David Joselit, Distinguished Professor of Art History, The Graduate Center, CUNY, “Painting Alterity”

David Joselit, Distinguished Professor of Art History, The Graduate Center, CUNY, “Painting Alterity”

In this lecture, modern painting will be linked to contemporary painting through a shared emphasis on alterity. Defined as a multivalent articulation of otherness, alterity can arise as the citation of ancient history, colonial tribal objects, mass culture, or divergent ethnicities (often, several of these registers appear at once). It is through an effort to manage such modern visual cultures of alterity that modern painting arises. In a sustained comparison of Pablo Picasso’s Demoiselles D’Avignon (1907) and Robert Colescott’s two versions of the Demoiselles D’Alabama (1985), which reprise Picasso’s composition, this lecture proposes a redefinition of modern painting, arguing that modernism in painting lies not in flatness or abstraction but in the registration of a triple alterity on the canvas surface:  within history, culture, and stereotype.

This event sponsored by Kaja Silverman’s Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award.