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Summer School Art History public lecture - AMY KNIGHT POWELL (University of Southern California): "The Birth of Easel Painting"

When:We 30-06-2021 16:30 - 18:00
Where:Online
A painting of a man in fancy historical dress in a sumptuous bedroom. The walls are richly decorated, the bed is covered by orange hangings, and there is a richly patterned rug on the table in from of the window.
A painting of a man in fancy historical dress in a sumptuous bedroom. The walls are richly decorated, the bed is covered by orange hangings, and there is a richly patterned rug on the table in from of the window.

The summer school Curating Art & Nature - The Knowledge of the Curator III offers a series of lectures open to the public. Tickets are free and available via eventbrite. All lectures take place online and are scheduled from 16.30-18.00 (CEST).

The Birth of Easel Painting

This talk comes from a book project called Picture Box: A Small History of the Easel Painting. The word “small” in my title is meant to indicate that, despite its outsized presence in the discipline of art history, the roughly half-millennium history of the easel painting is not, in fact, very big, when seen from the perspective of either global geography or deep time. The chapter I will present concerns the “birth” of the format and particularly the historical coincidence of this birth and the so-called primitive accumulation, that is, the expropriation of land and labor—including reproductive labor—that launched capitalism.

About the speaker

Amy Knight Powell is Associate Professor of art history at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Depositions: Scenes from the Late Medieval Church and the Modern Museum (Zone Books, 2012) and Picture Box: A Small History of the Easel Painting (forthcoming from Zone). She is also writing a book about the iconoclastic, pantheistic, and anti-anthropic nature of some seventeenth-century Dutch landscape art.