Objects and Ideas of Eighteenth-Century France

In recent decades, art history’s embrace of perspectives from material culture studies on the one hand and economic and social history on the other has encouraged a contextual approach to forms of eighteenth-century France art and design long admired primarily for their technical mastery or aesthetic appeal. Museums, meanwhile, are increasingly understood less as stable repositories of masterpieces than as places to tell stories with objects, often in dialogue with developments in the academic sphere. In both realms, eighteenth-century French paintings, furniture, ceramics, metalwork, textiles, dress, personal adornment, and other objects are now seen as intimately related to changes in French social structure and cultural life, including new ideas of gender and sexuality, fascination with the exotic, the invention of privacy and comfort, the allure of the pastoral, the impact of colonialism, and belief in the regenerative power of the natural world. This seminar examines how objects relate to new ideas in and about eighteenth-century France, and how they can continue to be used as primary documents of French life and thought. Class meetings, held at BGC, the Frick Collection, and the Met, pair the study of recent interpretive scholarship with a close look at selected objects and object types from the point of view of materials, fabrication techniques, patronage, and style. We will also take advantage of the semester’s three Françoise and Georges Selz Endowed Lectures in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Decorative Arts and Culture (attendance required), each of which will be followed by in-class workshops with the speakers. For their final projects, participants may choose to focus on an eighteenth-century French object on view at the Met, considering its potential in both academic and curatorial contexts. How might this object feature in a contextually informed historical study? What stories is it telling as currently installed, and how else might it be used to suggest alternative viewpoints and perspectives for a museum-going public? 3 credits. Satisfies Pre-1800 requirement.