Cézanne’s Gravity

The Shih Hsio-yen Distinguished Lecture in Art History series

Cezanne’s Gravity

Date: 14 March 2012 (Wednesday)
Time: 5:30pm
Venue: LG109, K.K. Leung Building, HKU

“Cézanne’s Gravity” concerns the nineteenth century mathematics of curved space, notions of the object in space suggested by the theory of relatively, and the relation to both of Paul Cézanne’s still-life work. It argues that it is in Cézanne’s work, rather than in that of the cubists, that there is the most resonance with the Einsteinian space-time continuum. At the same time, and on the basis of the model of temporality provided by relativity, it argues against the modernist teleology at the head of which Cézanne is usually place.

Speaker: Carol Armstrong

Carol Armstrong is one of the world’s leading and most innovative scholars on Impressionism. She is Professor of art history at Yale University and has taught previously at the University of California, Berkeley, City University of New Tork, and Princeton University. “Cézanne’s Gravity” is related to a current book project rethinking Cézanne’s work in relation to modern physics and schizophrenia.