S. Hollis Clayson, the 2013-14 Samuel H. Kress Professor at the National Gallery of Art‘s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts as well as the Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities at Northwestern University, will discuss “Confinement and Absorption: Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s and Edvard Munch’s Paris Threshold Pictures” on Thursday, March 27, at 4:10 p.m. in Cohen Hall, Room 203. A reception will follow the lecture in the Cohen Hall atrium.
The free event is the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Lecture in Art History at Vanderbilt.
Clayson is also a professor of art history at Northwestern and holds a joint appointment in the department of history. She is the founding director of the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. A historian of modern art who specializes in 19th-century Europe, especially France, and trans-Atlantic exchanges between France and the United States, she is the author of Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era and Paris in Despair: Art and Everyday Life Under Siege (1870-71).
Clayson is co-editor of Understanding Paintings: Themes in Art Explored and Explained, a thematic study of painting in the Western tradition, which has been translated into six languages. Her current research focuses on U.S. artists in Paris from 1870 to 1914 and their preoccupation with night in the City of Light.
In 2013, she curated the exhibition Electric Paris at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Mass.—the first to explore the ways in which artists depicted older oil and gas lamps and the newer electric lighting that emerged around the turn of the 20th century. Her related book examines the visual cultures of the City of Light in the era of Thomas Edison and will be published by the University of Chicago Press.
The Goldberg Lecture is sponsored by the Department of History of Art. Limited parking will be available in Lot 95 outside Cohen Hall, which is located off 21st Avenue South on the Peabody College campus and across from Medical Center East.