Tuesday, September 16, 2025
7:30 PM

How is authority represented? Romans commissioned portraits in abundance, whether for members of the imperial family or people of lesser rank. Augustus, the first emperor, imbedded in his portraits features and details understood by the well-educated, often with direct allusions to famous Greek examples. Dynasties developed their own visual language for the men and women, establishing portrait trends for the masses. In the second century CE, Emperor Hadrian brought back the short-cropped beard, not seen for more than five hundred years. Communities in northern Egypt, part of the Roman empire, retained traditions established as early as the Old Kingdom, while adapting the prevailing traditions of recent Greek and then Roman occupation. The resulting painted portraits, best known from the Fayum funerary district, bring us into direct contact with people who are individualized and compellingly contemporary to us.

Tuesday, September 9, 2025
7:30 PM

How is knowledge expressed? Portraits of Greeks tended to revolve around famous individuals from the areas of philosophy, literature, and leadership. The first portrait of Homer was created three centuries after he lived. How did the sculptor approach the challenges of this unknown subject? In general, creating an ideal image seemed to be the goal in the Greek world, but the shock of ugliness in portraits of Socrates introduced new options. The portrait could include a multisensory experience, including visually stimulating colors and olfactory scents, as recent research reveals. The Greek speaking world continued to expand, and portraits of the wider populations changed as well, from North Africa to the Greek East. A new emphasis is seen in individualized portraits of people we might expect to see in our own local communities.

Tuesday, September 2, 2025
7:30 PM

How is power revealed? Kingship in portraiture is usually made with enduring materials such as bronze and stone that survive for millennia. Sargon, king of the Akkadian empire, is likely the subject of one of the finest and most costly bronze portraits from Mesopotamia. Through their royal workshops, rulers from Egypt established and controlled distinctive images in stone during the Old and New Kingdoms, perpetuating a youthful and virile image. While these were the standards, exceptions emerged during the Middle Kingdom and again during the succession of queens in the Amarna period of the New Kingdom, most notably with the presentation of the celebrated and beautiful Nefertiti. Beauty and high status, however, were not always the goals.

Monday, April 21, 2025
7:30 PM

Architect Antonio Gaudí was the greatest exponent of Catalan modernism. Influenced by neo-Gothic techniques and orientalism, he forged a unique organic style inspired by the complex geometry of natural forms. Although his very long career predates and postdates Art Nouveau’s heyday, his most original works coincide with the 1890–1915 period of this lecture series. His experimental work with hyperboloid and paraboloid arches influenced mid-century modernism, High Tech, postmodernism, and Deconstructivism.

Monday, April 14, 2025
7:30 PM

The waning days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire coincided with a flourishing of Belle Époque artistic expressions in Eastern Europe. By the mid-1890s, the experimental Vienna Secession advocated for integrated design, while the “Wagner School” (named after Otto Koloman Wagner) supported a modern architecture where form followed function. Rebuilding, due to modernization, of Vienna led to entire sections of the city built in the Art Nouveau style.  Artisans of the Wiener Werkstätte (Viennese Workshops) influenced the later Bauhaus, American Art Deco, Scandinavian Modernism, and Italian Craft and Design.

Monday, April 7, 2025
7:30 PM

The style gained popularity through exposure at the Paris Exposition. French architects Hector Guimard, Jules Lavirotte, and Frantz Jourdain experimented with optics, transparency, motion, and point of view. Decorative artists, like Louis Majorelle, Emile Gallé, and Georges de Feure, contributed furniture, glass, and metalwork that integrated into the overall design, while jewelry, paintings, and poster design continued to use Art Nouveau techniques independent of architecture. 

Monday, March 31, 2025
7:30 PM

Meet Victor Horta, Paul Hankar, and Henri van de Velde who originated the Art Nouveau style in Brussels. The movement elevated “craft” to an “art” and unified all art forms. In using modern materials and construction techniques, it eliminated historicism while emphasizing nature and movement through use of the whiplash line. Open floor plans and expansive use of glass, mirrors, and electricity brought transparency and spatial fluidity to once dark and constricted interiors. 

NEW DATE: Wednesday, February 26, 2025
7:30 PM

As an example of experimental archaeology, in 2009, Dr. Schwab and six students collaborated with a professional hairstylist to test whether or not the six Caryatids’ hairstyles could be recreated with a positive result. Tools and hair products, just like today, were important in the domestic sphere. The arrangement of hair became a clear signal of rites of passage and status within the community. Locks of hair were often dedicated in temples or cut before warriors left for battle. Together we will explore a range of ancient Greek hairstyles and their meanings for both individual and society.

Thursday, February 13, 2025
7:30 PM

Ancient Greek gold jewelry is renowned for its intricate designs and goldsmithing techniques, such as granulation. Adornment applied to both men and women, even to statues and other objects. Gold jewelry accompanied an individual throughout a lifetime to the grave. Statues could be adorned with wreaths or earrings, and vases could be adorned with painted gold necklaces. Women dedicated jewelry to a goddess in her temple. Royal families amassed extraordinary examples of goldwork, all of it ornate and substantial in size and weight. Numerous gold wreaths with leaves and acorns or berries have been discovered in royal tombs. Today some of the finest jewelers in Greece have found inspiration from these artifacts when developing their own jewelry for the public. In this lecture we will explore some of the finest examples of ancient Greek gold jewelry.

Thursday, February 6, 2025
7:30 PM

Several customs, traditions, and events in today’s modern Olympics can be traced back to the ancient competitions held at Olympia. Today’s victors are celebrated for their athletic prowess, as they were in ancient Greece. This lecture will focus on the important role of athletics in ancient Greece, the four Panhellenic sites, and the unique Panathenaic Games celebrated in Athens. As they are today, athletics were popular in ancient Greece, where boys and young men devoted time to working out in the palaestra (gymnasium) to maintain fitness and ultimately to be ready for combat. Even the passage of time was organized around the four-year interval between Olympic Games known as the Olympiad, and specific Olympiads were numbered as markers of the events and political developments associated with those times.

Thursday, January 30, 2025
7:30 PM

We carry pocket change as currency. The idea for these coins or coinage came from the ancient Greek world. The earliest coins, made of electrum at Sardis, rapidly evolved into silver coins of different weights and values. One drachma (the Greek monetary unit at the time) equaled a day’s wage. Both the front and back of the coin displayed designs, resembling miniature relief sculptures. Artists sometimes added their signature to the coins. Cities and islands developed unique images, an early form of advertising and branding. Once in circulation, Greek coins traveled great distances throughout the Mediterranean region and beyond. Even today, many of these ancient coins are admired in museums and sought by collectors for their beauty and rarity.

Thursday, November 21, 2024
7:30 PM

From Paris, surrealism spread to Belgium, where René Magritte became a leading figure. In New York, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, and Dorothea Tanning represented surrealism at Peggy Guggenheim’s Gallery of the Century. In Mexico City Frida Kahlo and Diego Riviera together with a group of exiles from WWII, like Leonor Fini and Remedios Varo, organized and showed surrealist art. Exhibitions sprang up in Belgrade, Cairo, Prague, Brussels, London, and San Francisco. A historical survey of Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism at MOMA in 1936 introduced the movement to a wider audience.

Breton’s death in 1966 left no heir to unite the divergent branches of surrealist artists all over the world and led to the end of surrealism as a unified movement, but its influence continues today.

Thursday, November 14, 2024
7:30 PM

A year after publishing his Surrealist Manifesto, Breton organized the first group exhibition for La peinture surréaliste in the Gallery Pierre in Paris. It included work by Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso, Jean Arp, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, André Masson, Man Ray, Jean Tanguy, and Pierre Roy. New members joined the group in 1929: former Dadaist Tristan Tzara, Salvador Dalí, filmmaker Luis Bunuel, and sculptor Alberto Giacometti. A group of talented women artists have long stood in the shadow of their famous male peers. This lecture also explores the contributions of Leonora Carrington, photographer Dora Mar, Lee Miller, and Meret Oppenheim. The beginning of WWII scattered the surrealist group all over the world.

Wednesday, November 6, 2024
7:30 PM

It is very fitting to end the series by focusing on the work of Kendrick Bangs Kellogg, the San Diego native who recently passed away. He worked with both Sim Bruce Richards and Frederick Liebhardt before going on to design some of the region’s most dramatic buildings.

Wednesday, October 30, 2024
7:30 PM

Sim Bruce Richards drew from his respect for Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Irving J. Gill to design homes, commercial buildings, and sacred spaces of wood, glass, and adobe across San Diego County. His passion for Native American, Aztec, and Mayan culture, as well as Japanese architecture, landscape, and craft, greatly influenced over 200 projects unique to our region. Wishing to create living and working environments that delight all the senses, Richards imbued a number of his projects with built-in art by James Hubbell, Rhoda LeBlanc Lopez, and others. This presentation unveils his architectural spirit through tales of Richards’ unique client-architect relationships.

Wednesday, October 23, 2024
7:30 PM

When Lilian Rice was working as a teacher she taught a young Lloyd Ruocco. He then worked with her when she was designing the new town of Rancho Santa Fe. Ruocco went on to become the central figure in the San Diego modernist scene. One of the young architects in his orbit was Frederick Liebhardt. He was one of several of the apprentices of Frank Lloyd Wright who made such an impact in the region after the war.

Wednesday, October 16, 2024
7:30 PM

The only place to begin a discussion of modernism in San Diego is with Irving J. Gill. But what was his legacy? Were all his progressive ideas lost amidst the fashion for Spanish revivalism? We will look at the work of Gill’s protégé Richard Requa in a new light and see how he provides a link with the architects of the midcentury. The lecture will conclude with an examination of San Diego’s rogue architect, William Kesling.

Thursday, October 3, 2024
7:30 PM

In his last years, having lost all whom he had loved, along with his large fortune, Rembrandt turns inward; the cockiness of youth yields to a tragic vision of age and loss. Western art has never experienced such magnificent examinations of what it is to be human. Rembrandt’s portraits present compelling, sentient beings, who think … feel … remember. In these lectures, we always speak of the role of art within its given society, but with Rembrandt’s evocations of a human’s inner life and of the tragedy of life, art becomes universal, transcending boundaries and borders, time and place.

Thursday, September 26, 2024
7:30 PM

When the young Rembrandt arrives in Amsterdam in 1631, he is not only ambitious, but, judging from his self-portraits of that period, brash, cocky, and confident of his artistic power. Determined to prove that he is the equal of the great Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens, Rembrandt paints in Rubens’s Baroque style. A decade later, Rembrandt realizes that—despite the drama and theatrical lighting effects of Baroque art (characteristics he will retain)—he needs to capture deeper truths, greater profundity. In short, his unrelenting need for drama deepens, but now, buffeted by tragedy, he moves toward the drama of the soul.

Thursday, September 19, 2024
7:30 PM

This lecture will be a meditation on Jan Vermeer, an artist celebrated in literature and movies today, but after his death, forgotten until the 1850s, when a French art critic stumbled upon a masterpiece (View of Delft) by a mysterious artist he thought might be named Meer and devoted the rest of his life to searching out more “Meers.” Today, of course, Vermeer’s crystalline cubes of light-filled space, masterful reflections, and enigmatic, contemplative women make him one of the most revered painters in art history.

Thursday, September 12, 2024
7:30 PM

In the second week, we examine in greater depth the paintings the Dutch loved to see on their walls: landscapes that evoke a land dearly wrested from the sea; still lifes ranging from glorious floral bouquets sparkling with butterflies to dour skulls and smoking candles; genre painting that presents often humorous portrayals of everyday people and everyday lives; and, of course, brilliant portraiture from the easels of artists like Rembrandt and Frans Hals. Dazzling art, to be sure, but also puzzling. How is it that this flat and uninspiring land gives birth to landscapes? Or that this newly minted Protestant nation produces still lifes suffused with religious symbolism? Or that this sober and reserved society invents genre painting, evidence of a people able to laugh at themselves.

Thursday, September 5, 2024
7:30 PM

Art must be placed within its historic context; this first lecture will examine Dutch economic, political, and religious factors in a search for clues to explain how such artistic genius flourished in this time and place. An overarching factor is 17th century Holland’s uniqueness within the European experience. It becomes the first Protestant nation, and its long, ultimately victorious war of independence from Spain frees the Dutch from the only power structures Europe had ever known—King and Church. Power now comes from Holland’s maritime empire and spreads laterally to a solid middle class that reaps immense riches–a wealth that was funneled into art patronage. (There were more artists than bakers in mid-century Amsterdam.)

Thursday, March 7, 2024
7:30 PM

Van Eyck’s art must be viewed on two antithetical levels. While his work is optically rich and highly materialistic, down to single gold threads in a sumptuous tapestry, it is also profoundly spiritual, injected as it is with religious symbols. In addition to transforming the medium used in painting, van Eyck also transformed portraiture, as visible in the Arnolfini Portrait and Portrait of a Man. The lecture ends with painted images of van Eyck’s hometown of Bruges—that sweet Medieval time capsule—and with a coda: the mystery of the 1930s theft of one of the master’s greatest works.

Thursday, February 29, 2024
7:30 PM

This lecture opens with exquisite paintings from what is considered “the most valuable book in the world,” the Limbourg Brothers’ Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, richly illustrated scenes drawn from our childhood visions of a castles and kings, knights and ladies—a wondrous world for those of us eager to burrow down into history. We then turn toward the pivotal artist Jan van Eyck, notable not only as one of Europe’s greatest painters, but also as the “inventor” of oil paints over the traditional tempera. (The mixing of ground pigments with oil had been attempted unsuccessfully for centuries, and van Eyck discovered how to make the mixture viable.)

Thursday, February 15, 2024
7:30 PM

A great efflorescence in European painting took place in 15th century Florence—the Renaissance. The thumb on the scales of history favors the Renaissance because it is so central to our cultural identity. However, at the very same time, a similar burst of artistic genius took place north of the Alps, in the Duchy of Burgundy, one of the most refined and romantic of all European courts. The immensely talented artists in Burgundy produced work as brilliant and worthy of wonder as their Italian brethren, an art with architecturally rich, light-suffused spaces, sumptuous textiles, and dazzling jewels.

Thursday, November 2, 2023
7:30 PM

In discussing which art movements of the 21st century will have a lasting effect, Feye reviews some of her favorite artists from around the world, many of them “who use any medium imaginable and explore universal or societal issues.” Artists include Ai Weiwei, El Anatsui, Cai Guo-Qiang, Olafur Eliasson, Pussy Riot, Australian Barbara Weir, Kay WalkingStick, Kara Walker, Anish Kapoor, William Kentridge, and Alicia Kwade, among others.

Thursday, October 26, 2023
7:30 PM

The feminist art that began in the 1970s continues in the 1980s. Traditional fabric and fiber crafts inspire the Pattern and Decoration movement in California and New York. In the era of post-Modernism, artists appropriate aspects of previous art movements into their work. Street artists make their statements on public buildings. Environmental artists work with organic material to create impermanent art. Neo-Expressionism arises. Artists include Barbara Kruger, the Guerilla Girls, Alexis Smith, Robert Kushner, Cindy Sherman, Gerhard Richter, Banksy, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Maya Lin, to name a few.

Thursday, October 19, 2023
7:30 PM

Installation art expands into immersive life-size environments, while performance art incorporates the participation of the viewer into live happenings. In Europe, the Fluxus movement exerts a strong influence. On the West Coast the Light & Space movement is inspired by the California sun and wide-open spaces. With Earth/site-specific art movement, art moves out of the gallery space and into the open landscape. Conceptual art rising to preeminence placing prime importance on words and ideas. Artists include Ed Kienholz, Robert Irwin, Joseph Beuys, Marina Abramovich, Allan Kaprow, James Turell, Larry Bell, Peter Alexander, Dewain Valentine, Walter de Maria, Michael Heizer, Robert Long, John Baldessari, Bruce Nauman, and Jenny Holzer, among others.

Wednesday, October 18, 2023
7:30 PM

The Athenaeum is excited to present Dr. Katherine Schwab, an expert in the authentic aesthetics and representations of ancient Greek sculpture. In her lecture, which begins at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, October 18, Schwab will explore the evidence for color on ancient Greek sculpture and the use of both new and old technologies to aid our understanding of their original polychromatic appearance.

Thursday, October 12, 2023
7:30 PM

Minimalism and Pop Art emerge in reaction to Abstract Expressionism. Op art, or optical art, placing its emphasis on visual perception, follows. West Coast artists, including the “Cool School” and “Finish Fetish” at  LA’s Ferus Gallery, emerge as innovators. Assemblage artists add a third dimension and found objects into their art. Artists include Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, Victor Vasarely, Bridget Riley, Ed Ruscha, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Wayne Thiebaud, Joseph Cornell, and Louise Nevelson, to name a few.