Maura Coughlin

In this volume, emerging and established scholars bring ethical and political concerns for the environment, nonhuman animals, and social justice to the study of nineteenth-century visual culture. They draw their theoretical inspiration from the vitality of emerging critical discourses such as new materialism, ecofeminism, critical animal studies, food studies, object-oriented ontology, and affect theory. This timely volume looks back at the early decades of the Anthropocene to query the agency of visual culture to critique, create and maintain more resilient and biologically diverse local and global ecologies.  Pre-order a copy on the Routledge website: https://www.routledge.com/Ecocriticism-and-the-Anthropocene-in-Nineteenth-Century-Art-and-Visual/Coughlin-Gephart/p/book/9780367180287

In the later 19th and early 20th centuries, many fields of knowledge, interest and physical labor intersected on the shore of the French Atlantic. On this varied coastline, artists, peasant workers, tourists, marine biology enthusiasts and natural scientists each experienced and exploited the place differently. The formation of artists’ colonies, whose members were fascinated by the lives and labors of fisherfolk, coincided with the establishment of marine biology field stations, the rise of amateur natural history specimen collecting, and the growing demand for natural resources collected from the coastline such as kelp, flint, maerl sand and feathers. Gleaning, gathering and otherwise appropriating material and visual images of the littoral are at the heart of this essay. Instead of looking at visual art with a primary emphasis on modern tourism, images of people working by the sea, made by people who lived by the sea are discussed as part of an ecological, geological, botanical and animal economy of the shore.  Although many of modernism’s artistic encounters were staged on the French Atlantic coast, this paper looks outside of canonical Impressionism and Post Impressionism to focus on works by Charles Cottet, Elodie La Villette, Mathurin Méheut and others, drawing theoretical inspiration from ecocriticism and New Materialism. These artists have been chosen to discuss together because of the ecological awareness that they developed and maintained as they became important actors in their communities, intimately connected to the intertidal culture and ecology of the shore.

Working close to home, Paul Géniaux (1873-1929), photographed a female paludier, or salt-pan worker, in Billiers, on the south coast of Brittany in about 1905. Grayscale contrast has material consequences: we cannot avoid the dirt on her apron or her tough, bare feet on the salted earth. Registered in the image’s silver salts is the difference between the light cotton kerchief on her head and the dark skin of her face, exposed to the same blazing summer sun and wind that crystalizes the salt she skims.

Saliculture is a materially intensive agricultural labor, working with sea, sun and wind, yet it shares qualities with fishing and quarrying to harvest salt, the only rock that we eat. In the marais salants of the French Atlantic coast, trapped ocean water increases in salinity as it is guided through grids of carefully maintained, clay-lined channels to ultimately crystalize into prized fleur de sel. Like the crystals skimmed from the briny pan, Géniaux’s photographic practice was a gathering up of the world around him on silver gelatin dry plates. Although allied with a realist approach to photography rather than nascent French pictorialism, Géniaux photographed a highly selective archive of his native Brittany that inventoried the specificity of locally particular gestures, types and trades. Salt workers and their insular, clannish culture had been mythologized by Honoré Balzac, and had been a staple of travel illustration in the 19th century. Géniaux’s photographs generally echoed established visual tropes of rural labor and locale from travel writing to Salon painting; they were widely reproduced as collographs --a photomechanical fusion of camera and printing press-- in journals and as postcards that were reprinted for several decades.
 
This essay is a reflection on material equivalence in fin de siècle realist photography. It puts into dialogue Susan Sontag’s descriptions of photography’s “relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing” literal qualities with Timothy Morton’s “weird essentialism” in which “things are partial, yet ‘organic.’ There are things, but they don’t come with a handy little dotted line that says Cut Here to separate the essence from the appearance.” Tim Ingold’s notion of landscapes as hybrid and dynamic “meshworks” is useful in getting away from “the sterile opposition between the naturalistic view of the landscape as a neutral, external backdrop to human activities, and the culturalistic view that every landscape is a particular cognitive or symbolic ordering of space.” Ingold has further called attention to the absence of materiality in studies of objects that have been “already crystallized out from the fluxes of materials and their transformations.” In addition to these theoretical approaches, I have found it fruitful to think about Géniaux’s photograph through the language of land art and collaborative artistic processes of working with the world’s materiality, especially Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), and his interests in salt’s crystalline properties.

At the turn of the century, visual artist Charles Cottet exhibited seascapes and images of Breton women in mourning, a project he collectively titled In the Country of the Sea. Although almost forgotten today, in the period prior to World War One, Cottet’s works were prominent in public exhibitions; they received enthusiastic critical attention and were avidly collected. Many critics noted that his focus on rural life, rooted in the specifics of Breton coastal culture, was a Naturalist offspring of the politically radical realism of Gustave Courbet and Jean-François Millet. Nonetheless, when shown alongside international Symbolist works, his imagery also shared many of these artists’ formal strategies and thematic iterations of eternal, associative, and allegorical symbols. Léonce Bénédite, curator of the Luxembourg Museum, acquired works by Cottet for the French state at about the same time that he critically praised its “subjective realism” in reviews.3 Bénédite’s seemingly paradoxical phrase best demonstrates the way that his style and subject matter adhered to an appealing middle ground, or else struck a compromise between Naturalism and Symbolism.

Looking outside canonical late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century modernist images of the French Atlantic coast, this essay examines usually discrete fields of landscape painting, botanical visual culture and nascent intertidal natural history to articulate an ecological realism of the ecotone. In a survey of peasant gleaning practices, popular natural science of the shore as well as amateur marine botany, the ecological visual literacy of viewers of this era is speculatively assembled. Works by artists such as Elodie La Villete, Charles Cottet, André Dauchez and Mathurin Méheut who lived long term on the coast are put into dialogue with the pressed images made by seaweed collectors and the industrial harvesting of geological and botanical resources of the shoreline.

Both remarkable and everyday, women’s ritual maintenance of the memory of the dead was often the subject of paintings, sculpture, photography and popular illustration produced in late 19th and early 20th century Brittany. Breton popular beliefs put the dead and living in close proximity and this was expressed in a range of visual culture that clustered around the holiday of Toussaint (All Soul’s Day and Day of the Dead). Why was the spectacle of women in the cemetery, praying upon the grave or laying wreaths upon it, so compelling for visitors to Brittany? This paper examines the visual and material culture of death rituals in Brittany (and their representations), including the seemingly anachronistic practice of reburial of the body, several years after its interment, the ritual function of the ossuary in the churchyard, the display of individual skull boxes in the church and ossuary, and the hybrid Celtic-Christian culture of death lore in Brittany.  While examining a range of artistic topographies written onto the Breton landscape, this essay also maps out an ecology of place, as local politics of cemetery placement in rural Breton life came into conflict with official pressures to modernize and sanitize public space. With the great losses suffered in Brittany from the World Wars, cemeteries, memorials that featured mourning widows, and images of women’s mourning and memory rituals take on entirely new meanings in French visual culture.

Celtic coastal Brittany, as constructed by Breton folklorist Anatole Le Braz in the years around 1900, was a place that modernity had overlooked and that stubbornly retained popular beliefs that centuries of Catholic missions had failed to extinguish. Le Braz, in La Légende de la mort en Basse-Bretagne (Death Legends in Lower Brittany) (1893) presents a collection of death omens, folktales and superstitions that he compiled in his travels in the far western region of Finistère. These death legends describe the coming of Ankou (the Grim Reaper) deadly sirens, hags or old crones who curse or steal children, midsummer night visitations of the dead, night demons and harpies and the power of widows’ curses. Le Braz’s text encouraged a genre of ethnographic travel writing about Northern European Celtic traditions, and fired up the desire to record (if not reinvent) cultures on the edge of extinction in the face of modernity. This paper examines the writing of Celtic Brittany in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the historiography of the visual culture of death in the region, and the importance of Le Braz’s island narratives for later texts such as J.M Synge’s Aran Islands.

In the rural communities of coastal Brittany, women’s mourning rituals and objects dealt in particular and local ways with loss of life and social change. Grieving widows were insulated from unwanted gazes by heavy black cloaks clasped with silver buckles. Bodies lost at sea or buried abroad were mourned on the remote island of Ouessant via the ritual substitute of a waxen proella cross.  Material traces of lives, fragments of wedding costumes, locks of a dead child’s hair, and other loaded apotropaic and symbolic items were collected and displayed in marriage globes. Elaborate domestic altars in coastal homes were the meeting place of private loss and global travel: beside the marriage globes sat exotic colonial souvenirs and images of local saints. The dramatic, melancholic and seemingly archaic nature of these mourning practices was the subject of many literary and visual representations. In the wake of the Great War, the image of the grieving Breton widow became the subject of public memorials as an ideal secular icon of collective mourning and her ritual objects have come to stand for a lost pre-war local particularity of the experience of loss itself.

An abandoned rock quarry is a ruined, emptied landscape. Although bearing witness to strenuous work, as a subject of representation it cannot summon the sort of national pride invested in fertile agricultural landscapes, industrious windmills and aqueducts; quarried land is an intervention better off forgotten. When depleted, it is typically abandoned; its remaining void remaining then fills with refuse and run off waters that “rise into ruin,” breeding miasma and social panic. Open quarries on the edge of Paris (whose material had built the city) became embarrassing eyesores and were often filled in and tidied up. The best known case is the wildly spectacular Buttes-Chaumont park, landscaped for the 1867 Universal Exposition to hide the former lime quarries, squatters’ camps and waste dumping grounds.

Robert Smithson, in his infamous essay “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic” [Artforum, 1967] suggests that the notion of what constitutes a “monument” is constructed by the spectator who alone determines its cultural value. This paper proposes to read paintings of quarries in the Paris region and in Provence that Van Gogh and Cézanne repeatedly painted through Smithson’s notion of the “entropic ruin”.

Throughout the nineteenth century, from the Isle-de-France to the arid plains of Provence, the French landscape was quarried to build cities, towns and roads. Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Cézanne were not the first French artists to represent abandoned quarries, but both painters exercised remarkable formal violence in the signature brushwork of their quarry paintings that effectively trashed the expectations of the Historical Landscape as formulated by academic theoretician Pierre-Henri Valenciennes in the early nineteenth century. Valenciennes had influentially promoted a mode of classical landscape whose status was elevated above other landscapes (in the hierarchy of genres) because of the inclusion of small-scale mythological narratives and the quotation of Greco-Roman ruins. Rather than ruined architecture, Van Gogh and Cézanne dwell on the feral remains of capitalist exploitation of natural resources: damaged nature fallen to ruin. Theirs was not, therefore, an entirely escapist construction of nature as the pristine, prelapsarian other to urban modernity but rather an engagement with the awkward, ugly remains of modern exploitation.

Writing in the early 20th century, sociologist Max Weber found the modern world increasingly ‘disenchanted’: belief in the magical and sacred had receded to its uncolonized margins. In France, these margins on the Brittany coast drew a seasonal crowd of cultural tourists throughout the 19th century. Artists and writers who journeyed to the coast of Western Brittany were fascinated by the spectacle of local festive displays such as the yearly religious pardons at St. Anne de Palud. But instead of understanding ritual festivities on the Brittany coast as simply the encounter of an outsider and his or her rural other, we can read these events as collective experiences that provided many ways to be both spectacle and spectator. This essay departs from previous studies of art in Brittany in two significant ways: it considers the experience of local travel to coastal festivities (such as pardons) rather than taking tourism only to mean travel on a wider national or international scale. It also widens the focus of previous critical considerations of pardons in paintings to an expanded archive of visual and material culture from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rather than equating rural life and representations of it with an outsider’s longings for an imaginary past, I employ methodologies drawn from feminist cultural criticism and the anthropology of material culture to view Breton pardons and their forms of visual culture as vibrant and ever changing performances and mediations of place and cultural identity. I consider these yearly public rituals as occasions that are marked as separate from ordinary daily routine yet that are also retrospectively integrated to everyday experience through their material and visual culture. Although paintings are central to my argument, this essay takes a short detour away from concerns with artistic representation in order to engage with the bodily experience of the pardon, and then makes a return to the visual. This shift attempts to move past a primary focus on the “tourist gaze” and toward an interest in the experiential, concrete poetics of the festive and its relationship to the “everyday”.

"How can material culture studies offer new
perspectives on the study of late-19th-century art
in France? How can the work of contemporary
artists animate a collection of historical and
locally specific objects? This paper takes up these
questions by a close reading of an installation
in St.-Brieuc, along with the collections of
two ecomuseums in Brittany and several other
historical sites in terms of a politics of display and
commemoration. It further engages the collections
in a dialogue about historical sites, photographs
and paintings of religious ritual in late-19th-century
Brittany that focus upon everyday rituals of memory
and mourning."

Working close to home, Paul Géniaux (1873-1929), photographed a female paludier, or salt-pan worker, in Billiers, on the south coast of Brittany (France) in about 1905. Registered in the image’s silver salts is the difference between the light cotton kerchief on her head and the dark skin of her face, exposed to the same blazing summer sun and wind that crystalizes the salt she skims. Allied with a realist approach to photography rather than nascent French pictorialism, Géniaux photographed a highly selective archive of his native Brittany; his photographs echoed established visual tropes of rural labor and locale; they were widely reproduced as collographs --a photomechanical fusion of camera and printing press-- in journals and as postcards. In this presentation, Géniaux’s photograph is a central node in a network of historical and ecological ideas that include the picturing of human labor, the social and environmental history of this coastal encounter (and the making of salt). Reflecting on material equivalences in fin de siècle realist photography, Susan Sontag’s descriptions of photography’s “relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing” literal qualities is put into dialogue with Timothy Morton’s “weird essentialism” in which “things are partial, yet ‘organic.’ There are things, but they don’t come with a handy little dotted line that says Cut Here to separate the essence from the appearance.” Using the implied material transformation (of water to salt), in dialogue with the materiality of photography, this talk proposes ecocritical interpretations that may have larger implications for photography at this transitional moment.

Focusing on visual culture produced from Boulogne-sur-Mer to Bordeaux in the 19th and early 20th centuries, this paper explores the mobility of material things that moved across the shoreline and across the Atlantic.  Enormous amounts of maërl sand, flint, seaweed, feathers, and sardines were gathered (from a shoreline that had previously seemed impoverished to its visitors) and exported abroad. The material aspects of coastal peasant cultures of fishing, harvesting, recuperation, beachcombing and salvage were at once viscerally repellant and visually appealing to tourists to the coast. These ancient métiers of foraging and recuperation have been recently canonized by the heritage industry. This is especially evident in new, multi-figure memorial sculptural programs on roundabouts near the coast such as the bronze Mussels Pickers in Honfleur, or the Stone Gatherer in Saint-Jouin-Bruneval (near Etretat) or in the re-use of former fishermen’s shacks as chic summer rental homes. The visual language of these recent monuments and re-purposed dwellings is related to paintings and popular visual culture of the later 19th and early 20th centuries in the works of artists such as André Dauchez, Elodie La Villette and the illustrator Maturin Méheut. These artists have been selected to discuss together because of the ecological awareness that they evinced in their work, as they became important actors in their communities, and were intimately connected to the intertidal cultures and ecologies of the shore.  The methodology of this talk is drawn from tourism studies, Eco criticism and new materialism.

In “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earthworks” (1968), artist Robert Smithson wrote that “[w]hen a thing is seen through the consciousness of temporality, it is changed into something that is nothing.…The object gets to be less and less but exists as something clearer. Every object, if it is art, is charged with the rush of time.”
This talk began as a travelogue and a meditation on the idea of material discovery in nineteenth-century France. In the summer of 2014, I drove across France and encountered things from prehistoric objects, remains and caves (Niaux, Peche Merle, Font de Gaume, Aven d’Orgnac, Abri de la Madeleine) that were “discovered” as prehistoric monuments or natural wonders by archeologists and speleologists (although the locals had always known about them) to Romanesque marvels (like Conques) that had somehow been “forgotten” and then “found” in the French countryside (by Prosper Merimée), to the postman’s Cheval’s gigantic work of outsider architecture (made of rocks and cement) the Ideal Palace that was “discovered” and celebrated by the Surrealists. Objects discovered underground (included in this talk) are the seventeen Neanderthal skulls discovered in Aurignac in 1842 and “lost” after they were given a cemetery burial as ordered by the village mayor, and the Madeleine Mammoth engraved on the tusk of a mammoth that was the linchpin in the argument for prehistoric time. Using Smithson’s writings on time, John Berger’s observations on the politics of the term “primitive,” and New Materialist and ecocritical readings of the agency of objects, I will theorize the unearthing of these case studies and put them into dialogue with discussions of heritage and the French designation of a “Monument Historique.”

In its representation of death, Realism is at its most material, disturbing and ambiguous. Gustave Courbet’s massive and weird hunting painting Death of the Stag was on view at his Pavilion of Realism in 1867, at the same time that the spectacular taxidermy assemblage by Jules Verreaux, Arab Courier Attacked by Lions was awarded a gold medal at the Exposition Universelle. Painting and taxidermy were employed to do what photography could not yet accomplish: to assemble the effect of stilled action at the height of conflict, the moment of extinction. In order to better theorize the materially disconcerting qualities of these works (and to propose new approaches to the study of Realism), my talk takes its cues from social art history of Realism in the 1970s and fuses these fertile observations to concepts drawn from ecocriticism, critical animal studies and new materialism.

Coastal Brittany became an intensely desired artistic site in the later 19th century. Skirting the well- researched artists who passed through Pont Aven, this paper investigates the visual culture of other Breton ports (such as Douarnenez and Camaret-sur-Mer) through which people (artists, tourists, sailors, fishermen) and many things (artwork, sardines, boats, Atlantic trade) flowed. In the earlier 19th century, the shoreline of Brittany was often viewed as an unpleasant wasteland of rock and rotting seaweed, populated by marginal indigents and degenerate looters; legends of the littoral were rife with hybrid creatures and ghouls. However, the economy and its ecology of the coast were in transition in the later 19th century; its aesthetic worth was shaped by the artists (such as Mathurin Méheut, Charles Cottet, Henri Rivière and sisters Elodie La Villette and Caroline Espinet) who lived, moved through, summered or settled there. In many of their works, the intertidal zone was represented as a site of fertile production and labor (shell-fishing, seaweed harvesting, wreck-picking on the wrack-line, laundry at springs on the strand); of loss and mourning on the sea and shore; of ecological collapse and starvation; as well as a place of seasonal pleasure. Whereas much attention has been focused on artists’ romanticization of ‘primitivism’ in Brittany, this paper draws theoretical inspiration from New Materialism and Ecocriticism to think about ecological relationships and human and non-human ‘networks’ on the Brittany coast, and to engage with ways in which visual and material culture interact, in terms posed by Jane Bennett, as embodied ‘assemblages.’

In Northwest France, on the Brittany coast, throughout the 19th and well into the 20th centuries, many men fished the long cod season on the banks of Iceland or Newfoundland for the better part of a year. Because so many died abroad or disappeared at sea and their bodies would never return to the home soil, mourners lacked both the emotional closure of proven death as well as the physical body as a ritual focus. In the village of Ploubazlanec, the cemetery has a famous Wall of the Disappeared at Sea to which were affixed homemade cenotaphs and plaques, standing in for those the ground is missing. On the Breton island of Ouessant, a singular ritual called proella was developed in order to hold a wake and funeral for sailors lost at sea. Both of these very local responses to loss of life at sea became central to Breton travel texts, collections of ethnographic anecdote, such as Anatole Le Braz’s La Legende de la Mort chez les Bretons Armoricains (Death Legends in Coastal Brittany)(1893) and novels such as Pêcheur d'Islande (Iceland Fisherman) (1886), by Pierre Loti. Banking on Brittany’s Celtic past and its long traditions of death omens and superstitions, these texts in turn encouraged touristic routes through these morbid Breton locales, some of whose streets had been renamed, based upon their descriptions in Loti’s novels. This paper’s focus is the literary and visual culture that reinscribes these places and objects with the cult of death, mourning and memory.

Images from French Places:
La Martyr: one of the oldest enclos paroissiaux (parish closes) in Finistère (11th-17th cent.): stone steps lead up to the top of the 16th century triumphal gateway. Adam and Eve are on the building’s façade as is a “mermaid” that might signify the pre-CR notion in Brittany that hell is damp and cold.
Kermaria-an-Iskuit: a Breton church in Plouha (Côtes-d'Armor), (13th century) that has one of the most well-preserved Danse Macabre wall paintings with 47 figures (c. 1500) and a prominent 19th century skull box.
The sculpted figure of Ankou (death) at the church of Ploumilliau, (Côtes-d'Armor), 17th century.
Painted Skull Boxes in the Cathedral of St. Pol-de-Léon, Finistère: 32 boxes 17th-19th centuries.
Ossuary (15th century) at the cemetery of Saint-Hilaire Marville, (Lorraine) The Breton practice of preserving individual’s skulls in marked boxes was taken up here, in Northern France in the 19th century. Shot through the metal bars on the ossuary.
Joël Thépault Placard Mortuaire (2006-7), a cupboard of skulls and other things carved by hand into the rock face at “Les Lapidiales”: an exhausted limestone quarry that has since 2000 has been an open air, international artist residency program for young sculptors, Port d'Envaux (Charente-Maritime). I found this first by chance by looking for something entirely else.

Images from other places:
a mossy rock in Montague, MA, a sarong blowing in the wind, a poppy, a garage door, a sparkling pond, a reflection on a stream and boiling water in Wellfleet, Provincetown and Eastham MA.
Stone: Hard old granite from Brittany and the soft limestone of the Charente.
Sound: a refrigerator in a 19th-century distillery in Cognac, samples from Saint-Saens’ Danse Macabre, ambient sound in Kermaria including the ancient tour guide, bells at La Martyre.
Hauntings / Intersections: I teach art history and visual studies using keynote—and in my classroom I always object to the use of flashy transitions and special effects that come with the software. Here, I made layers that act as effects from natural phenomena—sparkles of sunlight on a pond, moss on a huge boulder, a poppy waving in the wind, boiling water reflected on the ceiling, a reflection on a stream, a slow pan across a diamond-shaped window with snow outside. Nature dances across stony things that don’t move.

This panel with the participation of Veronique Chagnon-Burke, Will Pooley, Patrick Young (Commentator), and Simon Kelly (Chair), has been accepted for the 59th Annual Society for French Historical Studies Meeting, which will take place in Cambridge, MA, April 4-7, 2013.

The Brittany coast, in the later nineteenth century, attracted a range of artists, folklorists, journalists and tourists who were fascinated by the adaptations of everyday rural Breton life to conditions of famine, poverty, poor soil, natural disasters, death at sea and inclement weather. In images of widows, working poor women and communities surviving the “Sardine Famine” of 1903 (and even starving animals), the harshness of life in rural Brittany was repeatedly presented in the visual arts, travel narratives and popular imagery. This paper examines visual and literary fascinations with these themes and the fetishization of folk practices that responded (often ingeniously) to lives of material scarcity.
Many forms of visual culture, including the invented tradition of the “Filets bleus” festival in Concarneau and regional spectacles originating in cultures of salvage, recycling and recuperation (such as houses made of old boats) framed poverty and rural depopulation as exotic regional difference and tourist spectacle. This paper examines examples of this genre of primitivism and also proposes readings of images that resist the aestheticization of deprivation.

Celtic coastal Brittany, as constructed by Breton folklorist Anatole Le Braz in the years around 1900, was a place that modernity had overlooked and that stubbornly retained popular beliefs that centuries of Catholic missions had failed to extinguish. Le Braz, in La Légende de la mort en Basse-Bretagne (Death Legends in Lower Brittany) (1893) presents a collection of death omens, folktales and superstitions that he compiled in his travels in the far western region of Finistère. These death legends describe the coming of Ankou (the Grim Reaper) deadly sirens, hags or old crones who curse or steal children, midsummer night visitations of the dead, night demons and harpies and the power of widows’ curses. Le Braz’s text encouraged a genre of ethnographic travel writing about Northern European Celtic traditions, and fired up the desire to record (if not reinvent) cultures on the edge of extinction in the face of modernity. This paper examines the writing of Celtic Brittany in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the historiography of the visual culture of death in the region, and the importance of Le Braz’s island narratives for later texts such as J.M Synge’s Aran Islands. My research methods are informed by cultural geography, feminist art history, cultural studies and a love of strange northern places on the edge of the sea.

In emulation of Augustus John’s mural Galway (1916), British painter Gerald Leslie Brockhurst exhibited an uncharacteristically allegorical and (perhaps) politically charged painting Ireland 1916, at the Chenil Gallery in Chelsea, seven months after the Easter Rising. His black-clothed female figure suggests at once an ethnographic type, a portrait and an allegorical persona, making available visual references that range from the widows of 1916, Symbolist fascinations with death and mourning to Victorian popular visual culture of the famine stricken West.
Whether Deirdre of the Sorrows, Dark Rosaleen, Erin or Cathleen ni Houlihan, Ireland has so often been personified as a woman whether she stands for colonized Ireland or the Free State. Many literary critics and art historians note that the power of female allegorical images tends to be constructed in inverse proportion to the agency of historical women. Ireland 1916 was painted in the West of Ireland while the artist avoided the war; Anais Folin, Brockhurst’s French Basque wife, was his model. Irish women’s alterity is a common trope in the visual culture of colonial Ireland but what does it mean to perform it as a primitivising masquerade? Will any “other” do?
Rather than triumphing a forgotten painter, or claiming him as an unlikely speaker for the formation of Irish identity, this paper positions this little known image at a moment between the Easter Rising and the declaration of the Free State when national allegorical language and collective traumatic memory were in the process of being constructed.

“uncleanliness offends only those to whom it is unfamiliar, so that those who have lived in so artificial a state as to be unused to it in any form are the sole persons whom it disgusts in all forms. Of all virtues this is the most evidently not instinctive, but a triumph over instinct.”
John Stuart Mill, 1874
Waste, like dirt, is a relative category explored in may forms of visual culture. Before recycling was done by choice, European peasant culture survived on thrift, substitution and the culture of recuperation. Whether salvaging shipwrecks, burning seaweed, composting manure, mending ragged garments or stewing previously inedible material, ingenuity was driven by a climate of scarcity and poverty. Peasant familiarity with base matter such as dirt, manure and seaweed is represented throughout mid to late nineteenth-century realist and naturalist art. This paper explores a few examples by Jean-François Millet, Vincent Van Gogh and other lesser known artists to ask the following questions: Does the visual culture of peasant thrift commodify the rural as nostalgia or articulate the modern in opposition? To whom or for whom does this imagery speak? Why are there so many images of abject forms of rural waste (such as John Constable's dung heaps) and the bodies that are familiar with it? The methodology of this paper draws from the feminist theorization of abjection, material culture studies and social art history.

This panel invites interdisciplinary visual culture studies approaches to the mundane, concrete, local, overlooked and discarded materials of modern and contemporary life. While the abstract ‘deterritorialization’ processes and increasingly global commodity cycles of production and obsolescence often seem to characterize this long epoch, this panel explores the importance of understanding the local specificity material objects and concrete experiences.

Along with Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, and other philosophers of the everyday, cultural anthropologist Tim Dant suggests that we form lived and embodied relationships with material objects; can we discuss these relationships without necessarily dismissing them as framed by nostalgia, imposed from outside authority, or generalized by international or global culture? What is or can be considered ‘material’ in our modern life? In what ways do messages and meanings of art and other aspects of visual culture invoke materiality? How do they depend upon both the concreteness of physical matter and the multivalence of their histories, uses, metaphors, allegories, etc.? How can materialist methodologies help us to understand the interaction between people and things – and articulate the power, politics, and poetics of a phenomenological basis of subjectivity in material culture?

Papers offer methodologies applied to visual culture, specific artistic approaches, or topics that include, but are not limited to representations or use of waste, filth, trash, obsolescence, commodities, the discarded, junk, thrift, bricolage and the material basis of subjectivity.

Textual and allegorical references are interwoven with observations of the everyday in Jean-François Millet’s framing of rurally experienced, seasonal time. Several of his decorative painting cycles, depicting human life cycles and agricultural seasons, articulate the experience of time apart from a linear, progressive trajectory. Millet’s allegorical eclecticism held an enormous appeal for artists of the Symbolist generation such as Charles Cottet. In the 1890s, Cottet was hailed the inheritor of the realist tradition because of the darkness of his palette and the grim fatalism of his subject matter that repeatedly tied the life of the coastal Breton peasant to cycles of nature. Resonant of Millet’s iconic Angelus (c.1857-59), Cottet’s depictions of death, mourning and memory in Brittany both restage Biblical dramas in the rural present and speak to the gendered practices of everyday life as they relate to the material nature of a specific place.

The focus of this course is a cluster of related concepts in late nineteenth-century French visual culture: place, ecology and environment. We will talk about centers and peripheries.  Paris’s centrality as the nineteenth-century art capital of Europe and its symbolic function as the image of bohemian modernity will be countered by artists working from other places or identities such as the French suburbs, industrial zones, the seaside, the provinces and colonies as well as other European countries. Cultural interchange between these places will be discussed as relationships of gender, race, ecology, politics and class. We will discuss paintings and prints as “things” as well as images, and will consider their agency in the world.

Earth, soil, dirt, property, view, landscape: our language belies the many associations we have with land. Rural land has been invested with mythic presence and has seemed to promise authentic, immediate experience to the viewer ever since the Renaissance. In our current moment of ecological crisis, studying the visual culture of landscape and ecology has become ever more pertinent. This course offers critical and historical background to our present ecological condition and offers models of hope and change. We will chart a trajectory of landscape and modern experience that will examine the place of landscape, nature and human subjectivity in Western art up to the present day. Traditional theories of the picturesque, sublime, pastoral, and beautiful as well as recent cultural studies of tourism, nostalgia, nationalism, gender and ecological awareness will inform a critical examination of landscape as a wide genre: from academic painting to performance and land-based contemporary environmental art.

The NCSA conference committee invites proposals that examine the theme of explorations in the history, literature, art, music and popular culture of the nineteenth century. Disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches to this theme are welcome from North American, British, European, Asian, African and worldwide perspectives.

In the past two decades, ecocriticism has moved into central visibility in the humanities, as a vital, interdisciplinary mode of practice that rises to meet the challenges of our changing world, considering the fundamental interconnectedness between humans and their environments. The essays in this anthology will consider how art makers, images, and objects had particular ecological agency: they observed, critiqued, created and maintained resilient and biologically diverse local and global ecologies, just as ecological discourses were taking shape. We welcome proposed 5000 word essays (inclusive of footnotes) by emerging and established scholars whose work integrates the study of nineteenth-century visual culture with ethical and political concerns about fragile global ecosystems, resilient practices and/or nonhuman animal-cultural entanglements, and environmental justice. These essays may span the disciplines of art history, visual and material culture, and the history of science, to articulate and demonstrate engagement with emerging and established critical discourses. We particularly invite contributions that investigate indigenous and global approaches to the visual cultures of the long 19 th century, articulating how eco-materalism may help us rethink traditional historical accounts of spatial and cultural contact, hybridity, and change. In their proposals, authors should specifically affirm how their research contributes to or intervenes in current theories of ecocriticism/ecomaterialism, and how it aligns with or queries the growing, interdisciplinary fields of inquiry across the environmental humanities. To address this, authors might also consider: • What might ecocriticism offer as a new vantage point relative to the study of nineteenth-century art, objects, makers, materials, and practices, and what can art history and visual culture – considered broadly – contribute to enriching the scope of the environmental humanities? • What might a new canon of nineteenth-century visual culture look like if it were framed by the ecological concerns of the Anthropocene? Put another way, how can eco-critical approaches help us expand the disciplinary limits of what has long been considered the purview of 'art,' aesthetics, or visual culture? • How can we better understand the networks of exchange and materialities of objects, representational models, and art-making in the nineteenth century, on both global and local levels, before ecological discourses had a well-articulated language, and before they had taken on their present urgency? • Apart from " illustrating " a growing popular interest in natural history, how did visual culture participate in and enable scientific thinking about the nascent field of ecology? • How could artworks or objects invite ecological thinking by engaging the sensory imaginations of viewers, and/or exceeding the limitations of the visual? • How can the approach you take to your images or objects suggest new avenues of inquiry for other scholars? • How does the engagement of so many 21 st century contemporary artists and critics in ecological art, resilience, global issues of social justice and environmental " slow violence " in the global south encourage new research into art of the long nineteenth century? Timeline: 300-350 word abstracts and CVs are due June 1, 2017 Preliminary drafts of essays requested of selected participants will be due by December 15, 2017.

In honor of the 100 th anniversary of Philadelphia's Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the NCSA committee invites proposals that explore the notion of the vista in the nineteenth century. From personal gardens to public parks, from the street level to the top of a skyscraper, or from the microscope to the panoramic photograph, the nineteenth century was a moment when the idea of the vista changed from a narrow sightline to a sweeping, expansive view. How did theorists alter our historical perspective, broadening our notion of the world through science or religion? In what ways did power systems affect urban vantage points? How did man-made vistas reflect socio-cultural ideals? How did domestic spaces or nightlife transform with the widespread use of gas or electric lighting? How does the conceptual vista operate metaphorically? Topics might include horticulture, landscapes and seascapes, new technology, photography, sightseeing, film and the theater, urban planning, visions and dreamscapes, shifting perceptions of the gaze, or literary or artistic descriptions or depictions of viewpoints. In contrast, papers may consider the absence of vistas, such as mental or physical confinement or elements that obfuscate a view. Please send 250-word abstracts with one-page CVs to ncsaphila2018@gmail.com by September 30th , 2017. Abstracts should include the author's name, institutional affiliation, and paper title in the heading. We welcome individual proposals and panel proposals with four presenters and a moderator. Note that submission of a proposal constitutes a commitment to attend if accepted. Presenters will be notified in November 2017. We encourage submissions from graduate students, and those whose proposals have been accepted may submit complete papers to apply for a travel grant to help cover transportation and lodging expenses. Scholars who reside outside of North America and whose proposals have been accepted may submit a full paper to be considered for the International Scholar Travel Grant (see the NCSA website for additional requirements: http://www.ncsaweb.net).