Vortrag // Iris Brahms, Tübingen: Poussière précieuse. Staub als motivo-choc in der Portraitmalerei des 18. Jahrhunderts

In the organizer's words:

In 1753, the powdery quality of pastel painting was described as poussière when a method of fixation was presented at the Académie Royale. On a visual level, this impermanence is reflected in a detail that is frequently observed in portraits, but has been overlooked by scholars to date, and which is linked to the demonstration of high social status: the fashionable wig powder is reflected in a sometimes veritable accumulation of dust on the shoulders of the sitter. This motivo-choc (Chastel 1984), which can also be observed in oil paintings, is disconcerting and all the more suggests a deeper meaning. I pursue this under the premise that objects are designed and semanticized in an indissoluble network of relationships between technical-artistic logic and social practice.

Iris Brahms' second book deals with the canonization concepts of 18th-century pastel painting, which she is finalizing as part of the CRC 1391 Other Aesthetics at the University of Tübingen. From 2022 to 2023, Brahms held the professorship for Early Modern Art History at the University of Hamburg on a part-time basis. In 2018 she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte München, after working as a research assistant at the Kunsthistorisches Institut der Freien Universität Berlin from 2013-2018, where she received her doctorate with a thesis on the tradition of color ground drawing up to Albrecht Dürer (published in 2016).

Venue: Central Institute for Art History, Room 242, II. floor
Participation is free of charge.
The lecture will be broadcast in parallel via Zoom. Further information can be found here.