Cripping Things in Late Nineteenth-Century Art

April 25, 2023 6:00 pm

38 West 86th Street New York

A lecture by Elizabeth Guffey, Professor at SUNY Purchase and recipient of Bard Graduate Center’s 2023 Iris Foundation Award.

Painter Claude Monet was going blind and had to wear special cataract glasses. Pierre-Auguste Renoir became so arthritic, he used a wheelchair and had paintbrushes strapped to his wrists. The history of French impressionist art is filled with legends about its most famous practitioners, their bodily impairments, and the ways these were believed to have shaped their art. This lecture uses the French impressionists and their art to introduce the notion of crip objects. In so doing, it suggests that material objects related to disability are useful in helping us understand a range of issues related to human embodiment and the sensorium, all the while raising more complex questions about artistic creativity.

Cripping Things in Late Nineteenth-Century Art