Third Annual Robert Rosenblum Lecture: Bridget Alsdorf
Tuesday, April 23, 6:30pm
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Fifth Avenue at 89th Street
New York City
www.guggenheim.org/publicprograms
During the tumultuous decade of the 1890s in France, public debates about crowd psychology reached a fever pitch. Art played an important, albeit silent, role in these debates, a role too often drowned out by the contentious arguments of social scientists. In the third Annual Robert Rosenblum Lecture, Bridget Alsdorf, Princeton University, examines several works by Pierre Bonnard and Félix Vallotton, two artists who represented the crowd with particular acuity, creativity, and wit, and considers how their visions of the crowd and its behavior were unique. A recurring feature in both of their crowd scenes is the gawker, or badaud, a social type who clung to crowds and the urban spectacles that made them form. Tapping the possibilities of the pictorial media (paintings and prints) in which they worked, Bonnard and Vallotton present the crowd as multidimensional in material and conceptual terms: as a volatile and often disturbing public force, yet one that bears the potential for an ethics of empathy and social responsibility.
Bridget Alsdorf is Assistant Professor and Arthur H. Scribner Bicentennial Preceptor in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University. She is the author of Fellow Men: Fantin-Latour and the Problem of the Group in Nineteenth-Century French Painting (Princeton University Press, 2012), as well as articles on Nicolas Poussin, Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, and Félix Vallotton.
A private reception and viewing of the exhibition Gutai: Splendid Playground immediately follows the lecture.
For tickets visit www.guggenheim.org/publicprograms or call the Box Office at 212 423 3587. A limited number of free student tickets are available with valid ID and advance registration.
The Annual Robert Rosenblum Lecture honors the wide-ranging career of Robert Rosenblum (1927–2006), former Guggenheim Swid Curator of Twentieth-Century Art, and Henry Ittelson Jr. Professor of Modern European Art, New York University, whose celebrated work included projects on Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Norman Rockwell, Andy Warhol, and the depiction of dogs in art. This series is facilitated by donors to the Robert Rosenblum Fund who are gratefully acknowledged for their generosity.
