The Sixty-Seventh A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts: Positive Barbarism: Brutal Aesthetics in the Postwar Period, Part 3: Georges Bataille and His Caves

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 five artists. In the third lecture, “Georges Bataille and His Caves,” held on April 22, 2018, Foster asks what Bataille saw in the “enigma” of the cave paintings of Lascaux.