New Directions in Art History: Alicia Caticha – The Aestheticization of Sugar in Eighteenth-Century France

Alicia Caticha

The Aestheticization of Sugar in Eighteenth-Century France

By the mid-eighteenth-century, France—by way of its exploitation of colonial holdings in the Caribbean—was the largest exporter of sugar across Europe and had developed a robust refining industry in French cities such as Orléans, Nantes, La Rochelle, and Bordeaux. At the same time, the confiseur (or “candy maker”) developed into its own profession, blurring the lines between art and craft as they transformed the tablescapes of eighteenth-century Europe into lavish French formal gardens. Confiseurs exploited the crystalline whiteness of refined sugar to fashion the main centerpieces of these multi-media surtout de tables, with white statuettes evoking both marble sculpture and novel porcelain figurines. At this same time, an inordinate amount of analytic and scientific efforts were exhausted on the subject of sugar refining as scientists, merchants, and refiners attempted to transform the raw materials of sugar cane into paragons of whiteness that could find credence and value within neo-platonic European moral and aesthetic codes. In this talk, I shall explore how the agricultural cultivation and refining process of sugar facilitated its use as a food worthy of elite editable consumption and as a sculptural material. Through the aestheticization of its whiteness, sugar—and, in particular, sugar sculpture—sheds light on the darker political and social ideologies of the Enlightenment, bearing witness to a society attempting to assert ideas of racial difference and hierarchy at a key moment of colonialist and imperialist expansion.