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.

Thursday, October 5, 2023
7:30 PM

Cornelia Feye begins the series in the post-war period. Abstract Expressionism is the dominant art movement and is followed in the mid-1950s by color-field painters and geometric abstraction artists. Artists include Willem and Elaine deKooning, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, Helen Frankenthaler, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Frank Stella, Ronald Davis, and Ed Moses, among others.

Monday, May 15, 2023
7:30 PM

In his own words, Matisse sought to create “…an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter…” Indeed, this master colorist’s art is rich, sensuous, opulent,   and seemingly transparent… until subjected to deeper scrutiny. Unlike Cezanne’s paintings, which demonstrate a steady progression toward realizing his ultimate artistic vision, Matisse’s six-decade career contained puzzling starts and stops and vacillation between sculptural and decorative styles. Throughout, however, he raised profound questions about the very nature of art, of perception, and of reality. Of his friend and archrival, Picasso said, “All things considered, there is only Matisse.”

Monday, May 8, 2023
7:30 PM

Unlike the very conventional Matisse, Vincent Van Gogh’s life was one of alienation, debilitating mental illness, and ultimately, suicide.  Keenly aware of the isolation his odd behavior caused, he poured his longing for relationships, for human communion, into his paintings. He bends pigment and brushstrokes to his psychic needs. Where, ultimately, do we find Vincent? Not in wheat fields, nor in nighttime skies, nor doleful visages, but in the most basic truth about art: the stroke of hand to canvas.

Monday, May 1, 2023
7:30 PM

When Cezanne and Van Gogh met in Paris in 1886, they despised each other, a contempt that spilled over in their opinions of each other’s work. Indeed, their respective styles were antithetical. Vincent’s art is visceral, Cezanne’s, cerebral. Vincent injected into his paintings his immense psychological yearnings, whereas Cezanne erects psychological barriers to lock the viewer out of his works. Cezanne’s forms are solid and immutable; Vincent’s inanimate objects dance with a kinetic energy. We can’t find Cezanne, the man, in his paintings; in Vincent’s canvases we can’t avoid him. 

Monday, April 24, 2023
7:30 PM

Matisse and Picasso both claimed that Cezanne was “the father of us all,” and indeed, he stands at the inflection point, the cusp, between traditional, realistic art and 20th century abstraction. Solitary, antisocial, mistrustful, Cezanne could only realize his distinctive style in the solitude of his native Provence. The resulting style is as complex as 3D chess; Cezanne’s canvases must be filtered through the intellect to apprehend. For instance, at the same time that his paintings contain explosive oppositional forces, recurring echoes of color or line or shape create loving embraces that stretch across the canvas. In contrast to Van Gogh’s psychological power, Cezanne’s art is cold, aloof, detached: in his landscapes we find none of the solace of nature, in his people, no invitation to friendship, in his still lives, no appeal to appetite. But we do find genius.

Tuesday, November 15, 2022
7:30 PM

Art dealers Ernst and Hildy Beyeler made all the paintings and sculptures of their world-famous art collection accessible to the public at the Fondation Beyeler in 1997. Today, the collection comprises more than 400 classic modern and contemporary works, with an emphasis on Matisse, Picasso, and Monet, as well as ethnographic sculpture. Star architect Renzo Piano designed the building in an English-style park outside Basel to create interplay between art, nature, and architecture.

Tuesday, November 8, 2022
7:30 PM

As part of the National Gallery in Berlin, the Berggruen Collection opened to the public in 1996. It is housed in the western Stülerbau (Stüler Building) opposite Schloss Charlottenburg in what is now known as the Museum Berggruen. With its impressive collection of works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Paul Klee, and Alberto Giacometti the Museum Berggruen is one of the most important museums of modern art in Berlin. The art dealer and collector Heinz Berggruen was born in Berlin-Wilmersdorf in in1914, but he left Nazi Germany in 1936 and emigrated to the United States, working as a journalist, before opening a gallery in Paris. He acquired many of his works from the artists he represented at his gallery. We will also visit the Scharf-Gerstenberg Surrealism collection in the twin, eastern, Stüler Building right next to the Berggruen Museum.

Tuesday, November 1, 2022
7:30 PM

The Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza houses one of the finest and most varied collections of Western painting. Van Eyck, Dürer, Titian, Caravaggio, Rubens, Rembrandt, Canaletto, Monet, Degas, Morisot, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Picasso, Kirchner, Kandinsky, Goncharova, O'Keeffe, Hopper, Dalí, and Pollock are just some of the names on the long list of great masters shown. The collection includes almost 1,000 paintings, spanning the history of art from the 13th right up until the 20th century. Founded by three generations of Thyssen-Krupp industrialists, it was originally located in Lugano, Switzerland, before moving in 1992 to the Villahermosa Palace in Madrid on the Paseo del Prado, across from the Museo Nacional del Prado.

Tuesday, October 25, 2022
7:30 PM

Originally the founder, Knud W. Jensen, intended for the museum to be a home for modern Danish art. But after only a few years he changed course, and instead Louisiana became an international museum of modern art with many renowned works by artists like Giacometti, Calder, Warhol, and German artists of the 1980s. The museum opened to the public in 1958 and, its building is considered a major example of Danish modernist architecture. In the well-balanced style of the late 1950s discreet modernism, the museum presents itself as a horizontal and understated building complex that fits gracefully and intimately into the landscape in Humlebaek, about an hour north of Copenhagen directly on the Baltic coast.

Tuesday, October 18, 2022
7:30 PM

Diaghilev conceived of music, choreography, set design, and costume as equal, integral aspects of the ballet, and he commissioned many great composers, choreographers, and artists to create original works for the Ballets Russes. In its 20-year history, the company could boast of an illustrious, international “Who’s Who” of collaborators, elevating ballet to a new height in the cultural hierarchy. Ruthless and dictatorial, Diaghilev persevered in realizing his artistic vision, until, debilitated by diabetes, he died in Venice in 1929.

Tuesday, October 11, 2022
7:30 PM

Influenced by the dance innovations of Isadora Duncan, Richard Wagner’s concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk, and the synaesthetic theories of Charles Baudelaire, Diaghilev finally achieved his ultimate synthesis of the arts with his creation of the Ballets Russes, which opened in 1909 at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. Dancers included Anna Pavlova, Vaslav Nijinsky, and Mikhail Fokine. The Ballets Russes toured throughout Europe and the Americas uninterruptedly for two decades, from 1909 to 1929.

Tuesday, October 4, 2022
7:30 PM

The great turning point for Diaghilev came when he moved to Paris in 1906. He organized an exhibition for the Salon d’Automne entitled Two Centuries of Russian Art and Sculpture. Filling 12 galleries in the Grand Palais, it included 750 works by 103 artists. In 1907, he produced a series of concerts at the Paris Opera, featuring Russian nationalist composers, which culminated in Modest Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov (in Russian) with Fyodor Chaliapin in the title role.

Tuesday, September 27, 2022
7:30 PM

In 1905, Diaghilev organized a historic portrait exhibition of Russian art treasures at the Tauride Palace in St. Petersburg. He himself traveled to secure loans of more than 4,000 paintings, owned by 450 collectors. The innovative installation of the exhibition displayed groups of paintings in differently decorated interiors to create a sense of artistic synthesis. It was a huge success, catapulting Diaghilev to the pinnacle of the Russian cultural elite.

Tuesday, September 20, 2022
7:30 PM

Born in 1872 to parents of nobility, Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev was raised in Russian high society and sent to study law at the University of St. Petersburg. In 1890, he joined the Nevsky Pickwickians, an informal circle of student intellectuals who founded a progressive art journal, Mir iskusstva (“The World of Art”). As Chief Editor, Diaghilev became the primary spokesman for contemporary art. In 1899, he was appointed artistic advisor to the Imperial Theatres in Moscow.

Tuesday, March 8, 2022
6:30 PM

In 1938, with war on the horizon, Mondrian decided to move to London. There he was welcomed by the Circle group, which had published his first essay in English, Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art. The bombardment of London led him to flee to New York City, where he was received with enthusiasm by artists and collectors. Invigorated by the vibrant energy of the city, he worked tirelessly, until his death from pneumonia in 1944.

Tuesday, March 1, 2022
6:30 PM

Although he returned to Paris at the end of the war, Mondrian continued his close collaboration with the artists of De Stijl. The 1920 publication of his booklet, Le Néo-plasticisme, served to disseminate his new theories throughout Europe. In the course of the years that followed, Mondrian’s artistic innovation led to the development of a unique pictorial language. Ever pursuing pure abstraction, he became affiliated with the international art associations, Cercle et Carré and Abstraction-Création.

Tuesday, February 22, 2022
6:30 PM

In the summer of 1914, Mondrian returned to the Netherlands to visit his father, who was seriously ill. The outbreak of World War I prevented him from returning to Paris, so he settled in the avant-garde artists’ colony of Laren, where he met Bart van der Leck and Theo van Doesburg. With Van Doesburg, Mondrian founded the journal, De Stijl (The Style), in which he published essays defining his artistic theory, which he named Neoplasticism.

Tuesday, February 15, 2022
6:30 PM

In 1911, Mondriaan visited the Moderne Kunstkring exhibition in Amsterdam. He was so impressed by the avant-garde work of the Cubists, that he immediately resolved to move to Paris. Upon arrival, he changed his name, dropping an “a” from “Mondriaan,” as a symbol of his complete immersion into a new culture and society. Experimenting with the style of Picasso and Braque, Mondrian found a way to integrate representational form and geometric abstraction in his work.

Tuesday, February 8, 2022
6:30 PM

Born into a devout Calvinist family in central Holland, Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan, Jr. was encouraged by his family to draw and paint from early childhood. In 1892, he enrolled in the Royal Academy of Visual Arts in Amsterdam, where his academic training focused on drawing from the model, copying the Old Masters, and genre painting. He supported himself by making scientific drawings, producing copies of museum paintings, and giving private drawing lessons in his studio.

In-person:

Thursday, November 18, 2021
7:30 PM

The 17th and 18th centuries were an artistic pinball machine, all blinking lights and shrill bells as a cacophony of various art movements jostled for dominance. Where were stability and future direction to be found? Not in Paris, center of the art world, but in an ancient forest, where a small group of unconventional artists worked out radical ideas that would bring order and direction to art―and foretell its future far into the 20th century.

Tuesday, November 16, 2021
7:30 PM

With the exception of Native American artist Maria Montoya Martinez (1887–1980), who gained fame for her exquisite pottery from San Ildefonso Pueblo, most of the indigenous women artists in this lecture remained relatively unknown beyond their native environment: Nampeyo (1859–1942), a Hopi-Tewa potter, who lived on the Hopi Reservation in Arizona; Kenojuak Ashevak (1927–2013), a Canadian Inuit graphic artist who was born in an igloo; and Emily Kame Kngwarreye (1910–1996), an Aboriginal Australian artist from the Utopia region in the Northern Territory, and her relatives Minnie Pwerle and Barbara Weir.