Roberta and Richard Huber Colloquium, Fall 2019

Wednesday, December 4, 6:30pm

Reforming the Baroque, in Bits and Pieces, from Latin America

Aaron Hyman, Assistant Professor, Department of the History of Art, Johns Hopkins University

The Baroque has been conceived as one of art history’s foundational styles. This talk, in examining the transmission of prints from Europe to Latin America and their extensive colonial copying, instead reframes the Baroque in terms of form. Seeing the Baroque from a vantage point staked in Latin America and rearticulating it in terms of formal syntax and pictorial recombination has ramifications both for the ways we look at European art and, more broadly, for interrogating some of art history’s seminal historiographic assumptions.

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Wednesday, September 11, 6:30pm

Alexander von Humboldt and the United States: Art, Nature, and Culture

Eleanor Harvey, Senior Curator, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Alexander von Humboldt was arguably the most important naturalist of the 19th century. He lived for 90 years, published more than 36 books, traveled across three continents, and wrote well over 25,000 letters to an international network of colleagues and admirers. In 1804, after traveling almost five years in South America and Mexico, Humboldt spent exactly six weeks in the United States. Humboldt—through a series of lively exchanges of ideas about the arts, science, politics, and exploration with influential figures such as President Thomas Jefferson and artist Charles Willson Peale—shaped American perceptions of nature and the way American cultural identity became grounded in our relationship with the environment. This lecture examines the legacy of that short trip in American art and culture.