Contact details:

The Courtauld Institute of Art

Somerset House

Strand

London WC2R 0RN

 

satish.padiyar@courtauld.ac.uk



Satish Padiyar trained as an art historian at University College London, where he gained his PhD (1999), working with Helen Weston and Adrian Rifkin. He taught at the University of Leeds and at University College London, and was the recipient of a J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship, before joining The Courtauld as Visiting Lecturer in 2005. He worked on The Triumph of Eros. Art and Seduction in 18th Century France, at the Hermitage Rooms, London, in 2006, as chief curator. He was appointed Lecturer in Nineteenth Century Art in 2008.


Current Research and Interests:


European Neoclassicisms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with specific attention to questions about male embodiment, subjectivity and sexuality. My interest in rethinking European neoclassical sculpture and painting with queer, feminist, psychoanalytic and Marxist theory culminated in my book Chains. David, Canova, and the Fall of the Public Hero in Postrevolutionary France (2007), reviewed in The Burlington Magazine and Art History . I am currently researching and preparing a book on theories and practices of ‘free agency’ in European modern art, from Fragonard to Twombly, c. 1750 – 1950.

 

Programmes Taught During Forthcoming Academic Year:


MA: The Male Body in Nineteenth-Century European Art

This course focuses on depictions of the male body in nineteenth-century painting and sculpture, in the work of David, Canova, Ingres, Géricault, Courbet, Manet, Caillebotte, and others. The political and theoretical challenges of recent feminism have provoked a range of cultural responses about men and masculinity. In particular, since the 1990s there has been continuing debate about whether masculinity is irrevocably ‘in crisis’, due to the erosion of once-secure gender boundaries, sexual identities and roles. From this contemporary perspective the course will address a number of questions. How might we understand the shift in nineteenth-century history paintings from homoerotically charged androgynous male nudes to ones of hyper-inflated masculinity? And what happens to the represented classical body itself in the face of a powerful emerging concentration on modernity and modern life? The course will also focus on depictions of the aestheticized male body in relation to questions of colonialism and racialized others, the homosocial and military ethos, and the history of sexuality. The course is of especial interest to those wishing to engage with current theories of self, sexuality, desire and vision, as articulated by Judith Butler, Jacques Lacan, Eve Sedgwick, Kaja Silverman, and Klaus Theweleit.  

BA Special Option: David
BA Two: Classicisms in Modernity


 

Recent Publications:


2008

‘Who is Socrates? Desire and Subversion in David’s Death of Socrates (1787)’, Representations, 102

‘Interview’, Acne Paper (Special Issue, ‘Eroticism’)


2007

‘Shadow of Agency: Derrida, Marx, David’, in Matthew Beaumont, et.al. (eds.), As Radical as Reality Itself: Essays on Marxism and Art for the 21st Century, Peter Lang

Chains. David, Canova, and the Fall of the Public Hero in Postrevolutionary France, Pennsylvania State University Press


2006

‘Menacing Cupid in the Art of Rococo’, in The Triumph of Eros. Art and Seduction in 18th-Century France

‘Catalogue Introduction’, The Triumph of Eros. Art and Seduction in 18th-Century France, exh. Cat., with Dimitri Ozerkof.


 

2000

‘Sade/ David’, Art History, 23

‘The Luminous Body’, Portfolio. The Catalogue of Contemporary Photography in Britain, 32

 

Reviews

‘Futures’, parallax, 51, 2009 (review of Jean-Paul Martinon’s ‘On Futurity: Malabou, Nancy and Derrida’)

‘Canova’, The Burlington Magazine, March 2009 (review of ‘La Mano E Il Volto di Antonio Canova’, Possagno)

‘Neo-Classical Sculpture and Architecture’, The Burlington Magazine, May 2008 (review of ‘The Return of the Gods: Neoclassical Sculpture in Britain’, Tate Modern)

‘Antonio Canova’, The Burlington Magazine, January 2008 (review of ‘Canova e la Venere Vincitrice’, Villa Borghese, Rome)

‘About Gossip’, Oxford Art Journal, 29, No.2, June 2006 (review of Gavin Butt’s ‘Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 1948-1963’)

‘Crisis? What Crisis?’, Art History, 21, June 1998 (review of Abigail Solomon-Godeau’s ‘Male Trouble: A Crisis of Representation’)

In Preparation

‘Last Words: David’s Mars Disarmed by Venus and the Three Graces, Adieu to Painting and Politics’

‘Twombly/  Fragonard’