UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Nancy Locke, professor of art history, will discuss her book, "Cézanne's Shadows: Poussin, Chardin, Rubens," with B. Stephen Carpenter II, Michael J. and Aimee Rusinko Kakos Dean in the College of Arts and Architecture, on Monday, Nov. 10, at 4 p.m. at the Woskob Family Gallery in the Penn State Downtown Theatre at 146 S. Allen Street. The discussion is part of the dean's ongoing series of “book talks” with faculty authors.
Locke’s book, published by Penn State University Press, explores Cézanne’s and other modernist painters’ engagement with the artistic traditions that came before them. She argues that the idea of a modernist forgetting would never have taken hold if the modernist painters themselves, and Cézanne in particular, had not wrestled so fiercely with the work of their predecessors. Exploring the importance of Cézanne’s involvement with the art of the past in essays devoted to Poussin, Chardin and Rubens, she asserts that Cézanne’s art cannot be understood without an investigation into what he made of these earlier models and how they continued to haunt even his mature work.
Locke, who is director of graduate studies in art history, teaches classes in both European art and the history of photography. She is the author of "Manet and the Family Romance" (2001), and her articles have appeared in a variety of journals, including "Art Bulletin and History of Photography." Locke has delivered lectures at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Musée d’Orsay, among others.