ELEVENTH 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

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.

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

10:15 AM – 11:15 AM: First Morning Session & Discussion
Petra ten-Doesschate Chu (Seton Hall University), Moderator

Ulf Dingerdissen (University of Goettingen, Germany), “The Practical Realization of Romantic Art Theory: The Riepenhausen Brothers and Their Etchings for The Life And Death of Saint Genevieve”

Until Franz and Johannes Riepenhausen published their cycle of fourteen etchings for Ludwig Tieck’s drama Leben und Tod der Heiligen Genoveva (1806), Romantic art was considered a literary invention only. By comparing these etchings with the writings of the most influential Romantic art theorists, Ulf Dingerdissen reveals how the Riepenhausen brothers translated Romantic art theory into practice.

Mary Slavkin (Graduate Center, City University of New York), “Statistically Speaking: Exhibitors at the Salons of the Rose + Croix”

Statistical analysis of reviews and catalogs reveals that ten core artists exhibited the greatest number of works over the longest duration at the Salons of the Rose + Croix (1892-1897). Although they were considered key members by contemporaneous critics, these artists have not received a proportional amount of recent scholarly attention.

11 AM - 11:15 AM: Break

11:15 AM - 12:15 PM: Second Morning Session & Discussion
Peter Trippi (President, Association of Historians of Nineteenth-Century Art), Moderator

Kara Fiedorek (Institute of Fine Arts, New York University), “’The Embodiment of a Prayer’: Julia Margaret Cameron’s Devotional Photographs”

The work of Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879), one of the most important nineteenth-century photographers and certainly its most important woman photographer, has been interpreted from a late-twentieth-century perspective. Kara Fiedorek explores how Cameron’s expressive Marian photographs of the mid-1860s cut against the grain of contemporaneous positivist applications of photography to religious representation in the medium’s formative years.

Emily Handlin (Brown University), “The Naked, Absolute Fact: Photography and Other Famous Truth-Tellers”

Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs from Animal Locomotion (1887) raised questions about the relationships between visual technologies, perception, and knowledge. Yet, as Emily Handlin explains, these questions were also widely debated in contemporary arts and science journals, where they coalesced around the problem of defining representational truth and, as in the motion studies, often intersected with investigations of the human body.

12:15 PM – 2:00 PM: Lunch Break

2:00 PM – 3:30 PM: First Afternoon Session & Discussion
Marilyn Satin Kushner (New-York Historical Society), Moderator

Rachel Newman (Stanford University), “Laboring in Silence and Solitude: William Berryman’s View of the Jamaica Sugar Plantation”

Rachel Newman examines the unstudied archive of William Berryman, an English watercolorist who worked in Jamaica between 1808 and 1816. Employed as a plantation bookkeeper, Berryman comprehended the plantation distinctly from his contemporaries by depicting slaves and the spaces they inhabited, and by rejecting the picturesque genre.

Kanitra Fletcher (Cornell University), “Imag(in)ing Sarah”

Kanitra Fletcher examines shifts in the portrayals of Sarah Baartman as the “Hottentot Venus” between 1810 and 1815 that point to the intersection of popular culture and scientific racism. In British and French posters, cartoons, caricatures and studies, Baartman’s imag(in)ed figure signaled a new era in the hierarchical ranking of humans.

Kylynn Jasinski (University of Pittsburgh), “The Aryan Contribution: Visualizing Race through Architectural History in Charles Garnier’s History of Human Habitation”

Presented at the 1889 Universal Exposition, Charles Garnier’s display Histoire de l’habitation humaine visualized nineteenth-century intersections of architectural history and race through a series of full-scale houses. Kylynn Jasinski explains how this display integrated contemporary theories of race to show the history of the Aryan migration through architecture.

3:30 PM – 3:45 PM: Break

3:45 PM – 4:45 PM: Second Afternoon Session & Discussion
Patricia Mainardi (Graduate Center, CUNY), Moderator

Russell Stephens (University of British Columbia, Canada), “Making Rabbit Stew: Daumier’s Subversive Image of the 1867 Universal Exposition”

In a series of caricatures for Le Monde illustré, Honoré Daumier challenged the greatest spectacle of Napoléon III’s Second Empire, the 1867 Universal Exposition. Russell Stephens argues that in order to circumvent censorship Daumier utilized argot (slang) in both word and image as the “unofficial” language of the streets and the suppressed working class.

Ágnes Sebestyén (University of Berne, Switzerland), “The Pavilion of Bosnia and Herzegovina at the 1900 Paris Universal Exposition: A Powerful Means of Artificial Nation Building”

Ágnes Sebestyén proposes that the Swiss collector of Islamic artifacts Henri Moser (1844–1923) became an essential asset for the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in its attempts to justify the annexation of the provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The chef d’oeuvre in this process was the pavilion of Bosnia and Herzegovina at the 1900 Paris Universal Exposition.

The 2014 jury consists of Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, Marilyn Satin Kushner, Patricia Mainardi, and Peter Trippi.
The symposium committee includes Caterina Pierre and Margaret Samu.

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