ARTSMUSE CLASS TOPICS from 2020 - 2024 (present) - see full descriptions below
MARISOL: ASSEMBLING POP
Inspired by the comprehensive retrospective of Marisol Escobar’s work on view at Buffalo’s AKG, our class delves into the originality and humor of this prolific Paris-born Venezuelan and American artist. Legendary for her glamour as well as her sculpture, Marisol (1930-2016), who went solely by her first name, was one of the few female Pop artists who actually achieved fame and success. Her large blocky assemblages, self-portraits, and cheeky installations helped define the decade of the 1960s. The New York-based sculptor was as celebrated during this period as her good friend Andy Warhol. Though Warhol’s oeuvre and life is better known today, Marisol’s art was much more edgy, satirical, and compelling! Let’s look closely and discuss!
HILMA AF KLINT & FRIENDS: WOMEN, SPIRITUALISM, AND ABSTRACTION
Despite Vassily Kandinsky’s claim that he was the first to create purely abstract compositions, we now know that a contemporary Swedish artist and mystic Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) had been producing colorful, stunningly imaginative, often monumentally-scaled, abstract paintings and drawings that predate his by several years. Af Klint kept these pictures largely private for decades, however, because she felt the world wasn’t ready to understand the messages they were intended to communicate–messages transmitted to her from the world beyond. Like the early art of Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian, Klint’s abstraction should be considered within the historical context of spiritualism and Theosophical ideas circulating among artistic and literary circles at the time. In our class, we will investigate the theme of early modernism’s connection to spiritual engagement as we delve into Hilma af Klint’s story, the formal and symbolic qualities of her abstraction, and the ambitious nature of her visionary ongoing project.
MARY CASSATT: AMERICAN/WOMAN/ARTIST
Philadelphia-born painter and printmaker Mary Stevenson Cassatt (1844-1926) was the only American associated with French Impressionism. Inspired by Mary Cassatt at Work, an exhibition held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, this class explores Cassatt’s fascinating life and illuminates her ongoing evolution as an artist, her modern perspective on “feminine” subject matter, and the ways she challenged societal conventions as a so-called “New Woman.”
THE MOMENT OF IMPRESSIONISM
Inspired by the current exhibition, Paris in 1874: The Moment of Impressionism, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., we will celebrate Impressionism’s 150th anniversary, immerse ourselves in the Paris of the 1860s and ‘70s, and look anew at this ground-breaking artistic movement.
PAULA MODERSOHN-BECKER
Despite her untimely death at the age of 31, German artist Paula Modersohn-Becker (1878-1907) created over 700 paintings and for a short time, during the first decade of the 20th century, occupied a central place in German and French modernism. Inspired by the Neue Galerie’s Summer 2024 exhibition “PAULA MODERSOHN-BECKER: ICH BIN ICH/I AM ME,” our class offers a window onto Modersohn-Becker’s radical themes and style, her artistic circle, which included poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and her successes and struggles as a woman artist.
SARAH BERNHARDT: DRAMA QUEEN OF THE FIN-DE-SIÈCLE
Considered by many to be the world’s first superstar, French actress, impresario, and a quite talented visual artist, Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923) truly understood the power of the image. Across a nearly 60-year career, Bernhardt leveraged–and constantly reinvented–her celebrity through fashion, merchandising, and marketing, shrewdly creating buzz not only around her theatrical roles but also her unconventional, at times scandalous life. Our class will explore how the actress flouted social conventions, rewrote the rules, and turned herself into a one-woman brand, a Diva, synonymous with the high art of drama.
HENRI ROUSSEAU: (PARIS IS) WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE
Let your imagination roam; self-taught artist Henri Rousseau (1844-1910) did. Fascinatingly the painter never left France, and his stylized works combine imagery and ideas culled from a range of sources, from illustrated postcards and Orientalist art to the early cinema of Méliès and the tropical hothouses of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. Featuring imagined jungles, inconsistent scale, figures seemingly suspended in motion, and full moons seen in daytime, Rousseau’s art evokes far-off places and dream-like states in a way that is transfixing, childlike, and unexpectedly modern.
SONIA DELAUNAY: AN ARTIST AHEAD OF HER TIME AND ALWAYS IN FASHION
Moving to Paris in 1905 at the age of 20, Ukrainian artist Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979) quickly became an essential part of a vibrant international community of avant-garde artists, writers, and musicians. Seemingly at the center of everything modern, she produced dynamic paintings, artist books, textiles, costume and set designs, interior decoration, and fashion, boldly blurring distinctions between these modes. For decades French culture was shaped (and colored) by Sonia Delaunay’s spirit, style, and marketing savvy. Throughout her lengthy career, she remained an artist ahead of her time and always in fashion.
KÄTHE KOLLWITZ: THE POWER OF PRINT
Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945) was one of the most renowned and important graphic artists of all time. Living in Berlin from the 1890s until her death in the 1940s, Kollwitz witnessed a period in German history marked by the upheaval of industrialization and the trauma of two world wars. Focusing on themes of motherhood, grief, and resistance, Kollwitz brought attention to the plight of the working class, especially women, and asserted the female point of view as a necessary and powerful agent for change. Her compelling oeuvre, with its anti-war and women-centered imagery, remains urgently stirring and resonant in today’s world.
TRANSATLANTIC MODERNISM: THE CENTRAL ROLE OF BLACK CREATIVITY AND CULTURE
This class–serving as a standalone as well as a part II to our Harlem Renaissance class–gives us a chance to consider the Harlem Renaissance (also known as the New Negro Movement) within a global context and to delve more deeply into the theme of transnational exchange from the 1900s to 1940s. We look at how the influence and inspiration between African-American and European artists flowed both ways as well as how both Black and African subjects, aesthetics, expression, and invention were absolutely integral to the development of international modernism.
THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE
Inspired by The MET’s Spring 2024 exhibition: The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, we will celebrate and explore this important period of American history, between the late 1910s and 1940s, when Black urban life and culture centered in New York City’s Harlem (as well as other big cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston, etc.) experienced a spectacular efflorescence across art, music, dance, theater, philosophy, literature, and so much more.
REFLECTING THE PAST: THE PRE-RAPHAELITES, MIRRORS, AND MORALITY
This class (a stand-alone that also serves as a part II to the Jan van Eyck class) examines the work of a radical group of mid-19th-century British artists who referred to themselves as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood because they so deeply admired and sought to emulate the art and craft of Medieval artisans, from a time preceding the Renaissance period. Through the (convex) lens of Jan van Eyck, we consider the aesthetics and agenda of the Pre-Raphaelites as well as the more general Victorian-era obsession with both mirrors and morality.
JAN VAN EYCK AND THE SACRED ART OF LOOKING
15th-century Netherlandish artist Jan van Eyck may not have invented oil painting (as is often asserted), but he certainly mastered its use. In complex scenes, sacred and secular, he rendered the most minute of details with astounding precision, captivating viewers and especially other artists for centuries to come. In this class, we look closely at and decode the symbolism of some of Van Eyck’s most well-known paintings, and tease out some of his vast influence upon art history.
CAMILLE CLAUDEL
Overshadowed by the tragic narrative of her life and famously tumultuous affair with Auguste Rodin, Camille Claudel’s contributions to modernism have long been undervalued and underplayed. In fact, she was among the most daring and visionary sculptors of the late nineteenth century, not to mention the impact she had upon Rodin’s artistic practice. Celebrated by critics for her brilliance at a time when women sculptors were rare, Claudel not only defied societal conventions (and the fervent wishes of her conservative bourgeois family) but also took the plastic arts to new heights of experimentation and modern expression. Let’s rediscover the genius of this remarkable artist.
FAUVISM: MATISSE, DERAIN, DUFY AND OTHERS
Based on The Met’s autumn exhibition The Vertigo of Color, we will examine the origins of Fauvism, a radical artistic movement spearheaded by a youngish Henri Matisse and other primarily French artists around 1905. Get ready for outrageous color and bold experimentation with brushwork and blank canvas. Pink clouds, red blotches of sand, green, orange and purple faces! It’s no wonder critics and viewers alike declared it the stuff of wild beasts (les fauves). Fauvism may have been brief but it changed modern art forever.
ED RUSCHA: PAST/PRESENT/FUTURE
Long associated with West Coast cool, for over 65 years, pop/conceptual artist Edward Ruscha has been creating paintings, prints, artist’s books, and photographs that subvert traditional ideas around what art is and what makes meaning. Words, sounds, graphic design, organic materials, cinematic references, and the vernacular are all fodder for Ruscha’s witty production. Together, let’s take a closer look at Ruscha’s work to better understand his place in art history.
BARKLEY HENDRICKS: REINVENTING THE OLD MASTERS
Decades before contemporary artists Kehinde Wiley or Amy Sherald became known for creating monumental canvases depicting ordinary African American subjects (or more famous ones like the Obamas), there was Philadelphian photographer and painter Barkley Hendricks (1945-2017). Hendricks’ art is the subject of an upcoming exhibition at The Frick Collection, where the artist sought frequent inspiration during his life. Compelled as a student by the painterly skill and transhistorical power of the Old European Masters, Hendricks nevertheless noticed the conspicuous absence of black or brown people from these depictions. From the late 1960s on, he made it his project to give representation to members of his own community, emphasizing their individuality and dignity by mixing groovy, personal style with the elevated scale and artistic strategies and poses derived from paintings by Van Dyck, Bronzino, and Rembrandt among others.
MANET/DEGAS
Inspired by The Met’s breathtaking exhibition pairing the art of dear friends and spirited rivals Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas, our class will explore the changing Parisian scene of the mid-late 19th century in parallel with the ongoing artistic dialogue between two French painters who contributed to the birth of modernism.
FRANÇOISE GILOT: AN ARTIST WITH AN EXCEPTIONAL VIEW
Françoise Gilot passed away on June 6, 2023, at the age of 101. Much more than Pablo Picasso’s beautiful muse and resilient survivor of their tumultuous relationship, Gilot was an accomplished and prolific painter, poet, and memoirist who possessed abundant creativity as well as an extraordinary perspective onto the art world and society at large. Our class explores Gilot’s diverse body of work, her keen insights, and her fascinating, unconventional life.
SHADOWS AND SILHOUETTES IN MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART
Individuals have been creating silhouetted figures since ancient times; this shadowy mode is even tied to mythology around the origins of art. An especially popular art form during the 18th and 19th centuries, flat opaque black cut-outs and illustrations were taken up by the Parisian avant-garde in the 1890s, and employed as a symbol of modernity, resistance, and revelry. Since then, these explicitly 2-dimensional stylized forms have been utilized at varied scale and across media, from paper and puppets, to painting, plexiglass, and film, to convey a range of narratives and sensibilities. Our class traces the dynamic theme of the silhouette in art from Toulouse-Lautrec’s cabaret posters to the contemporary wall-size cut-paper tableaux of Kara Walker and operatic animations of William Kentridge - with some shadowy surprises in between.
GEORGIA O’KEEFFE: A SENSE OF PLACE
Inspired by the Museum of Modern Art’s spring exhibition “Georgia O’Keeffe: To See Takes Time,” we will not only take time to “see” some of O’Keeffe’s most important works, but also to explore the remarkable life and pioneering practice of an artist deservedly called the “Mother of American modernism”.
VERMEER
Have you been swept up in Vermeer-mania? Bringing new scholarship and scientific analysis to our appreciation and understanding of the 17th-century Dutch painter, the current blockbuster show at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which boasts no fewer than 28 of the artist’s 35 known paintings, provides ample inspiration and material for us to delve into. This class will consider issues from mood to meaning, opticality to originality, as we look closely at the particularity of Vermeer’s luminous lens on Holland’s Golden Age.
OUR OBSESSION WITH YAYOI KUSAMA
94-year old Japanese contemporary artist Yayoi Kusama is more popular than ever, not in the least because her installations are extremely experiential and instagrammable. Today, the highest paid living woman artist in the world, Kusama’s artistic and financial success was neither easily nor quickly won. Her personal story is complex and filled with inner struggle. Self-admittedly, her fascination with repeated patterns: stickers, brushstrokes, protrusions, and most famously polka-dots has its roots in childhood hallucinations, obsessions, and phobias. Yet – or indeed because of this – Kusama’s innovative, creative spirit has spanned decades, presenting itself across a gamut of compelling objects, interventions, performances, and environments. From the 1950s when she first came to New York through today, the artist has experimented, set trends, and drawn audiences into the reality of her own cosmos.
RUTH ASAWA AND LOUISE NEVELSON: SHAPING THE ART OF THE POST-WAR PERIOD
At first glance, the work of Louise Nevelson (1899-1988) and Ruth Asawa (1926-2013) could scarcely appear more different; the same could be said of their personalities. Both women, however, were fearless experimenters, each pushing the boundaries of her respective materials and engaging with abstraction in ways that profoundly shaped the Post-War art world. Our class will explore the lives and practices of these two important American sculptors (one Ukrainian-born and the other of Japanese descent) against the backdrop of 20th-century U.S. history.
EDWARD HOPPER’S URBAN LENS
American Realist Edward Hopper (1882-1967) is most well-known for cinematic-like depictions of common place environments evoking a sense of solitude, loneliness, melancholy, or ennui, moody scenes - with or without people - that seemingly served as windows on to the modern human condition. Particularly the cityscapes, created during a period of great urban transformation and social change in U.S. history, are at once familiar and haunting. New York was the artist’s home for nearly 6 decades. It was, as he put it, “the American city that I know best and like the most.” Taking the Whitney Museum of Art’s current exhibition Edward Hopper’s New York as our impetus, we will explore some of Hopper’s most iconic works, including Automat (1927), Drug Store (1927), and Nighthawks (1942), and consider the city not only as it existed on the map but also in the artist’s mind, as a place shaped by lived experience, collective imagination, and memory.
MODIGLIANI’S MODERN MILIEU : FRIENDS, LOVERS, AND RIVALS IN MONTPARNASSE
Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) was the quintessential bohemian artist. From the moment he arrived in Paris in 1906, the gifted Italian expat was a fixture at modernism’s center, hanging out in Montparnasse, associating with the most avant-garde artists and writers of the time, and attracting attention for his painting and sculpture as well as his antics. This class investigates Modigliani’s practice and modern style by looking closely at and considering artworks inspired by his relationships with friends, lovers, and rivals.
CUBISM AND THE ART OF DECEPTION
During the 1910s, Juan Gris, Pablo Picasso, and Georges Braque shocked and amused the Parisian art world with Cubism, a movement that put everyone’s visual perception to the test like never before. Their flattened and fragmented compositions, peppered with puns, hide-and-seek references to contemporary life, and non-fine art materials, not only radically disrupted painting’s long-held goal of creating the illusion of looking through a picture window on to the world (established during the Renaissance period through means of perspective, shading and more) but also turned the practice of artmaking into a creative game of one-upmanship between the three (two Spaniards and a Frenchman) - and with art history itself. Inspired by The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2022 Cubism and the Trompe L’Oeil Tradition exhibition, we will look at several Cubist paintings and collages, and discover how some of these artists’ most daring moves engaged with and updated strategies and devices employed for centuries by so-called trompe l’oeil specialists, painters who beguiled viewers with their dazzling technical skills and clever representational fictions.
MATISSE’S STUDIO: A WORLD OF COLOR
With MoMA’s Summer 2022 exhibition which focused on the French artist’s famous 1911 painting The Red Studio as our jumping off point, this class provides an opportunity to open up a layered discussion around Matisse’s modernism. We will delve into the painter’s working practice, influences and inspirations, self-referentiality, critical reception, and above all his radical use of color.
SEEING RED: WHAT IS IT ABOUT THIS COLOR? Vitality, happiness, passion, rage, power? What are your associations with red and how does the color (and its different shades) signify in art and culture? Following upon our previous fun and fascinating explorations of the sources, uses, and above all meanings of BLUE and YELLOW across time and geography, this week's class will dive into the history of RED.
WORD PLAY: TEXT IN ART/TEXT AS ART (CUBISM - PRESENT)
Representing an interruption of the elevated subject matter and timeless ideal of painting espoused by the European Academy through the 19th century, the inclusion of words was an almost unthinkable artistic gesture. For this reason, incorporating text (sentences, phrases, words, and fragments) became a subversive, experimental strategy of early modernists, and still resounds today in dynamic - sometimes urgent, sometimes humorous - modes. For Picasso, Kurt Schwitters, Ed Ruscha, Bruce Nauman, Deborah Kass, and many more artists throughout the last century, “word play” has been used to signal temporality and the everyday, to prioritize concepts and ideas over aesthetics, and to upend the traditional sense of “reading” a work of art. Lots for us to discuss!!!
APPROPRIATION IN ART: WHOSE ART IS IT ANYWAY?
Especially since the 1960s, but even before this, we encounter a great deal of appropriation in the visual arts (and music). Put another way, we find artists explicitly and intentionally borrowing from, sampling, even entirely re-doing well-known works of art from the past. What is this “recycling” strategy all about? Do artists have nothing original left to say? Do audiences care? Together we will explore the work of several artists who have employed appropriation - including Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Richard Pettibone, Sherri Levine, Jeff Koons, Louise Lawler, and Deborah Kass - to better understand some of the meanings and spectrum of this practice.
FAITH RINGGOLD
Inspired by the New Museum’s 2022 exhibition, Faith Ringgold: American People, our class will explore the work of one of the most groundbreaking and influential artists today and uncover some fun art historical references along the way. For over 60 years, Ringgold, now 92, has worked in a colorful figurative mode across media: painting, illustration, sculpture, and most notably quilting. Drawing from both her own life story as an artist, educator, activist, and mother as well as collective histories about the ongoing struggle of African-Americans for social justice and equity, Ringgold’s narrative works bear compelling witness to the complexity of the American experience.
MODERNISM’S MUSE: VICTORINE MEURENT (AKA OLYMPIA)
Painted between 1862 and 1873, Édouard Manet’s most radical works center on a singular model, a petite working-class woman with flaming red-hair, named Victorine Meurent, herself an aspiring artist. Manet’s Olympia (1863-65) representing a courtesan lying naked on rumpled sheets presented with a bouquet by her Black maid, was considered the painter’s most scandalously modern picture. In actuality, however, Manet’s entire suite of canvases depicting Victorine audaciously pushed the boundaries of both decorum and art history, as the model’s guises, features, and even gender were inventively re-figured. What do we know about Victorine Meurent and why did she inspire such bold experimentation/even collaboration? Together we will explore Victorine’s world, her art, and her indelible impact on modernism as Manet’s most important muse.
SUZANNE VALADON
Suzanne Valadon’s incredible story - of rising from an impoverished childhood to become a successful self-taught artist in a field almost exclusive to men - is one of rebellion, self-determination, and true grit. From the 1890s through the 1930s, the French painter and printmaker bucked societal conventions with her independent (often complicated) lifestyle and modernist approach to art, forging her own personal path and breaking new ground with her unapologetic portraits and nudes. Stressing the special character of Valadon’s art, the Barnes Foundation writes “Confrontational and witty, her works tackle themes that remain provocative today: female desire, the conflicts of marriage and motherhood, and a woman’s experience of her own physicality.” Come discover (or re-acquaint yourself with) this pioneering artist.
SHADES OF MEANING: A HISTORY OF YELLOW
Throughout the centuries and across the globe, the color yellow has signified a variety of meanings. Belonging to the trifecta of primaries (red, yellow, and blue) and one of the earliest pigments in human history, yellow can be found as far back as the cave paintings at Lascaux, and has been associated with everything from jaundice to joy. Our class offers a brief whirlwind history of this color, exploring the range of its shades, science, and symbolism, from the egg-yolk yellow favored in the Chinese lmperial courts to the mustard-yellow covers of racy avant-garde novels in France and England around 1890, and much more.
WOMEN OF DADA: HANNAH HÖCH, SOPHIE-TAEUBER-ARP, BEATRICE WOOD, AND ELSA VON FREYTAG-LORINGHOVEN.
DADA was an art movement - broadly defined - that erupted around 1916 among the European and American avant-garde as a reaction to the horrors of WWI. Manifest particularly in performance, poetry, collage, object-making, and assemblage, DADA celebrated disruptive strategies of chance, disjunction, and absurdity intended to assail artistic tradition, nationalism, militarism, and bourgeois complacency. The more nonsensical and subversive the intervention, the better. Though generally allotted less credit than their male counterparts, figures like Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Beatrice Wood, Hannah Höch, and Sophie-Taeuber Arp were integral to antics and aesthetics of DADA. Let’s uncover their stories.
ARE YOU THERE, GOD? IT’S ME, ANDY. (WARHOL AND RELIGION)
This class is inspired by the 2022 exhibition Andy Warhol: Revelation at the Brooklyn Museum. Without a doubt, Warhol was one of the most celebrated and recognizable artists of the 20th century. Cheeky, controversial, clever, and camp; he was also a life-long Catholic. Using religion as a lens, we will think about the deep role played by faith in Andy’s life and work, and explore some of the complexities and contradictions of his appropriation of Catholic symbolism and imagery to make Pop art.
JASPER JOHNS: THE AMERICAN LIFE
For seven decades, Jasper Johns has been at the forefront of contemporary art – experimenting with materials and processes, blurring boundaries between genres and concepts of high and low, and producing now-iconic works that exist as explicit signposts of American culture as well as vessels for the artist’s more coded personal meaning. Taking our cue from concurrent Jasper Johns retrospectives (both entitled Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror) held in Philadelphia and New York in Fall 2021, our class will look closely at several highlights of Johns’ oeuvre to gain insight into the artist’s humor, audacity, invention, and legacy.
ALBRECHT DÜRER: THE ARTIST AS BRAND
16th-century German painter, printmaker, and theorist Albrecht Dürer’s talent was legendary – and he worked incredibly hard to maintain this exceptional status. In fact, Dürer was one of the earliest artists in history to successfully leverage self-promotion and savvy marketing in a modern sense, gaining him wide recognition, influence, and wealth. Our class will not only explore the extraordinary oeuvre of this gifted and versatile Northern European artist but also how he established himself as a type of brand during his lifetime – and beyond. And, don’t worry, I promise to include a look at Dürer’s beloved rhinoceros print!
KEHINDE WILEY & AMY SHERALD: A LOOK AT THE ARTISTS BEHIND THE OBAMA PORTRAITS
Barack Obama’s presidency was ground-breaking, history-making, and engaged. So, it should not come as a surprise that the portraitists selected by the President and former First Lady Michelle Obama to officially commemorate them for posterity would offer an excitingly relevant, contemporary take on this seemingly hallowed tradition. Inspired by the Brooklyn Museum venue of the five-city Obama Portrait tour, our class will explore the innovation, importance, and meaning of Kehinde Wiley’s and Amy Sherald’s acclaimed 2018 Obama portraits within the larger context of their respective bodies of work.
FLORINE STETTHEIMER’S EXTRAORDINARY WORLD
She is “perhaps the most important modernist you’ve never heard of…” Between the late 1910s and her death in 1944, Stettheimer’s salons were a magnet for a who’s who of New York’s avant-garde, including her BFF Marcel Duchamp. Delightfully idiosyncratic, uncategorizable, and assuredly proto-feminist, she made up her own rules for painting, poetry and life. Her distinctive theater set designs and colorful, witty miniaturized scenes, depicting experiences ranging from swimming at Lake Placid and visiting the newly-established Museum of Modern Art to shopping at Bendel’s Department Store, offer us a window not only onto a by-gone era but also onto the extraordinary world of Florine Stettheimer.
THE MEDICI: POWER PLAYS AND PORTRAITURE IN 16TH-CENTURY ITALY
Taking the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Summer 2021 exhibition The Medici: Portraits and Politics, 1512-1570 as our inspiration, we will consider how the Medici leveraged culture to make Florence the epicenter of the Renaissance and shore up their extended family’s political control and legacy. Looking at stunning portraits and other commissions, we will examine the intertwined forces of art and power during the 16th century, and maybe dig up a little Mannerist style drama too. So grab your copy of Machievelli’s The Prince, and get ready to decode some serious power moves!
EGON SCHIELE: ENFANT TERRIBLE OF AUSTRIAN ART
Continuing our exploration of Viennese culture in the early decades of the 20th century, as society was being permeated with Freud’s theories, we will focus on Gustav Klimt’s young protégé, Egon Schiele. Schiele was bona fide prodigy, who pushed artistic and societal boundaries much further than his beloved mentor and ersatz father figure ever did. (That boy could draw!) During the 1910s, Schiele hovered recklessly between incarceration for pornography and assuming the figurative mantle of Austrian modernism. We will examine Schiele’s dramatic story and his exciting, explicit mode of Expressionism, not only for its raw sexuality, but also its extreme radicality and aesthetic forcefulness.
GUSTAV KLIMT
In the first years of the 20th century, Gustav Klimt went from being a darling of the academic establishment to a Secessionist rebel in a long blue caftan, supported by members of Vienna’s wealthy elite. During this period, his style and subject matter consciously evolved from a conservative gloss on staid allegories to a more elusive and erotically charged mode infused with Freudian mystique and decorative elements culled from Japanese art, ancient Greek designs, Egyptian idols, and Byzantine mosaics. We will delve into the deliciously decadent art, life, and loves of this iconic and surprisingly discrete Viennese artist who championed artistic freedom and changed the face of Austrian art forever.
WAYNE THIEBAUD AND THE “THINGNESS” OF AMERICAN ART
West coast artist Wayne Thiebaud spent over six decades representing whole pies and slices, cakes, ice cream cones, delicatessen and diner cases, gum ball machines, trays of cold-cuts, and other peppy, popular foodstuffs and symbols of 20th-century American culture. Using Thiebaud as our touchstone, we will explore themes and variations within a longstanding strand of American art celebrating realism and “thingness.” Our class will move from late 19th-century trompe l’oeil paintings by John Frederick Peto through the matter-of-factness of Edward Hopper and early graphic work of Stuart Davis, to the cheeky deadpan of Andy Warhol’s Pop, and more.
PEGGY GUGGENHEIM: ART LOVER EXTRAORDINAIRE
Peggy Guggenheim was truly one-of-a-kind: a wealthy and eccentric heiress, a powerfully connected gallerist and collector, and above all an ardent patron of the arts from the 1930s until her death in 1979. Sassy, smart, and used to getting what she wanted, she had an unerring eye for scouting innovation and a self-professed addiction to art. She was also notorious for having affairs with artists. This class offers an exciting window onto the history and machinations behind the emergence and promotion of modern art in Europe and the U.S., in which (Peggy) Guggenheim - not to be confused with her famous art collector uncle Solomon - played an enormous role.
OUT OF THIS WORLD: “THE SPACE RACE” AND THE ART & CULTURE OF THE 1960S.
Fueled by a booming economy, post WWII aspirations, and intense Cold War rivalry, the “Space Race” captured the imaginations of Americans during the early 1960s, evoking a simultaneously frightening and exhilarating proposition. Artists Robert Rauschenberg, Lee Bontecou, Helen Frankenthaler, James Rosenquist, Robert Indiana and many others responded to the advent of space exploration with remarkably evocative and forward-looking works - abstract and figurative - long before Hollywood ever envisioned the imagery for Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica. Looking at the art (architecture, fashion, film, tv, etc.) of the past, we will discover that much 1960s culture was well … out of this world!!!
FRIDA KAHLO AND HER CIRCLE OF FRIENDS, LOVERS, AND FELLOW REVOLUTIONARIES
This class focuses on the inseparable life and art of Mexican painter and larger-than-life personality Frida Kahlo (1907-1954). We will look closely at Kahlo’s paintings and explore her importance as an artist, teacher, and activist at the center of a 20th-century cultural Renaissance in Mexico. As part of our discussion, we will reflect on work by Kahlo’s well-known husband Diego Rivera as well as the contributions of their circle of friends, including Tina Modotti, Rufino Tamayo, and Manuel Alvarez Bravo.
TAKING A CLOSER LOOK AT WOMEN SURREALISTS
Like many art movements, Surrealism was dominated by men - or at least that’s what its male proponents wanted us to think. Women Surrealists, however, were a disruptive force to be reckoned with, producing potent and provocative work across all media. Especially over the last several decades, female artists’ contributions to Surrealism (from the 1920s-the 1960s) have been increasingly reconsidered and appreciated. This class will revel in the exciting, diverse practices of artists such as Dora Maar, Meret Oppenheim, Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington, and Remedios Varo, among others.
SURREALISM
Get ready for all things strange, erotic, uncanny, and dreamlike - because we are diving into Surrealism. Spearheaded by writer André Breton in Paris during the mid-1920s, and becoming an international sensation, this provocative artistic and literary movement was grounded in Freudian theories, or at least the idea of tapping into one’s unconscious by any and every means possible: dreams, drugs, drink, automatic drawing, free association, stream-of-consciousness, etc. Artists we will look at include: Alberto Giacometti, René Magritte, Max Ernst, and Salvador Dalí, among others.
JACOB LAWRENCE: AN AMERICAN STORY
Beginning in the late 1930s, a young African-American artist named Jacob Lawrence breathed new life into the tradition of history painting, expanding its narratives to include people of his own day. Expressing deeply human stories through bold, simplified figuration and closely cropped cinematic views, the artist’s pictures still read simultaneously as universal and historically specific. We will engage with two of Lawrence’s multi-panel series: The Migration Series (1940-41) and Struggle: From the History of the American People (1954-56), as well as a few of his poignant scenes of every day life in and around Harlem.
ALEXANDER CALDER: MODERN ART IN MOTION
Working for decades at the intersection of American ingenuity and European Modernism, Calder (or Sandy, as his friends called him) developed a whimsical, abstract style that put an indelible stamp on 20th-century culture and really got sculpture moving. This class explores the artist’s special art and life.
AMERICANS IN PARIS DURING THE 1920S: STUART DAVIS, MAN RAY, GERALD MURPHY AND ALEXANDER CALDER
Paris was the place to be in the 1920s. American artists, writers, composers, musicians, and dancers flocked to the City of Light to be a part of its creative scene. In this class, we look at some of the wonderful art produced by expats during these exciting, heady years!
DARING ACTS: SPECTACLE AND THE CULT OF THE CIRCUS DURING THE FIN-DE-SIÈCLE
In Paris during the latter part of the 19th-century, le cirque offered a grand spectacle. It was there that the elite rubbed elbows with the working classes, and avant-garde artists found not only entertainment but also inspiration for their work. Taking a front row seat at the circus will allow us to engage with the art of Degas, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Seurat, among others.
ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI: A WOMAN ARTIST GOING FOR BAROQUE
Artemisia Gentileschi was a remarkable 17th-century artist who challenged societal conventions and triumphed in a man’s world! Known for storytelling on an epic scale, Artemisia’s own life trajectory represents a dramatic, heroic story in the face of almost insurmountable traumatic experiences early on. Her recognized success as a sought-after female painter with patrons across several major cities speaks to an adaptability, savvy, and resilience we can truly appreciate today, and Artemisia’s talent speaks for itself. This class transports us back to the 1600s in Rome, Florence, and Naples, where Artemisia forged her career and gained her fame.
GOYA’S GRAPHIC IMAGINATION AND LEGACY (Goya Part 2) *Goya Part 1 is not a pre-requisite
Inspired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2021 exhibition Goya’s Graphic Imagination, this class allows us to dig deeper into the Spanish artist’s prolific output as a draftsman and printmaker and the legacy of his dark and politicized Romanticism.
FRANCISCO GOYA: A SPANISH MODERN (OLD) MASTER (Goya Part I)
The class focuses on Francisco Goya (1746 - 1828). One of the most fascinating artists of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, he occupied a unique position as both an Old Master and an innovative and modern artist.
MR. MORGAN’S LIBRARY: J.P. MORGAN AND THE WONDERS OF HIS LIBRARY AND COLLECTION
This class explores the history of the remarkable private library that financier J. Pierpont Morgan commissioned c. 1900 to display his beloved collection of rare books, manuscripts, and art – and which in 1928 was turned into a public museum and research facility. (As a former educator at The Morgan Library & Museum for many years, this is a subject especially near and dear to my heart).
SACRÉ BLEU: A LOOK AT BLUE’S ALLURE THROUGH THE AGES
This class explores various meanings attributed to the color blue by artists and craftsmen throughout time, from the use of lapis lazuli in civilizations of the ancient world, including Mesopotamia, Egypt, and India, to the later European obsession with ultramarine pigment, from the 14th century on, and the talismanic hold of this (synthetic by the 1800s) shade upon the 20th century avant-garde - across painting, performance, and music.
THE JAPANESE EFFECT: JAPONISME IN LATE 19TH-CENTURY EUROPEAN ART AND CULTURE
When Japanese items - from woodblock prints and kimonos to decorative screens, fans, and ceramics - suddenly became readily available to European markets in the late 1850s, the taste for just about anything Japanese exploded. In addition to being a fashion trend, these exotic objects, particularly woodblock prints, with their vibrant colors, contemporary themes, flattended stylized forma, and unusual compositions and views, had a profound impact upon modern artists from Monet and Whistler to Van Gogh and Gauguin. Let’s take a look at the influence of Japonisme!
ÉDOUARD MANET AND BERTHE MORISOT
In this class, we explore the intertwined lives and careers of these two 19th-century French avant-garde artists, as well as their forbidden romance expressed through painterly dialogue.