In this Research and Academic Program lecture, Kirstin Ringelberg (Elon University / The Kaleta A. Doolin Foundation Fellow) addresses the once-celebrated (and occasionally reviled) but now largely unknown Belle Époque Parisian artist Madeleine Lemaire (1845–1928). Working in a wide variety of genres as a “specialty,” Lemaire was sometimes referred to in masculine or hybrid gender terms and seen as an enabler of queer relationships. Notions of sorting and valuing by both gender and artistic genre were central to this time and place yet remain distorted in our persistently binary histories of art. Understanding Lemaire’s artistic and personal history in context can reset our understanding of the way still-dominant canonical commitments to certain stylistic approaches enhance historically unsupportable stances on the relative impact of certain artists and their careers—and support problematically cisheteronormative approaches to art histories of the Euro-American nineteenth century.

Kirstin Ringelberg is professor of art history in the department of history and geography at Elon University in North Carolina. Ringelberg is the author of Redefining Gender in American Impressionist Studio Paintings: Work Place/Domestic Space (Ashgate, 2010; Routledge paperback, 2017). In 2020 Ringelberg co-edited, with Cyle Metzger, the special themed issue New Work in Transgender Art and Visual Culture Studies for the Journal of Visual Culture, and co-authored the essay “Prismatic views: a look at the growing field of transgender art and visual culture studies.” At the Clark they will complete a manuscript titled Chez Madeleine Lemaire: Gender and Genre in the Queer Belle Époque.

Free. Accessible seats available; for information, call 413 458 0524. A 5 pm reception in the Manton Research Center reading room precedes the event.

Image: Madeleine Jeanne Lemaire, Bust of a Lady (detail), 1855–1928, watercolor and pencil on wove paper. The Clark, 1955.1685