NEWS

Princeton University professor to deliver Rand art lectures

By LANITA WITHERS
UNC News Services

CHAPEL HILL -- Four lectures celebrating the work of Austrian painter Franz Anton Maulbertsch will be presented April 13-17 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Dr. Thomas DeCosta Kaufmann, an art history professor at Princeton University, will give all four talks for the lecture series, "Painterly Enlightenment: Franz Anton Maulbertsch (1724-1796)." The free, public lectures in the Hanes Art Center Auditorium will be:

• "Introducing an ‘Original Strangeling,’ " 3 p.m. April 13. A reception will follow.
• "Shades of Enlightenment," 6 p.m. April 14.
• "From Fantasy to Reason," 6 p.m. April 16.
• "On the Margins of Modernism," 6 p.m. April 17.

The talks will form this year’s Bettie Allison Rand Lectures in Art History sponsored by the art department. The lectures emphasize European painting of the 14^th through 18^th centuries. William G. Rand of Raleigh established the lecture series in honor of his late wife, who studied art at UNC and was a founding member of the Raleigh Fine Arts Society and a life member of the N.C. Art Society.

Kaufmann has studied at Yale University, the Warburg Institute in London and Harvard University. A scholar of early modern art in Central Europe, he has taught at Princeton since 1977. Kaufmann has been a curator or consultant for exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe and is an elected member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Royal Academy of Sciences in Belgium.

Kaufmann wrote "The Majesty of Nature: Aspects of Art, Science, and Humanism in the Renaissance," "Court, Cloister and City: The Art and Culture of Central Europe, 1450-1800," and "The School of Prague: Painting the Court of Rudolf II."

The lectures from this year’s Rand series will be transcribed and turned into a book to be published by UNC Press, said Elaine Maisner, an editor at the press.

Limited parking for the lectures will be in the Swain parking lot beside the Hanes Art Center.

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(Withers is a senior in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication from Reidsville.)

Contact: Lindsay Fulenwider, 962-2015, lindsay@email.unc.edu