Iris Moon is Assistant Curator in the European Sculpture and Decorative Arts Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the author of The Architecture of Percier and Fontaine and the Struggle for Sovereignty in Revolutionary France. She teaches at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

“In Luxury After the Terror, Moon demonstrates the fascinating and subtle ways in which the decorative arts were shaped by the contradictory politics of the French Revolution. She measures this influence less in terms of iconography and the new emblems such as Phrygian bonnets and tricolour cockades that came to adorn many surfaces; rather, she reflects on the expressive limits and materiality of different genres of cultural production, from wallpaper and assignat banknotes (including a remarkable prototype stitched on silk), to lime-wood carving and hard-paste porcelain. Her analysis balances a meticulous attention to the physical properties and aesthetics of objects from across the 1790s with a refreshing willingness to speculate about how they articulated collective fantasies and anxieties.”—Tom Stammers Apollo Magazine

Iris Moon is Assistant Curator in the European Sculpture and Decorative Arts Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the author of The Architecture of Percier and Fontaine and the Struggle for Sovereignty in Revolutionary France. She teaches at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

“In Luxury After the Terror, Moon demonstrates the fascinating and subtle ways in which the decorative arts were shaped by the contradictory politics of the French Revolution. She measures this influence less in terms of iconography and the new emblems such as Phrygian bonnets and tricolour cockades that came to adorn many surfaces; rather, she reflects on the expressive limits and materiality of different genres of cultural production, from wallpaper and assignat banknotes (including a remarkable prototype stitched on silk), to lime-wood carving and hard-paste porcelain. Her analysis balances a meticulous attention to the physical properties and aesthetics of objects from across the 1790s with a refreshing willingness to speculate about how they articulated collective fantasies and anxieties.”—Tom Stammers Apollo Magazine

Iris Moon is Assistant Curator in the European Sculpture and Decorative Arts Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the author of The Architecture of Percier and Fontaine and the Struggle for Sovereignty in Revolutionary France. She teaches at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.

“In Luxury After the Terror, Moon demonstrates the fascinating and subtle ways in which the decorative arts were shaped by the contradictory politics of the French Revolution. She measures this influence less in terms of iconography and the new emblems such as Phrygian bonnets and tricolour cockades that came to adorn many surfaces; rather, she reflects on the expressive limits and materiality of different genres of cultural production, from wallpaper and assignat banknotes (including a remarkable prototype stitched on silk), to lime-wood carving and hard-paste porcelain. Her analysis balances a meticulous attention to the physical properties and aesthetics of objects from across the 1790s with a refreshing willingness to speculate about how they articulated collective fantasies and anxieties.”—Tom Stammers Apollo Magazine