Department of Art History

Yves Porter, Aix-Marseille Université

Jeremy Melius, Tufts University, will give a lecture that revisits the relationship between the Victorian critic John Ruskin and his disciple and translator Marcel Proust in order to rethink key aspects of Ruskin’s investment in the durational intensity of works of art.

In a volume dedicated to the Wars of the Roses, historian Colin Richmond opens his essay on the visual arts with the delightfully cavalier dismissal: “the badness of English art, as well as the Englishness of English art, in the fifteenth century is a theme, a text rather than a sub-text of my contribution.” Historians of medieval art will be familiar with this attitude, one that has relegated England to the periphery of our field. Yet aesthetic dissatisfaction accounts only partially for this neglect.

Event Recording

Please join us on Wednesday 18 October at 4:30pm in CWAC 156, for the second meeting of the Research in Art and Visual Evidence (RAVE) workshop for the 2017-2018 academic year. 

Serge Guilbaut is a leading Marxist art historian of postwar art in the United States and Europe. He is Professor Emeritus of art history at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Guilbaut’s book How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom and the Cold War, first published by the University of Chicago Press in 1983, remains one of the most important and canonical texts on 20th century art.

Stephen Houston, Dupee Family Professor, Brown University, will speak on Maya writing, a hieroglyphic system like ancient Egyptian, that existed at the interface between text and image.  His talk explores the carried navigations in that zone of turbulence, ranging from aesthetic judgements to the conviction that writing might literally live, its shapes and spellings erupting into active bodies. At times playful, often serious-minded, Maya writing offers enduring insights into the cultural and philosophical implications of graphic representation. 

Please join us one week from today, on Wednesday 11 October at 4:30pm in CWAC 156, for the first meeting of the Research in Art and Visual Evidence (RAVE) workshop for the 2017-2018 academic year.