Professor Morton delivered a talk, “Max Klinger’s Brahmsphantasie: Embodied Sounds,” in a session sponsored by The Body Studies Network at the German Studies Association in Portland Oregon, October 4-6, 2019. The lecture examined Klinger’s illustrations for Brahms’ Song of Fate, where imagery of the human body in states of peril and pain in dystopian landscapes visualized the dissonant musical chords. Both were related to Edmund Burke’s eighteenth-century concept of the neurological sublime and it’s later application to the music of Beethoven in the late nineteenth century when his legacy was being contested between supporters of Wagner and Brahms.
Professor Morton also participated in the annual conference of ESNA (European Society for Nineteenth-Century Art) held in the Hague, Netherlands. This year’s conference theme was “Frictions and Friendships: Cultural Encounters in the Nineteenth Century.” Morton’s talk,
“Old Faces in New Places: Leopold Carl Müller and Friends in Cairo,” explored the personal and professional relationships between the painters Müller, Hans Makart, and Franz von Lenbach during a two-month sojourn in Egypt. Their artistic orientations led them to very different understandings of Orientalism and ways of engaging with “foreign” cultures. These ranged from enculturation and assimilation to colonialist attitudes geared to exotic sexualized adventures.