2023 Terra Lectures in American Art. "Made in Japan: American Identity and the Arts of the East"

Lectures to be delivered by Professor Christopher Reed, Terra Visiting Professor of American Art.  

The third lecture in this series turns to the years after World War II,  and looks at the ways that attitudes toward modernist Japanese prints reflected social and geographic hierarchies in the United States. Highbrow tastes for traditional Japanese aesthetics cultivated by New York museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art, were contested by middlebrow interest in living Japanese artists through a series of print exhibitions staged by the Art Institute of Chicago. An ethos of middlebrow affiliation with Japanese aesthetics running back to Frank Lloyd Wright’s development of “Prairie School” architecture underlies that championing of living Japanese artists personified most famously by the popular novelist James Michener, who wrote about, collected, and commissioned modernist Japanese prints. The conceptual focus here will be on ideas of kinesthetic empathy that connected middlebrow viewers to the innovative techniques of modernist printmakers at a moment when highbrow attention concentrated on the expressive gestures of Action Painting.

Lectures open to all.  No booking required.