western Europe, a burgeoning field in its own right, and a model effort at comparative cultural history . . . The collection as a whole sheds light on areas little known even to erudite scholars. —Anthony Grafton, Princeton University
Fellowship | Poulet Curatorial Fellowship at The Frick
From The Frick:
Anne L. Poulet Curatorial Fellowship 2013–15
The Frick Collection, New York
Applications due by 18 January 2013
The Frick Collection is an art museum consisting of more than 1,100 works of art from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century displayed in the intimate surroundings of the former home of Henry Clay Frick. The residence, with its furnishings and works of art, has been open to the public since 1935. It is considered one of the world’s most perfect museums; its sister research institution, the Frick Art Reference Library founded in 1920, is of equal distinction. The Library is an internationally recognized research library that serves as one of the world’s most complete resources for the study of Western art.
Position Summary
The Frick Collection is pleased to announce the availability of a two-year predoctoral fellowship for an outstanding doctoral candidate who wishes to pursue a curatorial career in an art museum. The fellowship will offer invaluable curatorial training and will provide the scholarly and financial resources required for completing the doctoral dissertation. Internationally renowned for its exceptional collection of Western European art from the early Renaissance through the end of the nineteenth century, The Frick Collection, complemented by the equally significant resources of the Frick Art Reference Library, offers a unique opportunity for object-based research. The fellowship is best suited to a student working on a dissertation that pertains to one of the major strengths of the Collection and Library.
The Anne L. Poulet Curatorial Fellow will have an opportunity to work with curatorial and educational staff on research for special exhibitions and on the permanent collection. Other curatorial training responsibilities include participation in the organization of the annual Symposium on the History of Art, a two-day event co-sponsored with the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University; the preparation, in coordination with a curator, of a focus exhibition around a work of art in the Collection; and participation in the daily administrative routines of a small museum. The Fellow will have a place of study, access to the collections and library, as well as introductions to New York City museums and libraries. Frick curators and conservation staff will be available for consultation on the dissertation. The Fellow will be expected to give a public lecture on his or her topic. The Fellow will divide his or her time between the completion of the dissertation and activities in the curatorial department.
Qualifications and Application Process
Applicants must be within the final two years of completing their dissertations. The Fellow will receive a stipend of $35,000 per year and a travel allowance. The term will begin in September 2013 and conclude in August 2015.
Applications must include the following materials:
· A cover letter explaining the applicant’s interest in the fellowship and his or her status in the Ph.D. program. The letter should include a home address, phone number, and email address
· An abstract, not to exceed three typed pages double-spaced, describing the applicant’s area of research
· A complete curriculum vitae of education, employment, honors, awards, and publications
· A copy of a published paper or a writing sample
· Three letters of recommendation (academic and professional)
Please submit application materials to pouletfellowship@frick.org. Letters of recommendation may be mailed directly to the address below. Please note that any additional materials sent by post must be submitted in triplicate to the following address:
Anne L. Poulet Curatorial Fellow Search
Office of the Chief Curator
The Frick Collection
1 East 70th Street
New York, NY 10021
The application deadline for the fellowship is January 18, 2013. Finalists will be interviewed. The Frick Collection plans to make the appointment in early April.
Benefits in Employment with The Frick Collection
The Anne L. Poulet fellow is considered a fulltime temporary employee for the duration of his/her fellowship and may access all benefits associated with fulltime employment status. Such as eligibility to participate in group life, health, and dental insurance plans. Employees contribute to the cost of their health insurance based on income level and the type of coverage they select. Other benefits include: short and long term disability insurance; employee contributed tax deferred annuity; flexible spending plans for health, dependent care and commuting costs; 13 paid holidays; and accrual of 12 vacation days the first year of employment (25 days second year). Additionally, The Frick Collection provides a dining service for all employees and volunteers.
Call for Papers | The Louvre before the Louvre
From The Wallace Collection:
The Louvre before the Louvre: Artisans, Artists, Academies
The Wallace Collection, London, 5 July 2013
Proposals due by 15 January 2013
Pedestal clock, ca. 1712- 20. Attributed to André-Charles Boulle. Jacques-Augustin Thury, movement maker (Wallace Collection)
Now one of the world’s best-known museums, the Louvre was once a vast artistic and cultural centre of a different kind. The Louvre before the Louvre will delve into the fascinating but little known period of the Louvre’s history from 1643 to 1793, exploring the role this space played in the histories of art production and artistic sociability in early modern Paris.
Even before Louis XIV moved the Court from the Louvre to Versailles in 1682, the Louvre had already become the centre of artistic, creative, and intellectual energy in Paris. Artists and artisans of all trades – from watch-makers to history painters – were given lodgings and studio space in the same wings and corridors that accommodated cultural organs like the Menus Plaisirs du Roi (responsible for state festivities and spectacles), the royal printing press, and the royal academies (Painting and Sculpture, Architecture, Inscriptions, Science, and the Académie Française). As the palace expanded over the next two centuries, the Louvre complex (the building and surrounding streets) came to be dominated by this growing community of artists, artisans, men of letters, and their aristocratic patrons, inhabiting this space and living out their daily lives together.
The Louvre before the Louvre will reconstruct and re-evaluate this space of artistic sociability. As dust billowed and paint dripped in artists’ studios, theoretical debates were thrashed out in the academies, and groundbreaking technologies were designed in artisans’ workshops, the Louvre became a fertile ground for collaboration, the results of which are evident in many objects (e.g. by Boulle, Oppenordt, Oeben, Boucher, Oudry, Girardon, Coysevox, to name a few) now in the Wallace Collection where this conference will take place.
Seeking a more intimate understanding of the artistic and intellectual ‘neighbourhood’ of the Louvre and its effect on art and design in the period, we invite papers that explore the Louvre’s rich history, art, material objects, spaces, and social interactions during the 17th and 18th centuries. Suggested topics may include but are not limited to:
• Artistic and intellectual circles — The workings of the Royal Academies and their academicians
• Living in the Louvre — Artists’ logements/studios; social order and daily life; professional/social interactions; individual and collaborative practice
• Form and function of Louvre spaces — Key sites: Galerie d’Apollon, Salon Carré, Grande Galerie, theatres, chapels, etc.
• Patronage networks — Patrons and collectors in the Louvre
• Decoration and display — Furnishing and decoration by Louvre inhabitants; displays of collections; exhibitions
• Louvre experiences — Written and visual descriptions of life in the Louvre
• Finding boundaries — Where did the artistic communities of the Louvre begin and end? How did one ‘belong’ to the Louvre community? What did it mean to do so?
Please send proposals of no more than 300 words to amelia.f.jackson@gmail.com (Queen Mary University of London) and hannah.williams@hoa.ox.ac.uk (University of Oxford) by 15 January 2012.
Call for Papers | Imagined Worlds: Worldmaking in Arts and Literature
From the conference website:
Imagined Worlds: Worldmaking in Arts and Literature
University of Helsinki, Finland, 21-23 August 2013
Proposals due by 30 January 2013
The conference Imagined Worlds will focus on the imagined worlds created by artistic and literary works. To think of such works in terms of ‘worlds’ (or the mental representations they create in the minds of their audience) means concentrating on the representational dimensions of art and literature. The idea of worldmaking opens new perspectives in the study of art forms and their genres. It was formulated in philosophical terms by Nelson Goodman in Ways of Worldmaking (1978). His approach encompassed a broad spectrum of worldmaking across all art forms, sciences and cultural discourses and emphasized the idea that we create worlds on the basis of already existing ones. Worlds are built from the world(s) of our experience and cultural models or from already existing imagined worlds through various types of transformations.
Recent studies in cognitive narratology where questions related to how readers build up story worlds have opened a new field of study which can also function as a starting point for broader visions of the cultural imagining of worlds: ‘mapping words onto worlds’ to make sense of textual worlds can be more broadly understood as mapping signs onto worlds. Like texts, art and images do not merely mirror the world but also investigate ways of worldmaking.
Worldmaking also relates to the ideas of the works of art and literature we embrace. Asking the question ‘When is art?’ permits one to see different anachronisms and the messy temporalities of images. How an object or event functions as a work of art can explain how it may contribute to a vision and to the making of a world. (more…)
Conference | The Interior at European Courts
From the conference program (PDF). Also see the website: interior-unibe.ch.
Im Spiegel der Dinge – Objektkultur und Interieur an den Höfen Europas
Institut für Kunstgeschichte Universität Bern, 16 November 2012
Leitung: Birgitt Borkopp-Restle
Höfische Feste und Zeremonien der Frühen Neuzeit ereigneten sich in Räumen, die oft eigens für den gegebenen Anlass eingerichtet wurden. Die Konfiguration solcher Interieurs unterlag zumeist den Regeln des geltenden Zeremoniells; immer musste sie dem Repräsentationsanspruch eines fürstlichen Hauses, gelegentlich auch politischen Interessen oder Absichten Rechnung tragen. Das Symposium untersucht die Objekte, die als Konstituenten höfischer Interieurs zugleich komplexe Botschaften vermittelten – als Bildmedien konnten sie Geschichte vergegenwärtigen, durch ihre Materialität Rang und Reichtum sichtbar machen; sie konnten Tradition oder Innovation betonen und schliesslich auch dem Interesse an fernen Ländern Ausdruck geben.
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8:30 Willkommen (Kaffee)
9:00 Begrüssung: Christine Göttler (Universität Bern) / Einführung: Birgitt Borkopp-Restle, Universität Bern
Teil I
Moderation: Birgitt Borkopp-Restle
9:30 Michael Yonan (University of Missouri, Columbia/MO)
Keynote: Asian Objects and Interiors at the Habsburg Imperial Court under Empress Maria Theresia
10:30 Kaffeepause
11:00 Birgit Franke – Barbara Welzel (Technische Universität Dortmund)
Ereignis-Interieurs am Hof der Herzöge von Burgund
12:00 Hanns Hubach (Universität Zürich)
Empörende Bildteppiche – oder: Von der Kunst provokativer Diplomatie
13:00 Mittagspause
Teil II
Moderation: Christine Göttler
14:00 Ariane Koller (Universität Bern)
Objektwelten – Kartographie der Machtentfaltung am Hof des Kurfürsten Johann Georg I. von Sachsen
15:00 Alumni et Amici laden zum Afternoon Tea
15:45 Daniela Antonin (Hetjens-Museum Düsseldorf)
Zeremoniell und Porzellanbesitz am kurbayerischen Hof im 18. Jahrhundert
16:45 Birgitt Borkopp-Restle (Universität Bern)
Carpettes of sylke to ley upon the table – Oriental Carpets in European Court Ceremonies
17:45 Abschlussdiskussion
Exhibition | Drawings from the Osiris Donation at Malmaison
From the Château de Malmaison:
Un Semblant de Bonheur: Dessins de la Donation Osiris
Musée National du Château de Malmaison, Rueil-Malmaison, 24 October 2012 — 21 January 2013
Curated by Céline Meunier and Alain Pougetoux
Château de Malmaison (Wikimedia Commons)
This exhibition presents, for the first time together, all the [47] drawings of Daniel Iffla, called ‘Osiris’, who donated Malmaison to the French State in 1906. This unique collection contains drawings from the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, from Dutch, Flemish, Italian and French masters. Among the most famous you will find Aelbert Cuyp and Frans van Mieris, Francesco Guardi, Giambattista Tiepolo and Giulio Romano, Jacques Callot and François Boucher… But also some of Osiris’s contemporaris as the Orientalist artist Alexandre Bida or the animalier Antoine-Louis Barye. Several techniques are represented among them, as you will see with the delicate watercolors of Eugène Lami, illustrator of Alfred de
Musset’s poems.
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The more complete, French description:
En 1906 Daniel Iffla dit Osiris, après avoir offert en 1903 le château de Malmaison à l’Etat, lui fait don de sa collection personnelle d’œuvres d’art, à charge pour celui-ci de l’exposer dans un pavillon à son nom. Après la réouverture en 2011 du pavillon consacré à la présentation de cette collection (200 peintures, sculptures, meubles et objets d’art) le musée a souhaité mettre en valeur l’ensemble des dessins dont la trop grande fragilité ne permet pas une présentation permanente dans cet espace.
Ces quarante-sept dessins et aquarelles, font ainsi l’objet d’une exposition exceptionnelle qui va permettre de les présenter au public tous réunis pour la première fois. Une part importante d’entre eux appartient aux XVIIème et XVIIIème siècles. Parmi ces dessins anciens on rencontre des maîtres hollandais et flamands comme Hendrick de Clerck, Aelbert Cuyp ou Frans van Mieris, des artistes italiens comme Francesco Guardi et Giambattista Tiepolo, ou Giulio Romano, mais aussi des français tel Jacques Callot, et surtout une magnifique série de quatre dessins de
François Boucher. (more…)
Fellowships | Winterthur Fellowship Program, 2013–14
Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library Fellowship Program, 2013–14
Applications due by 15 January 2013
Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library is pleased to announce its Research Fellowship Program for 2013–14. Winterthur offers an extensive program of short- and long-term fellowships open to academic, independent, and museum scholars, including advanced graduate students, to support research in material culture, architecture, decorative arts, design, consumer culture, garden and landscape studies, Shaker studies, travel and tourism, the Atlantic World, childhood, literary culture, and many other areas of social and cultural history.
Fellowships include 4–9 month NEH fellowships, 1–2 semester dissertation fellowships, and 1–2 month short-term fellowships. Fellows have access to library collections of more than 87,000 volumes and one-half million manuscripts and images. Resources for the 17th to the early 20th centuries include period trade catalogues, auction and exhibition catalogues, an extensive reference photograph collection of decorative arts, printed books, and ephemera, searchable online at winterthur.org. Fellows may also conduct research in the museum’s collections, which include 90,000 artifacts and works of art made or used in the colonies or young U.S. republic to 1860. Fellowship applications are due January 15, 2013. For more details and to apply, visit the Winterthur website or e-mail Rosemary Krill at rkrill@winterthur.org.
Exhibition | Benjamin West: General Wolfe and the Art of Empire
From UMMA:
Benjamin West: General Wolfe and the Art of Empire
University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, 22 September 2012 — 13 January 2013
Benjamin West, The Death of General Wolfe, 1776 (William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan)
How is it that an American painter came to define the British Empire? Benjamin West’s iconic painting The Death of General Wolfe (1776) depicts the death of James Wolfe, the British commander at the 1759 Battle of Quebec, one of Great Britain’s most famous military victories, during what in this country is known as the French and Indian War. In conflating a momentous contemporary event with the genre of large-scale history painting, West flouted the conventions of academic painting and the work became one of the most celebrated paintings in Britain. The artist went on to produce six versions of the painting, one of which belongs to the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan. Through approximately 40 works, from Michigan, Canadian, and British collections, this ambitious and thematically focused exhibition will include the Clements canvas as well as other depictions of James Wolfe and his death on the battlefield. A fully illustrated catalogue published by the Museum as part of its UMMA Books series accompanies the exhibition.
Exhibition | Discovering Eighteenth-Century British America
From UMMA:
Discovering Eighteenth-Century British America: The William L. Clements Library Collection
University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, 22 September 2012 — 13 January 2013
Mark Catesby, The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands, 1731-43, hand-colored engravings (William L. Clements Library, 16791)
This significant exhibition provides glimpses of British America in the 1700s and is designed to complement the Museum’s concurrent exhibition Benjamin West: General Wolfe and the Art of Empire, which features the Clements collection’s major painting The Death of General Wolfe. William L. Clements assembled an outstanding array of primary sources on North America dating between 1492 and 1800, with a heavy emphasis on early European exploration and discovery and the eighteenth-century wars for control of the continent. The exhibition features a mix of rare items from Mr. Clements’s original donation and pieces the Library has acquired since 1923 to complement and enhance its strength in eighteenth-century American history.
This exhibition is part of the UM Collections Collaborations series, co-organized by and presented at UMMA and designed to showcase the renowned and diverse collections at the University of Michigan. The UM Collections Collaborations series is generously supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
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