How did women in eighteenth-century France picture themselves as artists when the dominant view held them to be incapable of creating great art? This talk focuses on pictorial allegories of creativity and explores the French Enlightenment view that women were governed by passions and fantasies hatched in an overly sensitive imagination. This belief opened other possibilities precisely because imagination was not only a source of dangerous fantasy, but also fundamental to all higher thought and creativity.

Sponsored by: Art History Program

In conjunction with: Department of Anthropology, Department of History, Department of Philosophy, Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, Krannert Art Museum, Lorado Taft Lecture Fund, School of Architecture, School of Art and Design, Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, Women's Studies Program