Lecture and Seminar on ‘Reversed Painting’ with Professor Richard Read

Louis Dupré, Portrait of M. Fauvel, The French Consul with View of the Acropolis, 1819 and William Sidney Mount, The Painter's Triumph, 1838 (Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts)

Richard Read

Professor of Art History at the University of Western Australia

LECTURE: Reversed Painting and the Conflict between Commercial and Academic Values in Nineteenth-Century London and Paris

This lecture examines how the strange, complex pictorial motif of the reversed painting was used in paintings representing art galleries and academic juries to adjudicate the conflict between academic and commercial values at a time when newly professionalized commercial galleries sought to wrest cultural authority and financial power from academies in both London and Paris.

SEMINAR: The Reversed Painting in Colonial Art

The lecture is followed by a seminar in which Richard Read will lead the discussion. This will explore the use of the reflexive pictorial motif of the reversed canvas in colonial and decolonized art to register synchronic differences between cultures where the representation of skin colour, pioneer technologies, and contrasting attitudes to paternal countries are concerned.

All Welcome

Monday 22nd March, 6:45pm

Venue: Rm 148/150, Elisabeth Murdoch Building, The University of Melbourne (Parkville).

Richard Read is Professor in Art History at the University of Western Australia. He has published in major journals on the relationship between literature and the visual arts, nineteenth and twentieth-century European and Australian art history and contemporary film and complex images in global contexts. His book Art and Its Discontents: the Early Life of Adrian Stokes (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002: PA: Penn. State U. Press, 2003) was joint winner of the AAANZ best book prize for 2003. His current research includes book projects on: ‘The Trope of Contrast in the Art and Literature of the British Grand Tour to Italy’, ‘The Reversed Painting in Western Art’, funded by an ARC Discovery Grant, and ‘Settler Societies and Cultural Modernization’ which he pursued at the University of Bristol as Institute of Advanced Studies Benjamin Meaker Visiting Professor in January 2010 prior to an international workshop at UWA in September 2010. His forthcoming publications include: ‘Contrasting Nurseries in John Ruskin’s Stones of Venice’, in Ruskin, Venice and 19th Century Cultural Travel, ed. Keith Hanley and Emma Sdegno (Venice: University of Ca’ Foscari, forthcoming 2010) ‘Intra-Extra-Recto-Verso: Ontological Realms in Reversed Paintings’, Melbourne Art Journal, 11-12, and ‘The Diastolic Rhythm of the Art Gallery: Originals, Copies and Reversed Paintings’, The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art.

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