NEW Not Room Enough: American Art Beyond the City
Online
Evening Study Online
Dr William L Coleman
5 pre-recorded lectures with 5 live Zoom seminars at 18:30, over 5 weeks from Thursday 22 October to Thursday 19 November 2026
£245
Course Description
In his 1836 “Essay on American Scenery,” the artist Thomas Cole lamented that “the ravages of the axe are daily increasing – the most noble scenes are made desolate, and oftentimes with a wantonness and barbarism scarcely credible in a civilized nation.” The very next year, Ralph Waldo Emerson gave voice to a growing counter-urban sentiment in the young United States, holding that “We need nature, and cities give the human senses not room enough.” The followers of Cole and Emerson in American art established a fascinating tradition of place-based practice by artists who chose to keep their distance from the urban art world and to make rural subjects their commitment.
The painters who are the focus of this course consciously isolated themselves from the lofts and galleries of New York City, even as they continued to depend on its booming market, which did not always know how to handle their creations. Case studies will include the inhabited landscape paintings of the so-called Hudson River School; the regionalism of Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton, and John Steuart Curry; the politically engaged counter-regionalism of Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Rockwell Kent, and George Bellows; Georgia O’Keeffe’s rural modernism between the Adirondack Mountains of New York and the New Mexico desert; and perhaps the most extreme example of iconoclastic commitment to the brutal realities of the rural, Andrew Wyeth. Students will come away from this course conversant in many of the key contributors to the history of American art and the wider structures in which they participated.
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Lecturer's Biography
Dr. William L. Coleman is a specialist in American landscape art and serves as the inaugural Wyeth Foundation Director of the Wyeth Study Center, dividing responsibilities between the Brandywine Museum of Art in Pennsylvania and the Farnsworth Art Museum in Maine, USA. Current projects include two nationally traveling exhibitions with scholarly publications he has edited: By Design: The Worlds of Betsy James Wyeth and Rockwell Kent: The Work of Art. After a 2008 Courtauld master’s, he earned a master’s in musicology at Oxford and a doctorate from Berkeley and held postdoctoral fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Washington University in St. Louis.