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Arts & Entertainment

Journey Back To the Turn of the 19th Century

Dr. Gretchen Bender, a faculty member at the University of Pittsburgh, will present a lecture on art Friday at Sweetwater.

If  you’re an artist or an art history buff, or simply have an interest in the human mind and body, Dr. Gretchen Bender wants to take you on a historical journey.

Travel back to the turn of the 19th Century, a transitional time in which artists were trying to make sense of a more modern world.

Bender, a faculty member in the University of Pittsburgh’s history of art and architecture department, will lecture on “Circa 1800: Birthpangs of the Modern World,” Friday at Sewickley’s Center for the Arts.

The former member of Sweetwater’s board of directors presents a few lectures a year at the center.

“Dr. Bender’s lectures always garner a ton of positive feedback — people absolutely love her," said Brenda Jaros, education director at Sweetwater. "She’s extremely knowledgeable and presents subject matter in a very accessible manner.”

The lecture will focus on themes of the body and nature. Each served as a source of inspiration for artists who, at the time, were trying to make sense of the world in which they lived.

Part of the lecture will focus on the work of Jacques Louis-David and Francisco Goya. Their professional careers “span from the Enlightenment and Rococo court culture of aristocracy and monarchy, through the Revolution and Terror in France,” Bender said.

“We will devote particular attention to the human body as it is figured in the work of David and Goya: heroes, martyrs, victims and oppressors," Bender said.

Bender said the human form in this era became a particularly "charged site," where artists worked through anxieties about the role of the individual in the shifting world order "and how he or she fares under the weight of collapsing institutions and traditions, as well as violent war.”

Bender plans to segue into the work of Romantic painters who “turned to landscape rather than the human figure.”

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One artist of this day, Caspar David Friedrich, was engaged with
the natural world as “an attempt to seek a sense of belonging, balance, faith, meaning and wholeness -- all of which he believed were, perhaps, inextricably lost,” Bender said.

This period in the history of art, Bender said, is  “increasingly overlooked.”

This lecture is meant to turn our attention to a time that is “often powerful and jarring, intellectually rich and still redolent of themes that we, as viewers, face in our new 21st century,” Bender said.

There will be a period for questions and discussions at the end of the lecture. For tickets call 412-741-4405. Tickets are $5 for members and $10 for nonmembers.

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