Terra Lectures in American Art 2021: Performing Innocence: US Artists in Paris, 1865-1914

Between the end of the US Civil War and the start of World War I, thousands of American artists studied and worked in Paris. While popular thought holds that they went to imbibe culture and attain artistic maturity, in this four-part lecture series, Professor Emily Burns explores the various ways that Americans in Paris performed instead a cultural immaturity that pandered to European expectations that the United States lacked history, tradition, and culture. The lectures chart knowing constructions of innocence that US artists and writers projected abroad in both art practice and social performance, linking them to ongoing conversations about race, gender, art making, modernity, physio-psychological experience, evolutionary theory, and national identity in France and in the United States. Interwoven myths in art and social practice that framed Puritanism; an ironically long-standing penchant for anything new and original; primitivism designed by white artists’ playing with ideas of Blackness and Indigeneity; childhood’s incisive perception; and originary sight operated in tandem to turn a liability of lacking culture into an asset. In analyzing the mechanisms of these constructions, the lectures return to the question about the cultural work these ideas enacted when performed abroad. What is obscured and repressed by mythical innocence and feigned forgetting?

The Terra Lectures in American Art will be broadcast by TORCH via YouTube – see here for more information:
www.torch.ox.ac.uk/event/performing-innocence-belated

Wednesday 17 February 2021 (5th Week, Hilary Term)

Wednesday 24 February 2021 (6th Week, Hilary Term)

Wednesday 3 March 2021 (7th Week, Hilary Term)

Wednesday 10 March 2021 (8th Week, Hilary Term)

This series features in the following public collections: