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Kristel Smentek is an historian of eighteenth-century
European visual culture with specializations in the
history of collecting, the art market, and the European
encounter with Asia. Smentek has received several
fellowships and awards from the Council of Graduate
Schools/UMI, the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris,
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC, and the Center for
Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery,
Washington, DC, among others.
In her first book project, Mariette and the Science of the
Connoisseur in Eighteenth-Century Europe
(Ashgate, Dec. 2014), she analyzes the transformation of
scholarly discourse on art in Enlightenment Europe through
an investigation of the celebrated eighteenth-century
print dealer, book publisher, and connoisseur of art and
antiquities. Her work situates Mariette’s praxis within
the intellectual and social structures of the eighteenth
century and elucidates the historically specific meanings
of collecting and connoisseurship as forms of knowledge
and social distinction. Mariette’s own scholarship and his
ambivalence about the market he helped bring into being
provide the context for an examination of the emergence of
‘art’ and ‘aesthetics’ as categories of intellectual
inquiry and the ideological opposition of both to commerce
in an era of consumer revolution.
In her new book project, Objects of Encounter: China
in Eighteenth-Century France, Smentek analyzes
European engagements with Asian objects in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries and their impact on continental
art and aesthetic theory. This project unites two central
themes of her research: the role of the market in
structuring the reception of art and the transnational
dimensions of eighteenth-century European artistic
production. In an article published in 2003 in the
exhibition catalogue Colorful Impressions: The
Printmaking Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France
(National Gallery of Art, 2003), Smentek analyzed the
marketing of new color printmaking technologies in the
late ancien régime. Another article on the role of fashion
and novelty in the print market of the 1780s was published
in Genre Painting in Eighteenth-Century France
(Studies in the History of Art, 2007).
In her exhibition and catalogue, Rococo Exotic:
French Mounted Porcelains and the Allure of the East (The
Frick Collection, NYC, March-September 2007), she examined
the eighteenth-century French fascination with Asia as
manifested in mounted Chinese porcelains. European
engagement with the visual culture of the Ottoman Empire
is the subject of her article on the eighteenth-century
self-described "Turkish" painter Jean-Étienne Liotard
(1702-1789), published in Ars Orientalis in
2010. Liotard’s work was showcased in an exhibition she
helped organize at the Frick in 2006.
While her research and curatorial work is anchored in the
eighteenth century, Smentek’s teaching bridges the modern
and early modern periods. She has taught courses on
European visual culture from the Renaissance to the
present, on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European
painting, the history and theory of the art museum, and
the Asian-European encounter in the eighteenth century.
OCW Site
Introduction
to Art History
The Art
Museum: History, Theory, Controversy
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