Notice Board

Art NOW Series presents Devon Smither
Naked Ladies: The Nude in Canadian Modern Art
12 pm | November 18, 2020
uLethbridge Online Presentation

Please reserve your pass at: uleth.ca/tickets. Registration is required as we need to provide you with secure access information prior to the start of the event.

Often censored and much debated, the nude in Canadian modern art has held a contentious position since the early twentieth century. The historic focus within Canadian art history on landscape painting has meant that themes concerning the figure and the nude have gone largely unexamined. In this talk, Smither analyzes a selection of nude paintings and photographs to contend that the nude was a nexus point for the often diverse, and at times incompatible, ways that artists and the public responded to the development of modern art and the conditions of modernity.

Devon Smither is Assistant Professor of Art History/Museum Studies here at the University of Lethbridge. Her research and teaching interests include gender and modernity; modern colonial-settler art in Canada; and modern North American women artists. She is completing a book manuscript on the female nude in Canadian painting and photography from 1913 to 1980 (McGill-Queen’s University Press) and a manuscript entitled Pegi Nicol MacLeod: Life & Work (Art Canada Institute). Her publications include a chapter in Censoring Art: Silencing the Artwork, eds. Roisin Kennedy and Riann Coulter (2018) and articles in The Journal of Historical Sociology, and The Literary Review of Canada. She is a founding member of Open Art Histories, a group of art historians in Canada devoted to advancing the conversation (and scholarship) on art, art history, and pedagogy.

Image: Lilias Torrance Newton, Nude in the Studio, 1933, oil on canvas