Savoir-Faire and Art of Living
Edited by Fabienne Fravalo. Essays by Fabienne Fravalo, Caroline Heering, Sophie Mouquin
Following a first volume devoted to secular and sacred objects and sculptures from the twelfth to the eighteenth centuries, this second catalogue in the decorative arts collection of the Fondation Gandur pour l’Art focuses specifically on the art of living. Furniture, caskets, boxes, clocks, lamps, turned ivories and gold and silver cups from the dawn of the Renaissance to the end of the Age of Enlightenment provide a panoply of strictly decorative European creativeness.
Edited by Fabienne Fravalo, curator of the decorative arts collection at the Fondation Gandur pour l’Art, this catalogue is introduced by two essays, written respectively by Sophie Mouquin, lecturer at the University of Lille, and Caroline Heering, professor at the Catholic University of Leuven. It presents the major objects in the collection, studied and analysed by curators and scholars working in German, American, English, Belgian, French and Swiss institutions.
Fabienne Fravalo has a doctorate in art history and has been curator of the decorative arts collection at the Fondation Gandur pour l’Art since 2015. She also edited the collection’s first catalogue in 2020. A specialist in the decorative arts and critical debate around 1900, she is the author of several articles and books, including: Art et Décoration, une revue entre deux siècles (1897-1914). De l’Art nouveau à un art décoratif moderne (2023).
Caroline Heering is Professor of Art History at the Catholic University of Leuven and co-director of GEMCA (Group for Early Modern Cultural Analysis). Her research focuses on seventeenth-century art in the former Southern Netherlands and on the theoretical, historical and formal aspects of decoration in architecture, painting, sculpture, the liturgical arts and Baroque performing arts.
Sophie Mouquin is a university lecturer (Bordeaux from 2004 to 2007, Lille since 2007) and was Director of Studies at the École du Louvre (2011-2016). She specialises in the decorative arts, ornamentation and the history of taste in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and is the author of several books, including Le Style Louis XV (2003) and Les Arts décoratifs en Europe, de la Renaissance à l’Art Déco (2020), and numerous articles, as well as contributing chapters to collective works.
