“From Wax to Paper”: The Françoise and Georges Selz Lecture on Eighteenthand Nineteenth-Century French Decorative

Arts and Culture by Charles Kang

By Bob Hewis (MA ’24)

For the 2022 Françoise and Georges Selz Lecture, Bard Graduate Center had the pleasure of welcoming Charles Kang, curator of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century drawings at the Rijksmuseum. His lecture centered a series of portraits of King Louis XIV of France, created by Antoine Benoist, that highlighted the dialogues among different media in the eighteenth century.

As an aspiring curator myself, I found Kang’s visit to BGC to be immensely inspiring. Kang exuded warmth and cheer throughout his visit with us, and he was more than happy to be approached with questions about life as a curator. The day before his lecture, Kang spoke to the BGC community at a Tuesday Lunch event about his work at the Rijksmuseum and a particular curatorial challenge he faced there.

Kang explained that just as he took up his current position, the Rijksmuseum acquired this circa 1780 drawing by Hendrik Pothoven. Pothoven was known to have painted two black servants in the court of the Oranges and what was believed to be a portrait of one of these young men, Willem Frederik Cupido, had already been identified. The tantalizing prospect of naming this portrait as the other, Guan Anthony Sideron, was therefore difficult to resist. Kang, however, faced with the question of what to name this work in the collection revealed a refreshingly self-reflexive approach. Kang did not feel he had enough evidence to comfortably call this a portrait of Sideron, and so he spoke us through his thought process of trying to choose the least charged terms, ultimately landing on the title Portrait of a Servant. In doing so, Kang offered us invaluable insight into the challenges of navigating the many conflicting interests acting on a museum: those of the directors, the donors, the curators, the visitors, and so on. Despite the obvious temptations in making claim to such a grand discovery, Kang made a convincing case for the value of remaining critical of one’s own thinking and of the limits to the arguments one can make with insufficient information. Perhaps what struck me the most was the fact that the Rijksmuseum restricts all of their object labels to seventy words, so it is impossible for Kang to inform the everyday museum visitor of these fascinating and complex debates underpinning the identity of the portrait’s subject. This draws us to the very heart of the question “What is the role of the museum?” and how do the parameters set by institutions help us understand their aims and objectives?

Kang inspired me with his thoughtful insights into what it means to be a curator, the constantly evolving nature of curatorial research, and the care and attention that is required when speaking for people who can no longer speak for themselves.

Kang presented the Selz Lecture as part of the Wednesdays @ BGC series developed by the newly formed department of Public Humanities + Research. Having written his doctoral thesis at Columbia University on the ways in which the use of wax by eighteenth-century French artists and artisans redefined conceptions of fine art, Kang has long been fascinated by the relationship between wax and other media. We can see this unique approach to drawings and portraiture not as static but as ongoing negotiations of technologies of seeing and representing in Kang’s previous projects, including the 2010 exhibition Works as Progress / Works in Progress: Drawing in 18th- and 19th-Century France, which he co-curated at the Williams College Museum of Art.

The entire lecture centered on one particularly striking wax portrait of the Sun King. This relief portrait made for an imposing presence throughout the talk, difficult to get out of one’s mind both for its peculiarity and for its eerie lifelikeness.

Created around 1705, when the king was sixty-eight years old, Benoist’s portrait invites the eye to move over different media—velvet, silk, wax, and even human hair—to create a richly textured impression of the sitter. As Kang began his discussion of this portrayal of the king and of the history of wax as a material used to create likenesses of important individuals, my mind couldn’t help but return again and again to the work of Georges Didi-Huberman.

Writing in 1999, French philosopher and art historian Didi-Huberman meditates on the material properties of wax and the meanings which the material becomes imbued with as a result. He recounts the words of a Sicilian wax-worker who said, “it is marvelous, you can do anything with it . . . It moves.” These simple yet revealing words provide the launching point for Didi-Huberman to explore the unsettling nature of wax, in all the senses of the word. Wax is “unsettling” in its ability to mimic human flesh: “the material of all resemblances…the unstable material par excellence.” It is also unsettling in the way it physically “moves” in its plasticity, but also in the way it “moves” its viewers emotionally. Its verisimilitude can upset, provoke, or excite. In these various ways, wax emerges as a medium of representation that permits a greater sense of human connection with the image.

In Kang’s lecture, this particular wax portrait also “unsettles” by challenging us to think critically about what message such royal portraits communicated. Kang’s central thesis was that to understand the role of this captivating portrait of King Louis XIV in communicating Benoist’s skill and social standing, it cannot be approached on its own but must be contextualized as one example in Benoist’s long career of depicting the monarch in diverse media. By bringing together various depictions of Louis XIV in paper, wax, and bronze by Benoist, Kang inventively argued that the artist was more interested in positioning himself as a chronicler of the king’s life than in fashioning himself as a highly skilled wax portraitist. Perhaps the most compelling piece of evidence that Kang showed us in my opinion was a series of gilt bronze medals produced of Benoist’s portraits of Louis XIV at ten different ages. We should consider the possibility, then, that the power of this portrait was not wrapped up in its materials and techniques but rather in the fact that it illustrated Benoist’s unparalleled access to the king’s likeness at multiple stages across his life.

Bard Graduate Center is grateful for the generous support of the Selz Foundation.