20 – NEW – After Impressionism: Routes into Early Modernism
On campus
Course 20 – Summer School on campus
Monday 8 – Friday 12 July 2024
MaryAnne Stevens
£645
Course description
The course covers the period 1880 – 1914, a period in which both meaning and process in European art were profoundly interrogated, and new visual languages were brought into being: Post-Impressionism, German Expressionism, Fauvism, Cubism and Abstraction, among others.
Our course opens with a consideration of the varied definitions of ‘modern art’ (including ‘modernism’) and an examination of the centrality of Paris for artistic training and the establishment of professional careers. While not disregarding the Impressionists after Impressionism nor the technical experimentation of painterly naturalism, we shall focus largely on the men and women working in various artistic media within the risk-taking and innovative ‘avant-garde’, headed, in the first generation, by the influential figures of Paul Cezanne, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin.
We shall then turn our attention to Gauguin’s ‘disciples’, the Nabis, including Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard and sculptors like Aristide Maillol and Camille Claudel, before moving on to the ‘Fauves’ and the origins of Cubism. The cultural and artistic energy of Paris on the one hand became aligned with other European cities so that careful consideration will be given to the protagonists, contexts and themes of modern art in Brussels, Barcelona, Berlin, Vienna and Moscow, while on the other hand the absence of innovative art in London, and the lack of a powerful avant-garde artistic centre in the Nordic countries will also be addressed.
How to book
To book your chosen course(s) please use the book now button below and you will be taken to our booking system where you can book and pay (Visa / Mastercard / GooglePay / ApplePay).
At checkout, you will be prompted to login (if you have previously booked gallery tickets) or to register and create a new account.
(Please note: this ticketing login is not the same as your short courses VLE login if you have one).
Once you have made your selection, your chosen course(s) will be added to your shopping basket which has a timer of 20 minutes, after which time your basket will be cleared and you will need to start again. The timer starts from when you put an item in the basket (not when you login or register).
If you have any questions please email us at short.courses@courtauld.ac.uk
Lecturer’s biography
MaryAnne Stevens is a historian of 18th- to early 20th-century art, with particular research interests in the arts of Britain, France and the Nordic countries. She was Director of Academic Affairs at The Royal Academy until 2013 and Acting Secretary (2005-2008). MaryAnne has curated numerous major exhibitions of British and European art, including on Post-Impressionism, and Impressionism to Symbolism, and monographic exhibitions on artists Alfred Sisley, Gustave Caillebotte, Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, Odilon Redon, Édouard Vuillard and Émile Bernard, and others. Her most recent exhibition has been After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art, held in 2023 at the National Gallery, London which explored the emergence of avant-gardes in Europe 1886 – c. 1914.