Seurat's public

• Research seminar series 2016-17

Speaker: Alastair Wright (University of Oxford)

Venue: Barber Lecture Theatre, The Barber Institute of Fine Arts

Refreshments served

Abstract:

Taking as its primary focus Seurat’s Cirque (1890-91), my paper examines how the artist’s work imagines the public both as depicted audience and as implied viewer. I assess the claims made by Seurat’s colleagues Paul Signac and Félix Fénéon for a proletarian and politically radical audience before suggesting that the work of another of Seurat’s contemporaries, Stéphane Mallarmé, offers a better model for the painter’s ambivalent invocation of the public. The paper explores aspects of Seurat’s technique and subject-matter and of Mallarmé’s writings on theatre and popular entertainments in relation to the politics of the public sphere under the French Third Republic.

Biographical Information:

Alastair Wright is Associate Professor and Tutorial Fellow in Art History at St John’s College, University of Oxford. His first book, Matisse and the Subject of Modernism, was published by Princeton University Press in 2004. In 2010 he curated an exhibition of Paul Gauguin’s prints at the Princeton University Art Museum. The accompanying catalogue, Gauguin’s Paradise Remembered, examined the role played by reproduction in Gauguin’s understanding of French colonialism in Tahiti. Alastair has published widely on European and non-European modernisms in October, Art History, the Oxford Art Journal, the Art Bulletin, and in various edited volumes and catalogues.

He is currently working on two book projects. The first is a study of the politics of embodied spectatorship in the work of the 19th-century British painter Ford Madox Brown. In the second he is exploring the manifold links between the emergence of modernism in the visual arts and the transformation of the public sphere under the French Third Republic, with a particular emphasis on the work of the Neo-Impressionists.