Janice Leoshko, Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History, will host a one day symposium on "Buddhist Traces and Early Twentieth-Century Art."
Program
Donald S. Lopez, Jr., Buddhist and Tibetan Studies, University of Michigan
2pm
“Theosophy, Tibet, and the Cosmic Modern: The Case of Nicholas Roerich”
In the first decades of the twentieth century, all manner of fantasies crossed the Himalayas, making their way to an imagined and imaginary Tibet. A particularly fascinating figure during this period was the Russian painter and mystic Nicholas Roerich. This lecture will explore his expeditions to Tibet in search of world peace.
Tea/coffee break
3pm
Linda Henderson, Dept. of Art & Art History, UT Austin
3:30pm
“Modern Art’s Invisible Realities’”
"What needs to be painted is not the visible but what has heretofore been held to be invisible, that is, what the clairvoyant painter sees,” the Italian Futurist Umberto Boccioni declared in a 1911 lecture. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries both science (X-rays, radioactivity, the ether of space) and the prevalence of interest in occultism and alternative religious philosophies supported the widespread belief in an invisible “meta-reality” beyond the reach of the human eye. This talk explores that cultural context and the artists who responded so creatively to it, with a focus on Wassily Kandinsky.
Sarah Victoria Turner, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London
4:15pm
"From Ajanta to London: Christiana Herringham and the cultures of copying”
The Buddhist cave-temples of Ajanta in India and the iron-and-glass structure of the Crystal Palace in South London were amazingly connected by some travelling objects which moved through the ever-restless networks of the British Empire. These objects were painted “copies” of ancient paintings, one set made in the mid-19th century by Major Robert Gill, and another set made in the early 20th century by Christiana Herringham and a team of Indian and British copyists. This talk explores the significance of the colonial copy and copyist within the circuits of the British Empire in the Victorian and Edwardian eras.
Janice Leoshko, Dept. of Art & Art History, UT Austin
5pm
“Ananda Coomaraswamy, Reiteration, Repetition and Canon Formation”
As greater awareness grows of the remarkable influence of Ananda K.Coomaraswamy (1877-1947), a pioneering scholar of South Asian Art, upon modernist artists, it is also increasingly clear that his own scholarly practice closely adhered to Western models. This talk considers the dynamics of his perspective in shaping the emerging canon of Indian art and the consequences of his constrained view of Buddhist traditions and particular interest in the intertwined nature of artistic forms.
Concluding Discussion moderated by Michael Charlesworth, Dept. of Art & Art History, UT Austin
5:30 pm
Donald Lopez is the Arthur E. Link Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies at the University of Michigan, where he serves as chair of the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and as chair of the Michigan Society of Fellows. His most recent books are (with Thupten Jinpa) Dispelling the Darkness: A Jesuit’s Quest for the Soul of Tibet and Hyecho’s Journey: The World of Buddhism. Earlier publications range widely from studies of Mahayana schools as preserved in Tibetan translation to analyses of the networks of influence that developed between Asia and the West (e.g. Buddhism and Science: A Guide for the Perplexed). A further focus is on the Tibetan author Gendun Chopel (1903-1951), considered by many to be the most important Tibetan intellectual of the twentieth century. Last month his paradigm-shifting critique published in 1998, Prisoners of Shangri-La: Tibetan Buddhism and the West, was reissued by the University of Chicago Press.
Linda Dalrymple Henderson is the David Bruton, Jr. Centennial Professor in Art History and Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin. Professor Henderson's research and teaching focus on the interdisciplinary study of modernism, including the relation of modern art to fields such as geometry, science and technology, and mystical and occult philosophies. In addition to numerous periodical articles and catalog essays, she is the author of The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton University Press, 1983; new ed., MIT Press, 2013) and Duchamp in Context: Science and Technology in the Large Glass and Related Works (Princeton, 1998). Among her other many works she has also co-edited with Bruce Clarke the interdisciplinary anthology From Energy to Information: Representation in Science, and Technology, Art and Literature (Stanford University Press, 2002).
Sarah Victoria Turner is Deputy Director for Research at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London. She is also the co-editor of British Art Studies, an open-access digital journal which is co-published with the Yale Center for British Art. Turner also teaches art history and is Visiting Senior Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art, and her research interests encompass many aspects of British art from 1850 to 1950. She has published her work in exhibition catalogues, academic publications and online. Most recently, she co-edited After 1851: the Visual and Material Cultures of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham with Kate Nichols (Manchester University Press). In 2018, she will co-curate a major exhibition with Mark Hallett at the Royal Academy in London to mark 250 years of the Academy’s Summer Exhibitions.
Janice Leoshko is Associate Professor in both the department of Art and Art History and the department of Asian Studies. Her publications engage long held assumptions about the artistic production at Buddhist sites in India (e.g. Sacred Traces: British Explorations of Buddhism in the 19th-century) with especial focus on Bodhgaya, where the Buddha achieved enlightenment. She has also written about Western artists’ interaction with Buddhist traditions (“Gauguin’s Buddhism”). She developed and served as the first director of the graduate portfolio in museum studies at UT, and a further research interest concerns the influence of museums and exhibitions, resulting from her time as a curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Sponsored by the South Asia Institute and the Department of Art and Art History.