Couples, Collaborators, Colleagues: Artists and Their ‘Others’
30 April 2025 - 18 June 2025
10.45 – 12.45 Wednesdays
£79.00 – £536.00
Description
The concept of the solitary male genius has been a dominant theme of Western art histories. Wives, mistresses, partners and collaborators have often been chased into the shadows, even if they too were practicing artists in their own right. We will explore the complexities of some of these notable artistic relationships, with an emphasis on the often lesser-known, or less-celebrated figure. Through these fascinating cameos, significant aspects of late nineteenth and twentieth-century European and American art and culture traversing painting, sculpture, textiles, theatre design and other media are brought into sharp relief.
“In her previous course, Diane helped lay bare the charismatic art of two wonderful cities. She ably demonstrated how this new art used all art forms (literature, music, dance, psychology, café culture and decorative arts) blended to depict modern life of the time lending credence to the motto “to every age its art - to every art its freedom” as declared by the Secessionists. A very enjoyable course”.
Course Outline
30 April 2025 – Auguste Rodin and Camille Claudel: Master, Mistress, Muse?
Few women artists managed to forge a career for themselves in the mid-nineteenth century in the face of male dominance and other societal pressures. As Rodin’s mistress and muse, later incarcerated for her ‘madness’, do we still consider Camille Claudel, the sculptor, as a victim, or can we now see her work with different eyes?
07 May 2025 – Wassily Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter: The Murnau Years
Gabriele Münter met Kandinsky, firstly as his student in 1902, forming an intimate and artistic relationship which endured for fourteen years. Münter and Kandinsky, founder of the Blue Rider collective, were inseparable during their years in Murnau, in the Bavarian Alps. Together they forged newly expressive painting, inspired by landscape, portraiture, and the urge to abstraction.
14 May 2025 – Robert and Sonia Delaunay: ‘Colour Has a Life of Its Own’
Sonia Terk, from a modest background in Odessa, met and married Robert Delaunay in Paris in 1910. Robert’s pioneering ‘Simultaneous’ painting, of abstract, geometricized forms and Sonia’s daring mixed-media pursuits, as a painter, fashion and textile designer, placed them at the centre of Paris’ avant-garde. Sonia’s dynamic career endured throughout her long life.
21 May 2025 – Salvador Dalí and Garcia Lorca: Secret Love & Surrealism: 1920s
Dalí first met the notable poet in 1923 as fellow-students in Madrid: their close friendship endured throughout the 1920s. Their often-passionate correspondence, writings on art, and Lorca’s poetry, significantly his ‘Ode to Salvador Dali’ were transformational. We trace the stormy passage of their relationship and their art in those seminal early years.
28 May 2025 – Anni and Josef Albers: ‘Equal & Unequal’?
Founders of transformative methods of making and pedagogy from their early years as students at the Bauhaus, Josef Albers was one of the first students to be appointed as a ‘Master’; Jewish-born Anni (Anneliese Fleischmann) eventually directed the weaving workshop. We follow their path from the Bauhaus years to the Black Mountain College, following their flight from Germany in 1933.
04 June 2025 – John Cage & Merce Cunningham: Working In ‘Common Time’: 1940s Onwards
Musician John Cage, best known for 4’33”, his radical ‘silent’ composition, and life partner Merce Cunningham, America’s great dance artist, worked together to break open the boundaries between the visual, the musical, sound and performance. Fiercely collaborative, they created music and dance pieces which existed in ‘common time’ at the pathbreaking Black Mountain College and beyond.
11 June 2025 – Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock: ‘All Painting Is Biographical’
Married to the hero of New York’s Abstract Expressionism from 1945 until Pollock’s untimely death, Krasner’s career has often been eclipsed by Pollock’s mythic status. Constantly referred to as ‘Pollock’s widow’, her peers rarely acknowledged her as a significant contributor to Abstract Expressionism in her own right at the time and beyond the Pollock years.
18 June 2025 – Benjamin Britten, John Piper and Their Circle: British Modernism in Music and Art
Piper, ‘one of Britain’s most significant artists of the twentieth century’, has not always been recognised as such. Best known for his love of the Romantic and the contemporary landscape, its buildings and ruins, he was a central figure in British modernism. In this pairing, we will focus on his scenic designs for Britten’s operas, notably Death in Venice.