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Events Lectures

Lecture: Tableaux Vivants and Attitudes. Image Circulation in Goethe’s ‘Elective Affinities’ and in Lady Hamilton’s Poses

Dr Philipp Ekardt

NOMIS-fellow (eikones), University of Basel

Monday, 10 December 2018, 5:30 pm

Warburg Institute
Woburn Square
London WC1H 0AB

Admission free; please register for this event through the Events section of the School of Advanced Study (SAS).

Aby Warburg’s concept of the Bilderfahrzeug implies a theory of
image-transmission which relies on the notion of a displacement of
material ‘carriers’ (a palpable medial support) on which such images
‘travel’. This lecture focuses on the period around 1800, and in
particular the works of Goethe – primarily his novel ‘Elective Affinities’
(1809), as well as Lady Hamilton’s ‘attitudes’ – offering a perspective on the mechanisms of image-circulation at that historical and cultural moment. Investigating Goethe and Hamilton also allows us to differentiate our general understanding of image-transmissions.

Looking at Goethe’s literary accounts of so-called ‘tableaux vivants’
(living images), and Hamilton’s art of theatrical poses and their
mediation, it becomes clear that the activity of building assemblages and
the aesthetic and artistic concept of composition are of central
importance here. Both form part of a constellation in which images are
less seen as ‘traveling’ on concrete carriers than as appearing,
disappearing and reappearing in fortuitous material configurations which
have been composed. The tableaux vivants and the attitudes form part of a
system in which also magical and aesthetic moments of resemblance, or the
creation of vistas in parks have their place.


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Events Lectures

Lecture: Bilderfahrzeuge in the Twittersphere: The Viking “Allah” Saga and the Future of the Image

Professor Stephennie Mulder

Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture

University of Texas, Austin

London, 2 May 2018, 5:30 pm

Warburg Institute
Woburn Square
London WC1H 0AB

 

Admission free; please register for this event through the Events section of the School of Advanced Study (SAS).

If Aby Warburg’s goal was to establish the autonomy of the image, that goal has certainly reached its apotheosis with the rise of digital media. On Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, images reign, and they have become powerful tools of manipulation and persuasion.

The rise and fall of the Viking “Allah” story, which captured headlines around the world for its seductive claims about the discovery of a Viking textile with Arabic writing, was propagated and argued largely by means of a highly manipulated image, but it was also a sequence of images that allowed me to deconstruct false claims about the textile, when I wrote a 60-tweet Twitter thread debunking the story in October of last year. In this image-rich environment, the work of art historians, cultural historians, and media scholars has never been more urgent, as university administrators work to deconstruct and defund the arts, humanities, and traditional paper libraries, thereby restricting our access to the analog history of images, consigning us to the endless matrix of digital duplication. How can the prescience of Warburg’s vision be put to use in the world of social media image construction and circulation, where “truthiness” reigns over “truth”? How does Bilderfahrzeuge work in the tangled networks of the digital age?

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Events Lectures

Lecture: How X-Ray Imagery Changed the Practice of Art History

Professor Sven Dupré

Professor and Chair of History of Art, Science and Technology, University of Utrecht

Professor of History of Art, Science and Technology, University of Amsterdam

Martin de Wild working on a X-radiograph in his laboratory, ca. 1930.

London, 13 June 2018, 5:30 pm

Warburg Institute
Woburn Square
London WC1H 0AB

Admission free; please register for this event through the Events section of the School of Advanced Study (SAS).

Despite experimentation with X-Ray technology applied to the diagnosis of paintings in German science laboratories in the first decade of the twentieth century, it was only in the 1920s and 1930s that the technology became more widely and systematically applied to art. Alan Burrough’s acquisition of the first and extensive archive of X-ray images of paintings, first of the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was the most important driving force behind this. Burrough’s efforts were inspirational for Kurt Wehlte, the German Maltechniker, who in the 1930s established a laboratory for the X-Ray investigation of paintings in Berlin. In this talk, Professor Dupré will speak about how and in which ways X-ray investigations of paintings were consequential for art history.

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Events Lectures

Lecture: Portrait of the African Woman from Atlantic to Mississippi: A New Topography of the Art of Enlightenment

Portrait d’une femme noire’ Marie-Guillemine Benoist © Musée du Louvre/A. Dequier – M. Bard

Professor Anne Lafont

Directrice d’études

EHESS, l’Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris

London, 24 January 2018, 5:30 pm

Warburg Institute
Woburn Square
London WC1H 0AB

Admission free; please register for this event through the Events section of the School of Advanced Study (SAS).

The figures of Africans in the early modern arts trouble the traditional chronology and geography of art history and sometimes disturb the hierarchical circulation of commodities between European metropolises and colonial territories. One cannot study art of colonial times and places with the exact same categories used to define the Italian Renaissance, the British Landscape and even the mobile case of El Greco. Authorship, centre versus periphery, the picture, the unicum… all these units need to be renegotiated in the imperial context. This lecture will focus on these issues through case studies based on the painting of female black figures in France and the French Americas at the end of the Eighteenth Century and in the first decades of the Nineteenth Century.

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Events Lectures

Lecture Series 2016-17

The Bilderfahrzeuge Lecture Series at the Warburg Institute 2016-17

Programme

(also available as a PDF)

5 October 2016 Roger Sabin Central Saint Martins UAL The Origins of Comics Criticism  
16 November 2016 Mechthild Fend UCL Medusa’s Hair. Images, Diseases and Terror in Post-Revolutionary France
14 December 2016 Stephen Bann Bristol Paul Delaroche’s Egyptian Excursion: the studies in preparation for Moses on the Nile (1853)
11 January 2017 Sachiko Kusukawa  Cambridge Copying as a form of knowing: early modern scientific images
8 February 2017 Tristan Weddigen Zürich Heinrich Wölfflin in the Hispanic World
1 March 2017 Tamar Garb UCL Constance Stuart’s War: Women and Documentary’s Excess.
10 May 2017  Zainab Bahrani Columbia Return of Images: Chance Encounters in the Afterlives of Antiquity
14 June 2017 Finbarr Barry Flood New York University The Relic as Image: Prophetic Aura in an Age of Technological Reproducibility

 

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Events Lectures

Lecture: Constance Stuart’s War: Women and Documentary’s Excess

Professor Tamar Garb

Durning-Lawrence Chair of History of Art
Department of History of Art,

University College London (UCL)

London, 1 March 2017, 5:30 pm

Warburg Institute
Woburn Square
London WC1H 0AB

Admission free; please register for this event through the Events section of the School of Advanced Study (SAS) here.

This lecture looks at a remarkable photograph taken by the South African war correspondent in WW2, Constance Stuart (Larrabee) at the moment of the liberation of France. The photograph, one of nine in a series, depicts one of the femmes tondues the sheared women collectively punished for having ‘associated with the Germans’. It is read in relation to other photographs in the series as well as the agenda of Libertas, the first picture magazine in South Africa, for whom Stuart worked. But there is more to Stuart’s relationship to the image than the need to document the occasion. What seeps out from the image is something that exceeds documentary’s desire, inadvertently articulating both the photographer’s and the protagonist’s position in history.

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Events Lectures

Lecture: Heinrich Wölfflin in the Hispanic World

Professor Tristan Weddigentristanweddigenlectureimage

Chair for Early Modern Art
Kunsthistorisches Institut
University of Zürich

Rudolf Wittkower Visting Professor
Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome

London, 8 February 2017, 5:30 pm

Admission free; please register for this event through the Events section of the School of Advanced Study (SAS) here.

Warburg Institute
Woburn Square
London WC1H 0AB

One century from the first publication of one of the most influential books of art history, Heinrich Wölfflin’s “Principles of Art History” of 1915, Professor Weddigen’s paper will explore one major part of its global reception: its impact on Hispanic and Latin American art and architectural history and aesthetics since the 1920s. The aim is to show how Kunstwissenschaft was translated, adopted, and appropriated for the construction of national, political, ethnic identities.

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Events Lectures

Lecture: Uses of images in early modern scientific knowledge

Professor Sachiko Kusukawagessnerpelicanzentralbibliothekzurich2120657

Fellow in History and Philosophy of Science
Trinity College
Cambridge

London, 11 January 2017, 5:30 pm

Admission free; please register for this event through the Events section of the School of Advanced Study (SAS) here.

Warburg Institute
Woburn Square
London WC1H 0AB

Professor Kuskawa will give a paper arguing for the importance of images as a versatile means of shaping and transmitting scientific knowledge in the early modern period. Traditionally, historians of science have looked to illustrations in early printed books as evidence of first-hand observation.  But a large number of these illustrations, including those labeled as ‘ad vivum’, turn out to be images copied from elsewhere. Copying images was undertaken for a variety of reasons in the early modern period, including as a way to save time and money for the printers. Rather than a disappointing, inferior iteration of first-hand observation, I propose that copying was a necessary and versatile means of shaping and sharing scientific knowledge, but as with any form of transmission, copying entailed some process of transformation and translation. This paper will discuss the many different uses through which images came to constitute early modern scientific knowledge.

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Events Lectures

Lecture: Paul Delaroche’s Egyptian Excursion: The Studies in Preparation for Moses on the Nile (1853)

Professor Stephen Bannstephenbanndelarocheimage

Emeritus Professor of History of Art, Research
Fellow in History of Art (Historical Studies)
University of Bristol

London, 14 December 2016, 5:30 pm

Admission free; please register for this event on our Eventbrite page here.

Warburg Institute
Woburn Square
London WC1H 0AB

Paul Delaroche’s drawings and oil studies reveal his tendency to ponder a range of different iconographic sources over a long period.The preparation of his Moses on the Nile is a particularly interesting example, since some of the original drawings in the Louvre are customarily attributed to the early 1840s, while the large painting (originally in the collection of Baron James de Rothschild, but now lost) is dated 1853. A drawing that has recently come to light indicates Delaroche’s initial debt to the paintings on the subject by Nicolas Poussin.
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Lectures

Lecture: Medusa’s Hair. Images, Diseases and Terror in Post-Revolutionary France

Dr Mechthild Fend

Reader in History of Art
Department of History of Art
University College London

London, 16 November 2016, 5:30 pm

Admission free; please register for this event on our Eventbrite page here.

Warburg Institute
Woburn Square
London WC1H 0AB

Mechthild Fend, Reader in History of Art at University College London, will give a lecture on the migrations of the visual and mental image of Medusa between early modern art, French revolutionary prints and medical illustrations and discourses.