Dennis Raverty

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.

This presentation will explore the relationship between humankind, nature and art in early nineteenth century landscape painting in the United States, dubbed by art historians the "Hudson River School." It will be shown that the wilderness these artists depicted in their paintings was viewed by them romantically as a new Garden of Eden.

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. 

Howard Pyle was at the forefront of the new technology that made full-color reproduction possible at a fraction of its former cost during the last decade of the 19th century.

     Unlike the gritty urban realists at the turn of the century, Pyle and his followers escaped into a fantasy world of swashbuckling pirates, noble knights and medieval romance.

     He was almost equally renowned as a master teacher, and his classes and lectures embodied a philosophy of teaching that valued, above all, the imagination.

An international faculty taught at the Bauhaus School of Art and Design in liberal Germany during the 1920s, but Hitler organized modern art seized from museums into his "Degenerate Art Exhibit" of 1936, which ridiculed modernism as an unhygienic symptom of artistic "miscegenation." The regime's philosophy of art was radically conservative and based on mistaken ideas about race. As a result of their policies, most of central Europe's best artists, designers and architects fled to the United States.

Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt often represented intimate scenes of the domestic sphere in their Impressionist paintings. They were doubly marginalized by both the conservative official art world as well as the avant-garde milieu of late 19th century Paris.

Salvador Dali famously quipped, "Art is Dope." The painter is best known for his Surrealist work during the 1920s and 1930s, where he used old-master oil glazing techniques to achieve a lucidity that is both meticulously realistic yet hallucinogenic. After his expulsion from the movement and his return to Catholicism, he turned to religious subjects and experimented in various styles. This presentation will be a critical examination of this late work, inspired by an exhibition currently at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

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.

Edouard Manet was what the French called a flaneur, a wandering idler coolly observing the spectacle of modern life as it passes by. Although born into a wealthy family, Manet had an understanding of and empathy with the struggles of the underclasses in the very stratified social world of mid-19th-century Paris. We will discuss, among other works, his most important painting, entitled Olympia. It represents a complex and surprisingly sympathetic look at the limited choices available to working-class women in Paris during the 1860s, and the dignity Olympia embodies despite all the odds against her.

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.

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.