Reviews
"Provocative and unsettling. . . . [ The Painter's Touch ] will surely provide the starting point of new thinking about eighteenth-century French art for decades to come." ---Katie Scott, Art History, "Ewa Lajer-Burcharth has written one of the first books that elevates eighteenth-century genre painting to the level of artistic and philosophical complexity that it truly deserves. One could say that it is a lesson in taking the art on its own terms. The result of close to a decade of sustained thought and research, the book is simply stunning. . . . It is Lajer-Burcharth's singular achievement to give us a very different eighteenth century, a 'luminous elsewhere' that's also right here with us. And radically ordinary." ---Kevin Chua, Nonsite, "Ewa Lajer-Burcharth's new work continues her radical and original accounts of eighteenth-century French painting. . . . The theories and ideas invoked belong both to eighteenth-century contexts and to unexpected modern inclusions, such as the psychoanalytic philosophy of Andre´ Green. The reader is involved in a vigorous and at times provocative debate, vital to our understanding of the origins of modernity." ---Richard Hobbs, French Studies: A Quarterly Review, "Brilliantly imaginative and provocative, The Painter's Touch is a hugely impressive book that radically recasts our idea of making selves and things, and how they are interformed, at a critical moment of Western modernity." --Satish Padiyar, author of Chains: David, Canova, and the Fall of the Public Hero in Postrevolutionary France, "Magisterially written . . . this book is a tour de force of interpretative analysis. Beautifully produced and generously illustrated, it offers a thoroughgoing, radical and at times controversial reassessment of the lives and careers of three of the eighteenth century's greatest painters." ---Colin B. Bailey, Burlington Magazine, "Provocative and unsettling . . . . [ The Painter's Touch ] will surely provide the starting point of new thinking about eighteenth-century French art for decades to come." ---Katie Scott, Art History, "In this long-anticipated book, Lajer-Burcharth looks more closely and originally at the very paint of masterpieces by Boucher, Chardin, and Fragonard than anyone may ever have done before. Unexpectedly extending the material turn to the medium we have come to take for granted, oil paint, Lajer-Burcharth convinces us that all great paintings contain deep meanings within their forms. If this book doesn't dispel the aura of frivolity called rococo around three great artists, nothing will." --Anne Higonnet, Barnard College, Columbia University, author of A Museum of One's Own: Private Collecting, Public Gift
