Visions of the Stage:
Theater, Art, and Performance
in France, 1600-1800
Friday, September 12, 2008 - September 13, 2008
This symposium, convened by the Clark in association with CESAR, brought together historians of art, literature, theater, and culture to explore the complex relationships between the visual and theatrical arts in Ancient Regime and Revolutionary France. Generous funding for the symposium was provided by the Samuel H. Kress and the Florence Gould Foundation.
Participants included:
Mark H Bannister, Oxford Brookes University
Jeanne Bovet, Université de Montréal, Canada
Jan Clarke, Durham University
Sarah R. Cohen, University at Albany, SUNY
Georgia Cowart, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Kathryn A. Hoffmann, University of Hawaii-Manoa
Mark Kroll, musician
Véronique Lochert , Université de Haute-Alsace, Paris, France
Erika Naginski, Harvard University
Nicholas D. Paige, University of California, Berkeley
Richard Rand, The Clark
Nathalie Rizzonim, Université Paris-Sorbonne et CNRS, Paris, France
Françoise Rubellin, Université de Nantes, France
Anne L. Schroder, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University
Shanti M. Singham, Williams College
Daniel Smith, Northwestern University
Program:
Welcome and Introduction
Mark Ledbury and Jeffrey S. Ravel
Session One: Spectacle and Illusion in the Seventeenth Century
Moderator: Jeffrey S. Ravel
Ces Divertissemens et inventions ingénieuses: Towards an Understanding of the Idea of Spectacle in Early Seventeenth-Century France
Mark Bannister
The Fourth Wall and Other Old Innovations: Illusion and the Aesthetics of the drame
Nicholas Paige
The Theatrical Cadaver: Staging Death in the Seventeenth Century
Kathryn A. Hoffmann
The Unknown Artists of the Seventeenth-Century Spectacular Stage
Jan Clarke
Session Two: Word, Image, and Action in Eighteenth-Century Theater
Moderator: Shanti Singham
Mouth Wide Shut: Visualizing Voice in French Seventeenth-Century Theater Images
Jeanne Bovet
Illustrations and Stage Directions: Reading Theater between Text and Image
Véronique Lochert
François Gérard’s 1787 Iphigénie and Operatic Melodrama: A View Inside J.-L. David’s Studio
Anne L. Schroder
The Persistence of Pastoral in Revolutionary Art and Theater
Mark Ledbury
Session Three: Eighteenth-Century Theater Images: Fans, Fairs, and the Pornographic
Moderator: Jeffrey Ravel
Images of Theatrical Rivalry: Form and Function of the Fair Theater’s Engraved Frontispieces
Françoise Rubellin
Naughty Readers Envision Bawdy Theater: Illustrations in the 1782 Théâtre gaillard
Daniel Smith
An Exceptional Iconographic Series: Hand Screens and Fan with Images of Blaise et Babet, de Monvel (1783)
Nathalie Rizzoni
Session Four: Rococo, Gender, and Genre
Moderator: Richard Rand
Watteau, the King, and the Staging of Spectacle
Georgia Cowart
Female Artistry and the Staging of Rococo Spectacle
Sarah Cohen
In spirit of the symposium, Mark Kroll presented "Portraits in Music," a harpsichord concert featuring music by Couperin and other French composers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries at William College.
*For more information on this event, please click here to read the presentations.
