Free of charge
About the lecture
The inter-war ideal of the gallery owner as a disinterested, visionary dealer of art was not a model embraced by Berthe Weill, to whom Abstract and Surrealist artists were drawn much less than the Fauves and Cubists. Adopting a socio-historical approach, Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel seeks to explain this discrepancy.
After 1900, the international modern art world was becoming more closed to innovation and the working classes. But these were precisely the profiles that Berthe Weill welcomed into her gallery, in contrast to that generation’s Surrealists, who were bourgeois and educated. In this lecture, we look at the role of social and cultural affinities between artists and gallery owners in the emergence of new avant-garde movements. Comparisons with the contemporary situation shed additional light on the subject.
About the series
Deepen your understanding of art, its history, and associated issues by attending the informal and captivating presentations in the Art in Focus series.
About the speaker
Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel is a professor at the University of Geneva, Switzerland, where she is Chair of Digital Humanities. Prior to this position, she taught modern and contemporary art history at the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris (2006-2019). Since 2008, she has led a number of digital projects focusing on art history (notably Artl@s and Visual Contagions), while contributing to the development of a global and social approach to art history. She has published a transnational history of avant-garde movements in three volumes (Vol. 1: 1848-1918; Vol. 2: 1918-1945, Gallimard; Vol. 3: 1945-1970, CNRS Éditions (English translations to be published by Brill). She co-edits the journal Artl@s Bulletin and her latest book, L’art contemporain. Une infographie, is published by CNRS Éditions. She is working on a forthcoming book, La mondialisation par l'image, with designer Fabian Lang.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Location: Maxwell Cummings Auditorium, 1379-A, Sherbrooke Street West
Reservation terms: Please note that unclaimed reserved seats will be made available to other participants on a first-come, first-served basis.
