Skills, Objects, Representations: Material Culture & the French Revolution

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 Revolution’s 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 UCL, 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 (UCL History) and Richard Taws (UCL History of Art)

10:30 David Garrioch (Monash University), ‘Foreign Artisans in Eighteenth-Century Paris’

11:30 BREAK

11:45 Panel 1
Chair: Marie Giraud (Queen Mary, University of London)
Katie Scott (Courtauld Institute of Art), ‘Rococo Rubbish: Ornament and Waste in Pre-Revolutionary Paris’
Jeff Ravel (MIT), 'Material Culture, Commerce, and Ideology: Playing Cards During the French Revolution'
Sarah Lund (Harvard University), ‘Erecting Revolution: Printmaker Louise Pithoud and the Gender(s) of the French Revolution’

13:30 LUNCH BREAK

15:00 Panel 2
Chair: Alessandro de Arcangelis (UCL)
Iris Moon (Metropolitan Museum of Art), ‘Porcelain and Picturing Revolutionary Origins’
Susan Siegfried (University of Michigan), ‘Chasing Time in Fashion and Print’
Glynnis Stevenson (UCL), ‘A “young, enthusiastic man, throwing green leaves to the wind”: Jacobinism at the Decennial Exhibition of 1889’

16:45 BREAK

17:00 Concluding Roundtable
Charles Walton (Warwick University)
Sanja Perovic (King’s College London)
Sean Takats (Université du Luxembourg)

With funding from the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies.