Dennis Raverty

For 19th-century illustrators the unfolding Western frontier was much more than just a new type of landscape to depict - it represented to them a myth of unfettered liberty and limitless expanding horizons designed for the folks back east. More than just a locality, it was a realm of unfulfilled desire. This desire was used to market products associated with the myth of the West and as a lure for the burgeoning railroads and tourist industry.

1 - Early Expeditions to the Frontier

2 - Marketing the West through the Railroads

3 - Remington, Russell and the Closing of the Frontier

The ramshackle beehive-shaped studio in prewar Paris dubbed La Ruche (the hive) was buzzing with activity. Included among its tenants were Jewish modernists from around Europe including Modigliani, Soutine, Lipchitz and Chagall, the painter who created a charming, enchanted world of fairy tales. All of them were colorful characters as well as influential artists.

1 - Amedeo Modigliani & Jacques Lipchitz

2 - Chaim Soutine

3 - Marc Chagall

Although the music and literature of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s is well known, the visual art associated with the "New Negro" movement (what black artists of the period called it) is not nearly as familiar to us today. Yet the work of these artists was actually more in touch with contemporaneous European Modernism than many of the more conservative white painters of the New York art establishment.

1 - Black Renaissance in Harlem

2 - African Americans Abroad

During the 19th century, religious impulses were often expressed indirectly through a search for God in the natural landscape. These presentations will explore the relationship between God, humankind and nature within the context of secular and religious thought from the period. It will be shown how these artists redefined the sacred in terms of implied narrative within their landscapes and how they used the evocation of light as a metaphor for the divine presence in nature.

1 - American Wilderness & the Hudson River School

2 - German Mysticism, Divine Presence & the Human Subject

3 - British Landscape: the Familiar & the Tragic in Constable & Turner

With the defeat of Germany in 1918 after the First World War, the fledgling Weimar Republic produced some of the finest art and design of the entire twentieth century, setting the standard for the International style that was to dominate architecture and design in the decades after the Second World War. Other artistic tendencies of the period include Dadaism and the New Realism, against the backdrop of the rise of a radically conservative reaction in the art and cultural policy of the Nazi regime.

1 - Dada & the the New Realism

2 - Bauhaus Design & Architecture

3 - The Nazis' War Against Modern Art

Andre Breton, the founder of Surrealism, was a medical student when he was enlisted as a psychiatric nurse during the First World War. His patients included soldiers sent back from the front, suffering what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder. Working from Freud's psychoanalytic theories, Breton "diagnosed" the war as an illness, with Europe suffering a collective "nervous breakdown" in an explosion of repressed aggression. Breton's ideas would lead artists to dive deep into the unconscious mind. However irrational and puzzling their results, the Surrealists hoped that by giving free artistic expression to forbidden desires, they could channel into works of art the collectively repressed frustrations that had led to the war.

1 - Illuminated Dreams

2 - Surrealist Film

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 sometimes referred to as the "Little Dutch Masters." A second presentation would be devoted exclusively to Rembrandt.

Dictators of both the left and the right persecuted modern art in the early 20th century. This three-part program explores the reasons for both the unpopularity of Modernism with the demagogues and its eventual triumph in America during the postwar period as a symbol of freedom and the victory of democracy over totalitarianism.

1 - Art and Revolution in the Soviet Union
2 - The Fate of Modern Art in Nazi Germany

3 - Modernist Art in Fascist Italy & Spain