Lecture and Book Signing | Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen on Seurat’s Models
Channel: Barnes Foundation
Date: 2022-04-11

Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen | “Seurat’s Poseuses and the Problem of Pose in Modern Art”

Author of Modern Art and the Remaking of Human Disposition (University of Chicago Press, 2021), Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen shares her research on one of the Barnes Foundation’s hallmark works: Georges Seurat’s Poseuses. This 1888 painting is the keystone and point of departure for her book, which offers a new perspective on the radical transformation in how human figures were represented in European art in the decades before 1900, by showing how artists broke with traditional ways of posing the human body to reflect modern understandings of human consciousness. Butterfield-Rosen will discuss Poseuses’s importance within the history of modern art and share a number of exciting new discoveries about the painting. 

About the Book
Modern Art and the Remaking of Human Disposition
Exploring major works by Seurat, Gustav Klimt, and the dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, Modern Art and the Remaking of Human Disposition combines intensive formal analysis with inquiries into the history of psychology and evolutionary biology. In doing so, it shows how modern understandings of human consciousness and the relation of mind to body were materialized in art through a new vocabulary of postures and poses.

About the Speaker
Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen is associate director of the Williams Graduate Program in the History of Art at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

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About The Barnes Foundation:
The mission of the Barnes is to promote the advancement of education and the appreciation of the fine arts and horticulture.

Our founder, Dr. Albert C. Barnes, believed that art had the power to improve minds and transform lives. Our diverse educational programs are based on his teachings and one-of-a-kind collections. 

Philadelphia art collector, Albert C. Barnes (1872–1951), chartered the Barnes Foundation in 1922 to teach people from all walks of life how to look at art. Over three decades, he collected some of the world’s most important impressionist, post-impressionist, and modern paintings, including works by Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso. He displayed them alongside African masks, native American jewelry, Greek antiquities, and decorative metalwork.

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