The Terra Lectures in American Art: Part 2 Performing Innocence: Puritan

Professor c, Terra Foundation Visiting Professor in American Art,
gives the second lecture in the The Terra Lectures in American Art:
Performing Innocence: US Artists in Paris, 1865-1914 series.
Moderator: Wanda M.Corn, Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor Emerita
in Art History, Stanford University 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? Performing Innocence: Puritan Abstract: Visual culture
representing Americans in Paris often polarized stereotypes of
French and US identities, framing French bohemia as distinct from
steadfast US work ethic. This lecture analyzes how Americans and US
institutions in Paris adopted the ideal of the Puritan as a symbol
of their sustained connection with the United States and a
protective armor from becoming absorbed into Parisian decadence. US
churches in Paris—all Protestant—participated in this construction
alongside offering critiques of Catholicism in the context of
debates about laicization in France. Professor Burns analyzes
paintings, sculpture, and illustrations by Julius LeBlanc Stewart,
Cecilia Beaux, Augustus St. Gaudens, and Jean André Castaigne, and
studies St. Luke’s Chapel, which was built for the US students in
Paris, to argue that this discourse inflected US artists’
representations of their studio spaces; the rhetoric of US artists’
clubs in Paris; and limited professional possibilities for US women
artists. 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. Wanda M.Corn, Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor Emerita in
Art History, Stanford University Having earned a BA (l963), MA
(l965) and Ph.D. (l974) from New York University, Professor Wanda
Corn taught at Washington Square College, the University of
California, Berkeley, and Mills College before moving to Stanford
University in Palo Alto, California in 1980. At Stanford she held
the university's first permanent appointment in the history of
American art and served as chair of the Department of Art and Art
History and Acting Director of the Stanford Museum. From l992 to
1995 she was the Anthony P. Meier Family Professor and Director of
the Stanford Humanities Center. In 2000, she became the Robert and
Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History. She retired from teaching
at Stanford in 2008. In 2009, she was the John Rewald Distinguished
Visiting Lecturer at the CUNY Graduate Center. A scholar of late
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American art and
photography, Professor Corn has received fellowships from the
American Council of Learned Societies, the Smithsonian American Art
Museum, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the
Smithsonian Regents, the Stanford Humanities Center, the Radcliffe
Institute of Advanced Study, and the Clark Institute of Art. In
2003 she was the Clark Distinguished Visiting Professor at Williams
College and in 2006-07, the Samuel H. Kress Professor at the Center
for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of
Art. In 2012, she was awarded a Mellon Emeritus Fellowship to
support her pioneering research on Georgia O’Keeffe’s clothes. She
has won numerous teaching awards: in 2007 The Distinguished
Teaching of Art History Award from the College Art Association; in
2002 the Phi Beta Kappa Undergraduate Teaching Award; and in 1974
the Graves Award for outstanding teaching in the humanities. In
2006, the Archives of American Art awarded her The Lawrence A.
Fleischman Award for Scholarly Excellence in the Field of American
Art History and in 2007 she received the Women's Caucus for Art
Lifetime Achievement Award in the Visual Arts. In 2014, the College
Art Association dedicated a Distinguished Scholar Session to her
work. She has served two terms on the Board of Directors of the
College Art Association and two on the Commission for the
Smithsonian American Art Museum. She served on the Advisory Board
of the Georgia O’Keeffe Catalogue Raisonné and two terms on the
Board of the Terra Foundation in American Art. Today she is a
trustee of the Andrew and Betsy Wyeth Foundation for American Art;
and a board member of the Grant Wood Art Colony at the University
of Iowa. Since 2000, she has chaired the Advisory Committee for
Historic Artist Homes and Studios (HAHS) that is an affiliate of
the National Trust. Active as a guest curator, she had produced
various books and exhibitions, including The Color of Mood:
American Tonalism 1990-1910 (1972); The Art of Andrew Wyeth (l973);
Grant Wood: The Regionalist Vision (1983); Seeing Gertrude Stein,
Five Stories (2011-12); and in 2017-19, Georgia O’Keeffe: Living
Modern. Her O’Keeffe study, published by Prestel Press, won
Honorable Mention for the College Art Association’s Alfred H. Barr
Jr. Award and was awarded the 1918 Dedalus Foundation Exhibition
Catalogue Award. Her historiographic article for Art Bulletin,
"Coming of Age: Historical Scholarship in American Art" (June
l988), became a significant point of reference in the field as has
her work on cultural nationalism in early American modernism. Her
study of avant-garde modernist culture along the Atlantic rim, The
Great American Thing: Modern Art and American Identity, 1915-35,
was published by the University of California Press in 1999 and won
the Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in
American Art. In 2011, UC Press published Professor Corn’s Women
Building History about Mary Cassatt and the decorative program of
murals and sculptures for the Woman’s Building at the 1893 Chicago
World’s Columbian Exposition. She continues to research, write, and
lecture on high, middle, and low culture interpretations of Grant
Wood’s American Gothic.