SIXTEENTH ANNUAL GRADUATE STUDENT SYMPOSIUM IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ART

Co-sponsored by the Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art (AHNCA) and the Dahesh Museum of Art

10 AM: Welcome
Peter Trippi, President of Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art

10:15 AM – 11:30 AM: First Morning Session & Discussion
Roberto C. Ferrari, Columbia University, Moderator

Aniel Guxholli, McGill University, “History as Ornament at the 1851 London International Exhibition”
The 1851 London Exhibition offers insight into nineteenth-century design and into a phenomenon that Aniel Guxholli argues takes its pervasive historicism to its end logic. In many exhibits, figures from history cast in life- size realistic form served both as stylistic ornament of present-day objects as well as references to an intelligible past.

Kaylee P. Alexander, Duke University, “Marbriers de Paris: The Funerary Marble Industry in Paris, 1857–1907”
Studies of French funerary monuments have exclusively considered architects and sculptors, yet stone cutters, marbriers, produced most of what was seen in cemeteries. Using commercial almanacs to construct a database of all known marbriers in nineteenth-century Paris, Kaylee P. Alexander examines clustering patterns and specialization within the industry against academic biases

Nicole Williams, Yale University, “’The Statue Case’: The Typical Philanthropist (1891), Public Portraiture, and the Dilemma of Female Fame”
Nicole Williams considers the New York Ladies Art Association's plans for a statue of philanthropist Mary Morris Hamilton, which became the subject of one of the nation’s earliest and most contentious legal cases on the right to privacy. Although the statue was never erected, few artworks of the era galvanized more controversy.

11:30 AM - 11:45 AM: Break

11:45 AM - 12:45 PM: Second Morning Session & Discussion
Marilyn Satin Kushner, New-York Historical Society, Moderator

Lindsay Wells, University of Wisconsin-Madison, “’Infinite Opalescence’: The Flower Book of Edward
Burne-Jones”
In his playfully enigmatic Flower Book (1882–98), a collection of watercolors inspired by old-fashioned plant names, Pre-Raphaelite artist Edward Burne-Jones drew continuous parallels between the material qualities of flowers, paint, and gemstones. Lindsay Wells explores how Burne-Jones’s late-career foray into jewelry design shaped the dynamic visual program of this book.

Sarah Mirseyedi, Harvard University, “Edouard Manet, Emile Bellot and the dessin direct typographique”
Sarah Mirseyedi presents new archival research on a little-studied print process invented by Emile Bellot in 1860, and considers how the identification of this process for the mass reproduction of a Manet drawing in 1865 can challenge us today to think more broadly about the relationship between “mechanical reproduction” and nineteenth-century artistic practices.

12:45 PM – 2:15 PM: Lunch Break

2:15 PM – 3:30 PM: First Afternoon Session & Discussion
Patricia Mainardi, Graduate Center, City University of New York, Moderator

Natalia Angeles Vieyra, Temple University, “Playing the Market: Camille Pissarro and Venezuela's Visual Economies”
In 1852, Camille Pissarro embarked on an artistic sojourn to Venezuela, a politically-divided country grappling with the arduous process of nation-building. Natalia Angeles Vieyra situates Pissarro’s early market scenes within the violent debates over the meaning of citizenship, the fate of slavery, and the value of a free economy that defined Venezuela in the post-Independence period.

Madeleine Haddon, Princeton University, “Spain in Black and White: 1855–1910”
Madeleine Haddon discusses Spain’s significance in nineteenth-century art, theorized through paintings by American and European artists who rendered Spanish figures in ways that experimented with the limits of how color can be manipulated to represent the human body and highlighted the relationship between the materiality of paint and that of color.

Lindsay Grant, University of Pennsylvania, “Structures of Sabotage: Maximilien Luce’s Scaffolding and Anarcho-Syndicalism”
Lindsay Grant situates Maximilien Luce’s 1910 painting Scaffolding within the artist’s oeuvre of construction work pictures, and within the longer history of modern-life painting in the late nineteenth century, to posit the work as anarcho-syndicalist propaganda promoting proletarian involvement in the general strike and acts of sabotage against employers.

3:15 PM – 3:30 PM: Break

3:30 PM – 4:45 PM: Second Afternoon Session & Discussion
Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, Seton Hall University and Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, Moderator

Carmen Rosenberg-Miller, Princeton University, “Painting and Performance: Avant-Garde Theater and the Work of Jean-François Raffaëlli”
Carmen Rosenberg-Miller considers Caractérisme, Jean-François Raffaëlli’s philosophy of art. Basing his work on empathetic connection rather than personal experience, Raffaëlli presented a significant counterpoint to the Impressionist project. This approach can be traced to his involvement with avant-garde theater, illuminating his thinking and the stakes of Late Realism more broadly.

Katharina Thurmair, Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich, “Relief abstrait and relief réel: Plasticity and Materiality in the Work of Gustave Moreau”
Katharina Thurmair proposes that Gustave Moreau’s paintings nuance the concept of Symbolism as an idealist movement. Reversing the academic tradition of the sublimation of material in favor of illusion and idea, Moreau transformed the academic category of plasticity into the relief-like surfaces of his paintings, where the material itself dominates the illusion.

2019 Jury: Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, Marilyn Satin Kushner, Roberto C. Ferrari, Patricia Mainardi, and Peter Trippi; 2019 Symposium Committee: Caterina Pierre, Margaret Samu, and Mary Frances Zawadzki

Special thanks to the Dahesh Museum of Art for the Dahesh Museum Art Prize for the Best Paper,
a gift from the Mervat Zahid Cultural Foundation

Special thanks to Amira Zahid and Alia Nour of the Dahesh Museum.

The symposium is free and open to the public; reservations are suggested but not required.
For further information: infodaheshmuseum.org.