In homage to Georges de Lastic (+1988), first curator of the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris and former director of the Musée de la Vénerie in Senlis (France), these two institutions will jointly organize on March 2011, an international conference titled Acteurs, enjeux, formes et pratiques de la collection de 1850 à nos jours [The art of collecting:
protagonists, issues, forms and practices from 1850 to the present day].
Professor Jacques Thuillier observed in his essay “Eloge du collectionneur” written for the catalogue of the exhibition on the Strasburg collectors, Othon Kaufmann and François Schlageter, that: “Nobody has yet written a novel on the art collector. Not even authors such as the Goncourt brothers or Champfleury, who were closely associated with the world of critics and art dealers. This is quite astonishing since the subject provides all the dramatic ingredients that a writer may wish for...” The peculiar relationship between a man (or a woman) and an object has been the topic of various studies and analyses, all the more since Antoine Schnapper, Krystof Pomian and Francis Haskell. Today, researches mainly focus – at least in France – on the modern period and on the first half of the 19th century. The conference dedicated to Private Collections and the Art Market in France from 1789 to 1848, Collections et Marché de l’art en France de 1789 à 1848, organised by the Institut national d’Histoire de l’art in Paris in December 2003, is evidence of this interest. The second half of the 19th century and the 20th century are periods that still remain open to research.
The Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature owes its very existence to the private donors and collectors, Jacqueline and François Sommer. So it was only natural for us to reflect on the nature of collecting and the concept of “collection”. Ours is a historical, sociological, anthropological and even psychoanalytical approach rather than a purely biographical one.
Collecting as a social practice will also be discussed: the collector’s role in the history of taste; the collection considered as a designed space, but also as a model, or a way of life;
the collection through texts and images. Collecting being the expression of the utmost diversity, we wish to reflect this diversity through a wide range of subjects and under a variety of aspects. Objects belonging to the collections of natural history will not be included and will the topic of another conference.
Themes developed will be:
Call for papers
- Theme 1: Collecting as a social practice: social and professional backgrounds and practice of collection;
-Theme 2: The Collector’s house: the collection’s space (places, architecture, devices, set-up and representation);
-Theme 3: The field of collection;
-Theme 4: The collection’s memory (the collection immortalized by text:
auctions catalogues, monographies; image of the collector and collecting in literature).
This conference will be published by Skira Flammarion.
Texts with a title and summary of about a page, come with a short CV must be addressed before the 30 th June 2010 , to both the curators of the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature and to the organizers of the conference:
Conference’s scientific direction
Pauline Prévost-Marcilhacy (Université Lille 3 Charles de Gaulle): ppmarcilhacy @laposte.net Patrick Michel (Université Lille 3 Charles de Gaulle): michelpatric@free.fr
Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature
Raphaël Abrille (associate curator): r.abrille@chassenature.org
