Event recordings – Autumn semester 2022/23

Detail of a drawing depicting the torso and arms of a woman wearing a long dress
Detail from Henry Fuseli, Standing woman seen from the back, c. 1796-1800, London, The Courtauld, Samuel Courtauld Trust, Sir Robert Witt bequest.

Fuseli’s mutable bodies

Frank Davis Memorial Lecture series: Fuseli and the Graphic Body
Speaker: Dr Martin Myrone, Head of Grants, Fellowships and Networks, Paul Mellon Centre for British Art.

This lecture would explore the mutability of Fuseli’s graphic bodies, and how they operate around but also defy distinctions between life and death, the sculpted and the fleshy, orderly and disorderly anatomies.

Organised by Dr Ketty Gottardo (The Courtauld) and Professor David Solkin (The Courtauld) as part of the Frank Davis Memorial Lecture series ‘Fuseli and the Graphic Body‘.

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Textures of New Eden

Speaker: Linda Freedman, Associate Professor, English, UCL. Organised by Professor David Peters Corbett (The Courtauld) and Dr Caroline Levitt (The Courtauld). Supported by the Centre for American Art and the Word and Image Cluster.

Open Courtauld Hour: The Modern Woman and Fuseli

This special Open Courtauld Hour brings our exhibition, Fuseli and the Modern Woman: Fashion, Fantasy, Fetishism, to an online audience. The event, through the fragmentary information we have about sex work and sex workers at this time, will aim to interrogate the uneven balance between artist, viewer and subject. Content note: This event will contain scenes and language of a sexual nature.

The Art of Thinking through collaboration Fuseli, Blake and Darwin

Speaker: Dr Sarah Carter, Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Chicago Organised by Dr Ketty Gottardo (The Courtauld) and Professor David Solkin (The Courtauld) as part of the Frank Davis Memorial Lecture series ‘Fuseli and the Graphic Body‘.


Drawing depicting the top half of a man's body. He wears a hat pulled down over one eye with a feathered arrow piercing it.
Henry Fuseli (1741-1825), William Tell, Around 1750, Pen and brown ink, with brown, pink and grey wash, over some graphite.154 x 136 mm. Zentralbibliothek Zürich

Fools, Heroes and Whores: Henry Fuseli’s Switzerland

This paper explores Fuseli’s Swiss roots. It focuses in particular on drawings taken from his Jugendalbum(Youth Album) now housed in the Kunsthaus Zürich. It explores the type of place Zürich was – its cultural traditions, religious beliefs and social attitudes – in order to explain why patriotic, religious and sexual themes feature prominently in the artist’s formative works.

Speaker: Professor Camilla Smith – Associate Professor, Art History, Department of Art History, Curating and Visual Studies, University of Birmingham.

Organised by Dr Ketty Gottardo (The Courtauld) and Professor David Solkin (The Courtauld) as part of the Frank Davis Memorial Lecture series ‘Fuseli and the Graphic Body‘. 

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Modern Enchantments, Anachronistic Space: The American Office of War Information Overseas Radiophoto Section in Central Africa and the British Raj, 1942-1945

Speaker: Dr Jonathan Dentler, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Paris, Nanterre Organised by Professor David Peters Corbett (The Courtauld), and chaired by Dr Matthew Holman (The Courtauld).

Science in the Séance Room

Science in the Séance Room: Stereographs, Medical Men, and the Testing of ‘Margery’ Crandon’s Extraordinary Body, c. 1925 This talk centres on the stereoscopic photographs of Crandon taken by the researchers to index the ‘spiritualist’ phenomena witnessed and to supplement the poor observational conditions of the pitch-black séance room. It also considers the researchers’ use of their other senses — touch, hearing, smell — and the photographs’ material qualities to explore the complex relationships embedded in these photographs and practices between apparent polarities like trust and deception, vision and blindness, truth and illusion, proof and faith, and science and supernatural belief. Dr Merkling’s research is generously funded by the International Research Network for the Study of Science and Belief in Society. This event is supported by the Gender and Sexuality Research Group at The Courtauld.

In Conversation: Hooligan Art Community

Considering the role of art in times of war, artist identity and responsibility, and the power of hybrid performances to transcend linguistic boundaries, panellists include director, librettist and performance maker Peter Cant, video artist and filmmaker Liubov Sliusareva, and actor and producer Danylo Shramenko and academic Dr Charlotte de Mille. See more of Hooligan Art Community’s work here Organised by Dr Charlotte de Mille (The Courtauld).


Artist once known (English), Printed Textile: William Penn’s Treaty with the Indians, ca. 1785. Copperplate print on cotton weave, 2.4 m x 13.97 cm x 1.5 m, Philadelphia Museum of Art. Gift of James Hillhouse, 1933, 1933-21-1.

Anachronisms in the art of North America

How do incongruent temporalities jockey for primacy in individual works of art? Does belatedness have a materiality, and if so, how is it construed visually? This session comprises individual case studies which analyze a variety of media, from painting and architecture to design and regalia. The talks analyze how, constructed in the fabric of objects and spaces, belatedness operates as a revealing and malleable myth in the context of settler-Native American and other transnational relationships, as well as human-nature dialogues.

Organised by Professor Emily C. Burns (Director of the Charles M. Russell Center for the Study of Art of the American West at the University of Oklahoma) and Professor David Peters Corbett (Professor of American Art and Director of the Centre for American Art, The Courtauld) as part of the ‘Belatedness and North American Art‘ series.

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‘Female Trouble’: Vamps, Vixens and Viragoes in the Art of Henry Fuseli

This lecture teases out the ways in which Fuseli both succumbed to and defied fashion in a multi-decade exploration of the female form at its most fetishized and eroticized. Speaker: Dr Kevin Salatino Organised by Dr Ketty Gottardo (The Courtauld) and Professor David Solkin (The Courtauld) as part of the Frank Davis Memorial Lecture series ‘Fuseli and the Graphic Body‘. *Content and trigger warning: Please note this lecture contains images of violence, sexual violence, nudity and sex*

Embedded in a History of Imposed Silences: Reclaiming Legitimacy in the Work of Grada Kilomba

This presentation will discuss Grada Kilomba’s performative work in general, and her performance-installation The Boat (2021) in particular, as a denunciation of the legacies of colonialism, racism, and social injustices in contemporary society. This presentation reads Grada Kilomba’s work as a forum to confront silences and the inequalities of power and privilege stemming from the transatlantic history of slavery down to the present day. Speaker: Kathryn Bishop-Sanchez Organised by Dr Rachel Warriner (The Courtauld) as part of the Gender and Sexuality Research Group, with support from Courtauld Contemporary.

Raphael in Villa Farnesina: From the colours of prosperity to the Egyptian Blue

The use of Egyptian blue emerged after centuries of oblivion: material evidence -completely unexpected- of the great interest of the Urbinate Master for the Antique. Non-invasive diagnostics for cultural heritage is therefore not only a necessary prologue to restoration procedures, but an essential hermeneutic tool for a new history of art, where sometimes the materials themselves tell the artist’s intentions like documentary traces. Speaker: Professor Antonio Sgamellotti, Professor Emeritus of Inorganic Chemistry, University of Perugia Organised by Dr Austin Nevin (Head of Department of Conservation, The Courtauld).


Photograph showing a book in a glass case standing on a brightly coloured plinth

Bloomsbury Collective: The Omega Workshops

The Omega workshop brought together a group of artists and designers who sought to translate the ethos of the Bloomsbury Group into beautiful, tangible objects. Join Anna Liesching, curator of Bloomsbury: A Collective from Ulster Museum with guests to explore the story and legacy of this important moment in art and design history.

This event is part of a series exploring the themes of Bloomsbury: A Collective at Ulster Museum, featuring works from the collections of The Courtauld and National Museums NI. Find out more about the exhibition here: https://www.nmni.com/whats-on/bloomsbury-a-collective

Organised by Katherine Dunleavy (The Courtauld).

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Carolee Schneemann: Body Politics

Accompanying the Barbican Art Gallery’s survey of her six-decade oeuvre, which will be the first major exhibition of the artist’s work since her death in 2019, the symposium takes up one of the show’s propositions and examines the ways in which Schneemann challenged, dismantled and expanded the subjects and media she worked with. This symposium will consider her long career and innovative experiments with form alongside her explorations of sexual expression, personal politics, and body as a medium, as well as the historical and artistic contexts in which she was working. Keynote speaker: Dr Lucy Bradnock Organised by Dr Rachel Warriner (The Courtauld) and Lotte Johnson (Barbican Art Gallery), and supported by the Centre for American Art.

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