Diane Radycki on Paula Modersohn-Becker
Galerie St. Etienne, 24 West 57th St.
Thursday, November 12th at 6 pm, free
Professor of art history and director of the Payne Gallery at Moravian College, Diane Radycki offers New Yorkers a rare opportunity to hear her speak about the first modern woman artist, Paula Modersohn Becker. Director of GSE, Jane Kallir wrote in her beautiful essay: "Paula Modersohn-Becker (1876-1907) was almost completely unknown when she died following childbirth at the age of thirty-one, but within fifteen years she had become a near mythic figure in her native Germany. Posthumous exhibitions were staged at museums and prestigious galleries throughout the country. The artist’s letters and journals, limited excerpts from which were first published in 1913, became a bestseller when an expanded edition appeared in 1919-20. And she was famously eulogized by Rainer Maria Rilke, whose early career had been intimately intertwined with hers. Although these literary elements did not exactly overshadow Modersohn-Becker’s art, they gave her story a tragic cast that belies the unsentimental rigor of her achievement.."
Margaret Oppenheimer on "Madame
Jumel Collects"
Mid-Manhattan Library, 455 Fifth
Avenue,
Thursday, November 12th at 6:30 p.m., free
Eliza Jumel has been featured on this blog before as a "ghost" invented by the incomparable artist Yinka Shonebare, during his exhibition at the Morris-Jumel Mansion in Washington Heights. Margaret wrote to me: "The amazing Eliza Jumel—raised
in a brothel, indentured as a servant, and confined to a workhouse while her
mother was in jail—rose to become one of New York's richest women. Along the
way she turned herself into an art connoisseur, acquiring more than 240
paintings in Paris between 1815 and 1817." Art
historian Margaret Oppenheimer will bring Jumel’s pioneering collection back to
life through a slide lecture of the paintings, their owner, and the early 19th-century art
scene in New York and Paris at the New York Public Library - Mid-Manhattan.
Oppenheimer holds a PhD
from New York University's Institute of Fine Arts and is the author of a newly
released biography, The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel: A Story of Marriage
and Money in the Early Republic, as well as The French
Portrait: Revolution to Restoration (2005), the collaborating writer of the
first edition of Art: A Brief History (2000), and a contributor to A
Personal Gathering; Paintings and Sculpture from the Collection of William I.
Koch (1996). Her articles have appeared in Apollo, the Gazette
des Beaux-Arts, the Metropolitan Museum Journal, and other
publications.
Margaret volunteers as a docent at the Morris-Jumel Mansion in New
York City, Eliza Jumel’s former home. (Please join me for a tour with Margaret on Saturday, December 5th.)
Kathleen Gilje, Linda Nochlin at the Bar of the Folies Bergère , 2005
Kathleen Gilje, Self-Portrait in Bougereau's Assault, 2012 (detail)
Jovana Stokic, Professor of Curatorial Studies, School of Visual Arts, NYC
Maura Reilly, Chief Curator, National Academy of Art, NYC
"Linda Nochlin: The Art Historian as Seen By Artists" - A Panel with Linda Nochlin
Thursday, November 12th, 7 pm, free
Which one will I attend - alas: none.
I teach "Picasso: The Artist, His Work and His Critics" on
Thursday evenings at Purchase College.
Best wishes to my dear colleagues and friends as you celebrate this tribute to women in the arts!
Beth New York
aka Beth S. Gersh-Nesic, Ph.D.
Director
No country does life on earth better than the French.
Paris, we love you. We cry for you. You are mourning tonight, and we with you. We know you will laugh again, and sing again, and make love, and heal, because loving life is your essence. The forces of darkness will ebb. They will lose. They always do."