Enfilade

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Opening next week at The Lewis Walpole Library:

Bawdy Bodies: Satires of Unruly Women
The Lewis Walpole Library, Farmington, CT, 24 September 2015 — 26 February 2016

Curated by Hope Saska and Cynthia Roman with contributions by Jill Campbell

Characterized by comically grotesque figures performing lewd and vulgar actions, bawdy humor provided a poignant vehicle to target a variety of political and social issues in eighteenth-century Britain. Bawdy Bodies: Satires of Unruly Women explores the deployment of this humorous but derisive strategy toward the regulation of female behavior. The exhibition will present satirical images of women from a range of subject categories including the royal family, aging members of fashionable society, disparaged mothers, political activists, gamblers, medical wonders, artists, performers, and intellectuals.

The exhibition is co-curated by Hope Saska, Curator of Collections and Exhibitions at the Art Museum of the University of Colorado, Boulder, and Cynthia Roman, Curator of Prints, Drawings, and Paintings at the Lewis Walpole Library, with contributions by Yale Professor of English Jill Campbell. It will be on view at the Lewis Walpole Library, 154 Main Street, Farmington, Connecticut, on Wednesdays from 2:00 to 4:30 pm and by appointment.

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P U B L I C  L E C T U R E

Amelia Rauser | Rock, Paper, Scissors: Dimensionality and
Neoclassical Aesthetics in the Art and Fashion of the 1790s
28 October 2015, 5:30 pm, Sterling Memorial Library Lecture Hall

In the 1790s, women dressed in imitation of antique statuary. Yet most devotees of the style had never seen the originals they emulated; rather, they were inspired by print representations of them, and this process of translation—from three-dimensional sculptures into two-dimensional paper representations and then back into fabric gowns swathed around moving bodies—created several interesting effects, including a pronounced emphasis on contour. This lecture will discuss the way 1790s fashionable dress was mediated by print, and connect this phenomenon to the contemporary vogue for John Flaxman’s outline drawings and other aspects of neoclassical taste.

Amelia Rauser is the author of Caricature Unmasked: Irony, Authenticity, and Individualism in Eighteenth-Century English Prints (2008). Her new project, “Living Statues: Neoclassical Culture and Fashionable Dress in the 1790s—London, Paris, Naples,” is a study of the radical style of undress in the 1790s and its connection to contemporary aesthetic, political, and scientific thought. Dr. Rauser is Professor of Art History at Franklin & Marshall College.

G R A D U A T E  S T U D E N T  W O R K S H O P S
Limited enrollment by application                                      

Jill Campbell (Yale University) | ‘We are an injured body’: Collectivity and the Female Body
2 October 2015, Lewis Walpole Library

Amelia Rauser (Frankin & Marshall College) | Expressive Bodies in Eighteenth-Century Satirical Prints
30 October 2015, Lewis Walpole Library

Details for all of these events can be found here»