Public Programs @ The Institute

Series: Conversations in Modern European Art

Prima Donnas: Asta Nielsen and Urban Gad’s Autofictional Cinema

Speaker: Bridget Alsdorf, Professor of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University

Thursday, November 5, 2026, 6:00pm

Between 1910 and 1914, the Danish writer and film director Urban Gad and the Danish actor Asta Nielsen made thirty-one films in one of the greatest creative partnerships in the history of cinema. Their romantic involvement was hardly incidental, for they made its complexity the subtext of multiple screenplays. Together, they mined the cinematic potential of their relationship in works that explore love and artistic collaboration, shifting between playful humor, tragic drama, and winking references to their off-screen selves. As pioneering filmmakers of the silent era committed to making cinema a respected art, Gad and Nielsen orchestrated almost every aspect of their films’ production and reception. In doing so, they developed novel ways to redirect their creative, professional, and emotional lives.

Bridget Alsdorf is Professor in the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University. She is the author of Fellow Men: Fantin-Latour and the Problem of the Group in Nineteenth-Century French Painting (Princeton, 2013) and Gawkers: Art and Audience in Late Nineteenth-Century France (Princeton, 2022). She co-edits a series on nineteenth-century art for nonsite. A 2023 Guggenheim Fellow, Alsdorf is now writing a book on love and collaboration in Scandinavian art during the period of the modern breakthrough, informed by the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard.