Watch Online | Theatre, Art & Visual Culture in 19th Century
*Watch Online*
If you missed the ‘Theatre, Art & Visual Culture in 19th Century’ session at our recent #forarthistory2021 Annual Conference you can now watch all 6 papers online thanks to session convenor Patricia Smyth who has made the full session available online.
‘Our session at the Association for Art History conference this year brought together six scholars working at various points of intersection between art history and theatre history. The interdisciplinary nature of the ‘Theatre and Visual Culture’ project is reflected in the makeup of our team, but so far our main academic networks have tended to be in theatre and performance, so this occasion was important to us as an opportunity to connect with art historical research in the field of nineteenth-century transmediality and to open a dialogue with art historians that we hope will lead to future collaborative work.’
Speakers who participated in this session are:
Marika Takanishi Knowles, giving a paper on French féerie and Romantic visual aesthetics.
Elena Cooper gives an illuminating account of the legal context of nineteenth-century transmediality revealed changing attitudes toward the circulation of specific compositions and motifs between media, which was such a dominant practice in this period.
Stephen Bann looks at pioneering work on artists such as Paul Delaroche, a key figure in the emergence of a new kind of transmedial visual culture in this period. Both Patricia Smyth and Stephen Bann deal with the genesis of Paul Delaroche’s Assassination of the Duc de Guise, a picture that was subsequently remediated in countless variations, as well as on stage, in a number of films and, most recently, in a virtual reality attraction at the chateau of Blois, where Guise’s murder took place in 1588.
The session finished with a pair of papers from Sophie Thomas and Gülru Çakmak, which both in their different ways deal with attempts to revivify the classical past and, in particular, with the emotional response of the spectator. Sophie exploration of staging Pompeii moves between a range of nineteenth-century media, such as Robert Burford’s panorama of The Ruins of Pompeii, to paintings including John Martin’s The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum, theatrical productions, and amusement park ‘pyrodramas’. Gülru Çakmak brings us back to the present day with a paper on the contemporary artist Yadegar Asisi’s Pergamon Panorama, which, housed in a specially constructed building under the auspices of the Berlin State Museums, offers a 360-degree bird’s eye view of the Hellenistic city during a festival day in the year 129 CE.
Image: John Parry, A London Street Scene, 1835, Alfred Dunhill Coll.
