THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED BUT WILL BE RESCHEDULED AT A LATER DATE.
Discover what happens when the Impressionists turn their attention to food in an evening of art and cuisine presented by the Richard R. Brettell Lecture Series. After the talk, enjoy small bites inspired by works of art in the DMA’s European art collection.
Talk: (Dis)Pleasure in Edouard Manet’s "Brioche with Pears"
7:00–8:00 p.m., Horchow Auditorium
Join art historian Dr. Marni Kessler for a talk about depictions of food culture in 19th-century French painting, from Edouard Manet's Brioche with Pears to Impressionist still lifes. Although he featured brioches in compositions throughout his career, Manet’s rendition of the buttery pastry at the center of Brioche with Pears of 1876 packs a particular punch. This pillowy roll is painted with an intense visual immediacy. Rich and sumptuous, its glossed contours catch the light that splashes across the white cloth upon which it sits, and shadows carve dark recesses. Realized from creamy strokes of pigment, this brioche approximates something of the artist’s own sensorial experience of its real counterpart. But Kessler will show that Manet unsettles the very gastronomic pleasures that his brioche engenders, its concrete form simultaneously corporeal and like a crusted fragment recovered at an archaeological dig.
Dr. Marni Kessler is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Kress Foundation Department of Art History at the University of Kansas. She is the author of Sheer Presence: The Veil in Manet’s Paris, as well as articles and book chapters on topics related to urbanism, fashion, food, family, and portraiture in late 19th-century French visual culture. Kessler has received fellowships from such institutions as the National Endowment for the Humanities, Getty Foundation, New York Academy of Medicine, and Schlesinger Library, and she was recently a New York Public Library Food Studies Fellow. Her current book project explores representations of food in late 19th-century France as they engage a range of pleasures, anxieties, and unease associated with life in the modern metropolis.
Reception*
8:00–9:00 p.m., Founders Room
Enjoy a complimentary beer or wine and a sampling of four small bites inspired by paintings on view in the DMA's European Art Galleries.
*An additional ticket is required to attend the reception
Menu:
Pear chips with candied walnuts and gorgonzola cheese served with brioche
Seared pork belly with homemade cinnamon apple butter and fried sage
Cherry and thyme bruschetta with balsamic goat cheese and Spanish peppers
Green tea and pistachio petit fours
Image: Claude Monet, Still Life, Tea Service, 1872, oil on canvas, Dallas Museum of Art, The Eugene and Margaret McDermott Art Fund, Inc., 2019.67.12.McD