EIGHTEENTH ANNUAL GRADUATE STUDENT SYMPOSIUM
IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ART
Saturday & Sunday, September 25 & 26, 2021, 1 to 4 PM EDT
Co-sponsored by the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art (AHNCA) and
the Dahesh Museum of Art. This event will be held virtually.
Special thanks to the Dahesh Museum of Art for the Dahesh Museum of Art Prize for the Best Paper(s), a gift from the Mervat Zahid Cultural Foundation
* * *
Saturday, September 25, 2021
1 PM: Welcome: Nancy Locke, Pennsylvania State University, President of Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art; Amira Zahid, Trustee, Dahesh Museum of Art
1:10 – 2:30 PM: First Session & Discussion
Patricia Mainardi, Graduate Center, City University of New York, AHNCA Program Chair, Moderator
Christine Garnier, Harvard University, and Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., “Dining from the Mine: Tiffany & Co.’s Comstock Silver Service of 1878.”
The Mackay silver service, displayed at the 1878 Exposition Universelle in Paris, was designed and fabricated by Tiffany & Company from metal extracted from the owner’s Nevada mine. Garnier examines the service through the period rhetoric of America’s inexhaustible supply of silver, as well as the environmental impacts of the material’s extraction on local foodways.
María Beatriz H. Carrión, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, and The Rijksmuseum, “Indigeneity as Spectacle: Photography, Infotainment, and the Curtis Indian Picture Opera.”
Edward S. Curtis inaugurated the Indian Picture Opera: A Vanishing Race in 1911. This fusion of music, images, and narration served popular and specialized audiences interested in learning about Indigenous Americans. Through this show, Curtis developed a form of modern, multimedia infotainment and reinforced the troublesome association between indigeneity and spectacle.
Edoardo Maggi, ‘Sapienza’ University of Rome, “Filippo Belli ‘Painter-Photographer’ in Rome: Picturesque Motifs and Artistic Documentation.”
Filippo Belli (1836–1927) was active mainly as a supplier of images depicting the Roman countryside meant to be used by artists, but he was also a documenter of the Eternal City’s cultural heritage. His work still awaits a proper study, and reconstructing it will shed more light on Italian historical photography.
2:30 – 2:40 PM: Break
2:40 – 3:40 PM: Second Session & Discussion
Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, Seton Hall University, and Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, Moderator
Lieske Huits, University of Cambridge, and Victoria & Albert Museum, “Excellent Modern Ornaments, Models of Ancient Production: The Art Journal’s Illustrated Catalogues and the Logic of Appropriation in Nineteenth-Century Revival Jewelry.”
Described as both modern ornaments and models of ancient production, the jewelry of John Brogden exemplifies how these seemingly opposed descriptions could coexist for nineteenth-century art-manufactures. Using The Art Journal’s illustrated catalogues of the world exhibitions, Huits examines the language surrounding revival and adaptation of style in the nineteenth century.
Feng Schöneweiß, Institute of East Asian Art History, University of Heidelberg, “Becoming Dragoon Vases: Porcelain, Provenance, and Monumentality in German Antiquarianism (1853–1913).”
Schöneweiß considers how the emerging recognition of provenance shaped public perception of monumentality during the long nineteenth century. Focusing on eighteen so-called Dragoon Vases of Dresden provenance, he explores the transcultural biography and monumentality of Chinese porcelain in German antiquarian, museological, and historiographical contexts.
3:40 – 4:00 PM: Discussion among Participants
Sunday, September 26, 2021
1:00 PM: Welcome: Nancy Locke, President of AHNCA, and J. David Farmer, Director of Exhibitions, Dahesh Museum of Art
1:10 – 2:30 PM: Third Session & Discussion
Alia Nour, Dahesh Museum of Art, Moderator
Gabriel Hubmann, University of Basel, “Allegory and Caricature in Antoine-Jean Gros’s Napoleon Visiting the Plague-Stricken of Jaffa (1804).”
The figure of Napoleon in Gros’s history painting has been interpreted as allegorical allusion to Apollo, Christ, or even to Doubting Thomas. Hubmann will argue that instead of being a potpourri of iconographical references, this figure can be read as reaction against caricatures critical of Napoleon.
Sean Kramer, University of Michigan, “Heroism and Difference: Regarding the Indigenous Soldier in Alphonse de Neuville’s The Last Cartridges (1873).”
Kramer examines the presence of a tirailleur algérien [Algerian light infantryman] in Alphonse de Neuville’s iconic Franco-Prussian War canvas, The Last Cartridges, in which Neuville transformed the figure into a synecdoche of the so-called indigenous troops, and gave him an intriguingly prominent role in an image celebrating French martial bravery in defeat.
Franziska Niemand, University of Fribourg, and Vitrocentre Romont, “Displaying a Forgotten Characteristic of Mamluk and Ottoman Architecture: Colored Glass Plaster Windows at 19th-Century World`s Fairs.”
While glass plaster windows were a characteristic of the Ottoman or Mamluk style displayed at 19th century World’s Fairs, by the 20th century they had disappeared from the attention of Islamic art historiography. This case study of the 1873 Weltausstellung in Vienna illuminates the reception of the forgotten windows through visual sources.
2:30 – 2:40 PM: Break
2:40 – 3:40 PM: Fourth Session & Discussion
Marilyn Satin Kushner, New-York Historical Society, Moderator
Alexis Monroe, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and Smithsonian American Art Museum, “Buildings in the Landscape and the Architecture of Statehood.”
The official government report of the 1849 Simpson Expedition is replete with fantastical prints of the New Mexico landscape. Monroe argues that these strange images must be understood in context of the contemporaneous debate over New Mexico statehood — which was inseparable from the debate over the future of slavery in America.
Hampton Smith, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “Tapping Painting: George Inness and Turpentine.”
Smith reframes George Inness’s landscapes of Florida and Georgia as they relate to turpentine, a material Inness utilized copiously. Attending to the intersection of subject matter and facture particular to Inness, he reveals how Inness’s late works softened the image of an ecologically harmful and pointedly racialized industry.
3:40 – 4:00 PM: Discussion among Participants
2020 – 2021 Jury: Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, Roberto C. Ferrari, Marilyn Satin Kushner, Nancy Locke, Patricia Mainardi, Alia Nour. Technical Director: Kaylee Alexander
The symposium is free and open to the public but registration is required at: https://tinyurl.com/ahncadahesh18
For further information: gro/muesumhsehad//ofni