Reinterpreting Porcelain Figures: A Review – by Noelle Yongwei Barr

Reinterpreting Porcelain Figures: A Review – by Noelle Yongwei Barr

In recent years, many American museums and their staff have staged revisionist interventions, urging general visitors and scholars to reframe, reimagine, and reinterpret European collections. In “Re-Presenting Art History: An Unfinished Process,” art historian Cristina Baldacci ruminates on the prefix “re-” as a hermeneutic tool strategically employed by curators to…

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Laboring Likeness: Charlotte Daniel Martner’s Paint Box in Martinique (1803-1821) – by Damiët Schneeweisz

Laboring Likeness: Charlotte Daniel Martner’s Paint Box in Martinique (1803-1821) – by Damiët Schneeweisz

Editor’s note: This essay by Damiët Schneeweisz is a pendant to David Pullins’s Contained Assertions: Marie Victoire Lemoine’s Paint Box. Together, Pullins and Schneeweisz unpack two paint boxes that belonged to Marie Victoire Lemoine (1754-1820) and Charlotte Daniel Martner (1781-1839), bringing out how these boxes tie the material history of…

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Contained Assertions: Marie Victoire Lemoine’s Paint Box – by David Pullins

Contained Assertions: Marie Victoire Lemoine’s Paint Box – by David Pullins

Editor’s note: This essay by David Pullins is a pendant to Damiët Schneeweisz’s Laboring Likeness: Charlotte Daniel Martner’s Paint Box in Martinique (1803-1821). Together, Pullins and Schneeweisz unpack two paint boxes that belonged to Marie Victoire Lemoine (1754-1820) and Charlotte Daniel Martner (1781-1839), bringing out how these boxes tie the…

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Theatricalizing (and Marketing) Race in Sicardi’s “Mirate che bel visino” – by Marika Takanishi Knowles

Theatricalizing (and Marketing) Race in Sicardi’s “Mirate che bel visino” – by Marika Takanishi Knowles

In August 2022, while visiting the new permanent exhibition “Bordeaux au XVIIIe siècle, le commerce atlantique et l’esclavage” at the Musée d’Aquitaine, I encountered a viscerally racist image (Fig. 1). I say that I “encountered” it because the print stages itself as a meeting between the subject and the viewer by…

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