OSK/Van Gogh Museum Visiting Fellow in the History of 19th Century Art

Artists’ and Collectors’ Museums: Display, (Self-)Representation, Evolution

Dates: 6-11 June 2021
Venue: Van Gogh Museum & University of Amsterdam
Open to: RMA students
Credits: 6 EC
Coordination: Dr Rachel Esner (UvA)
To register: please contact Dr. Rachel Esner: r.esner@uva.nl (putting “VGM Visiting Fellow” in the subject line). Please supply a short statement of motivation.

In June 2021 (Research) MA students in Art History and related fields will have the opportunity to participate in the annual Van Gogh Museum Visiting Fellow in the History of Nineteenth-Century Art seminar, sponsored by the Van Gogh Museum and the University of Amsterdam.

The aim of the Van Gogh Museum Visiting Fellow in the History of Nineteenth-Century Art seminar is to provide MA students with the opportunity to study a single yet wide-ranging subject in nineteenth-century art through an intensive one-week workshop taught by a leading scholar in the field and supported by the Van Gogh Museum. The seminar will introduce students to important issues in the study of nineteenth-century art and provide an impulse for further research. Its aim is to encourage interest in various aspects of the discipline, and to provide students not only with factual information, but more importantly with new methodological and theoretical perspectives on this important period in the history of art.

Visiting Fellow is Prof. Dario Libero Gamboni. University of Geneva, Switzerland. Gamboni completed his studies at the University of Lausanne and EHESS, Paris. He has pubished widely on various areas of nineteenth-century art history, with a focus on the period around 1900, including on the relationship between art and literature; iconoclasm and vandalism; the question of visual ambiguity; and the artists Paul Gauguin and Odilon Redon. One of his recent topics has been artists’ and collectors’ museums, the subject of this year’s seminar.

Museums created by artists and/or collectors constitute a worldwide phenomenon, with peaks around 1900 and today. The seminar aims at examining key aspects of their history, geography, anthropology, aesthetics and “social life,” all of which throw a unusual light on those of museums in general. Preceded by a public lecture entitled Destination and Experience: Artists’ and Collectors’ Museums in the Past and the Present, the seminar sessions will consider issues of display, arrangement and “disposition”; (self-) representation and monumentalization; and sustainability, heritage and adaptation.