Prints & Drawings Talk for March: Delacroix’s Faust: The Good, the Bad, and the “Ugly”

The second Friday of every month, one of P&D’s knowledgeable volunteers will give a talk that explores an area of the AGO’s P&D Collection.

*L’ombre de Marguerite apparaissant à Faust (Marguerite’s ghost appearing to Faust)*, 1828

Talk by: Corrinne Chong, Marvin Gelber Fellow in Prints and Drawings
Date: Friday, March 13
Time: 11 am (arrive at 10:30 to view works on display!)

Expansive in scope and evocative in style, Eugène Delacroix’s series of lithographs inspired by Goethe’s Faust is considered a landmark in the history of French printmaking. Through his masterful exploitation of lithography’s full range of expressive and narrative possibilities, the Romantic icon inspired the next generation of artists to explore this relatively new graphic medium. However, at the time of its publication in 1828, the illustrated book proved to be a complete commercial failure, in large part due to the artist’s Romantic aesthetic. This talk will illuminate aspects of Delacroix’s Faust lithographs that proved to be too daring or as he put it himself, too “ugly” in the eyes of his contemporaries.

Art historian, Dr. Corrinne Chong, is currently the Marvin Gelber Fellow in Prints and Drawings at the Art Gallery of Ontario. She was part of the curatorial team for Early Rubens and a contributor to the exhibition catalogue. Outside of her work at the AGO, her interdisciplinary research focuses on the intersections between music, opera scenography, and painting in the long nineteenth-century. To stay young at heart, Corrinne has been a teacher with the Peel District School Board since 2004.