The Institute of Fine Arts and The Frick Collection Symposium on the History of Art

For over a century, scholars have debated the existence of theater in Byzantium. Most scholars have searched for evidence of staged dramas or newly written plays in Byzantine to no avail. Their search for theater in the Classical-fifth-century-BCE-Athenian sense of the institution is indeed in vain. However, that is not to say that Byzantium had no theater at all. Theater played a large role in the medieval Byzantine school curriculum, treatises were written on the great Tragedians and Comedians, and Euripidean scenes were popularly depicted in medieval manuscripts. Indeed, the cultural memory of theater, preserved in physical spaces of theatrical performance, school curricula, and art, was present in many aspects of Byzantine culture and society. In this paper, which is part of my larger dissertation project, I query how the medieval Byzantine elite expressed the reverberations of ancient theater in their visual culture. I present part of the corpus of medieval Byzantine luxury objects which draw from theatrical iconography. These objects existed within the private sphere of the elites, most (if not all) of whom were educated in the Classical tradition. I argue that the elites who commissioned and displayed these objects did so in part to perform their societal role as the pepaideumenos (πεπαιδευμένος; the educated), who alone perpetuated the Empire’s Classical heritage. Thus, I demonstrate that theater—just like other Roman institutions such as bathing, circus games, imperial administration, and paideia (education)—was preserved and transformed as part of the Byzantine Empire’s conscious cultivation of its continuous romanitas, or Roman identity.

The phenomenon of artistic archaism, of images and objects crafted to evoke a sense of the past, both subverts and endorses notions of historical change. Archaistic objects deny monolinear models of chronological progression, but they simultaneously reveal that people in the past held connections between certain visual-material traits and particular temporal situations. In the study of ancient Greek art, as in other fields, the academic writing dedicated to this issue has located the motivations for archaism in the cultural tides of stylistic movements and in the operation of socio-political institutions.

Here I outline a different approach, foregrounding the makers and users of ancient objects and examining their preference for archaistic production from the perspective of their creations’ visual subjects and functional purposes. My study focuses on a large ceramic vessel deposited in a grave during the final decades of the fifth century BCE and now located in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MMA 57.11.4), a hitherto unsung object decorated in a painting technique that, at the time of its creation, had not been practiced for approximately one hundred years. Its maker’s choice to pursue archaism situated the mythological scenes adorning this vessel in the internal narrative past, and, due to their specific content, affected a temporal construction of subsequent mythological events that perpetually held the memory of the person buried with the vessel in the present, eternally commemorating and lamenting their death.

My conclusions demonstrate that the artistic manipulation of ideas of temporal change was not always guided by cultural fashions and political movements. It was, instead, a creative tactic available for the execution of more complex and intimate artistic purposes related to the needs arising from contexts of production and use, enabling ancient people to sustain and valorize the past in the living present.

In July 1930, Paris Vogue’s leading photographer, George Hoyningen-Huene, posed a fashion model beside a plaster cast of a fourth-century BCE sculpture of Diana. Over the next five years, he created dozens of photographs that paired his sitters with ancient Greek sculpture, thus marrying the ancient past to fashion’s ephemeral present. This talk asks why Hoyningen-Huene introduced ancient sculpture into the photo studio and reconstructs the meanings that Classical Greece conveyed to audiences of the fashion press. In addition to signaling elite cultural tastes and marketing an aspirational, upper-class lifestyle, Hoyningen-Huene’s ancient Greek sculptures sold a transgressive vision of modern femininity by constructing women as frigid and virile, inspiring both awe and fear. These qualities come into sharper focus when his fashion photographs are considered in relation to his private work, especially his male nudes, as well as contemporaneous representations of the cinematic femme fatale. His fashion illustrations also recall his photographs of public sculpture in fascist Rome, particularly the marble male athletes adorning the Foro Mussolini. While the hardness, whiteness, and monumentality of Hoyningen-Huene’s plaster casts evokes the fascist iconography of the Foro, his presentation of cosmopolitan and androgynous womanhood was nonetheless antithetical to the fascist ideals of traditional femininity promoted by the Italian state. This paradox underscores the difficulty of assigning a singular, unambiguous politics to Hoyningen-Huene’s plaster casts.

Even though Hoyningen-Huene was one of the leading fashion photographers of the twentieth century, this body of work has escaped critical analysis. While his references to ancient Greece have often been dismissed as evacuating meaning in the service of product marketing, this talk demonstrates how, on the contrary, his fashion photographs constructed complex identities and negotiated competing social and political values.

This paper addresses the capacity of Surrealist art to confront fascist ideology and violence in Prague under Nazi Germany’s occupation, with a focus on the experimental photobook From the Strongholds of Sleep (1940) by Toyen (née Marie Čermínová, 1902–1980) and Jindřich Heisler (1914–1953). Toyen was a leading artist of the Czechoslovak Surrealist Group since its founding in 1934. Heisler joined the group as a young poet in 1938, first contributing to Surrealism at a time when the movement was condemned by the Nazi-imposed regime as “degenerate art” and banned. Despite grave risks, Toyen and Heisler continued their artistic collaboration illegally, in projects interweaving the visual arts and poetry. Their resilience became even more pronounced after Heisler, in 1941, defied a deportation order for Jewish citizens and lived in hiding with Toyen until the end of the war.

From the Strongholds of Sleep is a testament to Toyen and Heisler’s artistic partnership and their commitment to artistic resistance in the face of political oppression. As implied by its title, the limited-edition photobook delves into the deepest realms of the sleeping mind, presenting it as a fortified refuge and base for attack. Through a series of photographic “realized poems,” the artists render tangible oneiric landscapes. Each image features a poetic text by Heisler, situated within staged environments composed of small three-dimensional elements, including figures, toys, and other everyday objects. My analysis reveals how the publication stages conflict at material, thematic, and conceptual levels. It draws a link between the private, intimate scale of the photobook and the large-scale war unfolding in the public realm. This paper argues that to counter the forces of fascism, Toyen and Heisler turned to strategies of collaborative practice, interdisciplinarity, and intermediality to develop a new aesthetic model of resistance at a time when public dissent was no longer possible.

This presentation, which is part of my dissertation chapter on photographer Michael Schmidt, focuses on his 1982 photobook, Benachteiligt (“Disadvantaged”) commissioned by Ulf Fink, West Berlin’s Senator for Health, Social Affairs, and Family. This slim volume follows four socially “disadvantaged” people interspersed with a written text on disability by journalist Ernst Klee. Klee writes “disability is always experienced through the evaluation of the environment,” conveying to the disabled person that they should perceive themselves as a disruption to social order. This relationship between the disabled and their environments forms the core of each of Benachteiligt’s four case studies. The protagonists are limited by and adapt to a social world not designed to be navigated by them. Through a close visual analysis, I contend that Schmidt challenges prevailing notions of the disabled. Instead of relegating his subjects to the designated roles of the helpless, uncapable, and dependent, his photographs confront the reification of environments and social forms that continually erase them as actors in the public sphere.

I trace Schmidt’s evolving engagement in photography’s seriality, explore how social reproduction manifests itself in forms of representation, and interrogate visuality’s ability to affirm and challenge existing habits of perception. Throughout the 1970s and 80s, Michael Schmidt garnered numerous state commissions to document social groups. Schmidt’s Benachteiligt series, a reflection of West Germany’s changing social make-up in that period, captures the expanding influence of politics into once-excluded spaces, aligning with the interests of previously marginalized individuals. Although the state commission of Benachteiligt reflects its desire to capitalize from and promote its role in the changing social tides of a “new cultural politics,” I argue that Schmidt’s visual narrative transcends this, gesturing towards the ways these social and cultural experiences are structured and reproduced.

This paper examines how artists approach postcolonial memory and trauma in disruptive and repressed forms through the lens of Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s works: Passages Paysages (video installation, 1978) and Dictée (semi-autobiography, 1982).

Celebrated for its fragmented style which resists the reification of its colonized subjects, Dictée has drawn critical attention in the field of Asian American studies since the 1990s. Scholars believe that Cha repudiates representational and documentary methods to trace personal memory, sidestepping the authenticity of the otherized object. Instead of replicating the images of home and origin, Cha presents discordant, displaced, decontextualized, and fragmented memories and languages.

Building upon this reception, this paper addresses the dialectic relationship among the aesthetic form, medium, and political content in Dictée. Focusing on Cha’s video installation Passages Paysages, I investigate how exiled memory and traumatic experience are repressed and represented through the mechanism of screen memory, in which trivial and contingent events replace a significant impression. Juxtaposing French text (often misspelled) with uncaptioned images throughout the film, Cha depicts not only a subject who cannot “dictate” well but also the ruptures between surface impressions and memories to be repressed. In both the spoken and screened language, abundant alliteration, homonyms, and polysemic words stress the materiality of language as well as emancipate the text from singular semiotic readings. The resultant misspelled texts also create a barrier to legible decipherment, representing the repressed and inaccessible trauma. In addition, the metonymies—of image and memory, screen and dream, and landscape and homeland—untether the imagery’s contents from their roots.

In her manipulations of syntax, photography, and film structure, I argue that Cha deters traumatic and nostalgic memory from direct recollection and creates a self-referential metaphorical structure that conceals colonial and authoritative violence.

Contemporary Indigenous artists have long engaged with histories of (mis)representation to confront ongoing legacies of settler colonialism and reclaim the right to tell their ancestors’ stories. Artists such as Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation), Meryl McMaster (nêhiyaw (Plains Cree), Métis, British and Dutch ancestry), and Kent Monkman (Cree, member of the Fisher River Cree Nation) have appropriated, subverted, and undermined George Catlin’s work. In the 1830s, the settler artist had travelled to the American West to document, through painting, writing, and collecting, Native communities he perceived to be “vanishing.” He assembled his painted portraits, scenes, and landscapes, and collected “Indian Curiosities” in his Indian Gallery to which he added publications and performances. Catlin not only fabricated an image of Indigenous North American life but also exhibited fabricated supposedly Native objects to lend authority to his displays creating a circular process of authentication.

In this presentation, I will first provide a brief overview of the Indian Gallery and the role his fabricated objects played in it. Then, I analyze how these three artists critically re-mediate Catlin’s work. Quick-to-See-Smith addresses the re-production, re-citation, and circulation of Indian Gallery. McMaster remediates Catlin portraits through photography to establish relations to ancestors highlighting lineage, continuity, and survival. Monkman working in all of Catlin's media subverts his narrative of vanishing Indigenous life and authenticity; he focuses on recovering those absent from Catlin’s representation based on racist and homophobic ideologies.

Their artistic practice, media, and the materiality of their works reveal the sophisticated and complex responses each artist has to Catlin. Centering the artists’ works and voices, I argue that their media choices are integral in their deconstruction of Catlin’s legacies beyond the visual.

Commissioned in 1978 by the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, famed fashion and celebrity photographer Richard Avedon had five years to prepare for what would become the 1985 portrait exhibition In the American West. From 1979 to 1984, Avedon, his researcher, and his cadre of assistants traversed seventeen states in search of the faces and characters with which he sought to populate his own vision of the American West. Met with fanfare and criticism, both, the exhibition drew large crowds and national press coverage in which Avedon was continuously credited as the sole artist-author-genius responsible. However, this paper argues for a more complex reading of authorship that acknowledges the historical moment from which the project was born; the numerous personalities, stakes, and institutions involved in the commission; and the contributions and agency not just of Avedon’s assistants and researcher, but of his sitters as well.

I establish the Studio Museum in Harlem’s (2018-19) exhibition entitled, Black Refractions as the inciting incident for investigating refraction as a theoretical framework that encompasses the acts/methodologies of ‘looking’, and ‘gazing’ as ways of seeing. My topic is a space that investigates refraction as it is situated in physics and places them in conjunction with art historical methodological practice. Applying refraction to Art History, I ask what it means to conceptualize blackness and refraction as it articulates different types of representational modalities. It investigates what knowledge of blackness does to an understanding of the function of Black art, and how refraction articulates those relationships.

The dissertation looks at the concept of refraction as a framework that looks at what an image can do. It creates space to think on how images reveal complex knowledge systems and structures of power, and how visual culture is often situated in a space of tension where questions of representation converge with issues of interest. In my thesis, refraction in physics is used as a footing to think about refraction in a social and cultural context. Using this dissertation as a space to play with theories on witnessing, perception, and ways of seeing, I reference the exhibition Black Refractions as a springboard of reference and inspiration to investigate and dissect visuality. With the emergence of anticolonial visions such as Black visuality, refraction as I apply it, attempts to articulate questions of representation, perception, spectatorship, and Black culture. As a result, refraction becomes a method to negotiate more nuanced ways to read and theorize visuality that seeks to affect society and behavior towards Black subjects in visual culture.

The image of St. Sebastian witnessed a transformation in the seventeenth century. Attention turned from the wounded saint to his healers, the ‘Pious Women’ of late-medieval hagiography. The work of St. Irene and an Unnamed Attendant, who tended to Sebastian and restored him to health, assumed new centrality in a plague-beleaguered Europe. The scene of tending became a touchstone across religious and geographic divides. One painter, however, depicted the subject more often than any other artist. José (Jusepe) de Ribera returned to Sebastian’s healers throughout his life. This talk centers on Ribera’s 1631 Saint Sebastian Tended by the Pious Women (Bilbao Fine Arts Museum). Produced in Naples, acquired by Philip IV, and displayed in the Royal Monastery of El Escorial, the canvas prompts an engagement with the work of tending in pictorial, social, and material terms.

In the earliest description of the canvas in 1667, Francisco de los Santos likened the grasp of the piercing arrow to the steadying of a maulstick. Following this comparison, I first consider the iconography of tending in relation to artistic practice: a precision of touch enabled by the instrument indexing Ribera’s approach to oil painting. Second, I turn to the social history of medicine in Naples, illuminating the origins of the ‘Care-Giving Women’ (‘Donne Caritative’) in the city’s largest hospital through new archival research. Here, I argue, the work of historical caregivers intersects the painter’s allegorical figurations. Third, I consider the relation between tending to a body and tending to a body of art. As Sebastian’s wounded body became a stand-in for the damaged canvas, the techniques of his care came to theorize the restoration of the artwork itself. Such a painting (as body) could assert its liability to injury—as well as its capacity, under certain conditions, for repair.

The abundance of blue flowers growing in between fronds of wheat in Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s famous painting of the harvest at the Metropolitan Museum of Art have not garnered much attention in previous scholarship on this canonical painting. These plants, known as “cornflowers” (Centaurea cyanus), have been growing in fields of cultivated grain in Northern Europe since the Iron Age. They are so deeply co-evolved with the agricultural landscapes of human sustenance in Europe, that changes in agricultural practices in the last century have left this species at risk of extinction in its native habitat. In this essay, I interrogate representations of the cornflower Bruegel’s landscape painting at the Met and its late medieval antecedents, in order to excavate the cornflower’s forgotten cultural significance in pre-modern Europe. I focus on depictions of the collection of cornflowers from fields of wheat in fifteenth-century French and Flemish illuminated calendars and herbals, as well as illusionistic depictions of plucked cornflowers scattered on, or hung from, the margins of later fifteenth-century Flemish Books of Hours. By pairing this visual evidence with written records of folk rituals and medicinal practices involving the collection of cornflowers in agricultural grasslands, I explore the integration of human culture and agricultural ecosystems in pre-modern Europe. The near disappearance of northwestern Europe’s species-rich agricultural grasslands today has obfuscated their centrality in European cultural history, and has made us blind to the plants that grow in even the most canonical paintings. This paper aims to uncover the intertwined art historical and ethnobotanical significance of the cornflower in the period before its disappearance.

In 1507, Albrecht Dürer painted an unusual portrait: while the front of the panel shows a young man, the reverse depicts a grinning old woman with exposed breast grabbing a moneybag. No consensus exists on the interpretation of this work. The identification of the male sitter remains unresolved, and the female figure is divergently understood as an allegory of avarice, vanity, or lust. Moritz von Thausing (1876) and Erwin Panofsky (1943) proposed that, by painting avarice on the reverse, Dürer took revenge on the greedy sitter who fell short of Dürer’s financial expectations. Others suggested that the panel could have been part of a marriage diptych (with the wife’s portrait now lost), or Dürer’s take on the ill-matched pair.

My paper suggests an alternative interpretation: a message not of revenge but of instruction. I argue that the sitter is a young mercantile apprentice whose portrait reminded him of what a merchant’s internal character may become if he is not mindful of his profession’s pitfalls. Historians have established how, around 1500, commerce was contrary to the Church’s doctrine of frugality and how contemporaries deemed the merchant class prone to several deadly sins, especially pride, greed, and lust. However, Dürer scholarship has overlooked how, as a response, this important group of Renaissance patrons consciously used their portraits within a moralizing framework that emphasized righteousness, modesty, and piety. My paper traces how instructional manuals, letters, and visual culture (including Dürer’s portrait) reflected these moral standards and countered societal prejudice towards the merchant class.

A 16th-century mounted Kinrande 金襴手[gold brocade] bowl is displayed on the Great Hall Balcony in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The silhouette of the dragon–shaped handles echoes the thinly applied delicate designs in gold on the monochrome blue ground, contorting and twisting to follow the contours of the golden foliate scrolls on the exterior. Their shiny terminations swirl in the fashion of the flowing leaves encircling the plum flower at the bottom of the bowl. The undulating cadence of lines that gracefully intertwine the mounts with the ceramic vessel accentuates the seamless material continuity achieved through the gilding on both porcelain and silver. Despite the geographic distance between the Chinese potter who decorated the bowl and the English silversmith who fashioned the mounts, the mounted bowl appears to be the product of a joint, albeit unintentional, partnership between the two artisans. This paper considers this composite object in connection to the affective qualities of porcelain, advancing the hypothesis that ceramic vessels exerted a direct influence on plate workers, inspiring innovative approaches and a synergic creative process in which the silversmiths navigate the delicate balance between showcasing their artistry while accentuating porcelain’s inherent aesthetic allure. The paper contends that silversmiths, in their role as collaborators with the porcelain medium, often find themselves engaged in a dialogue that transcends the purely technical aspects of their craft. This collaborative process not only demands technical finesse but also encourages a profound appreciation for the intrinsic qualities of materials. By understanding the affective and technical dimensions of this symbiotic relationship, this paper contributes to a broader discourse on the intersection of materials and craftsmanship within the realm of decorative arts.

Five years removed from the Paris Commune’s bloody repression in 1871, the exiled shoemaker Napoléon Gaillard–formerly the Commune’s head barricade builder–published a slim, illustrated pamphlet entitled L’art de la chaussure, or The Art of the Shoe. In this clarion call for his fellow tradespeople to consider themselves artists, Gaillard envisioned a shoe made “not for the foot that is, but for the foot that should be.” This hypothetical, idealized foot would be freed by their new shoes from the “disastrous wanderings of fashion” and the “evil organization” of a society gone awry, striding at the head of a faultless pedal lineage from classical sculpture to Renaissance painting.

This paper argues for this tract and its ideal foot as 1) a thinly-veiled post-mortem of the Commune’s idealistic aspirations and failings, and 2) an opening onto an art history of the nineteenth-century shoemaker, a trade whose aesthetic concerns became alternative syntaxes of revolutionary positions and strategies. Using Gaillard as a case study, the art of the shoemaker is traced through trade manuals, political clubs, and actual shoes to demonstrate how the profession’s unusual radicalization emerged from conscious juxtaposition between the aims of fine art and the “lowest” of the trades.

Gaillard’s chief contribution to his field, the unisex gutta-percha boot, is therefore read as revolutionary sculpture. Essentially a latex galosh, the boot was a versatile and durable piece of footwear. Yet, it was also an aesthetic object which visually refused the classed split between beauty and use, a shoe for the foot and the citizen “that should be.” Simultaneously positioned as an organic progression of classical feet and a cutting-edge product of nineteenth-century global industry, Gaillard’s boot is thus seen as paradigmatic of the Commune’s complex political ethos–a naturalizing reorganization made for an modernizing world of internationalist labor.

In this paper, I unpack the allusive suggestions to imperialisms and botanical practices past and present structuring François Gérard’s An Allegory of Empress Josephine as Patroness of the Gardens at Malmaison (c. 1805–6). For Joséphine, Martiniquais créole and one-time Empress of the French, engaging with the gardens at her increasingly expansive landholdings at Malmaison and with portraiture by the likes of figures like Gérard, offered a range of material and representations fields in which to explore the production of place and identity. Her collection and naturalization of “plantes étrangères” within the artificial climates of the large-scale serre chaude dominating Gérard’s image operated alongside a “manie de se faire peindre” as commensurate techniques of self-positioning within the Premier Empire’s increasingly complex networks of gender and race. The image thus reflects and interpolates a range of concerns around the cultural, social, economic, and political construction and possession of place and a trans-Atlantic French colonial nation at the turn of the nineteenth century.