ECR French Nineteenth-Century Art Network presents:

Tracing the Nineteenth Century: Cataloguing, Contexts, and Presentations

Thurs 25 January 1600 (GMT) / 1700 (CET) / 1100 (EST) / 0800 (PT)

The catalogue functions as a powerful tool for art historians, curators, dealers, and those within the art market. Not only does it offer an authoritative voice that traces a work’s provenance, but it is also an essential means to establish and interpret the history of collections. The advent of digital means of publication, along with the need for museums to (re)assess and (re)present their collections, has changed how catalogues are prepared, presented, and – crucially – what information they contain.  
 
This panel will bring together a range of scholars currently working on cataloguing projects across different contexts, from the auction house to the museum. It will highlight the importance that catalogues have within art history, the changing context of their presentation and the need for transparency and accessibility in their preparation. The event will be followed by a discussion and Q&A. 
 
We are pleased to welcome the following speakers: 
 
Joost van der Hoeven (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam)
 
In June 2023 the Van Gogh Museum launched its first online collection catalogue, in a specially developed, fully searchable digital environment. This catalogue focuses specifically on the art collection assembled by Theo and Vincent van Gogh, which includes works by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Gauguin, and Émile Bernard, and currently represents the core of the museum’s holdings by contemporaries of Van Gogh. The catalogue consists of an in-depth introductory essay on the collecting practices of the brothers, followed by scholarly entries on individual or coherent groups of works. The entries are published in batches, the last of which will appear online in 2025. The primary focus of the design of the website is readability, yet the many tools a digital environment has to offer have been included, albeit discreetly.  
 
Joost van der Hoeven is a Researcher at the Van Gogh Museum, where he focuses on Van Gogh’s contemporaries, with an emphasis on the art of Paul Gauguin, Émile Bernard, and Charles Laval. In 2018 he co-curated the exhibition Gauguin and Laval in Martinique, and in 2020 he published on the critical reception of impressionism in the Netherlands. Van der Hoeven is one of the authors of the exhibition catalogue Van Gogh in America (Detroit Institute of Arts, 2022–23) as well as a contributor to Van Gogh and the Avant-Garde: Along the Seine (Art Institute of Chicago and Van Gogh Museum, 2023). He is currently at work on an exhibition focusing on the artistic connection between Vincent van Gogh and the Chinese-Canadian artist Matthew Wong (1984–2019).
 
 
Kathryn Kremnitzer (Vice President, Head of Sale for 19th-Century European Art at Sotheby's, New York) 
 
This presentation will discuss collaborative, object-based approaches to Manet's work—from curatorial to commercial contexts—that may guide future cataloguing efforts in an increasingly digital and visual age. It builds on Dr Kremnitzer’s own doctoral research on Manet, the recent exhibition Manet and Modern Beauty(Art Institute of Chicago, 2019; J. Paul Getty Museum, 2019–20), and the online scholarly catalogue Manet Paintings and Works on Paper at the Art Institute of Chicago (2017). The talk will emphasize how comprehensive cataloguing (from classrooms, to museum galleries, to auction sale rooms) is increasingly important for questions of chronology, condition, process, and provenance to encourage better understanding and information sharing. 
 
Kathryn Kremnitzer joined Sotheby’s in June 2021 and is now head of the 19th-Century European Painting sales in New York. She earned her PhD at Columbia University in 2020 with a dissertation on Édouard Manet's work across media in the 1860s. She was previously a Research Associate in the Painting and Sculpture of Europe department at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she worked on Manet and Modern Beauty (2019), Monet and Chicago (2020), and Cezanne (2022), and contributed to the online scholarly catalogue of Manet’s works in the collection. As a Curatorial Assistant at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, she contributed to the exhibition and catalogue Madame Cézanne (2014).  
 
 
Clémence Gaboriau (Catalogue Raisonné of Maurice Denis’s Paintings)
 
The project to publish a catalogue raisonné of the work of Maurice Denis (1870–1943) dates back to the early 1960s, when the artist's son Dominique Denis decided to compile an exhaustive list of his father's works. He gathered a vast amount of documentation, including invaluable archival sources, and gradually involved his daughter Claire Denis in this gigantic project, which has been uninterrupted ever since. The project is currently being carried out by a small team of researchers under the direction of Claire Denis and Fabienne Stahl, an art historian and specialist in the Denis’s work. The aim is to inventory all of the artist's painted works, apart from the decorations preserved in situ. The catalogue, which contains 3,200 works, is nearing completion and should be published in 2025 by Flammarion. This paper gives a brief overview of this editorial project, the various tasks and stages involved in its preparation, and the difficulties encountered in such an undertaking.

Clémence Gaboriau is a doctoral candidate at Sorbonne University. Her thesis focuses on Maurice Denis's work as an illustrator. As well as examining the mechanisms of the illustrated books process, much of her research focuses on Denis's relationships with the publishers and collaborators who helped shape his status as an illustrator. Since 2015, she has been collaborating on the catalogue raisonné of Maurice Denis's paintings, currently being prepared under the direction of Claire Denis and Fabienne Stahl (to be published by Flammarion). In this context, she is compiling the exhaustive bibliography on Maurice Denis and has contributed to the Bibliographie des critiques d'art francophones for his theoretical writings. She is one of the scientific editors of Delacroix est à la mode, a collection of texts by Denis devoted to the Master of Saint-Sulpice (PUPS, 2018)

This is a virtual event held via Zoom, details will be provided upon sign up and a reminder will be sent before the event.. For any technical issues, please get in contact via info@ecrfrenchart.com

The ECR Nineteenth-Century French Art Network meets once a month during the academic year virtually via Zoom. It is open to current PhD and research students as well as ECRs who have recently graduated and are making their way in the world of academia/museums/education/arts or heritage. It is global, open to those located anywhere in the world who wish to join. Feel free to join and participate; we hope to create an engaging, diverse, fun and rewarding community.

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