University of Iowa News Release

April 7, 2006

French Art Historian Will Present Lecture At UI April 20

Stephane Guegan, the director of cultural services at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, will present a lecture, "From Girodet to Ingres: the Impossible Classicism," at 8 p.m. Thursday, April 20, in Room E109 of the University of Iowa Art Building.

Guegan's lecture, presented by the UI School of Art and Art History, will be free and open to the public.

Guegan is an art historian who has published extensively on 19th-century French painting. Among his books are "Gauguin, le sauvage imaginaire" (Gaugin, the imaginary savage), "Delacroix, l'enfer et l'atelier" (Delacroix, hell and the workshop) and "l'ABCdaire de Delacroix et l'Orient" (The ABC of Delacroix and the Orient). He is one of the contributors to "Theodore Chasseriau: The Unknown Romantic," issued in conjunction with an exhibition shown in Paris and New York.

His most recent book, "Ingres: Erotic Drawings," was published to coincide with a major Ingres retrospective exhibition at the Louvre, for which Guegan is the curator.

Guegan has served as curator to several previous exhibitions, including "From Delacroix to Renoir: French Painters in Algeria," shown at the Institut du Monde Arabe (Arab world institute) in Paris; "From Ingres to Delacroix: French Artists in Rome," shown at the Academie de France (French academy) in Rome; and an exhibition of Theophile Gautier at the Musee d'Orsay. He has written articles for numerous exhibition catalogs and other scholarly publications in art history.

One of the major art museums in Paris, the Musée d'Orsay is a national museum that has as its mission "to show, in all its diversity, the artistic creation of the western world from 1848 to 1914." Its collection includes many of the best known paintings of the period, including Impressionist and post-Impressionist works. It is housed in the former Gare d'Orsay, a train station that was built for the 1900 World Fair in Paris.

The School of Art and Art History is part of the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

For information on UI arts events, visit http://www.uiowa.edu/artsiowa on the World Wide Web. You may visit the UI School of Art and Art History web site at www.uiowa.edu/~art/. To receive UI arts news by e-mail, contact ur-acr@uiowa.edu.

MEDIA CONTACT: Peter Alexander, 319-384-0072, peter-alexander@uiowa.edu.