PaintOdor · “Intoxicated by turpentine”: An Olfactory History of Painting (1750-1939)

“Intoxicated by turpentine”: An Olfactory History of Painting (1750-1939)

The recent pandemic has greatly affected researchers, but the symptoms of anosmia associated with Covid-19 have also reminded us that the sense of smell is at the heart of many social issues, giving new momentum to the already expanding smell studies. The limited access to museums also reminded us that admiring pieces of art could not be achieved satisfactorily through digital technology alone and highlighted the multi-sensory nature of the museum experience. The context of the pandemic made the Paintodor project more difficult to carry out on the one hand, but it also gave it a different dimension, revealing that the sense of smell, which is usually excluded from digital technologies, had been of major importance not only in the material history of art, but also in the acquisition of knowledge and in artisanal practices. As planned, the objective of the research project, unveiling the hidden olfactory history of painting will be achieved through two main outcomes : a book on the smell of paint (1750-1950) whose final manuscript will be submitted in April as well as a museum device reconstructing the odor of a painter's studio in the early nineteenth century which will be inaugurated in November 2022. By questioning the numerous allusions to the smell of paint present in a very broad range of historical sources from the second half of the18th century to the first half of the 20th century, this project confirmed the hypotheses formulated in the project application, but also raised many important issues so that the book in progress includes seven more chapters than originally planned. Among the elements that this research has brought to light, we could first point out of all the way in which the question of the smell of painting subverts the hierarchies of knowledge about art. For example, at the time of the rediscovery of the Flemish primitives, mentions of the smell of paint are very common in accounts of the invention of oil painting. Although the anecdote that the smell of paint had uncovered the innovation of turpentine was present as early as Vasari's classical text in the sixteenth century, by the nineteenth century the smell of paint was no longer mentioned in scholarly works, while popular works and fiction took up the motif. Similarly, an analysis of medical discourse reveals that doctors have based hierarchies between artists, craftsmen and workers on the extent to which they were affected by the smell of paint. The last chapter of the book will present a historiographical reflection on the reconstitution of the smell of a painter's studio by the Fine-Arts Museum of Lyon, which constitutes the second outcome of this project. This device will both shed light on the history of the material culture of painting through its olfactory dimension (i.e., Paintodor) to a wide audience and enhance an important element of the Lyon Museum of Fine Arts: the color cabinet of the painter Fleury Richard, which contains 113 envelopes of pigments as well as utensils for preparing oil colors dating from the time when this practice disappeared in favor of industrially produced colors.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union