Dennis Raverty

David was the most powerful artist in the history of Western art. Winning the Prix de Rome from the French academy under King Louis XVI, he was later a signatory to that monarch's execution during the period known as "The Terror." Although briefly imprisoned, he later rose to become the first painter to Napoleon and reorganized the academy, placing his own students in prominent positions within that powerful state organization. It is no exaggeration to say that David was truly the "dictator" of art during these years. After Napoleon's defeat, David was exiled to Belgium, where he continued to have a strong and lasting influnce on French art of the nineteenth century.

Alfred Sisley was a British artist whose painting was very much within the orbit of his French colleagues. The art of Gustave Caillebotte was less typical of the Impressionist style, along with that of Jean Frédéric Bazille, whose life was tragically cut short before the first Impressionist exhibition in 1872. Women painters Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt (an American) were also marginalized in many accounts of the movement.

The Bauhaus was without doubt the most influential school of art, architecture, design and craft of the twentieth century. Founded in 1919 following the defeat of Germany in World War I, the Bauhaus school attracted a distinguished international faculty. They made affordable, well-designed products for the masses and utilized modern industrial methods in the age of machine production. The Bauhaus favored a sleek, industrial aesthetic in its clean, functional architecture, furniture design, and graphic arts. The internationally famous school was closed down in 1933 following the appointment of Adolf Hitler as chancellor.

When Henri Matisse and his followers exhibited their work at the 1905 Salon d'Automne in Paris, they were called Les Fauves--the "Wild Beasts"--because of what the critics perceived as the savagery of their intense and sometimes "unnatural" colors. Matisse went on to become one of the century's greatest masters, and his sophisticated, exuberant use of color is evident behind the mask of this modern "primitive," even when France was occupied by the Nazis. Among his greatest works are the collages he executed during the last decade of his life.

Claude Monet was informed by the physics of light in the nuanced color used in his paintings. New discoveries in the emerging field of optics about the perception of color in the eye were also utilized to create a more realistic depiction of landscapes under various conditions of light.

George Seurat systematized Impressionist color and achieved greater clarity by reduction to small dots sometimes called "pointillism." Camille Pissarro also addressed the lack of form in Impressionism and through his art created a bridge to twentieth-century modernism.

From the 1930s through the 1960s Ben Shahn's painting and illustration addressed such issues as unemployment, discrimination, the rise of authoritarianism abroad, and threats to freedom of expression in the United States. Starting his career during the Great Depression, his art witnessed the rise of totalitarianism abroad and the anti-Communist hysteria of postwar America, as well as the Civil Rights movement. Shahn viewed nonconformity as the essence of avant-garde art as well as the agent of social change. His art was clearly modernist yet remained figurative and accessible to a wide, popular audience. A retrospective exhibition that spans the artist's long career is at the Jewish Museum in New York City from May through October.

After the Nazi rise to power in 1933, the new government commenced its conservative cultural policy with breathtaking rapidity, closing the world-famous Bauhaus school of design, firing curators sympathetic to modern art from state museums, and organizing anti-modern exhibitions culminating in 'Degenerate Art" of 1937, which held modern art up to ridicule, while promoting a new, bombastic form of idealistic classicism that became the officially favored style of the regime.

Among the strangest of all relationships between an artist and a patron was the case of Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, commissioned by John D. and Nelson Rockefeller despite the artist's radical communist convictions. Rivera mounted the very first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and executed murals throughout the United States until Rivera went too far and his mural for Rockefeller Center was destroyed by his former mentor - an act described by some as "cultural vandalism."

Excerpts from Surrealistic films from 1929 through 1972 by Salvador Dali, Luis Buñuel, Jean Cocteau and Alfred Hitchcock will be introduced, screened and placed within the context of surrealist theory and psychoanalytic thought from the period.

Thomas Jefferson was not only a statesman and a president, but also an architect. He wanted to create a new type of architecture appropriate for a democratic republic with neoclassical form, in such buildings as the Virginia State House, the campus of the University of Virginia and his private plantation, Monticello. This presentation will examine Jefferson's architectural and city planning work critically, revealing the problematic and contradictory qualities of some of his designs, which attempted to hide the existence of slavery "behind the scenes."

The flourishing of capitalism in the Netherlands was a rich source for the establishment of an art that catered to the tastes of the newly rich middle class. Down-to-earth businessmen wanted realistic depictions of themselves and the prolific artists of the period supplied them with portraits, landscapes, still lifes and scenes of everyday life.

October 14-Little Dutch Masters

November 13-Jan Vermeer

December 16-Rembrandt

Filippo Brunelleschi is best known for designing the dome of the Florence Cathedral, the Church of San Lorenzo and other buildings in and around Florence. In fact, Brunelleschi's architectural influence is so strong there that it is hardly an exaggeration to say that Florence is in large part Brunelleschi's city.

     But he is perhaps even more important as the artist who first discovered the laws of linear perspective, which is a mathematical, scientific system for representing three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface that has been widely used by painters, draftsmen and designers ever since it was codified in the early 1400s.

For many African American artists the depression provided employment through the Federal Art Programs of the Works Progress Administration (the W.P.A.) as teachers printmakers, craftspersons and muralists. The government also provided opportunities for exhibiting their work through traveling shows and government-sponsored exhibitions at presitgious venues (like the Museum of Modern Art) that had previously not shown work by black artists. After the Second World War, however, African American artists were once again faced with the lack of both civil rights and exhibition opportunities.

EARLIER PRESENTATIONS:

Marc Chagall

Henri Rousseau

Giorgio De Chirico