Lecture: Professor Ruth E. Iskin: "The Janus-Faced Modernity of Toulouse-Lautrec and Jules Chéret" - 24 september 2013, 16:00

Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis: Special Guest Lecture

Professor Ruth E. Iskin: "The Janus-Faced Modernity of Toulouse-Lautrec and Jules Chéret"

24th September: 16:00

Oudemanhuispoort 4–6, Room D1.09, Amsterdam

Late nineteenth-century French art is among the most often studied topics, yet posters, which were one of the most prominent phenomena in the visual culture of the 1890s, have remained on the margins of art history. This lecture proposes that by analyzing posters, one gains new insights into modernity. Focusing on Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901) and Jules Chéret (1836–1932), it demonstrates that these artists represented opposing views of modernity and argues that these constituted divergent responses to industrialization, commodification, mass culture, and urban life—one exposed its melancholy, the other countered it with a dreamland of pleasures.

RUTH E. ISKIN is member of the faculty of Department of the Arts, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Her book, The Poster: Art, Advertising, Design, and Collecting, 1860s-1900s will be published by the University Press of New England in 2014. She is the author of Modern Women and Parisian Consumer Culture in Impressionist Painting, published by Cambridge University Press, 2007, which is being issued as a paperback (2013). She is co-editor of an anthology on modern art published by The Press of the Hebrew University, Magnes Press (in Hebrew). Her articles have been published in the Art Bulletin, Discourse, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and Nineteenth-Century Art World Wide, as well as in exhibition catalogues of European museums and in anthologies. Among these is her “Was there a New Woman in Impressionist Painting?” in Women in Impressionism: From Mythical Feminine to Modern Woman, exhibition catalog, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek Museum, Copenhagen, 2007. Some of her writings have been translated into Chinese, Danish, Czech, and Hebrew. She was a Mellon Senior Fellow at CASVA (Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and a Scholar in residence at INHA (Institut National de l’Histoire de l’Art), Paris.

The lecture is free of charge: all welcome.