"Courbet Now"
Linda Nochlin, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
23 October 2008; 6:00pm; Rubloff Auditorium, Art Institute of Chicago
abstract
Why is the way we interpret and understand Courbet today different from the way we did in 1977, the year of the last big Courbet retrospective? Partly it is because our notions about art have changed, but more specifically, it is because the art of today makes us see the art of the past with different eyes, think about it with different minds. A “post-modernist” Courbet intrigues Professor Linda Nochlin rather than a pre-modernist one. It is not the line from Courbet’s waves to Jackson Pollock’s abstractions that she wants to follow—a false trail if ever there was one! — but that leading from John Currin’s diggers back to Courbet’s stonebreakers. Courbet reacted to, or against, his own past. He created his own revolution about what painting could or could not do, how painting could be involved with the world. This involved knocking over some of the icons of the recent past, as he was accused of doing quite literally in the case of the toppling of the Vendome Column. Courbet’s example is as important now as it was then, in terms of formal achievement and political bravado. His work needs to be read from a new perspective.
bio
Dr. Linda Nochlin is currently the Lila Acheson Wallace Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts/New York University, where she earned her doctorate in Art History in 1963. Nochlin also taught at Yale University, the University Center of the City University of New York and at Vassar College. She is known widely for her work on Courbet and her ground-breaking 1971 article, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?", which is considered the advent of feminist art history and criticism. Nochlin has written numerous books and articles on the social and political history of art, such as Representing Women, The Body in Pieces, Women, Art, and Power, and The Politics of Vision. She co-curated the exhibition “Global Feminisms” at the Brooklyn Museum in 2007, the year in which her book, Courbet was published. Nochlin has been the recipient of numerous honors, including the Frank Jewett Mather Prize for Critical Writing and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and an NEH fellowship, among others. “Self and History: A Symposium in Honor of Linda Nochlin” was presented at New York University in April of 1999 to acknowledge her contributions to her students and to modern art history. She is also a Contributing Editor of Art in America.
The Norma U. Lifton Memorial Lecture is hosted annually by the Department of Art History, Theory + Criticism in commemoration of Norma Lifton, a dedicated and long-time member of the Art History faculty.
Chicago Consortium for Art History
Works-in-progress seminar series 2008-2009
Futures & Ruins in Eighteeenth-Century Paris
Nina Dubin
Assistant Professor, University of Illinois Chicago
respondent: David Van Zanten, Professor, Northwestern University
Thursday, 6 November 2008, 6-8pm
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Sullivan Galleries, 33 S. State St., 7th Floor
Each event takes the form of a discussion of a text distributed to participants in advance. Seminars are open to faculty and graduate students in Art History. RSVP to dgetsy@saic.edu to reserve a place and obtain the text to be discussed.
The Chicago Consortium for Art History is composed of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Newberry Library, Northwestern University, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the University of Chicago, and the University of Illinois Chicago. Faculty and graduate students from non-affiliated institutions are also welcome to attend.
This event is sponsored by the Goldabelle McComb Finn Chair Fund, Dept. of Art History, Theory + Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
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