Date:
Location:
Speaker: Ewa Lajer-Burcharth (Harvard University / I Tatti)
Established since the Renaissance as a tool of the creative process, drawing acquired a new status and meaning in eighteenth-century France. Leaving the narrow confines of the artist’s studio, the medium entered into the expanded field of culture and the social sphere. Exhibited, viewed, marketed, and collected on an unprecedented scale, drawing became an art form in its own right. Its widened circulation and social visibility endowed it with new cultural and commercial value. Serving as an instrument for transmitting knowledge within and across the emergent scientific disciplines, the medium was also implicated in France’s commercial and territorial expansion, directly or indirectly facilitating colonial conquest. Focusing on four artists – Antoine Watteau, Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, Madeleine Basseporte, and Jean-Honoré Fragonard – this seminar will examine how, unfolding beyond the traditional academic context, their drawing practices engaged with – and were transformed by – their encounter with the world at large.
William Dorr Boardman Professor of Fine Arts at Harvard University, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth specializes in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French art and writes frequently on contemporary art. Her books include Necklines: The Art of Jacques-Louis David after the Terror (Yale University Press, 1999; Ebook A&AePortal, 2022), Chardin Material (Sternberg Press, 2011), and The Painter’s Touch: Boucher Chardin Fragonard(Princeton University Press, 2018; paperback ed., 2022). She also co-authored Interiors and Interiority, (De Gruyter, 2015); Painting Beyond Itself: A Medium in the Post-Medium Condition (Sternberg Press, 2016), and Drawing: The Invention of the Modern Medium (Harvard Art Museums, 2017; Ebook A&Ae Portal, 2018). At I Tatti she will be working on her book project titled Drawing in the World.
Image: Gabriel de Saint-Aubin, View of the Salon of 1765. Watercolour, brown ink, grey ink, pencil, hightened with white, Musee du Louvre
Add event to calendar
