Performing Innocence: Belated
Presented by Emily C. Burns, Terra Foundation Visiting Professor in American Art
Moderator: Peter Gibian, Associate Professor of English, McGill University
Why did terms like innocence, naïveté, and artlessness have currency for US artists working in fin-de-siècle Paris? This lecture examines the language employed by artists and critics that applied these terms to Franco-American art exchange. Professor Burns traces the concepts’ emergence and expansion at the end of the US Civil War. Linking the mass exodus to France for study to attempts at cultural rejuvenation, innocence reveals a culture triggered by the realities of war, failed Reconstruction, divisive financial interests, and imperial ambition. The impossibility of innocence gave the myth its urgency and paradox. Engaging with artists from Thomas Eakins and Robert Henri to writers Mark Twain, Henry James and Edith Wharton, as well as journalists, the lecture frames the definitions and stakes of claiming to be innocent and naïve in Paris. In performing these characteristics, these artists and writers built an idea that American culture was belated compared with Europe; the lecture contextualizes this idea of strategic belatedness alongside similar projections in other emergent national contexts.
More information and YouTube link: www.torch.ox.ac.uk/event/performing-innocence-belated
Date:
17 February 2021, 17:00 (Wednesday, 5th week, Hilary 2021)
Venue:
Online - TORCH YouTube channel
Speakers:
Professor Emily C Burns (Auburn University),
Moderator: Peter Gibian (McGill Universty)
Organising department:
Department of History of Art
Host:
TORCH (University of Oxford)
Part of:
Terra Lectures in American Art 2021: Performing Innocence: US Artists in Paris, 1865-1914
Booking required?:
Not required
Audience:
Public
Editor:
Laura Spence
