It is generally acknowledged that the reception of engravers in the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture responded to Colbert’s wish to reproduce and circulate the academicians’ works. However, a more in-depth study of the relationship between the Academy and Parisian engravers provides an alternative viewpoint. This article attempts to show how engravers aspired to join the institution, and how the latter enabled them to produce a theory of engraving inspired by discourses on painting, thus leading them to distinguish between original and reproductive engraving.

DecamerONline, a pop-up project of the USC Levan Institute of the Humanities working group, "Books, Writing and Community," March-June 2020.
Our USC Levan Institute working group, “Books, Writing and Community," is developing a new and we hope useful online presence in this strange and isolating time: a platform called “DECAMERONline” in which members of our community take turns telling stories, as did the original protagonists of Boccaccio’s Decameron, to pass the days while they were in flight from the plague in Trecento Florence. Our stories wouldn’t be bawdy pieces à la Boccaccio, but bits of our writing and thinking that we’d like to continue working on in these coming days and weeks (as we might have produced –and I hope still will-- in our collective “writing times”). Writing from our various perspectives as musicians and musicologists, journalists and librarians, historians, art historians and curators, we will regularly offer texts, together with a posted response and an invitation for online comments, as ways to build shared communal life even as we stay at home.

In the summer of 1943, Taos artist Howard Cook (1901–1980) traveled to the South Pacific to serve as a correspondent in the U.S. Army’s short-lived War Art Unit. During his assignment, Cook produced hundreds of sketches documenting the daily lives of Allied soldiers working there; yet, one group stands out for its subject matter: the artist himself. Collectively titled Self-Portrait in a Foxhole, these works depict Cook taking shelter during an air raid and, together with his writings, offer an invaluable perspective into his interpretation of war through art. This essay explores Cook’s wartime oeuvre by examining the Self-Portrait group’s depiction of vulnerability. Through an expressionistic use of ink and paint and a compositional emphasis on his passivity, Cook offers a personalized interpretation of combat conditions that underscores his sense of exposure. Although his self-representation initially appears distinct from the more assertive soldiers in his other sketches, when viewed together, they collectively demonstrate Cook’s efforts to record a nuanced impression of the war, reflecting a broader tradition of exploring war’s deleterious effects on soldiers. More broadly, Cook’s oeuvre highlights the significance of the War Art Unit and the potential for more scholarship on this initiative.

Through the narrative threads of language, Ekphrasis considers an intimate relationship between site and practice. Navigating both the tracks and pathways of local parkland, and the contours of lines drawn on stone, the text dwells on the analogous acts of inscription in which these worlds converge. Moving between the woodland environment and the lithography studio these territories offer sites of speculation in which the transcriptions of language are born. Glimpsed in this process is an interplay between systems and substrates that simultaneously progress these unfolding lines, whilst resisting and constraining the routes they take. Spilling out from the overflow of these events is the excess of ornament.

Written alongside the making of a series of lithographs, closely observed are the places and events that shaped their materialisation. After twelve years the woodland I live next to has become embedded in my work, depicted in the hand coloured images is aging bark gathered from felled and rotting trees. Also visually hinted at are nineteenth century atlases and anatomical illustrations. The work more specifically references Ogham – a Celtic alphabet named after trees. What remains of this early script is preserved on stones and in manuscripts, no longer surviving are inscriptions carved into wood.