Thursday, November 21, 2024
7:30 PM

From Paris, surrealism spread to Belgium, where René Magritte became a leading figure. In New York, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Dorothea Tanning represented surrealism at Peggy Guggenheim’s Gallery of the Century. In Mexico City Frida Kahlo and Diego Riviera together with a group of exiles from WWII, like Leonor Fini and Remedios Varo, organized and showed surrealist art. Exhibitions sprang up in Belgrade, Cairo, Prague, Brussels, London, and San Francisco. A historical survey of Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at MOMA in 1936 introduced the movement to a wider audience.

Breton’s death in 1966 left no heir to unite the divergent branches of surrealist artists all over the world and led to the end of surrealism as a unified movement, but its influence continues today.

Thursday, November 14, 2024
7:30 PM

A year after publishing his Surrealist Manifesto, Breton organized the first group exhibition for La peinture surréaliste in the Gallery Pierre in Paris. It included work by Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso, Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, André Masson, Man Ray, Jean Tanguy, and Pierre Roy. New members joined the group in 1929: former Dadaist Tristan Tzara, Salvador Dalí, filmmaker Luis Bunuel, and sculptor Alberto Giacometti. A group of talented women artists have long stood in the shadow of their famous male peers. This lecture also explores the contributions of Leonora Carrington, photographer Dora Mar, Lee Miller, and Meret Oppenheim. The beginning of WWII scattered the surrealist group all over the world.

Thursdays, November 14 & 21, 2024
7:30 PM

On October 15, 1924, André Breton published his first Surrealist Manifesto in Paris which gave birth to the surrealist movement. These two lectures celebrate the centennial of surrealism. Surrealist artists and writers were inspired by Sigmund Freud’s dream analysis and the exploration of the subconscious mind. They tried to express themselves without any restrictions of reason, moral, or aesthetic considerations. Surrealists under the leadership of Breton marked a transition from the anarchist Dada movement to the proposition of a superior alternative in Surrealism.

Thursday, November 2, 2023
7:30 PM

In discussing which art movements of the 21st century will have a lasting effect, Feye reviews some of her favorite artists from around the world, many of them “who use any medium imaginable and explore universal or societal issues.” Artists include Ai Weiwei, El Anatsui, Cai Guo-Qiang, Olafur Eliasson, Pussy Riot, Australian Barbara Weir, Kay WalkingStick, Kara Walker, Anish Kapoor, William Kentridge, and Alicia Kwade, among others.

Thursday, October 26, 2023
7:30 PM

The feminist art that began in the 1970s continues in the 1980s. Traditional fabric and fiber crafts inspire the Pattern and Decoration movement in California and New York. In the era of post-Modernism, artists appropriate aspects of previous art movements into their work. Street artists make their statements on public buildings. Environmental artists work with organic material to create impermanent art. Neo-Expressionism arises. Artists include Barbara Kruger, the Guerilla Girls, Alexis Smith, Robert Kushner, Cindy Sherman, Gerhard Richter, Banksy, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Maya Lin, to name a few.

Thursday, October 19, 2023
7:30 PM

Installation art expands into immersive life-size environments, while performance art incorporates the participation of the viewer into live happenings. In Europe, the Fluxus movement exerts a strong influence. On the West Coast the Light & Space movement is inspired by the California sun and wide-open spaces. With Earth/site-specific art movement, art moves out of the gallery space and into the open landscape. Conceptual art rising to preeminence placing prime importance on words and ideas. Artists include Ed Kienholz, Robert Irwin, Joseph Beuys, Marina Abramovich, Allan Kaprow, James Turell, Larry Bell, Peter Alexander, Dewain Valentine, Walter de Maria, Michael Heizer, Robert Long, John Baldessari, Bruce Nauman, and Jenny Holzer, among others.

Thursday, October 12, 2023
7:30 PM

Minimalism and Pop Art emerge in reaction to Abstract Expressionism. Op art, or optical art, placing its emphasis on visual perception, follows. West Coast artists, including the “Cool School” and “Finish Fetish” at  LA’s Ferus Gallery, emerge as innovators. Assemblage artists add a third dimension and found objects into their art. Artists include Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, Victor Vasarely, Bridget Riley, Ed Ruscha, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Wayne Thiebaud, Joseph Cornell, and Louise Nevelson, to name a few.

Thursday, October 5, 2023
7:30 PM

Cornelia Feye begins the series in the post-war period. Abstract Expressionism is the dominant art movement and is followed in the mid-1950s by color-field painters and geometric abstraction artists. Artists include Willem and Elaine deKooning, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Frank Stella, Ronald Davis, and Ed Moses, among others.

Thursdays, October 5, 12, 19 & 26; November 2, 2023
7:30 PM

Seven Decades of Contemporary Art Trends, 1945 to the Present features an art historical overview of the most important art movements from mid-20th century to the present, recognizing geopolitical events reflected in the artwork.

Tuesday, November 15, 2022
7:30 PM

Art dealers Ernst and Hildy Beyeler made all the paintings and sculptures of their world-famous art collection accessible to the public at the Fondation Beyeler in 1997. Today, the collection comprises more than 400 classic modern and contemporary works, with an emphasis on Matisse, Picasso, and Monet, as well as ethnographic sculpture. Star architect Renzo Piano designed the building in an English-style park outside Basel to create interplay between art, nature, and architecture.

Tuesday, November 8, 2022
7:30 PM

As part of the National Gallery in Berlin, the Berggruen Collection opened to the public in 1996. It is housed in the western Stülerbau (Stüler Building) opposite Schloss Charlottenburg in what is now known as the Museum Berggruen. With its impressive collection of works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Paul Klee, and Alberto Giacometti the Museum Berggruen is one of the most important museums of modern art in Berlin. The art dealer and collector Heinz Berggruen was born in Berlin-Wilmersdorf in in1914, but he left Nazi Germany in 1936 and emigrated to the United States, working as a journalist, before opening a gallery in Paris. He acquired many of his works from the artists he represented at his gallery. We will also visit the Scharf-Gerstenberg Surrealism collection in the twin, eastern, Stüler Building right next to the Berggruen Museum.

Tuesday, November 1, 2022
7:30 PM

The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza houses one of the finest and most varied collections of Western painting. Van Eyck, Dürer, Titian, Caravaggio, Rubens, Rembrandt, Canaletto, Monet, Degas, Morisot, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Picasso, Kirchner, Kandinsky, Goncharova, O'Keeffe, Hopper, Dalí, and Pollock are just some of the names on the long list of great masters shown. The collection includes almost 1,000 paintings, spanning the history of art from the 13th right up until the 20th century. Founded by three generations of Thyssen-Krupp industrialists, it was originally located in Lugano, Switzerland, before moving in 1992 to the Villahermosa Palace in Madrid on the Paseo del Prado, across from the Museo Nacional del Prado.

Tuesday, October 25, 2022
7:30 PM

Originally the founder, Knud W. Jensen, intended for the museum to be a home for modern Danish art. But after only a few years he changed course, and instead Louisiana became an international museum of modern art with many renowned works by artists like Giacometti, Calder, Warhol, and German artists of the 1980s. The museum opened to the public in 1958 and, its building is considered a major example of Danish modernist architecture. In the well-balanced style of the late 1950s discreet modernism, the museum presents itself as a horizontal and understated building complex that fits gracefully and intimately into the landscape in Humlebaek, about an hour north of Copenhagen directly on the Baltic coast.

Tuesdays, October 25; November 1, 8 & 15, 2022
7:30 PM

When we go to a museum to admire art, we usually don’t ask ourselves: How did these works get there? Who acquired them? Where did they come from? In this lecture series we will explore four exquisite art collections, located in beautiful European locations, shaped by tenacious collectors. Their taste, budget, and power determined the art they assembled. Sometimes historical circumstances led to acquisition of undervalued paintings—or purchases directly from the artists. We will look at the collections in the context of history, selections of art, personal stories of the collectors, location, and architecture in which they are housed.

Tuesday, November 16, 2021
7:30 PM

With the exception of Native American artist Maria Montoya Martinez (1887–1980), who gained fame for her exquisite pottery from San Ildefonso Pueblo, most of the indigenous women artists in this lecture remained relatively unknown beyond their native environment: Nampeyo (1859–1942), a Hopi-Tewa potter, who lived on the Hopi Reservation in Arizona; Kenojuak Ashevak (1927–2013), a Canadian Inuit graphic artist who was born in an igloo; and Emily Kame Kngwarreye (1910–1996), an Aboriginal Australian artist from the Utopia region in the Northern Territory, and her relatives Minnie Pwerle and Barbara Weir.

Tuesday, November 9, 2021
7:30 PM

A limited selection of African American women artists includes Harriet Powers (1837–1910), folk artist and quilt maker; Alma Thomas (1891–1978), Expressionist painter; Lois Mailou Jones (1905–1998), influential painter and teacher; Betye Saar (b. 1926), assemblage artist; Faith Ringgold (b. 1930), painter, writer, speaker, mixed-media artist; Kara Walker (b.1969), silhouettist, installation artist, and filmmaker; Mary Edmonia Lewis (1844–1907), sculptor of African American and Native American heritage; contemporary artists Amy Sherald (b. 1973), Lorna Simpson (b. 1960), Bisa Butler (b. 1973); and photographers Deb Willis (b. 1948) and Alanna Airitam (b. 1971).

Tuesday, November 2, 2021
7:30 PM

The Abstract Expressionist art movement in 1950s New York was spearheaded by Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. Elaine de Kooning and Pollock’s wife, Lee Krasner, supported their husbands’ art and career, often at the expense of their own. Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler asserted their place in the macho art scene of Abstract Expressionism. This lecture also introduces several lesser-known Abstract Expressionist women artists.

Tuesday, October 26, 2021
7:30 PM

German Expressionist artists Paula Modersohn-Becker, Gabriele Münter, Marianne von Werefkin, and Anni Albers stepped out of the shadow of their domineering artist husbands or partners and asserted their artistic independence. Gunta Stölzl was the first and only women workshop leader at the Bauhaus, and Käthe Kollwitz forged a unique and successful career creating woodcut prints of working-class women, mothers, and war victims.

Tuesday, October 19, 2021
7:30 PM

The Impressionists were a close-knit group of artists in Paris at the turn of the 20th century. Several women models, including Suzanne Valadon, Eva Gonzalès, and Berthe Morisot, became painters. Other women, like Mary Cassatt, Marie Bracquemond, Helen Turner, and Cecilia Beaux, studied painting and broke into the male-dominated art scene.

Tuesdays, October 19 & 26; November 2, 9 & 16, 2021
7:30 PM

Ideally, we wouldn’t need lectures about women artists, or artists of color, or artists from different cultures and sexual orientations. They would be just artists of excellence. But until this ideal is reached, there is value in focusing on select women artists of the Impressionist, German Expressionist, and Abstract Expressionist movements, as well as African American and indigenous artists from the Americas and Aboriginal Australia, who were often overshadowed by their male or white counterparts. Feye’s previous lecture series on women artists included those from Latin America and Asia; in this series she focuses are on European, American, African American, and indigenous women.