The Lee Frank Memorial Lectures
Swarthmore College
Art Department
Paul Céznne, Portrait of Madame Cézanne in the Conservatory.
Oil on canvas. c.1890. Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The Lee Frank Memorial Art Fund, endowed by the family and friends of Lee Frank '21, sponsers each year a special event in the Art Department: a visiting lecturer or artist, a scholar or artist in residence, or a special exhibit.
2009 LEE FRANK LECTURE IN ART HISTORY:
Lang Performing Arts Center Cinema
This year's Lee Frank Lecture in Art History will be delivered by Keith Eggener, Associate Professor of American Art and Architecture, University of Missouri, Columbia. His lecture is entitled: "Settings for History and Oblivion in Modern Mexico, 1942-1958”.
Juan O'Gorman's painting La Ciudad de México of 1942, and the concrete towers designed in 1957-1958 by Mathias Goeritz and Luis Barragán for Mario Pani's Satellite City, are iconic images of Mexico City in the modern era. Together these bracket a period of remarkable urban transformation. Between 1940 and 1960, national and international investment in Mexico, and with these, industrial and economic growth--all focused on the capital city--rose precipitously. The city’s population surged from 1.7 million to 5.4 million. Cultural production flourished, as did all varieties of congestion and environmental degradation. Construction boomed. A geographically contained, pedestrian-scaled city of became a sprawling metropolis of glass-clad skyscrapers, subdivisions, highways, and shantytowns. It was during this same period that Mexico's agrarian populist Revolution of 1910-1917--the central event of the nation's history in the 20th century and the catalyst for much of its subsequent modernization and reform--began fading from lived memory and realpolitik . A related dissolution took place within the realm of architecture and urban planning. Established by the early 1930s as both an expression and an agent of progressive social and political reform, modern architecture in Mexico after World War II grew distanced from earlier Revolutionary aims, increasingly privatized in its ownership and indirect in its messages. Four artifacts--the painted city of O'Gorman, the University City (campus for the National Autonomous University of Mexico), the Gardens of El Pedregal residential subdivision, and the Towers of the Satellite City--allow us to chart this development. Taken as a sequence of events, these four projects represent a city shifting its constructive energies from center to periphery, revolution to commodification, history to nostalgia--a place, in words used by native-son Carlos Fuentes in 1958, "ancient in light…cradled among birds of omen," becoming a "city woven by amnesiacs."
Lang Performing Arts Center Cinema, Thursday, April 9, 2009, 4:30pm.
* * *
Past Lee Frank Lecturers and Titles have included:
1979-80
Svetlana Alpers, University of California, Berkeley: Looking at Words: The Representation of Texts in Dutch Seventeenth Century Art
1980-81
Wanda M. Corn, Stanford University and Visiting Scholar, Woodrow Wilson International Center (Smithsonian): The Bort of a National Icon: Grant Wood's American Gothic
1981-82
Joanna Gottfried Williams, University of California, Berkeley: The Non-Finito in Indian Sculpture
1982-83
William Heckscher, Rare Books, Princeton University: Egogenesis: Fundamental Change as an Essential Ingredient in the Formation of Genius
1983-84
Kathleen Weil-Garris-Brandt, New York University: Raphael and Cinquecento Sculpture
1984-85
Elizabeth Johns, University of Maryland: Thomas Eakins and Nineteenth Century Heroic Ideals
1985-86
Dale Kinney, Bryn Mawr College: An Excellent Horse: Critical Understandings of the Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius from Antiquity to Modern Times
1986-87
Shen Fu, Freer Gallery, Smithsonian Institution: The Mongol Princess Sengge as a Chinese Art Collector
1987-88
Meredith Claussen, University of Washington: The Department Store: Development of a Building Type
1988-89
Linda Seidel, University of Chicago: Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait: Business as Usual?
1989-90
Allison Kettering, Carleton College: The Courtship Paintings of Gerhard ter Borch
1990-91
David Freedberg, Columbia University: Naming the Visible: Art and Science in the Circle of Galileo
1991-92
Robert Storr, Museum of Modern Art, New York: ... that was then, this is now: modernism, post-modernism, and po-mo ...
1992-93
Richard Martin, Fashion Institute of Technology, New York: Fine Arts and Finery Arts: An Inquiry and an Odyssey
1993-94
Wendy Steiner, University of Pennsylvania: Construing Mapplethorpe
1994-95
Christine Poggi, University of Pennsylvania: Vito Acconci's Bad Dream of Domesticity
1995-96
Joanna E. Ziegler, College of the Holy Cross: Dance, Film & Gender; Retrieving Historical Women
1996-97
Maxwell K. Hearn, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York: Possessing the Past: Treasures from the National Palace Museum, Taipei
1997-98
Dalle Vacche, Emory University: Italy 1945: Cinema and Painting
1998-99
Nina M. Athanassoglou Kallmyer, University of Delaware:
2000-2001
Bonnie Yochelson '74: "The Story Behind Berenice Abbott's Changing New York"
2001-2002
Susan Sidlauskas, University of Pennsylvania: "Cezanne's Significant 'Other': The Portraits of Hortense"
2002-2003
Matthew Biro '83, University of Michigan: "Raoul Hausmann's Revolutionary Media: Dada Performance, Photomontage, and the Development of the Cyborg in Germany"
2003-2004
Ingrid Schaffner, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia: "The Dream of Venus Dreams On: Salvador Dali's Surrealist Funhouse and Contemporary Art"
2004-2005
Joseph Rishel, Senior Curator of European Painting, PMA: "Latin American Art 1492-1825: Making an Exhibition"
2005-2006
Gwendolyn Dubois Shaw, University of Pennsylvania: "Imagined Subjectivity: Portraits of the Past in Fred Wilson's Mining the Museum”.
2006-2007
Louise Allison Cort, Curator for Ceramics, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution: "A Japanese Potter's Study Trip to Edo: Ceramic Research and Development in the 17th Century”.
2007-2008
Rachael DeLue, Assistant Professor of American Art, Princeton University: "Painting as Translation, or Seeing and Knowing in the Art of Arthur Dove”.