Activity: Academic and Industrial events › Guest lecture or Invited talk
Description
Swiss-born Henry Fuseli was continually branded ‘foreign’, ‘odd’ and an ‘outsider’ by contemporaries. To a degree, this image was also cultivated by the artist himself. This paper explores Fuseli’s Swiss roots. It focuses in particular on drawings taken from his Jugendalbum (youth album) now housed in Kunsthaus Zürich. It explores the type of place Zurich was - its cultural traditions, religious beliefs and social attitudes - in order to explain why patriotic, religious and sexual themes feature prominently in the artist’s formative works. In doing so, it hopes to draw parallels between Fuseli’s attitude towards institutions in both Zurich and London. It argues that we should seek to recognise and reclaim the ‘Füssli’ in the work of Fuseli, whose Anglicisation of his name did not simply mean an eradication of his Swiss past.