EVENT DETAILS

Stephen Eisenman, "The Political Logic of Radical Art History in California, 1971-1984"

As is well known, Marxist art history (a.k.a ."radical," or "critical" art history) in the
U.S. received a significant boost with the arrival of TJ Clark and other mostly
English and German scholars in Los Angeles in the early 1970s. But what is
surprising is that this new scholarship did not arise in the context of a movement
for social change, but a world-historical failure and what I would call, (after Russell
Jacoby), a "dialectic of defeat." This lecture will be a tale of two academic coasts,
and an examination of the social, political, economic and biographic factors that
led to the creation and near-destruction of a mode of critical analysis essential for
understanding the visual world and the current global crisis.

Stephen Eisenman is professor of modern art in the Department of Art History at
Northwestern University. He is the author of seven major books and exhibition
catalogues, including The Temptation of Saint Redon (1992), Gauguin's Skirt
(1997), and The Abu Ghraib Effect (2007). He is also the editor and principle
author of the most widely used textbook in its field, Nineteenth Century Art: A
Critical History (1994/third edition 2007).