The campus community is invited to attend the 26th annual Harvey Buchanan Lecture in Art History and the Humanities on Wednesday, April 29, at 5:30 p.m. at the Cleveland Museum of Art Recital Hall.
Tim Barringer, the Paul Mellon Professor in the Department of The History of Art, will present the lecture, “Aspiring to the Condition of Music: The Sister Arts in Victorian England.”
During the lecture, Barringer will examine the relationship between art and music as it was understood by the aesthetic movement in late Victorian England. Turning against the mid-Victorian desire for art to tell stories and establish moral points, the aesthetic movement held up and ideal of formal perfection in which art was an abstract in its harmonies as a symphony or sonata.
Barringer will conclude with discussion of a parody of Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta Patience, in which music itself becomes a medium for a hilarious critique of the all-too serious aims of the aesthetic movement.
The lecture is presented by the Case Western Reserve University Department of Art and Art History.