Performance materielle: Dufour et le materialisme
Lehmann, Ulrich (2010) Performance materielle: Dufour et le materialisme. In: Joseph Dufour: manufacturier de papier peint. Art & Societe . Presses Universitaires de Rennes, Rennes, France, pp. 237-249. ISBN 9782753512368
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This peer-reviewed essay investigates the connection between changing perceptions of the material world and new forms of manufacture and design. It is a contribution to a book on Joseph Dufour, the wallpaper manufacturer whose career spans the period from the aftermath of the French Revolution to the end of the July Republic and the beginning of industrialisation in France. Dufour's life and work were the subject of an international conference in various towns in Burgundy (Lyon/Mâcon/Tramayes) during the spring of 2009, from which selected papers were edited to make up this publication.
The research presented in my essay combines the technical, material and visual analysis of Dufour's designs from the period between 1800 and 1830 with a discussion of the diverging perception of materialism in France in the eighteenth century. This discussion shows how the typologies of material production, as laid out in Diderot's/d'Alembert's Encyclopédie, changed the understanding of materiality, which, in turn, allows for a new interpretation of artisanal practice after 1790 in France. In the present essay, Dufour's recreation of marble or silk textures on papered walls is not seen as providing a fashionable illusion for his clients but as knowingly playing with the perception of materiality that heralded a new hierarchy in terms of material values and visual tropes.
The understanding of wallpaper thus far has been limited to art-historical discourses. By contextualising design and production through philosophical ideas, this anthology presents a new interpretation of working methods and visual tropes. It is the first that has brought together art-historical as well as socio-cultural analyses of wallpaper. My essay within it contributes to the changing discourse on the decorative arts and material culture in France, supporting the move from orthodox disciplines to more open, cross-disciplinary approaches, akin to Anglo-American cultural studies and material history.
Text in French.
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