In Part 8 of Capital Volume 1, “So-Called Primitive Accumulation of Capital,” Karl Marx takes on capitalism’s origin story. How to explain the existence of haves and have-nots? How is it that some people possess land and the resources to cultivate it, while others have only the skin on their backs and…
Rococo Redux: On the Bloom of The White Lotus and the Return of the Rocaille – by Sasha Rossman
The distinct theme song of Mike White’s TV hit The White Lotus (WL) returned to screens around the world this past winter. This time, the opening credits paired Cristobal Tapia De Veer’s warbling sounds with a pastiche of rococo wallpaper: fountains gushed, putti and satyrs romped in a pastoral eighteenth-century…
Vivienne Westwood’s Eighteenth Century – by Robert Wellington
The recent death of Vivienne Westwood (1941–2022), Britain’s most influential fashion designer of the last fifty years, gives us cause to reflect on the eighteenth-century art and fashion that inspired her designs. Taking a closer look at her collections from the 1990s reveals a deep and abiding love for eighteenth-century…
A Revolution on Canvas: A Review – by Yasemin Altun
Paris A. Spies-Gans, A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760–1830 (New Haven: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in Association with Yale University Press, 2022). 384 pp.; 157 color + b-w illus. Hardcover $55. (ISBN 9781913107291) Shortly after visiting the Paris Salon…
Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience: A Review – by Kathryn Desplanque
Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience, Raleigh, NC, April 2022-2023. We are all by now aware of the immersive Vincent van Gogh exhibition phenomenon and have perhaps even encountered whispers of its many mysteries: Why do these immersive exhibitions differ so much in their quality? Exactly how many immersive van Gogh exhibition…
Restorations: Coal, Smoke, and Time in London, circa 1700
Aleksandr Bierig Early modern London was the planet’s first coal-fired city. While the causes and timing of its transition to fossil fuel are still debated, historians have argued that the change was initially triggered in the early seventeenth century, when apparent timber shortages began driving up firewood prices in the…
St. Martin’s Lane: Neighborhood as Art World
Stacey Sloboda Perched inside a window box, an artist in a loose smock and a skullcap bends over his unseen work, the head of sculpted putti peering over his shoulder (Fig. 1). The artist’s back is turned to an urban neighborhood dense with brick and plaster terraced buildings, older timber-framed…
The City “en miniature:” Situating Sophie von La Roche in the Window
Anne Hultzsch Introduction When Sophie von La Roche (1730-1807), often referred to as the first female professional journalist writing in German, described Paris to her readers in 1787, she began with accounting for the role women had played in the history of this “Zauberort,” this “magical place”: “The love and…
The Revolutionary Origins of the Flâneur
Richard Wrigley Although the figure of the flâneur—the leisurely, urban male pedestrian observer—is associated with France’s July Monarchy (1830-1848), it was already current throughout the 1820s. Yet it is striking that texts from this decade are unequivocal that the phenomenon had its roots in the Revolution. For Beauregard and Pain…
The City and its Significant Other: Lived Urban Histories beyond the Comparative Mode
Sigrid de Jong The eighteenth century saw an urge to draw comparisons between cities, most frequently between the two major European capitals, London and Paris. Their special relationship of rivalry, competition, and emulation found its vibrant expression in Louis Sébastien Mercier’s Parallèle de Paris et de Londres (ca. 1780): London,…