Rembrandt: Portraits of Genius
An art historian by training, Dr. Tina Rivers Ryan is currently Assistant Curator at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in Buffalo, New York. She holds a BA from Harvard, three master’s Degrees, and a PhD from Columbia, and has taught classes on art at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, the Pratt Institute, and Columbia University, where she was one of the top-ranked instructors of the introduction to art history, “Art Humanities: Masterpieces of Western Art.” A regular critic for Artforum, her writing has also appeared in periodicals such as Art in America and Art Journal, and in catalogs published by museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Walker Art Center.
Overview
One of the most important artists of the 17th century, the “Old Master” Rembrandt van Rijn was also one of the most prolific–and inventive–portraitists in Western art. In this lecture, Dr. Tina Rivers Ryan will explore why his many self-portraits remain some of the most moving ever made, and how his experimental portraits of strangers in disguise contributed to the emergence of the modern notion of identity.