art lecture series

Mentoring Tradition: The Art Studio and its Continuing Contemporary Importance

Professor Weisberg examines the role of women in the teaching of academic techniques as developed in the 1860s at the Académie Julian in Paris. Julian was the best of the many Paris ateliers, or art studios, designed to provide preparation for, or an alternative to, the École des Beaux-Arts. The lecture presents new research on Amelie Beury-Sorel, the wife of its founder, Rodolfe Julian, who was a successful portrait painter, teacher, patron of many women students, and later the head of the academy’s seventeen studios in Paris.

Weisberg explores the continuation of this mentoring tradition by women in art studios today and discusses the enduring importance of academic drawing and painting.

About the Instructor: Gabriel P. Weisberg
Professor of Art History, University of Minnesota
Gabriel P. Weisberg, whose PhD is from The Johns Hopkins University, teaches courses in nineteenth and early twentieth century European Art at the University of Minnesota. His specialty is the history of graphic art, design, and visual culture in France and Europe from 1780 to 1920, with a particular interest in Art Nouveau.

He has curated numerous exhibitions and edited related publications, most recently ”Illusions of Reality: Naturalist Painting, Photography and Cinema, 1875-1918” originating at the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, and “The Orient Expressed: Japanese Influence on Western Art, 1854-1918,” which opened at the Mississippi Museum of Art in Jackson, Mississippi.

Professor Weisberg has served as a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University and Regents Professor at the National Museum of American Art in Washington, D. C. Among his many honors and awards are fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art. Professor Weisberg is Reviews Editor for the on-line journal Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide.