Allison Stewart

Associate Professor of Art History specializing in Northern Renaissance printed works of art on paper. I teach courses on Medieval and Northern Renaissance art, and the early history of prints. My research has centered around secular imagery of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in Germany and the Netherlands, including peasant festivals, and has been supported by Fulbright and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships. Before my appointment at UNL, which began in 1989, I taught at Columbia University and UCLA, and worked at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Getty Center for the History of Art and Humanities in Santa Monica, CA. I grew up in New Jersey and attended Syracuse University (B.A. in journalism and art history) and Queens College of the City University of New York and Columbia University (M.A. and Ph.D).

My book on paintings and prints showing men and women of vastly differing ages—usually an old man with a young woman not surprisingly--began my publications on secular imagery and gender over twenty years ago: Unequal Couples. A Study of Unequal Lovers in Northern Art (Abaris Books, 1979). I have published articles on printed art and the artists who made it, including biographies of Barthel and Sebald Beham in the Dictionary of Art (Macmillan, 1996); and “Printmaking” in Medieval Germany. An Encyclopedia, (Garland, 2001). Articles on secular prints include: “Sebald Beham’s Fountain of Youth and Bathhouse Woodcut: Popular Entertainment in Large Prints by the Little Masters,” Register of the Spencer Museum of Art, 6/6 (1989), 64-88; “Paper Festivals and Popular Entertainment: The Kermis Woodcuts of Sebald Beham in Reformation Nuremberg,” Sixteenth-Century Journal, 24/2 (1993), 301-50; “Large Noses and Changing Meanings in 16th-century German Prints,” Print Quarterly, 12/4 (1995), 343-60; “Taverns in German Reformation Art,” The World of the Tavern. Public Houses in Early Modern Europe, ed. Beat Kümin and B. Ann Tlusty (Ashgate, 2002), 95-115.; “Head of a Jester,” Print Quarterly, co-authored with Greg Davies, Print Quarterly, 19/2 (June 2002), 170-74.; and “Distaffs and Spindles. Sexual Misbehavior in Sebald Beham’s Spinning Bee,” for Saints, Sinners, and Sisters (cited in full below), expected 2003. Two books in progress address secular art and gender: Saints, Sinners, and Sisters. Gender and Visual Art in Medieval and Early Modern Northern Europe, ed. Alison Stewart and Jane Carroll, Ashgate Press, expected 2003, and Before Bruegel. Sebald Beham and the Origins of Peasant Festival Imagery, Ashgate Press (under contract).

Current Work

I am currently completing two books and investigating another: Saints, Sinners, and Sisters. Gender and Visual Art in Medieval and Early Modern Northern Europe, co-edited with Jane Carroll, Dartmouth College (Ashgate, expected Fall 2003), a compilation of essays showcasing current research on gender and Northern European art we plan as a companion text for teaching. My book Before Bruegel. Sebald Beham and the Origins of Peasant Festival Imagery is under contract with Ashgate Press, London (expected 2005), and studies the earliest peasant festivals designed by Sebald Beham in Reformation Nuremberg in Germany during the 1520s and 1530s, where they were published as woodcuts, before Beham moved to Frankfurt and reworked the images and published them himself in several series of engravings. From Frankfurt to Bruegel’s Antwerp, where his peasant festivals were first published as prints a bit after mid century, then completed as paintings, was a geographical hop, skip, and a jump. I argue that Beham established the market for peasant festival imagery on which Bruegel was able to capitalize.

In March 2002 I organized and led with Jane Carroll of Dartmouth College a workshop for the Historians of Netherlandish Art conference in Antwerp, Belgium, addressing meanings in one of Pieter Bruegel’s most enigmatic paintings, Dulle Griet, in the Museum Mayer van den Bergh, Antwerp. Dulle Griet or Mad Meg is shown as a large woman in the foreground of the painting. She holds objects she has pillaged; behind her stands a war-torn town with Hell-like flames filling the background. Hybrid creatures and structures showing Bruegel’s debt to Hieronymus Bosch offer additional visual appeal for the viewer. How was this work understood in Bruegel’s time? Discussions have been initiated on publishing the results of the workshop as a book for the museum addressing questions of meaning in the painting.