Multiple Exposures: Drawings, Displays, and Their Spaces in Eighteenth-Century France
Abstract (summary)
This dissertation seeks to re-center drawing exhibitions in the study of French art, histories of exhibitions, and eighteenth-century studies by providing the first full accounting of drawing exhibitions from seventeenth-century Italy to early nineteenth-century France, specifically by focusing on the relationship between drawings and the physical sites they occupied. The project goes beyond the usual historical examples by offering new approaches to defining which sites, spaces, and practices can fall under the concept of a “public display of drawings.” It also conducts a new quantitative approach to drawings in eighteenth-century France and unearths understudied artworks, artists, and archival documents to demonstrate how this new graphic attention in the French cultural sphere ultimately helped form public taste, prompted advancements in printmaking technologies, and impacted the machinery of the art market.
To this end, the project takes a four-part approach to an array of institutionally and intellectually distinct spaces. Chapter 1 adopts both an analytical and a historical approach to the more than one thousand sheets exhibited in the Salon of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture from 1737 to 1789 to surface important macro trends, such as how academic rank, drawing media, and institutional specializations related to artists’ propensities to exhibit drawings. Chapter 2 takes a micro-level approach, focusing on three artists—Charles-Nicolas Cochin, Charles de Wailly, and Gerard van Spaendonck—and examining how the drawings they publicly displayed exposed hitherto private or intellectually opaque spaces. Chapter 3 turns to exhibition sites outside the Parisian institutional structure to explore how new means of framing drawings—in literal, conceptual, and geographic senses of “framing”— aligned the medium with the emergence of spectacle culture and the evolution of art commerce. This chapter also considers alternative exhibition sites for drawings, such as the Luxembourg Gallery, Pahin de la Blancherie’s upstart Salon de la Correspondance, and public exhibitions staged outside of Paris by provincial academies, concluding with an analysis of the paradoxical drawing practice of François Boucher. Chapter 4 focuses on the Old Master drawings exhibition of 1797 in the Galerie d’Apollon in the Louvre and draws on previously unpublished archival documents to trace its planning, installation, interpretative techniques, and accompanying ephemera.
At its core, the dissertation interrogates how the increased visibility of drawings navigated social and academic strictures, how the reorientation of public displays toward drawings revealed the medium’s unique capacity to straddle multiple discursive spheres (the academic, the commercial, the courtly, the scientific), and how, through this evolution, drawings became deeply embroiled in contests over the privatization and democratization of knowledge in eighteenth-century France.
Indexing (details)
Fine arts;
History
0357: Fine arts
0578: History
