Announcement: 21.06.2022 Guest lecture Claudia Swan: Landscapes of the Mind: Materiality and the Force of Imagination in the Work of Hercules Segers

13 June 2022

Prof. Dr. Claudia Swan, since 2021 Inaugural Mark Steinberg Weil Professor of Art History at Washington University St. Louis, MO, holds a lecture on the topic »Landscapes of the Mind: Materiality and the Force of Imagination in the Work of Hercules Segers«:

So much about the Dutch artist Hercules Segers, who lived from ca. 1590 until ca. 1638, appears unique. Though respected during his lifetime and emulated by Rembrandt van Rijn, Segers died in obscurity and is not known to have trained any pupils. By all accounts, he adhered to neither pattern nor conventions: his works are singular investigations into the natural world and the technical capacities of the printmaking process. In the recent catalogue raisonné of Segers’s works Huigen Leeflang describes him as “one of the most enigmatic artists ever brought forth by the Golden Age.” This lecture considers Segers’ extraordinary and mysterious works against the backdrop of early modern art theory and in relation to practices and theories of the imagination. I hope to demonstrate, among other things, what is to be gained by conceiving of his art as women’s work—in the sense that the imagination was gendered, and its generative structure a matrix. The materiality of Segers’s experimentations in image-making is relevant to the use, beginning in the seventeenth century, of the term “matrix” to designate a printing plate.

Date: Thuesday, June 21, 2022, 04:00 p.m.
Venue: Gorch-Fock-Wall 3, 20354 Hamburg