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Associate 2001-02

Jane Block

Library Administration

NEO-IMPRESSIONIST PORTRAITURE

Professor Block is an art historian and art librarian whose scholarship for the past two decades has dealt with the avant-garde tradition in Belgium and its relationship to France. During her Center appointment she will pursue a book-length study dealing with an aspect of Neo-Impressionism, a manner of painting invented in the mid-1880s by the French artist Georges Seurat (1859-91). Focusing on a significant body of some 70 portraits that were created in France and Belgium at the end of the nineteenth century, Professor Block will attempt to redefine the Neo-Impressionist movement, heretofore associated primarily with urban landscape. By concentrating on the sitters and interweaving aspects of biography and literature with matters of technique and style, she will analyze Neo-Impressionist portraiture in the context of earlier portrait traditions that flourished in France and Belgium. She intends to let the portraits reveal new insights into the movement, practitioners of the style, and artistic centers of production in Paris and Brussels at the fin de siècle.