Kirstin Ringelberg, professor of art history, presented at the national SECAC conference in Columbus, Ohio.
Ringelberg, whose paper was entitled “The Requirements and Limitations of Illustrative Art”: Madeleine Lemaire’s Modernity,” presented as part of the panel “Illustrated Exchange: Text and Image in the Discourse of the Fin-de Siècle.” The conference was hosted at Columbus College of Art & Design, the second venue north of the Mason-Dixon line since SECAC changed from a regional to a national reach in 2015.
Ringelberg’s paper explored the decoupling of Lemaire’s illustrations from fin-de-siècle French novels in the art canon, even as they remain central to the valuation and sale of original editions on the bookselling market, as a sign of the modernist canon’s deliberate misrepresentation of the artistic styles and tastes of the period.