On the Place Pigalle:
Art at the Heart of Montmartre
April 2, 2005
East Building Auditorium
Held in conjunction with the exhibition
Toulouse-Lautrec and Montmartre
A panel discussion and open question-and-answer session follow the presentations. Participants include symposium lecturers and the Gallery's curators of French painting, Florence E. Coman, Philip Conisbee, and Kimberly A. Jones.
In the Fin-de-Siècle Battle between the "Ancients" and the "Moderns," the Avant-Garde Was in Montmartre
Phillip Dennis Cate, director emeritus and supervisor of curatorial and academic activities, The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Beginning in the early 1880s, Montmartre became the home and workplace for the post-Franco-Prussian-War generation of innovative artists and writers (the Moderns) whose goals were to break away from the artistic controls of the French Academy (the Ancients) and to revolutionize art and literature. Cate will demonstrate through images included in the exhibition how Montmartre artists rendered in their work this defiant act of rebellion against the status quo.
The Aesthetics of Slumming: Toulouse-Lautrec at the Moulin Rouge
Howard G. Lay, associate professor of modern art, Department of History of Art, University of Michigan
This lecture examines the connection between Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's famous dance hall pictures of high aesthetic ambition and lower-class culture. Professor Lay also addresses the ways in which Lautrec's pictures figure their spectators as participants in narrative situations evocative of the destabilizing effects of drinking, dancing, and slumming.