On October 16, 2019—two hundred and thirty years to the day she was guillotined—a new exhibition devoted to Marie-Antoinette opened at the Conciergerie in Paris. “Marie-Antoinette: Metamorphoses of an Image” presented a panoply of pictures of the doomed queen, from nostalgic celebrations to pornographic tirades, from a plumed Miss Piggy…
Anne Lafont, L’art et la race : L’Africain (tout) contre l’œil des Lumières, Dijon, Les presses du réel, 2019, ISBN: 9782378960162 Jean-Baptiste-André Dautier d’Agoty’s Portrait de Madame du Barry avec Zamore (1771) seems to engage with a reasonably familiar conceit in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European courtly portraiture (Fig. 1). An elegant,…
Katie Scott, Becoming Property: Art, Theory and Law in Early Modern France, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2018, ISBN 9780300222791 In Becoming Property: Art, Theory and Law in Early Modern France, Katie Scott examines the relationship between intellectual property and the visual arts in France from the sixteenth…
Caroline Vout, Classical Art, A Life History from Antiquity to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), ISBN 9780691177038 The title given to the review of Vout’s book in the TLS (January 4, 2019), “Crafting a Canon,” is somewhat misleading. The author, in fact, does not discuss precisely what has…
Le modèle noir. De Géricault à Matisse, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, 26 mars – 21 juillet 2019. En 2018, le couple Carters, Beyoncé et son époux Jay-Z, investissaient le Louvre pour y tourner le clip vidéo de leur chanson « Apeshit » de l’album Everything is Love. C’est à travers une performance…
“The atmosphere of this cabinet is one of order, neatness and beauty.” That is how Johann Christian Fabricius described the museum of the Scottish physician and obstetrician William Hunter (1718-1783) when he visited it in 1784.[1] The same words might apply to the exhibition of Hunter’s collection, William Hunter and…
The Smell of Success: Gerard & Cornelis van Spaendonck, Painters of Flowers in Paris is at Het Noordbrabants Museum in ’s-Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands from 26 April to 25 August 2019. It is accompanied by Paul Huys Janssen, De geur van succes. Gerard & Cornelis van Spaendonck, bloemenschilders in Parijs (Zwolle:…
LEFT: Juliette Trey and Hélène Grollemund, Inventaire général des dessins du musée du Louvre. Edmé Bouchardon (1698-1762), Paris : Musée du Louvre, 2016, ISBN 9782350315515 RIGHT: Édouard Kopp, The Learned Draftsman: Edme Bouchardon, Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2017, ISBN 978-1-60606-504-4 The exhibition dedicated to the eighteenth-century French sculptor Edmé Bouchardon (at the…
The ACA-RES research program on Art Academies and their Networks in Pre-Industrial France was initiated in 2016. It is supported by the FRAMESPA Laboratory (UMR 5136), the Labex “Structuration des Mondes Sociaux” (SMS), and the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme et de la Société de Toulouse. The activities and resources…
Empresses of China’s Forbidden City is on view at the Peabody Essex Museum from August 18, 2018 to February 10, 2019 Halfway through the spectacular exhibition Empresses of China’s Forbidden City, 1644-1912 at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA, a tiny metal object sits in a transparent box next…