We are seeking paper proposals for the following session at the annual conference for the American Society for Eighteenth-century Studies.

Political Revolutions and Art Historical Exile

In recent decades, scholars have investigated the revivals, echoes, and continuities of eighteenth-century artistic styles into and beyond the nineteenth century. Taking their lead, this session questions the effects that the presumed links between style, genre, medium and politics have had on our understanding of eighteenth-century artists whose oeuvres traverse the centuries and political regimes, but whose works, for the most part, remain unchanged. The turning of the century in France, for instance, was particularly marked by the colossal fragmentation in historical consciousness owing to the French Revolution. While scholars have recently challenged the transformative role of the Revolution as creating neat breaks in cultural consciousness that directly align with shifts in governance, the spotlight has remained firmly on “revolutionary” artists whose production primarily sought to create an explicitly public and political effect. This approach leaves the visual productions of artists active during this tumultuous period—such as Clodion (1738-1814), Anne Vallayer-Coster (1744-1818), and Jean-Jacques de Boissieu (1736- 1810)—in limbo, as seemingly oblivious to the gradual liberation of intellectual and cultural vision in the revolutionary period. Through this session, we aim to address the continuities of artistic production in moments of profound political change and historical segmentation (roughly 1776-1815), and we welcome papers that take on such “defiantly anachronistic” artists as case studies, topics that examine similar divisions in other European and American schools, and proposals that offer methodological solutions for addressing these erasures.

An abstract and a CV should be sent by September 15, 2019 to session chairs Elizabeth Browne (esbrownemit.edu) and Cabelle Ahn (jahn01g.harvard.edu).