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…
David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021). 704 pages. $35.00. ISBN: 9780374157357. When every day brings more bad news about the prospects for human life on our planet, readers will find a welcome reprieve in David…
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…
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…
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, 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…
Shilpa Shah and Rosemary Crill, The Shoemaker’s Stitch: Mochi Embroideries of Gujarat in the TAPI Collection (New Delhi: Niyogi Books, 2022). 220 pages. ISBN 9789391125455. The detailed image of chain-stitch embroidery that wraps around the cover of The Shoemaker’s Stitch hints at the attention to technique and creative process that…
Noémie Ndiaye, Scripts of Blackness: Early Modern Performance Culture and the Making of Race, RaceB4Race: Critical Race Studies of the Premodern series (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022). 376 pages, 8 b&w halftones, 12 color images. $64.95. ISBN 978-1-5128-2263-2. This book’s striking cover design cites a costume print produced by…
Editor’s Note: The last of three installments, this intervention by L’nu interdisciplinary artist, poet, and scholar Michelle Sylliboy offers an Indigenous perspective on the ongoing impact of Nouvelle Relation de la Gaspésie (Paris, 1691) by French missionary Chrestien Le Clerq, which is part of the eighteenth-century colonial archive of Indigenous-settler relations on…
Exhibition: Dare to Know: Prints and Drawings in the Age of Enlightenment, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts, September 16, 2022 – January 15, 2023. Pictures produce knowledge. The premise is uncontroversial, but the role that visual representation has played in intellectual transformations throughout history is often difficult to pinpoint. Diagrams…