BA (University College London), MA (University College London), PhD (University College London)

Contact details:

The Courtauld Institute of Art

Somerset House

Strand

London WC2R 0RN

+ 44 (0)20 7848 2508

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.


Research Interests


Recent areas of work include the history of sculpture, European neoclassical painting, the relation between art and philosophy, and critical theoretical approaches to the history of art. An interest in rethinking European neoclassical sculpture and painting with queer, feminist, psychoanalytic and Marxist theory culminated in his book Chains. David, Canova, and the Fall of the Public Hero in Postrevolutionary France (2007), reviewed in The Burlington Magazine, Art History, and The Journal of Modern History.  The book offers a fresh account of European Neoclassicisms of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, by attending to questions about male embodiment, subjectivity, Kantian aesthetics, and sexuality. He is currently researching and preparing a book on the senses of freedom, or ‘free agency’, in European modern art, from Fragonard to Twombly, c. 1750 – 1960, which will include chapters on the art of David, Courbet, Cézanne and Picasso.  

 

Courses Taught in 2010-11


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
Books

Chains. David, Canova, and the Fall of the Public Hero in Postrevolutionary France, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007.

The Triumph of Eros. Art and Seduction in 18th-Century France, exhibition catalogue, with Dimitri Ozerkof, 2006.

Articles

 “Notes on Writing as Vertigo”, Art History (Special Issue on ‘Creative Writing and Art History’), April, 2011 (forthcoming)

“Les Lettres de Madame Récamier à Canova (1813-1819): la grace et l’ex il au feminine”, in Les Voix des Femmes dans le Discours sur l’Art (1750-1850), Les Presses du Réel, Paris, 2010 (forthcoming)

‘Who is Socrates? Desire and Subversion in David’s Death of Socrates (1787)’, Representations, 102, 2008.

Interview, ‘Sculpture’, Acne Paper (Special Issue on ‘Eroticism’), 2008.

 ‘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, 2007

 ‘Menacing Cupid in the Art of Rococo’, in The Triumph of Eros. Art and Seduction in 18th-Century France, 2006

‘Catalogue Introduction’, The Triumph of Eros. Art and Seduction in 18th-Century France, exh. Cat., with Dimitri Ozerkof, 2006

 ‘Sade/ David’, Art History, 23, 2000

‘The Luminous Body’, Portfolio. The Catalogue of Contemporary Photography in Britain, 32, 2000

Reviews

Review of Sculpture and Enlightenment by Erika Naginski, Getty Publications, 2009, The Art Bulletin, 2010

‘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 Graces (1824), Subjectivity, Death, and Postrevolutionary Late Style’

‘Twombly/  Fragonard’

 

The Senses of Freedom: Painting and Agency from Fragonard to Twombly

 

Keywords


Body; Masculinity; Sculpture; Art and Philosophy; Critical Theory; Neoclassical; Late Style; Agency; Queer; Kantian Aesthetic