 It is my pleasure to introduce Ashley Cope. Ashley is a PhD student in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Maryland College Park, where she studies American art and visual culture. She received her BA in art history and gender, women, and sexuality studies at the University of Minnesota in 2019. In 2022, she defended her MA thesis, Neither Woman Nor Man, Negotiations of the Third Sex in Western Visual Culture, 1900 to 1930, and earned her MA from University of Maryland. Ashley has held fellowships at the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the Weisman Art Museum, where she served as the 2019, 2020, Jerry and Lisa O'Brien Curatorial Fellow. Her exhibition, Locally Grown, Documentary Photography of Minnesota Communities, opened at the Weisman in November, and even more recently, her co-curated Ringold Saar, Meeting on the Matrix, opened at the David C. Driscoll Center on campus at University of Maryland in January. Her paper this afternoon is titled, Seeing is Believing, Early 20th Century Visualizations of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality. Welcome, Ashley. First, I just wanna thank Professor Koropkin for that really wonderful introduction, and I also wanna thank the Barnes Foundation for hosting this event, as well as Dr. Gonzalez for moderating this discussion this afternoon. Also, before I begin, I just want to, like our speakers this morning, share my solidarity with Temple University's Graduate Student Association, who are currently on strike to fight for living wage and improve benefits, and more equitable working environment to teach, learn, and research. So I would encourage you to engage with that. In an early photograph by Berenice Abbott, journalist Janet Flanner sits casually on the floor, right knee bent to support her elbow as she lightly rests her fingers against her cheek. Flanner appears masculine in loose-fitting trousers, a collared button-down shirt, dark sports coat, and top hat. Her short cropped hair only serves to further a masculine illusion. Thank you. Flanner stares back at the viewer, and though her expression is placid, the intensity of her gaze is exaggerated by the unworn masks fastened to her top hat. The mask suggests the ability, or perhaps the necessity, to inhabit more than one role. I propose that in Abbott's photograph, three total pairs of eyes, two belonging to the masks and the other belonging to Flanner, mirror the concept of three distinct gender categories. Man, woman, and the third sex are all present as it were in this image. However, only one of these categories is embodied in the flesh by Flanner. The two masks above remain uninhabited, yet close at hand. Though the masks are otherwise similar in size and style, they are clearly differentiated from each other. The mask on top appears light gray, whereas the bottom mask looks black. These contrasting masks, evoking the dualism of man and woman, loom over Flanner's head without concealing her own visage. Though neither mask covers Flanner's face directly, both are significant components of her costume. Flanner's acknowledgement of, but refusal to conceal her own identity with either mask is what reveals her own ambiguity in an otherwise binary system of sex and gender. While Flanner is neither strictly woman nor strictly man, both elements contribute to the production of a new third type. As an artifact of a period in which competing theories about the nature of sex, gender, and desire proliferated, Abbott's photograph of Flanner probes the boundaries of a hegemonic understanding of sex and gender, and attempts to visualize a human subject distinct from the polarized categories of woman and man. In other words, Abbott's portrait carves out a third space for gender expression. Both Abbott and Flanner, Americans who lived and worked in Paris in the 1920s, are typically classified in contemporary scholarship as homosexual women. Their same-sex partnerships with other notable figures in the world of art and literature are well-known and cited in their respective biographies. But in the early 20th century, figures like Abbott and Flanner were enmeshed in a complex debate over identity that challenged binary distinctions like woman versus man, and problematized a straightforward reading of either Abbott or her sitter as women in the traditional sense. Though queer theory and transgender studies have challenged the limitations of binaries in more recent decades, dichotomous definitions of sex, gender, and sexuality tend to dominate studies of art history. Queer artists from antiquity to the present are gathered under the umbrella of homosexuality in surveys that focused on non-normative sexuality in art. And while there is value in tracing the visual culture of queerness through history, a great deal of temporal and cultural context is obfuscated when defining gender and sexuality in predominantly either or terms. One is either a man or a woman, a homosexual or a heterosexual. However, certain groups in Europe and the United States reconceptualized sex, gender, and sexuality from the mid-19th century onward and challenged the notion of a strictly binary system. Theories on the relationship between biological sex, gendered social roles, and sexual object choice proliferated around the turn of the 20th century. Explanations for same-sex attraction shifted from immoral act to pathological condition to ultimately a defining characteristic of human identity. From the late 19th century, competing theories from sexologists and medical professionals attempted to explain the causes and expressions of same-sex desire and gender non-conformity. One of the prevailing and most widespread explanations that emerges in the 1860s is the concept that same-sex desire and gender non-conforming behavior were innate and indicative of an individual's belonging to a separate category of humanity. Rather than being conceived of as normal men or women, individuals whose sex, gender expression, and or sexual preference were considered deviant were gathered under the category of the third sex. The proposal that sex, gender, and desire are interdependent aspects of a fundamental identity continues to play out in images like Abbott's portrait of Flanner. Abbott's photograph can be viewed specifically as a visual negotiation of the third sex in which Flanner's own same-sex preference and masculine gender expression separate her from the accepted definition of woman in the period. Photographs like Abbott's represent the ongoing project which emerged with clarity in the 1860s to represent a distinctly queer identity and images of figures like Flanner shed light on the ways in which such historically unique theories of identity manifested visually in works of self-expression. While Abbott's portrait photography represents the continuing relevance of this 19th century project into the early decades of the 20th century, her portrait of Flanner is better understood as an image that contributes to that larger project in this period asking the same question. How does one visualize thirdness when sex and gender are codified in binary terms? In this paper, I examined how the concept of the third sex was explored over the early decades of the 20th century both within medicine and within queer communities. Using journal illustrations curated by sexologist, Bagnus Hirschfeld and Abbott's portrait of Flanner, I provided glimpse into a much larger project that examines how the third sex identity was visualized both as a medical specimen and later as a self-possessed queer identity. Shortly before her passing, the French 19th century painter Rosa Bonhor submitted a profile of herself as a contracexual, another accepted name for a member of the third sex, to the scientific humanitarian committee co-founded by the German physician and sexologist, Magnus Hirschfeld. In 1900, one year after her death, Hirschfeld included a portrait of Bonhor in the front matter of his long-running sexology journal with the caption, Rosa Bonhor, famous French animal painter, deceased in May 1899, mentally and physically pronounced type of sexual intermediate. The suggestion that Bonhor's appearance in the portrait divulges her status as a member of the third sex highlights the significant role that images played in the intern of the century negotiations of emergent gender and sexual identities. Sexology texts like Hirschfeld's yearbook or intermediate sexual types in which Bonhor's portrait was published contained prolific theories surrounding the nature of human anatomy, gender and sexuality. The yearbook was an interdisciplinary publication open to professionals and enthusiasts alike. Articles were not limited to medicine but included literary and classical scholarship, history and ethnography. As a result of the journal's range of interests, the yearbook became a wide-reaching site of cross-national and cross-disciplinary dialogue. The many illustrations published in the journal are indicative of visual culture's role in the evolving definitions of gender and sexual identity at the turn of the century. In the first volume of the 1903 yearbook is a fold-out triptych featuring one human figure per page. These images, intended as a group, are included as illustrations in Hirschfeld's essay, causes and essence of Uranism. German captions identify the central figure as the earning type, yet another term linked to the third sex. And the figures on either side is the male type and female type. Linking each of these types together is a line of text on the central panel which translates as ratio between shoulder and hip width. Rather than curating three images of analogous style and medium, Hirschfeld gathers three disparate images to support his essay. A studio photograph of the Estonian wrestler, George Lurick, represents the male type. An 1894 painting of a hunting nymph by Joseph Wenger represents the female type. And an awkwardly cropped photograph of unknown provenance prior to publication in the yearbook represents the earning type. These images claim to represent three distinct human types, two of which are familiar in the dominant binary system of sex. But the earning type situated in between these two poles is not easily definable within that same hegemonic system. Hirschfeld argues in the introduction of causes and essence of Uranism that quote, the essence of the Uranian is not exhausted with the direction of his sexual instinct. As in man, the masculine. In woman, the feminine character is felt to be the main thing. So also in the earning, the earned character, a peculiar mixture of masculine and feminine qualities represents the myriad physical and psychic traits belonging to the earning, unquote. Hirschfeld also notes that the man who loves men, the woman who desires women are not men and women in the common sense, but another, a separate, a third sex. For Hirschfeld, gender and sexual preference are fixed in the appearance and anatomy of the body itself, which Kastan simply attempts to illustrate with his three figures. Where the historical context around Abbott's portrait photograph of Flanner complicates our view of Flanner as simply a woman. Hirschfeld's essay and his figures similarly trouble the nature of binary modes of identification by introducing the third sex or earning and giving explicit visual representation to a third distinct type between two poles. Hirschfeld's figures utilize comparison, absence, and concealment as tools to produce the visual identity of the third sex. Juxtaposed against the familiar expectations of the typical, even idealized, white male and female body, the body of the earning type is in many ways only definable through the absences that appear in comparison with the other two figures. The earning figure lacks the definable breasts of the female type, yet there is no penis that we can see or that requires censorship as in the image of Lurik. Though the earning type presents more pubic hair than the female type, who Wenger represents with none in his painting, there is yet an absence of the diamond shaped arrangement of pubic hair that grows towards the navel, a trait that Hirschfeld links to the male body in his essay. Beyond this triangular patch of pubic hair in the center panel, however, the figure's genitals remained obfuscated and unknown. Other features typically used to differentiate between the male and female body are also obscured. Acting as a partial veil, a piece of fabric conceals parts of the face and throat, denying access to facial features, hair growth, or the presence or absence of an Adam's apple, features which might be used to categorize the body as either male or female. Several of the traits most associated with the earning and sexology texts, such as hands and feet that are too small for normal men or too large for normal women, are also mostly obscured via pose or cropping in the central photograph. Though perhaps used to obscure the hands, the position of the arms may also serve to stretch the chest taut, further minimizing the appearance of breasts. Regardless, a great deal of intentionality and direction went into the presentation of the central androgynous figure. Rather than a naturally distinct type, the earning appears as a construction mediated by fabric, cropping, pose, and light, and traits typically associated with male or female anatomy are intentionally obfuscated. Hirschfeld's arrangement emphasizes a bias of perception. The male and female type have established rules, which the Western viewer recognizes and expects. Thirdness, rather than representing the extreme of either pole in a binary system, represents a capacious category, anything that falls outside of the boundaries of established binaries can be subsumed into the category of thirdness, where various aspects considered to be masculine or feminine combine and recontextualize into something neither strictly masculine nor strictly feminine, but something intermediate. What is absent, concealed, or strategically revealed is important to the viewer's understanding of each figure's relationship to its assigned type in Hirschfeld's arrangement. Though absence and concealment in the central image confound established expectations of the binary system of sex and gender the most, concealment and strategic visibility of anatomy are essential to the presentation of sex and gender in each of the three images. The male type, for example, directs a large leaf at a downward angle that simultaneously covers and indicates his genitals. Though there is no actual disclosure of the appearance or nature of said genitals, only the accepted implication that the male type must conceal his penis. What is concealed serves just as much to reveal a defining characteristic of the male type as the concealed or obfuscated portions of the earning serve to reveal a truly urnic nature. Alternatively, the painting by Wenker is revealing of the Western ideal female body, providing full uncensored access to her nude form, a body which has been strategically crafted by the hand of the male painter to resemble a classical ideal. Her blemish-free white skin, the absence of body hair and the hourglass figure which emphasize her breasts and wide feminine hips are the marks of the female type. In contrast to the conventional nude female type, so visible in art from antiquity to the present, the earning type's absence of pronounced breasts seems heightened against the relatively similar appearance of the groin in both the female and the earning. Herschfeld's representation of the third sex acknowledges the power and ubiquity of the binary definitions of sex. However, absence and concealment are reframed not as hindrances to visual representations of identity, but as markers of thirdness itself. What appears undisclosed in the earning is actually a defining characteristic of a third sex identity made visible despite the challenges of visualizing non-binary concepts in a predominantly binary worldview. Recognizing Abbott and Flanders' temporal and cultural proximity to significant theories emerging from sexology in the late 19th and early 20th century connects Flanders' portrait with Herschfeld's earlier project of visualizing the third sex, though their approach to representing the third sex subject differs. Whereas Herschfeld's figure of the earning must be compared, cropped, contorted and concealed in order to justify their position between the male and female type, Flander appears in Abbott's portrait as a self-possessed and natural subject who purposefully remains unmasked. The mask, something which would normally be used to conceal identity, as in the case of Herschfeld's earning, is used in Abbott's portrait as a tool to visualize the third sex as that which exists in relation to, but independent from, either extreme in the binary system of gender. Rather than obscure or subsume Flanders' identity, the masks act as markers of a third possibility and suggest, once again, that visualizing the third sex subject is a delicate negotiation of what is concealed and what is revealed. Thank you. Yes, I am Jane Sharp in the Art History Department at Rutgers. I'm delighted today to introduce Maria Garth on my advisory. Having arrived at Rutgers in 2018 with an MA in Art History from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, Maria is the recipient of a Dodge Avenir Fellowship at the Zimmerly Art Museum at Rutgers, a position that leads to an independently curated exhibition and publication, both of which were realized in March, 2021. This pathbreaking research project required extensive archival research into photographic collections, both at Rutgers and in Europe, and grounds for dissertation, now merely completed with the support of an additional Mellon Foundation Fellowship. Titled Camera Communism, Women Photographers, Avangard Art, Photojournalism and Documentary Aesthetics in the Soviet Union, 1920 through 1980, Maria's thesis focuses on the urbs of women photographers who worked both at the center of debate over photography's role in the 1920s and 30s and at its margins, especially in the 1960s. Offering a new perspective on canonical modernist photo history through its exclusions, her thesis examines the extent to which the concerns and professional status of such pioneers as Alexander Rodchenko and Gustav Kluzis may have been shared, contested, and differently manifested by their female colleagues. She breaks new ground by joining a re-examination of more widely known images by Olga Ignatovich and Valentino Kulagina with original research into work by entirely unrecognized Latvian and Russian women photographers of the post-Stalinist era. Here, as in her related exhibition, Maria introduces us to many unknown and unpublished photographs, only now entering the historical record in large part through her efforts, including in a sequence of publications and numerous conference presentations. This paper today turns our attention to a group of images by only one of these photographers. So please join me in welcoming Maria Garth, who will speak to us today on the aesthetics of avant-garde and socialist-realist photo montage in the early Soviet Union. Thank you, Jane, for that introduction. I really appreciate it. And I would also like to thank the Barnes for hosting us today. And I would like to also thank the other organizers at Temple University, Bryn Mawr College, and the University of Pennsylvania. And before I get started, I want to express my solidarity with the graduate workers of Temple University who are on strike seeking fair pay and benefits. And I invite all of you to learn more about their strike because their fight is our fight, too. So at the end of the 1930s, the artist, designer, and photographer, Valentina Kulagina, began working on a special project for the Soviet state. She had been commissioned to design large photography panels for the interiors of several pavilions of the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition, abbreviated as Vesechove, which opened in Moscow on August 1st, 1939. Originally planned to open in 1937, then rescheduled to 1938, and finally opening in 1939, the exhibition was intended to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the 1917 October Revolution. The sprawling of Ciesa Juzna, Cielska Hasejaistina Vistovka occupied a fair ground-like complex in Astankina, which still exists today is the All-Russian Exhibition Center and Park Grounds, known now as Vedenha. Valentina Kulagina was just one of the many recognizable names associated with the project. The exhibition team employed artists, designers, and photographers to design the interior presentations of various pavilions dedicated to showcasing the agricultural triumphs of the Soviet republics, and the constructivist artist, Elisitsky, designed the main pavilion. Cielska's photo, or Union photo, the Soviet photo agency, and a large number of amateur photographers were also involved, submitting thousands of anonymous negatives based on assigned topics that would highlight the agricultural production from all over the Soviet Union. These images were used by artists and exhibition designers in various forms to illustrate the themes of the exhibition. Beginning in the 1930s, the shift to a socialist realist discourse gradually transformed the formal qualities of Soviet photography compared to the late 1920s. By creating a new system of aesthetic value around the appearance of a photograph, this discursive shift shaped how photographers and viewers determined what constituted appropriate and desirable subject matter socially and by extension politically in the socialist state. To the average viewer, this process seemed to homogenize and standardize, not just the subjects, styles, and methods of artistic production, but more abstract ideologies, such as the concept of socialist vision. However, there is a great deal of nuance in how photographers applied socialist realist ideas to their work. This process was not linear or automatic, but rather happened over time and not all at once, as previous scholarship on this period would have us believe. We can view the transformation of photography's ideological applications through the photomontage work of Valentina Kulagina, who rose to prominence for her agitational visual style in the production of posters and photomontage murals between the transitional period of the 1920s and 1930s. The relationship between documentary photography, avant-garde aesthetics, and socialist realism is exemplified by her large-scale photomural works from 1938. The pavilions were intended to be temporary and Kulagina's compositions were not preserved after the exhibition closed. And the exhibition closed during 1941, which is at the height of the Second World War. Although her compositions are only partially preserved, in fact, similarly, they present a complex perspective on the legacy of radical post-revolutionary avant-garde practices, adapted to the demands of socialist realist art. Proficient in both photography and design, Kulagina had started using photomontage in her early 1930s mass-produced poster designs and was a key figure in shaping the application of socialist realist theory in the visual arts. However, in contrast to her early experiments with photography and design, her photomontage work in the late 1930s of Eschavez series shows a more nuanced compositional balance that evokes the seamless bucolic landscapes of classical painting. I argue that this pioneering series shows the process of creating distinctly Soviet photographic principles and points to the transmutability of these historical constructs, suggesting that a further examination of how socialist realism and the avant-garde are defined within art historiography reveals the instability of these categories. In her compositions for the Eschavez exhibition, Kulagina used the technique of photomontage to seamlessly combine photographs of livestock and nature into idealized scenes of agrarian life. Her works appeared as large photomurals inside the Siberia and animal husbandry pavilions. Kulagina's multiplied images of roaming pigs, cows and horses and mid-rolling hills and rivers evoke the Soviet Union's human interventions into the land and economic development projects such as collective farming and electrification. These compositions present the natural environment as an unlimited material resource, ripe for fulfilling the economic needs of the state, thereby heightening the sense of spectacle occasioned by the exhibition's grand narrative of agricultural triumph. Preparations for the exhibition opening were completed by a team of artists as the nation began the third five-year plan, which lasted from 1938 through 1941, which was during the Stalinist repressions of the great terror of 1937 and 1938. Kulagina worked on the project while dealing with the aftermath of the sudden arrest and disappearance of her professional collaborator and husband, the Latvian artist Gustav Klusis, who was considered by his contemporaries to be the furmost photomontour of the Soviet Union during the interwar period. Kulagina's engagement with the exhibition lasted for three years, from 1938 until 1941. She was commissioned to work primarily on the panels of the Siberia Pavilion. Most of the designs she created depicted bucolic scenes of collective farming. Through much of 1939, Kulagina was hard at work on the photomontage panels that would decorate the walls of the Pavilion interiors. These photographs were intended as a backdrop for the displays of materials and agricultural goods, such as giant bags of wheat, from all over the Soviet Union, which were the central focus of each theme. In her diary, she noted that she completed 10 designs for the exhibition, consisting of, quote, one, Chelyabinsk Tractor Factory, two, The Forest, three, Gold, four, Bees and Garden, five, Animal Husbandry, six, Technical Culture, seven, The Milkmaid, eight, production of hemp-based products, nine, Magnitogorsk, and 10, Kuznetsk, the Stalin figure. Her work was well received by the exhibition organizers, and Kulagina secured more commissions to create additional montages for the exhibition. On July 4th, 1939, she wrote in her diary that several high-ranking officials had visited the in-progress installation of the exhibition halls, quote, on the 3rd of July, we presented the Pavilion, Vyacheslav Molotov, Nikolay Bulganin, Anastas Mikoyan, and Andrei Vyshinsky were in attendance, they praised it highly, my montage has been praised, end quote. The success of the photo montage has rested in their ability to visualize a future Soviet reality that had not yet been realized and to present it in an appealing visual form. Thousands of visitors to the exhibition were supposed to be impressed by the exhibition's displays, so thoughtful design and layout of each pavilion were of paramount importance to the organizers in order to create the desired effect of a stunning panoply of wonders that attested to the state's growing economic success. In Kolagina's compositions for the exhibition, the land takes on a central focus with the multiplied animals, rivers, and trees conveying a sense of the Soviet soil's natural bounty. The seamless quality of the photo montage work gives the compositions a naturalistic feel, such as in the image of horses standing together on a grass lawn at a horse farm with an exaggerated billowing white cloud obscuring most of the background behind them. From a distance, montages like this appear to be documentary photographs because it seems where the visual cutouts are joined together can only be seen from careful observation up close. Yet this quality is mediated by sharp shifts in scale and detail, such as the differences between the foreground background or a forest and field. Repetition, a typical photo montage technique, enacts the sense of proliferation in Kolagina's compositions. In the montages of sheep and pigs, the same identical images are reused so that they appear to be interchangeable. However, the individual pieces of the montage are less important than the effect of the unified collective whole. An endless abundance of livestock repudies any accusation of food scarcity. This was, of course, during the same decade in which forced collectivization led to widespread food shortages and famine that killed millions of people in the Soviet Union. In this way, the formal techniques of the montage reflect the greater ambitions of the Stalinist ideology of the time in which the individual proletarian was subordinate to the socialist collective. The aesthetic of these photo montages embodied the twin's ideals of progress and modernization that the Soviet Union wanted to project with the exhibition. Cultivating idealism was essential to socialism and the state. Rebuilding the landscape until communist entity was as much an ideological project as an economic one. Soviet logic dictated that increasing agricultural production had to be achieved through a reconfiguration of the land. Thus, the exploitation of nature for the Soviet economy was an essential component of this identity, as Kulagina's compositions show. Through its mass scale, which included several hundred buildings set on acres of parkland north of Moscow, the exhibition was a way to justify the turbulent reconstruction of the old imperial order into a modern communist empire. This was an era characterized by political policies that ordained the subjugation of nature for economic production and altering the environment for the needs of the state. The transformation of the wilderness into a communist landscape was lauded as a Soviet achievement. Certainly, the decision of the exhibition organizers to foreground photo montage over other mediums and techniques is a significant one. Beyond the exhibitions run in Moscow, photography was an important component of constructing the exhibition's legacy and the Soviet history and spreading its message to the far reaches of the state. Along with ephemera, such as guidebooks and maps, other publications were also released to commemorate the exhibition, such as the photo book, which means pig breeding, in which Kulagina's photo montage appeared accredited. One of socialist realism's main tensions was the absence of neutrality. In such a politically charged environment, artists like Kulagina had to cultivate agility and responsiveness to the vague precepts of style that cast a shadow over their lives and careers. In such a climate of uncertainty, these state artists read the mercy of their critics' interpretations of a constantly shifting definition and redefinition of socialist realist art. The photo montage Kulagina created shows how the natural environment is bound up with communist aspirations within the Soviet Union of the 1930s, revealing an inner war conscientiousness about human intervention in the natural world. In creating a representation of humans and animals coexisting in the natural environment of a communist empire, Kulagina prompts us to consider how ecological change shapes the material world. By invoking ecology in this context, I refer to the intervention of Soviet industries, such as agriculture into the natural environment and the resulting systemic political, social, economic, and environmental impacts of this interaction. A similar phenomenon was present in the parallel cinema of this period in films like Zika Vertov's One Sixth Part of the World from 1926 and Sergey Eisenstein's The Old and the New from 1929. These films imagine a bright communist future that does not yet exist, but one which they try to visualize for the viewer. In this sense, Kulagina's photo montage functions in the logic of assemblage because juxtaposing disparate images together implies a relationship between them, a technique successfully leveraged by montage films that created loaded juxtapositions such as the Communist Soviet Union versus the capitalist West. By taking facts and repurposing them, these comparisons construct a new truth. In her compositions, Kulagina used the technique of photo montage to seamlessly combine photographs of livestock and nature into scenes of agrarian life that seem to transcend reality. Made just a few years after 1934, when socialism was designated as the official style of the Soviet Union, Kulagina's aesthetic choices reflect the particularities of Soviet ideology at this moment, which were not necessarily her own. The visual rhetoric of this series is a dense synthesis of images created by combining elements of collage and design with photography. The artist's compositionally complex photo montages for the agricultural exhibition combined her avant-garde training with socialist realist subject matter. Photography and photo montage specifically were essential to the vision of this project. Monumentality defined Stalinism in the 1930s as everything was done on a mass scale under the auspices of building communism and those who had formerly championed avant-garde photography, took up the charge with mixed results and personal politics that were not always in line with official ideology. As I have argued, the Vesechove compositions show that rebuilding the landscape into a communist entity was as much an ideological project as an economic one. Soviet logic dictated that increasing agricultural production had to be achieved through a reconfiguration of the land. Thus, the exploitation of nature for the Soviet economy was an essential component of this identity as Kulagina's compositions show. Through its mass scale, which included several hundred buildings set on acres of parkland north of Moscow, the exhibition was a way to justify the turbulent reconstruction of the old imperial order. This was an era characterized by political policies that ordained the subjugation of nature for the economic for, sorry. This was an era characterized by political policies that ordained the subjugation of nature for economic production. In altering the environment for the needs of the state, the transformation of wilderness into a communist landscape was lauded as a Soviet achievement. The discourses of avant-garde and socialist realist theory were not only present in Kulagina's late 1930s work, but wholly integrated into her visual language. Her work demonstrates the ways in which art and ideology were mutually constitutive in Soviet art, creating a system of meaning in which visual culture and official politics were intertwined. And moving away from naturalism, Kulagina's photo montages were more comfortably situated in metaphor. They present the viewer with a parable of an idealized Soviet life where agricultural bounty springs forth from a verdant soil rich with resources, a quality deeply emblematic of socialist realism. It is in this progression away from the avant-garde focus of the 1920s to the maturation of socialist realism as a Soviet aesthetic style. We might see the agricultural series as being imbued with both forms of expression, signifying not a clean break from one style to the other, but rather a continuation of earlier ideals in a new form under the conditions of Stalinism. In this way, Kulagina's series, Designs for the Pavilions of Vesechve, is a hybrid of two aesthetic and historical moments of her career. Post-revolutionary avant-garde photo montage and the monumental demands of socialist realism after 1934. The series occupies an important moment of transition and Kulagina's trajectory is an artist in which she extends her Vanguard artistic training to a new epoch of Soviet art in order to move forward as a successful state artist. By using the agitational qualities of photo montage to monumentalize Stalinism, Kulagina asserted her standing as a successful monture of two different areas in Soviet art, versed in the visual language of the avant-garde photo montage and the emerging discourse of socialist realism. Among her contemporaries, this was indeed quite a rare achievement. Thank you. Good afternoon, everybody, I'm David Stone. It's my pleasure to introduce Erin Hine, who's a doctoral candidate in art history at the University of Delaware. She came to Delaware with a B.A. in art history, a B.S. in chemistry, and an M.A. in art history from Case Western University. Erin's master's paper subsequently published in the Graduate Journal, Athenae, traced the afterlife of Caravaggio's St. Lucie altarpiece using travelogues and painted sculpted and printed copies. Erin has held curatorial internships at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum. And in 2022, she served as guest educator at the Hispanic Society in New York, developing public programs for two exhibitions, Gilded Figures and Nuestra Casa. Erin, a terrific teacher and currently teaching her own lecture course on 17th century art, was awarded the Anna R. and Robert T. Silver Award for excellence in teaching from our department last year. And in 2021, she won the Outstanding Achievement and Graduate Studies Award. Her dissertation, Accident and Fortuna in 17th century Italian Art and Theory, considers how early modern artists responded to chance and mistakes in their artistic process. This project was born out of Erin's interdisciplinary background and draws on early modern philosophy, theology, mathematics, science, and the burgeoning insurance business. Through study of objects, artist biographies, and art theory, Erin's project shows that Seijento artists were thinking critically about uncertainty and their own artistic agency long before Marcel Duchamp and Hans Arp famously tackled similar issues. Erin's talk today looks at two enigmatic drawings from the prolific Bolognese draftsman, Guargino. Erin? Thank you, David, for that kind introduction. I'd also like to thank the symposium organizers and Alia for her expert coordinating. And before I begin, I'd like to express my personal support of the Temple Graduate Student Workers who are currently on strike for fair pay and benefits. An energetic pen and ink drawing landscape with travelers in a rainstorm by Guargino in the Uffizi features bending trees and rolling hills. The varied terrain is articulated with multidirectional passages of hatching. And there's a sense of force in the atmosphere. The trees lean precariously in the storm as it rolls left to right. On the upper edge, an inscription states that the drawing is, quote, by the hand of the most excellent painter Giovanni Francesco, called Guargino of Cento, made impromptu and in an instant. Fatto da Luì in Cento in Uno Instante a la Casa in the year 1626. The scrawled script describes the creation of this drawing, claiming that it was made without deliberation and with much speed. Looking closely at the center of the composition, the viewer is prompted to think twice about the inscription's meaning. Here, amidst Guargino's long thin pen strokes and short staccato marks are orange drips of ink. The ink blots are randomly arrayed and shaped, clearly the result of an accident. Perhaps the words acazo in the inscription carry not so much a sense of impromptu, but rather the idea of chance. There is one other extent drawing that Guargino made with ink splatter. Three bathers surprised by a monster in the royal collection at Windsor. In this sheet, three figures are interrupted by a leering monster whose head is almost completely constructed by a random spray of ink blots. With a few deft lines, Guargino has transformed the chance-made marks into the creature's fearsome maw and brow. Three bathers turn to the monster, stunned amidst frenzied splashes of water. Whether Guargino himself flicked some ink on the paper or there was a clumsy mishap that resulted in these ink-spoiled sheets, the draftsman built complete representational scenes out of these abstract splotches. What was his mindset when he performed these amazing, almost magical transformations? What kind of intellectual and artistic ideas guided his actions? Guargino was constantly working around Pentamenti and was adept at responding to forms that he had already put on the page. Landscape with travelers in a rainstorm and three bathers surprised by a monster have long been seen as exciting and overt examples of Guargino's ability to riff off of his mistakes with graphic wit and spontaneity. At least one or the other of these drawings has been published in virtually every major Guargino's drawings catalog from the last 50 years. And they are almost always used to illustrate Guargino's incomparable invention but neither drawing has received much substantive study and there has been no meaningful analysis of their rather unusual origin. This paper, adapted from a chapter of my dissertation, argues that starting landscape with travelers and three bathers from splattered ink, Guargino entered into an artistic collaboration with chance and ultimately with nature. Today, I will first summarize antique and Renaissance traditions of chance made images, traditions in which Guargino actively participated. I then explore early modern natural history and art theory to show that monsters and storms were examples of nature's unpredictability and spontaneity. Finally, I argue that Guargino's collaboration with chance in three bathers and travelers in a rainstorm constituted a new form of naturalism, one that did not copy nature but rather gave her artistic agency and authorship. Perhaps the most famous artistic collaboration with nature, sorry, with chance, is recounted by Pliny the Elder in his natural history. While working on a mural, the ancient painter Protogenes was struggling to naturalistically paint foam on a dog's mouth. In a rage, he took his sponge, saturated with a variety of paint colors and hurled it at the wall. In that instant, Pliny says, Fortuna, goddess of luck and chance intervened and the mark left by the sponge perfectly rendered the foamy texture. The Protogenes story was widely known in the early modern period. Pliny's natural history was translated into Italian in 1476 and a discussion of the anecdote was included in the 1568 edition of Giorgio Vasari's Lives. Already in 1548, Vasari knew the story. He painted it in his house in Arezzo and that fresco is what I'm showing you here. The sprays of ink in Landscape with Travelers and Three Bathers would have aligned Giorgino with Protogenes and Fortuna in both the mind of the artist and the eyes of his viewers who were his closest patrons, family, and assistants. Because the splatters clearly not controlled by Giorgino's hand, the artist claimed chance's participation in his own compositions. But in his drawing process, Giorgino inverts the collaborative relationship of Protogenes and Chance. While Fortuna completed Protogenes' mural, Giorgino started with Chance's marks. This process of recognizing and completing Chance-made images was widely theorized in the early modern period and was discussed at length in H. W. Jansen's foundational 1961 essay, The Image Made by Chance in Renaissance Thought. In his treatise on sculpture published in 1464, Leon Battista Alberti asserted that the origin of sculptural practice came from early sculptors who identified and then excavated latent images in their raw material, wood, stone, or clay. Painters, too, understood that images were embedded in nature and held potential artistic value. Leonardo da Vinci in his treatise on painting maintained that artists could exercise their imagination by finding shifting images in clouds or by seeing landscapes, animals, and profiles in stains on walls. Vizari discussed similar imaginative activities in his lives. He writes that Piero di Cosimo played visual games by finding battle scenes and landscapes in bodily fluids that he encountered on the streets and walls of Florence. In these passages, Leonardo and Vizari established that identifying a chance-made image was a demonstration of artistic capacity and imagination. Guercino showcases his imagination and skill by entering into a collaboration with Chance. For his viewers, this collaboration is apparent precisely because the artist did not fully integrate the random ink splotches into either composition. While most of the ink spray in three bathers comprises the monster's face, some droplets extend past the crown of the monster's head, breaking the boundaries of representation. A second splatter of ink across the left bathers body is simultaneously integrated into the representation and independent from it. The left bathers mouth and maybe one or both of the eyes are made of drips of ink, and this was a detail that I did not notice until I went and was able to see the drawing in person. These chance-made marks below the bathers do not serve any representational purpose. Instead, they are overlaid by Guercino's successive diagonal scratches and loops that suggest splashes of water. In landscape with travelers, the ink splotches are also distinct from the representational language. The splatter, which makes up the heart of the downpour, is visually dissimilar from the long thin pen strokes and quick successive stippling that Guercino used to articulate the rest of the storm. Where Guercino laid down his ink in a linear manner, the chance-made marks are random and unorganized. Guercino further highlights, sorry, his graphic collaboration with Chance in his choice of subject matter, a monster, a marvel of nature, and a storm, a spontaneous weather event. In the 17th century, Chance was seen as a manifestation of Fortuna's whim, fate's design, and nature's spontaneity. It was argued that if astrology was a legitimate practice, if there was, in fact, a cosmic order, that Fortuna and fate must be responsible for generation and destruction, and therefore must be linked to nature. And this relationship is complex and something that I'm continuing to think about in the rest of my dissertation. We also get a sense of surprise and the unexpected in the narrative elements of these drawings. The monster pops out at the bathers, and one of the figures in the landscape, the one on the left, pulls their cloak up over their head as if the storm has caught them unawares. In early modern natural philosophy, monsters were seen as unpredictable manifestations of nature's spontaneity, creativity, and humor. The treatment of monsters as natural wonders was especially strong in the scientific community of Bologna, where Giorgino spent significant time just prior to his creation of this drawing. Ulisse Aldrovandi, a well-known 16th century naturalist affiliated with the University of Bologna, wrote A History of Monsters, which was posthumously published. This book categorized monsters by type and included woodcut illustrations. The elongated snout, stagging breasts, and reaching talons of Giorgino's invented creature in three bathers, resembles some illustrations in Aldrovandi's section on marine creatures. Giorgino's choice to bring forth a monster from Chance's Marks self-consciously incorporates artistic playfulness and wit. The draftsman took a seemingly ruined sheet of paper and turned it into an inventive scene featuring a fanciful monster. Giorgino mimicked nature's proclivity for monstrous creations by crafting his own hybrid form. As Sandra Chang has shown, knitting together disparate elements to create totally unique creatures was an inventive skill that Giorgino exercised in many other drawings. In this sheet at Windsor, Giorgino combined a dog-like one-eyed head, the body of a chicken, and a human foot. The monster in three bathers is a similar hybrid form, but Giorgino also highlights the hybridity of its graphic origin. He seized the opportunity to build up the splattered ink that was already laid down by nature. He not only copied nature's methods of production, but also subsumed her creation into his own. As with the monster in three bathers, Giorgino used the storm in landscape with travelers in a rainstorm to reinforce his artistic collaboration with Chance. Early modern theories of meteorology and the cosmos lent themselves to associations between Chance, nature, and storms. Leonardo noted that, quote, storms vary in the same sea and with the same wind. He concluded that weather and water were elements of persistent change outside of the control and no ability of man. Moreover, weather was the product of counterbalancing elemental forces, earth, water, air, and fire, hot and cold, wet and dry. A rising out of this elemental conflict, storms created disorder and turmoil at the change in the seasons. Required reading for early modern natural philosophers, Lucretias' On the Nature of Things said of spring, that, quote, there is discord amongst things and the air billows furiously in wild tumult with fires and winds. For the first part of warmth is the last part of cold. These unlike things must fight and make confusion when mixed together. The storm, this mixing of elemental forces, was an eloquent subject for Guerrino's Chance-based composition. His drawing makes order in the form of visual representation out of these splotches, which stand in for the primordial chaos of spontaneous seasonal rain. And by merging the drops of ink into his own marks, Guerrino forces a symbol of meteorological tumult to become a locus of harmony between him and nature. Guerrino rendered rain a force of both destruction and generation with chance-made blots. Here, a parallel is made between the sheets of rain in the storm and the drops of ink on the paper, underscoring the generative power of rain to bring life to the land and the power of ink to bring representational life to the page. I'd like to return now to Pliny's story of Protogenes, in which an image made with chance is more naturalistic than one made without. Here, the artist alone was unable to create a perfectly naturalistic mural. Leonard Barkin's interpretation of the sponge episode is particularly germane. He argues that for a painter in a fit of anger and a frenzy of creation, representation and artifice were insufficient. Only the thing itself, real foam created by water, pigment, sponge, and pressure would satisfy the artist. Three bathers surprised by a monster and landscape with travelers in a rainstorm attain the same kind of naturalism as Protogenes' foam. Guerrino's artistic strategy achieves naturalism not through mimesis and verisimilitude, but through inserting the thing itself into the artwork. The drips in the drawings are not Guerrino's. They're indices of nature in action, spontaneous and unpredictable. And Guerrino retains the potency of nature's marks by ingeniously integrating them into areas of the composition where they function as themselves. They capture the splash of water created by the bathers' surprise and the raindrops in the storm. Guerrino renders the monster and rainstorm as examples of nature actively creating. And the act of nature creating is arrested in the sprays of ink, which compel the viewer to see the drawings as material records of collaboration between man and chance. Thank you. Thank you for those wonderful papers, all really rich and all in their own ways. I suggested at the beginning dealing with some kind of philosophical, ideological framework, really trying to think through how those shape the possibility for image making and the conditions for image making. It was a genuine pleasure to read your papers in advance and to hear them today. I have three questions and I thought I would ask them all at the outset and then you could please feel free to answer them in whatever order suits you, their individual questions for each of you. And these questions come from a place of really enjoying your papers, but I'm also challenging you in these questions to think about some of these ideas a little further. So, Erin, underlying Guerrino's combination of craftsmanship and chance actually lies an older debate about beauty that extends back to Cicero, who wrote, quote, pigments flung blindly at a panel might conceivably form themselves into the liniments of a human face, but do you think the loveliness of the venus of costs would emerge from paints hurled at random, unquote? I'm fully convinced by and quite enjoyed your argument regarding the ink spray as natura and naturans. But if this mode of production was critical to the artist, why do you think Guerrino produced so few of these drawings? So that's my question for you. So we contextualize a little. Let me. Ashley, throughout your engaging and thoughtfully researched paper, several terms are introduced, including intermediate sex, contraceptual and the urnic. Could these terms also be leveraged to describe other photographic works of gender ambiguous subjects? Why or why not? Is recuperating the term third sex only useful in reading this particular portrait with its reference to three faces? Or is it preferable as a generic analytic for all images of these kinds of queer subjects? Maria, you convincingly argue that techniques of revolutionary avant-garde photo montage are carried over into socialist realist images of the Stalin era in the work of Valentina Calanguina, especially in the case of the All Union Agricultural Exhibition, which was new to me and really interesting. A darkroom photo montage has existed and existed since the middle of the 19th century. Calanguina's work shows doesn't look anything like Dadaist photo montage or Rochenko's photo montage from the 20s where the cut is really explicit and the disjointedness among the photo montage elements is sort of a really prominent element in that avant-garde look. But I did like the example you gave us, which I didn't see in the written version that you sent me, of the workers in a row in the factory where we get a little sense of that. So the underlying violence and culture of... Oh wait, so let me finish that. How do we know she was influenced by these avant-garde techniques? And I think you actually answered that question beautifully in the paper in ways that weren't in the original paper. So you can ignore that part of the question if you want. But the underlying violence and culture of fear implied in the story of Calanguina's husband's disappearance seems relevant to the labor she was requested to complete for the state. Is there any way we can discover whether her work was coerced or voluntary? And again, this is underlying in the paper but you do mention a diary and I wonder how much do we really know about her relationship to the labor she was requested to produce if you could pull that story out for us more. So thank you so much for these really interesting papers and please feel free to whoever would like to start. I can start. So your question was about this plethora of terms that are all being used and I introduced them pretty briefly in the paper for the short version and how they might be applied in broader contexts or to other images that might be doing the same work. Am I getting your question kind of right? So yeah, so I've been looking at a lot of different images both within things like medical photography or within these sexology journals and then also by artists who we know we're actually engaging a lot with these kinds of texts. These texts were disproportionately collected by and read by what we've, I'm gonna generally just kind of call queer communities in this period and were kind of read more specifically by them than by a general public. So it was kind of specific to medical field and also specific to these communities. So I'm looking at how they're engaging with those concepts which are really giving language for the first time to this more modern concept of gender and sexuality. And I think that they're being used in fairly different ways, right? So that's something I'm thinking about. But yeah, all of these different terms are essentially from different kind of scholars thinking about how to empirically categorize something that doesn't fit in the system. So it is a pretty big category and it does apply to more than just the brief images that I've talked about here and in things like the yearbook for intermediate sex, the Hirschfeld Journal. There's other images of specifically thinking about like intersex and different like anatomical configurations which is something that could be read in this image as well. So there's a lot of different ways that this term is applied mostly because it's so broad because it really is a catch-all for anything that doesn't fit within the kind of established norm. So I'm looking at a lot of the different ways that it's being used as this kind of really big and open category and how it is certainly does a lot of work of labeling, restricting and categorizing people in potentially harmful ways. But it is also interesting to think about this kind of early 20th century community that are forming identities and communities around this pretty broad language that brings people together for lots of people together around just the idea of being third or being outside. Just quickly follow up. I actually really enjoyed your comparative analysis in the talk about sort of thinking about narrow framing and the links to which the photographer had to go to disguise elements of the body compared to the Bernice Abbott image. I thought that comparison was really productive in pointing out why one term might be better than another. So just thank you. Thank you. I can go next. So your question was about context and maybe like in what circumstances is Guarcino making these images because there's only two of them and Guarcino is an incredibly prolific draftsman. We have perhaps the most prolific draftsman of the 17th century. And it is quite strange that we only have these two splattered ink drawings. And I think the inscription on top of landscape with travelers in a rainstorm gives us a clue as to the circumstances of these drawings. The inscription was not inscribed by the person who witnessed Guarcino making this drawing. The person who saw him make this was Governor Bondi. He was the governor of Bologna. And he writes a letter to his uncle describing that he was sitting with Guarcino. They were talking, Guarcino borrows his pen and dashes off this scene of a storm-swept garden. And then Defebo, who is the uncle, goes in and inscribes this drawing. And so I think we can use that inscription and the letter which Francis Gage has published to put together that these really are kind of impromptu drawings. Guarcino borrowed the pen of Bondi. He didn't even have one. And so it's hard to say where the splatter came from. But I think there's a sense that Guarcino didn't necessarily plan to make either of these drawings but saw the splattered ink and decided to respond to it graphically. And there really aren't other examples of this kind of drawing that I've been able to find. And so yeah, they're really just kind of spontaneous artistic exercises. Guarcino was constantly drawing in the streets just when he was sitting. His biographers say that he really was just always drawing, always moving his hand. So I think these fit into that kind of constant drawing practice that he has. Let me rephrase your question just to make sure that I understand. So you were asking, is it possible that Kulagina was coerced into the project? Is that right? So she was not coerced. She was invited to join the project. But what's interesting is, as I mentioned, Gustav Klusis, her husband had been arrested and unknown to her he had been killed in early 1938. So the only reason that she got to work on the project was actually because of his disappearance, as I refer to it in my paper. And she had financial motivations for wanting to work on the project, which I think is very relatable, right? She was suddenly left as an only parent. They had a young son at the time. And so she wrote in her diary that she had all of these financial concerns and she had to pay bills and her husband was no longer there. And her father was also arrested around the same time. So she was really the primary breadwinner for her family. So in a way, this project was a financial necessity for her, but it also helps propel her career forward because I think without this project, it's hard to say where her career would have gone. But because she got this opportunity as a result of Gustav Klusis being arrested, she was able to show whatever satire artist she was and she worked on this project for three years. So this was a boon to her later career and it was a major turning point. I have some follow-up, but I wanna see if the audience has questions. Yes, okay, great. Please, who has the, oh, she's bringing it. I'm like, David, I can't make this work so well. Thank you all for wonderful papers. I wonder if you can all speak a little bit about the role of shadows in your images. I'm thinking in particular the Bernie Sabbath photograph, what role you think that shadow plays, the sort of silhouette that is neither one gender nor the other, or how you think of that particularly because you talked about masking, I think of shadow as a kind of other metaphor to explore and form to explore. And for you, many of the, you know these images better than I do, I can only see a little bit from here in terms of shadows, but when I'm thinking of photo montage, shadows are one of those kinds of giveaway clues that maybe you're masking together different images from different contexts and putting them together. So I wonder if you can think about that a little bit as they appear or maybe don't appear in Collegina's work. And Erin, for you, less maybe interested in shadows per se, but since you're talking about ink, I'm thinking of the kind of Machia, the kind of blot, the kind of, and you've already talked a bit about that, but picking up Professor Gonzalez's question, if it's not a kind of space for the theorization of beauty, think of the kind of what does that blot and mark that kind of ink smudge do if it's not defining beauty, what kind of space is opened up in that? I could start if you want. Yeah, so the shadow in the Barony Sabbath portrait of Janet Flanner is, I thought about it in terms of also being a kind of doubling and also being a kind of looming figure who's kind of larger and superimposed, taller than Flanner in this portrait. So I think there's things to be said about a kind of doubling as well of persona and ability to inhabit or not to inhabit certain roles. And I also think there's a lot of interesting shadows being done across the eyes. A lot of, I think, the images that I've been thinking about have so much to do with the eyes as a part of your identity and your inner kind of character, and also because so much of this discourse around this time has to do with interiority and how to make that visible on the exterior. So I think there's a kind of work that's done in both this portrait of Flanner and also other works like Romain Brooke's self-portrait painting where the hat cuts like a really dark shadow across her eyes, which I can think about in similar contexts, that is really doing some interesting work around self-possession and self-identity and how identity is read on the exterior. Because I think there's a real discord between the interior self and the exterior presentation or legibility of the self in a lot of these images. And I think the shadow really helps to play with that and make that really abstract thought visible in this image. So. And I'll just answer the question about the shadows. In Colagan's work, I think you're right that sometimes that's a tell that the image is montaged. So some of them don't really have shadows. This one you see like the light source, but in the horse's image that we were looking at earlier, you can see the shadow. And I mean, that's one of the things that you notice, I think, one of the things that I love about the series is it really reminds me of the I Spy books that debuted in the 90s. It's like the longer you look at these, the more little details you find. And you might not notice the seams when you first look at it, but I think the more you look at it, the more you notice where the seams are and how some parts of the composition seem very naturalistic and then other parts definitely don't. So yeah, that's a really good catch about the shadows. I'm so happy you brought up Machia Stain's as relating to Guarcino's work. And Machia were discussed in art theory the century before Guarcino made these. And I think there's a real sense of kind of rescuing the sheets that like these, once these have the ink splatter on them and it's a blank page with the splatter, it's unusable to the artist or to someone who's going to write something down. Guarcino often used like ledger paper to just kind of sketch like you wouldn't be able to use that sheet for that either. And so there's the sense that Guarcino gets to rescue or like resurrect the sheet. And I think that adds to this level of like Invenzione invention and his kind of demonstration of wit for the viewer. And there is this sense in technical treatises technical treatises that were published. They have recipes for lifting stains from paper in the kind of restoration of drawings and I think prints as well. So there is the sense that these splotches could be damaging to the sheet. And this, you know, Guarcino probably wasn't thinking about this but Guarcino used iron gall ink and it's really abrasive and eats through the paper. And so seeing these in person today, there's a real sense this left bathers hair is the ink has really kind of eaten through the sheet. So there's this like extra layer of the Machia being destructive to modern viewers today. Much of the splotches have had to be kind of reinforced on the back of the sheet as well. So thank you. Yeah, a question for Ashley. Because I did so much reading on this unsexing the terminology used in the 19th century specifically with regard to atypical women. I'm wondering does that conversation disappear and really become consolidated? So I suppose it's an extension of Jennifer's question into this third type. Because when I looked at the Baronese Abbott I thought it's so concerned with undoing the look of portraiture. I wondered whether that might still bear traces of this really obsessive focus on unusual women rather than the creating of a third type. Or does this photograph and the discourse you're describing really constitute a shift? So I suppose what happens to that notion of unsexing. Which is so, I'm thinking of Cesare Lambroso, those texts from the late 19th century. Yeah, I think partially the thing I'm doing is trying to think about them in a way that they necessarily haven't been thought. So I think that these do definitely fit, the Baronese Abbott portrait definitely fits into that same conversation about unusual women or women who are kind of breaking kind of social boundaries in the 1920s. And, but I also think that that connection to a discourse around other conceptions of gender and sexuality has been a little bit underdeveloped. So that's something I'm looking at. And also it just makes me think also of the way that this concept of the third sex or overly masculinized women has been weaponized to kind of discredit certain movements of that kind to ignore gender or to lessen the impact of being viewed as a woman or to fight for certain rights. So the masculinization of women has also in some ways been used as a weapon to discredit those efforts. So I think it has placed in all of those conversations from like the late 19th century to the 1920s when this was made, but the connections that I also see to the way that these artists are running in circles who are thinking about or at least connecting to these different pieces of like medicine and sexology discourse is I think just a piece of all of the different kind of gender conversations that are happening in that moment because it's kind of a watershed of breaking boundaries of gender expectations, particularly for women in fashion, social kind of access and behavior. So it has I kind of think a multiple connection and that is kind of one of them. Thank you for these wonderful papers. The guercino paper and the talk on sex, gender and sexuality got me thinking about what you could describe, I guess, as a sort of broad human impulse to impose order on chaos, right? Like the creation of this third category to capture the things that don't fit, the subsuming of chance into the artist's own kind of conception and his own sense of order. I just think that that's sort of interesting, but also I'm wondering if I'm kind of misinterpreting. I guess this question is for you, Erin. Do you think that those ink drawings should be interpreted as he's like trying to impose order or is he more sort of embracing? I mean, I guess sort of both. And then another question that's sort of related is, does he do this in his paintings? Is there any evidence of sort of making something out of what you might, what might be mistakes? Yeah. So I think that to answer your first question, I think that guercino is really embracing the ink splatter and the kind of chaos that comes from it because his, I think this is especially true in the monster drawing, he really lets the ink splotches kind of do the work of creating the monster's head and he really only like transforms that for us and communicates that form to us through the contour lines, right? Through the, he like contours the brow or the eyelid and then gives us like a chin with some whiskers and the splotches really do the rest of the work there. And I also think his choice of subject matter really kind of plays up this idea of chaos and nature that he chose the storm and he chose the monster. And your second question, I don't necessarily see guercino's painting process as responding to mistakes in the same way, but I would say that he approaches designing his paintings in his preparational drawings in a way where he is responding to chance in a way. His design process for drawings is really quite remarkable. He sits down and starts sketching these figures and on the same sheet he'll sketch over and over the figures and like slowly change the positioning like the movement of an arm. You'll see kind of like move in one drawing and they're very iterative and he'll slowly kind of arrive at a composition, at a pose for a figure through several iterations of drawings and you really get a sense that he's kind of letting his hand flow free and then slowly kind of honing in on what he wants that composition to look like. So I think it's more of a kind of mental process there, but similarly kind of responsive to what's flowing out of his hand. Thank you. And then I'm sorry, I'm hogging the microphone, but this is a quick question, maybe not a quick answer, but a quick question for Ashley. The three illustrations, images that you had up there, why do you think the woman is a painting rather than a photograph? Yeah, so I've spent a lot more time thinking about these three images just on their own as well. And I think that there's a lot of different things that could be said about achieving the ideal and how certain photographic practices might not be able to capture that ideal in terms of how the kind of female ideal is constructed in this especially kind of classical way and also the medium itself kind of allows for those classical forms and classical subjects to be produced in I think the most recognizable way. And also I think that there's many different connections I think to make between all three of these figures, but all three of them are very odd, I think in general. And there's a lot I could go on about about the kind of domestic male figure versus the outdoors female figure, the kind of modernity of the man, the kind of wilderness of the woman. So there's like certain things that match up almost with binary conceptions of what it means to be male or female and then also things that seem totally counter or totally kind of strange. So there's a lot to say about all of these images just together and also to answer your question, one thing I've thought about a little bit and I'm still trying to think about is the way that certain conceptions of the third sex, it is kind of capacious, so it has a lot of things within it, but especially like the 1860s to 1880s-ish, a lot of the primary kind of research that was happening around or writing that was happening around the earning specifically, which is a term that comes from Carl Heinrich Ulrichs, who is a lawyer, sexologist, who was working on decriminalizing kind of sodomy laws, was thinking specifically about the male kind of same-sex attracted person because they were the ones most impacted by those laws. So they think there's also a kind of visual continuity between the central figure who was labeled earning and the male figure in terms of medium, yet still differentiated in all those different ways compared across all three. But I think there's something to be said about the connection between two mediums and one outlier. Thank you so much, all three of you. I wish I had a question for the panel, but instead I'd love to follow up on Martha's question to Erin. And when I'm thinking of the scholarship that's been produced between your early 17th century moment and then the Duchampian moment on chance, there are some scholars, I'm thinking in particular of Nina Dubin who have sort of taken the figurations of Fortuna and questions of chance and so on, not as metaphors of nature, but as profound metaphors of culture and in particular of changing economic structures, you know, her new work on the South Sea bubble and Fortuna is really thinking about how the taming of chance is not the taming of nature but actually in fact, a much more profound image of the making palatable of a speculative economy of forms of deeply profoundly changing economic structures instead. So I'm wondering if you think such a reading could be performed over Guargino. If not, which I think would be a perfectly viable answer as well, then maybe why would that be the case? So I'm just thinking about whether chaos really needs to be a figure of nature because to me it is much more a figure of naturalizing certain social and economic forces. Yeah, thank you, that's an interesting question. I saw the New York Public Library show on the bubble recently, I think it just closed. I don't know that I've actually thought about for these two drawings, the more kind of economic implications or kind of manifestations of Fortuna in culture. Partially just because the subject matter really relates to these ideas of nature as this kind of autonomous creator who plays in the 17th century. There's this idea of Lusus here of nature really kind of playing through creation. Other chapters of my dissertation deal with other artists and their interactions with chance and so I think the culture aspects of Fortuna will come into play much more in those other chapters. I'm thinking about Bernini's theatrical productions. I won't get into them, but he manufactures chance in a way and introduces this level of risk and of injury in his plays. And so I think that maybe that's a connection to ideas of insurance or divine providence, I think is another example of the way that Fortuna kind of manifests in culture. There's just so much happening in the 17th century in relation to uncertainty and chance. So narrowing down what aspects of culture relate to what artwork has been one of my challenges. But thank you, yeah. I actually have a question from the chat from online. So it's also for you, Erin. So are you thinking about the relationship between the quasi-automatic mark making in the Bathers? For example, the repeated open squiggles or loops between the two in the middle and the ink spray? Is this a spectrum of marking or is there a rupture with the sprays? I think that that's an interesting question. It makes me think of the kind of automatic drawing that comes with Surrealis in the early 20th century. I think there is an aspect of for Guercino's drawing practice of him kind of letting his hand just go and letting go of control a little bit. And then responding to the forms that he creates, especially kind of going back to Martha's question about arriving at composition and form for painting, which is kind of a more static practice, like the product that it creates. But I'll have to think more about that idea of kind of rupture that that question brings up. So thank you. Martha, how are we doing on time? Probably break. Okay, well, thank you all for your questions. It is now time for a break. Let's thank our wonderful speakers for the. Thank you.