ART, SERENITY AND CONFLICT: A TALE OF FIVE CITIIES

Distinguished Emeritus Professor Ian A. Aaronson, Medical University of South Carolina, United States   I

Monday 20–Friday 24 January 11.15 am COURSE FEES R550; Staff and students R275       T

This course will bring into focus some of the great paintings produced in five European cities hitherto regarded as only of secondary importance in the history of Western art.

In the Serene Republic of Venice, the wealthiest and most powerful of the Italian States, we will discover how Titian advanced Renaissance painting beyond that of Florence and Rome, whilst in a turbulent London we will meet William Hogarth, whose serial moralising paintings and prints would steer Western art in a new direction. In the complacent Vienna of a dawning twentieth century we will meet the young Egon Schiele, whose disturbing works reflected the increasing tensions that would soon erupt in the First World War. In Moscow, following the 1917 Revolution, we will see how the intellectual Wassily Kandinsky, among other artists, preserved his integrity in spite of the demands of an authoritarian regime.

It would, however, be in Berlin during the interwar years that the savage paintings of George Grosz and Otto Dix would expose the lingering militarism that would provide the tinder to ignite the Second World War. It would subsequently fall to the German artist Anselm Kiefer, born in 1945 in the waning weeks of a conflict that would leave his country in ruins, to confront the horrors of the Holocaust in a series of powerful works that were both monumental in scale and cathartic in their effect.

Lecture titles

  1. The Venice of Titian and Canaletto: from high noon to a gilded sunset
  2. The London of Hogarth and Gillray: palliatives for a troubled time
  3. The Vienna of Klimt and Kokoschka: waltzing towards the abyss
  4. The Moscow of Malevich and Chagall: confronting the Bolshevik Revolution
  5. The Berlin of Grosz and Dix: the perverse hedonism of the Weimar years

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