Letter of Seminar
At the end of his life, Giovanni Battista Piranesi fabricated three large candelabra along with some vases, tripods, and stands out of some mud-covered debris left over from sculptures that had been rediscovered in Hadrian’s villa during the Pantanello excavations of 1769. In retracing the history of these candelabra that no longer evince any ...
In Andrei Tarkovsky’s films, the objects are as important as the characters. In each of his shots, he pays as intransigent attention to them as he does to everything else. One may recognize therein an echo of old still lifes, but that does not suffice to account for the main function they perform in ...
Using documentary photography that prioritized home over street, Isabelle Bonnet invites us to enter British interiors of the 1970s. These photographs offer us signs of a new lifestyle henceforth centered on domestic space. There, the status of things speaks volumes, as does their number, their profusion within the working-class world, which contrasts with the ...
While Delacroix was not especially attentive to things, while he painted during his lifetime just one, though quite astonishing, still life (Still Life with Lobsters, preserved at the Louvre Museum), and while he was not himself a collector, either, and he even had declared his “dread of disorder,” this painter seems to have been ...
Charles Sterling is among those museum curators whose originality is to be rediscovered. Having had to flee Vichy France and the Nazi Occupation during World War II, he never was able to create exactly the kind of exhibition he wanted to organize until the Spring of 1952, when he presented his European retrospective The ...
Maurice Fréchuret has just been awarded the Pierre Daix Prize for his book Effacer. Last year, he offered us a preview of his reflections which take an interest, too, in the status of things. In a world where the eye is permanently being solicited, he pays heed to all artists who, since Marcel Duchamp, ...
Charlotte Guichard highlights everything that goes against the Kantian ideal. She is working on an anthropology of the picture by showing that art is also material and has what she calls its own preaesthetic regime. She lays stress on what vision by itself conceals: a whole world of gestures and practices, an entire material ...
Olivier Berggruen takes an interest in the status of the objects at the home of Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose thought as well as the conditions for his existence he examines. He shows us why it should not be forgotten that Wittgenstein was not only a philosopher but also a gardener, an ambulance driver, and an ...
Guillaume Faroult carefully observes the “talkative objects” that appeared at the fringes of eighteenth-century still lifes. At the moment when this quite old genre was receiving its designation in French as nature morte, and despite the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture’s directives, which favored a “good” model for still lifes consisting of ...
In studying the status of things over the long term, Amaru Lozano-Ocampo lay stress on the transition from the mysticism of the classical age to the secular world of modernity. According to him, the still lifes of the seventeenth century would be the ultimate testimony to a religious sensibility inherited from the Middle Ages. ...
