The 2026 Graham & Sally Lusk Lecture, 'Discomfort Food: Tissot's Bread and Vollon's Butter,' is scheduled for Saturday, October 3, from 2 to 3 p.m. The program is free, and no registration is required.
Marni Kessler, PhD, will present the lecture; she is a professor of nineteenth-century European art and director of graduate studies in the Kress Foundation Department of Art History at the University of Kansas. Kessler will consider how late-nineteenth-century French representations of food could evoke a spectrum of pleasure and unease associated with Parisian life.
The lecture addresses a period of social, cultural and political turmoil in which depictions of food could convey culinary delight while also engaging with the more troubling aspects of life in the metropolis. It is presented on the occasion of The Joslyn's exhibition 'Café Society.'
'Café Society' examines the development of the French café and its impact on modern art in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The exhibition includes paintings, drawings and prints by Vincent van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Édouard Manet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, James Tissot and Edgar Degas, among others.
Kessler specializes in European art of the long nineteenth century, with research focused on the material agency of artworks, critical theories including ecocriticism and historical context. Her 2021 book, 'Discomfort Food: The Culinary Imagination in Late Nineteenth-Century French Art,' analyzes how representations of food can convey material and immaterial possibilities beyond their seemingly mundane subject matter.
