The Artists’ Models: Diana Seave Greenwald and Susan Waller in conversation, hosted by Impressionist Futures online, Monday, November 11th. This discussion coincides with the current exhibition Manet: A Model Family at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Below is the complete recorded conversation.
The relationships between artists and models are notoriously complex. They are structured by shifting power dynamics. They encompass the vulnerabilities of exposure and the trials of physical exertion. They test personal and professional ties. Research into these dynamics and the lives of models has moved us far away from the concept of the ethereal muse effortlessly inspiring an artist to celestial heights.
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s exhibition Manet: A Model Family (10 October 2024 – 20 January 2025) promises to expand our understanding of these relationships by focusing on Édouard Manet’s use of non-professional models from his family and inner circle. Please join the Impressionist Futures Group as Allison Deutsch chairs an online conversation between Diana Seaver Greenwald, the exhibition’s curator, and Susan Waller, specialist in the artist/model transaction.
Susan Waller is an independent scholar and art historian art whose research focuses on the social history of artists and models in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She is professor emerita of art history at the University of Missouri—St Louis. She holds a BA from Brown University, an MA from Boston University, and a PhD from Northwestern University. She currently teaches at the University of Southern Maine. In addition to essays in journals including Oxford Art Journal, The Art Bulletin, Art History, and Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide, her publications include two books–The Invention of the Model: Artists and Models in Paris, 1830-1870 (Ashgate, 2006) and Women Artists in the Modern Era: A Documentary History (Scarecrow, 1991). Her most recent volume is collection of essays, co-edited with Karen L. Carter, entitled Foreign Artists and Communities in Paris, 1870-1914: Strangers in Paradise (Routledge, 2015).