Dennis Raverty

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.

Impressionism, probably the most popular of all avant-garde movements in modern art, was both influenced by and a rival to early forms of photography. But photography at that time could not capture color or motion. This is why the Impressionist painters, in an effort to outdo the camera, used the emerging science of optics to help them represent the fleeting effects of natural light and the ever-changing and increasingly rapid movement characteristic of urban life in Paris during the decades just before and just after the Eiffel Tower was erected in 1889.

April 17: Monet and the Science of Color and Motion

May 1: Renoir the Beguiling Flâneur

June 5 Degas, Master of Informal Form

July 17 Sisley, Caillebotte and Bazille, the Overlooked Impressionists

August 21 Seurat, Pissarro and the Reclamation of Form

Culturally, the Song dynasty (960-1275 C.E.) marks a high point in the long civilization of China—an era that would be returned to again and again for inspiration, not only by the Chinese themselves, but also by the Koreans, Japanese and others. This presentation will examine classic landscapes from the period and the Daoist nature mysticism that viewed the creative process as a revelation of natural forces (qi) manifesting itself through the spirit or "breath" of the artist's brush. Jing Hao's 10th c. treatise on the six principles of painting will be used as our guide for how to "read" a Chinese landscape.

Reacting to the Expressionism of the prewar years, many artists in Germany returned to realism during the 1920s, a tendency labeled Neue Sachlichkeit, or the "New Objectivity." These artists explored the harsh realities of contemporary life during the unstable period between the wars and are the subject of an exhibition at the Neue Gallerie in New York City from February through May 2025.

    The socially conscious realism of these artists was the target of the Nazi's cultural policy against Modern art, brought to a climax in the "Degenerate Art Exhibition" staged by the Nazis in 1936 to ridicule Modernism, whether abstract or realistic, as decadant "cultural bolshevism."

EARLIER PRESENTATIONS:

Marc Chagall

Henri Rousseau

Giorgio De Chirico