Mariët Westermann, Ph.D., director of the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, will lecture on “In the House of Mirrors: Painting and Experience in the Dutch Republic” at 4 p.m. April 24 in Anheuser-Busch Hall, Room 305.
Westermann is the final speaker appearing this spring as part of The Center for the Humanities in Arts & Sciences’ 2006 Faculty Fellows Lecture and Workshop Series. Her talk will center around her recent work on the mirror as a luxury item in 17th-century Dutch culture and as a model for new kinds of painting.
In addition, Westermann will lead a graduate-student workshop titled “Silence and Noise in Dutch Paintings of Manners” at 9 a.m. April 25 in Simon Hall, Room 108. This session, organized with the help and support of Paul Crenshaw, Ph.D., assistant professor of art history in Arts & Sciences, will be devoted to the problems of sound and soundlessness in painting — an interest that Westermann has been pursuing in relation to the history of the mirror as source and analogue of painting in the Netherlands.
Westermann has written widely on 17th-century Dutch art. Books include Johannes Vermeer, 1632-1675 (2005); Art and Home: Dutch Interiors in the Age of Rembrandt (2001); Rembrandt (2000); The Amusements of Jan Steen: Comic Painting in the Seventeenth Century (1997); and A Worldly Art: The Dutch Republic 1585-1700 (1996).
She earned a doctorate from the Institute of Fine Arts in 1997.
The lecture is free and open to the public. The workshop is limited in space and is designed for current WUSTL graduate students and faculty in related fields. RSVPs are requested in advance for both.
For seat reservations or more information, call 935-5576.