Skills, Objects, Representations: Material Culture & the French Revolution
22 May 2023, 9:30 amâ6:00 pm
Perspectives on material culture have helped promote a rich and interdisciplinary renewal of scholarship around the French Revolution. Art and artefacts from the Revolution helped to shape its polemics, and affected how it was experienced. Items including furniture, clothing and fashion, ceramics and prints of all kinds mediated events in France and transnationally, competed in a transforming cultural marketplace for everyday and luxury goods, and helped to contour the Revolutionâs material legacies and memories.
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All | MyAV·¶ staff | MyAV·¶ students
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
MyAV·¶ History
Location
-
IAS Common GroundG11, Ground Floor, South WingMyAV·¶, Gower Street, LondonWC1E 6BTUnited Kingdom
Perspectives on material culture have helped promote a rich and interdisciplinary renewal of scholarship around the French Revolution. Art and artefacts from the Revolution helped to shape its polemics, and affected how it was experienced. Items including furniture, clothing and fashion, ceramics and prints of all kinds mediated events in France and transnationally, competed in a transforming cultural marketplace for everyday and luxury goods, and helped to contour the Revolutionâs material legacies and memories.
A more capacious approach to material culture has contributed to the reframing of art history in this period, while historians have underlined how artisans should be accorded due recognition as makers and disseminators of unique forms of knowledge. An emphasis on material production, consumption and representation bridges more contextually focused approaches (such as social and cultural history) and more object-centred ones (such as art history and curating). Based on a collaboration between the Departments of History and History of Art at MyAV·¶, this workshop seeks to showcase these trends, and to contribute to their continuation, by bringing together a range of leading international scholars to foster interdisciplinary engagement and exchange.
PROGRAMME
9:30 COFFEE
10:00 Introduction, Simon Macdonald (MyAV·¶ History) and Richard Taws (MyAV·¶ History of Art)
10:30 David Garrioch (Monash University), âForeign Artisans in Eighteenth-Century Parisâ
11:30 BREAK
11:45 Panel 1
Chair: Marie Giraud (Queen Mary, University of London)
Katie Scott (Courtauld Institute of Art), âRococo Rubbish: Ornament and Waste in Pre-Revolutionary Parisâ
Jeff Ravel (MIT), 'Material Culture, Commerce, and Ideology: Playing Cards During the French Revolution'
Sarah Lund (Harvard University), âErecting Revolution: Printmaker Louise Pithoud and the Gender(s) of the French Revolutionâ
13:30 LUNCH BREAK
15:00 Panel 2
Chair: Alessandro de Arcangelis (MyAV·¶)
Iris Moon (Metropolitan Museum of Art), âPorcelain and Picturing Revolutionary Originsâ
Susan Siegfried (University of Michigan), âChasing Time in Fashion and Printâ
Glynnis Stevenson (MyAV·¶), âA âyoung, enthusiastic man, throwing green leaves to the windâ: Jacobinism at the Decennial Exhibition of 1889â
16:45 BREAK
17:00 Concluding Roundtable
Charles Walton (Warwick University)
Sanja Perovic (Kingâs College London)
Sean Takats (Université du Luxembourg)
With funding from the MyAV·¶ Institute of Advanced Studies.Â