Maggie Bickford, professor of the History of Art and Architecture at Brown University, and Fellow of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2005-2006, will speak on “Why Visual Evidence is Evidence: Connoisseurship and the Story of Chinese Art in the Early 21st Century” on Wednesday, May 17, at 1:45-2:50 p.m. in Arts 215.
Her talk, part of Nixi Cura's “Arts of China” class, is sponsored by the Visual Arts and East Asian Studies departments.
Bickford questions a heretofore unassailable aspect of Chinese painting history: that painters mastered realism during the Song dynasty (960-1279), after which they rejected realism in favor of more abstract self-expression. Aided by high-resolution digital images, Bickford unveils the visual technologies artists during the Song dynasty and later employed to create the illusion of realism.
Bickford is one of the preeminent scholars in the field of Chinese art history and Sinology. Prestigious honors include membership in the Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton University, and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Her Ink Plum: The Making of a Chinese Scholar-Painter Genre (Cambridge University Press, 1996), won the Association of Asian Studies Levenson Prize for books in Chinese studies, and her ground-breaking research on Song court patronage culminated in Emperor Huizong and Northern Song Culture: The Politics of Culture and the Culture of Politics (Harvard University Press, forthcoming July 2006).
Bickford is married to Christopher Bickford, a Union alumnus (Class of 1964) and American history scholar.