Making Sense of Abstraction: Roots, Context and Meaning
On campus
Dr Emily Christensen
Tuesday 10 – Thursday 12 September 2024
£375
Course description
Abstract art has provoked strong reactions since it emerged in the early twentieth century. It has been derided, reviled, banned, and burned. But it has also become one of the dominant and most celebrated forms of artistic expression of our time. What is abstract art? Where did it come from? What does it mean?
This course will explore these questions from different angles, examining the early manifestations of European abstraction through the work of artists including Wassily Kandinsky, Hilma af Klint, Kazimir Malevich, and Piet Mondrian as well as later permutations elsewhere in the world including works by Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Saloua Raouda Choucair and Ibrahim El-Salahi.
We shall examine stories of the creation of these paintings – what the artists may have intended – in the cultural and political context of their period. We shall also look at how viewers responded to them and uncover stories of the unexpected, shifting meanings ascribed to the paintings by politicians and ideologues as the twentieth century progressed. Afternoon gallery visits will include Tate Modern.
Lecturer's biography
Dr Emily Christensen is an Associate Lecturer at The Courtauld Institute of Art, teaching European 19th and 20th century art. Her own research has focused on the work of Expressionist artists Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter, and she has published on these artists and related topics in The Burlington Magazine, World Art, Aesthetica Universalis and Manazir and has contributed exhibition catalogue essays on these artists for Tate (2024), and for the Kunsthaus, Zurich (2023). In addition to her teaching and scholarship, Emily has co-curated an exhibition in The Courtauld Gallery Project Space entitled Drawing on Arabian Nights (2023), contributed to the exhibition Re-Orientations: Europe and Islamic Art, from 1851 to Today (2023) at the Kunsthaus in Zürich, and is currently working on the forthcoming exhibition With Graphic Intent: German and Austrian Modernism from The Courtauld collection, scheduled for in The Courtauld Gallery Project Space in 2025.