The lecture will examine late nineteenth- and early- to mid-twentieth-century Western European attempts to give a unified and universalizing account of the nature of modern art. “Post-Impressionism” (a term coined by the English critic Roger Fry in 1910) has long been out of favour as a category in art history, rejected as a crude label that obscures the true nature of the artists and styles it attempted to group. In this lecture, however, it is used not as a way to categorize late-nineteenth-century French painting (as in the first “Post-Impressionist” exhibition at the Grafton Gallery in London in 1910-11), but instead in order to come to terms with post-1900 conceptions of the universal nature of modern art. In the early- to mid-twentieth century, how was this theoretically “global” account followed up, spreading its tenets by way of criticism, exhibition, and art education to many parts of the world beyond Western Europe?

Dr. Rose is a Lecturer in the School of Art History at the University of St Andrews.