British Modernism and Chinoiserie
British Modernism and Chinoiserie

Author: Anne Witchard

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2015-03-01

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 0748690964

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This volume examines the ways in which an intellectual vogue for a mythic China was a constituent element of British modernism. Traditionally defined as a decorative style that conjured a fanciful and idealized notion of China, chinoiserie was revived in in London's avant-garde circles, the Bloomsbury group, the Vorticists and others, who like their eighteenth-century forebears, turned to China as a cultural and aesthetic utopia. As part of Modernism's challenge to the 'universality' of so-called Western values and aesthetics, the turn to China would contribute much more than has been acknowledged to Modernist thinking. As these 10 new chapters demonstrate, China as an intellectual and aesthetic utopia dazzled intellectuals and aesthetes, at the same time the consumption of Chinese exoticism became commercialized. The essays show that from cutting-edge Modernist chic to mass culture and consumer products, the vogue for chinoiserie style and motifs permeated the art and design of the period. --Provided by publisher.

Mariette and the Science of the Connoisseur in Eighteenth-Century Europe
Mariette and the Science of the Connoisseur in Eighteenth-Century Europe

Author: Kristel Smentek

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 343

ISBN-13: 1351559214

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Celebrated connoisseur, drawings collector, print dealer, book publisher and authority on the art of antiquity, Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694-1774) was a pivotal figure in the eighteenth-century European art world. Focusing on the trajectory of Mariette?s career, this book examines the material practices and social networks through which connoisseurs forged the idea of art as an object of empirical and historical analysis. Drawing on significant unpublished archival material as well as on histories of science, publishing, collecting and display, this book shows how Mariette and his colleagues? practices of classification and interpretation of the graphic arts gave rise to new conceptions of artistic authorship and to a history of art that transcended the biographies of individual artists. To follow Mariette?s career through the eighteenth century is to see that art was consolidated as a specialized category of intellectual inquiry-and that style emerged as its structuring analytic device-in the overlapping spaces of the collector?s cabinet, the connoisseur?s portfolio and the dealer?s shop.