Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds: Global and Local Geographies of Art

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While the connected, international character of todays art world is well known, the eighteenth century too had a global art world. Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds is the first book to attempt a map of the global art world of the eighteenth century. Fourteen essays from a distinguished group of scholars explore both cross-cultural connections and local specificities of art production and consumption in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe. The result is an account of a series of interconnected and asymmetrical art worlds that were well developed in the eighteenth century. Capturing the full material diversity of eighteenth-century art, this book considers painting and sculpture alongside far more numerous prints and decorative objects. Analyzing the role of place in the history of eighteenth-century art, it bridges the disciplines of art history and cultural geography, and draws attention away from any one place as a privileged art-historical site, while highlighting places such as Manila, Beijing, Mexico City, and London as significant points on globalized map of the eighteenth-century art world. Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds combines a broad global perspective on the history of art with careful attention to how global artistic concerns intersect with local ones, offering a framework for future studies in global art history.

Reviews

This wide-ranging collection of essays is a significant and welcome contribution to an art history which takes the interplay of local and the global as central concerns. It provides new case studies and invites new ways of thinking; together these help us to engage with art outside the frameworks of nations or of 'cultures', and to move forward the conversation around a deeper and richer understanding of this key period. * Craig Clunas, Professor Emeritus of the History of Art, University of Oxford, UK *
Ambitious in scope and innovative in approach, this volume is an invaluable contribution to scholarship of the eighteenth century. Fourteen essays by leading scholars demonstrate how the art worlds of the period took shape through exchange and circulation, via the mobility of people and things, and in places as varied as markets and mosques. Readers will encounter a fascinating array of material objects, from French commodes and Mughal cups to holy water fonts in California missions. Lively and insightful, Eighteenth-Century Art Worlds offers a model for understanding the complex interrelations of the local and the global. * Wendy Bellion, Professor and Sewell Biggs Chair in American Art, University of Delaware, USA *
A sophisticated exploration of art-making and its circulation, Eighteenth Century Art Worlds invites new thinking about trade and pleasure, taste and empire. This fascinating collection of essayson artworks and people who traveled through East Asia, the Spanish Americas, the Swahili Coast, and European capitalsfundamentally shifts the conversation on the geography of art. For those who care about the foreign and the global in early modernity this is important reading. * Dana Leibsohn, Alice Pratt Brown Professor of Art, Smith College, USA *

Author Bio

Stacey Sloboda is Paul H. Tucker Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts Boston, USA. Michael Yonan is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Missouri, USA.