Cut and Paste: The Mobile Image From Watteau to Robert

Abstract

This dissertation takes a mode of production — cutting-and-pasting in its most literal and more abstract forms — as a tool for thinking anew about eighteenth-century French art and visual culture in two key ways. The first is to orient art historians’ focus away from spaces of reception (prioritized in the field since the logocentric discourse established by academicians and critics in the seventeenth century) towards spaces of production (typically obfuscated by the same discourse). This is to undress painting of many of the ideologically-driven, highly wrought terms that elevated it from a mechanical to a liberal art in France between roughly 1690 and 1790. Cutting-and-pasting also provides a means of addressing current art historical concerns about “transmediality” (for which eighteenth-century France and its “integrative interiors” have been seen as particularly relevant) that nonetheless remains historically responsible about the medium-specificity so central to the guild-based culture that produced these objects. In order to lodge these issues at the heart of the study of eighteenth-century art, the examples of Antoine Watteau, Jean-Baptiste Oudry, François Boucher and Hubert Robert are explored in greatest depth and situated against a much broader cast of actors that includes print-makers, publishers, anonymous studio assistants, architects and experts in porcelain, textiles, marquetry and metalwork. In this dissertation’s conclusion, the ghost of the decorative in works that would become known as “rococo painting” is addressed in order to posit new insight into how divisions that were being actively constructed in the eighteenth century between fine and decorative, liberal and mechanical — and, indeed, works on canvas versus all other media — do not necessarily serve art historians well in their understanding of eighteenth-century French painting.