the Cooper Union School of Art Interdisciplinary Seminar

Helen Molesworth

The Horror: Luc Tuymans and the Painting of History

This lecture took place on October 28th, 2008 at 7:00 pm in the Wollman Auditorium at the Cooper Union

Lecture introduction

This lecture will examine the banality of violence in both modernity and modernism as they appear in the works of painter Luc Tuymans.

About Helen Molesworth

Helen Molesworth is the Head of the Department of Modern and Contemporary art as well as the Maisie K. and James R. Houghton Curator of Contemporary Art at the Harvard University Art Museums.  From 2002 to 2007 she was the Chief Curator of Exhibitions at the Wexner Center for the Arts where she organized Twice Untitled and Other Pictures (looking back) an exhibition of new and old works by Louise Lawler and Part Object Part Sculpture which charted a genealogy of transatlantic sculpture produced in the wake of Marcel Duchamp’s erotic objects and hand made readymades of the 1960s.  From 2000-2002 she was the Curator of Contemporary Art at The Baltimore Museum of Art, where she organized Work Ethic, which traced the problem of artistic labor in post-1960s art, and BodySpace, which explored the legacy of Minimalism for contemporary artists.  She is the author of numerous articles and her writing has appeared in publications such as Artforum, Art Journal, Documents, and October.  Her research areas are concentrated largely within and around the problems of feminism, the reception of Marcel Duchamp, and the socio-historical frameworks of contemporary art.  Her first exhibition for Harvard was a survey exhibition of New York based photographer Moyra Davey. She is currently at work on the first American retrospective of Belgian painter Luc Tuymans. 

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