Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds: Global and Local Geographies of Art

Description

While the connected, international character of today's art economy is well known, the 18th century too had global systems of artistic production and consumption. Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds is the first book to create a global map of the art world of the 18th century. Fourteen case studies from distinguished experts explore both cross-cultural connections and local specificities of art production and consumption in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. The result is an account of a series of interconnected and asymmetrical art worlds that were well developed in the 18th century. Capturing the full material diversity of 18th-century art, this book considers painting and sculpture alongside numerous prints and decorative objects. Analyzing the role of place in the history of 18th-century art, it bridges the disciplines of art history and cultural geography, and draws attention away from any one place as a privileged art-historical site, while highlighting places such as Manila, Beijing, Mexico City, and London as significant points on a global art map. Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds combines a broad global perspective on the history of art with careful attention to how global artistic concerns intersect with local ones, offering a framework for studies in global art history.

Stacey Sloboda is Paul H. Tucker Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts Boston, USA. She has held fellowships from the Kress Foundation, the Huntington Library, the Yale Center for British Art, the American Philosophical Society, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Sloboda is the editor of Bloomsbury Academic's forthcoming A Cultural History of Interiors in the Age of Enlightenment, 1650-1800 and she writes widely on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art. Michael Yonan is Alan Templeton Endowed Professor of European Art, 1600-1830, University of California, Davis, USA. He has previously taught at Stockholm University in Sweden and the University of Missouri, USA. Yonan was President of Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art & Architecture from 2012 until 2016 and now serves on the Executive Board of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. He is the General Editor of the book series Material Culture of Art & Design, which is published by Bloomsbury Visual Arts.

This wide-ranging collection of essays is a significant and welcome contribution to an art history which takes the interplay of local and the global as central concerns. It provides new case studies and invites new ways of thinking; together these help us to engage with art outside the frameworks of nations or of 'cultures', and to move forward the conversation around a deeper and richer understanding of this key period. * Craig Clunas, Professor Emeritus of the History of Art, University of Oxford, UK * Ambitious in scope and innovative in approach, this volume is an invaluable contribution to scholarship of the eighteenth century. Fourteen essays by leading scholars demonstrate how the "art worlds" of the period took shape through exchange and circulation, via the mobility of people and things, and in places as varied as markets and mosques. Readers will encounter a fascinating array of material objects, from French commodes and Mughal cups to holy water fonts in California missions. Lively and insightful, Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds offers a model for understanding the complex interrelations of the local and the global. * Wendy Bellion, Professor and Sewell Biggs Chair in American Art, University of Delaware, USA * A sophisticated exploration of art-making and its circulation, Eighteenth Century Art Worlds invites new thinking about trade and pleasure, taste and empire. This fascinating collection of essays-on artworks and people who traveled through East Asia, the Spanish Americas, the Swahili Coast, and European capitals-fundamentally shifts the conversation on the geography of art. For those who care about the foreign and the global in early modernity this is important reading. * Dana Leibsohn, Alice Pratt Brown Professor of Art, Smith College, USA *