In the summer of 1815, Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon’s older brother and dethroned king of Spain, fled Europe and arrived in New York under the assumed name of the comte de Survilliers. He brought with him a veritable art museum, far beyond anything that had been seen before in the Americas.…
Combine lime and gypsum with water, then add stone dust or sand and animal hair to strengthen it: this modest, somewhat dubious-sounding recipe produces stucco. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, stucco was used to create massive illusionistic interior architecture, to frame paintings with anything from gambolling cherubs to modest…
As the site of productive and often intriguing interactions between art and science, nature and artifice, the garden is an alluring subject, all the more so given the pervasive cross-disciplinary thinking in our current academic climate. Yet as historians of art, landscape architecture, and science know all too well, the…
Two exhibitions. Two catalogues. One theme: “Artist and Empire.” The two exhibitions were held at Tate Britain in London (November 25, 2015—April 10, 2016) and at the National Gallery of Singapore (October 6, 2016—March 26, 2017) respectively. We are now increasingly accustomed to travelling exhibitions, especially for blockbuster shows whose…
A surprisingly optimistic portrait of European unity graced newspapers earlier this month: a beaming Angela Merkel shaking hands with the newly elected Emmanuel Macron. The French, German, and European Union flags behind them signaled clearly that their embrace represented not only a bilateral partnership but the basis of continental stability.…
Hair as Communication and Commemoration In 1780 an almanach de mode bearing Marie-Antoinette’s personal coat of arms in gold on the front and back covers was published in Paris by the Esnauts et Rapilly publication house. Smaller than an average woman’s hand (Fig. 1) and therefore easily slipped into a…
Having strolled one day into an exhibition of Ellsworth Kelly’s abstemious drawings of plants and flowers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—pure outlines, no modeling, a modernist garden of lines—I pondered a question: how does Kelly’s work fit into the larger story of drawing (Fig. 1)? Thinking of a…
Une exposition de dessins des 18e et 19 e siècles aux Harvard Art Museums de Cambridge n’est pas nécessairement propice à la redéfinition du sens et de l’horizon de l’histoire de l’art (Fig. 1).[1] Le contexte paraît sans doute trop classique pour une aventure épistémologique. En effet, l’exposition d’un…
J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) is now, indisputably, a titan in the United States of America. A series of exhibitions in major institutions has catapulted him to the heights where he belongs in the canon—the greatest British Artist, the greatest painter of the first half of the nineteenth century, the greatest landscape…
Zara Anishanslin, Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic World. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2016. Rarely does a book offer a truly new approach to the eighteenth century, yet Zara Anishanslin’s Portrait of a Woman in Silk: Hidden Histories of the British Atlantic…