Thursday, October 3, 2024
7:30 PM

In his last years, having lost all whom he had loved, along with his large fortune, Rembrandt turns inward; the cockiness of youth yields to a tragic vision of age and loss. Western art has never experienced such magnificent examinations of what it is to be human. Rembrandt’s portraits present compelling, sentient beings, who think … feel … remember. In these lectures, we always speak of the role of art within its given society, but with Rembrandt’s evocations of a human’s inner life and of the tragedy of life, art becomes universal, transcending boundaries and borders, time and place.

Thursday, September 26, 2024
7:30 PM

When the young Rembrandt arrives in Amsterdam in 1631, he is not only ambitious, but, judging from his self-portraits of that period, brash, cocky, and confident of his artistic power. Determined to prove that he is the equal of the great Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt paints in Rubens’s Baroque style. A decade later, Rembrandt realizes that—despite the drama and theatrical lighting effects of Baroque art (characteristics he will retain)—he needs to capture deeper truths, greater profundity. In short, his unrelenting need for drama deepens, but now, buffeted by tragedy, he moves toward the drama of the soul.

Thursday, September 19, 2024
7:30 PM

This lecture will be a meditation on Jan Vermeer, an artist celebrated in literature and movies today, but after his death, forgotten until the 1850s, when a French art critic stumbled upon a masterpiece (View of Delft) by a mysterious artist he thought might be named Meer and devoted the rest of his life to searching out more “Meers.” Today, of course, Vermeer’s crystalline cubes of light-filled space, masterful reflections, and enigmatic, contemplative women make him one of the most revered painters in art history.

Thursday, September 12, 2024
7:30 PM

In the second week, we examine in greater depth the paintings the Dutch loved to see on their walls: landscapes that evoke a land dearly wrested from the sea; still lifes ranging from glorious floral bouquets sparkling with butterflies to dour skulls and smoking candles; genre painting that presents often humorous portrayals of everyday people and everyday lives; and, of course, brilliant portraiture from the easels of artists like Rembrandt and Frans Hals. Dazzling art, to be sure, but also puzzling. How is it that this flat and uninspiring land gives birth to landscapes? Or that this newly minted Protestant nation produces still lifes suffused with religious symbolism? Or that this sober and reserved society invents genre painting, evidence of a people able to laugh at themselves.

Thursday, September 5, 2024
7:30 PM

Art must be placed within its historic context; this first lecture will examine Dutch economic, political, and religious factors in a search for clues to explain how such artistic genius flourished in this time and place. An overarching factor is 17th century Holland’s uniqueness within the European experience. It becomes the first Protestant nation, and its long, ultimately victorious war of independence from Spain frees the Dutch from the only power structures Europe had ever known—King and Church. Power now comes from Holland’s maritime empire and spreads laterally to a solid middle class that reaps immense riches–a wealth that was funneled into art patronage. (There were more artists than bakers in mid-century Amsterdam.)

Thursdays, September 5, 12, 19 & 26 & October 3, 2024
7:30 PM

It is not an overstatement to refer to 17th century Dutch art as the Golden Age, for it is one of the most glorious eras in Western art. In the space of just three to four generations, tiny Holland bursts forth with genius—Rembrandt, Vermeer, Frans Hals, and many other brilliant, inventive artists. In addition, the Golden Age is uniquely innovative: true landscape painting is conceived; still life paintings acquire new, expressive language; Europe’s very first genre art is created; and portraiture is enlarged by canvases that define and expand the depiction of our humanity. Join us for this dip into one of the most productive periods in art history on five Thursdays this fall: September 5, 12, 19, and 26, and October 3.Tickets are available for the series or individual lectures.

Thursday, March 7, 2024
7:30 PM

Van Eyck’s art must be viewed on two antithetical levels. While his work is optically rich and highly materialistic, down to single gold threads in a sumptuous tapestry, it is also profoundly spiritual, injected as it is with religious symbols. In addition to transforming the medium used in painting, van Eyck also transformed portraiture, as visible in the Arnolfini Portrait and Portrait of a Man. The lecture ends with painted images of van Eyck’s hometown of Bruges—that sweet Medieval time capsule—and with a coda: the mystery of the 1930s theft of one of the master’s greatest works.

Thursday, February 29, 2024
7:30 PM

This lecture opens with exquisite paintings from what is considered “the most valuable book in the world,” the Limbourg Brothers’ Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, richly illustrated scenes drawn from our childhood visions of a castles and kings, knights and ladies—a wondrous world for those of us eager to burrow down into history. We then turn toward the pivotal artist Jan van Eyck, notable not only as one of Europe’s greatest painters, but also as the “inventor” of oil paints over the traditional tempera. (The mixing of ground pigments with oil had been attempted unsuccessfully for centuries, and van Eyck discovered how to make the mixture viable.)

Thursdays, February 15, 22 & 29, 2024
7:30 PM

Dreams and Enchantment is a three-week lecture series designed to transport us beyond upcoming elections, international challenges, and foreign tragedies to an otherworldly realm of noble knights, richly caparisoned steeds, and gleaming white castles—in short, to 15th century Burgundy, and the last glow—the brilliant culmination—of late medieval art.

Thursday, February 15, 2024
7:30 PM

A great efflorescence in European painting took place in 15th century Florence—the Renaissance. The thumb on the scales of history favors the Renaissance because it is so central to our cultural identity. However, at the very same time, a similar burst of artistic genius took place north of the Alps, in the Duchy of Burgundy, one of the most refined and romantic of all European courts. The immensely talented artists in Burgundy produced work as brilliant and worthy of wonder as their Italian brethren, an art with architecturally rich, light-suffused spaces, sumptuous textiles, and dazzling jewels.

Monday, May 15, 2023
7:30 PM

In his own words, Matisse sought to create “…an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter…” Indeed, this master colorist’s art is rich, sensuous, opulent,   and seemingly transparent… until subjected to deeper scrutiny. Unlike Cezanne’s paintings, which demonstrate a steady progression toward realizing his ultimate artistic vision, Matisse’s six-decade career contained puzzling starts and stops and vacillation between sculptural and decorative styles. Throughout, however, he raised profound questions about the very nature of art, of perception, and of reality. Of his friend and archrival, Picasso said, “All things considered, there is only Matisse.”

Monday, May 8, 2023
7:30 PM

Unlike the very conventional Matisse, Vincent Van Gogh’s life was one of alienation, debilitating mental illness, and ultimately, suicide.  Keenly aware of the isolation his odd behavior caused, he poured his longing for relationships, for human communion, into his paintings. He bends pigment and brushstrokes to his psychic needs. Where, ultimately, do we find Vincent? Not in wheat fields, nor in nighttime skies, nor doleful visages, but in the most basic truth about art: the stroke of hand to canvas.

Monday, May 1, 2023
7:30 PM

When Cezanne and Van Gogh met in Paris in 1886, they despised each other, a contempt that spilled over in their opinions of each other’s work. Indeed, their respective styles were antithetical. Vincent’s art is visceral, Cezanne’s, cerebral. Vincent injected into his paintings his immense psychological yearnings, whereas Cezanne erects psychological barriers to lock the viewer out of his works. Cezanne’s forms are solid and immutable; Vincent’s inanimate objects dance with a kinetic energy. We can’t find Cezanne, the man, in his paintings; in Vincent’s canvases we can’t avoid him. 

Monday, April 24, 2023
7:30 PM

Matisse and Picasso both claimed that Cezanne was “the father of us all,” and indeed, he stands at the inflection point, the cusp, between traditional, realistic art and 20th century abstraction. Solitary, antisocial, mistrustful, Cezanne could only realize his distinctive style in the solitude of his native Provence. The resulting style is as complex as 3D chess; Cezanne’s canvases must be filtered through the intellect to apprehend. For instance, at the same time that his paintings contain explosive oppositional forces, recurring echoes of color or line or shape create loving embraces that stretch across the canvas. In contrast to Van Gogh’s psychological power, Cezanne’s art is cold, aloof, detached: in his landscapes we find none of the solace of nature, in his people, no invitation to friendship, in his still lives, no appeal to appetite. But we do find genius.

Mondays, April 24; May 1, 8 & 15, 2023
7:30 PM

Realism was dead. Born in Florentine workshops in the early 1400s, realism enjoyed a long run, dominating European art for four centuries. By the mid-1860s it had degenerated into a weary superficiality. This inspired a group of young, creative, yet disgruntled artists to create a new artistic language, and to propound radical theories and techniques. They did so, knowing they would be ridiculed, and worse, ignored. 

In-person:

Thursday, November 18, 2021
7:30 PM

The 17th and 18th centuries were an artistic pinball machine, all blinking lights and shrill bells as a cacophony of various art movements jostled for dominance. Where were stability and future direction to be found? Not in Paris, center of the art world, but in an ancient forest, where a small group of unconventional artists worked out radical ideas that would bring order and direction to art―and foretell its future far into the 20th century.

In-person:

Thursday, November 11, 2021
7:30 PM

Contained within just one century, the pendulum of art careened from the mysterious serenity of Vermeer to the shocking ferocity of Caravaggio's beheadings; the lusty sensuality of Rubens to the intelligent rectitude of Velázquez; Frans Hals’ jump-out-of-the-canvas lively personalities to Rembrandt’s profound penetration of the soul.

In-person:

Thursday, November 4, 2021
7:30 PM

To the Greeks we owe the concept of humanism, the astoundingly revolutionary belief in man, and man’s power―and the possibility of a world guided by rationality. Christianity introduced the concept of a caring God and the institutionalization of societal care. There will be a brief discussion of a significant sin of omission in Eurocentric education―that is, mention of the intellectual vibrancy and manifold gifts to us of the Muslim world.

In-person:

Thursdays, November 4, 11, 18, 2021
7:30 PM

Over the many years (oh, alright, many, many years) I’ve had the privilege to stand behind a podium to share my passion for art with you, I’ve heard frustration—where, you wonder, do these specific talks nestle in Western art? Your frustration was appropriate: art cannot be extracted from the culture that produces and nurtures it. Art is an artifact of a total history. But instead of a larger historic context, you were rather inelegantly plopped down in one isolated historic era or lonely school of art.

Essentially, what you’ve requested is a timeline, Greeks to Picasso. So, let’s get to it! Let’s boil down two thousand, five hundred years in three hours—but very responsibly, of course. It’s been great fun to put this together, and I thank you.

Included will be an added fillip, a closer look at the two seminal eras, the “hinge moments” that halted the smooth-running course of that flow―halted, and redirected art into new, unpredictable directions. What in the world could cause such historic dislocation, such total reordering of inevitability? What, indeed. I call these hinge moments the “Great Disruption,” and the “Lesser Great Disruption.” What where they, and when? Your clues lie in this three-week series. ―Linda Blair

ONLINE LINDA BLAIR ART HISTORY LECTURE

In his last years, buffeted by grievous personal and financial losses, Rembrandt turns inward. The cockiness of youth yields to a tragic vision of age and loss. Western art has never experienced such magnificent examinations of what it is to be human. Rembrandt’s portraits present compelling, sentient beings, who think… feel… remember. This is an art that reveals us to ourselves, informs us, defines and enlarges our humanity. Rembrandt’s depictions of man's inner life, and of the tragedy of life, transcend boundaries and borders, time and place.

More info / Get tickets →

ONLINE

When the young Rembrandt arrives in Amsterdam in 1631, he is not only ambitious, but judging from his self-portraits of that period, brash and cocky, confident of his artistic power. Determined to prove that he was the equal of the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens, recognized by all Europe as the greatest artist of the age, Rembrandt paints in Rubens’ Baroque style. But a decade later, Rembrandt realizes that despite the drama and theatrical lighting effects of Baroque art, characteristics he will retain, he needs to seek a deeper, more profound, art. In short, his unrelenting need for drama deepens as he moves toward the drama of the soul.

More info / Get tickets →

ONLINE

This lecture will be a meditation on Jan Vermeer, an artist today celebrated in literature and movies, but forgotten until the 1850s, when a French art critic stumbled upon a masterpiece, View of Delft,” by a mysterious artist he thought might be named “Meer,” and devoted the rest of his life to searching for more “Meers.” Today, of course, Vermeer's crystalline cubes of light-filled space and his meditative, solitary women make him one of the most revered of painters.

More info / Get tickets →

ONLINE

The lecture examines in greater depth the paintings the Dutch loved to see on their walls: landscapes, evocations of a land dearly wrested from the oppressive rule of Spain and from the sea; still lifes, from glorious floral bouquets sparkling with butterflies to dour skulls and smoking candles; genre painting, scenes of everyday life, evidence of a people able to laugh at themselves, and evocations of the Dutch love of the pleasures and solace of the home.

More info / Get tickets →

ONLINE

It is most certainly not an overstatement to refer to 17th century Dutch art as a “Golden Age.” In the space of just three generations, tiny Holland burst forth with genius—Rembrandt, Vermeer, Frans Hals. and many other brilliant, innovative artists. What caused such a glittering galaxy of truly great painters? What unique historical imperatives account for this singular phenomenon, this artistic anomaly that has no parallel in the European experience?

More info / Get tickets →

ONLINE

It was Brigadoon! The stuff fantasy is made of: it alighted to earth in a blaze of brilliance, this glorious, Golden Age of Dutch art, but in the next moment, it vanished. The very words, Golden Age, summon visions of Rembrandt, Vermeer, Frans Hals, and many other brilliant artists. There is no equivalency in Western history for the phenomenon of 17th-century Holland. How to explain it? Three words: independence, Protestantism, prosperity. Its long, ultimately victorious war of independence from Spain freed the Dutch from the only power structures Europe had ever known–king and Church. A new ruling class emerges, a solid middle class that guides the state and quickly garners immense riches from its maritime empire. But lurking within that wealth was a serpent: Calvinist structure against ostentation in any form. There was only one way to sublimate their riches: art, paintings. (There were more artists than bakers in mid-century Amsterdam.)

More info / Get tickets →