Tuesday, September 16, 2014, 7–8:30 pm

By Dr. Janne Sirén, Peggy Pierce Elfvin Director

This lecture introduces the idea of the “modern temper” as it was embodied by a number of revolutionaries, including Francisco de Goya (Spanish, 1746–1828), an artist at the bridge of classicism and modernism. Although Goya was a court painter, he was also a chronicler of human failings, and of dreams, sorrows, and visions. His dedication to the subjective, rather than the idealized or objective world, was a harbinger of modernism itself. Goya lived contemporaneously with both the American and French revolutions, and the Napoleonic wars, eras marked by the waning power of the aristocracy. The lecture concludes with the end of an era in itself, marked by Napoleon Bonaparte’s abdication in 1814.

Tuesday, October 14, 2014, 7–8:30 pm

By Dr. Joe Lin-Hill, Deputy Director

This second lecture begins with a political event—the end of the first Napoleonic Empire in France—and ends with the ascendancy of Realism, a new artistic movement that culminated in the Salon des Refusés of 1863. The years in between 1815 and 1860 were among the most tumultuous in French history. They saw the emergence of a politically empowered French middle class, the rise of Romanticism, and the emergence of an avant-garde from the artistic and political actions of the Realists. Topics explored will include the Realist artists’ rejection of historical and allegorical painting, the political role of the avant-garde artist, and the evolving definition of the “modern” artist as capturing that which is both beautiful and fleeting in his or her own time.

Tuesday, November 11, 2014, 7–8:30 pm

By Dr. Janne Sirén, Peggy Pierce Elfvin Director

The third lecture addresses the best-known figures of the nineteenth-century avant-garde: artists such as Édouard Manet (French, 1832–1883), Edgar Degas (French, 1834–1917), Georges Seurat (French, 1859–1891), and Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926). Their signal achievements are at the core of the Impressionist movement, a generation of artists attuned to the provocations and charms of everyday life. The fruitful relationship between artists and writers during the second half of the nineteenth century immeasurably enriched the Impressionist movement. Popular histories of Impressionism will therefore be contextualized through a discussion of some of the movement’s critics, in particular the poet and writer Charles Baudelaire (French, 1821–1867).

Tuesday, February 3, 2015, 7–8:30 pm

By Dr. Janne Sirén, Peggy Pierce Elfvin Director

The first half of the twentieth century in Europe, Russia, and the United States was among the most tumultuous periods in history. For artists, early years of experimentation were soon followed by revolution, world wars, and dramatic economic instability. In Germany, forward-looking art and design training at the Bauhaus responded to the artistic idealism of Expressionist associations like Die Brücke (The Bridge) and Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). The radical developments in abstract art immediately preceding the Russian Revolution of 1917 were put to the test, as Constructivist artists such as Lyubov Popova (Russian, 1889–1924) and Aleksandr Rodchenko (Russian, 1891–1956) worked to make abstraction useful in the post-revolutionary era. This was a time of unprecedented artistic innovations: Cubism, Expressionism, Constructivism, De Stijl, Dada, Surrealism. Many artists lived long enough to see their formerly shocking work become acclaimed and collected after the end of World War I. Many of these gains were lost, just a few years later, with the brutality and censorship of World War II.

Tuesday, March 10, 2015, 7–8:30 pm

By Dr. Cathleen Chaffee, Curator

Many of the artists, such as Jackson Pollock (American, 1912–1956) and Mark Rothko (American, born Russia, 1903–1970), who contributed to what has been called the “triumph of American painting” in the 1950s had a great deal in common: they made representational painting as part of the Depression-era Work Projects Administration and they were exposed to an influx of European culture brought by artists in exile from the destruction of World War II. These artists brought their experience to bear on the development of a truly American style of abstract painting, which came to be called Abstract Expressionism. This generation of artists helped shift the center of the art world from Paris to New York City after the war. What kept New York at the apex of artistic innovation and art market success for decades afterwards was not, however, its role in the establishment of a new national school of art, but rather the way it continued to serve as a fulcrum for diverse communities of transplants and émigrés. Such increasingly international energies were often what redefined and expanded the definition of avant-garde art in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.  

Tuesday, April 28, 2015, 7–8:30 pm

By Dr. Janne Sirén, Peggy Pierce Elfvin Director; Dr. Joe Lin-Hill, Deputy Director; and Dr. Cathleen Chaffee, Curator

Although it is common to declare that we live in an increasingly global era—a “flatter” world—there is little consensus about how to make sense of this changed environment as it relates to the world of art and artists. This lecture will weigh a number of different approaches to understanding global trends in art. In particular, the discussion will contextualize the relationship between such “new” international voices and the rich historical tradition of modernism and the avant-garde addressed throughout the lecture series.

A reception will follow the final lecture.