Book Review: French Primitivism and the Ends of Empire, by Daniel J. Sherman (original) (raw)
Related papers
On Contemporary Collecting: Institutions without Objects
This text originates from a paper I wrote in 2013, under the title 'To collect or not to collect, that is the question: the in-terms contradiction of contemporary art museums.' Its objective was to acknowledge the role of non-collecting institutions in dealing chiefly with the performative nature of contemporary art, whilst providing them a place in museum theory. As with a retrieved old picture of oneself, the initial text looked ‘young’ and no longer exhaustive in describing the relationship between the institutional field and the practice of collecting contemporary art. These re-elaborated extracts present the theoretical basis, which I still consider relevant in the discourse around contemporary collecting. However, a lot still needs to be said on the growing number of private institutions, which are performing a significant role in preserving, researching and communicating contemporary art; the experimental approaches – both online and offline – promoted by grassroots non-for-profit organisations; and the adventurous programmes of certain museums, which have developed collecting strategies based on innovation rather than convention. Though, this is the subject of another discussion, which I hope to have the occasion to formalise in written words very soon. This paper was published in Exhibist. International Art From Turkey. Issue 12, June 2017. Istanbul: Scala Matbaa, 16-21 (i-ix)
Collecting and art market studies of the eighteenth-century period, which saw the rise of an international art market, used to focus mainly around the circulation of Old Masters’ painted canvases. But the historiography has significantly expanded its scope in the last decades, to include the study of modern drawings. Our paper proposes to recreate the networks and practices of modern drawing collecting, and its disruption on the already well-established French art market, by a detailed study of the collection of drawings bequeathed to the Fabre Museum of Montpellier by Antoine Valedau (1777-1838), a former Parisian stockbroker. These drawings, now preserved in a museum, were originally gathered in portfolios – the practice was traditional for prints or Old Masters drawings, but assembling works from living artists remained unusual. Easily displayed and circulated, they were praised for being the enterprise of a “man of the world, friend of the arts,” who had thus created “a real portable museum which has nothing in common with the album of the lady of fashion, but which presents a real interest, that of assembling for display the worthy productions of our most distinguished artists.” Le Miroir des spectacles, des lettres, des mœurs et des arts, December 11, 1821. This collection, which we confront to other contemporary ensembles such as the Valedau and Chenard collections, as well as the collection of Alexandre du Sommerard, founder of the Cluny Museum, testifies to an emerging market and a growing consideration for modern art. This paper first presents the disrupted context in which this practice appeared at the very end of the 18th century when artists had to adapt to a market in crisis. We will also touch upon the methodological difficulties of retracing collecting practices often founded on gift or exchanges arising from studio sociablity. Provenance search, auction studies and inventory upon decease – the traditional documents of collecting studies – are often unavailing in the case of modern drawing collections. On the other hand, drawing collections, because they are evidence both of intimate links and of aesthetic choices that were less scrutinized and codified, give us unprecedented access to the networks of sociability of eighteenth-century collectors.
The Time Capsule as a Case in Point O N THE 23RD OF SEPTEMBER 1938, the first ever so-called time capsule was buried at the site of the New York World's Fair, which was set to open in April 1939. To this day, it remains one of the most ambitious projects of its kind. Should the creators of the capsule have it their way, the cylindrically shaped, metal container, 7.5 feet tall and 8.75 inches in diameter, will not be unearthed until the year 6939 CE. 1 The Westinghouse Time Capsule will then present its receiver from the far future with a tangible impression of the "achievements" of Western civilization on the eve of World War II. This, at least, is the scenario as imagined in the Book of Record, copies of which were deposited in the capsule and also distributed widely, including, in 3,649 copies, to lamaseries in Tibet, Shinto shrines in Japan, and Buddhist temples in India, and to 2,000 libraries, museums and universities across the world. 2 Like the time capsule, the Book of Record was conceived by the Westinghouse Electric Company, in collaboration with a group of scientists, engineers, and advertising experts. 3 The capsule's content was selected by way of a public idea contest under the direction of the vice president of the company; it provides a colorful display: from small items of daily use, such as a can opener, safety pin, and toothbrush, to samples of textiles and other materials, to all manner of seeds, banknotes, and other trifles, to texts and images on microfilm and contemporary newsreels. Framed by
Contested Holdings: Museum Collections in Political, Epistemic and Artistic Processes of Return, 2022
Works of ancient and modern art, archaeological or ethnographic artefacts, physical anthropology and natural history collections generally occupy separate realms in the museum world, with dedicated institutions and disciplines. Yet, the claims on museum collections made by former owners, descendant communities or nations, and the growing discourse surrounding these claims, unite them in a very specific category, one that we will set out to define and will refer to as 'contested holdings'. As such, they can range from old masters owned by Jewish collectors in the 1930s to the ancestral remains of indigenous populations, which were fervently sought after by racial anthropologists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They can include things that may appear to have little in common at first glance; therefore, the term 'holdings' in no way qualifies the nature of the things referred to and for which, in some cases, even the term 'object' or 'artefact' proves problematic. It indicates, rather, their state as kept collections, which has become problematic due to the conditions in which they were taken at some point in their trajectories. It is the questioning of these conditions, the perception that museums and public opinion have of them and how they are judged that, in fine, defines the contested holding.
Call for papers - Contested Conservation - Special Issue Museums & Social Issues
Museum conservation in the West has long focused on the physical preservation of objects. Today, the heritage regime is being questioned and challenged in many ways. If collecting, storing, and exhibiting have participated as epistemological tools in the classification of the world, can artifacts be reconnected to living practices? What changes are needed for concerned communities to take agency in storage? How can we rethink cultural transmission and reconceive the role of collections without reconducting the cultural hegemonies inscribed in their history?
Journal for Art Market Studies, 2018
This article examines the ways how the formation of the Japanese ceramic collection of Sir William Van Horne (1843-1915) in Montreal was informed by art dealers and the global market of Japanese ceramics in the late 19th to early 20th century. Van Horne’s dealers, based in Japan and the US, played a significant role in the way Van Horne collected and perceived Japanese ceramics, because Van Horne never went to Japan and acquired objects only from them. Van Horne’s decisions about what to collect were not simply determined by his own judgment, but were also affected by external factors such as the availability of Japanese objects in the Western market at the time, and the intellectual landscape and the broad trends within the Euro-American circle of collecting Japanese ceramics. Furthermore, these currents in “collecting Japan” themselves did not occur naturally: they were in fact informed by the intentions, concerns and desires of influential dealers, collectors, and scholars. When looking at the establishment of a collection not only from the collector’s taste, but also from these external factors, a collection can be understood as a complex space in which multiple subjectivities and economies are intertwined.