Fiona Tan: Nellie (2013)

Es ist eben der Wandschrank, in dem Tan die Uraufführung ihres Videos installierte. Das Zimmer befindet sich im Museum Van Loon, das heute die bürgerliche Wohnkultur des Goldenen Zeitalters ausstellt. Das Museum war das Wohn- und Geschäftshaus der Familie Van Loon, die im 18. Jahrhundert als Finanziers von den Handelsbeziehungen zu Batavia profitierten. Dieses Haus, dessen erster Bewohner Ferdinand Bol ausgerechnet ein Schüler Rembrandts war, diente Tan als Drehort. Hier inszenierte sie Nellies ewiges „Dazwischenleben“, ihre Situation, aus der heraus sie nur aus dem Fenster starren, mit Briefen korrespondieren oder in Fieberträume versinken konnte. In einer Sequenz zitiert Tan Jan Vermeers berühmtes, 1657 entstandenes Gemälde Briefleserin am offenen Fenster. Vermeer malte es, als Nellie noch ein kleines Kind war. Bei Tan ist es weniger ein kunstgeschichtliches Zitat als sozialgeschichtliche Information. Nellies Gefängnis ist real: „In Batavia, dem heutigen Jakarta“, sagt Tan, „litt sie wahrscheinlich an Malaria. Sie konnte bestimmt nicht alleine aus dem Haus, um auf den Markt zu gehen und ihre Nachbarschaft zu sehen.“

A Fashion for Abolition

www.common-place.org · vol. 14 · no. 1 · Fall 2013

Cybèle T. Gontar is a PhD candidate in American art at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She has written for the Metropolitan Museum Journal, The Magazine Antiques, andCommon-place.
Cybèle T. Gontar
A Fashion for Abolition
Frédéric Etienne Joseph Feldtrappe's Traite des Nègres (ca. 1825)
Introduction

Today a gallery of the Nantes History Museum's Château des Ducs de Bretagne relates information about the transatlantic slave trade. Within stands a lit à la Duchesse, whose faded but once stylish toile ensemble reveals striking antislavery graphics (figs. 1, 2). One scene bears the title "Traite des Nègres"—Slave Trade—on a wooden sign printed in repeat across the fabric.

Toile, short for toile de Jouy (after the Oberkampf factory in Jouy-en-Josas, France), is cotton, linen, or silk printed with monochromatic scenes, often dyed in red, blue, or black. The word "toile," meaning cloth, derives from the Latin root tela, or web—an apt metaphor for the network of painters, engravers, and printmakers linked through Traite des Nègres. For example, while signed "E. Feldtrappe," Traite's scenery reflects contributions by six French and British artists inspired by the cause of abolition. Feldtrappe's cloth (circa 1825) re-disseminated imagery from late eighteenth-century abolitionist prints, underscoring their currency well into the nineteenth century as slavery persisted.

Seemingly deemphasized by their use for decorative upholstery patterns, Traite's vignettes, in fact, would have been difficult to miss, especially when draping windows or objects of repose, and hence viewed at close range. While private today, bedrooms were semi-public spaces for centuries, and bed draperies were among the most expensive and prestigious household possessions. Politically commemorative toiles were au courant material for entertainment and stimulating discussion within the personal yet open setting of the nineteenth-century bedchamber or parlor. Traite was printed to promote abolition, despite its inevitable use in households made wealthy by the trafficking it denounced.Made near Rouen, part of France's commercial slave-trading center, Traite is a symbol of the Atlantic world in which slaves labored over and were physically bartered for cotton.

This article will discuss how Traite des Nègres came to be produced, and will consider its use, meaning, and relationship to antislavery activity and related artworks. As will be shown, the cloth's scenes blend French, British, and American abolitionist expressions, characterized by Enlightenment ideals, romantic themes, and moralizing sentiment. Made near Rouen, part of France's commercial slave-trading center, Traite is a symbol of the Atlantic world in which slaves labored over and were physically bartered for cotton. Further, it is a material fragment of a vast global cloth trade—identified by Giorgio Riello as the effect of a progressive shift in the textile-manufacturing core from Asia to Europe, spurred by industrialization in France and Britain.

Traite, together with its sources, represents the interrelationship of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century textile and slave trades with colonial racial identity and experience in Europe, Africa, and America. While its use is yet undocumented in North America, surviving mulberry-on-white lengths have been collected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, with a saffron-colored remnant at the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum. Other samples exist in at least seven other collections outside the United States, confirming the cloth's popularity and the quantity of its manufacture. While the only known "furniture cotton" devoted to abolition motifs, Traite des Nègres is akin to other historic toiles celebrating liberty, some manufactured for a post-Revolutionary American market. For example, L'Hommage de l'Amerique à la France ("America's homage to France," produced by Oberkampf around 1780) includes a kneeling slave holding up a leaflet before an allegorical figure of France.

1. Lit à la Duchesse (cherry wood) with Traite des Nègres hangings (ca. 1825) by Frédéric Etienne Joseph Feldtrappe (French, 1786-1849), signed "E. Feldtrappe"; roller-printed cotton, probably Canteleu or Manufacture Girard à Déville-lès-Rouen (Normandy). Bed: 46.2 x 48.2 x 47 in.; canopy is suspended 8.75 ft. © Château des Ducs de Bretagne—Musée d'histoire de Nantes, photo by Alain Guillard.

2. Detail of Traite des Nègres, ca. 1825, Frédéric Etienne Joseph Feldtrappe (French, 1786-1849), mulberry-on-white roller-printed cotton signed "E. Feldtrappe," 101 x 33 inches. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund. Image source: Art Resource, New York. Click image to see full length of cloth in a new window.

Traite des Nègres

Read clockwise,Traite's four interlocking scenes begin in an Edenic Africa before the arrival of trade-seeking Europeans. Kind-hearted Africans rescue shipwrecked voyagers from drowning. Yet in the final scene, the welcomed Europeans (and a complicit African) have been transformed into brutal slave traders, one with a bludgeon and another with a branding iron at his feet. A native man is torn from his family, and another sits shackled in a rowboat. The menacing slave trader—an unlikely subject for bed linens—is included in other abolition-inspired stories and images. A figure with upraised baton is seen in Samuel Wood's 1805 broadside Injured Humanity, and in Charles-Émile Jacque's Un planteur entêté (An obstinate planter), ca. 1830, from La Caricature, a Parisian satirical magazine (figs. 3, 4). L'Histoire de Paul et Virginie, the iconic novel of 1788 by Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint Pierre set on the island of Mauritius, describes a confrontation with a cruel slave master. This scene was reproduced on fashionable Paul et Virginie toiles, including one designed by Favre, Petitpierre et Cie of Nantes, ca. 1795. But how did the printing of such scenery on furnishing fabrics come about?

The seventeenth-century "calico craze" for brightly colored, painted, and printed Indian cottons, exported mainly via the British East India Company, led to competitive embargoes in France. Resulting import substitution practices were also banned until 1759. An indienne (meaning "Indian") was a French fabric designed in emulation of the restricted fabrics. They were known also as toiles peints, or "painted cottons." Though prohibited, l'indiennage continued apace in Marseilles, Rouen, Nantes, and elsewhere in France.

Indiennage

Renée Green This was now then (1994)

Renée Green erhielt von der New York Times den Auftrag, eine Modeseite zu gestalten. Eines der dabei entstandenen Photos verwendete sie für ihre Texte zur Kunst-Edition. Auf diesem Gruppenbild posieren Freunde, Verwandte und Galeriemitarbeiter. Für die Aufnahme wurde der hintere Teil der Pat Hearn Gallery rekonstruiert, den Green für ihre Ausstellung "Taste Venue" (1994) als antikes Besucherzimmer mit Sekretär, Chaise Longue und Vitrinen konzipiert hatte. Alle Möbel und eine Wand waren mit dem Stoff "Toile" bezogen, den Green für andere Ausstellungsgelegenheiten hatte anfertigen lassen: Sein Muster kombiniert pastorale Szenen des 18. Jahrhunderts mit offiziellen Darstellungen von französisch-afrikanischen Begegnungen derselben Zeit. Wenn sich nun die nackten Modelle mit diesem Stoff bedecken, statt sich der umherliegenden Fashionitems zu bedienen, dann wird ihre eigene Verwicklung in Kunst demonstriert.

Paul Simmons

Timorous Beasties is a design studio in London. Established by Alistair McAuley and Paul Simmons

Their most famous work is the Glasgow Toile, a contemporary urban street scene with a drug addict shooting up, a lad in tracksuit peeing against tree, etc. Produced in the style of early 1800s Toile de Jouy wallpaper.
"I love the idea of an upper middle-class fabric depicting the underbelly of urban chaos," explains Simmons. "We're also satirising the incredibly conservative textiles world. You only have to have a print of an evil-looking bird and everyone freaks out. And we want to portray the Glasgow the tourist board ignores."

http://www.museedelatoiledejouy.fr

Toile de Jouy: Making

A colorized version of a famous Oberkampf toile, depicting the process of making Toile de Jouy.

Toile de Jouy

Die echte Toile wird sowohl durch das Druckverfahren als auch durch ihr charakteristisches Dessin bestimmt. Oberkampf war in Frankreich der erste, der Kattun mittels gravierter Kupferplatten bedruckte, was - eine genügend feine Oberflächenstruktur des Stoffes vorausgesetzt - es erlaubte, sehr feingliedrige und sehr anspruchsvolle Muster wie etwa detaillierte figurale oder florale Darstellungen zu drucken. Das Dessin der Toile-de-Jouy ist zweifarbig: auf weißen Stoff wird entweder rot - das ist die typische Farbstellung - oder blau gedruckt. Die Motive sind subtile chinoise oder auch pastorale Szenen, die mit zahlreichen feinsten Ranken- und Blütenarrangements verbunden werden. Die Wirkung entspricht etwa der des typischen Chinaporzellans, wo feine blaue (selten rote) Dekore auf weißen Grund aufgebracht werden. Es dürfte, neben der Verwendung der damals modernen Motivthemen, gerade diese Wirkung gewesen sein, die der Toile-de-Jouy ihren durchschlagenden Erfolg verschaffte. Obschon es in Jouy selbst keine Textilindustrie mehr gibt, werden heute zunehmend die Oberkampfschen Dessins wieder aufgelegt und finden Eingang sowohl in die Oberbekleidung als auch in die (Raum-)Dekoration.

Toile de jouy originated in France in the 1700’s and literally means “cloth from Jouy-en-Josas,” a town in north-central France.

This type of monochromatic pictorial cotton, toile de Jouy, takes its name from the village near Versailles where the first printed textile factory in France was founded. Started by Christophe-Philippe Oberkampf (1738–1815), who had been brought up in the textile industry, the factory began work in 1760. Located in Jouy-en-Josas near the court, it attracted an affluent clientele that appreciated the quality of Oberkampf's fabrics.

Printed multicolored patterns on cloth were achieved at first by use of carved wood blocks. By the 1770s, reproductions of finely drawn engravings of pictorial prints and floral and geometric patterns were made possible through copperplate and cylinder printing. Copperplate printing allowed for designs with a larger repeating pattern than that of block prints, although only in a single color; cylinder or roller printing soon provided the advantage of greatly increased production, although with a narrower repeat on the cloth. Oberkampf introduced these techniques into France and they were adopted by other manufacturing centers such as Mulhouse and Nantes.

Patterns for printing on cotton were created by draftsmen in the early days at the Jouy factory. But in 1783, the year in which Oberkampf acquired the royal license, he employed a Parisian painter, Jean-Baptiste Huet. Responding to general interest in Egyptian civilization stimulated by Bonaparte's expedition, Huet designed this pattern, Les monuments d'Égypte, in maroon on white cotton. Alternating scenes of Alexandria's harbor with the Maison Consulaire de France, the obelisk of Cleopatra with the ruins of the library, the obelisk de la Matharée with the waters of the Nile, and interpretations of other temples and sculpture are interspersed with figures and camels, all dispersed against a latticed ground punctuated by stylized lotus flowers. The motifs (printed in reverse) are derived from eight engravings after drawings by the painter and traveler Louis-François Cassas. The engravings come from a series of 330 by Cassas and published in Gabriel de La Porte du Theil's Voyage pittoresque de la Syrie, de la Phoenicie, de la Palaestine et de la Basse Aegypte (1799).

Source: Jean-Baptiste Huet after a drawing by Louis-François Cassas: Toile de Jouy: Les monuments d'Egypte (X.404) | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

 chinesisch

indiennes 2

Arbeiten einer Indiennes-Manudaktur. Indiennes-Motiv, 2. Hälfte 18. JH

indiennes 1

 

Sklavereimotiv auf Indiennes (Detail), um 1795. Manufacture Petitpierre&Cie., Nantes

indiennes 4

Seeschlacht (Keparnfahrten?), Indiennes-Motiv, 2. Hälfte 18. Jh.