Research Seminar: George Lucs and the First World War

Research Seminar, University of Nottingham, Arts Centre Lecture Theatre A30

Wednesday 14th December 2022 (16:30-18:00), you can also stream the talk on Echo360.

Our colleague Oliver O’Donnell is giving a Research Seminar at The University of Nottingham’s Centre for Research in Visual Culture introducing his next book project, which concerns the Ashcan School of painting as it relates to the growing global power of the United States between 1898 and 1918. To do so he will focus on the example of George Luks, who was one of the Ashcan painters and who made a number of paintings concerning domestic American responses to the First World War. Luks’s artworks about the war will be contextualized in relation to other artworks about that conflict, especially by members of the Ashcan School, and in relation to his larger artistic production, which includes illustrations for newspapers and popular magazines. As in the book as a whole, O’Donnell will argue that Luks’s images can provide insights into the emergence of the entangled nature of the American empire – being at once cultural, economic, and martial – that still shapes our world today.