Meredith Gamer The Past—or, more accurately, pastness—is a position.Thus, in no way can we identify the past as past.— Michel-Rolphe Trouillot, Silencing the Past (1997)[1] On December 1, 1783, London’s Gentleman’s Magazine presented its readers with a precisely executed picture of the city’s newest execution machine (Fig. 1). Jutting out…
Maggie M. Cao On long voyages that spanned from the Aleutians to the Cape of Good Hope, American whalers introduced a new industrial waste product into global circulation: whale teeth. For the whalemen themselves, the teeth became an artistic material for the novel art of scrimshaw. Scrimshaw describes the transformation…
Bart Pushaw In a woodcut printed in 1724, white polar bear pelts, tanned sealskins, and brown caribou hides billow like great sails from the masts of ships, as trumpets blare and thunderous timpani drums resound across choppy waters (Fig. 1).[1] Pictorial banners depicting Arctic fauna from cod and salmon, to…
Chanchal Dadlani and Holly Shaffer This dialogue was prompted by the call to consider—and contest—the “long eighteenth century” as a theoretical and methodological frame, particularly in art history. As scholars of South Asia and Europe, we began to see that the notion of the long eighteenth century refracts when seen…
Exhibition: Peintres Femmes: 1780-1830, Musée du Luxembourg, Paris, 19 May – 25 July 2021. In the first room of the Musée du Luxembourg’s unprecedented exhibition on women artists from the Revolutionary era, Women Painters, 1780-1830: The Birth of a Combat, four lines from the French writer Constance de Salm’s Épître…
Organic Supplements: Bodies and Things of the Natural World, 1580-1790, ed. by Miriam Jacobson and Julie Park (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020). 285 pages, $35. ISBN 978-0-8139-4494-4. With essays by Lynn Festa, Miriam Jacobson, Kevin Lambert, Rebecca Laroche, Jayne Lewis, Julia Reinhard Lupton, Julie Park, Diane Purkiss, Jessica Wolfe,…
Matthew Craske, Joseph Wright of Derby: Painter of Darkness (London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2020), 368 pages, ISBN: 978-1913107123. Everything you think you know about Joseph Wright of Derby ( 1734–1797) and his paintings may be wrong. Or at least Matthew Craske’s meticulous new book will…
Angela Oberer, The Life and Work of Rosalba Carriera. The Queen of Pastel (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020). 326 pages. ISBN: 9789462988996 Rosalba Carriera (1673-1757) is a celebrated name in the eighteenth-century art world, with a well-established place in Grand Tour mythology for attracting clients to sit for their portraits…
On the 26th of January 2021, as a pandemic-wracked India held muted celebrations of the anniversary of its constitutional founding, a group of farmers protesting recently introduced farm laws veered from their permitted routes towards the Red Fort in the heart of the Old City of Delhi. Staid images from…
Zeynep Çelik Alexander, Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), ISBN: 978-0-2264-8520-1 Zeynep Çelik Alexander’s Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design offers a new account of German modernism told through the history of its preoccupation with bodily experience from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth…