Tuesday, September 8, 2015, 7–8:30 pm

By Dr. Janne Sirén, Peggy Pierce Elfvin Director

In our postmodern era it is easy to forget that art was once not only subject to the oversight and control of academies, but also ordered strictly by a hierarchy of genres that affected an artwork’s status—from its creation to its exhibition to its eventual acquisition. For centuries, this hierarchy of genres would have been familiar to any art lover, and a work’s place in that pyramid was largely inseparable from the monetary value and critical acclaim individual artworks could attain. At the pinnacle was history painting, the genre that pictured stories of the past with an edifying purpose. Portraiture, a means of capturing the image of contemporary greats as well as commonplace sitters followed behind. Genre painting presented views on everyday life, often with an affirmative or didactic message. Finally, views of landscapes and seascapes were generally prized higher than more domestic and often more intimately scaled images of animals or still life. This first lecture in the series presents an overview of these genres, and suggests the many reasons for the evolution of such a codified value system for visual art.

Tuesday, October 20, 2015, 7–8:30 pm

By Dr. Joe Lin-Hill, Deputy Director

History painting is associated with an exalted approach to grand narratives, celebrating the great and condemning the infamous—whether by enlisting figures from the past to instruct the present, or by elevating a moment from recent events to the status of History. As the most complicated “machines” of the traditional painter’s practice and the benchmark for artistic success, this genre required a comprehensive mastery of the painterly craft and considerable historical erudition. But as the nineteenth century brought an immediacy to visual representations of modern life, history painting in the grand manner gradually lost its cachet with the wane of the Academy itself. While the genre’s vitality expired, its spirit has continued to engage artists up to the present day. This second lecture in the series will discuss the history of this fascinating genre and artists who continued to reinvent the tradition in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Tuesday, November 10, 2015, 7–8:30 pm

By Dr. Cathleen Chaffee, Senior Curator

The dictionary definition of a still life is “the depiction of inanimate objects or material goods.” This dry description of what has often been seen as art’s most modest, lowly of genres does little to record the incredible rise of still life painting as a genre. These studies of commonplace as well as luxurious objects have offered a glimpse into the values and material culture of specific and diverse cultures for many centuries—from seventeenth-century Dutch vanitas painters to nineteenth-century French artists such as Paul Cézanne who used still life as an opportunity for the study of light and color. In the twentieth century, still life painting became a way to consider our powerful and powerfully complex relationship with consumerism. The inevitable connections between objects and self-presentation that have been used by some contemporary artists have transformed still life painting into a wry form of portraiture.

Tuesday, February 2, 2016, 7–8:30 pm

By Dr. Janne Sirén, Peggy Pierce Elfvin Director

The first painting to enter the Albright Art Gallery’s Collection in 1863 was a majestic land and seascape painting, The Marina Piccola, Capri, 1859, a gift of the artist Albert Bierstadt. One hundred and fifty years later, in 2013, the continuing relevance of the landscape painting tradition was the subject of the AK’s landmark exhibition Anselm Kiefer: Beyond Landscape. As that exhibition demonstrated, the landscape is not merely a representation of nature’s grandeur and beauty, but a pictorial site laden with social, historical, and political dimensions. Nicolas Poussin was one of the most celebrated landscape painters of the seventeenth century, largely because of the way he looked to classical sources as a motivation for studies of picturesque vistas, combining landscape painting with historical subject matter and allegory. This fourth lecture in the series will discuss the taste for landscape painting and the celebrated works of artists such as Poussin, J. M. W. Turner, Bierstadt, and others whose experimentation set the stage for later renewals of the landscape tradition by artists like Anselm Kiefer.

Tuesday, March 8, 2016, 7–8:30 pm

By Dr. Cathleen Chaffee, Senior Curator

The title of this fifth lecture reads like the set up to a joke and also contains an implied question: what could a milkmaid, a drunkard, and a newsboy have in common? In fact, each of these occupations or pastimes was a favorite subject of genre painters from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Depicting milkmaids allowed painters such as Vermeer to comment on domesticity and purity. Drunkards were favorite subjects of genre painters like Jan Steen in The Netherlands in the seventeenth century; an ideal embodiment of vice, they gave painters a way to inject humor into their artworks while facilitating cautionary instruction on ideals of comportment. The newsboy stands in for the common depiction in genre painting of occupations or typological studies. Historical genre paintings are the precursor to many practices that define contemporary art today—from the myriad photographic images of everyday life to video documentation of performance.

Tuesday, April 19, 2016, 7–8:30 pm

By Dr. Joe Lin-Hill, Deputy Director, featuring a discussion between Dr. Lin-Hill; Dr. Janne Sirén, Peggy Pierce Elfvin Director; and Dr. Cathleen Chaffee, Senior Curator

This final lecture will discuss the most lively of all genres in contemporary life: portraiture. The clear connections and distinctions between the traditional genre and our smartphone-driven “selfie” culture will be considered. Ranging from important innovations of eighteenth century British portraiture through bellwether examples from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to a spectrum of positions in contemporary art, this lecture traces our unwavering dedication to affirming identity and the self.

A reception will follow the final lecture.