The Terra Lectures in American Art: Part 4; Performing Innocence: Baby Nation

Professor Emily C. Burns, Terra Foundation Visiting Professor in
American Art, gives the fourth in the series of The Terra Lectures
in American Art: Performing Innocence: US Artists in Paris,
1865-1914. Content Warning: This talk will include references to
historic racist language and imagery. Viewer discretion is advised.
Performing Innocence: Baby Nation Moderator: Professor Alastair
Wright, Associate Professor in the History of Art, St John's
College 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: French artists
often referred to US artists and art as their offspring. In the
context of French declining birthrates, cultural fecundity absorbed
the anxieties about a decline of French culture in the name of
superiority. The final lecture analyzes how US artists in Paris
took up the child as a motif and mantra that reinforced or rejected
the narrative of French artistic parentage. While Edwin Blashfield
and Henry Ossawa Tanner, both artists invested in the French
academy system, framed dutiful tutelage, Mary Cassatt, Cecilia
Beaux, and Ellen Emmet Rand instead probed burgeoning ideas in
psychology about the child to frame independent and precocious
children. These modern children modeled artistic independence
echoed in these painters’ aesthetic experimentation, mirroring the
conceit framed by Henry James’s depiction of his child character in
What Maisie Knew as “flattening her nose upon the hard window-pane
of the sweet-shop of knowledge.” Cartoons related to the War of
1898 suggest the fungible nature of this position; while playing
youthful in the context of Europe, Americans adopted the aged Uncle
Sam in rendering their colonized subjects as the children as they
moved to outgrow their longstanding dependence on Parisian art
practice. 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. Alastair Wright teaches modern art and visual culture for
both the first year course (Prelims) and courses taken in
subsequent years. At graduate level, his teaching focuses on French
modernism and the interaction between art and mass culture. In all
his teaching he encourages students to engage as closely as
possible with actual works of art, regularly leading visits to
collections in Oxford and beyond. Alastair Wrights's research
focuses primarily on European modernisms. His first book, Matisse
and the Subject of Modernism, was published by Princeton University
Press in 2004, and more recently he curated an exhibition of Paul
Gauguin’s prints at the Princeton University Art Museum. The
accompanying catalogue, Gauguin’s Paradise Remembered: The Noa Noa
Prints, examined the role played by reproduction in Gauguin’s
understanding of French colonialism in Tahiti. He has published
essays in Art History, Oxford Art Journal, Art Bulletin, Burlington
Magazine, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Artforum International,
Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide and in various edited volumes.