Juliet Kinchin will be coming to speak in the Modern Design History Seminar Wednesday, December 9, 2009 on: Hungarian Pottery, Politics and Identity in the 20th Century.

Juliet Kinchin joined the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2008 as Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design, focusing of the history of modern design. She holds a B.A. from Cambridge University and an M.A. from the Courtauld Institute of Art of the University of London. She is currently an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Glasgow where she was formerly a Senior Lecturer in the Department of the History of Art, and Founding Director of the graduate program in Decorative Arts and Design History. She has also held faculty positions in the history of art and design at the Glasgow School of Art, and the BGC, and has worked as a curator in Glasgow Museums and Art Galleries, and London’s Victoria & Albert Museum. Kinchin has published extensively on 19th and 20th century design and decorative arts, notably on Charles R. Mackintosh and his Glasgow contemporaries, on E.W. Godwin, and on Hungarian Art Nouveau. Recent publications include “Hungarian Pottery, Politics and identity: Re-representing the Ceramic Art of Margit Kovacs 1902-77” (The Journal of Modern Craft, 2009); In the Eye of the Storm: Lili Markus and Stories of Hungarian Craft, Design and Architecture 1930-1960 (Glasgow, 2008); “Performance and the Reflected Self: Modern Stagings of Domestic Space, 1860-1914” (Studies in the Decorative Arts, 2008); Hungary, Shaping a National Consciousness’ in The Arts and Crafts Movement in Europe and America (LACMA/ Thames and Hudson, 2004).

This lecture explores the significant, and hotly contested, role of ceramics in material and metaphorical representations of Hungarian identity. During a century of dramatic political, social and economic upheavals, ceramics featured prominently in debates about the accommodation of modernity and tradition, and specifically about the interrelationship of folk arts (nép művészet), ‘home industries’ (háziipar), and decorative art or industrial design (iparművészet)

Please join us in the Lecture Hall at 38 West 86th Street, between Columbus Ave and Central Park West, at 5:45pm for a reception before the talk.