Pascal Bertrand
Université Bordeaux Montaigne

François Boucher and the Decorative Arts: Promoting and Maintaining His Fame

In this lecture, Bertrand will explore the role of the decorative arts in the process of making and maintaining an artist’s fame, using the example of the quintessentially Rococo painter François Boucher. Boucher’s art was translated to a wide range of mediums—primarily tapestry and porcelain, but also gold and lacquer objects as well as printed fabrics and fans. How did he use these decorative arts to build his own reputation? And how did the decorative arts transmediate his paintings, prints, and drawings to disseminate them during his lifetime and preserve them after his death, right up to the present day? While the first question has been the subject of specific in-depth studies in one medium or another (porcelain in particular), Bertrand’s lecture considers the second question, and the significance of intermediality.

Pascal-François Bertrand. Full Professor of Art History, Université Bordeaux-Montaigne. 2019 Getty Rothschild Fellow. His work questions the history of tapestry within the history of artistic creation, according to three complementary methods: a historiographical approach, a study on the close relationship between painting and tapestry, and a social approach of the medium. With Charissa Bremer-David, he has recently prepared an annotated edition of the Registres de fabrication de la Manufacture royale de tapisserie de Beauvais (1724-1793) preserved at the Mobilier national, Paris (to be published online). He has been involved in a multidisciplinary research project in collaboration with Archéosciences-Bordeaux (UMR CNRS 6034) on the Reconstruction of the original colors of an Aubusson Tapestry. 2019-2023.

Tuesday, September 19, 12:15 pm
38 West 86th Street, Lecture Hall

Lunch will be served starting at noon. Registration required.