PHAIS Seminar Series Week 22: Professor Kathleen Pierce

The PHAIS Seminar Series meets weekly in term time to discuss a paper by a visiting Philosopher, Historian, Art Historian or a member of our academic staff.

Seeing Spots: Pattern, Pathological Skin, and the Cubist Surface

Prof Kathleen Pierce, Smith College (Massachusetts)

This talk explores the use of spots and dots in early twentieth-century visual culture between spheres of art and medicine. Close looking at dermatological atlases, advertisements for patent medicines, and public health posters reveals all-encompassing red spots to be frequent indices of a diseased and disrupted skin surface. I bring this thinking about the disrupted surface to bear on similarly pocked modernist artworks, such as Picasso’s Absinthe Glass (1914). Like the physician inspecting the skin of syphilitic patients, I contend that Picasso’s myriad red dots probe the integrity and quiddity of the rendered artistic surface.

Biography

Kathleen Pierce is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Art History at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. Her research and teaching explore intersections of art and medicine in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French empire, attending closely to intersections of gender, race, health, power, and visuality. She is currently working on her first book project, tentatively titled Surface Tension: Paper, Paint, and Pathological Skin in the Fin-de-Siècle French Empire. The book explores relationships between medical thinking about the surface of the modern body--the skin--and the surface of modernist art; her talk today emerges from this work. Beyond work on the book, Pierce has recently published scholarly writing in Art Journal Open, Buildings & Landscapes, and Synapsis: A Health Humanities Journal.

This is a hybrid event: the speaker will present via Zoom, but the seminar will be shown on campus. A Zoom link will be available for those who wish to attend remotely - please email phaispg@essex.ac.uk to request the link.