Charlotte Guichard

Charlotte Guichard
Period: 2012-2013
Profession: Art historian Charlotte Guichard is a researcher at the CNRS. A specialist in 18th-century France, she works at the crossroads of art history, socio-cultural history and the social sciences. Through notions of expertise, authenticity and originality, she examines the constitution of art worlds and their values in modern Europe. After working on the emergence of the figure of the amateur in the 18th century, marked by the rise of learned institutions, amateur practices and new forms of sociability between artists and patrons, she is now interested in the materiality of works and objects, and their processes of designation, classification and signature. Her current project focuses on the painter’s signature in eighteenth-century Paris, when, breaking with the long silence of the sources, the signature is constituted as a detail and as a salience in artistic literature. It also began to play a role in the development of the market and attribution practices. An indication of authenticity, a graphic trace, the aura of a name: the painter’s signature is becoming an essential element of the art world. Constructing the signature as an art-historical object, between socio-cultural history and interpretive approach, not only brings to light the history of a detail. The signature-object has a heuristic value, insofar as it forces us to discuss certain central, and rarely questioned, categories in the writing of art history since Vasari: the status of the proper name in the worlds of art, the role of attributive practices in the value of art, the autographic conception of painting. Publications (selection): WORK 1.
Les amateurs d’art à Paris au XVIIIe siècle, Seyssel, Champ Vallon, 2008. DIRECTION D’UN NUMERO DE REVUE 2.
Les Formes de l’expertise artistique en Europe, XIVe-XVIIIe siècles, for
Revue de Synthèse, 2011, n°132-1. REVUES A COMITE DE LECTURE 1. “Taste Communities. The Rise of the Amateur in Eighteenth-Century Paris”,
Eighteenth-Century
Studies, vol. 45, no. 4, Summer 2012, pp. 519-547. 2. “The market at the heart of museum invention? Jean-Baptiste-Pierre Lebrun et le Louvre (1792- 1802)”,
Revue de synthèse, no. 2011-1, pp. 93-118. 3 “Les Formes de l’expertise artistique en Europe”, general introduction,
Revue de Synthèse, n°2011-1, p.1-13. 4 “Les savoirs à l’épreuve. Autour de l’expertise. Conclusions de la journée d’études doctorales”,
Hypothèses. Travaux de l’École doctorale de Paris 1, Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 2011, p. 155-161. 5 “Du ‘nouveau connoisseurship’ à l’histoire de l’art. Original et autographie en peinture”,
Annales. Histoire, Sciences sociales, n°6- 2010, p. 1387-1402. 6. With F. Elsig, P. Parshall, P. Sénéchal, “De la pertinence du connoisseurship face aux nouvelles méthodes”,
Perspective. La Revue de l’INHA, 2009-3, p. 344-356. 7. “La signature dans le tableau aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles: identité, réputation et marché de l’art”,
Sociétés et représentations, May-June 2008, no. 25, special issue “Ce que signer veut dire”, pp. 49-79. 8 “Les livres à dessiner à l’usage des amateurs à Paris au XVIIIe siècle”,
Revue de l’Art, no. 143, 2004-1, pp. 49-58. 9. “Arts libéraux et arts libres à Paris au XVIIIe siècle : peintres et sculpteurs entre corporation et Académie royale”,
Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, n°49-3, July-Sept. 2002, p. 54-68.