24 – Collectors, Exhibitions and Art Dealers: Modern Art in Europe 1863-1920
On campus
Course 24 – Summer School on campus
Monday 14 – Friday 18 July 2025
Dr Natalia Murray
£645
Course description
This course examines the role of collectors, dealers, and exhibitions in the formation of modern art in Paris, Vienna, London, Moscow and Munich. In these lectures and during afternoon visits, we shall discuss the ways in which dealers directed collectors’ purchases and thereby helped shape contemporary taste. We shall also explore if and to what extent dealers influenced what artists created, and how these works were presented, disseminated and received, by way of prominent exhibitions, and in art journals and reproductive prints.
Picasso’s dealer, Daniel Kahnweiler, was responsible for the titles of Picasso’s and Braque’s Cubist paintings, while the Berlin-based dealer Paul Cassirer provided German artists with access to the paintings of Van Gogh, without which German Expressionism might not have developed. The critic, painter and arbiter of taste Roger Fry introduced British audiences to avant-garde French art in his groundbreaking exhibitions at the Grafton Galleries in 1910 and 1912, for which he coined the label ‘Post-Impressionism’. And the major promoter of Impressionism, Paul Durand-Ruel, who sent Monet’s Haystacks to the 1896 Impressionist exhibition in Moscow, was pivotal in Kandinsky’s decision to become an artist and to pursue abstraction. The sponsorship of leading collectors meanwhile enabled artists to create some of their most outstanding work – Sergei Shchukin, for instance, commissioned Matisse’s Dance and Music.
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Lecturer's biography
Dr Natalia Murray is a lecturer in modern art and curating at The Courtauld. She gained a BA and MA in art history at the Academy of Fine Arts in St Petersburg, and a PhD at The Courtauld. She is a writer, lecturer and curator specialising in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Russian and Western European art and was the curator of the Royal Academy’s major exhibition Revolution. Russian Art 1917-1932 (2017). Natalia is currently working on several new exhibition projects in the US and in Europe. She has published widely: her most recent book, Two Women Patrons of the Russian Avant-Garde. Nadezhda Dobychina and Klavdia Mikhailova, was published in 2021 and was dedicated to the first gallerists in Russia.