Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the Eighteenth Century

 

During the reigns of Louis XV (1723-74) and Louis XVI (1774-92) fashion and furniture merged ideals of beauty and pleasure through their forms and embellishments. With their fragile surfaces and delicate proportions, tables, chairs, and other pieces of furniture enhanced the elite's indulgence in leisurely pursuits, fostering highly complex standards of etiquette and performance. Men and women restated the splendor of the Rococo and Neoclassical interiors of the period in their opulent costumes. For the eighteenth-century libertine and femme du monde, a refined elegance and delicate voluptuousness infused their world with a mood of amorous delight.

Dangerous Liaisons takes its theme from this era, when trifling in love propelled the energies of elite men and women, providing almost daily stimulating encounters, and when, as has been written, "morality lost but society gained." In Choderlos de Laclos's novel of the same name, Ceacile, a young girl, is praised by her tutor in the worldly arts: "She is really delightful! She has neither character nor principles ... everything about her indicates the keenest sensations." Valmont, her seducer, notes the following morning, "Nothing could have been more amusing." Valmont has won a game in the contest of lovemaking.

The beautifully photographed and handsomely reproduced images on the following pages bring these amorous adventures to life. The vignettes, staged for the widely praised exhibition "Dangerous Liaisons: Fashion and Furniture in the Eighteenth Century," held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2004, feature eighteenth-century costumes in the Museum's spectacular French period rooms, The Wrightsman Galleries. The artfully composed scenes include: a woman sitting for her portrait while her husband flirts with her friend; a man being granted an audience with a woman in a peignoir who is having her hair dressed; a vendor embracing the wife of an old man, his back turned, examining a table for sale; a girl receiving more than a harp lesson from her teacher, while her oblivious chaperone reads an erotic novel; a woman giving up her garter as a memento of a very private dinner. The entertaining and knowledgeable texts set the scenes perfectly.  [This book was originally published in 2006 and has gone out of print. This edition is a print-on-demand version of the original book.]

Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press 

 

Cochineal Red • The art history of a color

From antiquity to the present day, color has been embedded with cultural meaning. Associated with blood, fire, fertility, and life force, the color red has always been extremely difficult to achieve and thus highly prized. This book discusses the origin of the red colorant derived from the insect cochineal, its early use in Precolumbian ritual textiles from Mexico and Peru, and the spread of the American dyestuff through cultural interchange following the Spanish discovery and conquest of the New World in the 16th century. Drawing on examples from the collections of the Metropolitan Museum, it documents the use of this red-colored treasure in several media and throughout the world.

Textiles of Late Antiquity • The Metropolitan Museum of Art

To this day Late Antique textiles found in Egypt are widely designated as Coptic textiles, following a tradition established a hundred years ago when excavators first reported on the discovery of such pieces. The term Coptic, however, refers to native Egyptian Christians, while the design and imagery of these textiles can only very rarely be attached to an unequivocally and narrowly Christian-Coptic context. Until fairly recently it was difficult to place Egyptian decorated textile fragments in a larger perspective and to recognize them as the late products of an industry that had already blossomed for centuries in the Near and Middle East. One reason for this difficulty was the apparent lack of contemporary and earlier finds in neighboring regions. For a long time this absence of comparative material caused the Egyptian pieces to stand out as the sole examples of weaving from classical antiquity. Textiles from other regions of the Near East have since come to light, leading to a reassessment of the weaving finds from Egypt and for some of them a redetermination of their place of manufacture. It also became clear that most textile finds from Egypt can be dated to the fourth and fifth centuries A.D. by stylistic comparisons to works of art produced in other media. In those centuries, however, the eastern Mediterranean and Egypt were still strongly influenced by cultural and iconographic traditions inherited from Hellenistic and Roman times. This was especially true among traditionally educated aristocrats and wealthy citizens who were largely the owners of elaborately decorated textiles.
At the turn of the twentieth century, Alois Riegl and Joseph Strzygowski undertook significant studies of the third through sixth centuries A.D. After this research waned until the 1970s when two important exhibitions were held in New York and and Frankfurt. These catalyzed a new interest among archaeologists, art historians, philologists, and scholars of other disciplines in an epoch whose fascination lies In the many levels of understanding and diverse possibilities for interpretation allowed by its artistic forms of expression.
Format pdf / 48 pages / Language: English

The Colonial Andes Tapestries and Silverwork 1530-1830

The Essential Art of African Textiles Design Without End • MET

Textiles are a major form of aesthetic expression across Africa, and this book examines long-standing traditions together with recent creative developments. A variety of fine and venerable West African cloths are presented and discussed in terms of both artistry and technique. Wrapped around the body, fashioned into garments, or displayed as hangings, these magnificent textiles include bold strip weavings and intricately patterned indigo resist-dyed cloths. Also considered by the authors are striking contemporary works—in media as far-ranging as sculpture, painting, photography, video, and installation art—that draw inspiration from the forms and cultural significance of African textiles.