Manet’s Execution of Maximilian (1867-8) and the Visual/Material Culture of Nineteenth-Century Mexico.
Workshop at the Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles) and the Norton Simon Museum (Pasadena), California, 14-15 jan. 2027
Just as Michel Foucault analyzed Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656) as a historical “mirror,” offering an age’s image of its own epistemological order, so too, Manet’s Execution of Maximillian (1867-8) offers a mirror of an essential epistemological shift in the way that power was constructed, known, distributed, and experienced in the middle of the nineteenth century. If study of Manet’s Mexican history paintings have continued to center Paris as a center of knowledge, experience, power, and attention, this 2-day workshop affords the opportunity to think about Manet’s image of imperial and nationalist power through other lenses and with other objects. The workshop will take place on January 14 & 15, 2027 in Los Angeles and Pasadena in conjunction with an exhibition at the Norton Simon Museum of the National Gallery, London’s version of Manet’s painting alongside a selection of materials related to the French occupation of Mexico in the collection of the Getty Research Institute. We invite abstracts from scholars in Mexico and Latin America, as well as North America and Europe whose research and interest open up new avenues for situating Manet’s painting within the broader histories of art, empire, visual culture, and material culture in the nineteenth century. Topics might include: Mexico before the Battle of Puebla (1862); Mexico under Bonaparte (1862-7); critical historiographies and new historical approaches attending to the prospective and retrospective constructions of Mexican and global power; new histories of photography. Our workshop will expand into an edited volume that critically rethinks the exigencies of this period as well as Manet’s painting from a variety of perspectives. With this aim in mind, we plan to reconvene the volume’s contributors for a final workshop of papers in Summer 2027 in Los Angeles.
Abstracts (300 words), along with title and 3-page C.V., should be submitted to Zirwat Chowdhury (Zi****@**la.edu) by June 19, 2026. Participants will be selected and notified in early July. The workshop will cover participants’ travel to and from Los Angeles, accommodations, and local transportation. While the workshop will be conducted primarily in English, we will be able to provide informal translations of papers from Spanish to English/English to Spanish as well as informal language interpretation between English and Spanish at the event. We also aim to provide resources for a more formal translation of papers from Spanish to English for the publication. We thus welcome abstracts in Spanish as well.
Organizers: Idurre Alonso (Getty Research Institute), Zirwat Chowdhury (UCLA), Hector Reyes (University of Southern California), Emily Talbot (Norton Simon Museum).
