The Sixty-Seventh A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts: Positive Barbarism: Brutal Aesthetics in the Postwar Period, Part 1: Walter Benjamin and His Barbarians

Hal Foster, Townsend Martin, Class of 1917, Professor of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University. In the six-part lecture series Positive Barbarism: Brutal Aesthetics in the Postwar Period, Hal Foster explores the pervasive turn, from the mid-1940s to the early 1960s, to the brut and the brutalist, the animal and the creaturely, as these are manifest in the early work of Jean Dubuffet, Georges Bataille, Asger Jorn, Eduardo Paolozzi, and Claes Oldenburg. In the first lecture, “Walter Benjamin and His Barbarians,” held on April 8, 2018, Foster probes how modernist art “teaches us to survive civilization if need be.”