Katie Scott

Screen Wise, Screen Play: Jacques de Lajoue and the Ruses of Rococo

Technologically simple but operationally comlpex, the folding screen prospered as a new item of furniture in the first decades of the eighteenth century, its surfaces colonized as supports for visual elaboration as sophisticated as the social functions it served. This essay analyses a screen painted by Jacques de Lajoue in the mid-1730s that stood in the Paris print shop of Gabriel Huquier. Drawing upon Alfred Gells reading of traps as works of art, I interpret the ornamental tactics deployed in and on Lajoues trap-like screen even as it functioned as a mercantile aid and articulated a commercial ideology. I make these arguments by modelling my essay on the form of the screen itself. Like the twelve faces of the screen, my essay has twelve sections of equal word length; the rhythms created by movement between front and back, the seen and the screened, the public and the private, and the manifest and the latent are fundamental to my historical analysis. More broadly, the essay presses on the conceptual tensions between standard concerns within the social history of art and an analysis that embraces dialectics of repetition and variation -that creates a narrative which inevitably hides as well as reveals- through formal experimentation.

Edme Bouchardon's ‘Cris de Paris’: crying food in early modern Paris

This article takes as its subject the set of sixty drawings made by the sculptor Edme Bouchardon between 1737 and 1746 depicting Cris de Paris, now at the British Museum in London. Focusing especially on the food vendors it makes a case for the orality and performativity of their portrayal via an analysis of the sculptors manipulation of red chalk and his composition and arrangement of the five suites that constitute the work. Drawing on the anthropological writing of Marcel Jousse on oral culture and on the ethnographic record of Paris Cries made by Georges Kastner it makes a case for the drawings as sounding images. The connoisseur, antiquarian and writer of ‘low’ fiction, Caylus, noted that Bouchardon had drawn like he played the cello. The essay asks whether and to what end Bouchardons Cris can be considered not just auditory but musical. It ends with an analysis of the reproductive prints Caylus made after the drawings and considers their ‘aura’ or lack of it, in light not of Benjamins writing on mechanical reproduction but of Adornos on sound recording and light music.