Presented by Emily C. Burns, Terra Foundation Visiting Professor in American Art
Moderator: Professor Alastair Wright, Associate Professor in the History of Art, St John’s College

French artists often referred to US artists and art as their offspring. In the context of French declining birthrates, cultural fecundity absorbed the anxieties about a decline of French culture in the name of superiority. The final lecture analyzes how US artists in Paris took up the child as a motif and mantra that reinforced or rejected the narrative of French artistic parentage. While Edwin Blashfield and Henry Ossawa Tanner, both artists invested in the French academy system, framed dutiful tutelage, Mary Cassatt, Cecilia Beaux, and Ellen Emmet Rand instead probed burgeoning ideas in psychology about the child to frame independent and precocious children. These modern children modeled artistic independence echoed in these painters’ aesthetic experimentation, mirroring the conceit framed by Henry James’s depiction of his child character in What Maisie Knew as “flattening her nose upon the hard window-pane of the sweet-shop of knowledge.” Cartoons related to the War of 1898 suggest the fungible nature of this position; while playing youthful in the context of Europe, Americans adopted the aged Uncle Sam in rendering their colonized subjects as the children as they moved to outgrow their longstanding dependence on Parisian art practice.

More information and YouTube link: www.torch.ox.ac.uk/event/the-terra-lectures-in-american-art-performing-innocence-baby-nation