Under pressure: history painting at the threshold of national cultures Art History Research Lecture: Professor Mary Roberts, Senior Global Fellow, University of Sydney

Polish artist Stanislaw Chlebowski's career was forged in multiple worlds, in multiple studios and across multiple national narratives. Chlebowski created history paintings for the Ottoman, Polish and French clients, constantly reframing the historic narratives for these diverse patrons. The challenges of code-shifting across this nationally bound genre of artistic practice is most apparent in his longstanding, ultimately irresolvable, effort to create a painting of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople. This lecture explores that painting's instabilities and its relationship to his Orientalist interiors.

These interiors were not static repositories of collecting or studio practice, but spaces teeming with the tension of movement. Chlebowski's unfinished painting began to shape his interiors and its irresolution is redolent of his fraught relationship with his own mobility. This lecture charts the tensions of peripatetic artistic practice, with its multiple- sometimes conflicting- national and imperial narratives. These tensions yield provocations for a more globally expansive history of art.

Mary Roberts is Professor of Art History at the University of Sydney. Working at the intersection of modernism and orientalism, she pursues global networks that inform European and Islamic art. Her books include Istanbul Exchanges: Ottomans, Orientalists and Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture (UC Press, 2015), which was awarded AAANZ's Best Book Prize, and Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature (Duke, 2007). Her next book is Four Thresholds: Orientalist Interiors, Islamic Art, the Aesthetics of Global Modernities.

The lecture will be also be streamed online. Cameras and Microphones of online attendees will be disabled for the duration of the event.

You are also welcome to join a wine reception afterwards at the School of Art History, 79 North Street.