Program Title: Cooking and Modern Art
Speaker: Mary Ann Caws
November 21, 2013
Location: National Arts Club
Mary Ann Caws, Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the Graduate School of the City University of New York and author of The Modern Art Cookbook, piqued our art appetites with images of food by artists of the late 19th and 20th centuries, including still lifes by Manet and Matisse and food images by Claes Oldenburg and Roy Lichtenstein. She paired these works with artists’ writings about food from diaries, novels, letters, and poems and regaled us with anecdotes and recipes from soup–Picasso’s herb soup–to coffee–Colette’s Concierge’s Café au Lait. In her research, she has discovered such bons mots as Salvador Dalí’s “I like to eat only things with well-defined shapes that the intelligence can grasp. I detest spinach because of its utterly amorphous character.” Refreshments from recipes in the book were served, including Allen Ginsberg’s borscht, Picasso’s Spanish omelet, and Monet’s almond cookies.
Artistically-inspired refreshments were served, including Caws’s adaptation of Monet’s madeleines