3 Sessions on-site

Tuesdays, April 5, May 3, June 7
4 pm

$20 Members | $40 Non-members per session

Limited availability. Pre-registration is required.

April 5 – Session I: The Origins of Impressionism

We delve the literary, artistic and musical sources of the original movement, including the Anglo-American connection (Turner, Constable, Ruskin, Wilde, Whistler) and the astonishing group of poets and painters in Paris (Mallarme, Baudelaire, Degas, Monet, Manet, Renoir with a nod to Delacroix and Courbet).

May 3 – Session II: Session II: Cezanne and the Writers

Beginning with his childhood friend Zola (author of The Unknown Masterpiece, which is about Cezanne) and moving through the great philosophical and literary tradition of Henri Bergson, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Rainer Maria Rilke to the works of Samuel Beckett, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, we will enjoy the great writings that the art of Cezanne inspired.  All of them made the pilgrimage to the studio in Aix and learned the essential lesson of Cezanne’s art: doubt.

June 7 – Session III: The Bloomsbury Group and Modernism

We will combine texts of Virginia Woolf and Roger Fry with a close look at the paintings of Vanessa Bell (Woolf’s sister) and the designs for dance of Duncan Grant, with references as well to the ballets of Frederick Ashton as we consider the role of Bloomsbury in the rise of Modernism.