June 2nd: Paul Galvez in Conversation with Cheyney Thompson

Presented by 192 Books and Paula Cooper Gallery, Paul Galvez will discuss his new book Courbet’s Landscapes: The Origins of Modern Painting with Cheyney Thompson.

The live event will stream directly on this page on Thursday, June 2nd, at 7 pm ET. There is no login or rsvp required. A recording will be posted shortly afterwards.

Paul Galvez — Courbet's Landscapes: The Origins of Modern Painting (Yale University Press, 2022)

Between 1862 and 1866 Gustave Courbet embarked on a series of sensuous landscape paintings that would later inspire the likes of Monet, Pissarro, and Cézanne. This series has long been neglected in favor of Courbet’s paintings of rural French life. Courbet’s Landscapes: The Origins of Modern Painting explores these astonishing paintings, staking a claim for their importance to Courbet’s work and later developments in French modernism.

Ranging from the grottoes of Courbet’s native Franche-Comté to the beaches of Normandy, Paul Galvez follows the artist on his travels as he uses a palette-knife to transform the Romantic landscape of voyage into a direct, visceral confrontation with the material world. The Courbet he discovers is not the celebrated history painter of provincial life, but a committed landscapist whose view of nature aligns him with contemporary developments in geology, history, linguistics, and literature.

Photo: Steven Careau

Paul Galvez is research associate at the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History at the University of Texas at Dallas, where he was also Director of the MA Program in Art History. A scholar of modern art from the nineteenth century to the present, Galvez was guest curator of “Object Lessons: Jay DeFeo’s Works on Paper from the 1970s” (Galerie Frank Elbaz, Dallas in 2018) and has recently written on Paul Cézanne and James Ensor for Artforum.

Photo credit: David McIntyre

Cheyney Thompson (b. 1975, Baton Rouge, Louisiana) is a painter based in Brooklyn, New York. His projects utilize generative systems of production, incorporating mathematics, modern technology and a range of historical references. The resulting work reflects the problems of painting as a medium and art's operation within larger systems of circulation. His work was recently included in Low Form. Imaginaries and Visions in the Age of Artificial Intelligence at MAXXI, Rome (2019) and Programmed: Rules, Codes, and Choreographies in Art, 1965-2018 at the Whitney Museum, New York (2019).