WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — On Saturday, Feb. 21 at 2 pm, the Clark Art Institute's Research and Academic Program presents a lecture by Richard Taws, professor and head of the History of Art Department at University College London, in conjunction with the Shadow Visionaries: French Artists Against the Current, 1840–70 exhibition. 

 

The talk takes place in the Manton Research Center auditorium.

 

Taws examines how representations of infrastructure, nature, and technology shaped the cultural imaginaries of nineteenth-century urban modernity, and how they intersected with contemporary ideas about time and history in France. Focusing on artists featured in Shadow Visionaries, including Charles Meryon, Victor Hugo, and Nadar, the talk explores tensions between organic life and mechanical form, visibility and invisibility, and tradition and transformation, in Paris and further afield.

 

Richard Taws specializes in European visual cultures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He taught previously at McGill University, Canada, and has been a Getty Postdoctoral Fellow, a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and a Visiting Fellow at the Bard Graduate Center, New York. In 2012, he was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize; in 2018, a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship; and in 2022, a Leverhulme Research Fellowship.

 

Free. Accessible seats available; for information, call 413 458 0524.