Lightning Talks: We [Don’t] Know What You Did Last Summer.
Thursday 19 September
1600 (BST) // 1700 (CEST) // 1100 (EDT) // 0800 (PDT)
We are excited to announce the lineup for our September Network Event, “Lightning Talks: We [Don’t] Know What You Did Last Summer.” Composed of brief (8–10-minute) presentations, this session will spotlight the recent and ongoing research of five emerging scholars. They will share their discoveries and reflect on some of the obstacles, successes, and surprises that arise from art historical investigations.
Our speakers are:
Hoyon Mephokee, “Summer Research: Producing Siam in the French Colonial Consciousness”
This summer, Hoyon Mephokee conducted dissertation research on the 1861 visit of Siamese (Thai) ambassadors to France where, at the Château de Fontainebleau, they presented gifts and a letter from the Siamese king Mongkut to Napoléon III and Eugénie. In 1863, under the directive of Eugénie, the gifts were combined with objects looted from China during the Second Opium War to form the so-called Musée Chinois. The Siamese ambassadors were also taken to Paris, where they were photographed by Jacques-Phillippe Potteau, whose portraits were combined by the Muséum d’Histoire naturelle with other ethnographic images to form the Collection Anthropologique du Muséum de Paris. Through the objects and photographs, the Second French Empire was able to materially possess Siam such that it could create its own understanding of the kingdom in service of its imperialist goals in East and Southeast Asia.
Hoyon Mephokee is a PhD candidate at Washington University in St. Louis, where he studies French modern art under Elizabeth Childs. He is primarily interested in decolonial and postcolonial approaches to art history and is specifically interested in interrogating the colonial and cultural threads between France and Southeast Asia. His dissertation, titled “On the Hunt for the White Elephant: Visualizing and Materializing Siam in the French Colonial Imaginary, 1861–1900,” examines the complexity and multi-accentuality of the Siamese Kingdom (present-day Thailand) in the French colonial consciousness.
Dr. Courtney Wilder, “Veuve Cadart: Inheriting the Etching Revival”
Over the summer, Dr. Courtney Wilder catalogued a large collection of etching revival prints as part of her work as a project-based curator at the Vanderbilt University Museum of Art. She noticed several prints credited to “Veuve Cadart,” or Célonie Sophie Cadart (née Chifflart; her brother was the artist François-Nicolas Chifflart), and became curious to assess the role she played in taking over the famous etching revival publishing empire of her husband, Alfred Cadart, when he died unexpectedly in 1875. By 1882, the business had failed, and all assets were auctioned. Despite relatively voluminous scholarship on the Etching Revival, Célonie Sophie Cadart remains a footnote at best; she lacks an ULAN entry and, in the catalogs of several large museums, is listed as her husband or as simply “V. Cadart.” Dr. Wilder will discuss some early questions about what could potentially be learned by looking more closely at Veuve Cadart’s short-lived and ultimately unsuccessful tenure as symbolic head of the Etching Revival.
Dr. Courtney Wilder’s scholarship explores the intermediality of print, with a particular interest in early nineteenth-century textile printing. She is currently the Sullivan Collection Curator at the Vanderbilt University Museum of Art in Nashville, where she is working on a multi-year project to catalog a recently rediscovered trove of over 6,000 prints. She has held fellowships, internships, and research positions at a variety of institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Getty Research Institute; she received her PhD from the University of Michigan in 2021.
Lucile Cordonnier, “When the Corpus Chooses You: Peregrinations of a PhD Candidate”
Spending the entire summer in Paris to conduct research for her dissertation proposal, Lucile Cordonnier’s initial goal was to consult archival sources relating to the four decorative ensembles painted by Maurice Denis and Édouard Vuillard that she had already picked as part of her dissertation corpus. However, after close examination of these works and the primary sources, she realized that her entire dissertation could focus on a single cycle: Maurice Denis’s Légende de saint Hubert, painted for baron Denys Cochin’s hôtel particulier between 1896 and 1897. In this lightning talk, Lucile will outline how she pinpointed the research potential of the Légende and how she shifted her approach to incorporate ecology and eco-criticism, despite incessant doubts and skepticism. Trusting your instincts and diving into new material is, she believes, the foundation stone for conducting exciting and stimulating research.
Lucile Cordonnier is a PhD candidate in Art History at McGill University, working under the supervision of Dr. Mary Hunter. After her undergraduate studies at the École du Louvre and the Université Paris Nanterre, she pursued her Master’s degree at Concordia University. Her doctoral research examines questions of ecology in late nineteenth-century French art, with a particular focus on Maurice Denis. Lucile’s studies at McGill are funded by a FRQSC Doctoral Training Scholarship. Moreover, Lucile benefitted from several grants (French Historical Society, Fonds de Recherche du Québec-Société et Culture, Elspeth McConnell Fine Arts Award, Fred and Betty Price Research Award) to work in museums across France, the United States, and Canada.
Sarah Lawson-Schalles, “The Transatlantic Paradigm: Analysing the Lives of Five African American Artists in Europe During the Long Nineteenth Century”
This research paper focuses on the African American artist Henry Ossawa Tanner, considered one of the most internationally successful African American artists. To further his studies, in 1891 Tanner travelled to Paris, where he found solace in artistic and racial freedom. Moreover, this paper argues that Tanner and other artists in this research project have set a precedent of a transatlantic paradigmatic exchange that would continue into the Harlem Renaissance and years to come. Utilizing archival material as well as secondary sources, this paper will contextualise the period in which Tanner worked during the late nineteenth century in Paris, regarding the social and political climate during the Third Republic in France from 1870–1940.
Sarah Lawson-Schalles is a second-year PhD by-distance student at the University of Edinburgh. Her project is supervised by Professors Michelle Foot and Maryam Ohadi-Hamadani. She completed her undergraduate degree in History of Art at the University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies, which focused on non-western art histories. Remaining at SOAS, she completed her master’s degree in history of art and archaeology, where she developed a great interest in the arts of the African Diaspora. This led to her doctoral research focusing on the transatlantic visual culture of five African American artists who lived and studied in Europe during the long nineteenth century.
Dina Eikeland, “A False Cézanne? Authenticity Debates in Scandinavia in the Mid-War Period”
This June, Dina Eikeland had the chance to stay at the Getty Research Institute as a Library Grantee to conduct research in the archives of The Swedish French Art Gallery in Stockholm. As an important intermediary between the French art world and the Scandinavian art market between its opening in 1918 and throughout the mid-war period, this gallery is a central part of her PhD-research. One of her finds in these archives, concerning the Cézanne painting Avenue (ca. 1880–82), today in the Gotheborg Museum of Art’s collections, is particularly intriguing. After having been declared a false painting by French experts in 1929, it engendered great mobilization within Danish and Swedish art networks to prove the French experts wrong. The authenticity of the Cézanne painting was important for consolidating the collective story telling on the Scandinavian-French relations, in general, and on the Scandinavian acquisition of French late nineteenth-century paintings in particular.
Dina Dignæs Eikeland has been a chargée d’études et de recherche at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA) in Paris since 2022. Her PhD-research, conducted under the supervision of Professor Dominique Poulot at the Panthéon-Sorbonne University in Paris, explores the renewed interest for French art, especially impressionist and early modern art, in Scandinavia between 1910 and 1938. She aims to document and analyse the Scandinavian reception of French art by focusing on the formation of a transnational network of museum professionals, art dealers, art collectors and art historians engaged in the promotion, acquisition and exhibition of French art in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.