Announcement Van Gogh Museum Visiting Fellow | Prof. Linda Goddard
We are pleased to announce the 2025 Van Gogh Museum Visiting Fellow in Nineteenth-Century Art, Prof. Linda Goddard of University of St. Andrews, Scotland.
Linda Goddard is a specialist in nineteenth- and twentieth-century French art and literature, and artists’ writings. She holds a BA in French and Italian language and literature from the University of Oxford and an MA and PhD from The Courtauld Institute of Art, London. Her most recent book, Savage Tales: The Writings of Paul Gauguin (Yale University Press, 2019) is the first book-length analysis of the artist’s wide-ranging literary output. She has edited or co-edited two journal special issues devoted to the interpretation of artists’ writings: Artists’ Writings, 1850-present (Word & Image), including her essay, “Artists’ Writings: word or image?” and (with Natalie Adamson) Artists’ Statements: Origins, Intentions, Exegesis (Forum for Modern Language Studies), both 2012. She has recently begun a new project on the life writings of women artists, in nineteenth-century France and beyond.
Women Artists and Life Writing around 1900
In the nineteenth century, women artists increasingly wrote about their lives, using letters, diaries and memoirs as vehicles for artistic self-definition, alongside self-portraits and studio scenes. We will study women artists who lived in or travelled to Paris around 1900 – from France, Scandinavia, North America, The United Kingdom and elsewhere – where they exploited the opportunity for a networked, professional identity distinct from their usual domestic roles. Instead of focusing on the negative portrayal by novelists and caricaturists of women artists as amateurs, or aberrations, we consider how they negotiated the constraints and possibilities of their profession in their own words. In forms that were often creative as well as strategic, women wrote their own influential script of the artist’s life, which in turn inspired the self-definitions of later women artists.
- The seminar will be preceded by a 3-session tutorial, which will take place from March 2025. The course will be completed with a paper. Please note that the topic of your paper does not have to relate to the nineteenth century, but can deal with the topic of women and life writing in any period.
- The three seminar sessions will take place in the week of 23 June 2025 (dates and times t.b.a.), with a kick-off lecture (mandatory for particpants) on Sunday, 22 June at the Van Gogh Museum