This four part course will bring into focus some of the best known and most studied artworks of the modern era: Impressionist portraiture from the second half of the 19th century, the subject of the special exhibition at the Kimbell Art Museum Faces of Impressionism: Portraiture from the Musee d'Orsay (October 19, 2014 – January 25, 2015), consisting of loans from the Musee d’Orsay in Paris, largest depository of Impressionist art in the world. (https://www.kimbellart.org/exhibition/faces-impressionism-portraits-musée-d’orsay). The Impressionist artists were concerned with images of the world around them, often painted in a sketchy or unfinished-looking style, which set them apart from the Academic traditions of their more classically trained contemporaries. The special camaraderie they shared is evidenced through their independent group exhibitions set up in opposition to the official government-sponsored Salons, and in their use of each other as subjects for their often controversial paintings. Through the use of digital images and classroom discussion of the approximately 70 works included in the exhibition, we will explore Edgar Degas’ The Bellelli Family, Paul Gaugin’s Self Portrait with Yellow Christ, Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Young Women at the Piano, and Edouard Manet’s Portrait of Emile Zola, as well as Impressionist portraits and populated interiors and landscapes from other museum collections. Note: this course does not include an exhibition visit to the Kimbell.
Four Thursdays, 90 minutes each.
Masterworks of 19th Century Art – David to Van Gogh
July 10 and 12, July 31 and August 2, 2014
The early 19th century witnessed the domination of two seemingly incompatible styles of painting: Neoclassicism and Romanticism, while by mid century these traditions were being challenged by the upstart Realists and Impressionists, which ushered in the beginning of modern art. This two part course will explore major paintings by artists working during this period, moving through such diverse styles as the Neoclassicism of David, the Romanticism of Delacroix and Gericault, the Realism of Courbet and Manet, the Impressionism of Degas and Renoir, and the Post Impressionism of Seurat and Van Gogh. One meeting will focus on important paintings by these artists aided by the use of digital images in a classroom setting, while the second meeting will be held in the galleries at the Dallas Museum of Art special exhibition The Mind’s Eye: Masterworks on Paper (June 29 – October 26, 2014), dedicated to drawings, prints, watercolors, and other works on paper by these same artists, many drawn from the museum’s permanent collection and including some privately owned works. Museum and exhibition admission included, 2 sessions, 90 minutes each,
PICASSO, MATISSE AND A DIALOG OF IMAGES
Four Thursdays, March 6 -27, 2014
Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse are titanic forces in the art of the twentieth century, and like most modern artists, they actively followed and saw each other’s work. They often responded to these works through their own paintings, drawings and sculptures, and in so doing, created one of the richest visual dialogs in the history of art. These responses began around the time of their initial meeting in 1906 when the avant garde writer Gertrude Stein collected the works of both artists, and the dialog was continued by Picasso even after the death of Matisse in 1954. Through classroom discussion and aided by digital images, the course will explore the complicated and often contentious relationship between the two artists, as each would pass through periods of working with their own strengths (color and composition for Matisse, stylistic and technical variance for Picasso), and alternately invading the territory of the other in a game of aesthetic brinksmanship that challenged the other’s mastery of his craft. This dialog includes some of the most radical and progressive works in modern art, such as Matisse’s Woman With A Hat, Blue Nude and Music and Dance murals, and Picasso’s Portrait of Gertrude Stein, Three Musicians, and Mother And Child. We will trace the many points of connection and overlap in their lives, their personal triumphs and setbacks, their responses to two world wars, their exhibitions, the dealers and collectors who supported them, the acquiring of each other’s works, and what each had to say about the other.
PICASSO, MATISSE AND EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY MODERN ART: LOANS FROM THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO
October 10 - November 7, 2013
January 16 - February 6, 2014
Join this four part classroom voyage through the special exhibition The Age Of Picasso And Matisse: Modern Masters From The Art Institute Of Chicago, on view at the Kimbell Art Museum October 6, 2013 – February 16, 2014. This overview of early twentieth century modernism will focus on loans from the Art Institute to the Kimbell while the Institute’s galleries are being renovated. This exhibition is not a tour, so the Kimbell will be the only venue to show these landmark works.
Through the use of digital images and classroom discussion, we will explore works in the exhibition as well as those by other artists that helped define modern art in the first half of the twentieth century. Both the course and the exhibition will guide students through the major developments of Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism, abstract art, Dada and Surrealism, all of which changed the direction of art history and continue to reverberate through contemporary art. The course will serve as an excellent primer to those visiting the Kimbell exhibition, as well as survey the larger context of twentieth century modern art.
Nearly 100 objects will be on view in the exhibition, including ten works each by Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. On the exhibition checklist are Bathers By A River by Matisse; Mother And Child by Picasso, Golden Bird by Constantin Brancusi, part of his highly polished sculptural series of increasingly reductive images of flight; Still Life With Glass, Dice, Newspaper And Playing Card by Georges Braque, who along with Picasso, is one of the inventors of Cubism; Improvisation No. 30 by Wassily Kandinsky and Composition No. 1 (Gray Red) by Piet Mondrian, both pioneers of abstract art; and Personages With Star by Joan Miro, one of the major figures of Surrealism.
MODERN SCULPTURE AT THE NASHER
One Saturday, November 16, 2013, 2:00-4:00 PM
Encounter modern and contemporary sculpture on a guided tour in the light filled galleries of the world renowned Nasher Sculpture Center. This course will explore works from the permanent collection inside the Renzo Piano designed building, and the outdoor garden. We will also tour the special exhibition Return To Earth: Ceramic Sculpture of Lucio Fontana, Fausto Melotti, Joan Miro, Isamu Noguchi, and Pablo Picasso 1943-63, on view September 21, 2013 through January 19, 2014. Two hours, museum admission included.
THE FOCUSED GAZE: A concentrated look at ten modern art masterpieces
Five Thursdays, March 21 - April 18, 2013
This course will focus on ten iconic modern and contemporary artworks, all supreme examples of each artist’s vision and maturity, and often marking a turning point in their respective careers and the direction of modernism. Over five meetings, we will discuss two works in each class, illustrated by high quality digital images of the work under consideration as well as others by the same artist, and each work will be set within the context of the artist’s larger body of work, and within the backdrop of modernism as a whole. This course is ideal for those who wish to take a sustained look at some of the key works of modern art.
The Age Of Bronze by Auguste Rodin is widely considered to be the first mature work by the founder of modern sculpture, and therefore occupies a pivotal place in the history of modernism. Rodin’s abandonment of academic conventions, such as narrative, and study of the actual appearance of the model led to accusations that the sculpture was cast from life, rather than modeled in clay by the artist.
Georges Seurat’sSunday Afternoon On The Island Of La Grande Jatte is a supreme example of the Post Impressionist style of painting known as Pointillism, for its distinctive pattern of colored dots covering the painting’s surface, and is undoubtedly one of the most famous paintings ever made. Seurat’s cool, analytical style drew heavily upon scientific theories of color and optics, and his calculated method was in marked contrast to the sketch-like, improvisational method of the Impressionists.
Still Life With Plaster Cupidby Paul Cezanne is one of the landmark works of Post Impressionism, and signals Cezanne’s desire to return to painting an emphasis on structure and geometric underpinnings, as opposed to the optical effects of Impressionist painting. His use of passage, or the conflation of one object in the painting with another, created a tension between the depiction of three-dimensional space and the flatness of the picture surface that has resonated through modernism since.
Blue Nude (Memory Of Biskra) by Henri Matisse embraced Matisse’s notion of the decorative in painting, which for him meant the inventive, subjective use of sinuous line and often non-naturalistic color to describe forms, rather than traditional perspective. The painting created a scandal when shown at the Armory Show in New York City in 1913.
Fountain by Marcel Duchamp ushered into the lexicon of art history the word “readymade,” Duchamp’s term of choice for a functional object not made by him, taken from its context as a useable object, and placed within an art gallery context, thereby transforming it into art simply by declaration of the artist. Duchamp’s choice of an ordinary porcelain urinal to be exhibited unaltered by him as an original work of art changed the conception of what an artwork can be, and the role of the artist in society.
Pablo Picasso’s Guernicais one of the most politically charged paintings in modern art history. Recording Picasso’s reaction to the German bombing of the Basque town of Guernica, the mural-sized canvas employed the language of Cubism and a stark black, white and gray palette to chronicle destruction and death by one of the first uses of the airplane as a weapon of war.
Charles Sheeler’s glorification of the machine aesthetic reached a pinnacle in Rolling Power, one of six works commissioned by Fortune Magazine in 1939 on the subject of power and American technology. Dubbed Precisionism by critics because of its emphasis on the depiction of machine imagery, crisp, hard edged forms, and reliance on photography as a source for the painting, Sheeler’s work bridged the gap between representational and abstract painting.
Broadway Boogie Woogieby Piet Mondrian is the final completed work by the pioneer of abstract painting. After inventing his distinctive language of flat, primary colored planes bound by vertical and horizontal black lines, Mondrian moved from Paris, then London, to New York City to escape the ravages of the second world war, to find new inspiration in the gridded streets, bright lights and jazz music of the modern city.
Jackson Pollock’s Cathedral is one of the earliest of his drip paintings, made by dripping thinned industrial paints directly onto raw canvas lying on the floor, and a highlight of the Dallas Museum of Art collection. This technique was a breakthrough for Pollock and his work, which was dubbed by critics Abstract Expressionism, for its lack of recognizable subject matter and the existential, heroic attitude assumed by Pollock when making these works.
Campbell’s Soup Cansby Andy Warhol embraced the low imagery of popular culture as appropriate subject matter for works of art. The very ordinariness and ubiquity of Warhol’s imagery came to signify the dominance of American consumer goods and culture worldwide.
The only work on this list no longer in existence, Tilted Arc by Richard Serra was a monumental 120 foot curving steel wall commissioned by the US government to stand before a federal courthouse building in New York City. From the beginning, Serra planned the piece as a site-specific installation, regarding it as belonging only to the space for which it was designed. The resulting court case to have it removed changed how public art in the US is commissioned and installed.
FOUR MODERN MASTERS
October 25 - November 15, 2012
Four Modern Masters will focus on the work of four of the most radical and influential artists of the modern age: Auguste Rodin, Constantin Brancusi, Pablo Picasso, and Piet Mondrian. This course is ideal for those who wish to take a more sustained look at the work of these important pioneers. We will devote an entire class meeting to each of these artists, placing their work within the context of their times and within that of modernism as a whole.Auguste Rodin is widely considered to be the first modern sculptor. His frequent employment of rough facture in his finished works that reveal the workings of his hand and marks of the sculptor’s tools, rejection of narrative as an accepted genesis for the work, willingness to alter a work previously considered to be finished, and recognition of the truly three dimensional nature of sculpture in the round all revealed his departure from accepted norms and academic standards. Rodin’s realism concerned both his expression of an often profound emotional content of the figures themselves, and his belief that artists were free to devise their own standards. These concepts were revolutionary in their influence, and changed the direction of sculpture in the modern age. His use of bronze as a preferred medium for his work reaches back to antiquity, and his conception of sculpture as monument links him to the Renaissance works of Michelangelo. Major works to be discussed include his important Age Of Bronze (a highlight of the Nasher Sculpture Center collection), Burghers Of Calais, and Gates Of Hell.
Although employed by Rodin as a studio assistant, Constantin Brancusi broke with Rodin’s conception of the method of making sculptural form. Brancusi’s belief that sculpture should be carved, and not modeled, as was Rodin’s method, and his search for a sculptural essence devoid of emotional expression, led him to reduce his work to simple geometric volumes and smooth, often highly polished surfaces. His tendency toward greater abstraction is exemplified by his work in series, particularly on the theme of the Kiss, Birds In Space, and portrait heads.
Pablo Picasso’s myriad styles, methods and techniques reflect his gargantuan abilities as a painter, draftsman, sculptor, and printmaker. He seemingly effortlessly mastered all manner of depicting his subjects, from highly representational to the nearly abstract. As a co-inventor (along with Georges Braque) of Cubism, his influence reached into subsequent developments in twentieth century art. Some of the works to be discussed are his Blue and Rose period paintings, the pre-Cubist Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, analytical and synthetic Cubist works, papiers colles, and the politically charged Guernica.
Piet Mondrian’s flat planes of pure primary colors bounded by horizontal and vertical lines are among the first purely abstract art, and the most instantly recognizable. His paintings, writings, even the arrangement of his studio have been enormously influential on subsequent artists. We will examine his early Impressionist influenced landscapes, through his Cubist phase, on to his mature Compositions, to his final sublime pieces created during his last years in New York City.
IMPRESSIONISM: TRADITION AND THE BEGINNING OF MODERN ART
April 5-26, 2012
Impressionism is perhaps the most widely known and beloved of all styles in modern art, yet its acceptance when it first appeared in the 1860's was far from universal. Deliberately courting controversy by choosing the low genre of landscape, and scenes of contemporary life, the Impressionists rejected the academic strictures of traditional art, both in subject matter and technique. The Impressionist painters challenged long accepted standards of finish by applying unmixed colors directly to the canvas, often with rough brush strokes that blurred distinctions between finished work and sketch. Yet despite staging their own independent exhibitions apart from the official state sponsored Salons, some the Impressionists still sought acceptance through this more established institution, even as their own working methods and marketing strategies both changed and weakened the Salon system.
Through the use of digital images and classroom discussion, this four part course will consider the works of the major, core Impressionists from the beginning of the movement through the end of the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth as the impact of these early modern works continued to influence the course of modernism. While taking a broad view of Impressionist works that are now widely dispersed in museum collections worldwide, many of the paintings discussed with be those from the special exhibition The Age Of Impressionism: Great French Paintings From The Clark, consisting of loans from the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, MA, on view at the Kimbell Art Museum, March 11 - June 17, 2012 (https://www.kimbellart.org/Exhibitions/Exhibition-Details.aspx?eid=75). The course will explore major works by the core Impressionists such as Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Pierre Renoir and Camille Pissaro, as well as important but lesser known artists such as Gustave Caillebotte, and also investigate the works of the Realist painters Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet, contemporaries and precursors of the Impressionists and major influences upon them. Also examined will be the origin and context of the word "Impressionism," as well as how the artists to whom it was applied used it to their advantage, and the critical and public reception of these important works.
MODERN AMERICAN ART IN THE JAZZ AGE
May 3-17, 2012
Two on campus digital image supplemented meetings on modern American art of the 1920s will precede a private, guided tour of the Dallas Museum of Art special exhibition Youth And Beauty: Art Of The American Twenties. The exhibition will include more than one hundred thirty paintings, sculptures and photographs by sixty five artists, notably those of Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz, Charles Sheeler, Gerald Murphy, and Edward Hopper.
CUBISM AT THE KIMBELL
July 23, 2011
Take a private, guided tour of the summer special exhibition Picasso And Braque: The Cubist Experiment 1910-12 at the Kimbell Art Museum. This focused show will consist of 15 paintings and 20 works on paper made during a period of intense collaboration between the Cubist masters as they revolutionized the development of Western art through radical departures from accepted norms of representation in the Analytical phase of Cubism. This course will be held in the galleries of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. Admission included.
THE ART OF COLLAGE: ITS HISTORY AND MEANING
Feb. 24 - Mar 10, 2011
In this three part course, the twentieth century technique of collage will be explored and interpreted. Beginning with the Cubists’ use of pasted papers (papier colle), they as well as other artists from diverse backgrounds began to employ this quick and highly inventive method of making art. Through the use of printed materials such as photographs and tromp l’oeil papers, artists quickly realized and capitalized on the multiple associations of this method, which included political satire as well as works that questioned accepted notions of perception. Collage can incorporate a variety of materials, including anything from other art to discarded found items.
Cubist artists such as Picasso and Braque often drew or painted on the collage after pasting the cut papers. The Dadaists, employing the technique of photomontage (cropped and pasted photographs from diverse sources), made satirical pieces critical of Nazi Germany, often incorporating text from newspapers to create bizarre and unsettling works that challenged the accepted veracity of the photograph as an objective record of perceptual vision. Later, the Surrealists juxtaposed images in bizarre combinations to invoke dreams and unconscious meaning. The Abstract Expressionists, Pop and abstract artists all used collage either as a method of study for larger works, or as finished works in themselves. Many contemporary artists use the concept of collage to make works in more traditional media such as oil painting or metal sculpture.
An optional third meeting will be offered to those who wish to attend a session to make their own collages.
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY: MID TO LATE CENTURY (ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM; JASPER JOHNS AND ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG; POP ART; MINIMALISM, CONCEPTUAL ART AND EARTHWORKS)
Mar 24 - Apr 14, 2011
Through classroom discussion and the use of digital images, this four part course will explore and discuss the major artists and movements of the second half of the twentieth century.
Many European modern art masters who fled to the U.S. to escape the destruction of World War II exerted a sustained influence on their American counterparts. As America emerged from the war years a superpower, American artists were poised like never before to dominate the art world. With the rise of Abstract Expressionism, New York City supplanted Paris as the world’s art capital. Painters as diverse as Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, and the sculptor David Smith inherited the influence of the subconscious dream world of the Surrealists and the utopian, abstract vision of Piet Mondrian. The painters' heroically scaled canvases invoking vast pictorial spaces while recording the movements of the painter’s progress in making the work emphasized an existential view of contemporary life.
Following the heyday of mural scaled painting by the Abstract Expressionists, the works of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg returned imagery to American art, embracing common vernacular subject matter. Their work belongs to no specific movement, yet incorporates attitudes and techniques of preceding styles such as Dada and Cubism, and pointed in the direction of Pop Art. Johns paintings of familiar American motifs such as flags, targets and numbers are ironically ambiguous and confound a reading of the traditional pictorial space, while Rauschenberg’s collage approach and mastery of diverse materials are a metaphor for our media-dominated culture.
Pop Art is the most distinctly American style of the twentieth century, in that it embraces American consumer culture of mass produced items, often incorporating humor in its choice of the mundane and ordinary as subject matter. Andy Warhol’s repeating images of Campbell’s soup cans and Marilyn Monroe mirror the mass overload of sensory data in contemporary life, while Roy Lichtenstein’s comic book paintings blurred distinctions between high art and commonplace imagery.
Minimal Art, while coexistent with Pop, is visually and conceptually at an opposite pole. Emphasizing geometry and the purely abstract, much Minimal work is industrial, mathematical and highly self-referential. Donald Judd designed rigorously precise works made of industrial, non-traditional materials that were manufactured by others, while Dan Flavin utilized ordinary florescent lighting to redefine the viewer’s experience of the object and its surrounding space. Conceptual art denied the validity of the art object, placing value instead on the idea of a work of art rather than the making of a physical piece. Sol Lewitt, whose Notes on Conceptual Art are among the landmark writings of contemporary art, began making Wall Drawings in the late 60's, artworks installed by assistants directly onto the walls of buildings according to detailed written instructions. Earth Works or Land Art are often environmentally scaled works placed in remote locations far from cities and outside the typical realm of the art gallery or museum space. Robert Smithson applied simple geometry to massive, site specific works made of dirt and rock by earth moving equipment.
MODERN ART FOR A MODERN AMERICA
January 28 - February 18, 2010
This course will focus on the painting and sculpture of American artists in the modern age. Beginning with colonial painting to briefly establish context, the course will chart the development of the visual arts in the U.S., focusing on the shock of the Armory Show, the 1913 exhibition of modern art that alerted many American artists and the public to advanced developments in Europe; art between the wars, and post WW II art, the period in which American art began to dominate the world stage with Abstract Expressionism, and New York became the center of the art world. The course will conclude with the works of artists whose post modern concepts often reflect their immigrant roots or minority status, and cross genres outside traditional boundaries.
THE TWENTIETH CENTURY - BEGINNINGS TO MID CENTURY (LATE IMPRESSIONISM AND FAUVISM, CUBISM, DADA AND SURREALISM, AND ABSTRACT ART)
September 9 - 30, 2010
Through the use of digital images and classroom discussion, the major modern works and artists of the first half of the twentieth century will be presented and compared in this four part course. The pace of change and invention in the visual arts was at its peak during this period, as artists experimented with new techniques, materials, and attitudes toward the greatly expanded potentialities of painting and sculpture. The course will show that, while many of these movements are often viewed as rigid and sequential, their borders are in fact more fluid, as they overlapped and competed with each other, and that the artists themselves changed approaches and styles frequently.
This course will begin with an exploration of the late works of artists generally associated with nineteenth century modernism, but who produced works of significance and lasting influence at the end of their careers in the twentieth century and whose lives overlapped such early twentieth century movements as Cubism and the beginning of abstract art. The late, mature works of Paul Cezanne, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet and Auguste Rodin, usually associated with Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, will be recontextualized and shown as anticipating the works and thought of later twentieth century art. This period overlaps Fauvism, the first major style of the twentieth century, in which the "wild beasts," led by Henri Matisse, painted canvases that relied on bright, non-naturalistic color alone to describe objects and structure pictorial space.
The tendency toward the purely abstract is the most distinctive legacy of twentieth century visual art, which succeeded in divorcing art from the world of fidelity to nature and freed artists to explore the limits of their creativity. Claiming a deeply spiritual aspect to their work, artists such as Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky and Kasimir Malevich pioneered the use of color and form to completely abstract ends as carriers of meaning that are broadly universal and specifically modern.
Cubism is the most radical and influential of all twentieth century movements. The works of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso questioned the very nature of pictorial and sculptural space and challenged assumptions about art held since the Renaissance by dissolving contours of objects, the distinctions between objects and the surrounding space, and altering the role of the viewer in interpreting and understanding their work. These artists’ invention of papier colle and collage introduced mixed media and a sly wit into art, expressing the heterogenous nature of modern life. The works of other important Cubists, such as Juan Gris and Jacques Lipchitz, will also be analyzed.
The iconoclastic movements Dada and Surrealism challenged the established norms of society through anti-art performances and objects. Marcel Duchamp, whose readymades (ordinary objects chosen by Duchamp to be exhibited as art) profoundly altered the role of the artist, spawned diverse movements whose repercussions are still being explored by contemporary artists. Surrealism overthrew the dominance of perception as the only source for visual art by incorporating dreams, the subconscious, and free association as material. The works of Rene Magritte, Joan Miro and others explore the playfulness, childlike simplicity, and often bizarre juxtapositions of the world of the imagination.
FOUR MODERN MASTERS
March 30 - April 20, 2009
Four Modern Masters will focus on the work of four of the most radical and influential artists of the twentieth century: Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, and Marcel Duchamp. This course is ideal for those who wish to take a more sustained look at the work of these important pioneers. We will devote an entire class meeting to each of these artists, placing their work within the context of their times and within that of modernism as a whole.
Picasso’s myriad styles, methods and techniques reflect his gargantuan abilities as a painter, draftsman, sculptor, and printmaker. He seemingly effortlessly mastered all manner of depicting his subjects, from highly representational to the nearly abstract. Some of the works to be discussed are his Blue and Rose period paintings, the pre-Cubist Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, analytical and synthetic Cubist works, and the politically charged Guernica.
Matisse’s marriage of sinuous line and saturated color with images of the human figure, still life and landscape redefined representational painting and sculpture, and solidified the artist’s role in determining the autonomy of the art object. The infamous Blue Nude, the Back reliefs, and his late paper cut outs will be included.
Mondrian’s flat planes of pure primary colors bounded by horizontal and vertical lines are among the first purely abstract art, and the most instantly recognizable. His paintings, writings, even the arrangement of his studio have been enormously influential on subsequent artists. We will examine his early Impressionist influenced landscapes, through his Cubist phase, on to his mature Compositions, to his last sublime pieces created during his last years in New York City.
Duchamp’s Readymades changed forever the definition of the art object, even as his iconoclasm challenged the prevailing conception of the role of the artist in contemporary society. Viewed will be his early paintings such as Nude Descending a Staircase, Readymades Fountain and Bicycle Wheel, the enigmatic Large Glass, through to his last and secret work The Illuminating Gas.
MODERN SCULPTURE IN THE CITY
October 22 - November 12, 2009
In this four part course, we will investigate the history of modern sculpture, beginning with the works of Auguste Rodin, in two on campus classroom meetings. Two other meetings will be devoted to field trips to the Nasher Sculpture Center to view and discuss the permanent collection, and to the Meadows Museum on the SMU campus to visit the reinstallation of the museum's collection of modern and contemporary sculpture, including the recent acquisition of Sho, a monumental outdoor work by Spanish artist Jaume Plensa.
MODERN SCULPTURE: FROM RODIN TO THE NASHER
June 5 - June 19, 2008
The course will begin with Auguste Rodin, widely considered to be the first modern sculptor, and trace the development of sculpture since his work and career. Discussion will center on how modern sculpture changed focus from an academic discipline to one that emphasized the individual aspirations of the artists themselves. We will utilize high quality digital images in the classroom, and discuss actual works by the artists in the permanent collection of the Nasher. Admission included.
3 Th, 6:30-8:30 p.m. (6/12-6/26) Two class meetings held on the SMU campus; the third offers a private tour of the Nasher Sculpture Center in the Dallas arts district.
GERALD MURPHY: MODERNISM, AMERICAN STYLE
July 10 - July 17, 2008
Held in the galleries of the Dallas Museum of Art, this course examines the life and work of Gerald Murphy, an expatriate American whose bold, colorful paintings of American subject matter were made under the influence of Cubists such as Picasso and Braque. Visit the special exhibition Making It New: The Art and Style of Sara and Gerald Murphy, which includes all known surviving works by Murphy as well as works by Murphy's contemporaries Picasso, Braque, Gris, and Leger. In 1960, The Dallas Museum of Contemporary Arts included Murphy's work in a group exhibition of overlooked early American modernists, and is thus directly responsible for the revival of his recognition as an important contributor to the development of modern art in America. His work is now regarded as anticipating American Pop Art. Admission included.
MODERN ART AND THE SOCIETE ANONYME
June 21 - July 12, 2007 (skip July 5)
Explore the collection of the Societe Anonyme, the first museum devoted exclusively to modern art in America. Founded in 1920 by Katherine Dreier (nine years before the Museum of Modern Art in New York), the Societe was devoted to the promotion and exhibition of the most radical and modern works available. With the able assistance of artist Marcel Duchamp, the Societe showed works by some of the artists now recognized as among the most important in the modern era, including Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Kurt Schwitters, and Duchamp himself. The collection is comprised of works by more than one hundred artists, and now belongs to the Yale University Art Galleries. We will visit the European galleries at the DMA one visit, the modern American galleries the second visit, and the special exhibition itself on the third and final visit.
FIFTY MODERN ART MASTERPIECES EVERYONE SHOULD KNOW
April 4 - May 2, 2005
April 18 - May 16, 2006
September 28 - October 26, 2006
February 8 - March 8, 2007
September 20 - October 18, 2007
March 27 - May 1, 2008
September 11 - October 16, 2008
Explore fifty of the most important and best known works in the history of modern art. Through richly illustrated classroom discussions, examine the work of modernist icons such as Manet, Monet, Picasso, Matisse, Pollock and Warhol, and such major movements as Impressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop and Minimalism.
UNDERSTANDING MODERN ART Section A
February 10 - March 3, 2005
September 8 - September 29, 2005
February 2 - February 23, 2006
Experience modern works by acknowledged masters directly in the galleries of the Dallas Museum of Art. This course will cover works by the early moderns, such as Degas and Courbet, and continue through roughly 1945. Works by European and American artists will be emphasized.
UNDERSTANDING MODERN ART Section B
March 10 - March 31, 2005
October 13 - November 3, 2005
Continue your experience of discussing modern works of art in the contemporary section of this course, world art made since 1945. Held in the contemporary galleries and sculpture garden at the Dallas Museum of Art, this course will allow students to directly experience the works to be discussed, seeing them in context with other contemporary art.
NASHER SCULPTURE CENTER TOUR
May 12, 2005
April 30, 2005
October 6, 2005
October 8, 2005
April 1, 2006
November 4, 2006
March 31, 2007
October 20, 2007
Displayed in a magnificent light filled building designed by Renzo Piano, the Nasher is one of the largest and finest private collections of modern and contemporary sculpture in the world. Discover works by such integral artists from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as Rodin, Picasso, and Matisse, as well as contemporary artists such as Richard Serra and David Smith.
