Dennis Raverty

Arguably the greatest sacred site of the century, Antonin Gaudi's Sagrada Familia (Holy Family) Expiatory Temple was left incomplete at his death in 1928, but work was continued by others over the decades and the basilica finally opened to the public only in 2017. It is the crowning jewel in the modern city of Barcelona. The elaborate sculptural program on the east facade depicts narratives surrounding the birth, childhood and adolescence of Jesus and were executed under the direct supervision of the artist; these will be the main focus of the talk.

   During the 1930s Spanish Civil War however, communists fleeing the fascists destroyed all the drawings and models remaining in Gaudi's studio, making completion after the war challenging. This presentation will also examine the controversial work since 1945, including the expressionistic west facade and the breathtaking, light-filled interior.

Giorgio de Chirico is among the most enigmatic of early 20th century painters. His strange "metaphysical" pictures executed during the First World War and shortly thereafter, capture an uncanny, poetic world of lonely, haunted piazzas and melancholy streets with dreamlike distortions and juxtapositions of time, scale and perspective. Although idolized by the Surrealists, he later denounced his early work and turned to classicism.

In nineteenth-century German Romantic landscape painting, the real subject was not the forest or the mountain, it was the viewer of the painting him/herself. Landscape was, rather, the evocative setting for an excursion traveled by the subject, a trek into the unknown, a journey of sublime significance.

     The first retrospective exhibition of the greatest of the German Romantics, Caspar David Friedrich is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City through early May. But if you can't make it to the city, or if you just want a good briefing before you see the exhibit, please join us on Zoom to examine Friedrich's dark mid-winter journey.

The son of a traditional artist, Pablo Picasso had entered the academy at the unprecedented age of twelve. By the time he was nineteen, the young artist was living and working in Paris. We will examine his early work, including his melancholy blue and more optimistic rose styles through his encounter with traditional African art in 1907, ushering in Cubism, arguably the most important movement of the entire century, not only for painting and sculpture but also for architecture and modern design.

Faith Ringgold died at the age of 93 last April. She had been a pioneering figure in the Black Arts Movement of the 1970s, where Ringgold faced not only the challenges of being a black artist in the highly exclusive New York art scene, but also had to deal with the prejudices of her black male colleagues. This presentation will place her work within the tradition of quilt making, a medium which was artistic but also had an important social purpose, especially for women. The style and form she uses can be traced back to 19th century quilts and even older West African ceremonial banners.

For many African American artists the depression provided employment through the Federal Art Programs of the Works Progress Administration (the W.P.A.) as teachers printmakers, craftspersons and muralists. The government also provided opportunities for exhibiting their work through traveling shows and government-sponsored exhibitions at presitgious venues (like the Museum of Modern Art) that had previously not shown work by black artists. After the Second World War, however, African American artists were once again faced with the lack of both civil rights and exhibition opportunities.

Kerry James Marshall portrays idealized subjects derived from African American experience in large-scale, multiple-figure works that share many characteristics with European history painting in the "grand manner." This romantic visual rhetoric and scale is juxtaposed with intimate elements of African American vernacular culture in order to reinsert African American subjects and aesthetics into the larger mainstream of America's artistic and cultural history—a history from which, the artist believes, blacks have been largely excluded.

As a result of the Atlantic slave trade, captured Africans were given new names and forbidden to practice their traditional faiths. They subversively adapted the Christian saints as stand-ins for their deities, resulting in a curious hybrid art for what is still today one of the most misunderstood of the world's religions, Vodun, the "Sign of the Portal" as it is known among the Fon people of modern Benin (formerly known as the "Slave Coast"). See the richness and beauty of these synchonistic traditions without all the misrepresentations about "Voodoo" in the Western popular media.

The Parisian Surrealists between the First and Second World Wars were notoriously patronizing to women artists, putting them on pedestals and treating them as muses but not taking them seriously as artists. This presentation will examine these formerly marginalized women (not just Frida Kahlo) and seeks to reevaluate their place in the development of modernist art in the twentieth century.

In the turbulent art world of late 18th-century Paris, Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun was one of the few women to be recognized as a full member of the academy, rising to become the first painter to Queen Marie Antoinette. But after the execution of the royals, she was branded a counter-revolutionary and forced into exile. The artist continued to pursue her career in Italy, Russia, Switzerland, England and Prussia before eventually being allowed to return to France. Her style ripened from the Rococo manner of the ancient regime to eventually embrace the new classicism of Jacques Louis David and his mostly male followers, while vehemently disagreeing with their radical politics.

Previously known mainly as a frequent model for Manet, Berthe Morisot was one of the few women painters associated closely with the French Impressionists, exhibiting along with them throughout the 1870s and into the 1880s. With the encouragement of Manet, she developed a very loose, painterly, and virtuosic style that was arguably the most radical of the entire movement and which was not widely appreciated until relatively recently.

The flourishing of capitalism under the Protestant Republic of the Netherlands was a rich source for the establishment of an art that catered to the tastes of the newly-rich middle class. Down-to-earth businessmen wanted realistic depictions of themselves and of everyday life, and the prolific artists of the period supplied them with portraits, landscapes, still lifes and genre scenes. Collectively they are cometimes referred to as the "Little Dutch Masters." A second presentation would be devoted exclusively to Rembrandt.

The first major retrospective exhibition of the work of Caspar David Friedrich in thirty years will be on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from February through early May. Friedrich transformed and elevated landscape painting in the early 19th century from a minor genre to the bearer of the kind of sublime content that had formerly been reserved for biblical subjects alone. We will explore how Friedrich and other German Romantics redefined the sacred in terms of implied narrative, with the subjective experience of the viewer (not the landscape itself) as its primary concern.