This lecture is about the problem of time, and a certain artist’s measured response to it. Arguably, Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806) was a painter who was at odds with bourgeois late eighteenth-century notions of progressive time and historical and material progress. Satish Padiyar will be asking then, how does this artist mark time, and what is the time and the timing of his quasi-expressionist marks? What is the pace of a graphic and painterly practice which traverses, eventually, a new cultural notion of time as ‘revolutionary’ and Empire? This lecture seeks to inquire into the particular way with time in the distinctive oneiric and fast-paced world created by Fragonard.
Satish Padiyar is Senior Lecturer in the History of Art at The Courtauld Institute of Art, London. He is the author of Chains. David, Canova and the Fall of the Public Hero in Postrevolutionary France, as well as numerous articles and essays on eighteenth and nineteenth-century art in Europe. He is currently writing a monograph on Jean-Honoré Fragonard for Reaktion Books.