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.
2008 LEE FRANK LECTURE IN ART HISTORY:
Lang Performing Arts Center Cinema
This year's Lee Frank Lecture in Art History will be delivered by Rachael DeLue, Assistant Professor of American Art, Princeton University. Her lecture is entitled: "Painting as Translation, or Seeing and Knowing in the Art of Arthur Dove”.
Arthur Dove is best known for his abstract paintings of the natural world. Less familiar is his investment, shaped by his understanding of the scientific inquiry of his day,in articulating a pictorial language for translating the known, if unseeable, into the seen, much as a scientist might translate a hypothesis or theory into abstract mathematical notation. Dove used the medium of paint to conduct a series of experiments by which he investigated the possibility of exploring and then visualizing phenomena—including music and other forms of sound—unseeable by human sense. This talk explores the various strategies Dove employed in articulating new modes of pictorial perception and understands these experiments as intimately tied to larger cultural conversations in the early decades of the twentieth century about the subjects and methods of science as well as the nature of human cognition.
Lang Performing Arts Center Cinema, Wednesday, March 26, 2008, 4:30pm.
Arthur G. Dove. Sun Drawing Water, 1933. Oil on canvas. Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.
* * *
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”.