The Terra Lectures in American Art: Part 3; Performing Innocence: Primitive / Incipient

Professor Emily C. Burns, Terra Foundation Visiting Professor in
American Art, gives the third in the series of The Terra Lectures
in American Art: Performing Innocence: US Artists in Paris,
1865-1914. Performing Innocence: Primitive / Incipient The Terra
Lectures in American Art: Performing Innocence: US Artists in
Paris, 1865-1914 Moderator: James Smalls, Professor and Chair of
Visual Arts, University of Maryland, Baltimore County Between the
end of the US Civil War and the start of World War I, thousands of
American artists studied and worked in Paris. While popular thought
holds that they went to imbibe culture and attain artistic
maturity, in this four-part lecture series, Professor Emily Burns
explores the various ways that Americans in Paris performed instead
a cultural immaturity that pandered to European expectations that
the United States lacked history, tradition, and culture. The
lectures chart knowing constructions of innocence that US artists
and writers projected abroad in both art practice and social
performance, linking them to ongoing conversations about race,
gender, art making, modernity, physio-psychological experience,
evolutionary theory, and national identity in France and in the
United States. Interwoven myths in art and social practice that
framed Puritanism; an ironically long-standing penchant for
anything new and original; primitivism designed by white artists’
playing with ideas of Blackness and Indigeneity; childhood’s
incisive perception; and originary sight operated in tandem to turn
a liability of lacking culture into an asset. In analyzing the
mechanisms of these constructions, the lectures return to the
question about the cultural work these ideas enacted when performed
abroad. What is obscured and repressed by mythical innocence and
feigned forgetting? Abstract: Projections of different ideas of
innocence became entangled in the representation of Black US
character in fin-de-siècle Paris. By pairing new research on
blackface minstrelsy and painter Henry Ossawa Tanner in the
American Art Association of Paris with the displays of Blackness
curated by Black intellectuals in the “Exhibit of American Negroes”
in the Paris Universal Exposition of 1900, Professor Burns argues
that American minstrelsy in Paris built a racialized “primitive”
identity that caricatured Black men as effeminate and emasculated,
while the latter exhibit constructed innocence grounded in claims
of youth, newness, and incipient culture. While the curators
staunchly and effectively rejected narratives of primitivism, these
tropes of the new simultaneously paralleled and reinforced
performances of cultural innocence in the largely white US
community in Paris. Biographies: Emily C. Burns is an Associate
Professor of Art History at Auburn University where she teaches
courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American, Native
American, and European art history. Her publications include a
book, Transnational Frontiers: the American West in France
(University of Oklahoma Press, 2018), which analyzes appropriations
of the American West in France in performance and visual and
material culture in the tripartite international relationships
between the United States, France, and the Lakota nation between
1867 and 1914, as well as journal articles, exhibition catalogue
essays, and book chapters related to art and circulation, US
artists in France, and American impressionism. She is currently
completing a co-edited volume with Alice Price on global
impressionisms entitled Mapping Impressionist Painting in
Transnational Contexts (forthcoming from Routledge). During her
tenure as the Terra Foundation for American Art Visiting Professor
in the Department of History of Art at the University of Oxford and
a Visiting Fellow at Worcester College, Professor Burns will
complete her second book, Performing Innocence: Cultural
Belatedness and U.S. Art in fin-de-siècle Paris. Dr. James Smalls
is an art historian, with a focus on the intersections of race,
gender, and queer sexuality in the art and visual culture of the
nineteenth century, as well as the art and visual culture of the
black diaspora. He is the author of Homosexuality in Art (Parkstone
Press, 2003) and The Homoerotic Photography of Carl Van Vechten:
Public Face, Private Thoughts (2006). He has published essays in a
number of book anthologies and prominent journals, including
American Art, French Historical Studies, Third Text, Art Journal,
and Art Criticism. His book chapters and articles include: Menace
at the Portal: Masculine Desire and the Homoerotics of Orientalism
(2016), The Soft Glow of Brutality (2015), A Teacher Uses Star Trek
for Difficult Conversations on Race and Gender (2015), Racial
Antics in Late Nineteenth-Century French Art and Popular Culture
(2014), Sculpting Black Queer Bodies and Desires: The Case of
Richmond Barthé (2013), and Exquisite Empty Shells: Sculpted Slave
Portraits and the French Ethnographic Turn (2013). Smalls is
currently completing a book entitled Féral Benga: African Muse of
Modernism. In 2006, Smalls curated a two-part exhibition at the
Baltimore Museum of Art on the art, career, and international
influence of the African American artist, Henry Ossawa Tanner. In
2009-2010, he served as the Consulting Editor for the five-volume
set of The Grove Encyclopedia of American Art. In 2015 he was
appointed to the Advisory Board for The Archives of American Art
Journal. Dr. Smalls holds degrees from the University of
California, Los Angeles (UCLA), in Ethnic Arts (B. A.), and Art
History (M. A., and Ph.D.). He has taught at Rutgers University,
Columbia University, and at the University of Paris.