Emily C. Burns - "Local Color in Art"

Описание: A lecture by Dr. Emily C. Burns (Auburn University), entitled "Local Color in Art": Nationalism and Impressionism in the United States, Australia, and France, given at the American Studies Center, University of Warsaw.

June 7th, 2016
ASC UW

The American Studies Center would like to thank the Terra Foundation for American Art for co-organizing this event (http://www.terraamericanart.org/event...)

Terra Foundation for American Art: http://www.terraamericanart.org/

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In an essay entitled "Local Color in Art," (1894), the American critic Hamlin Garland argued that artistic style could be international, but if the subject matter was local, art would reveal a national culture through the eyes, palette, and touch of each artist. Writing in celebration of American artists' embrace of impressionism for Garland, plein-air painting became a strategy for defining national culture around immediacy. His comment seeks to circumvent the sticky question of artistic influence by celebrating local landscape as a metonym for the national.This talk elucidates the tensions between impressionism and nationalism by analyzing the broader connections between these discourses in three different national contexts: the United States, Australia, and in France. While the artistic movement of impressionism is inextricably tied with Paris, the city where it originated, how "French" is it? A few scholars have interpreted the styles associated with impressionism as connected with French politics and French patriotism, yet on the whole art historical discourse has preferred to consider impressionism in the context of modernist formalism in its emphasis on facture, materiality and ideas of time. This talk addresses the problematic of impressionism and its French national context, and considers the questions that arise when American and Australian artists appropriate the style in France or in their home terrain.

Emily C. Burns is Assistant Professor of Art History at Auburn University in Alabama, US and currently Terra Foundation for American Art Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris. Her research considers Franco-American artistic and cultural exchange in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her dissertation, "Innocence Abroad: The Construction and Marketing of an American Artistic Identity in Paris, 1880-1910," explores the ways in which American artists performed ideas of cultural belatedness in response to French expectations about American culture. In addition to publishing articles related to her research on American artists in France, she is currently developing a book manuscript that considers the visual cultures of the American West in the French imagination between the Exposition Universelle of 1867 and the start of World War I. This book, titled, Transnational Frontiers: the Visual Culture of the American West in the French Imagination, 1867-1914, analyzes the intertwined relationships between art and popular culture, addressing questions of transnational exchange, native agency, and cultural nationalism. Her research has been supported by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Baird Library Society of Fellows, the Walter Read Hovey Memorial Foundation, the University of Nottingham, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, WY.