Saturday 14 May, 11:00-13:00
Dr Anne Puetz and Dr Niccola Shearman
Women feature prominently in a number of key works from The Courtauld’s modern collections, appearing as barmaids, nudes, dancers or fashionable sitters in portraits. Looking beyond our own collections, it is clear that in much avant-garde art – mostly painted by men – women abound as ‘subject-matter’; as objects to be looked at, to put it another way. This event foregrounds a number of striking women artists of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Berthe Morisot, Gabriele Münter, Marianne Werefkin and Paula Modersohn Becker, and explores the connections between women (as subject-matter and as agents) and wider nineteenth-century concepts and connotations of modernity. We shall look closely at the ways nineteenth century attitudes to women and their experience reveal themselves in paint, and ask how these differ when the woman herself is the producer of the work. Progressing into the early twentieth century, we shall discuss the boundaries to be negotiated by female painters, considering the ways in which they bridged the gap between their desire to work in a man’s world, and society’s expectations of an appropriate feminine identity. For each of these artists, complex questions of creative agency are at stake.
Attend online:
Online (as a recording) £20 (£10 concessions). The recording of the event will be available to online students on Monday 16 May from 14:00 [London time] to 12:00 [London time] on Monday 23 May.
On campus booking is now closed
On campus at Vernon Square: £45 (£35 concessions), includes refreshments and admission to The Courtauld Gallery permanent collections – FULL AND BOOKING NOW CLOSED