Ewa Lajer-Burcharth
Ewa Lajer-Burcharth is William Dorr Boardman Professor of Fine Arts in the History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University.
Lajer-Burcharth, Ewa
Lajer-Burcharth, Ewa
United States of America
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Description: Necklines: The Art of Jacques-Louis David after the Terror
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00327
Twice imprisoned after the fall of Robespierre, French painter Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) faced an artistic and personal crisis as the political and cultural values he had embraced crumbled in the mid-1790s. This strikingly original book examines the crucial period of David’s artistic career as he struggled both to "save his neck" and to recast his identity in the aftermath of the Reign of Terror. Ewa Lajer-Burcharth examines David’s work in the context of the larger cultural and social formations emerging in France and offers a fascinating new perspective on his paintings and on French artistic culture at an important moment in its history.

The book begins with a close examination of the work David produced while in prison. Lajer-Burcharth first considers the artist’s self-representations, focusing on Self-Portrait and Abandoned Psyche, and addresses his crisis of individual identity. She goes on to look at David’s effort to redefine himself as a history painter after the Terror and at his engagement with the collective memory of the Revolution. In her analysis of the broader search for a new republican identity, the author frames her discussion around David’s Sabine Women, the sketches for which he had prepared in prison, and places special attention on the privileged role of women and femininity as signs that both David and other citizens employed to establish distance and difference from the Terror. The book concludes with a brilliant interpretation of David’s unfinished portrait of Juliette Récamier and its complex relation to the process of cultural reinvention of the self as a function of desire.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal.*
Print publication date October 1999 (out of print)
Print ISBN 9780300074215
EISBN 9780300272314
Illustrations 172
Print Status out of print
Description: Drawing: The Invention of a Modern Medium
~The aim of the present exhibition is to make visible — and palpable — the multifarious process of drawing’s emergence into modernity. To achieve this aim, we have dispensed with the traditionally privileged...
PublisherHarvard Art Museums
Related print edition pages: pp.12-34
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00039.003
Description: Drawing: The Invention of a Modern Medium
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00039
The aim of the present publication is to make visible the multifarious process of drawing’s emergence into modernity. To achieve this aim, the authors have dispensed with the traditionally privileged chronological, stylistic, or oeuvre-oriented formats of display in favor of a model of presentation based in a constellation of interrelated categories. The book is divided into three main sections (Medium, Discourse, and Object) and, within them, into several subsections that address specific aspects of these divisions. Grouped under these headings are drawings produced at different moments in time as well as different types of drawings.

This catalogue accompanied the exhibition "Drawing: The Invention of a Modern Medium," on view at the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts, from January 21 through May 7, 2017.

*This eBook is available exclusively on the A&AePortal*
Author
Print publication date January 2017 (in print)
Print ISBN 9781891771712
EISBN 9780300238372
Illustrations 197 Illus.
Print Status in print