SALON Conference 2026 Call for Papers Unreliable Lives: Rethinking the Artist’s Biography in the Nineteenth Century
Can Gauguin’s work ever be separated from the reputation of a sexual predator with a colonialist gaze? What is at stake in questioning Caillebotte’s sexual orientation? And how should we confront Degas’s antisemitism? Unreliable Lives seeks to interrogate nineteenth-century biographical practices and their ramifications into the present day. It aims not only to historicize these frameworks but also to foster constructive debate about the role of biography in art history today: its possibilities, its limitations, and its ethical demands.
