Dennis Raverty

The U. S. government subsidized art under the Works Progress Administration during the 1930s, but unlike the government-sponsored art of the Stalinist state or Hitler's Nazi government, subject-matter and style were not dictated or officially prescribed. The result was the political radicalization of artists under the influence of the Mexican muralists, the formation of the Artists' Union, the John Reed Clubs and the American Artists' Congress. But with the postwar rise of abstract art and the anti-communist hysteria of the early 1950s, much of this heritage was lost or forgotten.

Spain was neutral during the First World War, so Picasso was not drafted and was free to travel with the Russian ballet during the conflict. Without abandoning the Cubist style he had developed before the war, a new classicism emerged in his work, alongside a growing interest in the dark recesses of the unconscious. In his 1937 masterpiece Guernica, he synthesized and transcended these disparate influences into one of the most powerful artistic and political statements of the century.

John Constable's lyric naturalism conjures up the pre-industrial, rural society of his boyhood while J. M. W. Turner's dramatic depictions of the fury of nature and of modern life in an industrial society are the two poles around which British Romantic landscape painting revolved during the early 19th century. Their attitudes towards nature and their bravura brushwork anticipated the work of the later French Impressionists

Landscape and genre painting in the early 19th century romanticized the Western frontier as a realm of abundance and a new Garden of Eden. More than a mere geographical region, it was also a horizon of the imagination. Depictions of the Native peoples, who were also romanticized by these artists, embodied racial stereotypes that will be examined critically.

Illustrators accompanied key government and privately sponsored expeditions to the Western frontier during the nineteenth century, to document the terrain as well as the native inhabitants of these remote regions. These artists depicted not so much the reality of the West as the myth of the West as a territory of unfettered liberty and limitless expanding horizons for the folks back east.

Secular Jewish artists figured prominently in Pop art during the 1960s, which among other things embodied a "camp" aesthetic of banality so extreme as to have a perversely sophisticated appeal. They depicted the commodification of desire in a scathing cultural critique of life mediated by images in the glutted consumer society of the midcentury United States.

With the "closing" of the frontier after 1890, the myth of the West reached its apex in the work of Frederick Remington and Charles Russell, whose art was the basis for our continuing representations of the "Old West" as a semi-fictive realm of the imagination.

A brief overview of the careers of celebrated architects Richard Upjohn, the original designer of the mid-19th century neo-Gothic Church of the Ascension, and Stanford White, who oversaw its redesigning and decoration in the American Renaissance style near the end of the century. This presentation will place their work on the church in the context of their other architectural achievements. The scandal involving White's murder on the rooftop of Madison Square Garden (a building he himself designed) will also be discussed.

Philipp Otto Runge and Caspar David Friedrich transformed and elevated landscape painting during the first half of the 19th century from the minor genre it had been up to that point, to the bearer of the kind of serious and sublime content that had formerly been reserved for biblical or mythological subjects alone. Explore how these artists redefined the sacred in terms of implied narrative within their landscapes and their evocation of light as a metaphor for the divine presence in nature.

Contemporary African American illustrator Kadir Nelson utilizes a subversive strategy of "re-emplotting" history by visually quoting from famous art of the past.  In his redux of Grant Wood's iconic American Gothic, he re-inserts black representation back into an historical narrative from which African Americans had previously been excluded. 

During the 19th century, religious impulses were often expressed indirectly through a search for God in the natural landscape. This lecture will explore the relationship between God, humankind and nature within the context of Protestant thought of the period. It will be shown that in the Hudson River Valley, and the frontier West that was still largely unexplored by white settlers at that time, was painted by them as a new, unspoiled Garden of Eden.

Rousseau was a self-trained painter and customs official in turn-of-the-century Paris, whose fantastic, dreamlike worlds inspired Picasso and the Cubists, but was also a major influence on artists like Chagall or the later Surrealists, who likewise explored the dark regions of the imagination.