Symposium | Georgian Group, Wren 300
Sir Godfrey Kneller, Portrait of Sir Christopher Wren, 1711, oil on canvas, 49 × 40 inches
(London: NPG).
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From The Georgian Group:
Wren 300: Georgian Group Symposium
Trinity College, Oxford, 15 April 2023
The Georgian Group’s 2023 Symposium, led by Geoffrey Tyack of Oxford University, will form a central focus of the Wren 300 Festival. Wren’s late work from 1690 to 1723, his subsequent reputation, and design legacy will be considered by leading scholars. Public tickets (£70) include a buffet lunch and drinks reception. A limited number of student tickets (£35) are available here. Please read the Terms and Conditions before booking. If tickets have sold out for this event, please email members@georgiangroup.org.uk to be added to the waiting list.
P R O G R A M M E
10.15 Registration
10.45 Session 1
• Geoffrey Tyack — Introduction / Wren’s Work in Oxford
• Rory Coonan — Wren before Architecture
• Jennifer Mitchell — Tom Tower
• Mark Kirby — The Furnishing of Wren’s Churches
12.45 Lunch
1.45 Session 2
• Anya Lucas — Greenwich
• Elizabeth Dean and Matthew Walker — Wren and Hawksmoor
• Will Aslet — Wren and Gibbs
4.00 Session 3
• Charles Hind — Wren’s Sale Catalogues
• David McKinstry — Wren’s 19th-Century Reputation
• Geoffrey Tyack — Destruction and Rebuilding: Wren’s Churches after 1945
5.45 Drinks Reception, The Garden Room, Trinity
New Book | The Anglican Episcopate, 1689–1800
Published by the University of Wales and distributed by The University of Chicago Press:
Nigel Aston and William Gibson, eds., The Anglican Episcopate, 1689–1800 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2023), 368 pages, ISBN: 978-1786839763, £70 / $88.
The eighteenth-century bishops of the Church of England and its sister communions had immense status and authority in both secular and religious society. In this volume, leading experts offer a comprehensive survey of all things episcopal between the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 and the early nineteenth century, when the Anglican Church enjoyed exclusive establishment privileges in much of Britain. The essays consider the appointment and promotion of bishops, their parliamentary duties, and their relation to Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and the American colonies.
Nigel Aston is a Research Associate at the University of York and Reader Emeritus in the School of History, Politics, and International Relations at the University of Leicester, where he taught for two decades. He is the author of several books and numerous articles on British and French eighteenth-century religious and political history, including the forthcoming book Enlightened Oxford: The University and the Cultural and Political Life of Eighteenth-century Britain and Beyond (Oxford University Press, 2023).
William Gibson is Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford Brookes University and Director of the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History. His most recent book is Samuel Wesley and the Crisis of Tory Piety, 1685–1720 (Oxford University Press, 2021).
C O N T E N T S
Introduction — Nigel Aston and William Gibson
The Politics of Church and State
1 Securing the Mitre: The Promotion and Progress of a Bishop — Nigel Aston (University of Leicester)
2 Lord Bishops: The Episcopate in National Politics — Ruth Paley (History of Parliament)
3 Bishops and the Monarchy — Grayson Ditchfield (University of Kent)
Performance
4 Pastors of Their Flock: Visitation, Ordination, Confirmation — Colin Haydon (University of Winchester)
5 Authority, Conflict, and Consensus: Bishops, Their Clergy, and Diocesan Government — William Gibson (Oxford Brookes University)
6 Bishops and Patronage — Daniel Reed (Oxford Brookes University)
Cultures
7 Wives and Families: The Domestic Life of Bishops — Nigel Aston (University of Leicester) and William Gibson (Oxford Brookes University)
8 Bishops and Eighteenth-Century Intellectual Life — Robert Ingram (University of Ohio)
9 Bishops, Taste, and Culture — Matthew Craske (Oxford Brookes University)
Beyond England
10 Episcopacy in Scotland — Rowan Strong (Murdoch University)
11 Anglican Bishops in Wales — John Morgan-Guy (University of Wales: Trinity St David)
12 The Other Establishment: Bishops in the Church of Ireland — Toby Barnard, (University of Oxford)
13 Anglican Bishops, the Wider World, and the Other Christian Churches — Ted Campbell (Southern Methodist University)
Appendix: Episcopal Incomes — Ruth Paley (History of Parliament)
Summer Seminar | Material Religion in Early America
From the American Antiquarian Society:
Material Religion: Objects, Images, Books
2023 CHAViC-PHBAC Summer Seminar
American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts, 25–30 June 2023
Led by Christopher Allison and Sonia Hazard
Applications due by 17 April 2023
Scholars of religion have taken a material turn, delving into the study of images, objects, monuments, buildings, books, spaces, performances, and sounds. What do these inquiries look like in the context of early America, and how did religious materialities shape early American worlds? The goal of this seminar is to explore this area’s exciting archives, theories, and methods, enabling participants to bring together religion and materiality in their own work in fresh ways.
The American Antiquarian Society provides an exceptional site for hands-on inquiries into the material worlds of early American religions. Collections at AAS furnish materials relating to religion before 1900 in North America, including Islam, Judaism, Mormonism, Catholicism, Protestantism, metaphysical religions, African-inspired religions, South Asian religions, and civil religion as well as collections that support studying religious hybridity and forms of Christianity as practiced in Hawaiian, Caribbean, and Indigenous nations and groups.
Topics will include lived religion, materialisms (old and new), sensory culture, books as objects, animisms and animacies, iconoclasm, visual piety, the ontological turn, residual transcription, and sacred objects in archival contexts. The seminar will be held from Sunday, June 25, through Friday, June 30, 2023, at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts. Co-leaders for the seminar will be Chris Allison and Sonia Hazard. Guest speakers will include Solimar Otero, Professor of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Indiana University, Bloomington and Anthony Trujillo, doctoral candidate in American Studies, Harvard University.
Participation is intended for faculty, museum and library professionals, and graduate students. It welcomes researchers across fields such as art history, religious studies, history, anthropology, American studies, music, and literature. It is co-sponsored by the Center for Historic American Visual Culture (CHAViC) and the Program in the History of the Book in American Culture (PHBAC).
The format of the seminar will be select readings, highly interactive seminar discussion, collections explorations and archival sessions, individual research time with the collection, and site visits to notable collections and religious sites in the area, including the Worcester Art Museum, burial grounds, and sacred sites. The syllabus is available online. Information on access to the readings will be emailed to students.
Tuition for the seminar is $600, which includes lunch each day and some evening meals. Some financial aid is available for graduate students. The cost of housing is not included in the tuition fee. Housing is available at two nearby hotels.
Faculty
• Sonia Hazard is Assistant Professor of Religion at Florida State University. Her book, Building Evangelical America: How the American Tract Society Laid the Groundwork for a Religious Revolution, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. She did her graduate work at Harvard Divinity School and Duke University.
• Christopher Allison is Director of the McGreal Center for Dominican Historical Studies, Department of History, Dominican University. He is the author of the forthcoming book, Protestant Relics: Capturing the Sacred Body in Early America, under contract with the University of Chicago Press. He did his graduate work at Yale Divinity School and Harvard University.
Guest Speakers
• Solimar Otero is Professor of Folklore and Ethnomusicology at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is the author of Archives of Conjure: Stories of the Dead in Afrolatinx Cultures (Columbia University Press, 2020).
• Anthony Trujillo is a doctoral candidate in American Studies at Harvard University. He works at the confluence of Native American and Indigenous studies, history, religious studies, anthropology, and the arts.
New Book | Inventing the Alphabet
From The University of Chicago Press (though not entirely clear from the blurb, Drucker’s book provides a historiography rather than a history of the alphabet—as stated in the introduction, excerpted below)
Johanna Drucker, Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2023), 384 pages, ISBN: 978-0226815817, $40.
Inventing the Alphabet provides the first account of two-and-a-half millennia of scholarship on the alphabet. Drawing on decades of research, Johanna Drucker dives into sometimes obscure and esoteric references, dispelling myths and identifying a pantheon of little-known scholars who contributed to our modern understandings of the alphabet, one of the most important inventions in human history. Beginning with Biblical tales and accounts from antiquity, Drucker traces the transmission of ancient Greek thinking about the alphabet’s origin and debates about how Moses learned to read. The book moves through the centuries, finishing with contemporary concepts of the letters in alpha-numeric code used for global communication systems. Along the way, we learn about magical and angelic alphabets, antique inscriptions on coins and artifacts, and the comparative tables of scripts that continue through the development of modern fields of archaeology and paleography. This is the first book to chronicle the story of the intellectual history through which the alphabet has been ‘invented’ as an object of scholarship.
Johanna Drucker is the Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies and a distinguished professor in the Department of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has been the recipient of Fulbright, Mellon, and Getty Fellowships and in 2019 was the inaugural Distinguished Senior Humanities Fellow at the Beinecke Library, Yale University. Her artist books are included in museums and libraries in North America and Europe, and her creative work was the subject of a traveling retrospective, Druckworks 1972–2012: 40 Years of Books and Projects. Her publications include Visualizing Interpretation, Iliazd: Meta-Biography of a Modernist, and The Digital Humanities Coursebook.
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From the introduction:
“. . . this study is not an addition to the number of authoritative books on alphabet history. . . Instead, this work is a contribution to the intellectual history of this topic. Who knew what when about the alphabet? And how did the way they knew it—through texts, images, inscriptions, or artifacts—affect their conception of the identity and origin of alphabetic writing? As a historiography, this account traces the ways knowledge and belief shaped the understanding of alphabetic writing.”
New Book | Blinded by Curiosity
Kate Heard’s review of Zelen’s book (published online in August 2022) appears in the latest issue of the Journal of the History of Collections 35.1 (March 2023). From Primavera Pers:
Joyce Zelen, Blinded by Curiosity: The Collector-Dealer Hadriaan Beverland (1650–1716) and His Radical Approach to the Printed Image (Leiden: Primavera Pers, 2022), 272 pages, ISBN: 978-9059973305, €35.
This book explores a phenomenon in the history of print collecting that has never been extensively investigated: the cutting and pasting of prints in the early modern period. The book focuses on the colourful Dutch classical scholar and libertine Hadriaan Beverland (1650–1716). Beverland was banished from the Dutch Republic in 1679 for publishing blasphemous, heterodox, and provocative scholarly texts on sex and sin. Books that dealt with prostitution in ancient times, original sin as the first act of sexual intercourse, and the sexual lust of women, were considered dangerous to Dutch public morality. In 1680, Beverland fled to England, where his friend Isaac Vossius took him in. It was here that Beverland began cutting (nowadays) costly etchings and engravings and arranging the cuttings into collages. These collages, which again demonstrated his interest in sexual matters, survived in two illustrated manuscripts, now in the British Library in London and the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
This study aims: 1) to reconstruct Beverland’s life in England, primarily concentrating on his interests and dealing in art and books; 2) to map the early modern practice of cutting and pasting prints, on the basis of remaining cuttings as well as textual sources from Beverland’s day; and 3) to present a comprehensive analysis of the two illustrated Beverland-manuscripts in terms of form and function.
Joyce Zelen is a Jacoba Lugt-Klever Research Fellow at the RKD (Dutch Institute for Art History) in The Hague and the Fondation Custodia in Paris.
C O N T E N T S
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I | Hadriaan Beverland: A Passionate Man with a Passion for Art
1 The Life of Hadriaan Beverland: A Biographical Sketch
2 ‘Fair and Candid in all his Dealings’: Beverland as Agent and Collector of Art, Books, and Curiosities
3 The Self-Promotion of a Bad Boy: Beverland’s Portraits
Part II | Beverland’s Manuscripts with Prints
4 Early Modern Print Collecting: A Context for Beverland’s Manuscripts with Prints
5 Prints, Scissors, and Antiquarian Aspirations: Beverland’s Inscriptiones Singulares Manuscript
6 ‘Dirty’ Notes and Print Collages: Beverland’s Crepundia Lugdunensia Manuscript
Conclusion
Appendices
Abbreviations, Transcriptions, and Translations
Notes
Bibliography
Index
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Note (added 11 April 2023) — Also see Karen Hollewand’s recent book The Banishment of Beverland: Sex, Sin, and Scholarship in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic (Leiden: Brill, 2019), reviewed by Benjamin Bernard in the latest issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies 56 (Spring 2023), pp. 473–79.
New Book | What Pornography Knows
From Stanford UP:
Kathleen Lubey, What Pornography Knows: Sex and Social Protest since the Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2022), 312 pages, ISBN: 978-1503611665 (hardcover), $90 / ISBN: 978-1503633117 (paperback), $28.
What Pornography Knows offers a new history of pornography based on forgotten bawdy fiction of the eighteenth century, its nineteenth-century republication, and its appearance in 1960s paperbacks. Through close textual study, Lubey shows how these texts were edited across time to become what we think pornography is—a genre focused primarily on sex. Originally, they were far more variable, joining speculative philosophy and feminist theory to sexual description. Lubey’s readings show that pornography always had a social consciousness—that it knew, long before anti-pornography feminists said it, that women and nonbinary people are disadvantaged by a society that grants sexual privilege to men. Rather than glorify this inequity, Lubey argues, the genre’s central task has historically been to expose its artifice and envision social reform. Centering women’s bodies, pornography refuses to divert its focus from genital action, forcing readers to connect sex with its social outcomes. Lubey offers a surprising take on a deeply misunderstood cultural form: pornography transforms sexual description into feminist commentary, revealing the genre’s deep knowledge of how social inequities are perpetuated as well as its plans for how to rectify them.
Kathleen Lubey is Professor of English at St. John’s University. She is the author of Excitable Imaginations: Eroticism and Reading in Britain, 1660–1760 (2012).
C O N T E N T S
List of Illustrations
Preface: Pornography in the Library
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Pornography without Sex
1 Genital Parts: Detachable Properties in the Eighteenth Century
2 Feminist Speculations: Penetration and Protest in Pornographic Fiction
3 The Victorian Eighteenth Century: Publishing an Erotics of Inequity
4 Uncoupling: Pornography and Feminism in the Countercultural Era
Coda: A Mindful Pornography
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Exhibition | Hair and Body Hair
From the Musée des Arts Décoratifs:
Des cheveux et des poils / Hair and Body Hair
Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, 5 April — 17 September 2023
Curated by Denis Bruna
Poster for the exhibition Des cheveux et des poils © Aurélien Farina. Jacob Ferdinand Voet, Portrait of a Man, before 1689 (Sotheby’s / Art Digital Studio); model photographer: © Virgile Biechy.
Following the success of the exhibitions La mécanique des dessous (2013), Tenue correcte exigée! (2017), and Marche et démarche (2019), the Musée des Arts Décoratifs continues its exploration of the relationship between the body and fashion with an exhibition on hair styles and body hair grooming. Des cheveux et des poils (Hair & Hairs) demonstrates how hairstyles and the grooming of human hair have contributed to the construction of appearances for centuries. Hair is an essential aspect of one’s identity and has often been used as a means of expressing our adherence to a fashion, a conviction, or a protest while invoking much deeper meanings such as femininity, virility, and negligence, to name just a few.
Through 600 works, from the 15th century to the present, the exhibition explores themes inherent in the history of hairstyles, as well as questions related to facial hair and body hair. The trades and skills of yesterday and today are highlighted with iconic figures: Léonard Autier (favorite hairdresser of Marie-Antoinette), Monsieur Antoine, the Carita sisters, Alexandre de Paris, and more recently studio hairdressers. Great names in contemporary fashion such as Alexander McQueen, Martin Margiela, and Josephus Thimister are present with their spectacular creations made from this unique material that is hair.
Fashion and Extravagance
The exhibition opens with the evolution of feminine hairstyles as a social indicator and marker of identity. In the Middle Ages, in response to the command of Saint Paul, the wearing of the veil was imposed on women until the 15th century. Gradually, women abandoned it in favor of extravagant hairstyles that were constantly renewed. In the 17th century, hairstyles such as ‘to the Hurluberlu’ (dear to Madame de Sévigné) and ‘to the Fontange’ (after the name of Louis XIV’s mistress) were emblematic of a real fashion phenomena. Around 1770, high hairstyles known as Poufs appeared, among the most extraordinary of Western hair modes. Finally, in the 19th century, women’s hairstyles—whether inspired by ancient Greece, or known as ‘the giraffe’, in curls, or ‘the Pompadour’—could be just as convoluted.
To Beard or Not to Beard
After the hairless faces of the Middle Ages, a turning point occurred around 1520 with the appearance of the beard, symbol of courage and strength. In the early 16th century, the three great Western monarchs: Francis I, Henry VIII, and Charles V were young and wore beards, which were then associated with the virile and warrior spirit. From the 1630s until the end of the 18th century, the hairless face and the wig were the hallmarks of courtiers. Facial hair did not reappear until the early 19th century with the mustache, sideburns, and beard: the period was by far the hairiest in the history of men’s fashion. A multitude of small objects used (mustache wax, brushes, curling irons, wax, etc.) attest to the enthusiasm for mustaches and beards. During the 20th century, the rhythm of bearded, mustached, and smooth faces continued, until the return of the beard among Hipsters in the late 1990s. The maintenance of hairiness among these young urbanites has given rise to the profession of barber, which had disappeared since the 1950s. Today, the thick beards tend to give way to the mustache that had deserted faces since the 1970s.
Keeping, eliminating, hiding, or displaying hair on other parts of the body is a subject also addressed in the exhibition through the representation of nude bodies in visual arts and written testimonials. Hairiness is rare, or even absent from ancient painting. The hairless body is synonymous with the antique and idealized body, while the hairy body is associated with virility or triviality. Only enthusiasts of virile sports such as boxing and rugby, as well as erotic illustrations or medical engravings, show individuals covered in hair. Around 1910–1920, when women’s bodies were exposed, advertisements in magazines touted the benefits of hair removal creams and more efficient razors to eliminate them. In 1972 actor Burt Reynolds posed naked with his hairy body on display for Cosmopolitan magazine, but fifty years later, an abundance of hair is no longer in fashion, even for men. Since 2001, athletes being photographed naked for calendars like Les dieux du stade (The Gods of the Stadium) have had rigorously controlled hairiness.
Between True and False
Marisol Suarez, Braided wig, © Katrin Backes.
Hair styling is an intimate act. Moreover, a well-born lady could not show herself in public with her hair down. A painting by Franz-Xaver Winterhalter, dated 1864, depicting Empress Sissi in a robe and with her hair untied, was strictly reserved for Franz Joseph’s private cabinet. Louis XIV, who became bald at a very young age, adopted the so-called ‘bright hair’ wig, which he then imposed on the court. In the 20th century, Andy Warhol had the same misfortune: the wig he wore to hide his baldness became an icon of the artist. Nowadays, hairpieces and wigs are used in high fashion, during fashion shows or, of course, to compensate for hair loss.
The natural hair colors and their symbolism are presented along with what they convey. Blonde is said to be the color of women and childhood. Red hair is attributed to sultry women, witches, and some famous stage women. As for black hair, it would betray the temperament of brown and brunettes. From the experimental colorations of the 19th century to the more certain dyes from the 1920s: artificial colors are not forgotten. The work of the hairdresser Alexis Ferrer who makes digital prints on real hair is also presented.
Trades and Skills
The exhibition reveals the different hair professions: barbers, barber-surgeons, hair stylists, wigmakers, ladies’ hairdressers, etc., through archival documents and a host of small objects: signs, tools, various products, and the astonishing perming machines and dryers of the 1920s.
In 1945, the creation of haute coiffure elevated the profession to the rank of an artistic discipline and a French savoir-faire. 20th-century hairdressing was marked by Guillaume, Antoine, Rosy and Maria Carita, and Alexandre de Paris styling princesses and celebrities. Nowadays, great hairstyling is mainly expressed during the fashion shows of prestigious fashion houses. Sam McKnight, Nicolas Jurnjack, and Charlie Le Mindu were invited to the exhibition to create extraordinary hairstyles for top models and show business personalities.
A Hairy Century
Finally, a special focus will allow us to evoke the iconic hairstyles of the 20th and 21st centuries: the 1900 chignon, the 1920s garçonne haircut, the 1930s permed and notched hair, the 1960s pixie and sauerkraut, the 1970s long hair, the 1980s voluminous hairstyles, the 1990s gradations and blond streaks, not to mention afro-textured hair.
The arrangement of hair in a particular form can reveal belonging to a group and manifest a political and cultural expression in opposition to society and the established order. More ideological than aesthetic, the Iroquois crest of the punks, the neglected hair of the grunges, or the shaved heads of the skinheads are strong moments of hair creativity.
Wearing the hair of another, known or unknown, has an eerie dimension, and this superstition seems well-entrenched. Despite these apprehensions, some creators choose to transcend this familiar material into fashion objects. This is the case of contemporary designers such as Martin Margiela, Josephus Thimister, and Jeanne Vicerial. The question of identity, treated lightly or more deeply, is often at the heart of the reasoning, whether the hair is real or fake.
Presented in the Christine & Stephen A. Schwarzman’s fashion galleries of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the exhibition is curated by Denis Bruna, Curator in Chief, Fashion and Textile Department, Collections before 1800. The scenography is by David Lebreton of the Designers Unit agency. The Musée des Arts Décoratifs has benefited from exceptional loans from the Château de Versailles, the Musée des Beaux-Arts d’Orléans, the Musée du Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay.
Denis Bruna, ed., Des cheveux et des poils (Paris: Les Arts Décoratifs, 2023), 288 pages, ISBN: 978-2383140139, €55. With contributions by Marie Brimicombe, Denis Bruna, Yanis Cambon, Astrid Castres, Pierre-Jean Desemerie, Ana Escobar Saavedra, Saga Esedín Rojo, Louise Guillot, Guillaume Herrou, César Imbert, Sophie Lemahieu, Maëva Le Petit, Aurore Mariage, Anne-Cécile Moheng, Sophie Motsch, Marie Olivier, Dominique Prevôt, Hélène Renaudin, Raphaël Sagodira, and Bastien Salva.
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Diane Pernet provides a useful summary with lots of images and an interview with Denis Bruna here»
Exhibition | Doucet and Camondo: A Passion for the 18th Century
Now on view at the Musée Nissim de Camondo:
Doucet et Camondo: une passion pour le XVIIIe siècle
Musée Nissim de Camondo, Paris, 16 March — 3 September 2023
Curated by Juliette Trey
Between 1906 and 1912, the celebrated couturier and great patron of the arts, Jacques Doucet (1853–1929), lived in an hôtel particulier built especially to house his collection of 18th-century art on the Rue Spontini in the 6th arrondissement of Paris. Drawings held a particularly important place in it. The exhibition Doucet et Camondo: une passion pour le XVIIIe siècle evokes the mansion through the watercolors done by the decorator Adrien Karbowsky (1855–1945) and forges the link between Doucet and Moïse de Camondo (1860–1935), who purchased some of the items in his collection from Doucet.
Les Arts Décoratifs et l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA) présentent, au musée Nissim de Camondo, une exposition consacrée à la riche collection d’œuvres d’art du XVIIIe siècle constituée par Jacques Doucet. Célèbre couturier et grand mécène, Jacques Doucet (1853–1929) est aussi l’un des plus importants collectionneurs de son temps. Une sélection de dessins, photographies et documents d’archives conservés à l’INHA retrace l’histoire de ce prestigieux patrimoine. L’exposition dévoile les décors éphémères de l’hôtel particulier situé rue Spontini dans le XVIe arrondissement que Doucet fait spécialement édifier pour accueillir cet ensemble de tableaux, dessins, sculptures, meubles et objets d’art du XVIIIe siècle. Elle met en lumière les œuvres ayant appartenu à Jacques Doucet, conservées notamment au musée Nissim de Camondo, ancien hôtel particulier de Moïse de Camondo, tissant ainsi le lien entre ces deux grands collectionneurs.
More information is available here»
Juliette Trey, Jacques Doucet et Moïse de Camondo: Une Passion pour le XVIIIe Siècle (Paris: Les Arts Décoratifs / INHA, 2023), 48 pages, €12.
New Book | Jewish Blues: A History of a Color in Judaism
From Penn Press:
Gadi Sagiv, Jewish Blues: A History of a Color in Judaism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023), 252 pages, ISBN: 978-1512823370, $55.
Jewish Blues presents a broad cultural, social, and intellectual history of the color blue in Jewish life between the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries. Bridging diverse domains such as religious law, mysticism, eschatology, as well as clothing and literature, this book contends that, by way of a protracted process, the color blue has constituted a means through which Jews have understood themselves.
In ancient Jewish texts, the term for blue, tekhelet, denotes a dye that serves Jewish ritual purposes. Since medieval times, however, Jews gradually ceased to use tekhelet in their ritual life. In the nineteenth century, however, interest in restoring ancient dyes increased among European scholars. In the Jewish case, rabbis and scientists attempted to reproduce the ancient tekhelet dye. The resulting dyes were gradually accepted in the ritual life of many Orthodox Jews. In addition to being a dye playing a role in Jewish ritual, blue features prominently in the Jewish mystical tradition, in Jewish magic and popular custom, and in Jewish eschatology. Blue is also representative of the Zionist movement, and it is the only chromatic color in the national flag of the State of Israel.
Through the study of the changing roles and meanings attributed to the color blue in Judaism, Jewish Blues sheds new light on the power of a visual symbol in shaping the imagination of Jews throughout history. The use of the color blue continues to reflect pressing issues for Jews in our present era, as it has become a symbol of Jewish modernity.
Gadi Sagiv is Associate Professor in the Department of History, Philosophy, and Judaic Studies at The Open University of Israel.
C O N T E N T S
Introduction
1 The Materiality of Blue in Premodern Judaism
2 Tekhelet in Medieval Jewish Mysticism: Cosmology, Theology, and Vision
3 Blue Garments in Early Modern Judaism: Between Kabbalistic Symbolism and Social Practice
4 The Modern Renaissance of the Tekhelet Dye
5 Reactions to Modern Tekhelet: Blue as a Sociocultural Challenge
Conclusion
Glossary
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
Exhibition | The Sassoons
Johan Zoffany, The Family of Sir William Young, 1767–69, oil on canvas; 45 × 66 inches (National Museums Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery). Formerly in the Philip Sassoon Collection.
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From the press release (17 November 2022) for the exhibition:
The Sassoons
The Jewish Museum, New York, 3 March — 13 August 2023
Organized by Claudia Nahson and Esther da Costa
The Jewish Museum presents The Sassoons, an exhibition that reveals the fascinating story of a remarkable Jewish family, highlighting their pioneering role in trade, art collecting, architectural patronage, and civic engagement from the early 19th century through World War II. The exhibition follows four generations from Iraq to India, China, and England, featuring a rich selection of works collected by family members over time.
Torah finials, England, probably London, 1804, dedicated in 1834/35 (Hebrew inscription date), silver parcel gilt, and enamel, 6 inches (Collection of Jane and Stuart Weitzman). Formerly in the Reuben and Flora Sassoon Collections.
Over 120 works—paintings, Chinese art, illuminated manuscripts, and Judaica—amassed by Sassoon family members and borrowed from numerous private and public collections are on view. Highlights include Hebrew manuscripts from as early as the 12th century, many lavishly decorated; Chinese art and ivory carvings; rare Jewish ceremonial art; and Western masterpieces including paintings by Thomas Gainsborough and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, and magnificent portraits by John Singer Sargent of various Sassoon family members. The Sassoons explores themes such as discrimination, diaspora, colonialism, global trade, and war that not only shaped the history of the family but continue to define our world today.
The exhibition narrative begins in the early 1830s when David Sassoon, the patriarch of the family, was forced to leave his native Baghdad due to the increasing persecution of the city’s Jewish population. Establishing himself in Mumbai (then Bombay) and initially involved in the cotton trade, his vision led the family from Iraq to India, China, and finally England where his descendants gradually settled over the decades. His activities soon grew to include the opium trade, which had escalated after the collapse of the East India Company in the mid-19th century, ending its monopoly and allowing private companies to engage in this profitable enterprise. He aligned with and benefitted from British colonial interests soon extending his business to China and England by deploying his eight sons to oversee new branches in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and London.
Although less known, the Sassoon women were discerning collectors. The exhibition will pay special attention to these unsung patrons of art. Rachel Sassoon Beer became the first woman in Britain to edit two newspapers, The Sunday Times and The Observer, and played a crucial role reporting on the Dreyfus affair in Britain. Her painting collection, sold at auction in 1927, listed, among other great works, one drawing and 15 paintings by Corot, a Constable, and a Peter Paul Rubens. Of a younger generation, Hannah Gubbay, a Sassoon on both her father’s and her mother’s side, was a major collector of 18th-century art, furniture, and porcelain, as was her cousin, Mozelle Sassoon.
Thomas Gainsborough, Portrait of the Artist with His Wife and Daughter, ca. 1748, oil on canvas, 36 × 28 inches (London: National Gallery; acquired under the acceptance-in-lieu scheme at the wish of Sybil, Marchioness of Cholmondeley, in memory of her brother, Sir Philip Sassoon, 1994). Formerly in the Philip Sassoon Collection.
The exhibition also highlights the distinguished properties of the Sassoons in the United Kingdom. A Member of Parliament for the Conservative Party, Sir Philip Sassoon made active use of his three great residences, Park Lane (now destroyed) and Trent Park in London, and Port Lympne in Kent. Surrounded by landscaped gardens (in the case of Trent Park and Port Lympne) and filled with priceless works of art, all three were used by the government for high-profile cabinet meetings and receptions of foreign dignitaries and celebrities. Paintings of Port Lympne by Sir Winston Churchill, a frequent visitor, are featured.
The last section of the exhibition focuses on the service of a younger generation of Sassoons in the First World War. Sir Victor Sassoon served in the Royal Flying Corps, barely surviving an airplane crash that left him permanently disabled. Sir Philip Sassoon, private secretary to Field Marshal Douglas Haig, recruited his artist friends including John Singer Sargent to cover the war, and several of these works will be on display. A very different war is experienced through the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon. Though a brave and much decorated soldier, his graphic and shocking portrayal of the trenches and fierce criticism of the establishment were emblematic of a generation scarred by war’s brutality. Some of the journals he wrote and illustrated during battle, including his famous anti-war statement, will be on view.
During the Second World War, some 18,000 Jewish refugees arrived in Shanghai fleeing Nazi Europe. They were able to survive the war thanks to the money raised by members of the Baghdadi Jewish community who resided in the city at the time. Prominent among them was Sir Victor Sassoon who donated considerable funds and placed several buildings at the disposal of the International Committee for European Immigrants.
Numerous private and public collections have contributed loans to the exhibition including His Majesty King Charles III, the British Museum, the National Gallery of London, the National Trust of Britain, the Tate, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the British Library, the Houghton Hall Collection, the Cambridge University Library, the Fitzwilliam Museum, the National Gallery of Ireland, the Israel Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Yale Center for British Art.
The Sassoons is organized by Claudia Nahson, Morris and Eva Feld Senior Curator at the Jewish Museum, New York, and Esther da Costa Meyer, Professor Emerita at Princeton University. The exhibition design is by Leslie Gill and Adam Johnston, Leslie Gill Architect; graphic design by Miko McGinty.
Esther da Costa Meyer and Claudia J. Nahson, The Sassoons (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), 256 pages, ISBN: 978-0300264302, $60.
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