About Face: World War I, Plastic Surgery, and the Modern Beauty Revolution
| Date: | September 20, 2012 |
| Time: | 5:30 PM |
| Location: | Bob & Jean Smith Auditorium-Meadows Museum |
| Cost: | – |
| Description: | David M. Lubin, Charlotte C. Weber Professor of Art, Wake Forest University |
The lecture explores the development of plastic surgery for disfigured soldiers during the First World War and considers the impact of war-related facial trauma on modernist aesthetics and changing standards of female beauty.
Colonial Style and the History of Things in Spanish America
| Date: | October 18, 2012 |
| Time: | 5:30 PM |
| Location: | Bob & Jean Smith Auditorium-Meadows Museum |
| Cost: | – |
| Description: | Dana Leibsohn, Priscilla van der Poel Professor of Art, Smith College |
Early in the early 17th century, Antonio de Morga, a colonial official stationed in Manila, described the vast array of imports that arrived in his city from distant lands. His account offers a sharp critique alongside its inventory. Some objects were lovely, others delectable, still others worthless but entertaining. The geography of de Morga’s gaze was extensive, and his eye was keen: this man knew good things when he saw them. Taking a cue from his account and drawing examples from recent writing on the art of Spanish America, Leibsohn poses the question of what constitutes a “good colonial object.” Her answer turns upon contemporary conceptions of style and materiality, which, she argues, depend upon long-standing and ambivalent relationships with alterity. To identify the foreign yet reign it in—to what extent is this now, or must it be, the dominant mode of historicizing colonial visual culture?
Velazquez: Master and Masterpieces
| Date: | November 15, 2012 |
| Time: | 6:00 PM |
| Location: | Bob & Jean Smith Auditorium-Meadows Museum |
| Cost: | – |
| Description: | Jonathan Brown, Carroll and Milton Petrie Professor of Fine Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University |
Internationally renowned Spanish art scholar Jonathan Brown has paved the way for generations of art historians in the United States and abroad. His numerous publications and exhibitions have revolutionized Hispanic studies by focusing on a contextual approach to art history that, as he explained, “seeks to place a work of art in the historical-ideological frame of reference in which it was created.” Professor Brown has received numerous honors in and outside the U.S, and he was appointed the 2012 director of the prestigious Cátedra at the Museo Nacional del Prado, where he is organizing a series of seminars devoted to the history and historiography of Golden Age Spanish painting.