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mvidal@ucsd.edu
Biography:
Professor Mary Vidal who served on the full-time faculty from 1997 to 2007, died July 6, 2007, in Berkeley, California. She died of a cancer related illness. A small memorial gathering was held on August 12, 2007.
Mary Vidal is an art historian whose teaching and writing has focused on the early modern period in Europe from the late sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries with an emphasis on the art and culture of eighteenth-century France. She joined the faculty of the Visual Arts Department in 1997 after having taught for several years at Princeton University where she was awarded the R. K. Root University Preceptorship for outstanding research. She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Art History from the University of California, Berkeley. She has held year-long research fellowships at the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (Mellon), and she has been a member of the Executive Board of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Vidal has lectured widely at conferences and colloquia both in the United States, for example at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and in France at the Louvre and the École Normale Supérieure (rue d'Ulm). Her work appears in the Art Bulletin, The Journal of the History of Ideas and Art History, and she has published a book dealing with the intersection of language, texts, social behavior, and images entitled Watteau's Painted Conversations: Art, Literature, and Talk in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century France (Yale University Press, 1992). Her second book, under contract with Yale and forthcoming in 2003, presents original critical readings of images of women and love by the French Revolutionary painter, Jacques-Louis David. She is also currently co-editing a volume of commissioned essays on the topic of interdisciplinarity and forwarding research for an in-depth theoretical, historical, and visual analysis of French genre painting in the early modern period.
Vidal's study of artworks arises out of a thorough consideration of the visual. She emphasizes the priority of forms and artistic manner in the generation of meaning in images and as the basis for exploring the fluid give and take between art, language and social codes. Her work is also theoretically based with an emphasis on historical writers such as de Piles, Diderot and Baudelaire as well as on post-structuralists such as Foucault, Jauss, and Levinas. Vidal teaches a broad range of courses and topics from surveys on Baroque painting, the art of the Enlightenment, Romanticism, and Impressionism, to thematic lectures and seminars, for example, on single painters or pairs of painters (Rembrandt, Watteau/Chardin, David), on art-historical methods, on concepts of the artist through history, on genre and landscape painting, on early modern women artists, and on image and text in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
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