This is the fourth and final program in the From Exile to Avant-Garde: The Life of Princess Natalie Paley exhibition lecture series. 

In the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, friendly gatherings at Pebbles, Natalie Paley’s beautiful house in Fairfield, Connecticut, drew together many of the creative leaders of the burgeoning American fashion world. At the same moment, the state of Connecticut writ large--from Easton and Westport to Sherman and Roxbury—was becoming a bucolic breeding ground for cutting edge art and design. Alexander Calder, André Masson, Louise Bourgeois, Arshile Gorky, Peter Blume, Marcel Breuer, Kay Sage and Yves Tanguy, among many others, transformed the Nutmeg State from a site of antique Americana to a laboratory of the avant-garde. Alongside the creators of significant new painting, sculpture, architecture, and design, art-world movers and shakers--including Chick Austin at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford and the Baroness Hilla Rebay, one of the Guggenheim Museum’s founders, at Franton Court, her home at Greens Farms--were crucial to the development of art and design at mid-century. Professor Kenneth E. Silver will offer a fascinating glimpse of this incredibly rich moment of modern art in the making. 

HYBRID PROGRAM 

This lecture will be presented in the theater in the Ellen MacNeille Charles Visitor Center and will be livestreamed via Zoom. Visitors can submit questions for the speaker from any location. 

IN-PERSON TIMELINE

5:30–6:30 p.m. | Explore Hillwood

• Enjoy Hillwood’s mansion, gardens,  greenhouse, and exhibition, From Exile to Avant-Garde: The Life of Princess Natalie Paley
• Find the perfect memento from your visit at the museum shop

6:30–7:30 p.m. | Lecture 

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Kenneth E. Silver is Silver Professor of Art History Emeritus, New York University, where he received his Bachelor’s degree. Silver received his M.A. and Ph.D. at Yale, and has taught there, as well as at Vassar and Columbia. For his book, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914-1925 (Princeton University Press and Thames & Hudson, 1989), Silver won the Charles Rufus Morey Award of the College Art Association and the “Prix du Livre,” from Beaux-Arts magazine, Paris, for its French translation, Vers le retour à l’ordre (Editions Flammarion, 1991). Silver has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and an American Council of Learned Societies Grant; he has also been a Getty Research Institute Visiting Scholar and a Mellon-Getty Fellow at the Phillips Collection (Washington, D.C.). Silver was a longtime Contributing Editor of Art in America magazine, and Adjunct Curator of Art at the Bruce Museum (Greenwich, Connecticut, 2007-2024). Silver was Guest Curator, the Guggenheim Museum, New York, for Chaos and Classicism: Art in France, Italy and Germany, 1918-1936, (2010), and at the Museo Guggenheim, Bilbao (2011), which won an International Association of Art Critics Award. More recently, Silver curated Jean Cocteau: The Juggler’s Revenge (Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, April-September 2024), its catalogue published by Marsilio Arte. In recognition of his contributions to the dissemination of the art and culture of France, Silver was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts & Letters by the French government in the spring of 2010.

Image courtest of Kenneth Silver.