Picture Box: A Small History of the Easel Painting - A Seminar with Amy Knight Powell (USC Dornsife)

The history of easel paintings, those medium size, portable pictures that are framed and hung over the couch, may be tiny by planetary measures of time and space, and even already in comparison with the global history of art, but it is still far too large to fit inside a book. Picture-Box takes a long view, from the renaissance of the format in the fifteenth century, through its near extinction in the twentieth, and its zombie rising since, not to grasp it in all its variety but as a format—one so familiar it’s hard to see. The modern easel painting emerged—concurrently with colonial-capitalist expansion across the globe—from the containers, the folding diptychs and triptychs, coffers, and chests, in which late medieval pictures were stored. The new format was meant to escape these enclosures, opening like a “window onto an almost infinite distance,” in the words of Leon Battista Alberti, and laying claim, imaginatively, to indefinite stretches of territory, even as it remained constrained by its own formal limits. Successive avant-garde movements of the twentieth century would attack those limits, condemning the easel painting for embracing too little—not, that is, for wanting too much. But the easel painting had never stopped trying to escape the box that defines it. The avant-garde rejection of it in favor of a more expansive art, may have been a break with its shape but not with that drive.

*The working introduction to her book project Picture Box will be circulated in advance of the workshop at which time discussion and feedback will be welcomed.

Reception with light snacks will be held after the Workshop in the Art History Common Room (Rm. 2029).

Registration required. 

Amy Knight Powell is associate professor of art history at the University of Southern California, having joined the Department of Art History in 2019. She previously taught at the University of California, Irvine. Powell received her BA from the University of California, Berkeley, and received a PhD from Harvard University in 2004.

Powell’s research focuses on Northern European art and visual culture from 1400 to 1700, and especially painting in the Low Countries. Her 2012 book Depositions: Scenes from the Late Medieval Church and the Modern Museum was widely acclaimed. She has published a number of articles in Art History, Oxford Art Journal, and the Art Bulletin. Two current book projects are exploring the history of easel painting and iconoclasm in seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting.