The Louvre Before the Louvre

Just posting here the call for papers for a conference on artistic sociability in the early modern Louvre, which I am organising with Mia Jackson (QMUL) at the Wallace Collection next year.

We’ve both come at this from quite different perspectives – Mia from her research on the ébéniste, André-Charles Boulle, who lived in the Louvre and kept his collection of prints and drawings there; and me from research into the social networks of artists in my work on the Académie Royale (also housed in the Louvre) and on 18C artists’ local parishes (the Louvre being one of the liveliest artistic neighbourhoods). But our goal is the same: exploring what the Louvre was like before it became a museum, getting into all its nooks and crannies, retrieving its inhabitants, and basically bringing the old pre-Revolutionary Louvre back to life!

The response has already been great and we’re very excited to see it take shape.

THE LOUVRE BEFORE THE LOUVRE

Artisans, Artists, Academies

The Wallace Collection, London

5 July 2013

CALL FOR PAPERS - DEADLINE 15 Jan 2013

Now one of the world's best-known museums, the Louvre was once a vast artistic and cultural centre of a different kind. 'The Louvre before the Louvre' will delve into the fascinating but little known period of the Louvre's history from 1643 to 1793, exploring the role this space played in the histories of art production and artistic sociability in early modern Paris.

Even before Louis XIV moved the Court from the Louvre to Versailles in 1682, the Louvre had already become the centre of artistic, creative, and intellectual energy in Paris. Artists and artisans of all trades – from watch-makers to history painters – were given lodgings and studio space in the same wings and corridors that accommodated cultural organs like the Menus Plaisirs du Roi (responsible for state festivities and spectacles), the royal printing press, and the royal academies (Painting and Sculpture, Architecture, Inscriptions, Science, and the Académie Française). As the palace expanded over the next two centuries, the Louvre complex (the building and surrounding streets) came to be dominated by this growing community of artists, artisans, men of letters, and their aristocratic patrons, inhabiting this space and living out their daily lives together.

'The Louvre before the Louvre' will reconstruct and re-evaluate this space of artistic sociability. As dust billowed and paint dripped in artists' studios, theoretical debates were thrashed out in the academies, and groundbreaking technologies were designed in artisans' workshops, the Louvre became a fertile ground for collaboration, the results of which are evident in many objects (e.g. by Boulle, Oppenordt, Oeben, Boucher, Oudry, Girardon, Coysevox, to name a few) now in the Wallace Collection where this conference will take place.

Seeking a more intimate understanding of the artistic and intellectual 'neighbourhood' of the Louvre and its effect on art and design in the period, we invite papers that explore the Louvre's rich history, art, material objects, spaces, and social interactions during the 17th and 18th centuries. Suggested topics may include but are not limited to:

• Artistic and intellectual circles (the lives of the Royal Academies & their academicians)
• Living in the Louvre (artists' logements/studios; social order & daily life; professional/social interactions; individual and collaborative practice)
• Form and function of Louvre spaces (key sites: Galerie d'Apollon, Salon Carré, Grande Galerie, theatres, chapels, etc)
• Patronage Networks (patrons and collectors in the Louvre)
• Decoration & Display (furnishing and decoration by Louvre inhabitants; displays of collections; exhibitions)
• Louvre Experiences (written and visual descriptions of life in the Louvre)
• Finding boundaries – where did the artistic communities of the Louvre begin and end? How did one 'belong' to the Louvre community? What did it mean to do so?

Please send proposals of no more than 300 words to amelia.f.jackson@gmail.com (Queen Mary University of London) and hannah.williams@hoa.ox.ac.uk (University of Oxford) by 15 Jan 2013.

For further information:
http://www.wallacecollection.org/education/research/forthcomingconferences

Cuts, closures and threats to cultural institutions in Berlin and Paris

Every time I check my email or Twitter at the moment it seems there is yet more sad news about proposed cuts and closures in the museum and cultural heritage sector. This is just a brief post about two particularly distressing situations in Europe, one in Germany and one in France/Netherlands, and the actions being taken to prevent them.

Titian, Self-Portrait, 1550 (Gemäldegarie, Berlin)

Gemäldegalerie, Berlin
The proposal here is to empty the Gemäldegalerie of Old Masters to make way for twentieth-century art from the Pietzsch collection, without finding an alternative forum for displaying one of the world's foremost collections of Old Masters. Professor Jeffrey Hamburger (Harvard University) has been actively leading the charge against this proposal with a petition signed by over 12,000 so far. Many people signing the petition have left moving testimonials about the collection - not just its importance as a cultural institution of international significance, but also its role in forming people's personal experiences of art and art's histories. I strongly urge everyone to sign this petition and take a few moments to look through the comments.

Institut Néerlandais, Paris
The Institut Néerlandais is a Dutch cultural centre in Paris founded in the twentieth century by the collector and connoisseur Frits Lugt. Despite the Institut's historical and cultural importance, the Dutch Government have decided to eliminate all funding to the institution (as of January 2015) leaving no other option but closure. This would have serious consequences also for the Fondation Custodia (connected with the Institut and located also within the Hôtel Turgot) and its collections of art and manuscripts, which would need to find a new home if the Institut were forced to close. The Institut is running a campaign to petition the Dutch government and will be sending its proposition on 17 August. You can find out more on their website and in Didier Rykner's articles in The Art Tribune (on the initial threat and the proposed actions against it).

Hacking Historical Maps... or trying to

This weekend, I spent Sunday afternoon experimenting with solutions for historical mapping with Mia Ridge, a digital humanist and doyenne of hack days. We staged our own mini hack day to work through some of the challenges involved with the mapping side of my project on Parisian parishes, a major component of which involves geolocating demographic data to map the neighbourhoods in which artists lived in 18th-century Paris.

Over the past few years I've done the archival digging to come up with the data and now I'm at the stage of looking for the best ways to visualise it, both for research purposes (i.e. for me to use while thinking through and writing up the results) and for publication (i.e. how do you get copyright to publish a map in a book or journal article when you've built it on a commercial service like Google Maps?). Today we were mainly focusing on the first problem as it seemed the easier of the two, but ideally there'll be a single solution for both.

I experimented with two websites, Georeferencer and Hypercities, both of which I've used in the past, but today I was hoping to explore some more of their features. In the end, however, while both have some useful functionalities, neither was perfectly suited to my requirements (though it must be said that Hypercities seemed to have a bug that was preventing data from being saved so it was difficult to explore far). As you can see from the screenshot of my results with Georeferencer, I successfully georeferenced a fragment of an 18th-century map on Google Maps... but there was no way to geolocate historical data on it.

Mia experimented with Metacarter and Mapwarper, and has written up her results and experiences over at Open Objects. I have a major problem with sites like Metacarter because everything you produce is publicly visible, which obviously makes it very difficult when you're working with unpublished data. Most sites allow the option of keeping the maps you make restricted and that makes more sense for academics using these sites for research purposes. I'm excited to share my research when it's complete, but I'd like to have control over what happens in the meantime.

Administrative map of Paris, 1890 (Uni of Chicago Library)

So all-in-all I didn't discover the ideal open-access resource in a single afternoon (shock-horror) and for now I'll just have to keep going with the methods I've been using. But I have been able to pinpoint more accurately what it is that I'm looking for and what challenges I face in finding it. And as a happy bi-product we also discovered lots of wonderful sites providing access to historical maps that I hadn't encountered before, like the David Rumsey Map Collection and a great collection of 19th-century maps of Paris at the University of Chicago Library (most in high resolution with zoomify for getting into the detail of street level, as you can see in the screenshot).

Artists' Things on the road

Katie Scott and I have been taking Artists' Things out and about with two presentations already this year and another booked in. Our formula for these dual presentations seems to be working quite well - the feedback so far has been great and we've had some dynamic discussions and really useful leads. Each paper begins with one of us giving an introduction with a conceptual frame that sets up the themes that will emerge from the interventions to come - then we each take one object from our collection and present them in dialogue, one after the other.

For the CRASSH '18th Century Things' series in Cambridge, we explored the materiality of artistic practice through two professional tools - Fragonard's colour box and Houdon's modelling stand, and for AAH2012 at the Open University we looked at everyday life in the French Royal Academy through two institutional objects - the secretary's document box and the concierge's register of funeral invitations. The next stop for us is going to be Lyon for the Luxury and Trade Conference this November, where we will be talking about (you guessed it) artists' luxury possessions. Through Boucher's shell collection and Coypel's gold watch, instead of the more conventional image of the artist as a producer of luxury goods, we will explore the artist's role as a consumer.

If you're interested, you can listen to our CRASSH presentation in the 18th Century Things audio archive, where you'll also find lots of other stimulating papers on 18th-century 'stuff'. Abstracts for the papers can be found on the Artists' Things website.

Why do we care about Molière's armchair?

With a couple of hours to spare in Paris on a research trip last month, I went to Comédie Française s'expose at the Petit Palais. The exhibition recounts the history of the Comédie Française through its visual and material remains, tracing the life of the company from its beginnings under Molière in the 17th-century to its revered state today. All is presented through a chronological arrangement of objects including props and costumes; set designs (a whole room of them); theatre buildings; a manuscript ledger - Extraict des Receptes et des affaires de la Comédie depuis de l’année 1659 - recording the daily business of the company; and a jeton probably used as a voting token in company meetings. There were also many portraits of Comédie Française actors and playwrights forming a who's who of French theatre through the ages.

Perhaps the most direct (and certainly the most poignant) connection to the company's past was to be found in the personal objects that once belonged to the company's founder. One of the first rooms in the exhibition was devoted to Molière - with low lighting and spotlit displays, the experience here was of a sacred space dedicated to this patron (and the mostly French exhibition goers were indeed observing appropriately hushed tones). Along with his effigy in a series of portraits and the company ledger open to the page recording his death, there was a trio of reliquaries (seen in my blurry photo): his armchair (first used in the production of the Malade Imaginaire in 1673 and later as a seat in Company meetings), his watch, and his bonnet.

Being in Paris on the hunt for artists' things for the Artists' Things project (see earlier post) and having spent days scouring museums and archives for the merest material trace of 18th-century artists, I was particularly struck by the survival of so many of the 17th-century playwright's possessions. Molière as an individual reached an iconic status that no single 18th-century French artist did, but nevertheless, I found myself wondering why there is comparatively much more interest in collecting, preserving and revering the things that once belonged to writers than those that belonged to artists. Indeed, a large-scale replica of Molière's armchair once became a piece of public sculpture outside the Théâtre de la Comédie Française, and Voltaire's personally customised armchair is on permanent display at the Musée Carnavalet. In the context of museum display, maybe writers' personal objects are more visually engaging than a page of manuscript, or maybe it's just a French thing about armchairs.

As we're discovering, 18th-century artists' things do survive (armchairs among them), but they're usually lying forgotten in museum store rooms or in the corner of a room. Obviously art works make for much more visually exciting encounters in museums than tatty old domestic objects, but wouldn't people want to see, for instance, the brush that created the canvas? Is Shakespeare's quill really more exciting than Michelangelo's chisel? It left me thinking about how personal possessions survive in the first place, and what role the cult of personality plays in preservation and display.