Michael Leja

Touching Illusions: The Trompe l'Oeil Paintings of William Harnett

Thursday, March 29, 2001
5:30 p.m.

William Harnett's trompe l'oeil paintings were frequently described in contemporary press reports as eliciting highly animated responses from audiences. Viewers reportedly were deceived by them; the paintings allegedly prompted wagers over whether they presented illusions or the real things, and some viewers tried to poke or touch them. While the paintings were appreciated as cunning deceptions, they were also admired as faithful and contemplative renderings of meaningful objects, often evoking senses of melancholy and loss. My paper argues that these responses can be reconciled through close attention to Harnett's paintings and the place they occupied in late 19th-century American culture.

-Michael Leja

Michael Leja is the Sewell C. Biggs Professor of American Art History at the University of Delaware. He is the author of Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (Yale University Press, 1993) and the forthcoming Suspicious Eyes: Art, Modernity, and Deception in New York 1871-1917.

To read an interview with Michael Leja, please click here.

Andrew Hemingway

Proletarian Love and Revolutionary Art in New York, 1935

Thursday, April 5, 2001
5:30 p.m.

Andrew Hemingway is a reader in history of art at University College London. He is the author of Landscape Imagery and Urban Culture in Early 19th-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 1992). He coedited (with William Vaughn) Art in Bourgeois Society 1790-1850 (Cambridge University Press, 1998), and (with David Blayney Brown and Anne Lyles) Romantic Landscape: The Norwich School of Painters (Tate Gallery, London, 2000). Several of his articles on Cotman have been published by the Walpole Society, London.

In this talk Hemingway discusses the strategies American commun-ists used in trying to develop a style of revolutionary art in the early 1930s. Having analyzed the works of Jacob Burck, Raphael Soyer, and Philip Evergood, he argues that among the reasons these works "failed" for many people were the impossibly high formal expectations placed on communist art, as well as the incongruity of projecting a Soviet vision of socialist humanity onto the consciousness of the American proletariat. Both the issue of sexual relations under communism (or "proletarian love") and the complex relationship between ideals and reality produced a tangle of contradictions. Hemingway believes that the best work of these artists pointed to truths that threatened to rupture the communist mythos, rather than revealing the truths communist ideologues expected of proletarian realism.

To read an interview with Andrew Hemingway, please click here.