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…
It’s an interesting moment to be a scholar of eighteenth-century art. A neglected field in English-language art history for most of the twentieth century, it is currently enjoying a boom. One can no longer rightly say that it is an understudied subject, the purview of a tiny community of specialists.…
Amelia Rauser In the spring of 1793, a strange fad swept London: women began to wear belly pads under their dresses. Although no pads are known to survive today, a contemporary described one as “a linen bag, about the size and shape of a small pillow case… left open…