In this Research and Academic Program lecture, María Isabel Baldasarre (Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Argentina and Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas / Every Page Foundation Fellow) analyzes how throughout the twentieth century a hegemonic image of the female body was shaped and spread through popular culture. Throughout the twentieth century, in Argentina—as in much of the Western Hemisphere—the female body was an arena to be disciplined into the parameters of "ideal beauty." Visual culture—magazines, cinema, television, art—contributed to cementing this canon, while physiques that did not adhere to the norm were made invisible.

María Isabel Baldasarre is professor of art history in the MA Program in Argentinian and Latin American art history at Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Argentina and researcher at Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET). Between 2019 and 2023 she was National Director of Museums of the National Ministry of Culture. She is the author of the books Los dueños del arte: Coleccionismo y consumo cultural en Buenos Aires (2006) and Bien vestidos: Una historia visual de la moda en Buenos Aires (1870–1914) (2021). At the Clark, Baldasarre will be working on a book project titled The Liberation of the Female Body: Fashion, Art, and Visual Culture in Modern Argentina. This research discusses fashion, self-representation, and the bodies of women and those with feminine identities as they relate to visual culture from the late-nineteenth century through the present.

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: Detail of Paulina Singerman in the film Caprichosa y millonaria (1940) by Enrique Santos Discépolo