Mahaney Arts Center 125

Lecture by Ellen Prokop. Many specialists have claimed that the early modern artist El Greco served as an important source of inspiration for several seminal masters of French 19th-century painting. Yet there is little evidence that these avant-garde artists had the opportunity to study El Greco’s work in person. This lecture outlines this scholarly debate and demonstrates how geospatial technologies and analytical techniques offer a compelling means to explore El Greco’s contested legacy and discover new perspectives on the enduring issue of his influence.

Amy Wlodarski ’97, associate professor of music at Dickinson College, discusses the film score for Alain Resnais’s Holocaust documentary Nuit et Brouillard/Night and Fog (1955), with particular attention to how it illustrates the broader postwar phenomenon of secondary Holocaust witness.

A Music Department event. Sponsored by the Holocaust Remembrance Film Fund. Free

2017 marks the 150th birthday of German artist Käthe Kollwitz. Famous for her socially engaged art especially between the two World Wars, Kollwitz and her social engagement for the poor, for children, and for war victims have often been studied through the lens of her biography—having lost a son in the war, much of her adult life was characterized by grieving this loss. Prof. McVeigh’s lecture seeks to broaden the focus and contextualize Käthe Kollwitz’ work as an artist and as a social activist in the context of the women’s movement in the first half of the 20th century.

Dr. Sharon Hecker, art historian, curator, and leading scholar of Medardo Rosso (1858-1928), author of A Moment’s Monument: Medardo Rosso and the International Origins of Modern Sculpture. Dr. Hecker considers the artist’s work, his unusual casting techniques and exhibition strategies, as well as his influence on modern and contemporary artists.

Sponsored by Middlebury College Museum of Art, Department of History of Art and Architecture, Department of Italian

Internationally-admired photographer David Maisel presents a talk in conjunction with the exhibition Land and Lens: Photographers Envision the Environment. Known for his books and exhibitions, Maisel has focused on aerial and x-ray photographs of environmentally-impacted sites since the 1980s. Sponsored by the Department of History of Art and Architecture, Johnson Enrichment Fund, and the Middlebury College Museum of Art. Free

In the 1870s, James Whistler and his sometime rival Walter Greaves developed the visual genre of the nocturne. Borrowing its name from Chopin’s piano sketches, it aims to capture the moody stillness of the night, explained in this presentation by Professor Pieter Broucke as part of the Fridays at the Museum series. Free

Photographer Jane Fulton Alt will discuss her photographic project, The Burn, for which she photographed controlled burns conducted by ecologists on the Illinois prairie, as well as her latest project, Fire and Water. In conjunction with Land and Lens: Photographers Envision the Environment, on view at the Middlebury College Museum of Art. Free

Public lecture by John Cort, Professor of Asian and Comparative Religions at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. John will talk about the sectarian differences between the Digambar Jains and Shvetambar Jains. He will focus on disagreements concerning: the biographies of the 24th Jina Mahavira; whether a true monk should be naked or can wear white robes; and whether or not women can directly attain liberation. Sponsored by the Department of History of Art and Architecture and the Johnson Enrichment Fund. Free.

Middlebury’s terracotta relief The Ecstasy of St. Teresa of Avila has been attributed to Tommaso Amantini, a Baroque sculptor trained in Bernini’s circle in Rome, on the basis of a similar, signed relief in Vienna. Dr. Jessica Boehman of CUNY LaGuardia Community College will link both reliefs to high-profile church patrons in Le Marche, Italy. Part of the Fridays at the Museum series. Free

Using unpublished archival sources and a photographic survey undertaken in 2017, this talk by Gauvin Alexander Bailey reconstructs the circumstances, influences, and builders of this extraordinary monument to demonstrate its position at the nexus of a global network of cultures at the dawn of Caribbean and Latin American independence. A History of Art and Architecture event. Free