Date change: OSK/Van Gogh Museum Visiting Fellow | Prof. Linda Goddard
Dates: 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
Venue: Van Gogh Museum & University of Amsterdam
Open to: RMa students
Credits: 6 EC
Instruction language: English
Fellow: Prof. Linda Goddard of University of St. Andrews, Scotland
Instructor: Dr Rachel Esner (UvA)
Coordination: OSK (osk-fgw@uva.nl)
You can register via this link.
Deadline for signing up is December 1st. Please send in a short motivation and your CV to: osk-fgw@uva.nl.
We are pleased to announce the 2025 Van Gogh Museum Visting 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.
The seminar will be preceded by a 3-session tutorial, which will take place from February 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.
Please save the following dates for the tutorial:
27 February, 15-18 hrs (this is a new date, was 20 February)
10 April, 15-18 hrs.
3 July, 15-18 hrs.
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.
Course outline
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.
Seminar 1: Marie Bashkirtseff: A Diarist and her Legacy
Ukrainian-born painter Marie Bashkirtseff’s diary, first published in Paris in 1887, was both a chronicle of art student life and a landmark event in the burgeoning literature of the self around 1900. In this session, we explore the themes and strategies of her highly influential diary, and how it acted as a touchstone for other women artists as writers of their own lives.
Seminar 2: A Studio of Her Own
A privileged site for the construction of artistic identity, the studio was a vital space for women artists who sought to establish a professional network outside the home. In this session, we address the studio as a theme in both art works and letters by Scandinavian, British and American artists resident in Paris.
Seminar 3: Paula Modersohn-Becker and Gwen John: Art and Life
In a powerful set of self-portraits, diaries and letters created in Paris at the turn of the twentieth century, Paula Modersohn-Becker and Gwen John gave voice to the complexities of their lives as artists and women. In the process, they produced a new script for the life of the woman artist to which future generations have referred. In this final session, we close by considering how life writing can be a way for women artists to speak to each other across time.
You can find a full overview of the OSK Education Programma for the academic year 2024-2025 here.