Carole Blumenfeld

Carole Blumenfeld
Period: 2011-2012
Profession: Art historian Carole Blumenfeld was born in 1983. With a doctorate in art history, she has taught at the Université de Provence (Aix-en-Provence), the Université de Lille 3 and the Ecole du Louvre. Her thesis was on “Marguerite Gérard and genre painting from the late 1770s to the 1820s”. She was able to complete her thesis thanks to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s SummerInternshipProgramm, the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art Fellowship, where she spent four years on the French Getty Provenance Index program, the Getty Research Library Grant, and the Fondation Napoléon Fellowship. She assisted Philippe Costamagna in curating the exhibition
Le Cardinal Fesch et l’art de son temps at the Musée Fesch in Ajaccio (2007), was scientific curator of the exhibition
Marguerite Gérard, artiste en 1789 at the Musée Cognacq-Jay in Paris (2009), and will curate
Petits théâtres de l’intime. La peinture de genre de Marie-Antoinette à Marie-Caroline de Berry at the Musée des Augustins in Toulouse (2011-2012). Her research focuses on genre painting, the Parisian art market of the 1780s, and the sociability of painters and artists at the Opéra Comique in the late 18th century. She is currently publishing the correspondence exchanged by the Drolling family during Michel-Martin Drolling’s stay at the Villa Medici (1811-1816). In recent years, she has been focusing on the role played by color merchants in the stylistic evolution of painters at the end of the eighteenth century. Appointed to a twelve-month residency at the Académie de France in Rome, her project is entitled “Aux sources d’une éloquence. Les pensionnaires de l’Académie de France à Rome et l’économie romaine de la couleur (1756-1816)”, and deals with the plastic and technical experience of French painters from the second half of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth. Painters’ fascination and infatuation with Italian colors played a decisive role as they sought their own path and palette, a major component of their artistic personality. The desire and effort for authenticity, for a closer relationship with the “idea of nature”, but also for the search for the picturesque, all came through this work on color.