LOOKING BACK TO MANET'S FUTURE

Looking Back to Manet’s Future builds upon an article on Manet’s Portrait of Victorine Meurent—“The Spectacle of the Face,” published in Therese Dolan’s New Perspectives on Manet in 2012. Individual works by an artist whose influence continues are studied in light of late 20th and 21st century photographs and new media in an effort to “see” the painter afresh.

CÉZANNE'S UNCANNY DOMESTICITY

Cézanne’s Domestic Uncanny will continue work begun in an essay on the artist’s watercolor, Balcony (Philadelphia Museum of Art) for a book on interiority edited by Ewa Lajer-Burcharth and Beata Söntgen. I will consider both the artist’s ‘unhomely’ houses and the strangely present domestic objects he draws and paints.

THE MEDICAL PORTRAIT

The Medical Portrait: The Aesthetic as Evidence in Modern Photography and Film is a series of essays on how the “artfulness” of the photographic and/or cinematic form was used to persuade the viewer of the “reality” of physical and mental illness. In 1882, Dr. William Playfair hired a society photographer to make “before and after” images of patients he treated with the controversial rest cure that had been invented by his friend Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell of Philadelphia. The Holloway Sanatorium compiled casebooks of their patients that drew upon the conventions of formal portraiture, rather than institutional photography. Plastic surgeons used series of glass slides to teach their medical students the new methods perfected in the years after World War I. Films commissioned by the army after World War II drew upon the cinematic conventions of film noir to tell the story of soldiers recovering their psychological equilibrium.

JOHN SINGER SARGENT AND THE PHYSICS OF TOUCH

John Singer Sargent and the Physics of Touch presents a new framework for a painter who is generally beloved by curators and the public, but comparatively neglected by ambitious modernists within the academy. The book argues that Sargent was far more than a chronicler of the Gilded Age upper classes at their most intemperate. In his most ambitious later portraits, he wielded the material of paint as energetically and inventively as any avant-garde painter of the early 20th century. Through a series of case studies, I make the case that Sargent belongs not only to the history of modernism, from which he is often exiled, but to the cultural history of science.