The Courtauld Gallery reopened its doors to the public on 19 November. As audiences return to its home in Somerset House, our Study Day explores this magnificent building in depth. Somerset House was the most significant public building project in Britain in the late eighteenth century, and originally housed a number of key government offices, including the headquarters of the Navy Board, alongside England’s major learned societies. Our Study Day investigates the building’s sophisticated construction and external ornamentation, as well as its function and symbolic role within a wider network of British imperial spaces and architectures.
Speakers: Kyle Leyden, Dr Emily Mann, Dr Anne Puetz
Moderated by Dr Anne Puetz
Saturday 11 December 2021
Today, Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings achieve fantastic sums at auctions, his style is unmistakable, and his popular recognition arguably the highest of any modern painter. Collectively, we feel that we ‘know’ this artist. The Courtauld Gallery’s exhibition Van Gogh’s Self-Portraits (3 February – 8 May 2022), the first ever devoted to the artist’s self-portraits across his entire career, asks us to think again, drawing on new research about his social networks, and about the works themselves. Exhibition curator Dr Karen Serres will reflect on both entrenched myths and the new perspectives gained about Van Gogh as man and artist.
Speakers: Dr Karen Serres in conversation with Dr Anne Puetz
Saturday 12 March 2022
Women feature prominently in a number of key works from The Courtauld’s modern collections, appearing as barmaids, nudes, dancers or fashionable sitters in portraits. Looking beyond our own collections, it is clear that in much avant-garde art – mostly painted by men – women abound as ‘subject-matter’; as objects to be looked at, to put it another way. This event foregrounds a number of striking women artists of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Berthe Morisot, Gabriele Münter, Marianne Werefkin and Paula Modersohn Becker, and explores the connections between women (as subject-matter and as agents) and wider nineteenth-century concepts and connotations of modernity. We shall look closely at the ways nineteenth century attitudes to women and their experience reveal themselves in paint, and ask how these differ when the woman herself is the producer of the work. Progressing into the early twentieth century, we shall discuss the boundaries to be negotiated by female painters, considering the ways in which they bridged the gap between their desire to work in a man’s world, and society’s expectations of an appropriate feminine identity. For each of these artists, complex questions of creative agency are at stake.
Speakers: Dr Anne Puetz and Dr Niccola Shearman
Saturday 14 May 2022
Exhibition curators Professor David Solkin and Dr Ketty Gottardo discuss the life and work of one of British Romantic art’s most unusual figures, the Swiss-born painter and draughtsman Henry Fuseli (1741-1825). We’ll try to make sense of Fuseli’s private and highly inventive drawings of the ‘modern woman’, by considering their relationship to previous and contemporary figure studies.
Speakers: Professor David Solkin and Dr Ketty Gottardo
Moderated by Dr Anne Puetz
Saturday 26 November 2022
Our Saturday Study event accompanies The Courtauld Gallery’s exhibition of new and recent paintings and prints by Peter Doig (10 Feb – 29 May 2023). One of the most renowned British contemporary figurative artists, Doig lived and worked in Trinidad since 2000 before re-establishing himself in London in 2021. Our lecturers will set Doig into the wider context of post WWII British figurative painting before exploring his working practices and the themes of his large-scale expressive landscapes and figure paintings of Canadian and Trinidadian subjects, and of the recent experience of cultural relocation.
With exhibition curator Dr Barnaby Wright, independent curator and art historian Catherine Lampert and Dr Catherine Howe, Research Officer at Zaha Hadid Foundation. Moderator: Dr Anne Puetz (The Courtauld)
Saturday 29 April 2023
This Saturday Study event will provide an opportunity to delve deeper into the ideas raised in The Courtauld Gallery exhibition Drawing on Arabian Nights (22 February – 3 June 2023). The first of three talks will introduce the exhibition and the works: a selection of Orientalist works on paper from The Courtauld’s collection, and explore the curatorial decision to present them in the context of the folk tales Arabian Nights. The second talk will look more broadly at the history and complexity of Orientalist paintings, and examine the multiple interpretations they invite. Our final talk will introduce the reception and production of Orientalist visual and written material in the region of Turkey and the Levant in the nineteenth and twentieth century.
Speakers: Dr Emily Christensen and Dr Ambra D’Antone. Moderator: Dr Anne Puetz
Saturday 23 March 2024
This Saturday Study event accompanied The Courtauld Gallery’s spring exhibition Frank Auerbach. The Charcoal Heads.
Uniquely, this show brings together a series of large-scale portrait drawings of the artist’s friends, and one self-portrait, accompanied by a selection of related paintings the artist made of the same sitters. Join exhibition curator Dr Barnaby Wright and independent curator and writer Jane Alison to explore these poignant images over which the artist took evident care, characteristically re-working them in numerous sessions with the sitters. We shall also set these works of the 1950s and early 1960s into the context of post-war British portraiture.
Speakers: Dr Barnaby Wright, Jane Alison. Moderator: Dr Anne Puetz
Saturday 22 June 2024
Our summer term Saturday Study event accompanied The Courtauld Gallery’s first focused display of works by the important Bloomsbury artist and designer Vanessa Bell.
We’ll investigate Bell’s artistic development and milieu in the context of the wider British art world of the time, ask what it took to be a pioneering woman artist at the time, what we understand by Modernism in Britain in the early years of the 20th century and in what ways Bell, and the Bloomsbury group more widely, contributed to it. We’ll weigh the benefits of belonging to a collaborative avant-garde group against the disadvantages of later commentators’ excessive focus on the Bloomsbury artists’ notoriously unorthodox private lives, and ask why it took so long for female artists like Bell to step out of the shadow of her better-known male colleagues.
Speakers are the exhibition curator Dr Rachel Sloan (The Courtauld) and Dr Wendy Hitchmough (formerly curator at the Bloomsbury artists’ home, Charleston, and senior lecturer emerita at the University of Sussex).
Moderator: Dr Anne Puetz
Saturday 30 November 2024
This study morning accompanies The Courtauld Gallery’s exhibition Monet and London. Views of the Thames (27 September 2024 – 19 January 2025). The show brings together a number of remarkable serial paintings of major London landmarks that Monet had painted over three visits to the British capital from 1899-1901, and realises his plan for a London exhibition of these works.
Join exhibition curator Dr Karen Serres in conversation with Dr Anne Puetz, as they discuss, among other topics, Monet’s London, the concept of seriality, and the artist as curator.
