Posted on November 15, 2001 at 11:40 a.m.
BIRMINGHAM, AL — University of Alabama at Birmingham Art History Professor Heather McPherson, Ph.D., has been awarded the 2001 Southeastern College Art Conference’s Award for Excellence in Scholarly Research and Publication for her book, The Modern Portrait in 19th Century France, published this year by Cambridge University Press.
The book explores the evolution of French portraiture after the advent of photography through six case studies of French artists, ranging from Sarah Bernhardt to Paul Cèzanne, whose work, “Self-Portrait with Palette” is featured on the cover of the book. More than 100 illustrations are featured in the book.
McPherson focuses on portraiture in the latter half of the 19th century, when the genre was threatened with obsolescence by the photographic image. McPherson also relates the diverse strategies artists used to revitalize the portrait.
The book is the culmination of more then seven years of writing and research, much of it done in Paris. The idea for the book originated with the exhibition, “Fin-de-Siècle Faces: Portraiture in the Age of Proust,” which was organized by McPherson in late 1988 for the Proust Symposium at UAB. McPherson began researching Sarah Bernhardt during the NEH Summer Seminar on Portraiture and Biography, which she participated in at Harvard University in 1990.
In the nomination for the award, committee members noted that McPherson’s book “sets forth a provocative analysis of portraiture in a succession of quite diverse essays that include discussions of photography, painting, posters, the rise of modern theatre, the role of women, the impact of technology and the relationship between writers, critics and artists.
Research for the book was made possible through a Camargo Fellowship and two faculty research grants from the Graduate School at UAB. In 1995, McPherson received an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.
McPherson came to UAB in 1982 and is also the director of graduate studies in art history. She received her Ph.D. in art history at the University of Washington in Seattle. She earned her master’s degree from the Universitè de Paris/Sorbonne in France.
McPherson has published widely on French art and visual culture in journals such as the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, History of Photography, Nineteenth-Century Contexts and Nineteenth-Century Studies. She has also authored exhibition catalogues on “Gavarni’s Images of Women,” “Portraiture in the Age of Proust” and “Marie Laurencin.”
The award was presented by Charles R. Mack, vice president and chair of the awards committee, at the conference’s annual meeting, held in Columbia, S.C. in October. Other committee members were Robert Lemon, Rollins College; Anne Beidler, Agnes State College; William Eiland, University of Georgia; and Pamela Simpson, Washington and Lee University.The Southeastern College Art Conference, founded in 1942, seeks to promote art in higher education through facilitating cooperation among teachers and administrators who are concerned with the development of art in their respective institutions and the community. The organization represents a 12-state area, and serves over 300 individual members and 100 institutional members.