In A Delicate Matter: Art, Fragility, and Consumption in Eighteenth-Century France, materiality is the message. Oliver Wunsch explores the shifting, often competing meanings of physical fragility in eighteenth-century French art. Originally an aspect of courtly social aesthetics, delicacy (délicatesse) became an aspect of objecthood as well as personhood, a commodified material quality that was diversely cultivated, savored, criticized, and resisted. In an expanding, speculative market animated by artists seeking recognition and newly wealthy collectors seeking cultural legitimacy, “delicacy structured debates over morality, status, and power” (12). 

Wunsch links the creation and reception of materially unstable artworks with conceptual instability in eighteenth-century attitudes toward art. By signifying artistic innovation and a collector’s refined taste, a delicate painting or sculpture could sublimate the stigmatized realities of profit-seeking and acquisitiveness. At the same time, damage-prone artworks could expose artists to allegations of negligence and consumers to allegations of frivolity. Delicacy also involved tensions regarding the temporality of art, sparking debates about the merits of creative spontaneity, fleeting fashion, and immediate gratification versus the creation of monuments and reputations that would endure for generations to come.

Four concise chapters present case studies of fragility in different mediums, each exemplified by a particular artist and together spanning most of the eighteenth century. This approach departs from the tradition of organizing an art history monograph around a single medium, oeuvre, style, or genre.  It also departs from a tendency, in scholarship on eighteenth-century topics, to work on one or the other side of a distinction between rococo and neoclassical art. Wunsch’s elegant, jargon-free writing deftly integrates voices from numerous primary sources and presents complex ideas with a remarkable balance of clarity and nuance.

Chapter one focuses on Antoine Watteau, whose scenes of elite leisure have been widely studied for their stylistic, iconographic, and affective délicatesse. Wunsch turns to the generally overlooked issue of surface darkening and cracking due to Watteau’s liberal application of a substance that made oil paint dry more quickly. Eighteenth-century commentators deplored the damage, but Wunsch questions whether durability mattered to buyers with considerable interest in visual pleasure but little interest in posterity. The discussion makes good use of Watteau’s famous image of a luxury boutique hung with paintings, as well as a hyperbolic piece of art criticism by Étienne La Font de Saint-Yenne, published in 1747, that is often cited as an example of anti-rococo attitudes but rarely analyzed in detail. Taking a fresh look at these familiar sources, Wunsch highlights the increasingly market-oriented perspectives of artists and collectors during the first half of the eighteenth century, a period increasingly invested in “the ephemeral ‘seductions’ of an emerging commercial sphere” (32).

Chapter two turns to the unstable medium of pastel, most notably in portraits by Maurice-Quentin de La Tour created during mid-eighteenth century. The evanescent quality of pastel was compelling for its capacity to suggest an artist’s creative spontaneity as well as their sitter’s worldliness and elusive personal essence. However, the medium also became bound up with anxieties about the fleeting whims of fashion and the plight of artists who supposedly pandered to vain clients. The fragility of pastel became a liability, both materially and conceptually. De La Tour and others struggled and failed to find an effective way of fixing the powdery substance, flattering portraits shed pigment at the slightest vibration, and the medium “lost its allure as an instrument of artistic ambition” (63). Nevertheless, it helped to advance “a new understanding of art, one that emphasized an improvisatory responsiveness to the present moment” (64). 

Chapter three explores an effort to resolve the tension between ephemerality and durability through a medium that is less well documented than those addressed in other chapters. Painting with emulsified wax, a technique known as encaustic, became a subject of experimentation and debate during the 1750s. Advocates imagined it as an exceptionally pure, stable medium with an ancient pedigree, capable of preserving forever the freshness of an artist’s touch. In contrast to pastel’s associations with fashion and vanity, the delicacy of encaustic signified virtue. Yet it was still a market-oriented phenomenon, subject to mockery as well as valorization, and ultimately it proved no more stable than other painting methods. Examples come mainly from the career of Joseph-Marie Vien, including an insightful analysis of a work that thematizes encaustic’s fragility not through actual usage, but rather through an oil painting of Daedalus tenderly applying wax-dipped feathers to the body of his young son, Icarus, who will perish in an attempt to fly. Wunsch also develops an interesting connection between the supposed purity of encaustic and idealizing images of virginal women, a subject favored by artists working in the medium.

Chapter four turns to the popularity of small-scale terracotta sculpture during the late eighteenth century. Focusing on the work of Claude Michel, known as Clodion, Wunsch shows how material delicacy became more pointedly associated with artistic virtuosity. Highly malleable and left unglazed, terracotta yielded “works whose earthen candor provided cover for their embrace of commercial ephemerality” (88). Clodion replicated an effect of originality by hand-finishing and signing sculptures that studio assistants produced in multiples using molded parts.  Wunsch proposes that viewers could appreciate these objects as both sensually pleasing and high-minded by connecting Clodion’s nubile bacchic revelers with Enlightenment ideas about agrarian abundance. The chapter offers a new analysis of Clodion’s model for a state-sponsored monument competition intended to celebrate the new technology of hot air balloons. The cupid-festooned sculpture is usually regarded as a late example of rococo aesthetics, but Wunsch reframes it as an early example of “the artist as commercial showman” (103). Impossible to realize on a monumental scale, Clodion’s design flouted the aims of the royal arts administration and addressed prospective clients directly, using the motif of a fire-fueled balloon to invoke both the heat of the kiln and his own well-stoked imagination. 

These four episodes in ancien régime artmaking were relatively short-lived material trends. But Wunsch suggests that they had long-lasting implications for modern debates about the nature of genius, the place of art in a capitalist economy, and the possibility of aesthetic transcendence.  Tracing the discourses and practices that “transformed delicacy from a commodified extension of courtly sociability to a defining feature of art’s irreducible essence” (9) contributes to a broader understanding of how the eighteenth century “fundamentally altered the relationship between art, time, and value” (7).  The book’s epilogue considers the insistently ephemeral work of the contemporary artist Tino Sehgal, whose exclusive performances leave no material trace. While careful to avoid positing a linear history of transience, Wunsch ends with the provocative claim that the eighteenth-century art world helped to establish “foundations for the commercialization and concomitant temporalization of visual attention” (117).

Another aspect of the book with larger implications concerns the role of illustrations in art historical writing. Apart from conservation reports and studies of iconoclasm, scholarship generally ignores physical damage in artworks, seeks to transcend it through reconstruction, or suppresses it through strategically composed photographs. It is refreshing to see damage illustrated as eloquent visual evidence for arguments about the meanings of materiality. Images of densely fissured oil paintings (21, 23) discolored pastel portraits (60, 62), and cracked terracotta sculptures (87, 90) invite us to ponder our discipline’s investment in the physical integrity of artworks.

The book also invites further investigation of delicacy’s entanglement with colonial exploitation, national identity, and the cultural construction of race. Wunsch acknowledges at several points that the fortunes of many collectors came from colonial commerce, including the trafficking of enslaved people, and he has published elsewhere on how pastellists represented skin color. It would be worth exploring whether discursive formations around delicacy and durability in art resonated with anxieties about the physical fragility of elite, white, European bodies, and the expectation that infinitely available natural resources could be harvested through the labor of disposable human beings. Wunsch argues persuasively that delicacy was regarded as a distinctively French attribute and could counter the taint of commerce in the elite cultural imagination. What more insidious investments did it help to manage?

A Delicate Matter: Art, Fragility, and Consumption in Eighteenth-Century France has much to offer readers interested in the materiality and temporality of art; the history of collecting and art markets; and changing ideas about artistic experimentation and entrepreneurship. It’s a good book to think with—rendered with a delicate touch yet much more than a passing fancy.