The Metropolitan Museum of Art 2020 Spring Fellows Colloquia

The Metropolitan Museum of Art
2020 Spring Fellows Colloquia
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March 13 The Art of Adaptation: Pushing Temporal, Cultural, and Disciplinary
         Boundaries
March 20 Art for an Alternative Past
March 27 Of England and Elsewhere: Legacies of British Art and Collecting at The Met
April 3 Shifting Notions of Value and Identity in the Mediterranean World
April 17 Mediterranean Materialities
April 24 Objects of Study: Mapping Networks of Appropriation and Exchange in the
         19th and 20th Centuries
May 1    Changes over Time: Modern Techniques for Revealing the Past
May 8 Process and Choice: Replication and Collaboration in Early Modern Europe
May 15 A Journey from Surface to Structure

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March 13 The Art of Adaptation: Pushing Temporal, Cultural, and
Disciplinary Boundaries

The Art of Eating and Drinking in Anatolia: Change and Continuity
Pınar Durgun, J. Clawson Mills Scholar, Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art

Eating and drinking are integral parts of biological survival. They may be routinized
practices, but they consciously or unconsciously reinforce social roles and cultural
identities. Eating and drinking together can also establish and maintain social, ritual,
and political relations. In order to understand what objects can tell us about these
relations and the people participating in the act of eating and drinking, I analyze ancient
Anatolian vessels in The Met collection and beyond. By investigating the ways in which
eating and drinking vessels were made, decorated, and used over different time periods,
I question their material, ritual, and performative functions in various social contexts. I
specifically look at how these changes and continuities make us rethink the typological
or cultural identities we assign to objects.

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Impressions of Babylon: Use of Repetition in Achaemenid Art
Jacob Stavis, Hagop Kevorkian Fellow, Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art

Glazed brickwork at both Susa and Tol-e Ajori draws from the Babylonian visual legacy,
though the monuments from these sites differ in terms of both style and technique.
Together with the evidence from Babylon, these sites demonstrate the range of ways in
which Achaemenid art is fundamentally indebted to Mesopotamia, particularly in the
use of repetition. Scholars have frequently commented on the repetition observed in
Achaemenid monumental art. In some cases, this commentary has skewed negative,
describing the images as monotonous or lacking in creativity, particularly when
compared to more overtly narrative programs. Such judgments are rather anachronistic
and fail to consider the long-utilized powers of representation for the ancient viewer.
Contextualizing the glazed brickwork of Achaemenid Susa and Tol-e Ajori within the art
history of the ancient Near East, I suggest that repetition is the driving force behind the
monuments, and that it is what gives the representations presence or being.

Culture Contact and the Symbolism of Political Authority on the Pre-Columbian
Central American Coast
Rebecca Mendelsohn, Sylvan C. Coleman and Pam Coleman Memorial Fund Fellow,
Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas

This presentation addresses a series of widespread symbols shared between peoples of
Pacific coastal Mesoamerica and the northern Isthmo-Colombian region (Costa Rica).
During the period between 300 B.C. and A.D. 300, three classes of artifacts are
associated with political authority in both zones: jade pendants, zoomorphic scepters,
and stone “seats of power.” While these objects are similar in function, their style is
distinctive by region, with a clear division between eastern and western zones. In both
regions, these status-affirming objects are adorned with a similar suite of animal
symbolism, with frequent references to birds, jaguars, crocodiles, and snakes.
Similarities between these symbolically charged objects indicate that shared religious
beliefs and political customs existed along this vast “coastal lowland” zone. Differences
reveal that widespread symbols were adapted to fit local customs.

Blue-and-White Porcelain in the Early Ming (1402–24): A Transmedial Approach
Hui Fang, Marica and Jan Vilcek Fellow in Art History, Department of Asian Art

2020 Spring Fellows Colloquia | Abstracts

This paper examines the transformation of designs on blue-and-white porcelains during
the reign of the Yongle Emperor of the Ming dynasty, from 1402 to 1424. Conventional
opinions on this subject view the design of blue-and-white porcelains in the Yongle
period as a continuation of the previous Yuan dynasty models from the first half of the
fourteenth century. This paper, however, argues that the Yongle court transformed the
design of the blue-and-white porcelains by introducing pictorial principles from
painting. Such transformation entails transmedial thinking and presumably a close
collaboration between court painters and porcelain ceramicists.

How to Get a Persian Rock Relief into a Museum
Henry Colburn, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow, Department of
Ancient Near Eastern Art

In 2019, the Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art at The Met acquired an illustrated
Persian manuscript dating to the Qajar period. The manuscript records a journey taken
by Louise de La Marnièrre, a tutor to the Qajar princes, through southwestern Iran in the
late 1830s. La Marnièrre was accompanied by an Iranian scribe, ’Ali Akbar, and artist,
Ahmad Naqqash, who produced this unique manuscript that illustrates in a vibrant
manner many of the Achaemenid and Sasanian monuments she visited.

This talk explains why an ancient art department acquired a manuscript dating some
1,200 years after what is generally considered the “end” of antiquity. There are three
main reasons. First, the manuscript lets us display monuments from Iran in our galleries.
For example, rock reliefs are a major feature of Sasanian art, but by their nature they
cannot be displayed in museums. Second, it allows us to include Iranian voices in our
galleries. The study of the ancient Near East is dominated by Europeans and Americans,
yet Iranians have engaged with ancient art and architecture for centuries. Third, it
illustrates the continuing importance of antiquity in later periods of Iranian history, such
as in the Qajar dynasty, and can create explicit links with the Museum’s Islamic galleries.
By displaying this manuscript, we can present multiple views of ancient Iran and
thereby increase the ways by which we might connect with our visitors.

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March 20 Art for an Alternative Past

“America’s Exotic Spark”: Manuel Rendón and the Art Market for Latin American Art
in Paris, 1925–32
Giovanni Casini, Leonard A. Lauder Fellow in Modern Art, Leonard A. Lauder Research
Center for Modern Art

Born in Paris to a wealthy Ecuadorian family and raised in the international milieu of
diplomats in Spain and France, Manuel Rendón exemplified the cosmopolitan artist and
poet based in Paris in the interwar years. Exhibiting at the annual Salons and in
commercial galleries, Rendón was well integrated in the Parisian artistic scene.
Following the artist’s first extended stays in Ecuador (in 1920 and 1923–24), Rendón
discovered the “exotic spark” of his family’s native country, described in one of his
poems, and started including indigenous themes in his painting. After Rendon’s return
to Paris, the dealer Léonce Rosenberg, owner of the Galerie L’Effort Moderne,
consistently promoted his work in the years 1926–32 and, despite a significant lack of
information and archival evidence, their relationship provides crucial evidence on the
Ecuadorian artist and his work. Rosenberg attempted to market Rendón’s paintings by
buying and reproducing them in his journal Le Bulletin de l’Effort Moderne, where,
during its existence between 1924 and 1927, the dealer promoted select Latin American
artists in a particularly sustained and discerning manner, creating unexpected
dialogues among the artworks reproduced in its pages. Focusing on Rendón’s case, I
argue that Rosenberg played a crucial role in overcoming the French audience’s
expectations for exoticism from the art of Latin Americans, while Rendón expressed
well the new stylistic developments that Rosenberg’s idiosyncratic vision of modernism
had embraced by the end of the 1920s.

Past Recovered: Diego Rivera’s Monuments and Idols
Cristóbal Jácome-Moreno, Chester Dale Fellow, Department of Modern and
Contemporary Art

This presentation examines Diego Rivera’s appropriation of pre-Columbian objects in
one of his most renowned works: the mural Epic of Mexico (1929–34), located in
Mexico’s National Palace of Government. In this work, I argue, Rivera understood
Mexico’s pre-Columbian past not only as a series of successive events in time but
especially as an active, integrative force in an ever-changing present.

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In addition to analyzing the historical narrative depicted in Epic of Mexico, my proposal
also advances research on Rivera’s relationship to archaeologist Alfonso Caso, who
oversaw various government excavation projects beginning in the late 1920s through a
specially created directorate (Dirección de Administración de Bienes Patrimonial).
Caso’s project aimed to establish the notion of an indigenous past in which Aztec
culture could be seen as the crux of all things pre-Columbian. Rivera translated this
institutional project into the mural based on Aztec art and mythology. Ultimately, my
presentation seeks to explore how Rivera’s and Caso’s ventures worked in tandem to
advance the idea of a modern national identity based on Mexico’s ancient past. Despite
these very real and tangible connections between archeological research and its
appropriation by Rivera, the relationships among archaeology, architecture, and the
pre-Columbian past remain understudied in discussions of modern art. My aim is to
elucidate how Epic of Mexico is indeed key to the study of the complex ideological and
artistic interrelations that are at the root of Mexican modernism. This large-scale mural
offers a framework for understanding the reenactment of the Mexican past,
monumentality, national identity, and the politics of patrimony.

Another Purity: The Institutionalization of the “New Art of Mobile Color” (1947–52)
Pierre-Jacques Pernuit, Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow, Department of Modern and
Contemporary Art

This paper critically examines an American museum’s support of what, in the early
1920s, was called the “new art of Mobile Color.” This innovative art form consisted of the
projection of colored lights through “visual organs,” or other light devices of varying
sizes, onto screens in improvised, abstract compositions. I analyze how and why the
Museum of Modern Art and The Met funded and exhibited Thomas Wilfred’s Mobile
Color machines throughout the late 1940s and 1950s. I focus particularly on the
inclusion of Wilfred’s Clavilux machines in Dorothy Miller’s 1952 MoMA survey of
abstract American painting, 15 Americans, in which Wilfred’s devices were exhibited
alongside abstract expressionist painters such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and
Clyfford Still. Moving beyond the traditional division of museums into specific media
departments, Mobile Color’s institutional history reveals the complex status of time-
based media art and technology in art institutions. I argue that
Wilfred’s Clavilux machines are pivotal art objects in the debates during the 1940s and
1950s around such notions as purity and medium specificity in painting.

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“The Stuff the World Is Made Of”: Scaling Sheila Hicks’s Écailles
Grant Johnson, Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow, Department of Modern and
Contemporary Art

“Do not confuse size with scale: / the cathedral may be very small, / the eyelash
monumental,” warns the poet Dean Young. With Young’s admonition in mind, this talk
takes the scale of Écailles, 1976, a small weaving by the prolific artist and weaver Sheila
Hicks (b.1934; Hastings, Nebraska) as one calm node in a monumental matrix of world
art and global culture. Appearing for the first time alongside sewn sculpture by Claes
Oldenburg and printed textiles by Robert Rauschenberg as part of the spring
reinstallation of the Modern and Contemporary Art mezzanine-level
galleries, Écailles dramatizes a generational turn toward craft pursued by artists of all
genders. Even as many turned to media previously sidelined as evidence of “women’s
work,” reception then and since ironically still effectively favored the work of men.
Dramatizing what the weaver Anni Albers called “the adventure of being close to the
stuff the world is made of,” Écailles juxtaposes silk and wool beside the sharp shells of
razor clams. In this way, it troubles apparently distinct binaries such as nature and
culture to plumb the space between what the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss would
call, “the raw and the cooked.” Heir to ancient genius and artifacts from beyond the
European tradition, Écailles revels in the defiance of modern aesthetic hierarchies
posited among fine art, decoration, and craft. Thus, it echoes social stratifications then
newly up for revision too, from those between men and women to the geopolitical
reorganization ongoing between the western and developing worlds.

Femininity, Eroticism, Modernity, and Consumption
Marissa Vigneault, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow, Department of Modern and
Contemporary Art

Celebrity postcards and boudoir, cigarette, and tobacco cards featuring seminude
women circulated as material objects of exchange, both publicly and privately,
throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Such images both
secured and naturalized associations among femininity, eroticism, modernity, and
consumption. The rapid advancement and distribution of these economized images of
women, ranging from lightly titillating to heavily erotic, resulted in what Abigail
Solomon-Godeau has called the “heightened visibility of femininity.” It is “heightened
visibility,” enacted through codes of pose, dress, accessories, and makeup, that Hannah

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Wilke (1940–1993) employed in her performances to destabilize historicized
categorization, which constrains the individual will of women. More specifically, Wilke
used the striptease as a critical performative strategy to assert her (erotic) will in the
face of rote machinations of female sexuality rampant in 1970s visual and material
culture. It is Wilke’s introduction of the strip, and its attendant associations with kitsch
and bodily pleasure, into the spaces of high art that I identify as her critical interference
of scopic structures that both position and reinforce the female body as object of
consumption. I further connect Wilke’s actual act of stripping to the historical
emergence of tableaux vivants, burlesque performance, strip clubs, and pornographic
films, all connected to the notion of the spectacle as theorized in the post-war years.
Her stripping highlighted the persistent linkage of women’s bodies to economic and
artistic exploitation, and it is this point that makes her work so astringent as a
necessary political act.

Constructing the “Folk”: Reimagining Black Southern Folkways in the 1980s
Abbe Schriber, Sylvan C. Coleman and Pam Coleman Memorial Fund Fellow,
Department of Modern and Contemporary Art

In 1985, David Hammons built a fantastical structure called Delta Spirit in collaboration
with architect Jerry Barr and artist Angela Valeria. Part installation, part architectural
unit, part performance space, the work was built for the nonprofit public art
organization Creative Time's exhibition Art on the Beach, in what is now Battery Park
City. Several years earlier, Hammons had indicated interest in Gullah cultures and
vernacular architectures in Georgia, South Carolina, and the Sea Islands. In Delta Spirit,
this nascent interest came to fruition in a structure festooned with newspapers, bottle
caps, tin cans, shoes, and feathers. However, while critics interpreted the work as a
direct replica of a Southern shanty, Hammons’s creation in fact rejected any faithful
mimetic representation of rural, working-class homes. Rather, I argue, it was precisely
the uncategorizable nature of the house, its purposeful meld with the rural “folk,” that
gave Delta Spirit its most characteristic quality, along with the identification, memory,
and affective sensation that it inspired in viewers. In this paper, I explore Hammons in
dialogue with Southern folk artists and trained artists such as Beverly Buchanan, who
drew upon the U.S. South and the aesthetics of the rough hewn, handmade, and at-hand
to signal the experience, if not the direct representation, of black Southern folkways.

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March 27 Of England and Elsewhere: Legacies of British Art and
Collecting at The Met

“Material Evidence of the Most Momentous Events”: Nineteenth-Century British
Collections of Arms and Armor and Their Echoes in The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Chassica Kirchhoff, Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Research/Collections Specialist
Fellow, Department of Arms and Armor

From the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries, British collectors
amassed extraordinary arrays of historical arms and armors. They sought these objects
for their artistic appeal and virtuosic craftsmanship, as well as for their perceived value
as vestiges of famous men or witnesses to fateful events. As several scholars—
including Stuart Pyhrr, Clive Wainwright, and Jonathan Tavares—have observed, these
collectors of arms and armors participated in the waves of romantic nostalgia and
revivalist interest that celebrated the medieval and early modern past, reshaping it
within the imaginaries of a rapidly changing Britain. Great British collections of martial
objects were fed by the liquidation of grand familial arsenals, the upheaval of the
Napoleonic era, and the speculation of dealers and smugglers who saw opportunities to
profit from burgeoning markets of antique arms and armor in London and Paris.
Collectors such as Sir Samuel Rush Meyrick, the first Lord Londesborough, and Baron
Charles Alexander de Cosson who zealously sought the best objects also pursued
knowledge of these works’ origins and functions that would help to lay the groundwork
for the field of arms and armor studies. From its inception, The Met’s Arms and Armor
department has been integrally linked to legacies of collecting rooted in Britain, and its
collection encompasses numerous objects that once resided in the homes, halls, and
galleries of British collectors. Presented both in celebration of the reopening of The
Met’s British Galleries and in recognition of the Museum’s sesquicentennial, this paper
reexamines the British provenance of The Met’s renowned collection of arms and armor.

Anglomaniacal Collecting: Identity, Art, and the Ideological Origins of The Met’s
British Galleries
H. Horatio Joyce, Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Research/Collections Specialist Fellow,
Department of Drawings and Prints

This paper links the creation of The Met’s British galleries at the turn of the nineteenth
century to a small group of American businessmen and their project to turn themselves

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into a European-style aristocracy, based on Anglo-Saxon racial identity and a muscular
Christian image. While this group, which included industrialists and bankers such as
J. P. Morgan, sent their agents scouring far and wide on the European continent for art
objects that would elevate them into modern-day American Medicis, England held a
special place in their hearts. It was England, not Italy or even France, that provided
these Yankee aristocrats with their ruling ideology—wrapped up in ideas of Anglo-
Saxon white supremacy, aggressive masculinity, and the creed “Survival of the
Fittest”—and their primary forms of self-identification. English architecture and
decorative arts were absolutely necessary to this group’s sense of itself.

British Galleries at The Metropolitan Museum of Art 1870–2020
Max Bryant, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow, Department of European
Sculpture and Decorative Arts

Walk under the portico; pass through the medieval hall; turn right. For more than half a
century, visitors to the Metropolitan Museum have known where to find British art in
New York City. Nineteen museums around the world define themselves as “universal,”
but The Met is the only one of them to have an entry in its “encyclopedia” on the history
of British design. This is the story of how these galleries came to be established and
how they have retained their identity as other parts of the Museum have risen and
fallen. The story goes back to 1870 and the drafting of the charter and constitution of
the Museum in April of that year. Victorian ideas were foundational to decorative arts
collecting for The Met's first decades, but these ideas would be replaced by others,
themselves soon to be followed by new perspectives, embodied in a succession of new
galleries. Through these vicissitudes, British art at The Met provides a prism through
which to see the mutating identity of the institution itself.

Everyday Aestheticism, Everyday Imperialism: The Camellias and Azaleas of John
Everett Millais
Lindsay Wells, Chester Dale Fellow, Department of European Paintings

My talk unpacks the colonial significance of the floral motifs that appear in the art of
British painter John Everett Millais. Between the 1860s and 1880s, Millais completed
several large portraits that feature colorful images of potted camellias and azaleas.
Along with orchids, palms, and ferns, these flowers became some of the most popular
ornamental houseplants in nineteenth-century Britain. Both specimens were admired

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for their vivid blossoms and lush foliage, two characteristics that professional florists
spent much time manipulating through hybridization and cross-breeding. Camellias and
azaleas also have direct ties to colonial activities of the period. To meet consumer
demands, Victorian nurserymen imported large quantities of these flowers from Asia,
where Britain pursued some of its most aggressive foreign policies during the late
nineteenth century. Departing from past scholarship that treats empire as an isolated
anomaly in Millais’s oeuvre, my talk will analyze how the camellias and azaleas in his
late-career portraits reflect the myriad ways that botanical imperialism reshaped
Victorian daily life and the Victorian art world.

From Sargent to Copley: England to America and Back Again
Caroline Culp, Douglass Foundation Fellow in American Art, The American Wing

In 1899, the famed American portraitist John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) was
commissioned to paint a portrait that would become a pendant painting, or companion
piece, for the already century-old The Sitwell Children (1787). Sargent’s George Sitwell,
Lady Ida Sitwell, and Family (1900) mirrors the scale, palette, and figural composition of
the original family group painted by the colonial American portraitist John Singleton
Copley (1738–1815). This paper examines the Sitwell commission to explore the wide-
ranging significance of Sargent’s borrowings from Copley’s eighteenth-century
portraits. Despite the contrast between Copley’s verisimilitude and Sargent’s painterly
style, the latter encountered Copley’s works in the homes of his patrons—many of
whom were descendants of Copley’s prominent subjects—in both England and New
England. By examining the impacts Copley’s colonial-era canvases had on Sargent’s
Gilded Age portraits, this project pursues a new understanding for the exchange of
ideas between England and America at the turn of the twentieth century: a process
occurring between distant times and far-flung geographies. It considers how the art of
the past was made new in order to disseminate distinct ideas about familial perpetuity
and the cultural power of history.

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April 3 Shifting Notions of Value and Identity in the Mediterranean
World

Shifting Identities in Egyptian Miniature Art: The Use and Re-use of Scarabs
Vanessa Boschloos, Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Research/Collections Specialist
Fellow, Department of Egyptian Art

What happens to an identity marker when it changes hands? Will it alter its purpose?
To answer these questions, this talk offers some thoughts on our evolving
understanding of the purpose and meaning of the Egyptian scarab.

Ancient Egyptian scarab-shaped amulets come in many sizes and colors and are
ubiquitous in the archaeological record. Many are finely carved, and their undersides
are inscribed or skillfully decorated with motifs or hieroglyphic signs or symbols. It is
therefore not surprising that an art collection such as that of The Met comprises
thousands of these small objects, each exhibiting unique aspects of use and re-use.

While there are different contexts for their uses, and although their primary function
was apotropaic, requesting divine or royal protection, scarabs could also function as
sealing devices for administrative purposes or could be a means to express social
status or group belonging. This is evident for scarabs inscribed with the names and
titles of men and women from the highest levels of society. Especially during the Middle
Kingdom (ca. 2030–1650 B.C.) scarabs became the most prevalent means of sealing a
wide variety of things (papyrus scrolls, doors, jars, boxes, etc.), and their impressions in
clay are found in administrative buildings in Egypt and Nubia. However, given their
small dimensions, scarabs are often passed on to the next generation as heirlooms, or
resurface and are re-used in other contexts. They tell complex and fascinating stories.

The Mastaba of Rashepses LS16 at Saqqara
Hany Ahmed, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow, Department of Egyptian Art

The Mastaba of Rashepses represents an extraordinary monument dating to the reign
of Djedkara (r. 2414–2375 B.C.) in the Fifth Dynasty. The Rashepses mastaba contains
twenty-three chambers and passages, making it the largest Old Kingdom mastaba in
Saqqara belonging to one person. Rashepses held thirty-three titles, including vizier

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and “overseer of upper Egypt”—perhaps the first to hold this title. The mastaba is also
the earliest with a decorated burial chamber and contains several rare scenes.

The first documented exploration of the tomb was undertaken in 1842–45 by Karl
Richard Lepsius, who briefly explored a small part of the tomb and copied some of its
scenes and inscriptions. In 1907 and 1908, James E. Quibell pursued a brief campaign
focused on the mastaba. Since 2010, the exploration of the tomb has continued under
the Supreme Council of Antiquities, under my direction.

The tomb seems to have been constructed in several stages, reflecting the social rise of
Rashepses. The major part of the tomb was completed before Rashepses became vizier.
His highest titles, “vizier and chief justice,” can be found only in two places within the
tomb. These were added to the inscription in the main entrance of the tomb and the
burial chamber. The Mastaba of Rashepses is connected directly to the tomb of Perneb,
of which parts are now in The Met collection. Although the relationship between
Rashepses and Perneb is still unclear, recent fieldwork suggests Perneb is not the son
of Rashepses.

Inscribing Value: Weights, Ownership Inscriptions, and Artists’ Signatures on Roman
Silver Vessels
Alice Sharpless, The Bothmer Fellow, Department of Greek and Roman Art

In The Met’s Roman galleries, there is a pair of silver cups that announce that they
belonged to Sattia, daughter of Lucius, and that together they weigh two pounds,
eleven ounces, and seven grams. Many silver vessels from the Roman period
communicate through inscriptions, telling us who owned them, their weight, whether
they were dedicated to a god, and occasionally who made them. Yet the intentions
behind inscribing—or not inscribing—silver vessels, and the purposes this might serve
are not always straightforward. For example, Roman authors tell us that collectors
passionately sought out silver vessels by famous artists, but only a very few surviving
silver pieces are signed by their maker. Modern commentators often cite designations
of weight as simple indications of “value,” but the weight of a highly decorated silver
cup would reflect only its minimum material worth: we know from literary sources that
owners could pay a good deal more for labor or artistic skill. In addition, some
inscriptions are neatly punched into the metal whereas others are scratched in
scrawling, sometimes illegible, lettering. These techniques, which require different tools
and amounts of time to produce, clearly reflect differing intentions. I suggest that these

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inscriptions can be better understood when placed within the larger social context of
how the Romans used and thought about luxury tableware. Through comparison to
literary and historical sources, I will show the varied ways in which the Romans
attributed value to silver vessels and how the inscriptions on vessels support these
notions of value.

Collecting Egyptian Antiquities: A Shifting Value
Maxence Garde, Sylvan C. Coleman and Pam Coleman Memorial Fund Fellow,
Department of Egyptian Art

The great collections of Egyptian artifacts exhibited in international museums attract
millions of visitors every year and contribute to the fascination of the public for this
ancient civilization that has characterized European intellectual history since antiquity.
My research aims to analyze in depth the mutations and developments of the Egyptian
antiquities market that enriched these collections during the twentieth century. By
highlighting the networks, locations, and personalities involved in these exchanges, we
learn more about the modern history of these objects, now kept in museums.

This study is essentially based on the archives of the French Egyptologist Jacques Jean
Clère (1906–89) and his “dealers files.” Through his correspondence with many
Egyptologists, curators, and dealers, we will examine study his crucial cooperation with
Bernard Bothmer (1912–93), former chief curator of the Brooklyn Museum in New York.

The overview of the legal issues governing trade and exports, theoretical applications
of those issues, and their evolution over time will lead us to address the practical
aspects of these exchanges. The supply networks, the ways of buying antiquities, the
routes of transmission of objects, as well as the different types of dealers operating in
Egypt, will thus be approached. This mapping of the antiquities market will be an
opportunity to contextualize several examples of objects now displayed at The
Metropolitan Museum of Art. Through studying this shifting period for the history of
collecting, we will meet some of the most important issues regarding archaeological
collections nowadays.

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The Beauty of Efficiency: An Economic Perspective on Ancient Egyptian Coffins
Vera Rondano, Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow, Department of Egyptian Art

This talk presents the results of an analysis of modes of production of ancient Egyptian
coffins dated to the 25th and 26th Dynasty (712–525 B.C.). The coffins from The
Metropolitan Museum of Art were the first objects to be assessed. This preliminary
assessment enabled me to select the variables and outline the methodology for a
broader assessment, which includes more than 120 coffins now housed in museums in
Italy, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands. My analysis evaluates the
level of efficiency in the methods used to assemble the wooden structures, as well as
the techniques employed to execute the decorative programs. The underlying
assumption of this assessment is that higher efficiency in the modes of production is a
reflection of higher demand in society. I argue that an economic perspective on these
coffins will shed some light onto the social dynamics that led to the renegotiation of
values during a period of political unrest. Such renegotiation of values enabled the
production of objects for the afterlife that were less aesthetically appealing, though
easier to produce, than coffins made in earlier periods of Egyptian history. These
objects lent themselves to a system of mass-production, which might reveal a
reconfiguration of the social dynamics in Egypt in the first millennium B.C.

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April 17 Mediterranean Materialities

A Late Roman Lead Coffin
Paul Stephenson, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow, Department of Medieval Art and The
Cloisters

A lead coffin (61.206), at only 14 1/4 inches (36 cm) long, would have held a newborn
infant from Tyre, today in Lebanon. A coffin of this size is rare and speaks to the modest
wealth of the infant’s parents and to their desire to inter their child with proper
ceremony. It bears witness to parental love and the hope for salvation, the skills of a
local craftsman, and the chthonic qualities of lead, redeposited in the earth thousands
of miles from where it was extracted. The coffin’s decoration was formed by pressing
designs into a mold of clay or sand into which the molten lead was poured. The designs
betray their workshop, and each mold was unique. On the lid of the infant’s coffin are
two knotted, braided ropes, and on the sides, ends, and lid are imprinted rosettes and
columns, apotropaic symbols. The ropes figuratively bind the coffin and keep it closed,
protecting the body from malign spirits. The coffin speaks to the fragility of human life
in a society in which life expectancy at birth was less than thirty years. Some children
were poisoned by lead, which the young absorb more readily than adults. Extant works
of art in lead are rare, in part because lead is so easily recycled, and in part because it
was not regarded as an appropriate medium for art. Lead was regarded as the antithesis
of silver, which is a gleaming noble metal extracted from the same ore, lead sulphide
(galena).

Power in the Making: The “Conspicuous Virtuosity” of Byzantine Enamel
Shannon Steiner, Hanns Swarzenski and Brigitte Horney Swarzenski Fellow,
Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters

One of the most notable features of enamel created in Byzantium is its demonstration of
complete technical excellence. At The Metropolitan Museum of Art, viewers can marvel
at the intricacies of enameled objects created in miniature or wonder at the incredible
uniformity of pattern and line evident in larger enamels. Byzantine enamel astounds
with its graceful symmetry, harmonious visual rhythm, and brilliant use of contrasting
color. This paper investigates the broader cultural significance of skilled craftsmanship
in Byzantine enamel, framing it in terms of what James Trilling has called “conspicuous
virtuosity.” “Conspicuous virtuosity” addresses the role of artistic skill in visual and

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material performances of power, particularly power over the forces of nature. Enameling
in Byzantium was conceived of as a technological feat related to alchemy, and thus
prowess in enameling could signify control over the behavior and operations of physical
matter itself. By examining the display of specialized knowledge through cultivated
artistic ability, I argue that Byzantine enamel was capable of conveying notions of
Byzantine authority and control over the workings of the material world.

Fatimid-Style Wood Carving in Palermo, Sicily: Between Local and Foreign
Production
Ariel Fein, Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow, Department of Islamic Art

Amidst the gleaming mosaics of the twelfth-century Santa Maria dell’Ammiraglio
(Martorana) church of Palermo, Sicily, one finds a pair of monumental doors inset with
Fatimid-style carved wooden panels. Similarly elaborate jambs, intrados, and ceiling
panels survive from the Norman Palazzo Reale and the aristocratic home of Adelicia di
Golisano, now preserved in the Galleria Regionale di Sicilia, Palazzo Abatellis. In each
case, the carving is fully interchangeable with Egyptian counterparts still in situ in the
monasteries, palaces, and mosques of Fatimid Egypt and in the myriad Fatimid
fragments dispersed among museum collections.

Although long recognized as reflective of contemporaneous artistic traditions in
Fatimid Egypt, Norman Sicilian woodcarving has not yet been studied comprehensively.
Combining scientific analysis of Fatimid wooden fragments in The Metropolitan
Museum of Art’s collection with a comparative examination of extant Norman Sicilian
and Egyptian examples, this paper questions the existence of a local woodworking
center in Palermo, Sicily, and its connections to the artistic techniques and traditions of
Fatimid Egypt. This paper further interrogates the role played by Arab Christians in the
transmission and circulation of visual and material traditions outside the Fatimid
Empire. By untangling the complex histories of the Arabo-Norman carvings, their
creation and consumption, as well as their reception, collection, and display in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this paper argues for the local synthesis of visual
and epigraphic styles and techniques from North Africa and Egypt in Arabo-Norman
production.

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Modeling across Dimensions: Italian Portrait Sculpture and the Problem of Three-
Dimensionality
Marcello Calogero, Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow, Department of European
Sculpture and Decorative Arts

Renaissance patrons saw medals and portrait busts as two closely related sculptural
media. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the identification of anonymous busts
portraying Roman emperors through comparison with ancient coins had become an
established practice among antiquarians. At the same time, patrons started to
commission medals that showed their profiles exactly as they appeared on portrait
busts already in their possession. In this way, rulers, aristocrats, and men of letters took
advantage of the wide circulation of medals to disseminate dignified images of
themselves that fostered a visual association with antiquity.

In my paper, I focus on the opposite sculptural practice: as I show, very often artists had
to engage with the complex process of turning medals portraying dead sitters into
three-dimensional images. I examine a selection of case studies related to different
Italian cities: the Medici family in Florence, the Duke of Mantua, and a group of
antiquarians living in Padua. I provide a context for these cases, discussing the self-
fashioning strategy that led Renaissance patrons to assemble series of portraits
depicting illustrious men and women. I also discuss the problems of symmetry and
psychological animation that sculptors had to face when recreating three-dimensional
likenesses from small profiles. As I argue, this singular artistic practice was rooted in the
mythological origin of sculpture itself, as recounted by Pliny in his Naturalis Historia.

Nicholas of Tolentino between Heaven and Hell
Krisztina Ilko, Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow, The Robert Lehman Collection

My talk investigates a small-format panel painting from the mid-quattrocento in the
Robert Lehman Collection. The panel depicts the exultation of Saint Nicholas of
Tolentino. Nicholas, a miracle-working friar, died in the early fourteenth century and
became the only officially canonized member of the third major mendicant order, the
Hermits of Saint Augustine, during the Middle Ages. The panel was created by the
eccentric Sienese artist Giovanni di Paolo (ca. 1403–1482), who engaged in a long-term
and fruitful collaboration with the Order of the Hermits of Saint Augustine. My talk
compares the Lehman panel to other depictions of Nicholas of Tolentino by the same
painter and explores the iconography and cult of the saint throughout the late Middle

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Ages. Through combining these images with contemporary hagiographical evidence,
my paper illuminates the role of civic pride, epidemics, and the belief in purgatory in the
creation of medieval saint cults. Through this examination, my research seeks to
identify the original function of this peculiar panel and sheds new light on the
development of late medieval devotional panels.

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April 24 Objects of Study: Mapping Networks of Appropriation and
Exchange in the 19th and 20th Centuries

Viewing and Collecting Ruins: The Role of Photography in Othering Archaeology,
Italy, 1858–62
Nicole Coffineau, J. Clawson Mills Scholar, Department of Photographs

During the Italian Risorgimento, photography and travel albums explored the potentials
for landscape and archaeology to contribute to identity and otherness. Albums created
by Italian photographers in Sicily and in Qajar, Persia, demonstrate comparative tactics
for collecting and framing views of culturally significant sites along these lines. A
domestic notion of southern Italian and Sicilian inferiority that emerged from the
Risorgimento was based upon historical and cultural stereotypes according to which
southerners were neither fully Italian nor fully modern but rather stuck in a “primitive”
time and lifestyle, rooted in their African and Arab biological and cultural heritage. At
the same time, Greek and Roman archeological sites in Sicily were valued as evidence of
Italian cultural depth and superiority. Stereographic albums of Sicily simulate Grand
Tour travel to these sites, engaging vision and the perception of space so as to involve
the viewer in the composition, and, significantly, in the technological process of the
illusion of depth. Diplomatic missions to Qajar, Persia, also generated photograph
albums of archaeological sites, most notably the ruins of Persepolis. These images tend
to isolate architectural and sculptural details, denying senses of space and
organization, and were often motivated by the pursuit of anthropological knowledge.
As photographs of Persian subjects taken before the 1880s tend to be left out of the
literature on orientalist photography, this paper offers a working definition of
“orientalism” appropriate to this imagery, in dialogue with the complex and telescoping
orientalisms at play in Italy in the mid-nineteenth century.

Images in Translation: Reading Chinese Images in Japanese Printed Illustrated
Books
Mai Yamaguchi, Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow, Department of Asian Art

In nineteenth-century Japan, publishers began to print books of images called gafu that
consisted primarily of images accompanied by little text. Scholars have often
approached the books as models of paintings, especially Chinese ink painting, for
amateur artists and professional artisans to copy. In some cases, Japanese publishers

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took pages from famous Chinese painting manuals, such as the Mustard Seed Garden
Manual, and reordered them to create publications of their own. This talk explores the
shifts in meaning that occurred when an image was moved from one book to another,
transplanted from one culture to another. I argue that Japanese repackagings of
Chinese manuals were intended not to lead readers to create drawings on their own but
to teach readers how to look at images, and thus provided readers with cultural
competency.

Paper Trails: Expressionism, Cubism, and the Idea of Africa in Tristan Tzara’s Dada
Hilary R. Whitham, Leonard A. Lauder Fellow in Modern Art, Leonard A. Lauder
Research Center for Modern Art

“We read in the newspapers that the Kru nègres call the tail of a sacred cow: DADA,”
wrote the poet Tristan Tzara in the 1918 Dada Manifesto. African epistemologies appear
second in the list of seven possible meanings—ranging from bacteria to the hobby-
horse—for the name given to the artistic movement born among the international
group of artists and writers living in Zürich during the First World War. Tellingly, Tzara
lists the cube as another possible meaning of the word Dada: he would have been aware
that as early as 1907, the artist Pablo Picasso, credited along with Georges Braque with
inventing Cubism, was inspired by the forms of Kru masks from present day Côte
d’Ivoire. However, Tzara’s juxtaposition of the two in the manifesto suggests their
separate roles in the development of Dada. This talk traces Tzara’s formulation of Dada
vis-à-vis both Cubist and African art, comparing Dada publications and exhibitions prior
to 1918 to the German journals Der Sturm and Der Blaue Reiter, which reproduced both
in their pages. Advancing previous scholarship on the “soirées nègres” at the Cabaret
Voltaire and Tzara’s early poetic transformations of ethnographic texts, my analysis
explores how Tzara positioned African and Cubist artworks in the foundational
moments of Dada.

From Document to Artwork: Hans Prinzhorn’s “The Artistry of the Mentally Ill”
(1922)
Raphael Koenig, Leonard A. Lauder Fellow in Modern Art, Leonard A. Lauder Research
Center for Modern Art

This talk offers an analysis of the early history of the reception of self-taught artists in
Europe by focusing on German psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn’s “The Artistry of the
Mentally Ill” (1922), linking its concrete presentation as an art book with the paradigm

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shift envisioned by Prinzhorn, from medical documents to works of art. I will argue that
studying this innovative presentation strategy allows us to shed new light on
mechanisms of appropriation, projection, and the esthetic and ideological stakes of this
reception.

Early Soviet Art through the Lens of the Czech Avant-Garde
Meghan Forbes, Leonard A. Lauder Fellow in Modern Art, Leonard A. Lauder Research
Center for Modern Art

The leftist, Czech avant-garde group Devětsil maintained an “art as life” ethos in the
post–World War I period, articulated in the textual-visual project of “Poetism,” the
seminal contribution of Devětsil to the interwar avant-garde in Europe. While engaging
with peers in locales such as France, Germany, and Yugoslavia, members of the group
also followed with interest political and artistic developments in the first years following
the October Revolution in Soviet Russia and envisioned Poetism to be a part of the
constructive, “concrete work” of that revolution, a dialectical synthesis of the spheres of
politics, art, and everyday life. But before fall 1925—when Devětsil members Karel
Teige, Jaroslav Seifert, and Jindřich Honzl joined a Czech cultural delegation on a
journey to Moscow and St. Petersburg (then Leningrad)—representations of the Soviet
avant-garde are sparse in the Devětsil publications. I argue that, due to limited exposure
at home to Soviet film, theater, and art making, this opportunity for travel to the USSR
had a strong impact on the theoretical and artistic formulations of the Czech avant-
garde in the second half of the 1920s. Through a close analysis in particular of Teige’s
correspondence from the period, published articles, and photomontages, I show how
Teige, and the leftist Czech avant-garde more generally, appropriated aspects of the
Soviet model to form a unique vision of the role of art in modern life that embraced
certain ideals of socialism in a more playful iteration of a technologically advanced
urbanity.

How to Build a Collection: Pacific Art at the Museum of Primitive Art, 1954–74
Philippe Peltier, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow, Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania,
and the Americas

In 1954, Governor Nelson Rockefeller founded the Museum of Primitive art in New York.
With the help of Rene d’Harnoncourt, then director of the Museum of Modern Art, and
Robert Goldwater, the museum began to build up an African, Ancient American, and

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Pacific collection. They bought extensively on the art market what they considered to
be the best example of “works of Art” in each geographical field. Through the example
of the Pacific collection, this presentation focuses on two areas of study: the network of
dealers and collectors in New York at that time and the criteria of acquisition, which was
set up to find and buy paradigmatic pieces to promote “primitive art” and demonstrate
its value.

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May 1 Changes over Time: Modern Techniques for Revealing
the Past

[Re]Writing the History of Sub-Saharan African Musical Instruments
Ignace de Keyser, Andrew W. Mellon Fellow, Department of Musical Instruments

As with other studies in African history, the reconstruction of music history is
necessarily dependent on a variety of disciplines and methods, such as the study of oral
traditions with reference to the recent past, a material and morphological analysis of
musical instruments, and the historical interpretation of the continent-wide distribution
patterns that these instruments display. Linguistic data available from dictionaries,
reports, and so on not only inform us of the different ways Africans prepared saka-saka
in the sixteenth century, but also tell us that in the rainforest in Northern Congo in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they used the term npungi to mean “elephant
tusk,” whereas this term meant “ivory horns” in an ensemble played at the Atlantic
Coast. During my years at the Africamuseum, I learned much about the early history of
African musical instruments through study of a seventeenth-century ivory horn that
was clearly a hybrid instrument belonging to both African and European musical
traditions, and I address those findings here as well.

My work here at The Met primarily concerns drums, but I also share some results and
new insights that I gained about other musical instruments of the collection. Those
results and insights came from my review of organological descriptions and linguistic
data, employing a comparison to the oral culture of the communities in which the
instruments were used, and from review of available archival material.

Everything You Wanted to Know about XRF but Were Afraid to Ask
Alicia McGeachy, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Conservation Fellow, Department of
Scientific Research

Behind the scenes, scientists are hard at work to identify pigments, unravel the
mysteries around how or when an object might have been produced, and generally
trying to improve our understanding of the objects in The Met collection. In addressing
many of these questions, we often turn to X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (XRF), a
common, powerful tool that can noninvasively and quickly provide information about
the chemistry of an object. As a testament to its utility and impact, XRF has been used

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to reveal the lost colors of Incan idols, uncover the secrets behind the Ghent Altarpiece,
and understand the material nature of a West African helmet mask—all of which were
reported in January 2020 alone. While we rely heavily on the insights that can be gained
from XRF, the technique is sometimes only a launchpad from which we need to
investigate further. There are a number of things that need to be considered to
maximize the information that can be gleaned from the analysis. In some cases, the
results from XRF need to be supported by historical evidence or other noninvasive or
minimally invasive techniques to offer the level of information necessary to address
complex questions or even seemingly simple questions, such as the identity of a
pigment. Through an exploration of three unique projects—including objects from
three different continents and spanning nearly 1,200 years—and using an anthology-
style approach, we will learn more about the capabilities of XRF techniques and the
challenges that remain even after analysis is complete.

The Paper Test: A Novel Alternative Oddy Method for Organic-Based Collections?
Francesca Volpi, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Conservation Fellow, Department of
Scientific Research

Commercial products used for displaying, storing, and transporting artworks may off-
gas reactive molecules capable of damaging the art. These materials, such as foams,
boards, and sealants, are routinely screened using artificial aging tests to assess their
suitability for use near collections.

The traditional approach employed in the majority of museums is the Oddy Test, which
has significant limitations. A major limitation is the subjectivity of the results, which are
collected by human observation and assessment of the corrosion formed on metal
strips that have been aged with the material in a sealed jar. In addition, it is unclear
whether the use of metal “sensors” is applicable to nonmetallic art such as parchment,
paper, feathers, and fabrics.

To address these issues, a new approach was developed and evaluated to assess the
suitability of materials used near organic-based artworks: the paper test. It employed a
cellulosic paper sensor (as a surrogate for organic art) that underwent artificial aging in
a closed jar together, but not in contact, with the material under examination. Rather
than visual observation of degradation, the paper sensor was evaluated using
nonsubjective and quantifiable, advanced analytical techniques to assess its level of
degradation due to aging with the material being tested. Using this data, the materials

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were ranked for use with art into different classes, such as “suitable,” “temporary,” and
“unsuitable,” and then compared to their respective Oddy classifications. Finally, the
quantification of specific chemicals off-gassed by the materials were determined by gas
chromatography mass spectrometry (GCMS), and the related damage threshold
concentrations were established.

The Material of the Future Is Getting Old: Preserving Plastics in Fashion Collections
Kaelyn Garcia, Polaire Weissman Fund Fellow, The Costume Institute Conservation

The first plastic to be invented, cellulose nitrate, was presented at the Great
International Exhibition in 1862 in England. Eventually, other types of semisynthetic and
synthetic plastic materials would be developed in the twentieth century. These entered
the design and production of practically every manufacturing industry, including
fashion, industrial design, and the arts. Objects composed partially or entirely of plastics
therefore found their way into museum collections and are now presenting a problem:
these innovative materials are deteriorating in new ways, and museums are trying to
find a way to preserve and prolong these unstable artifacts for future generations.

In 2017, The Costume Institute began conducting a multiyear, real-time aging
experiment. Fourteen mannequins were constructed from nineteen different composite
plastic materials and placed in different locations and storage conditions where they
would be exposed to various temperatures, relative humidities, and light and oxygen
levels. This research focuses on collecting and analyzing this information to understand
how each material fared during the experiment. Documentation of the changes includes
condition reports, photographs, measurements of weight and size, measurements of
changes in color using a spectrophotometer, and tensile strength.

Additionally, these findings will inform future research on long-term cold storage
housing for cellulose acetate, cellulose nitrate, and plasticized PVC accessories and
garments in the collection. As there is a current lack of such research in museum
costume collections, these results and, one hopes, recommendations for storage will
benefit the collections of many institutions, as well as that of The Metropolitan Museum
of Art.

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The Shiny Path of the Ceremonial Cloth from Indonesia: Preliminary Examination of
the Gold Embellishment (prada), a Technique Lost in Time
G. Arabel Fernández L., Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Conservation Fellow, Department
of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas

In the Indonesian archipelago, the textile industry developed by various cultural groups
stands out for the production of fine cotton fabrics decorated with different reserve
techniques, such as batik, plangi, and tritik. These fabrics are part of the clothing of the
inhabitants of these islands. The garments are simple in their shape and conformation;
however, they stand out for their variety of symbolic decorative motifs, and at the same
time, they serve to establish social differences. The technical-artistic development
achieved for this clothing also incorporates the application of thin layers of gold, known
as prada, revealing another of the more extraordinary technical developments of
artisans in Indonesia. Textiles decorated with this technique are recognized as the most
luxurious and symbolic objects of the clothing of the inhabitants of these islands, their
use being reserved for special ceremonies.

Although there are ethnographic records that illustrate the reserve techniques
procedure, there is scant information about the prada technique. In general, Indonesian
artisans use a gold leaf or gold dust adhered to the fabric with organic glue (ancur),
obtained from fish bone or water buffalo skin. There are five ceremonial textiles with
gold pattern from the islands of Java and Sumatra in the Department of Arts of Africa,
Oceania, and the Americas. In order to gather preliminary information about this lost
technique, the textiles will be studied under different analytical techniques, and
materials and techniques will be compared in order to learn more about the process of
making these fancy textiles.

Twenty Years Apart: Revisiting a Caftan from the Northern Caucasus in The Met
Collection
Martina Ferrari, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Conservation Fellow, Department of
Textile Conservation

In recent years, advances in analytical studies, digital technology, and diagnostic
techniques have furthered interdisciplinary collaborations between curatorial,
conservation, and scientific research departments by providing new access to historical
textiles in museum collections.