In his room-sized watercolor work Room for a Lost Paradise, Robert Horvath evokes some signature stylistic moves of the rococo: ornate elegance, a sensuous palette, and an emphasis on playful intimacy. But beyond those aesthetic affinities, in its making, the work also deploys technology in ways that remind us how…
What the Elephant Heard – by Makoto Harris Takao
As a musician and a scholar of music, my sensorial orientation in and towards space is one that almost always favors the ear. Interfacing with Robert Horvath’s Room for the Lost Paradise invites, in this way, a sonic encounter in three movements: the soundscape of the Indianapolis Museum of Art’s…
Decay and Decadence – by Jason M. Kelly
The place without worry, Sanssouci, is a space of pseudo-domestic decadence. A place set apart from his court, King Frederick II of Prussia’s “Weinberghäuschen (little vineyard house)” was meant to be a space of repose. But, for all its gilded vines and cascades of flowers—the pastel rusticity of its decorative…
Curator’s Notes: Resplendent Dreams: Reawakening the Rococo – by Michael Vetter
Robert Horvath’s Room for the Lost Paradise forms part of a larger exhibition at the Indianapolis Museum of Art titled Resplendent Dreams: Reawakening the Rococo, which showcases the work of three contemporary queer artists who take inspiration from early 18th-century European art. Also featured is Arkansas-based multidisciplinary artist Anthony Sonnenberg,…
Paradise Lost – by Meredith Martin
Rococo period rooms have always been fantasies assembled from pieces of wall paneling, furnishings, and objets d’art that often have no historical link to each other but are designed to simulate and invoke some kind of eighteenth-century reality. Robert Horvath’s Room for the Lost Paradise (2024-25) plays with this idea…
Everything in Between: Reflections on HECAA@30 – by Emily C. Casey and Matthew Gin
That HECAA meets only every five years makes it a useful yardstick of changes within the discipline. If HECAA at 25 reflected a burgeoning trend towards reimagining scholarship on eighteenth-century art and architecture in more expansive global terms, HECAA@30 remained fixed on the vast world beyond Europe but with an…
Material Art History and Black Feminist Pedagogies – by Kathryn Desplanque
“Entering the classroom determined to erase the body and give ourselves over more fully to the mind, we show by our beings how deeply we have accepted the assumption that passion has no place in the classroom.”bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York: Routledge,…
The Power of Storytelling and Story-Listening: Reflections on HECAA@30 – by Karen Lipsedge
In June 2024, British author Bernadine Evaristo used her invitation to speak at the Sir Thomas Gresham Annual Lecture Series to talk about the power of stories. As Evaristo summarized so eloquently, “We are stories. Stories are us. We breathe stories. We create stories. Stories are made up about us…
The Ethics of Study and Display of Ivory Objects – by Deepthi Murali
In 2014, Prince William suggested that all ivory objects from Buckingham Palace be destroyed. His intent was to send a clear message against elephant poaching in Africa. Purposeful destruction of raw and worked ivory as a way to deter poachers has become a common tactic amongst nations; one of the…
Who (or What) Speaks in a Global History of Art? – by Dawn Odell
Reflecting on the HECAA at 25 conference in Journal18 five years ago, Nancy Um proposed a new agenda for a global eighteenth-century art history. The field should, Um wrote, “query, perhaps even destabilize, the easy relationships that are often assumed between people, places, and things, rather than reifying an assumed…