Posted by vrcvanderbilt on Thursday, March 6, 2014 in HART, Lectures, VRC.

S. Hollis Clayson, 2013-2014 Samuel H. Kress Professor, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities, Northwestern University, will present the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Lecture in Art History on Thursday, March 27, at 4:10 p.m. in 203 Cohen Hall. Her lecture is entitled “Confinement and Absorption: Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s and Edvard Munch’s Paris Threshold Pictures,” with a reception to follow in the atrium.

At Northwestern she is also a professor of art history and holds a joint appointment in the department of history. She is the founding director of the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities.

A historian of modern art who specializes in 19th-century Europe, especially France, and transatlantic exchanges between France and the United States, Clayson is author of Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era and Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life Under Siege (1870-71).

She is co-editor of Understanding Paintings: Themes in Art Explored and Explained, a thematic study of painting in the Western tradition, which has been translated into six languages. Her current research focuses upon U.S. artists in Paris (1870-1914) and their preoccupation with night in the City of Light. In 2013 Clayson curated the exhibition Electric Paris at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, MA, the first to explore the ways in which artists depicted older oil and gas lamps and the newer electric lighting that emerged around the turn of the twentieth century. Her related book examines the visual cultures of the City of Light in the era of Thomas Edison and will be published by the University of Chicago Press.

Sponsored by the Department of History of Art, the Goldberg Lecture is free and open to the public. Limited parking is available in Lot 95 outside Cohen Hall, off 21st Avenue South on the Peabody campus and across from Medical Center East.