[Reader-list] Invitation for the Lecture Series by eminent American Art historians

[Zest Reading Group]

NATIONAL CENTRE FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS
MOHILE PARIKH CENTER
VISUAL ARTS FORUM                                          
                  
ARCHITECTURE FORUM         


Dear Friend,

You are cordially invited to attend the Lecture Seires 
organised by the Mohile Parikh Center - Visual Arts 
Forum.

Lecture and Discussion
Venue: Godrej Dance Academy Theatre, NCPA
Date:    October 27-29, 2003 and November 3-6, 2003
Time:    6.00pm to 8.00pm

CAROL BECKER
Negotiating the Terrain: Contemporary Artists in 
Society

Carol Becker is the Dean of Faculty and Vice President 
for Academic Affairs at The School of the Art 
Institute of Chicago. She is the author of numerous
articles 
and several books including: The Invisible Drama: Women 
and The Anxiety of Change; The Subversive Imagination: 
Artist, Society, and Social Responsibility; Zones of 
Contention: Essays on Art, Institutions, Gender and 
Anxiety; and most recently, Surpassing the Spectacle: 
Global Transformation and the Changing Politics of Art.
 
The lectures will focus on contemporary practice and 
how artists address various aspects of society. Each 
lecture will attempt to situate the complexity of the 
role of the artist as citizen. Each will also attempt to 
deepen the audience's understanding of how artists 
think about the social issues of their time and to 
explain how U.S. audiences respond to contemporary work. 

October 27, 2003
Lecture I: Dreaming in the Dark: The Ambivalent Love 
Affair Between Artists and Museums
October 28, 2003
Lecture II: Messing With the Sacred: When Images 
Unnerve Their Publics
October 29, 2003
Lecture III: Borne of Necessity: Artists Address 
Poverty
 

II
JAMES ELKINS
World Painting, 1900-2000: Theoretical and Political 
Problems

James Elkins is a Professor at the Department of 
Visual and Critical Studies and the Department of Art 
History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art 
Institute of Chicago. His writing focuses on the history 
and theory of images in art, science, and nature. Some 
of his books are exclusively on Fine Art, comprising 
of What Painting Is; Why are our Pictures Puzzles? On 
the Modern Origins of Pictorial Complexity; Our 
Beautiful, Dry and Distant Texts: Art History as Writing. 
Others include scientific and non-art images and 
archaeology such as , The Domain of Images: On the
Historical 
Study of Visual Artifacts; On Pictures and the Words 
That Fail Them, and some explore natural history as 
well such as, How to Use Your Eyes. He has also authored 
numerous articles, book reviews and exhibition 
catalogues and has lectured extensively in various 
universities and art institutions in the U.S.
 
Modern painting poses extremely difficult problems for 
art history, because it is divided into a mainstream, 
the sequence that begins with Manet or Cézanne and 
continues through Picasso and abstraction, and a large 
number of regional and national schools. Many countries 
have famous painters who are nevertheless hardly known 
in Western Europe or North America. Theories of 
success and failure in modernism, together with
philosophies 
of modernist painting, are mainly products of the 
West, so that modernist painting is divided between the 
main sequence and many "marginal," belated, derivative, 
or otherwise, devalued works. One of the most 
important projects for a global art history is to find a
way 
to write inclusively and sympathetically about a wide 
range of modernist practices.

November 3, 2003 
Lecture I: Major Theories of Success and Failure in 
20th Century Painting
November 4, 2003
Lecture II: How is It Possible to Write About the 
World's Painting?
November 5, 2003
Lecture III: Rethinking Art Historical Terms


III 
MARGARET MACNAMIDHE
Paint that Divides and Gathers: Delacroix's 
Romanticism 
 
Margaret MacNamidhe is a Visiting Lecturer in the 
Department of the History of Art, University College, 
Dublin. She graduated from the Johns Hopkins University in 
2002 with a dissertation entitled 'The Dilemma of 
Painting in the 1824 Salon: A New Interpretation of Eugène 
Delacroix's Career'. Her undergraduate training was as 
a painter. After graduating from the National College 
of Art and Design in Dublin with a degree in Fine Art 
and Art History, she spent the next four years 
painting full-time, including scholarships in Italy, 
Scandinavia and Greece, and exhibiting widely in Ireland
and 
Europe. In addition to UCD, she has also taught in 
DePaul University Chicago, the School of the Art Institute 
of Chicago, the American University of Paris and the 
Johns Hopkins University. An essay entitled "Sigalon's 
Poison: Viewing French Romanticism in 1824," was 
published in June in a volume of essays entitled The 
Enduring Instant. 
 
Eugène Delacroix's painting Scenes from the Massacres 
at Chios was his major entry for the Paris Salon of 
1824 where it met with consternation and bafflement. In 
this lecture, the speaker will examine why 
contemporary viewers found the painting with its mass of
slumped 
and suffering figures so difficult but compelling to 
look at. Whether supportive or furious, critics in the 
newspapers and journals of the time lingered over the 
painting-variously shoring it up with explanatory 
narratives or sifting its disorder. They found that the 
Chios took a long time to look at. This, the speaker 
believes, is key to the constitutive nature of the 
painting: it demands time to see the Chios, it cannot be 
perceived 'whole', it has to be viewed figure by figure, 
area by area. This is, above all, a matter of the ways 
in which it is painted. It is this that sets it apart 
from the painting that came before in the French 
tradition. Delacroix's approach is fundamentally unlike the

unities of gesture and purpose that course though 
Jacques-Louis David's Oath of the Horatii (1785) and also 
Théodore Géricault's Raft of the Medusa (1819), a 
painting to which the Chios has however, frequently been 
compared.

November 6, 2003
Lecture: Paint that Divides and Gathers: Delacroix's 
Romanticism 
 

Do join us for Tea/Coffee at 6. 00 pm
 
Admission free. 
Please register your name by October 20, 2003 at the 
Mohile Parikh Center

With Best Regards,
Amrita Gupta
Program Coordinator - Visual Arts Forum, MPC

Mohile Parikh Center
National Center For The Performing Arts
Nariman Point, Mumbai - 400021
Tel.: 22838380/81  
email: mpcva at vsnl.com





________________________________________________________________________
Yahoo! India Matrimony: Find your partner online.
Go to http://yahoo.shaadi.com