What: Bonnard, Vallotton, and the Fine Art of Gawking in Fin-de-Siècle France: 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 this 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 will consider how their visions of the crowd and its behavior were unique. 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.
When: Tuesday, April 23 @ 6:30 pm
Where: Guggenheim
Cost: $12, $8 members. Free student registration has reached capacity; students with valid ID may purchase $5 tickets.
