Neil Jeffares, Dictionary of Pastellists Before 1800: Maurice-Quentin de La Tour (1704–1788) website, 2021 edition, http://www.pastellists.com/LaTour.htm. French pastellist Maurice-Quentin de La Tour (1704-1788), whose sitters included Madame de Pompadour, Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, and Voltaire, is often and justifiably lauded as a “tour de force.”[1] Neil Jeffares, the author of…
Les Animaux du Roi, Château de Versailles, Versailles, France, October 12, 2021 – February 13, 2022. Curated by Alexandre Maral and Nicolas Milovanovic. Scenography: Guicciardini & Magni Architetti. Lighting: Lionel Coutou. You are allowed to enjoy this exhibition. Cast off your critical baggage and just relax. It’s okay. Forget your…
Exhibition: In Sparkling Company: Glass and the Costs of Social Life in Britain During the 1700s, Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York, May 22, 2021 – January 2, 2022. In Sparkling Company, a ground-breaking exhibition curated by Christopher Maxwell at the Corning Museum of Glass, invites us into the…
Exhibition: Peintres Femmes: 1780-1830, Musée du Luxembourg, Paris, 19 May – 25 July 2021. In the first room of the Musée du Luxembourg’s unprecedented exhibition on women artists from the Revolutionary era, Women Painters, 1780-1830: The Birth of a Combat, four lines from the French writer Constance de Salm’s Épître…
Organic Supplements: Bodies and Things of the Natural World, 1580-1790, ed. by Miriam Jacobson and Julie Park (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2020). 285 pages, $35. ISBN 978-0-8139-4494-4. With essays by Lynn Festa, Miriam Jacobson, Kevin Lambert, Rebecca Laroche, Jayne Lewis, Julia Reinhard Lupton, Julie Park, Diane Purkiss, Jessica Wolfe,…
Matthew Craske, Joseph Wright of Derby: Painter of Darkness (London: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, 2020), 368 pages, ISBN: 978-1913107123. Everything you think you know about Joseph Wright of Derby ( 1734–1797) and his paintings may be wrong. Or at least Matthew Craske’s meticulous new book will…
Two exhibitions installed across the Seine from each other this past summer used versions of the same artworks—two eighteenth-century French tapestries from the royal series known as the Nouvelles Tentures des Indes— to tell very different stories about European legacies of race, slavery, and colonialism. One version, from a set…
Angela Oberer, The Life and Work of Rosalba Carriera. The Queen of Pastel (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020). 326 pages. ISBN: 9789462988996 Rosalba Carriera (1673-1757) is a celebrated name in the eighteenth-century art world, with a well-established place in Grand Tour mythology for attracting clients to sit for their portraits…
On the 26th of January 2021, as a pandemic-wracked India held muted celebrations of the anniversary of its constitutional founding, a group of farmers protesting recently introduced farm laws veered from their permitted routes towards the Red Fort in the heart of the Old City of Delhi. Staid images from…
Zeynep Çelik Alexander, Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), ISBN: 978-0-2264-8520-1 Zeynep Çelik Alexander’s Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design offers a new account of German modernism told through the history of its preoccupation with bodily experience from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth…