VISUAL ARTS + MUSEUMS

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston presents a Special Five-Part Lecture Series:  Picturing War and Peace in European Art.   Thursdays, February 26, March 5, 12, 19, and 26, 2009 at 7:00 p.m.

The prints in the exhibition The Plains of Mars: European War Prints, 1500-1825, from the Collection of the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation reveal the broad scope of graphic imagery devoted to war and peace in the early modern period. During this time, Europe remained in an almost perpetual state of war. Religion, politics, economics, and dynastic ambition all played a role in the turmoil that spread across the continent. Webs of often shifting alliances meant that distinct conflicts easily became inflamed and widespread.

While such constant warfare is not historically unique, the proliferation of the printed image beginning in the late fifteenth century meant that various aspects and scenes of war could be experienced for the first time by a broad audience. War-related prints, both original and reproductive, came to serve an array of functions: commemorative, propagandistic, iconic, narrative, eulogistic, critical, and instructional.

This lecture series will use the exhibition as a point of departure for exploring various themes and modes of representation employed in images of war and peace from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries.

Thursday, February 26, 2009
Introduction and Exhibition Tour
Presented by Leslie Scattone, Assistant Curator of the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation

Thursday, March 5, 2009
Allegories of War and Peace
Presented by Leslie Scattone, Assistant Curator of the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation

Thursday, March 12, 2009
West, Copley, and the Modern Hero
Presented by Kaylin H. Weber, Curatorial Assistant, American Painting and Sculpture, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Thursday, March 19, 2009
Squadrons of Satirists; Or, the Cannons of Caricature: The War-Time Weapons of Humor
Presented by Dr. Robert L. Patten, Lynette S. Autrey Professor in Humanities, Rice University

Thursday, March 26, 2009
Mediated War
Presented by Dr. James Clifton, Director of the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation and Curator of Renaissance and Baroque Painting, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Pictured:  Francisco de Goya,  detail And are like wild beasts (Y son fieras) (no. 5), from The Disasters of War (Los Desastres de la Guerra), c. 1810—15/1863, 155 x 210 mm (6 1/8 x 8 ¼ in.), Etching with aquatint, first edition (1863).