Please join the Nicholson Center for British Studies for a session exploring Symbolist artworks at the Smart Museum, led by Dr Stefano Evangelista (Oxford), and curators Matthew Winterbottom and An Van Camp (Ashmolean).
Thursday, October 30 at 12.30-2pm in the Collections Research Lab, Smart Museum, 5550 S Greenwood Ave.
About the event: The handling session will provide the opportunity to explore some of the most striking works of Symbolist art housed in the Smart Museum. Our special focus will be on how, at the turn of the twentieth century, Symbolism created a bridge between different arts, including literature, and between different national cultures. The session will be led by a small team of curators and academics from Oxford University and the Ashmolean Museum, who are planning a research project and exhibition on global Symbolism.
No prior registration is required. Interested participants are asked to read Arthur Symon’s introduction to The Symbolist Movement in Literature, and W.B. Yeats’s essays ‘Symbolism in Painting’ and ‘The Symbolism of Poetry’ before the session.
About the speakers: Dr Stefano Evangelista is a professor of English at Trinity College, Oxford. His work explores the links between English literature and other languages, classical antiquity, visual culture and the history of sexuality, in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. Matthew Winterbottom is an assistant keeper and a curator of decorative arts and sculpture at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. While his research interests cover a wide range of European decorative arts from the late medieval to the early twentieth centuries, his current work focuses on 19th-century design and design reform, in particular the work of William Burges and Christopher Dresser. An Van Camp is the Christopher Brown assistant keeper of Northern European Art at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Her research centers on art made in the modern-day regions of Belgium, The Netherlands and Germany.
For further information, please contact Jo McDonagh (jmcdonagh@uchicago.edu) or Zuzanna Wolodko (zmwolodko@uchicago.edu).