Art Talk - Sarah Bernard

The Federation of Alliances Françaises USA invites you to attend an online Art Talk:  art historian Beth S. Gersh-Nešić talks to Sarah Bernhardt scholar, Carol Ockman, about the recent exhibit on the famous actress at the Petit Palais in Paris.

Writer, performer, and curator, Carol Ockman is a world-renowned scholar of Sarah Bernhardt. She is co-author of Sarah Bernhardt: The Art of High Drama (2005), whose awarding-winning exhibition and catalog she and Kenneth E. Silver curated and wrote for the Jewish Museum (New York, 2005-06). In addition to lecturing widely on Sarah Bernhardt, she was interviewed as Bernhardt in “Wish You Were Here,” as part of a series inspired by Andy Warhol’s Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century. Her memoir, Sarah Bernhardt’s Handkerchief (in progress), which she wrote and performs as a one-woman show, weaves together close encounters with stardom, her father’s suicide, and the power of objects from the past to mitigate loss.

Ockman has also written extensively on nineteenth-century art (Ingres’s Eroticized Bodies: Retracing the Serpentine Line) and contemporary art and culture, including art criticism and essays on Barbie, the nude, portraiture, and stereotypes. As Curator at Large for Marie Selby Botanical Gardens (Sarasota, Florida, 2016-2022), she put major works of art in dialogue with living plants, working with horticulturalists to produce six exhibitions on Marc Chagall, Andy Warhol, Paul Gauguin, Salvador Dalí, Roy Lichtenstein, and Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith. As writer and performer, Ockman also collaborates with other creatives, in works like Netta Yerushalmy’s Paramodernities (2016-2020), a six-part piece that queries iconic dances from Nijinsky to Cunningham. A long-time teacher at Williams College, Ockman is now Robert Sterling Clark Professor of Art Emerita.

Beth S. Gersh-Nešić, Ph.D. is an art historian and the director of the New York Arts Exchange, an arts education service.  She writes about Picasso, Cubism, the French poet/art critic/journalist André Salmon, modernism, and contemporary artists. Her most recent book is Pablo Picasso, André Salmon and “Young French Painting,“ a translation with annotations and an introduction by Jacqueline Gojard, Professor Emeritus, University of Paris III. She is also a staff writer for Bonjour Paris, an online magazine, and a Senior Lecturer at Mercy University. Her article on the Sarah Bernhardt exhibition at Wildenstein Gallery appeared in Women Artists News (Spring 1985).

This event will be in English on Zoom 

Members : Free

Non members can purchase tickets ($10)

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