Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s extraordinary series of views from the Villa d’Este in Tivoli has been described as “one of the most beautiful red chalk drawings ever made.” Focusing on the specific visual and material aspects of this remarkable series, the lecture will discuss how the series contributed to the emergence of a modern conception of drawing in eighteenth-century France. In particular, it will consider the ways in which the series invites us to reimagine drawing as a fundamentally social act.

Speaker Bio:

Ewa Lajer-Burcharth is the William Dorr Boardman Professor of Fine Arts in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. She teaches modern and contemporary art focusing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, post-1970s art, and critical theory. Her current research interests include historical conceptualization of drawing as a practice, a medium and a discourse; the issue of artistic individuality in its different historical formulations; the relation between space and subjectivity; the question of interiority; the dialectic of privacy and publicness; the historical conceptions of painting as a practice, a discourse and an institution; art practice in a revolutionary situation, and art, architecture and technology in the Enlightenment. Professor Lajer-Burcharth is the author of Necklines: The Art of Jacques-Louis David after the Terror (Yale University Press, 1999); Chardin Material (Sternberg Press, 2011); and The Painter’s Touch: Boucher, Chardin, Fragonard (Princeton University Press, 2017). Professor Lajer-Burcharth is currently working on a book project on drawing in the eighteenth century. Professor Lajer-Burcharth also publishes in the field of contemporary art. Her most recent publications in this field are: “Interiors At Risk: Precarious Spaces in Contemporary Art,” Harvard Design Magazine, special issue on “What about the inside,” Fall/Winter 2008/2009; “Borders,” in Krzysztof Wodiczko: Guests, exhibition catalogue, The Polish Pavilion, Venice Biennial (53 Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte), June-November, 2009; and “Interior and Interiority: Chantal Akerman’s La Bas,” 31 Das Magazin des Instituts für Theorie, Special Issue: Die Figur Der Zwei/The Figure of Two, Zürich, No. 14/15 December 2010; and “The Inner Life of Painting,” essay in the exhibition catalogue Amy Sillman, The Institute of Contemporary Art, 2013.

This lecture is generously sponsored by the Lamar Dodd School of Art, Doris and Shouky Shaheen, and the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts.