Kelly Hill

Kelly Hill is a Humanities instructor at the University of Louisville. She holds an MFA in Writing from Spalding University, and she loves Impressionist, Surrealist, and Abstract Expressionist art. She's been known to bore her friends and family with discussions about representations of gender in 19th century art. If she could only look at one painting for the rest of her life, it would be Degas’s The Star.

Stories By Kelly Hill

Art Nouveau

Gerda Wegener: Art Deco Feminist
By Kelly HillAugust 28, 2020
Today Gerda Wegener is best known for her lesbian and feminist art. She was also married to a trans woman, the landscape artist Lili Elbe. Their marriage was later dramatized in David Habershoff’s 2000 book The...
19th Century

5 Artists Who Likely Suffered From Syphilis
By Kelly HillJuly 31, 2020
Also known as the French disease or great pox, syphilis was a common sexually transmitted disease in Europe in the 1800s. In fact, 10-15% of Europeans in the 19th century were likely infected with the bacterial...
19th Century

5 Things You Need to Know About Australian Impressionism
By Kelly HillJune 11, 2020
Australian Impressionism might not be as well known as its French counterpart, but this late 19th century art movement was important to the country. In fact, some consider these artists to be part of the first...
20th century

Anita Berber: Femme Fatale of the Weimar Republic
By Kelly HillMay 14, 2020
Born on 10 June, 1899 in Dresden Germany, Anita Berber shocked and entertained the cabaret and bourgeois crowd of the Weimar Republic right up to her untimely death at the age of 29. Film star, nude...
19th Century

Painting of the Week: Vincent van Gogh, Bridge in the Rain (after Hiroshige)
By Kelly HillMay 10, 2020
In the mid 19th century, Japanese ports were suddenly opened up to international trade, and Europeans went crazy for Japanese culture and art, especially woodblock prints. A new word in French, Japonisme, was even created to describe this...
19th Century

The Scandalous Nudes of Gustave Courbet
By Kelly HillMay 1, 2020
In the 19th century, French painter and rebel Gustave Courbet generated outrage with his scandalous nudes. What exactly was so scandalous about his paintings? Courbet had the audacity to paint (gasp) real women in the nude. Courbet and...
20th century

Keeping up with the Boys: Abstract Expressionist Helen Frankenthaler
By Kelly HillApril 29, 2020
It’s often the men of Abstract Expressionism who are best known: Jackson Pollock and his famous “drip” technique; Willem de Kooning’s abstract women; Mark Rothko’s colorful rectangles. Yet it’s Frankenthaler who, after seeing what Pollock was...