Art Presentations by Wendy Evans

To receive regular e-mail updates listing currently-scheduled lectures, tours, and other offerings contact wendyevans@art-talks.org

Talks scheduled in public venues:

This series looks in depth at the life and work of three great European artists, the Italian painter Caravaggio, the Dutch master artist Rembrandt van Rijn, and sculptor-architect Gianlorenzo Bernini.  

All three were immensely skillful and innovative artists whose lives, like their artworks, were filled with drama and emotion.

July 11:   Caravaggio
July 18:   Rembrandt
July 25    Bernini

(Information and registration for any or all classes at 248 644-5832 or on line) 

It was a time of change, a time when art offended and scandalized.  Breaking conventions, despising old traditions, challenging those in power, were the hallmarks of social and political changes in the 20th 
century - a century that went from horse-drawn carriages to man on the moon, from gas lamps to cell phones.  Art reflects society so artistic challenges to Renaissance tradition multiplied.  Modernism was propelled by the urge to break rules and overturn established hierarchies.

Oct 23:   Away with Conventions (European Art 1900-1945). 
We'll look at the founding of modern art in Europe by artists like Henri Matisse in France, Expressionists like Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in Germany, and Dada artists like Marcel Duchamp.  For different reasons they were dispensing with natural color, natural form and even recognizable imagery
                     
Oct 30:   America Triumphant (American Art to 1960).  The early modernist seeds got watered in America 
by artists fleeing Europe and fertilized by American strength, brashness and optimism in the wake of World War II.  Artists like Willem da Kooning and Helen Frankenthaler in New York explored the possibilities of abstraction.  The artists like Andy Warhol brought back imagery and ideas from the world getting away 
from purely formal concerns about art itself.

Nov 6:    Provocation Intended (Art after 1960).  Some artists like Ellsworth Kelly tried to reduce art to its purest essentials.  Others, like Robert Smithson, made art to be outside the commercialism of the booming art market or rejected any attempt to set limits on what can be art.  Artists like Fred Wilson and the 
Guerrilla Girls challenged who and what gets accepted into the canon of art.  We'll explore some works 
that, even though they come from the last century, still have the power to shock us.

(Information and registration for any or all classes at 248 644-5832 or on line)