Implements of Impression
The Department of the History of Art and Architecture's 2025/26 Lecture Series will welcome five visiting lecturers to speak about their scholarship through the lens of the theme “implements of impression”. Whether it is a matrix pressed into clay or a framework filled with concrete, implements of impression are the tools and techniques that artists and architects use to make works of art and architecture in multiple. Blocks and molds, print and cast, tracing and rubbing, line and void; rarely are these implements and their impressions singular.
For preservationists, these tools—molds, casts, architectural modules, woodblocks, engraved plates, photographic negatives, silkscreens—are among the most tangible traces of intangible heritage. For scholars of early modern, modern, and contemporary art and architecture, they are the tools of the printmaking or architecture studio and the fine arts foundry. For those invested in the study of the deeper past, these techniques of making are most often absent. They can be reverse engineered from the fragments of excavated workshops and the impressions they left on surviving works of art and architecture.
From Impression to Projection: Making Fantasies in the Chinoiserie designs of the Preissler Workshop
Iris Moon, Associate Curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City
February 24, 2026 6 pm
Free and open to the public
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Consider the work of the Preissler Workshop, Bohemian decorators of porcelain active in the early eighteenth-century, and the ways in which they transformed Chinoiserie from a style in Europe that described rare luxuries imported from Asia, into a domestic European idiom that activated surfaces into sites of fantasy and projection. Building upon the exhibition, Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie (2025), and recent research by Errol and Henry Manners, Moon's lecture will look anew at Chinoiserie by focusing on the Preissler workshop, Hausmalerei or independent decorators active outside of the European factories that painted lavish decorative compositions on readymade porcelain works for courtly consumption. In addition to mythological and religious paintings on glass, the Preissler workshop developed a distinctive idiom that revolved around Chinoiserie: these encompassed densely patterned grotesques, costumed figures, deities, and imaginary landscapes punctured by palm trees.
Derived from print sources, such ornamentation transformed the plain surfaces of Chinese and European porcelain into a skin of invented loci. On the one hand, this talk delves into the practical elements of production, and the tools of the trade: European prints of China that functioned as the “implements of impression” that allowed the transformation of two-dimensional images into the lustrous and curved porcelain surfaces. On the other hand, reading into the subject matter allows us to consider the projections that accompanied the technical aspects of impression, which turned simple objects such as a saucer into a portal elsewhere.
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About Iris Moon
Iris Moon is responsible for European ceramics and glass at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she recently curated the exhibition, Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie (2025). In addition to her curatorial work, she is the author of Melancholy Wedgwood (2024) and Luxury after the Terror (2022), and co-editor with Richard Taws of Time, Media and Visuality in Post-Revolutionary France (2021). She earned her PhD at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has taught at Pratt Institute, Cooper Union, and The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.
This lecture series is made possible through the generous support of:
The Marshall Woods Lectureship Foundation of Fine Arts and The Anita Glass Fund