COUR: The Grotesque in Late Nineteenth-Century European Art

'The Grotesque in Late Nineteenth-Century European Art'
Van Gogh Museum (Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
3-8 June 2018

This year’s Van Gogh Museum Visiting Fellow in the History of Nineteenth-Century Art is Frances Connelly, Professor of Art History at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Her research focus is modern European art, with a particular interest in the intersection of art history and anthropology. She has published two books on the grotesque: The Grotesque in Western Art and Culture: The Image at Play (2012) and Modern Art and the Grotesque (2003), as well as essays for exhibitions on this topic for the Museo Picasso Málaga and the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt and the Neue Galerie, New York. Other publications focus on the phenomenon of primitivism, including The Sleep of Reason: Primitivism in Modern European Art and Aesthetics, 1725-1907 (1995). Her research has been supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Mellon Foundation.

The seminar will consist of three sessions of three hours each, plus an afternoon excursion to the exhibition Van Gogh and Japan. A public introductory lecture will take place at the Van Gogh Museum on Sunday, 3 June. The seminar meetings will take place at the Van Gogh Museum (Monday and Wednesday from 10 am to 1 pm, and Friday from 1-4 pm.)

Franz von Stuck, Dissonanz (detail), 1910

The Grotesque in Late Nineteenth-Century European Art
The grotesque plays an outsized role in modern and contemporary art, and finds especially fertile ground in the artistic movements of the late nineteenth century. The monstrous, uncanny, abject, aberrant: all find new expression in the fin-de-siècle. To be sure, the expressive range in this period is striking, easily demonstrated by comparing the hybrid creatures imagined by Redon with those of Böcklin, the distorted bodies of Rodin with those of Beardsley, or the cadaverous crowds of Munch with the satirical masquerades of Ensor. The enthusiastic assimilation of Japanese imagery spurred even bolder experimentation in the realm of the grotesque for many artists, including van Gogh. This seminar will explore the workings of the grotesque in this unsettled and unsettling period and explore why it is a particularly powerful means to grapple with its social upheavals and cultural shifts

All interested are welcome to attend. For more info, please keep an eye out for updates on the website of the Van Gogh Museum. To register, you may contact vantilborgh(at)vangoghmuseum.nl