ECR French Nineteenth-Century Art Network presents:

Between Public and Private: Auction Houses Beyond the Market  

Thursday 6 March 2025 1600 (GMT) // 1700 (CET) // 1100 (EST) // 0800 (PST)

* * Please note the updated time of this event **

This panel aims to demystify the role of auction houses in the art-world ecosystem. Much more than just a marketplace for artworks, auction houses can also play a pivotal, if underrated, role in the shaping of museum collections and exhibitions, from acquisitions and deaccessions to exhibition checklist assistance with private collectors, and provenance research. This Network Session will share some behind-the-scenes insights that go beyond important sales and blockbuster prices to speak candidly about the relationship between the auction house, public institutions, private collectors, and the market. 

Kathryn Kemnitzer (Sotheby’s New York, 19th-Century European Paintings) will be joined by Emerson Bowyer (Searle Curator, Painting and Sculpture of Europe, at the Art Institute of Chicago) and Jaden Katz (Global Fine Arts Associate at Sotheby’s New York) to show how this dynamic relationship works in practice. 

Speaker Bios:

Kathryn Kremnitzer joined Sotheby’s in June 2021. She earned her PhD at Columbia University in 2020 with a dissertation that explored how Édouard Manet worked across media in the 1860s. She was previously Research Associate in the Painting and Sculpture of Europe department at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she worked on Manet and Modern Beauty (2019), Monet and Chicago (2020), and Cezanne (2022), and contributed to the online scholarly catalogue of Manet’s works in the collection. As a Curatorial Assistant at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, she worked on Madame Cézanne (2014) and Tiepolo Caricatures from the Robert Lehman Collection (2014). She specializes in 19th-century European painting, particularly French, and works on paper.

Emerson Bowyer is Searle Curator, Painting and Sculpture of Europe, at the Art Institute of Chicago. A specialist in 18th- and 19th-century French and British art, he has previously worked at the Frick Collection, New York, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and he Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. His exhibitions include David d’Angers: Making the Modern Monument (Frick Collection, 2013), Luminous Worlds: British Works on Paper 1760–1900 (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco); Like Life: Sculpture, Color, and the Body (Met Breuer, 2018); Canova: Sculpting in Clay(National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., and Art Institute of Chicago, 202324); Camille Claudel (Art Institute of Chicago, and J. Paul Getty Museum, 202324). Emerson is currently working on an exhibition focused on Vilhelm Hammershoi’s paintings of his apartment at Strandgade 30 in Copenhagen. 

Jaden Katz is a Global Fine Arts Associate at Sotheby’s New York, working between the Restitution and 19th-Century European Paintings departments. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in History and Art History at University of Michigan in 2023, with a thesis on the Salon de la Rose+Croix. 

ECR French Nineteenth-Century Art Network presents:

 Curatorial Roundtable: Manet: A Model Family 

Thursday 21 November  1600 (GMT) //  1700 (CET) // 1100 (EST) // 0800 (PST)

Every artist has their muses. For Édouard Manet (1832–1883), one of those muses was family. But the home life of the French painter was complicated, even by today’s standards. Manet: A Model Family, on view at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, from 10 October 2024–20 January 2025, explores how despite complexities between relatives, the Manet family lived happily—from a wife who had once been in the household’s employ, to a child of questionable paternity, to a mother who disinherited Édouard’s surviving kin. They were also the artist’s most frequent models, a crucial source of financial and emotional support, as well as creative inspiration. Immortalized in groundbreaking bold brushstrokes, Édouard Manet's loved ones enriched his life and his art. After his death, they cultivated his legacy and ensured that his work would never be forgotten.  

Manet: A Model Family at the Gardner Museum is the first exhibition to explore Manet through the lens of the complex familial relationships between and amongst the artist and his sitters, shedding new light on the life and masterpieces of the “father of modernism.” 

This network session will offer an opportunity to learn about the landmark exhibition Manet: A Model Family. It will provide a glimpse onto some of the original research that has gone into the exhibition; the curatorial decisions and collaborations that have informed the conception and presentation of the exhibition; as well as the partnerships forged in the securing of unique loans to the exhibition. We will be joined by exhibition curator, Diana Seave Greenwald, William and Lia Poorvu Curator of the Collection at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; Kathryn Kremnitzer, PhD, Vice President, Director, Head of Sale, 19th-Century European Paintings, Sotheby’s New York; and conservator Gianfranco Pocobene, Principal of Gianfranco Pocobene Studio.

Diana Seave Greenwald is an art historian and economic historian. Her work uses both statistical and qualitative analyses to explore the relationship between art and broader social and economic change during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly in the United States and France. Diana’s first book, Painting by Numbers: Data-Driven Histories of Nineteenth-Century Art, was published by Princeton University Press in 2021.  She is currently the William and Lia Poorvu Curator of the Collection at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. At the Gardner she has written, co-authored, or edited four exhibition catalogs and books: Betye Saar: Heart of A Wanderer (2023, editor), Fellow Wanderer: Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Travel Albums (2023, co-editor with Casey Riley), Isabella Stewart Gardner: A Life (2022, co-authored with Nathaniel Silver), and Isabella Stewart Gardner: Dog Lover (2020). Prior to joining the Gardner, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., working in the departments of American and British Paintings and Modern Prints and Drawings. She received a D.Phil. in History from the University of Oxford. She was co-supervised by Professor Kevin O’Rourke and Professor Michael Hatt (University of Warwick). Before doctoral study, Diana earned an M.Phil. in Economic and Social History from Oxford and a Bachelor’s degree in Art History from Columbia University. 

Kathryn Kremnitzer joined Sotheby’s in June 2021. She earned her PhD at Columbia University in 2020 with a dissertation that explored how Édouard Manet worked across media in the 1860s. She was previously Research Associate in the Painting and Sculpture of Europe department at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she worked on Manet and Modern Beauty (2019), Monet and Chicago (2020), and Cezanne (2022), and contributed to the online scholarly catalogue of Manet’s works in the collection. As a Curatorial Assistant at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, she worked on Madame Cézanne (2014) and Tiepolo Caricatures from the Robert Lehman Collection (2014). She specializes in 19th-century European painting, particularly French, and works on paper. 

Gianfranco Pocobene is Principal of Gianfranco Pocobene Studio, a private practice specializing in the conservation of paintings and murals. He received his Master of Arts in Conservation in 1984 from Queen’s University, and his forty years of experience include fifteen years at the Harvard Art Museums and twenty years at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. At the Gardner he led the conservation department as the John L. and Susan K. Gardner Chief Conservator and also served as its Chief Paintings and Research Conservator where he carried out numerous technical studies and treatments including works by Fra Angelico, Simone Martini, Botticelli, Velázquez, Crivelli, Titian, Degas, Sargent and Manet. While working on Harvard’s University collection, he oversaw the restoration of mural cycles at the Boston Public Library by Puvis de Chavannes, Edwin Austin Abbey and John Singer Sargent and co-edited and co-authored the 2010 publication, John Singer Sargent’s Triumph of Religion Murals at the Boston Public Library: Creation and Restoration.

Lightning Talks: We [Don’t] Know What You Did Last Summer.

 
Thursday 19 September
1600 (BST) // 1700 (CEST) // 1100 (EDT) // 0800 (PDT)
 
We are excited to announce the lineup for our September Network Event, “Lightning Talks: We [Don’t] Know What You Did Last Summer.” Composed of brief (8–10-minute) presentations, this session will spotlight the recent and ongoing research of five emerging scholars. They will share their discoveries and reflect on some of the obstacles, successes, and surprises that arise from art historical investigations.

Our speakers are:

Hoyon Mephokee, “Summer Research: Producing Siam in the French Colonial Consciousness”

This summer, Hoyon Mephokee conducted dissertation research on the 1861 visit of Siamese (Thai) ambassadors to France where, at the Château de Fontainebleau, they presented gifts and a letter from the Siamese king Mongkut to Napoléon III and Eugénie. In 1863, under the directive of Eugénie, the gifts were combined with objects looted from China during the Second Opium War to form the so-called Musée Chinois. The Siamese ambassadors were also taken to Paris, where they were photographed by Jacques-Phillippe Potteau, whose portraits were combined by the Muséum d’Histoire naturelle with other ethnographic images to form the Collection Anthropologique du Muséum de Paris. Through the objects and photographs, the Second French Empire was able to materially possess Siam such that it could create its own understanding of the kingdom in service of its imperialist goals in East and Southeast Asia.

Hoyon Mephokee is a PhD candidate at Washington University in St. Louis, where he studies French modern art under Elizabeth Childs. He is primarily interested in decolonial and postcolonial approaches to art history and is specifically interested in interrogating the colonial and cultural threads between France and Southeast Asia. His dissertation, titled “On the Hunt for the White Elephant: Visualizing and Materializing Siam in the French Colonial Imaginary, 1861–1900,” examines the complexity and multi-accentuality of the Siamese Kingdom (present-day Thailand) in the French colonial consciousness.

Dr. Courtney Wilder, “Veuve Cadart: Inheriting the Etching Revival”

Over the summer, Dr. Courtney Wilder catalogued a large collection of etching revival prints as part of her work as a project-based curator at the Vanderbilt University Museum of Art. She noticed several prints credited to “Veuve Cadart,” or Célonie Sophie Cadart (née Chifflart; her brother was the artist François-Nicolas Chifflart), and became curious to assess the role she played in taking over the famous etching revival publishing empire of her husband, Alfred Cadart, when he died unexpectedly in 1875. By 1882, the business had failed, and all assets were auctioned. Despite relatively voluminous scholarship on the Etching Revival, Célonie Sophie Cadart remains a footnote at best; she lacks an ULAN entry and, in the catalogs of several large museums, is listed as her husband or as simply “V. Cadart.” Dr. Wilder will discuss some early questions about what could potentially be learned by looking more closely at Veuve Cadart’s short-lived and ultimately unsuccessful tenure as symbolic head of the Etching Revival.

Dr. Courtney Wilder’s scholarship explores the intermediality of print, with a particular interest in early nineteenth-century textile printing. She is currently the Sullivan Collection Curator at the Vanderbilt University Museum of Art in Nashville, where she is working on a multi-year project to catalog a recently rediscovered trove of over 6,000 prints. She has held fellowships, internships, and research positions at a variety of institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Getty Research Institute; she received her PhD from the University of Michigan in 2021.

Lucile Cordonnier, “When the Corpus Chooses You: Peregrinations of a PhD Candidate”

Spending the entire summer in Paris to conduct research for her dissertation proposal, Lucile Cordonnier’s initial goal was to consult archival sources relating to the four decorative ensembles painted by Maurice Denis and Édouard Vuillard that she had already picked as part of her dissertation corpus. However, after close examination of these works and the primary sources, she realized that her entire dissertation could focus on a single cycle: Maurice Denis’s Légende de saint Hubert, painted for baron Denys Cochin’s hôtel particulier between 1896 and 1897. In this lightning talk, Lucile will outline how she pinpointed the research potential of the Légende and how she shifted her approach to incorporate ecology and eco-criticism, despite incessant doubts and skepticism. Trusting your instincts and diving into new material is, she believes, the foundation stone for conducting exciting and stimulating research.

Lucile Cordonnier is a PhD candidate in Art History at McGill University, working under the supervision of Dr. Mary Hunter. After her undergraduate studies at the École du Louvre and the Université Paris Nanterre, she pursued her Master’s degree at Concordia University. Her doctoral research examines questions of ecology in late nineteenth-century French art, with a particular focus on Maurice Denis. Lucile’s studies at McGill are funded by a FRQSC Doctoral Training Scholarship. Moreover, Lucile benefitted from several grants (French Historical Society, Fonds de Recherche du Québec-Société et Culture, Elspeth McConnell Fine Arts Award, Fred and Betty Price Research Award) to work in museums across France, the United States, and Canada.

Sarah Lawson-Schalles, “The Transatlantic Paradigm: Analysing the Lives of Five African American Artists in Europe During the Long Nineteenth Century”

This research paper focuses on the African American artist Henry Ossawa Tanner, considered one of the most internationally successful African American artists. To further his studies, in 1891 Tanner travelled to Paris, where he found solace in artistic and racial freedom. Moreover, this paper argues that Tanner and other artists in this research project have set a precedent of a transatlantic paradigmatic exchange that would continue into the Harlem Renaissance and years to come. Utilizing archival material as well as secondary sources, this paper will contextualise the period in which Tanner worked during the late nineteenth century in Paris, regarding the social and political climate during the Third Republic in France from 1870–1940.

Sarah Lawson-Schalles is a second-year PhD by-distance student at the University of Edinburgh. Her project is supervised by Professors Michelle Foot and Maryam Ohadi-Hamadani. She completed her undergraduate degree in History of Art at the University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies, which focused on non-western art histories. Remaining at SOAS, she completed her master’s degree in history of art and archaeology, where she developed a great interest in the arts of the African Diaspora. This led to her doctoral research focusing on the transatlantic visual culture of five African American artists who lived and studied in Europe during the long nineteenth century.

Dina Eikeland, “A False Cézanne? Authenticity Debates in Scandinavia in the Mid-War Period”

This June, Dina Eikeland had the chance to stay at the Getty Research Institute as a Library Grantee to conduct research in the archives of The Swedish French Art Gallery in Stockholm. As an important intermediary between the French art world and the Scandinavian art market between its opening in 1918 and throughout the mid-war period, this gallery is a central part of her PhD-research. One of her finds in these archives, concerning the Cézanne painting Avenue (ca. 1880–82), today in the Gotheborg Museum of Art’s collections, is particularly intriguing. After having been declared a false painting by French experts in 1929, it engendered great mobilization within Danish and Swedish art networks to prove the French experts wrong. The authenticity of the Cézanne painting was important for consolidating the collective story telling on the Scandinavian-French relations, in general, and on the Scandinavian acquisition of French late nineteenth-century paintings in particular.

Dina Dignæs Eikeland has been a chargée d’études et de recherche at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA) in Paris since 2022. Her PhD-research, conducted under the supervision of Professor Dominique Poulot at the Panthéon-Sorbonne University in Paris, explores the renewed interest for French art, especially impressionist and early modern art, in Scandinavia between 1910 and 1938. She aims to document and analyse the Scandinavian reception of French art by focusing on the formation of a transnational network of museum professionals, art dealers, art collectors and art historians engaged in the promotion, acquisition and exhibition of French art in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.

ECR French Nineteenth-Century Art Network presents: “Curatorial Roundtable: Behind the Scenes of Paris 1874”

Tues 7 May 1600 (BST) / 1700 (CEST) / 1100 (EDT)

Join us for a special Network Event to learn about the landmark exhibition Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment, taking place at the Musée d'Orsay in Paris from 25 March–14 July 2024, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. from 8 September 2024–19 January 2025. The exhibition marks the 150th anniversary of the First Impressionist Exhibition by bringing together works from that exhibition as well as from the 1874 Salon, offering a fresh perspective on this critical moment in the history of French art and culture. The speakers will include members of the D.C.-based curatorial team, including Mary Morton, Kimberly A. Jones, and Nikki Georgopulos.

Speaker bios:

Nikki Georgopulos is an art historian, curator, and educator specializing in European art of the nineteenth century. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Art History, Visual Art & Theory at the University of British Columbia. Her current book project traces representations of mirrors and reflection in nineteenth-century French painting. She has also published extensively on the work of Mary Cassatt, looking particularly to Cassatt’s interest and investment in the question of labour, as well as her involvement in the US women’s suffrage movement. She was a part of the Washington-based curatorial team for Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment while serving as the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow in the Department of French Paintings from 2020–2022.

Kimberly A. Jones received her PhD from the University of Maryland in 1996. A former museum fellow at the Musée national du château de Pau and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, she joined the curatorial staff of the National Gallery of Art in 1995. Jones has curated a number of exhibitions including Edouard Vuillard (2003–2004); In the Forest of Fontainebleau: Painters and Photographers from Corot to Monet (2008); Degas/Cassatt (2014), Frédéric Bazille and the Birth of Impressionism (2016–2017), and Degas at the Opéra (2020). She is part of the curatorial team for Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment, which opens in Washington in September.

Mary Morton is curator and head of the Department of French at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. She received her PhD in the history of art and architecture in 1998 from Brown University. Before joining the NGA, she held the position of associate curator of paintings at the J. Paul Getty Museum (2004–2010) and associate curator of European art at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Houston (1998–2004). 

ECR French Nineteenth-Century Art Network presents:

 Imperial Imaginaries: Visions of a Second French Colonial Empire

in partnership with the French Colonial Historical Society

Thurs 21 March 1600 (GMT) / 1700 (CET) / 1200 (EDT) / 0900 (PDT)

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Napoleon III embarked on a massive program of overseas imperialism. Restoring and expanding the territories previously held by his uncle—notably through conquests in Indochina (modern day Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos), Africa, and the South Pacific—this “Second French Colonial Empire” became an enduring source of economic power and civic pride for France. Trade with the colonies meant access to valuable raw materials and new markets for French manufactured goods, as well as to “uncivilized” populations patronizingly believed to be in need of assimilation to the French system of values. Indeed, the possibilities for empire were seen as limitless, extending to remote territories not yet explored or claimed by Western powers, including the Arctic.

This session brings together scholars who explore, in different media and geographical contexts, the ways in which a renewed imperial vision of France was constructed, circulated, experienced, and understood, both at home and on a global stage.

 Ivana Dizdar (University of Toronto) - “The Domestic North”

In 1855, the French manufacturer Zuber & Cie produced and distributed a wallpaper that featured, among other scenes, an Arctic landscape: complete with a French flag, a sail ship glides through a glacial sea populated by floating ice, glaciers, northern seabirds, and a pair of polar bears at the chilling water’s edge. Despite its portrayal of other regions—Canada, Bengal, Algeria, and Switzerland—the wallpaper’s only portrayal of humans is in the Arctic scene. That the manufacturer and designers, botanical illustrator Eugène Ehrmann and animal painter Théophile Schuler, chose to interpolate human figures in the wallpaper’s Arctic scene is striking. It counters nineteenth-century conceptions of the Arctic as a vast and empty space, devoid of human life, and instead reflects the fact that European powers like France were invested in seeing the Arctic as an accessible and even inhabitable place. Crucially, the figures are not situated in optimal climatic conditions but are thrust into the harshness and precarity of the extreme north. The scene suggests that France has no limit: nothing, not even the risks associated with freezing temperatures, will hinder its colonial spirit. Given France’s colonial presence elsewhere, why, I ask, do French explorers and the nation’s flag appear not in Canada, Bengal, or Algeria but in the Arctic? I argue that Zuber raises the flag in the Arctic precisely because—not in spite—of its status as unclaimed territory. Taking the wallpaper as a point of departure, I examine what it meant to effectively claim the Arctic in French nineteenth-century material culture, decorative art, and interior design.

Ivana Dizdar is a PhD candidate in art history at the University of Toronto and a visiting researcher at the Musee d’Orsay. Her dissertation examines representations of the Arctic in French nineteenth-century visual culture.

Yasmine Najm (Leipzig University) – “(Re)spatializing the Empire: French Official Publications in the Metropole and French Indochina, 1814–1914”

My research focuses on the history of French imperialism, press, spatiality, and nation-state-building processes in the nineteenth century. My dissertation, titled “(Re)spatializing the Empire: French Official Publications in the Metropole and French Indochina, 1814–1914,” aims to uncover how French elites imagined and (re)constructed the French empire in the post-revolutionary period and places a particular focus on the colonization of Indochina. To trace the processes of (re)spatialization that took place after the fall of Napoleon I in 1814/1815, I explore the French Journaux Officiels, a form of official press that has rarely been studied as a primary source for historical analysis and thus remains understudied. In my dissertation, I bring together historical analysis and insights from digital humanities to assess the spatial semanticscontained in the journals to analyze the nature of the spatial discourse used to promote both the (re)construction of the Empire and the French nation-state in the metropole and French Indochina. I argue that Official Journals were used as a tool of (re)spatialization both in their role of physical record of the state’s actions and decisions but also discursively as a medium to semantically test and (re)define the spatial dimensions of the French nation-state with colonial extensions, the spatial format of France in the nineteenth century. 

Yasmine Najm is a doctoral candidate at Leipzig University and a fellow of the Franco-German College Doctoral of the Ecole Normal Supérieur (ENS-PSL). Her research focuses on the (re)spatialization of the French empire and the role of the official press in the nineteenth century, with a particular focus on French Indochina. Before joining Leipzig University, she completed a double-degree master's program in Global Studies at Leipzig University and Global Economic History at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).

Eve Rosekind (Washington University in St. Louis)—“Building A Modern Empire: Empress Eugénie at the Inauguration of the Suez Canal, 1869”

In November 1869, Empress Eugénie of France arrived at Port Sa’ïd to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal. The modern waterway between the West and the East connected the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea through the engineering triumph of the Isthmus of Suez. This project, led by French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps, strengthened the political and cultural relationship between France and Egypt. French artists accompanying the Empress portrayed her journey through Egypt and the opening ceremonies, visualizing France’s central role in the canal project and in uniting West and East. By examining these illustrations, this talk demonstrates how the imagery of Eugénie illustrated France’s imperial leadership and political prowess on the global stage. Furthermore, the French public could imagine themselves traveling alongside their Empress, marvelling at their technological innovation and their role in guiding Egypt into the modern era. These images of Eugénie affirmed France’s continued imperial investment in Egypt.

Eve Rosekind is a PhD. Candidate in Art History at Washington University in St. Louis studying late-nineteenth century French art with an interest in Orientalism and Second Empire Paris. She is in the process of writing her dissertation titled “France Producing Egypt: The Material Cultures of Orientalism, 1869–1922.” She holds a BA in Art History from Johns Hopkins University with minors in French Cultural Studies and Museums & Society and an MA in Art History from Williams College. Eve was previously the Curatorial Assistant for European Decorative Arts and Sculpture at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

This is a virtual event held via Zoom, details will be provided upon sign up and a reminder will be sent before the event. For any technical issues, please get in contact via info@ecrfrenchart.com

The ECR Nineteenth-Century French Art Network meets once a month during the academic year virtually via Zoom. It is open to current PhD and research students as well as ECRs who have recently graduated and are making their way in the world of academia/museums/education/arts or heritage. It is global, open to those located anywhere in the world who wish to join. Feel free to join and participate; we hope to create an engaging, diverse, fun and rewarding community.

For further updates/information check out our website or sign up to our mailing list . If you wish drop us an email info@ecrfrenchart.com.

Transformation and Trouble: Photography as a Tool in Nineteenth-Century France 
9 November 2023 - 1600 (GMT) / 1700 (CET) / 1100 (EST) / 0800 (PST)

It is hard to overestimate the extent to which the advent of photography in the early nineteenth century changed the course of visual culture in France and abroad. New photographic inventions, such as Louis Daguerre’s ‘diorama’ (a popular Parisian spectacle featuring theatrical painting and lighting effects) introduced novel visual mechanisms to a wide audience. Though denigrated by critics like Charles Baudelaire for its presumed limitation to merely reproduce the visible world, photography was in fact in dialogue with other means of visual expression. Artists such as Eugène Delacroix and Paul Cezanne were indebted to the medium for the development of many of their paintings; Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic studies of bodies in motion allowed artists such as Edgar Degas to reconsider the artist’s capacity to depict movement.  While linked to aesthetic and scientific advancement, however, photography was equally a vital tool for French colonial endeavours, reinforcing propagandistic messages, justifying missionary activities, and lending seemingly objective evidence to the pseudoscientific project of eugenics and related endeavours of white supremacy. The tool of photography was put to many uses, unified by its promise of technological progress.

We are pleased to announce the following speakers:

Isabelle Lynch (University of Pennsylvania) - "'World Without Sun': The Diving Bell, The Camera, and the Rapture of the Deep."

“Is an underwater environment unsuitable for taking good photographs?” pondered marine zoologist and pioneering underwater photographer Louis Boutan (1859–1934), frustrated with what he described as the “shapeless” and “clouded” images taken by his submerged camera while researching mollusks at the Observatoire océanologique (Arago Marine Laboratory) in Banyuls-sur-Mer, France. Artificial light made photography possible in spaces no sunlight reaches, and as early as 1893, Boutan seized artificial fire to conquer the depths of darkness and bring forth pictures of the sea floor.

Described by the oceanographer and filmmaker Jacques Cousteau as a kind of “Prometheus who had given mankind fire and thus artificial light,” Boutan developed underwater flash technologies, specialized camera housings, and remote-control technologies for deep waters using an electromagnet. Collaborating with electrical engineers M. Chaffour and (later) Joseph David, Boutan developed various lighting technologies to illuminate and visualize underwater environments: dangerously explosive underwater flash bulbs where magnesium coils burned inside oxygen-filled glass bottles, and later, battery powered carbon-arc lamps. How might the materiality and agential capacities of artificial light—which explodes and creates dense clouds of vapor—confound ambitions of scientific objectivity and oceanic visuality? Situating Boutan’s experiment with underwater flash photography within the context of burgeoning research in underwater optics, this paper considers the temporality and “liquid intelligence” of artificial light.

Isabelle Lynch is a PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania who studies modern and contemporary art. Her dissertation focuses on the role of artificial light in processes of photographic exposure, development, and projection. She currently lives in Chicago where she teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

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Édouard de Saint-Ours (University of St Andrews) - “Capturing the French imperial imagination: Émile Gsell’s photographs at the edge of colonial desires in Indochina, 1865–79”

In Picturing Empire (1997), James Ryan writes that Samuel Bourne’s aesthetic motivations in creating his commercial photographic portfolio of the British Raj between 1863 and 1870 does not absolve his work of imperial ideology because the context of imperialism was itself ‘a major source of imaginative power’ for photographers (p. 55). This was a euphemism, considering the colonial biases conveyed both in Bourne’s writings and photographs. There were many ways in which photographers could and did support the global agendas of imperial powers, whether they were operating at the forefront of colonial expansion or at the very centre of empire, whether their pictures were disseminated as prints in colonial settlements, or as engravings in the mainland’s illustrated journals.

Émile Gsell is a case in point. A commercial photographer operating from Saigon, the capital city of French Cochinchina (present-day Ho Chi Minh City in southern Vietnam) from 1865 until his death in 1879, he appears to have received only one commission from the colonial authorities. Yet his work often embodied the edge of French designs in Southeast Asia, whether geographically thanks to the expeditions he was able to join, or iconographically through the performance of colonial desires in front of the lens (depicting indigenous women as available, presenting local rulers as loyal allies, rendering tribal people as tame and visible). Furthermore, Gsell’s photographs also circulated widely in illustrated journals and books rife with colonial rhetoric and in the colonial sections of international exhibitions. In this talk, which draws on material in my dissertation, I argue that the apparent contradiction between commission and production actually bears witness to a tacit transaction existing between Gsell and the colonial project at large, as well as to the systemic nature of this relation and the efficacy of photography as a tool of imperial vision. I suggest that the imperial imagination was so ingrained in colonial society that an ambitious and savvy photographer could not fail to give it visual currency. In turn, his production, made appealing by a certain talent for the medium, could not fail to sell.

Édouard de Saint-Ours is a historian of photography specializing in the early development of the medium in Asia. Trained in art history and museology at the École du Louvre (2012–2017), he pursued his doctoral studies at the Universities of St Andrews (Art History) and Le Havre (Contemporary History) and is preparing a thesis on the place of photography within the French colonial enterprise in Indochina in the 19th century. His work has been published in the journals History of Photography, Photographica and Le Magasin du XIXe siècle, and more recently in the collective work Mondes photographiques, histoire des débuts (2023), the catalogue of the exhibition "Ouvrir l'album du monde. Photographies (1842-1911)" at the Musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac. Édouard de Saint-Ours also works at the Musée national des arts asiatiques - Guimet, where he took over as Curator of Photographic Collections in October 2023.

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Joshua Teasdale (University of Oxford) - “Capturing Subjectivity in Late Nineteenth-Century Photographic Catalogues”

Animal Locomotion (1884–87) by Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) was a pioneering use of the camera to depict the spectrum of human movement. It is often incorporated into narratives of Western modernity, wherein the camera surpasses the limitations of the human eye, enabling the rationalisation of the natural world. In these accounts, Muybridge appears to utilise the device to accumulate swathes of visual information, which he gathered into categories and then brought together as a catalogue. As a result, Animal Locomotion has been implicated in the emergence of modern discourses fusing knowledge and power. However, we can fruitfully re-situate his work within a cultural context of experimentation with representational forms, revealing salient tensions with unexpected works. L’Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière (1878) was a visual record of physical symptoms observed in patients with hysteria at L’Hôpital de la Salpêtrière; it functioned as a conduit for comprehending this altered state of consciousness. These physical expressions were subsequently cited by Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) in his Gates of Hell (1880–1917) to convey his subjects’ psychological torment. Through re-framing the catalogue, we can begin to reconsider photography’s relationship to subjectivity in Muybridge’s canonical work.

Joshua Teasdale is a research student at the University of Oxford’s Department of History of Art, and a member of Wadham College. He holds both a BA and MSt degree from Oxford, in History and History of Art, respectively. His research focuses on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century intellectual culture in Britain, France, and the US, with a particular interest in the relationship between representation and subjectivity. His thesis is supervised by Professor Jane Garnett, and titled: ‘Mathematics, Marble, and Martial Arts: Art in Motion from 1887 to 1930’.

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Sophie Lynch (University of Chicago) - "The Blur of Market Labor: Eugène Atget’s Photographs of Les Halles"

This paper considers the blurs that emerge across Eugène Atget’s photographs of market vendors at Les Halles, the busy central market of 19th century Paris. As a visual effect, photographic blur is often an indication of movement that could not be apprehended: residue of that which eluded the speed of the shutter. In these works, the photographer’s lack of control over the unfolding movements of labor offers a series of images that are not easily legible. A spectral figure appears to hover over boxes of fresh produce, lingering on the threshold of photographic visibility. In another photograph, women are hunched over counters, the rapid movements of hands counting coins or garlic cloves blurred by the photographic apparatus. Through the movements of their labor, the figures resist complete photographic legibility. Indistinct expanses invite the deceleration of viewing experiences; half-glimpsed figures emerge and retreat, at times seeming to flee from visibility and evoking the instabilities of experiences of movement and migration. The contours of their bodies only partially expressed, the blurred workers recall the complexities of lived experiences in turn of the century Paris, as well as the spectral past’s imbrication within encounters of daily life. By failing to depict labor through legible forms, the photographs poetically portray the everyday movements of labor and interrogate the ability of a photograph to function as evidence, shining a light on the socio-economic conditions of labor. Through a focus on relations between blurred photographs, movement and labor in Paris at the turn of the century, I argue that blurs caused by the movements of workers come forth as sites of temporal disruption, fugitivity, and resistance.

Sophie Lynch is a PhD candidate pursuing a joint-degree in the departments of Cinema & Media Studies and Art History at the University of Chicago. She studies modern and contemporary art, photography and film from the late 19th century to the present. Following her interests in historical intersections of bodies and technologies, her dissertation considers blurred images in works of photography and film from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. 

Building an Exhibition: Degas & the Laundress 

13 September at 1500 (BST) // 1600 (CEST) // 1000 (EDT)

Online // Free  

Join us for a special Network Session to learn about the landmark exhibition Degas and the Laundress: Women, Work, and Impressionism taking place at the Cleveland Museum of Art between 8th September 2023 and 14th January 2024. The exhibition brings together dozens of Edgar Degas’s representations of laundresses, a subject that he undertook in a variety of media throughout his career. In addition to works pictorializing the labor of laundresses by Degas and his contemporaries, the exhibition will feature ephemera contextualizing the public image and reputation of this working-class symbol throughout the late nineteenth century.

We will be joined by two members of the exhibition team: Britany Salsbury, Curator of Prints and Drawings at the Cleveland Museum of Art; and Ivey Barker, Andrew W. Mellon Photograph Conservation Fellow at the Cleveland Museum of Art; as well as two catalogue contributors: Aleksandra Bursac, PhD Candidate, University of Toronto; and Jillian Kruse, PhD Candidate, Case Western Reserve University. We will hear about the show’s conception and organization, the collaborative research that made it possible, and the objects within. The event will be followed by a discussion and Q&A.

Our Speakers:

Britany Salsbury is curator of prints and drawings at the Cleveland Museum of Art. Her previous exhibitions and publications include Altered States: Etching in Late 19th-Century Paris (2016) and Nineteenth-Century French Drawings from the Cleveland Museum of Art (2023). Her research has been published in journals including Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide and Print Quarterly, and with Ruth E. Iskin, she co-edited the book Collecting Prints, Posters, and Ephemera: Perspectives in a Global World (2019). Her doctoral dissertation on print portfolios in fin-de-siècle Paris, completed at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, was supported by the Getty Research Institute and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Ivey Barker is the Andrew W. Mellon Photograph Conservation Fellow at the Cleveland Museum of Art. She earned a Master of Arts in Photographic Preservation and Collections Management from the University of Rochester, in collaboration with the George Eastman Museum. Her graduate studies and research culminated in the disaster response thesis and workshop, “Water Emergency Response for Aqueous Inkjet Prints.” In addition to being a Fulbright alumna, she has recently held positions at the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, DC and the Image Permanence Institute at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, NY.

Aleksandra Bursac is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto. Her dissertation explores how Degas used particular motifs to engage with media and materiality, and to negotiate larger social questions. Her essay in the catalogue for the upcoming exhibition Degas and the Laundress at the Cleveland Museum of Art draws on this work. She will be a curatorial intern in the department of paintings at the Getty Museum in 2023–2024.

Jillian Kruse is a PhD candidate in the joint Art History program at Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Museum of Art. Her research focuses on nineteenth-century European works on paper with particular interests in ecocriticism, experimental printmaking, and the connections between artmaking, anarchism, and utopia in the prints of Camille Pissarro. She has held positions at the National Gallery of Ireland, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Jillian currently serves as a curatorial intern in Prints and Drawings at the Cleveland Museum of Art.