Journée d’étude : « Symposium in Nineteenth-Century Art » (New York, 22 mars 2013)

Tenth Annual Graduate Student Symposium in Nineteenth-Century Art (New York, 22 mars 2013)
New York University, Silver Center, 100 Washington Square East, New York City, March 22, 2013, 10AM to 4:30PM

PROGRAM

10 AM
Welcome
Peter Trippi (President, Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art)

10:15 AM – 11:15 AM
First Morning Session & Discussion
Marilyn Satin Kushner (New-York Historical Society), Moderator

Jeff Richmond-Moll (University of Delaware)
Ideal Companions: Horatio Greenough’s Busts of Christ and Lucifer
A little-studied pair of busts of Christ and Lucifer from the 1840’s by Horatio Greenough (1805-1852) provides a unique example of the artist’s vanguard efforts in ideal sculpture. Jeff Richmond-Moll explores anew the creation and display of these unprecedented works, and unfolds Greenough’s efforts to counteract the busts’ potentially blasphemous connotations as he aimed to present them blamelessly before contemporary Protestant audiences.

Sarah Schaefer (Columbia University)
‘With the Smallest Fragment’: The Archeology of the Doré Bible
In Gustave Doré’s Bible illustrations, viewers witnessed the fragments of archaeological excavations circulating in museums, photographs, and publications, now rendered whole and placed within the familiar context of the Bible. Sarah Schaefer explains that through its accumulation and reconstruction of archaeological fragments, the Doré Bible represents the various ways in which the biblical past operated in nineteenth-century France.

11:15 AM – 12:15 PM
Second Morning Session & Discussion
James Rubin (Stony Brook University), Moderator

Peggy Moorhead Seas (Graduate Center, City University of New York)
‘On Your Head Delacroix!’: The Reception of Renoir
In exploring Renoir’s brushwork or touche, Peggy Moorhead Seas considers the role of Delacroix, both as an influence on the Impressionist painter and as a polarizing force, who, even after his 1863 death, was invoked, for better and for worse, in the critical reception of painterly painters.

Heather Read (Washington University, St. Louis)
Gauguin’s Tupapa’u as ‘Primitive’ Phantasmagoria
Heather Read explains how phantasmagoria informed Paul Gauguin’s Manao Tupapa’u (1892). Using pictorial devices inspired by phantasmagoric spectacle, Gauguin depicted the tupapa’u, or spirit of the dead, as a physically tangible entity to demonstrate how superstition can overwhelm empirical reality and render the believer vulnerable to social or sexual violation.

12:15 PM – 1:30 PM
Lunch Break

1:30 PM – 2:30 PM
First Afternoon Session & Discussion
Patricia Mainardi (New York University), Moderator

Steven Lauritano (Yale University)
Schinkel, Spolia and Caryatids that Travel
Focusing on a sequence of caryatids in designs by Karl Friedrich Schinkel and several of his students, Steven Lauritano explores an emerging conception of the female support as an allegory for architecture in motion – a motif specially equipped to raise questions of appropriation and the role of architectural remnants.

Nina E. Harkrader (Institute of Fine Arts, New York University)
Building for ‘the Other’: The Spatial Embodiment of Poverty in Victorian England, 1850-1914
Victorian poverty theories evolved together with medical models, and veered between charity and control, integration and isolation, moralizing and sympathy. Nina E. Harkrader offers specific examples suggesting that buildings for the poor in Victorian England not only reflected—in form, plan, iconography and spatial organization—these evolving medical-social models but themselves helped construct the social programs they embodied.

3:00 PM – 4:30 PM
Second Afternoon Session & Discussion
Nebahat Avcioglu (Hunter College, CUNY), Moderator

Kelly C. Tang (University of Oxford)
Sex, Drugs, and Reclining Women in 19th-Century Chinese Photography
Kelly C. Tang traces the subject of reclining women in nineteenth-century Chinese photography, a reoccurring motif that has an
extensive history within the history of Western art, but not in the history of Chinese art. The motif is traced within the histories of prostitution and opium in China.

Rashmi Viswanatan (Institute of Fine Arts, New York University)
Selling Science: Packaging the Art of Balthazar Solvyns
In 1796, Balthazar Solvyns published a body of prints depicting the castes of India. He re-issued this body of work twice in subsequent years, with the addition of descriptive text and the advertisement of increasingly didactic functions. Rashmi Viswanatan  historicizes his anthropologizing interventions in terms of changing market trends, to illustrate the complicity of fashion in the formations of his ‘documentary’ art.

Beth Fadeley (University of Georgia)
Object Lessons: Francis Davis Millet and the Politics of Domestic Orientalism
Through a close reading of The Expansionist, an 1899 painting by American artist Francis Davis Millet, Beth Fadeley argues that the domestic interior—as both a living space and a cultural concept—emerged as a crucial site for the negotiation of political values during the age of American imperialism.

The symposium is co-sponsored by the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art (AHNCA) and New York University. This year’s jury is composed of Nebahat Avcolu, Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, Marilyn Satin Kushner, Patricia Mainardi, James Rubin and Peter Trippi. The symposium committee includes Caterina Pierre, Margaret Samu and Mary Frances
Zawadzki.

Special thanks to the Dahesh Museum of Art for the Dahesh Museum of Art Prize for the Best Paper, AHNCA Graduate Student Symposium 2013, as a gift in honor of Mrs. Mervat Zahid on behalf of the Board of Trustees.

The symposium is free and open to the public; reservations are not necessary.
For further information: pm569@nyu.edu.