The Story of Art

What will I learn?

Join artist and art lecturer, Nick Pearson to appreciate the themes, influences and historical events as well as the individual artists that have shaped western art history. This course takes the form of a series of lively and informative illustrated lectures. Term one begins in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance and takes us through the 17th and 18th centuries, via the Baroque and Rococo periods (including Caravaggio, Rubens, Rembrandt and Vermeer) to the Enlightenment and Romantic period (Hogarth, Gainsborough and Reynolds to Delacroix, Constable and Turner) Term two begins in France in the 19th-century and introduces Realism (e.g. Courbet, Bonheur, Manet), Impressionism (e.g. Monet, Renoir, Pissarro) Post-Impressionism (e.g. Cezanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, van Gogh) and carry on through all the major ‘isms’ ending in the art of the mid-twentieth-century. Term three continues our journey through art of the twentieth century, looking at Pop Art (eg. Hamilton, Lichtenstein, Warhol), Land Art, Body and Performance art (eg. Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Abramovic, Gilbert & George), Minimalism (eg. Andre, Judd, Kelly) and the return to painting in the 1980s (eg. Caulfield, Kiefer). We then 'complete' the story with art of our own century (eg. Hirst, Emin, Perry) etc Course content (indicative) Term 1. 1. Course intro + e Middle Ages and International Gothic 2. Early Renaissance in Florence 3. Early Renaissance spreads 4. High Renaissance in Venice and Leonardo da Vinci 5. The High Renaissance Masters: Leonardo and Michelangelo 6. Raphael and The Northern Renaissance 7. Mannerism and Italian Baroque 8. International Baroque 9. Rococo, Canaletto and 18th-century painting in Britain 10. The 19th Century: Romanticism to the 'Literary Realism' of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood Term 2. 11. The 19th century: French Realism 12. Impressionism 13. Post-Impressionism 14. The 20th-century: Cubism 15. The 20th-century: Expressio