Art
Events Spring 2012
Stephen E. Ostrow Distinguished Visitor in the Visual Arts Series Lecture:
Richard Shiff "Loss of Subject (Cézanne)"
February 7, 2012, 7 p.m., Vollum Lecture Hall
Art historians usually classify images like Cézanne's Card Players as genre pictures: views of daily life that may reveal attitudes toward a class of society or a set of cultural practices. Can such pictures be abstractions? Abstractions of what? This lecture investigates the fact that Cézanne's earliest viewers evaluated his Card Players as if they were abstractions, and by this interpretive route, the paintings gained a special social significance.
Professor Richard Shiff received his Ph.D. from Yale University. He holds the Effie Marie Cain Regents Chair in Art and directs the Center for the Study of Modernism. His scholarly interests range broadly across the field of modern art from the early nineteenth century to the present, with emphasis on French painting and post-war and contemporary American and European art. He has been particularly involved with theory and criticism. His publications include Cézanne and the End of Impressionism (University of Chicago Press, 1984), Critical Terms for Art History (University of Chicago Press, 1996, 2003), Barnett Newman: A Catalogue Raisonné (Yale University Press, 2004), Doubt (Routledge, 2008), Between Sense and de Kooning (Reaktion, 2011), and numerous studies of critical and methodological issues. Recent essays have focused on Vincent van Gogh, Georges Seurat, Pablo Picasso, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Richard Serra, Bridget Riley, Georg Baselitz, Peter Doig, and Julie Mehretu, among others. In addition to his ongoing contributions of interpretive essays to exhibition catalogues and artists’ books, his current projects include a collection of his earlier essays (University of Chicago Press).
About the Stephen E. Ostrow Distinguished Visitors Program
The Stephen E. Ostrow Distinguished Visitors Program in the Visual Arts was established by a generous 1988 gift from Edward and Sue Cooley and John and Betty Gray in support of art history and its place in the humanities. The lecture program enables Reed College's art department to bring distinguished individuals in the arts to the college for periods of up to a week. These visitors give public lectures and seminars with students.
The intent of the program is to bring to campus creative people who are distinguished in connection with the visual arts and who will provide "a forum for conceptual exploration, challenge, and discovery." The program is named in honor of Stephen Ostrow as a tribute to his career and out of respect for his advisory role in the formulation of the Cooley-Gray gift and the design of the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery. Ostrow is the chief of the prints and drawings division of the Library of Congress.
Past artists have included:
2011.09 Do Ho Suh, installation artist/sculptor
2011.03 Joseph Koerner, art historian
2010.11 Patricia Fortini Brown, art historian
2010.02 Terry Winters, painter/printmaker
2009.10 David Rosand, art historian
2009.03 Alexander Nemerov, art historian
2008.10 David Reed '68, painter/installation artist
2008.03 Martin Powers
2007.11 Gary Hill, video artist
2007.10 Barbara Stafford, art historian
2007.04 David Freedberg, art historian
2006.10 Mona Hatoum, installation artist/sculptor
2005.04 Ann Hamilton, installation artist
2004.09 Hans Haacke, conceptualist artist
2003.11 Jennifer Bartlett, painter/printmaker
2003.04 T.J. Clark, art historian
2003.04 Al Held, abstract painter
2002.11 Leo Steinberg, art historian
2000.04 Michael Fried, art historian
2000.01 Judy Pfaff, installation artist
1999.04 Linda Nochlin, art historian
1999.03 Adrian Piper, performance artist
1998.09 Robert Davidson, performance/installation artist
1997.09 Robert Morris, minimalist sculptor
1996.09 Jules Feiffer, graphic artist