Disorient: Arts from China in Eighteenth-Century France

FAIN: FEL-289543-23

Kristel Smentek
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, MA 02139-4307)

Research and writing leading to a book on French engagement with Chinese art objects during the 18th century.

This book project investigates how French men and women responded to the influx of unfamiliar objects and artworks imported from China over the course of the eighteenth century, a pivotal age in European history. It argues that these imports conveyed profoundly disorienting visions of China’s culture, history, and technological achievements to French viewers. Close attention to the substantial material transformation of these imports by craftspeople and collectors, as well as more subtle adaptations of their unusual qualities by painters, yields a new view of artmaking and cultural (mis)understanding in eighteenth-century France, the center in which critics and artists produced the most influential art theory in Europe and the most desired visual and luxury arts. The book proposes that imports from China hovered over eighteenth-century European artistic and intellectual debates, inflecting propositions about human unity and diversity and challenging conventions of viewing and making.