Ellery Foutch
I'm an Associate Professor in the American Studies Program at Middlebury College, where I teach classes on the art and material culture of the U.S. as well as critical museum studies.
I received my PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in May 2011 with a dissertation titled "Arresting Beauty: The Perfectionist Impulse of Peale's Butterflies, Heade's Hummingbirds, Blaschka's Flowers, and Sandow's Body" and am currently revising and reworking this material as a book project (abstract below).
My recent articles include an exploration of patents for portable magic lantern projectors and illuminated, wearable technologies, and an analysis of nineteenth-century glass ballot boxes and notions of political transparency. My current book manuscript investigates fascinations with perfection and its preservation in art and natural history of the nineteenth century.
The pursuit of perfection pervades 19th-century American art and culture. While historical interpretations of this era posit a binary opposition of competing desires—an embrace of progress and new technologies, versus anti-modernist nostalgia—my work identifies and analyzes a previously unstudied phenomenon: the desire to stop time at a “perfect moment,” pausing the cycle of growth, decay, and rebirth to arrest and preserve a perfect state, forestalling decay or death. Four case studies in diverse visual media illuminate this notion of the perfect moment: Titian Peale’s Lepidoptera portfolios and specimen cases; films, photographs, and sculptures of bodybuilder Eugen Sandow; and Harvard’s collection of Blaschka Glass Flowers.
Address: Axinn Center, Middlebury College
Middlebury, Vermont 05753 USA
I received my PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in May 2011 with a dissertation titled "Arresting Beauty: The Perfectionist Impulse of Peale's Butterflies, Heade's Hummingbirds, Blaschka's Flowers, and Sandow's Body" and am currently revising and reworking this material as a book project (abstract below).
My recent articles include an exploration of patents for portable magic lantern projectors and illuminated, wearable technologies, and an analysis of nineteenth-century glass ballot boxes and notions of political transparency. My current book manuscript investigates fascinations with perfection and its preservation in art and natural history of the nineteenth century.
The pursuit of perfection pervades 19th-century American art and culture. While historical interpretations of this era posit a binary opposition of competing desires—an embrace of progress and new technologies, versus anti-modernist nostalgia—my work identifies and analyzes a previously unstudied phenomenon: the desire to stop time at a “perfect moment,” pausing the cycle of growth, decay, and rebirth to arrest and preserve a perfect state, forestalling decay or death. Four case studies in diverse visual media illuminate this notion of the perfect moment: Titian Peale’s Lepidoptera portfolios and specimen cases; films, photographs, and sculptures of bodybuilder Eugen Sandow; and Harvard’s collection of Blaschka Glass Flowers.
Address: Axinn Center, Middlebury College
Middlebury, Vermont 05753 USA
less
InterestsView All (25)
Uploads
Papers by Ellery Foutch
CFP: Producing and Consuming the Image of the Female Artist
CAA 2020 (Chicago, 12-15 Feb. 2020)
Co-Chairs: Alison J Carr and Ellery E Foutch
American illustrator Zoë Mozert (1907-1993) was the ultimate 1940s “Calendar Girl,” famously serving as her own model for the pin-ups that she so prolifically painted. Newsreels and magazine coverage fostered a fantasy of an artist-model who willingly and flirtatiously revealed herself to viewers. Her assertive engagement with commerce and publicity—and canny use of her own body helped to launch and sustain her creative career.
Although Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz incisively analyzed and articulated the tropes, ‘myths,’ and ‘legends’ of male artist-creators throughout history, the image of the female artist has not been as extensively investigated. This panel invites explorations of the role of women artists in society and art history, across chronological and geographical boundaries. How have female and nonbinary artists embraced, rejected, or adapted stereotypes of artistic identity and success for their own ends? When the dominant genre of artistic achievement has been the representation of the female nude, how have these artists inserted or adapted the representation of their own bodies? What does it mean to deploy one’s own body in image-making? What does the exploitation through idealization of the artist’s body mean? How might we understand bodies as sites of and vehicles for exploration, experimentation, and even protest?
Please submit proposals (2-page cv, abstract, images) to co-chairs Alison J Carr ([email protected]) and Ellery E Foutch ([email protected]) by 23 July. For more information, see https://caa.confex.com/caa/2020/webprogrampreliminary/meeting.html.
About The Zoë Mozert Appreciation Society (ZMAS)
Inspired by the work of Zoë Mozert, a mid-century pin-up artist and model, ZMAS explores questions of artistic practice, image consumption, bodily display, and relationships between artist and model, muse and producer. Balancing a playful spirit of inquiry with rigorous research and critical engagement, ZMAS searches for evidence of the lived experiences of pin-up models and artists through archival hunting and imaginative acts of interpretation and speculation.
ZMAS.org will function as an archive and platform as we generate transdisciplinary research into Mozert, reconstructing a context for her that considers her contemporaries as well as who Mozert has influenced today. We welcome collaborators, contributors, and co-conspirators in this exploration and adventure.
This essay explores the rhetorics of visibility and transparency that made themselves manifest in material form in the mid-19th century: a glass ballot box, designed, patented, and manufactured in New York in 1856-1857 and later illustrated in dozens of political cartoons and allegorical representations of the democratic process. Just as the hanging chad, the butterfly ballot, and the Diebold voting machine came to exemplify fears and anxieties about voting, democracy, and representation at the turn of the twenty-first century, Jollie’s glass ballot box is a compelling embodiment of nineteenth- and twentieth-century election concerns, of both anxieties and aspirations for American democracy.
http://common-place.org/article/glass-ballot-box-political-transparency/
Session sponsored by the Association of Historians of American Art (AHAA)
College Art Association Annual Conference, February 3-6, 2016
Washington, DC
This session will explore the explosion of inventiveness from art historical perspectives and will consider works of art through the lens of the history of technology. How did new media alter expectations for art and industry? What relationships developed between artists and inventors, and what was at stake in the dialogues between art and invention? How did inventions and patent processes change the look of modernity, and how was American identity shaped by the production of art and inventions?
Please send proposals to organizers Ellery Foutch and Hélène Valance by May 8, 2015. For more information, please see http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/2016CallforParticipation.pdf or contact the organizers: efoutch [at] middlebury.edu; helenevalance [at] gmail.com. Accepted presenters must be members of both AHAA and CAA to participate in the 2016 conference. Proposals from all time periods are welcome.
This session will explore the explosion of inventiveness from art historical perspectives and will consider works of art through the lens of the history of technology. How did new media alter expectations for art and industry? What relationships developed between artists and inventors, and what was at stake in the dialogues between art and invention? How did inventions and patent processes change the look of modernity, and how was American identity shaped by the production of art and inventions?
Technological developments have profoundly changed all aspects of artistic production, consumption, and display; industrially-produced pigments and supports altered the process and materiality of painting itself, while photography and chromolithography yielded entirely new media, fostering competition and leading to anxieties about the status of art. Furthermore, new technologies such as the telegraph and the steamship—whose inventors, Samuel Morse and Robert Fulton, were also painters—allowed for increased transmission of ideas and images around the globe. Innovations such as artificial lighting affected the display of art, and new exhibition formats such as world’s fairs and patent museums juxtaposed painting and sculpture with the latest technological developments, from steam engines to X-ray machines. Many of these enterprises were financed by industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, Charles Lang Freer, or Henry Marquand, who marketed innovations to global consumers while turning to artists and art institutions via philanthropy for status. Art in turn was used to glorify technological change, as when railroad magnate J.J. Phelps commissioned George Inness’s painting Lackawanna Valley in 1855.
This session will explore the explosion of inventiveness from art historical perspectives and will consider works of art through the lens of the history of technology. How did new media alter expectations for art and industry? What relationships developed between artists and inventors, and what was at stake in the dialogues between art and invention? How did inventions and patent processes change the look of modernity, and how was American identity shaped by the production of art and inventions?
Please send proposals to organizers Ellery Foutch and Hélène Valance by May 8, 2015. For more information, see http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/2016-call-for-participation.pdf or contact the organizers: [email protected]; [email protected].
CFP: Producing and Consuming the Image of the Female Artist
CAA 2020 (Chicago, 12-15 Feb. 2020)
Co-Chairs: Alison J Carr and Ellery E Foutch
American illustrator Zoë Mozert (1907-1993) was the ultimate 1940s “Calendar Girl,” famously serving as her own model for the pin-ups that she so prolifically painted. Newsreels and magazine coverage fostered a fantasy of an artist-model who willingly and flirtatiously revealed herself to viewers. Her assertive engagement with commerce and publicity—and canny use of her own body helped to launch and sustain her creative career.
Although Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz incisively analyzed and articulated the tropes, ‘myths,’ and ‘legends’ of male artist-creators throughout history, the image of the female artist has not been as extensively investigated. This panel invites explorations of the role of women artists in society and art history, across chronological and geographical boundaries. How have female and nonbinary artists embraced, rejected, or adapted stereotypes of artistic identity and success for their own ends? When the dominant genre of artistic achievement has been the representation of the female nude, how have these artists inserted or adapted the representation of their own bodies? What does it mean to deploy one’s own body in image-making? What does the exploitation through idealization of the artist’s body mean? How might we understand bodies as sites of and vehicles for exploration, experimentation, and even protest?
Please submit proposals (2-page cv, abstract, images) to co-chairs Alison J Carr ([email protected]) and Ellery E Foutch ([email protected]) by 23 July. For more information, see https://caa.confex.com/caa/2020/webprogrampreliminary/meeting.html.
About The Zoë Mozert Appreciation Society (ZMAS)
Inspired by the work of Zoë Mozert, a mid-century pin-up artist and model, ZMAS explores questions of artistic practice, image consumption, bodily display, and relationships between artist and model, muse and producer. Balancing a playful spirit of inquiry with rigorous research and critical engagement, ZMAS searches for evidence of the lived experiences of pin-up models and artists through archival hunting and imaginative acts of interpretation and speculation.
ZMAS.org will function as an archive and platform as we generate transdisciplinary research into Mozert, reconstructing a context for her that considers her contemporaries as well as who Mozert has influenced today. We welcome collaborators, contributors, and co-conspirators in this exploration and adventure.
This essay explores the rhetorics of visibility and transparency that made themselves manifest in material form in the mid-19th century: a glass ballot box, designed, patented, and manufactured in New York in 1856-1857 and later illustrated in dozens of political cartoons and allegorical representations of the democratic process. Just as the hanging chad, the butterfly ballot, and the Diebold voting machine came to exemplify fears and anxieties about voting, democracy, and representation at the turn of the twenty-first century, Jollie’s glass ballot box is a compelling embodiment of nineteenth- and twentieth-century election concerns, of both anxieties and aspirations for American democracy.
http://common-place.org/article/glass-ballot-box-political-transparency/
Session sponsored by the Association of Historians of American Art (AHAA)
College Art Association Annual Conference, February 3-6, 2016
Washington, DC
This session will explore the explosion of inventiveness from art historical perspectives and will consider works of art through the lens of the history of technology. How did new media alter expectations for art and industry? What relationships developed between artists and inventors, and what was at stake in the dialogues between art and invention? How did inventions and patent processes change the look of modernity, and how was American identity shaped by the production of art and inventions?
Please send proposals to organizers Ellery Foutch and Hélène Valance by May 8, 2015. For more information, please see http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/2016CallforParticipation.pdf or contact the organizers: efoutch [at] middlebury.edu; helenevalance [at] gmail.com. Accepted presenters must be members of both AHAA and CAA to participate in the 2016 conference. Proposals from all time periods are welcome.
This session will explore the explosion of inventiveness from art historical perspectives and will consider works of art through the lens of the history of technology. How did new media alter expectations for art and industry? What relationships developed between artists and inventors, and what was at stake in the dialogues between art and invention? How did inventions and patent processes change the look of modernity, and how was American identity shaped by the production of art and inventions?
Technological developments have profoundly changed all aspects of artistic production, consumption, and display; industrially-produced pigments and supports altered the process and materiality of painting itself, while photography and chromolithography yielded entirely new media, fostering competition and leading to anxieties about the status of art. Furthermore, new technologies such as the telegraph and the steamship—whose inventors, Samuel Morse and Robert Fulton, were also painters—allowed for increased transmission of ideas and images around the globe. Innovations such as artificial lighting affected the display of art, and new exhibition formats such as world’s fairs and patent museums juxtaposed painting and sculpture with the latest technological developments, from steam engines to X-ray machines. Many of these enterprises were financed by industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie, Henry Clay Frick, Charles Lang Freer, or Henry Marquand, who marketed innovations to global consumers while turning to artists and art institutions via philanthropy for status. Art in turn was used to glorify technological change, as when railroad magnate J.J. Phelps commissioned George Inness’s painting Lackawanna Valley in 1855.
This session will explore the explosion of inventiveness from art historical perspectives and will consider works of art through the lens of the history of technology. How did new media alter expectations for art and industry? What relationships developed between artists and inventors, and what was at stake in the dialogues between art and invention? How did inventions and patent processes change the look of modernity, and how was American identity shaped by the production of art and inventions?
Please send proposals to organizers Ellery Foutch and Hélène Valance by May 8, 2015. For more information, see http://www.collegeart.org/pdf/2016-call-for-participation.pdf or contact the organizers: [email protected]; [email protected].
In September 1863, U.S. painter Martin Johnson Heade boarded a steamer bound for Brazil, informing the public that he intended " to paint those winged jewels, the humming-birds, in all their variety of life as found beneath the tropics. " For the next several months, Heade socialized with many wealthy U.S. expatriates in Rio de Janeiro and Petropolis, pursuing patrons for a proposed album of chromolithographs to be titled Gems of Brazil. Heade also sought the support and patronage of notable Brazilians, utilizing his connections to the U.S. Consulate to arrange meetings with Dom Pedro II, and he ultimately convinced the emperor to support the project, dedicating the work to him. Although Heade refused to sell any of his hummingbird paintings in Brazil, he actively participated in both official and unofficial exhibition programs, submitting work to the Exposições Gerais and mounting a show in a shop operated by American businessman Henry Milford on rua dos Ourives, near Rio's most fashionable shopping district. With his titles and palette, Heade transformed fast-moving, ephemeral hummingbirds into gemstones, a metaphor that virtually crystallized the creatures into hard, glittering, precious entities rather than the soft, organic, and often-decaying bodies they inhabited. This transformation also echoed popular American perceptions of Brazil and its riches, especially its mines with their wealth of gemstones that were imported to both North America and Europe, removed from their indigenous, natural sources and refined into elaborate gilded settings, foreign to their original contexts. Actual hummingbird heads and bodies were similarly employed in jewelry of the period, their heads mounted in gold settings in a taxidermy substitution for rubies and emeralds—a popularized literalization of Heade's Gems of Brazil for fashionable ladies of the period, furthering Brazil's reputation as an exotic land of riches and brilliant flora and fauna. Heade's " Gems of Brazil " is a remarkable project of artistic and scientific competition and exchange with metaphors that indicate wider cultural concerns about wealth, violence, preservation, and decay. This project explores the letters and diaries of Heade and his social network in Brazil and beyond, as well as his canny manipulation of the press coverage of his trip to Rio de Janeiro and subsequent work in London, to unpack the rich associations of Brazilian hummingbirds and international prestige in the 1860s.
Ellery Foutch
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Artist of the Beautiful” (1844) considers the lone figure of the watchmaker-artist Owen Warland, who retreats from society in his pursuit of perfection, inspired by- and attempting to create anew- an elusive, transcendent butterfly. Due to its dramatic and highly visible metamorphosis, the butterfly was a potent nineteenth-century symbol of change, transformation, and the evanescence of beauty. In their highly visible transformations from earth-bound, homely caterpillars to brightly colored and patterned flying creatures, butterflies acquired spiritual resonance that evoked the human passage from earthly body to heavenly soul or spirit; in their ‘rebirth’ from the cocoon, butterflies were seen to parallel Christ’s resurrection. While some authors occasionally referred to the cocoon or chrysalis as a ‘sarcophagus’ or ‘tomb’, the adult butterfly was consistently referred to as the “perfect state” of the insect. Like Hawthorne or Warland, Titian Peale (1799-1885) was similarly transfixed by butterflies and moths, studying the insects throughout the course of his lifetime and creating delicate sketches, lithographs, oil paintings, and over a hundred butterfly boxes bound in leather and marbled paper, their specimens preserved between layers of glass. Peale’s scientific and artistic preservation of these butterflies was an attempt to forestall their decay, immortalizing their perfection and transforming them from natural creatures that interacted with their environment into static objects, incapable of either decay or future life, a theme Hawthorne evoked in both “The Artist” and “The Birthmark.” The structured composition of Peale’s butterfly boxes imposed order, control, and symmetry on these fluttering, evolving creatures, while his use of watch glass explicitly trapped them in a tool of preservation intimately linked with the consideration of the passage of time. This paper considers the tensions between metamorphosis and stasis, life and death, and the limitations of human representation in Peale and Hawthorne.