A Delicate Matter. Art, Fragility, and Consumption in Eighteenth‐Century France. By OliverWunsch. University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press. 2024. 192 p. $99.95 (hb). ISBN 978‐0‐271‐09528‐8.

Oliver Wunsch's thought-provoking book, A Delicate Matter. Art, Fragility, and Consumption in Eighteenth-Century France, explores the Parisian art world from the 1710s to the 1780s through the distinctive notion of ‘delicacy’ (p. 7). But ‘delicacy’ does not mean this book shirks hard truths about art. Two key historical factors allow Wunsch to justify his lens: the first has to do with the extreme fragility of the materials with which some of the most celebrated artists of the time chose to work. Pastel, the powdery medium that defied all fixatives, is most exemplary here. The second factor is related to the cultural ideal of délicatesse — ‘an ineffable sophistication in behavior and conversation’ (p. 9) — that court members embraced during the seventeenth century. But délicatesse was destined to lose its prestige: in the eighteenth century, it extended to financiers and other nouveaux riches, who expressed it through their avid consumption of fragile works of art. What did this new material fragility mean for art as a noble enterprise, when its delicate productions, breaking the promise of permanence, now shared ‘the ephemerality of consumer goods’ (p. 1)? Wunsch partially answers this question by foregrounding the new understanding of art that took hold in the eighteenth century, where material fragility, enhanced by the artist's delicate touch, came to embody art's essence. The other part of his answer relates to the rise of consumer capitalism. Central to Wunsch's account is the fact that from the 1710s, art began to circulate on the market, a fresh force of the art world shaped by the volatile taste of wealthy individuals who cared little for the edifying mission of art. Today, Wunsch remarks (p. 1), the absence of a clear limit between art and commodity persists, in no small measure: the Palace of the Louvre houses a museum, but also a shopping mall. Wunsch's account, which assesses artistic production in light of the eighteenth-century fragmentation of the art world that shook the academic monopoly of the previous century, is anchored in a tradition of social art history. The significant novelty of his study is to consider the role of yet another actor — materials — in defining the value of art. As such, A Delicate Matter is also a contribution to art history's material turn, specifically in its effort to use technical analysis not simply to determine the condition of an object, but to develop an art-historical argument. (Caroline Fowler's 2019 article ‘Technical Art History as Method’, though not referenced by Wunsch, convincingly argues that conservation is in fact an art-historical issue, notwithstanding its scientific nature.) While the book's main goal is to trace the shifting meaning of délicatesse as embodied in fragile artistic materials, it also includes many compelling visual and contextual analyses, where the works of art are not strictly treated as objects, but also as images that engage with the themes of delicacy, fragility, and impermanence from a broad range of perspectives: the rococo aesthetic, fashion and marketing techniques, and the discourse on posterity, among others. Wunsch builds his argument in four chapters, each one focusing on an artist working with a specific medium: Watteau and oil, Maurice Quentin de La Tour and pastel, Vien and encaustic, and Clodion and clay. The chapter on Watteau is the most valuable as it covers the entire semantic spectrum of delicacy up to the 1780s, even though the artist died in 1721. The elegant, melancholic aristocrats featured in Watteau's fêtes galantes effortlessly perform délicatesse, while the artist's subtle application of paint captures the elusive essence of art. At the same time, Watteau's art and career speak to the mundane aspects of delicacy: his technique, involving a disproportionate amount of oil, led to cracks that disfigured the surface of his paintings. Furthermore, his work, consigned to the art dealer Gersaint instead of exhibited at the Academy, appeared to be purchased (that is, treated as a commodity) rather than collected, a more meaningful act considering the aesthetic commitment this entailed (that said, Watteau did have many devoted collectors). La Tour and Vien recognized Watteau's missteps: the first actively sought the patronage of philosophes rather than social climbers, while desperately seeking ways to stabilize his pastels. The second, an academic painter, developed an oil technique involving wax that was meant to imitate the velvety effects of pastel, but without being liable to flimsiness. Vien failed, as did La Tour. Fragility culminated in Clodion's terracotta statuettes, dangerously prone to cracks and breakage, yet celebrated for their exquisite modelling and texturing of clay. Fortunately for Clodion, by the time he occupied the artistic stage, delicacy was fully associated with artistic expression; he could intensify his studio production without the fear of being labelled a commercial artist. The reader is left with the sense that consumption and profit had the last word. If Wunsch initially presents a somewhat Kantian scenario where art's délicatesse overcame its status as ‘commodified extension of courtly sociability’ (p. 9) to become its fundamental attribute, his conclusion, focusing on where art, fragility, and consumption stand today, does not give art a chance. Using the example of the contemporary artist Tino Sehgal, whose performances, he argues, share the monetization of transience that characterized eighteenth-century French art, he writes: ‘Sehgal sees no other choice than to operate within the conditions of a market economy whose long-term impact he implicitly understands to exist beyond his control’ (p. 120). Are there really no alternatives? Let us consider two. The first is statutory: the effort to transform the Louvre into a public museum goes back to the 1770s and materialized in 1793, while the objects in its collection are biens inaliénables and imprescriptibles. As such, they cannot be absorbed by the market. The second is material: no one will contest that pastels are incredibly fragile; however, when they have been properly cared for, their most enticing features — the luminosity reflected by their coloured particles, the impression that the powdery pigments have just been grasped by the paper, and the immediacy of the sitters' smiles — all of this can still be experienced, and resists monetization. For all their fragility, many pastels by La Tour (and other eighteenth-century practitioners) have retained an incomparable freshness that museum visitors have access to. There is no doubt that A Delicate Matter is an important contribution to the material history of eighteenth-century French art, and its focus on major artists, combined with its sharp assessment of the new social and economic dynamics governing the eighteenth-century art world, also makes it an essential reading for non-specialists, who will appreciate its clear and vivid prose. A trip to the museum ought to accompany its reading.