Feb 19
Albert Bierstadt, Silver Mining, and the Reinvention of Landscape Painting in the Nineteenth Century

The Department of Art and Art History presents an Edwin L. Weisl Lectureship in the Arts sponsored by the Robert Lehman Foundation
Spencer Wigmore '11 is Curator of Fine Art Collections at the Minnesota Historical Society in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Previously he was the Associate Curator of Paintings, Sculpture, and Works on Paper at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, where he curated nearly a dozen exhibitions, including Trespassers: James Prosek of the Texas Prairie. A graduate of Carleton College, he earned his PhD in art history from the University of Delaware.
This talk is taken from his current book project, which reconstructs Bierstadt’s previously unknown life as a land speculator. The project offers a novel interpretation of Bierstadt's large-scale exhibition pictures of the 1860s-70s, ranging from The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak to Mount Corcoran. In Spencer’s account, the often maligned aspects of Bierstadt’s paintings–their schematic brushwork, formulaic compositions, exaggerated viewing distances, and inattentive naturalism–harbor underexamined complexity and creative ingenuity. They reveal the extent to which Bierstadt’s art constituted a unique exploration of the representational conventions of land speculation, while posing new questions about the purposes of landscape painting in the settler-colonial American West.
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