Margaret MacNamidhe | School of the Art Institute of Chicago (original) (raw)

Papers by Margaret MacNamidhe

This paper offers an entirely new kind of context in which to understand the Global North's 19th-... more This paper offers an entirely new kind of context in which to understand the Global North's 19th-century valorization of what the architectural historian Zeynep Çelik Alexander has influentially called kinaesthetic knowledge. In the Regency era, years before immediate bodily reactions (especially the reflex) were either tracked or theorized through laboratory experiments (by figures ranging from Gustav Fechner to Wilhelm Dilthey and onto William James) or enthusiastically encouraged in the classroom (especially in drawing and handwriting lessons), the British writing master Joseph Carstairs awarded unprecedented authority to the whole arm's free and athletic movement in the acquisition of his writing system. No longer an action reserved for the virtuoso's flourish, Carstairs demanded that beginners swoop their arms up and down the sheet. And Carstairs zealously demanded that the hand adhere to the sheet, never once leaving it, even in order to write “x” (a letter logically amenable to the lifting of the pen upon completion of its first line so that the second line could cross the first at its middle part). Drawing on (but contending against) Friedrich Kittler’s account of the increasing importance of cursive in Discourse Network 1800, this discussion offers a pre-kinaesthetic knowledge explanation for Carstairs’s focus on the arm. The context of Regency Britain remains paramount. Carstairs's system acquires an historical importance beyond the role given it in histories of handwriting, where it is described as the most important antecedent for Spencerian writing—that florid hand which dominated the US in the mid to late 19th century.

Delacroix and his Forgotten World, 2015

Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, 2019

Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, 2017

Niamh O'Sullivan's book forms part of a sustained development in scholarship on the history of ar... more Niamh O'Sullivan's book forms part of a sustained development in scholarship on the history of art in Ireland. This expansion continues apace: the department of art history at University College Dublin was fifty years old in 2016, and the year before saw the publication of the five-volume Art and Architecture of Ireland (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), showcasing the research of a multitude of specialists, O'Sullivan included. Modern Irish culture has been defined by its literary contributions: everyone knows Irish poets and writers, but relatively few are acquainted with Irish painters, sculptors, architects, or draftsmen. The forms of Irish visual art that are widely known are generally perceived to convey Celtic roots: the Book of Kells (ca. 800 C. E.), for instance, and other illuminated manuscripts, along with examples of ninth-century enamel work, such as the Ardagh Chalice. A bias against more recent art crept in: as in any colonial situation, art tends to be associated with works commissioned by the ruling class, leading to irresolvable questions of what counts as authentically Irish. The Sam Maguire Cup, commissioned five years after the establishment of the Irish Free State and awarded every year to the winners of the All-Ireland Final in Gaelic football, is a copy of the Ardagh Chalice. Patronage, and the entire market system, had to be seen through a different lens, and much interpretation needed to be done on work by artists from neglected centuries. Scholars across Ireland took up the challenge-the last several years in particular, have been rich in published evidence of what is now a newly substantial tradition of research. Niamh O'Sullivan (pronounced "Neeve") has become one of the most influential voices in this renascence. An inspirational force for the study of art history and visual culture during her teaching career at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, O'Sullivan has now brought her considerable energies to a curatorial role in Ireland's Great Hunger Museum at Quinnipiac University. Since the museum's founding its publications have included essays from the leading voices in Irish Studies, including Luke Gibbons, Christine Kinealy, and

The Art Bulletin, 2007

The Paris Salon of 1824 has been widely considered one of the most important of the nineteenth ce... more The Paris Salon of 1824 has been widely considered one of the most important of the nineteenth century. It has long been characterized as a highly polemical exhibition, divided between the waning tradition of Jacques-Louis David and the painting of Eugène Delacroix and his peers, more recent arrivals in the Salon arena. Delacroix's Scenes from the Massacres at Chios would seem to be the candidate least likely to garner approval from Étienne-Jean Delécluze, the Salon's staunchest critical defender of the Davidian tradition. His unexpected praise for the Chios's central figure reveals the relation between David's history painting and the Chios.

French Studies a Quarterly Review, 2007

Nineteenth Century French Studies, 2003

French Studies, 2006

The discourses of food and gastronomy in France have recently begun to receive a degree of critic... more The discourses of food and gastronomy in France have recently begun to receive a degree of critical attention, particularly in the United States. Schehr and Weiss’s French Food: On the Table, On the Page, and in French Culture and Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson’s Accounting for Taste (see FS, LX (2006), 166–67) are two noteworthy recent examples. West-Sooby’s anthology roams over a variety of areas, dealing with the ‘usual suspects’ — Grimod de la Reynière, Brillat-Savarin, the inappositely-named Carême — but encompassing also political philosophy (Thomas Bouchet on Fourier), literature canonical (Karin Becker on food in the nineteenth-century novel) and not so canonical (Timothy Unwin on Verne), and, in Anne Freadman’s concluding essay, the whole question of what it means for a nation to represent itself culturally. There is also, stretching the definition of gastronomy somewhat, a harrowing piece by Michelle Royer on Marguerite Duras’s alcoholism. The focus stretches back to the Renaissance (Pollie Bromilow on food and punishment in novellas of the period), and the book is a valuable indicator of the reach and intellectual possibilities of what might by some be thought a slightly frivolous area of study. Michael D. Garval’s analysis of the frontispieces for Grimod’s Almanach des gourmands is a particularly toothsome instance of what might be called an ‘emblem studies’ approach; it is a shame that visual representations of gastronomy were not further explored by way of a chapter or two on cinema. The culture that gave us Renoir and Chabrol surely deserves as much. Food as what Barthes called, apropos Brillat-Savarin, an ‘opérateur universel du discours’ is an important area for the cultural historian, for obvious reasons nowhere more so than in France, and this collection suggests a cornucopia of ways and areas in which it might be deployed. Alas, and following French publishing practice at its worst, there is no index. West-Sooby’s efforts surely deserved to be racontés par le menu.

French Studies, 2007

© Susan S. Waller, 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, store... more © Susan S. Waller, 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the permission of the publisher. The author ...

The image of Eugene Delacroix as an august artist with an august oeuvre was initially frozen into... more The image of Eugene Delacroix as an august artist with an august oeuvre was initially frozen into place by posthumous tributes and it has continued to the present. He was one of the finest yet least understood painters of the nineteenth century, the golden age of the French Romantic movement. He is remembered best for his masterpiece, La Liberte guidant le people, but few of his works have received the kind of constant, fascinated revisiting that has sealed the iconic status of Theodore Gericault's Le Radeau de la Meduse, for example. This book is one of the first to look carefully at individual paintings by Delacroix, especially at one of his most important works - a key but often overlooked painting from early Romanticism's heyday, Scene des massacres de Scio.

Books by Margaret MacNamidhe

“History Before Art History: The Flawed Resurrectionist Postnational in Nineteenth-Century France", 2023

This publication is the result of an invitation from Charles Green (Professor of Contemporary Art... more This publication is the result of an invitation from Charles Green (Professor of Contemporary Art, the School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne) and Ian McLean (Hugh Ramsay Chair of Australian Art History, University of Melbourne) to contribute to an essay collection seeking “notions of the postnational” that might displace the “steadfast” reverence still awarded “the nation-state and nationalisms” in art history. The anthology was generated by a colloquium at the Buku-Larrngay Mulka Centre art centre in Yirrkala, north-east Arnhem Land, in Australia’s Top End), home to the “iconic collaborative paintings, the Yirrkala Church Panels” (1962) painted by Narritjin Maymuru, Mawalan Marika, Wandjuk Marika, Mathaman Marika, Larrtjanna Ganambarr, Birrikitjili Gumana, Gawirrin Gumana, and other Yolnu elders. The essay broaches the potential of the postnational and attempts to recognize the magnitude of the Church Panels’ agency by acknowledging the extent to which an art-historical response to “the most significant, communal expression of Yolnu Law produced for public view” must be shaped by the epistemologies underwriting the 19th-century university disciplines of art history and anthropology. I argue that the tenacity of these disciplines may not be due to their supposedly nation-state origins but in the ferocity of their originary claims to universalism as crucially validated by their compliance with the Prussian historian Leopold van Ranke’s (1795-1886) interdiction on a “judging of the past.” I first uncover Edward Burnett Tylor's (1832-1917) canny flagging of the “German school” of experimental psychology and physiology in claiming for anthropology an apparently research-backed, account of animism, “religion from below." Second, I underline Heinrich Wölfflin’s (1864-1945) taking from the same “German school” the universalizing criteria he needed to claim an “aesthetics from below” for his widely influential Principles of Art History (1915). I look to the postnational beyond the choices two university disciplines give and ponder what role we might give to agency in contemporaneous responses to the material and immaterial by stressing Terry Smith’s “coeveal communality” within a measured critique of historical writings pre-dating von Ranke’s criteria (the narrative-driven, nation-driven, belief-driven, highly personal, and even outlandish historical writings of Jules Michelet (1798-1874]).