Recorded on November 17, 2020

Harmonious Systems: Charles Lang Freer’s Aesthetic Paintings
Melody Barnett Deusner, Associate Professor of Art History, Indiana University

Join art historian Melody Barnett Deusner as she discussed her new book Aesthetic Painting in Britain and America: Collectors, Artworlds, Networks (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art/Yale University Press, 2020), a transatlantic study that offers new ways of thinking about paintings produced in association with the Aesthetic movement in the late nineteenth century. Tracing how these pictures were made, purchased, lived with, exchanged, and donated to museums, Deusner delves into the ways that “art for art’s sake” actually did much more than simply cocoon patrons within harmoniously decorated domestic spaces. Instead, businessmen and politicians used those spaces to organize their social and professional networks at a historical moment when new technologies were connecting people around the world.

This lecture focused more specifically on the experiences of Detroit industrialist and collector Charles Lang Freer. As revealed by his extensive archival records, Freer’s artistic and business activities were often intertwined. His paintings by James McNeill Whistler, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Dwight Tryon, and Abbott H. Thayer functioned as connective agents, encouraging collective action among those who owned them, lived with them, and carried out business while surrounded by them. By restoring these connections, we see how these pictures offered an avenue through which their makers, viewers, and owners could interface with their world rather than escape it.

Melody Barnett Deusner is an associate professor of art history at Indiana University. In researching and teaching the visual and material culture of the late nineteenth century, she focuses primarily on patronage relationships, institutional formations, and the afterlives of objects. Her scholarship has appeared in the journals American Art and Art History, and in exhibition catalogues produced by the Clark Art Institute and the Smithsonian American Art Museum (forthcoming). Research featured in this lecture and in her new book was launched during her tenure as a Terra Foundation Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian in 2007–2008.

свернуть