Bard Graduate Center
38 West 86th StreetUnpacking the Choiseul Box
The Iris Foundation Awards Lecture by Meredith Martin (NYU)
Tuesday, April 22, 2025
38 West 86th Street, Lecture Hall
gallery@bgc.bard.edu
$15 General | $12 Seniors | Free for people associated with a college or university, people with museum ID, people with disabilities and caregivers, and BGC members
This interactive lecture will explore the famous Choiseul snuffbox, a tiny but extraordinary monument of the eighteenth century that features views of the Parisian mansion and art collection of the Duc de Choiseul, foreign minister to Louis XV. The snuffbox, or tabatière, became a cause célèbre in France in 2023 when it was offered for sale to the tune of nearly four million euros. The Louvre launched a massive public campaign to raise funds to acquire the box and published a scholarly tome dedicated to giving readers “all the keys you still need to unlock the secrets of this highly prized tabatière.” And yet in all the recent literature around this object, no mention has been made of its deep, unsettling connections to colonialism and enslavement at the level of material, iconography, patronage, and use. This talk will seek to “unpack” this box and will invite attendees to confront its materiality and multisensory dimensions through digital reconstructions produced in collaboration with Bard Graduate Center’s digital humanities team.
Meredith Martin is a professor of art history at New York University and a founding editor of Journal18. A specialist in early modern French art and empire, she is the coauthor (with Gillian Weiss) of the prizewinning book The Sun King at Sea: Maritime Art and Galley Slavery in Louis XIV’s France (Getty, 2022; French edition 2022), which is related to an exhibition that she and Dr. Weiss are cocurating for the Institut du monde arabe in Paris. Martin is also the author of Dairy Queens: The Politics of Pastoral Architecture from Catherine de’ Medici to Marie-Antoinette (Harvard, 2011), and a coauthor of Meltdown: Picturing the World’s First Bubble Economy (2020), which is related to an exhibition she cocurated for the New York Public Library. Together with Phil Chan, Martin reimagined and restaged a lost French ballet from 1739 known as the Ballet des Porcelaines, which premiered at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2021 and was performed throughout the US and Europe in 2022. She is currently working on a multimedia collaborative project called Colonial Networks, which explores links between Haiti/Saint-Domingue and the Paris art world during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
28th Annual Iris Foundation Awards
In 1997 Susan Weber created the Iris Foundation Awards to recognize scholars, patrons, and professionals who have made outstanding contributions to the field of decorative arts, design history, and material culture. Meredith Martin will receive the Iris Award for Outstanding Mid-Career Scholar on April 23. Proceeds benefit the Bard Graduate Center Scholarship Fund. To find out more about the Iris Foundation Awards, visit us online or call 212 501 3071.
Image: Louis-Nicolas van Blarenberghe (miniaturist; 1716–94) and Louis Roucel (goldsmith; ca. 1756–1787), tabatière Choiseul (Choiseul snuffbox), ca. 1770/71. Gouache on vellum, assembled in an architectural gold setting, 8 × 6 × 2.4 cm.
Tue, Apr 22, 2025 6:00 PM - 7:30 PM
Bard Graduate Center
38 West 86th Street
Bard Graduate Center is devoted to the study of decorative arts, design history, and material culture through research, advanced degrees, exhibitions, publications, and events.
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