In an age of millisecond answers and fractured attention, Professor of Art History Katie Hornstein asked her students to do something radical: look at the same work of art for three weeks.
Slow Looking in Paris Museums, the new Fall Plus program facilitated by the Frank J. Guarini Institute for International Education, offered 14 students an antidote to the age of distraction: immersion in the city’s most celebrated galleries.
The pedagogical heart of the experience was what Hornstein calls “slow looking”—a deliberate practice of sustained attention. Three meetings during the fall term on campus laid the groundwork, with students studying European art history from 1750 to 1850. Then, over three weeks in Paris, students practiced this approach at major institutions like the Louvre and Musée d’Orsay as well as smaller venues, engaging deeply with paintings, sculptures, and decorative arts.
“These kinds of ‘slow’ pedagogies are especially important in the age of AI euphoria, when we are increasingly putting our faith in corporate technologies to give us fast answers,” Hornstein says. “It’s rooted in an attempt to ask our students to slow down and focus on what is directly in front of them—a pedagogy designed to break through the impulse to scroll.”
For their culminating assignment, students selected a painting in the Louvre’s permanent collection and returned to it over and over again during the program.
“‘Slow looking’ asks students to be patient, to relax, to let themselves go a bit, to get out of the habit of instant gratification and to be patient with their thinking,” Hornstein says. “We never see something at first glance; it requires time and effort to actually ‘see’ a work of art.”
Students examine artwork in the permanent collection of the Louvre.
‘Old friends’ in Paris art museums
The idea for the program crystallized in January 2024, when Hornstein was conducting research in France and learned that the Louvre would mount a retrospective exhibition devoted to Jacques-Louis David, France’s most celebrated neoclassical painter. “When the Louvre curates a retrospective on a ‘big name’ artist, it’s usually a once every two or three generations sort of event,” Hornstein says.
She immediately wondered: would it be possible to bring Dartmouth students to see it?
For an art historian, there is simply no substitute for viewing works of art in person. “Nothing replaces the contingency of discovery that is unique to viewing art in person,” Hornstein says. “It makes you think deeper and more urgently about what you see in front of you: it raises the stakes of viewing.”
A scholar of 18th and 19th-century French art, Hornstein has devoted nearly two decades to visiting Parisian institutions and conducting archival research. She spent years as a tour guide in Paris museums and taught a semester-long study abroad program there after receiving her PhD from the University of Michigan.
“The works displayed in the Louvre and Musée d’Orsay feel like old friends to me,” Hornstein says. “What this translates to is my ability to bring our students into the collections and talk to them about what they’re seeing in a deep way. On a more practical level, it means that I know how to navigate these spaces. In a place like the Louvre it matters that I know where the best bathrooms are!”
Her recent book, Myth and Menagerie: Seeing Lions in the Nineteenth Century, chronicles the lions who populate 19-century French art and the colonial violence that brought these animals from Algeria to Parisian menageries, zoos, and artists’ studios. The book exemplifies her approach to art history—one that insists on viewing artworks not in isolation, but as part of broader cultural, political, and material contexts.
Hornstein’s intimate knowledge of Paris—and her deep connections with French curators—created extraordinary learning opportunities throughout the program. Chief curator of painting at Versailles Frédéric Lacaille, who first told Hornstein about the David exhibition, brought students into the palace’s attic, using “giant 19th-century iron keys” to unlock doors concealing important paintings rarely seen by the public.
When labor strikes at the Louvre closed galleries where some students had selected paintings for their assignments, curator of 19th-century painting Côme Fabre arranged a private viewing. “I had to call in a favor with Côme, who graciously took us into the closed galleries and we had to have a guard lock us in there and then ask to be let out,” Hornstein recalls.
The class also spent a morning in a private drawing collection institution, the Fondation Custodia, with Charles Kang, curator of 19th-century drawings at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Students examined 18th and 19th-century drawings before joining Kang for lunch to learn about what curators do and how they care for their collections.
Maya Spektorov ’28 says these encounters revealed dimensions of museum work she had never considered.
“It was really special to have curators show us around the museums they worked so hard on, and it helped me understand both the importance of museum formatting and caretaking of the art,” she says. “Previously, I had never considered where a painting is hung, but when I walk around a museum now, where a work is situated—what hangs across and next to it—completely transforms my view.”
Students look closely at “Olympia” (1863) by Édouard Manet.
The power of looking slowly
Spektorov discovered how sustained attention unlocks layers invisible at first glance.
“Being asked to look at a painting hours in a row helped me understand the layers of depth an artwork may have,” she says. “No matter how long I had already explored a painting, a classmate or Professor Hornstein would make a small comment or notice a detail, and it would open a whole avenue of the work I had yet to consider.”
Ryan Williams ’28 found the program’s approach transformative as well. “To stop, to slow, to linger and to ponder: the trip made me think about art through the vessel of curiosity—to listen to it, and move with it," he says. “Letting myself spend hours in front of single objects, drawing aspects I found of interest, and dialoguing these streams of consciousness engagements in my journal.”
Williams chose Théodore Géricault’s “The Raft of the Medusa” for his final assignment. “Parts of the work begin to pop out more: the repetition of the curve of a wave, 20 minutes in; a particular transition of color from the brush on hour five,” he says. “Having access to such a broad array of historically and politically active documents for learning over an extended period was invaluable, and has fundamentally changed the way in which I perceive both the museum, and how to engage with it.”
The difference between walking quickly through galleries and spending sustained time with individual works became clear to him. “When you walk through a museum you see capsules of many histories, cultures, and pockets of relationships; in a flurry of walking through it all you gain moments, or perhaps even an overall feeling, but you don’t gain a deep engagement with the dialogues of any particular experience or object,” he says.
Maria Trybus ’26 discusses “The Turkish Bath” (1862) by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres at the Louvre.
Seeing differently
Nathaniel Wayne ’28 says the program fundamentally changed his relationship with art. “I don't think I’ll ever go to a museum the same way again,” he says. “Looking at a work while knowing so much of the process, the context, and the history of it is completely different from how I’d experienced art before, and now I don't think I ever want to go back.”
The results demonstrated the value of Hornstein’s pedagogical approach. “Students rooted their arguments in these papers around the visual qualities of their respective works of art and let their looking and discoveries drive their arguments, supplemented by key art historical and historical context from secondary scholarship,” she says.
For Williams, the program’s impact extended far beyond the classroom. “Simply, the trip made me excited about art: to study it, learn of its surrounding cultures, and to engage in art practice; to see art objects as living and breathing members of my process in both making art, and writing about its dialogues.”
Slow Looking in Paris Museums was offered as a one-time program, but the Department of Art History hopes to make it a more regular Fall Plus offering that can rotate between faculty members working in different geographic locations.
“‘Slow looking’ is a fundamental aspect of what we do as art historians,” Hornstein says. “It is important to learn directly from works of art and to take your time doing so.”