"Unequivocally a modern, Francois Boucher (1703-70) defined the French artistic avant-garde throughout his career. Yet the triumph of modernist aesthetics - with its focus on the self-critical, the autonomous, and the intellectually challenging - has long discouraged art historians and other viewers from taking Boucher's playful and alluring works seriously. Rethinking Boucher revisits the cultural meanings and reception of his diverse oeuvre, inviting us to revise the interpretive cliches by which we have sought to tame this artist and his epoch."--BOOK JACKET.
Architectural Space in Eighteenth-Century Europe: Constructing Identities and Interiors explores how a diverse, pan-European group of eighteenth-century patrons - among them bankers, bishops, bluestockings, and courtesans - used architectural space and décor to shape and express identity. Eighteenth-century European architects understood the client's instrumental role in giving form and meaning to architectural space. In a treatise published in 1745, the French architect Germain Boffrand determined that a visitor could "judge the character of the master for whom the house was built by the way in which it is planned, decorated and distributed." This interdisciplinary volume addresses two key interests of contemporary historians working in a range of disciplines: one, the broad question of identity formation, most notably as it relates to ideas of gender, class, and ethnicity; and two, the role played by different spatial environments in the production - not merely the reflection - of identity at defining historical and cultural moments. By combining contemporary critical analysis with a historically specific approach, the book's contributors situate ideas of space and the self within the visual and material remains of interiors in eighteenth-century Europe. In doing so, they offer compelling new insight not only into this historical period, but also into our own.
'Luxury in the 18th Century' explores the political, economic, moral and intellectual effects of the production and consumption of luxury goods, and provides a broadly-based account from a variety of perspectives, addressing key themes of economic debate, material culture, the principles of art and taste, luxury as 'female vice' and the exotic.
This collection brings together studies on the French decorative arts in the eighteenth century, extending from bookbinding, typography and engraving to those related specifically to the domestic interior: porcelain, upholstery and furniture. A collection of studies on the French decorative arts in the eighteenth century. Covers an extensive range of subjects from bookbinding, typography and engraving to porcelain, upholstery and furniture. Demonstrates how the advancement of knowledge in porcelain and loom technology resulted in new luxury goods to the glory of Absolutism. Looks at how Revolution demanded that political change be reflected in the details of everyday life, such as dress and furniture.
Under the Second Empire in France, Cordier received several assignments in North Africa and there he completed scientific busts that were just as much works of art. His busts in silver or gilt bronze, onyx and coloured marble are delicate gems, reflecting Cordier's interest in other civilizations, most notably African. The Musee d'Orsay in Paris has organized an unprecedented international exhibition of Cordier's work, highlighting seventy-five sculptures and approximately forty ethnographic photographs. Filled with several texts on his life and work compiled by the exhibition's organizers, this book was created and based on the research by Jeanine Durand-Revillon for the Ecole du Louvre in 1980.
Now available in paperback, Imagined Interiors presents an extraordinarily diverse body of visual and textual material, suggesting fresh histories of the home, its contents and representation, and appealing to all who are interested in art history, interior design, social history and the decorative arts.
