Seeing the Art in Art

Thursday, November 5 at 7 p.m.
The Conference Center at Penn State Great Valley

When we go to a museum or an art gallery to look at paintings what do we see? Or, what do we think we see? What can we say about what we see in paintings or about our experience with them? And how do these experiences relate, if at all, to those experiences that otherwise fill our daily lives? Join art historian William Perthes, to explore these and related questions regarding our interaction with works of art. The presentation will explore ways of understanding paintings to uncover their visual language and how these experiences may relate to our everyday lives.

Biography of William M. Perthes

William M. Perthes is the Assistant Director of Education for the Violette de Mazia Foundation, a non-profit art and aesthetic education foundation located in Wayne, PA. He teaches art and aesthetic theory at area universities including West Chester, Villanova, and La Salle, as well as at the Barnes Foundation. Mr. Perthes is also an art historian whose scholarly research has focused on American Modernist painting. His most recent work, Baudelaire, Mallarmé and the Symbolist Aesthetics of Robert Motherwell published in Symbolist Objects: Materiality and Subjectivity at the Fin-de-Siècle, explores the relationship between the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé and the work of New York School painter Robert Motherwell.