The Art of the Anthropological Diorama. Franz Boas, Arthur C. Parker, and Constructing Authenticity, Berlin, De Gruyter, 2021.
Dioramas are devices on the frontier of different disciplines: art, anthropology, and the natural sciences, to name a few. Their use developed during the nineteenth century, following reforms aimed at reinforcing the educational dimension of museums. While dioramas with human figures are now the subject of healthy criticism and are gradually being dismantled, a thorough study of the work of artists and scientists who made them helps shed light on their genesis. Among other displays, this book examines anthropological dioramas of two North American museums in the early twentieth century: the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and the New York State Museum. Sites of creation and mediation of knowledge, combining painting, sculpture, photography, and material culture, dioramas tell a story that is always political.
Les autres et Les ancêtres. Les dioramas de Franz Boas et d’Arthur C. Parker à New York, 1900, Dijon, Les Presses du Réel, 2020. See more.
The Restoration of Paintings in Paris, 1750-1815, Practice, Discourse, Materiality, Los Angeles, Getty Publications, 2017.
The decades following the 1973 publication of Alessandro Conti’s Storia del Restauro have seen considerable scholarly interest in the history of restoration in France in the second half of the eighteenth century. The Restoration of Paintings in Paris, 1750–1815, however, is the first book to situate this work within the broader historical and philosophical contexts of the time. Drawing on previously unpublished primary material from archives in Paris, Berlin, Rome, and Venice, Noémie Étienne combines art history with anthropology and sociology to survey the waning decades of the Ancien Régime and early post–Revolution France. Initial chapters present the diversity of restoration practice, encompassing not only royal institutions and the Louvre museum but also private art dealers, artists, and craftsmen, and examine questions of trade secrecy and the changing role of the restorer. Following chapters address the influence of restoration and exhibition on the aesthetic understanding of paintings as material objects. The book closes with a discussion of the institutional and political uses of restoration, along with an art historical consideration of such key concepts as authenticity, originality, and stability of artworks, emphasizing the multilayered dimension of paintings by such important artists as Titian and Raphael.
La restauration des peintures à Paris, 1750-1815. Pratiques et discours sur la matérialité des oeuvres d’art, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2012, 353p.
By accurately illustrating a key period in the history of the restoration of paintings, this book opens up news areas of research for art history, and underscores the ways in which artworks are perpetually transformed and fluctuating. Every modification invites us to redefine the very nature of a painting, according to time and place. When a painting is restored, it is in effect created anew, such that the public perceives it differently. Thus, gesture is indissociable from thought, and practice, from theory.
Noémie Étienne 