Position
Professor of Art and Archaeology

Role
19th-Century European Art

Office Phone
(609) 258-3732

Email
alsdorf@princeton.edu

Website
http://alsdorf.princeton.edu


Bio/Description

Profile

Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 2008
Bridget Alsdorf specializes in European art of the 19th and early 20th centuries, with particular interest in art’s intersections with literature, philosophy, and social psychology.
She is the author of Fellow Men: Fantin-Latour and the Problem of the Group in Nineteenth-Century French Painting (2012), a study of the fraught dynamic between individual and group in some of the most ambitious paintings of the realist and impressionist generation, including works by Courbet, Manet, Degas, Bazille, Renoir and (most extensively) Fantin-Latour. A second book, Gawkers: Art and Audience in Late Nineteenth-Century France ( 2022), explores how Vallotton, Bonnard, the Lumière brothers, Toulouse-Lautrec, and others represented the seductions , horrors, and banalities of urban life through the eyes of curious viewers known as badauds. Positioning these gawkers as the flip side of the singular and aloof bourgeois flaneur, the book excavates a subject of deep significance in late nineteenth-century French culture, as a motif in works of art and as a conflicted model of the modern viewer.
Alsdorf has published essays on Cézanne, Gaillard, Hammersh?i and Kierkegaard, Manet, Poussin, Tissot, Utrillo, Vallotton and Fénéon. She also serves on the editorial board of nonsite.org, where she co-edits a series of issues on 19th-century art. Current projects include a book on partnership, collaboration, and enclosure in Danish painting and silent film during “the modern breakthrough,” focusing on the work of Vilhelm Hammersh?i, Anna and Michael Ancher, P.S. and Marie Kr?yer, Asta Nielsen and Urban Gad through the lens of Kierkegaard’s philosophy; an essay on Bonnard’s illustrations to Verlaine’s book of Sapphic love poems, Parallèlement (1900); and several translation projects.
Alsdorf’s research has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship Program, the Luce Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has worked at a number of museums, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.
At Princeton she is a Faculty Fellow in the Princeton Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts, an associated faculty member in the Department of French & Italian and the Program for Gender and Sexuality Studies, and teaches for the Programs in Humanistic Studies and European Cultural Studies. She received Princeton’s Graduate Mentoring Award in the Humanities in 2018.

Teaching Interests

Professor Alsdorf teaches courses on European art from the eighteenth century through the early twentieth century. Her graduate seminars have addressed the convergence of art, philosophy, and social theory; word and image studies; the cross-fertilization of painting and the novel; historical relationships between painting, print culture, and film; methodology; and new directions in the field. In addition to a regular survey of 19th-century European art, her undergraduate courses have explored the relationship of art and knowledge in the 19th century; selfhood and sociability in portraiture; modernism and masculinity; and the idea of the artist since the Renaissance. All courses take advantage of area museums and campus collections.

Selected Publications
Gawkers: Art and Audience in Late Nineteenth-Century France. Princeton University Press, 2022.
“Vallotton, Fénéon, and the Legacy of the Commune in Fin-de-siècle France.” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 49.3-4 (Spring 2021).
“Les badauds à la baraque de La Goulue,” in Toulouse-Lautrec: Résolument moderne. Réunion des musées nationaux, 2019.
“Manet’s Fleurs du mal,” in Manet and Modern Beauty—The Artist’s Last Years. Getty Publications, 2019.
“Painting the Femme Peintre,” in Women Artists in Paris, 1850–1900. Yale University Press, 2017.?
“Hammersh?i’s Either/Or.” Critical Inquiry 42.2 (Winter 2016).
“Félix Vallotton’s Murderous Life.” The Art Bulletin 97.2 (June 2015).
“Bonnard’s Sidewalk Theater.” nonsite 14 (Winter 2014/2015).
“Cyprien Gaillard: Blowing Off Steam.” Parkett 94 (June 2014).
Fellow Men: Fantin-Latour and the Problem of the Group in Nineteenth-Century French Painting. Princeton University Press, 2012, ?2013.
“Interior Landscapes: Metaphor and Meaning in Cézanne's Late Still Lifes.” Word & Image 26.4 (Oct. 2010).
?“Pleasure’s Poise: Classicism and Baroque Allegory in Poussin’s Dance to the Music of Time.”?The Seventeenth Century 23.2 (Oct. 2008).

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