The post-1800s curator of paintings Christopher Riopelle delivers our annual lecture
The annual Linbury Lecture invites world-renowned speakers working in museums, galleries or academic art history to deliver illustrated lectures exploring themes relating to the Gallery’s history and collections.
This year we welcome Christopher Riopelle our Neil Westreich Curator of Post 1800 Paintings and co-curator of our exhibition ‘Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers’ to deliver the lecture, entitled 'Enemy within? Cezanne's Bathers at the National Gallery'. Christopher is then joined in conversation by Gabriele Finaldi, Director of the National Gallery.
Abstract
The revelatory restoration in 2024 of Paul Cezanne's monumental late ‘Bathers’ painting draws renewed attention to its acquisition by the National Gallery 60 years ago. The sixth Cezanne painting to enter the national collection – earlier acquisitions were without fanfare – it was recognised by some like sculptor Henry Moore as a new lynchpin of the modern collection but met by others with startling hostility and condemnation. Why?
This lecture paints – with a broad brush – the complicated social and cultural context in which 'Bathers' arrived in the UK in 1964. The Chatterley trial; the Profumo Scandal; the Cambridge traitors; the Wolfenden Report as yet awaiting enactment; the Beatles and British Pop, art and music both; cosmopolitan London, newly 'swinging' but out of sync with the rest of the country. The acquisition at high price of an angular and rebarbative nude image – long championed by UK class and cultural elites but never enjoying any particular popular appeal – uniquely instantiated social and cultural misgivings at a key moment of historic flux.
Speaker
Christopher Riopelle is the Neil Westreich Curator of Post 1800 Paintings. He previously held curatorial positions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum, California. He has curated many exhibitions, including 'Gauguin's Portraits' (2019), 'Sorolla: Spanish Master of Light' (2019), 'Thomas Cole: Eden to Empire' and 'Ed Ruscha: Course of Empire' (2018), and 'Australia's Impressionists' (2017).
Standard: £10 / Concessions: £5
