Please note that the reception for this event will begin at 7pm, presentation will begin at 730pm.

PLEASE NOTE: DUE TO SPACE LIMITATIONS, WE ARE NO LONGER TAKING RSVPS FOR THIS EVENT.

Forthcoming issues of West 86th will feature new scholarship from Debora Silverman on the ties between Belgian Art Nouveau and imperialism in the Congo, Anthony Cutler on the art of working ivory in the tenth and the twentieth centuries, Pat Kirkham on the Saul Bass/ Alfred Hitchcock collaboration, Nick Pearce on one of China’s first art exhibitions, and Lourdes Font on the early career of Christian Dior.

David Freedberg will be coming to speak at the launch of W86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture at 7:30pm Wednesday, February 9, 2011, on “The Materiality of the Brain and the Material of Culture.”

David Freedberg is the Pierre Matisse Professor of the History of Art in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University, and Director of The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America. He received his B.A. summa cum laude from Yale University and his D. Phil. from the University of Oxford. He has taught at Westfield College in London, the University of London, and the Courtauld Institute of Art. Professor Freedberg has been the Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford University, the Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the Rudolf Wittkower Gast-Professor at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome, and a fellow at Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

Dr. Freedberg is the author of numerous books and articles including, Dutch Landscape Prints of the Seventeenth Century (1980); The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (1989); Iconoclasts and their Motives (1993); Joseph Kosuth: The Play of the Unmentionable (1992); The Eye of the Lynx: Art, Science and Nature in the Age of Galileo (2002); and with Vittorio Gallese, “Motion, Emotion and Empathy in Esthetic Experience,” and, “Mirror and Canonical Neurons are Crucial Elements in Esthetic Response,” both in Trends in Cognitive Science (May, 2007). He is currently working on three book projects: Anaxagoras: An Essay on the History of Classification; Modes of Seeing: Mind, Body and Emotion in the History of Art; and, On the Dance and Architecture of the Pueblo People.