The style of 19th-century French painting known as Impressionism—filled with color, light, and brilliant brushwork—was seen as an act of rebellion when it appeared in the 1870s. For artists to depict the sensations of rain, a sunrise, or a human gesture was shocking to other artists, art lovers, and critics who held that fine art should focus on timeless and unchanging subject matter.
The work of these modern masters—notably Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cassatt, and Morisot—led in turn to the radical art of the Post-Impressionists. During the 1880s and ’90s Seurat, Cézanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh used vivid colors to depict subjects from real life but in ways that were not always fully realistic.
In a richly illustrated series, Nancy G. Heller explores the sources, masterpieces, and later influences of these rebels, including their impact on art today. Heller is a professor emerita of art history at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.
October 7 Édouard Manet and Claude Monet: A Pioneer of Impressionism and a Master of the Style
Édouard Manet, the sophisticated “Painter of Modern Life,” challenged artistic and cultural norms, especially in his disquieting early paintings of contemporary women, such as Olympia and Luncheon on the Grass. Examine Manet’s later works, notably A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, which signaled a shift into the realm of Impressionism.
Claude Monet’s extraordinary series of haystacks, poplar trees, and, especially, waterlilies, demonstrated how much a painting could convey of the fascinating, ever-changing colors, sounds, and emotions inherent in a seemingly ordinary subject.
October 14 Beautiful Women in Lovely Settings
The art of Pierre-Auguste Renoir is characterized by its sweetness, demonstrated in such works as Le Moulin de la Galette and Nude in the Sunlight. Explore the sources of this approach and the controversies that it sparked, as well as the paintings of Berthe Morisot, another pioneering French Impressionist.
October 21 Ballerinas and Bathers
Famous for his studies of ballet dancers (such as the sculpture Little Dancer, 14 Years Old), Edgar Degas also found unexpected harmony in the movements of women bathers and galloping horses, both of which he depicted in oil paintings, pastels, and sculptures. Survey the life and work of Degas’s American friend and protegee, Mary Cassatt, whose depictions of mothers with young children continue to charm viewers.
October 28 Post-Impressionism: Structuring Color, Space, and Form
Inspired by the Impressionists’ experiments, Georges Seurat and Paul Cézanne created paintings by organizing the world into carefully calibrated systems of colored dots or patches of color. Their works, including Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte and Cézanne’s series of still lifes and views of Mt. Sainte-Victoire, influenced early 20th-century European Modernists.
November 4 Post-Impressionism: Expressing Emotions Through Stylization
Working at the same time as Cézanne and Seurat, Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh conveyed strong emotions by simplifying the colors and forms of their paintings, as in Gauguin’s seductive Tahitian subjects and van Gogh’s Starry Night. Heller also explores the later influence of this aspect of Post-Impressionism, which continued into the 21st century.
5 sessions
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