Elizabeth Legge, PhD
Elizabeth Legge studied at the University of Toronto, Cambridge, and the Courtauld Institute of Art. She is an Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Toronto. In 2005 she was visiting professor in the Humanities Centre at Johns Hopkins University. She has written on Dada, Surrealism, and contemporary Canadian and British art, with books on the Surrealist artist Max Ernst's uses of psychoanalysis, and on the Canadian artist and film-maker Michael Snow’s landmark film, Wavelength. In recent years she has written on a variety of topics: on the new aesthetics of cuteness and boredom in contemporary art, on the oppressive legacy of a high school textbook in French Surrealism, on the effects of miniaturization in artists’ depictions of historical atrocities, and on the emulation of computer effects in late 1960s art. Picasso and Matisse reinvent the world
Elizabeth Legge studied at the University of Toronto, Cambridge, and the Courtauld Institute of Art. She is an Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Toronto. In 2005 she was visiting professor in the Humanities Centre at Johns Hopkins University.
She has written on Dada, Surrealism, and contemporary Canadian and British art, with books on the Surrealist artist Max Ernst's uses of psychoanalysis, and on the Canadian artist and film-maker Michael Snow’s landmark film, Wavelength. In recent years she has written on a variety of topics: on the new aesthetics of cuteness and boredom in contemporary art, on the oppressive legacy of a high school textbook in French Surrealism, on the effects of miniaturization in artists’ depictions of historical atrocities, and on the emulation of computer effects in late 1960s art.
Picasso and Matisse reinvent the world
At the end of the twentieth century, facing a new millennium, Western curators and art historians felt the need to evaluate the major cultural achievements of the previous hundred years. Picasso and Matisse seemed to win these institutional stakes, as they were paired and compared in major exhibitions in London, Paris, and New York. Picasso and Matisse each regarded the other as his only artistic equal and worthy adversary in the shared task of inventing what the “modern” might look like. This lecture explores the ways these two artists, always engaged in a fractious dialogue with one another, envisioned new worlds of radically reconfigured space, colour, and subject matter, creating templates for the “modern.”
At the end of the twentieth century, facing a new millennium, Western curators and art historians felt the need to evaluate the major cultural achievements of the previous hundred years. Picasso and Matisse seemed to win these institutional stakes, as they were paired and compared in major exhibitions in London, Paris, and New York.
Picasso and Matisse each regarded the other as his only artistic equal and worthy adversary in the shared task of inventing what the “modern” might look like. This lecture explores the ways these two artists, always engaged in a fractious dialogue with one another, envisioned new worlds of radically reconfigured space, colour, and subject matter, creating templates for the “modern.”
This event is part of the Spring 2024 Speaker series.
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