Paid tickets required
Members: $80
Nonmembers: $100

This course concentrates on the development of architecture, painting, and sculpture in Italy from the late thirteenth century into the sixteenth century. The final lecture investigates art produced north of the Alps during that same period. We’ll explore issues such as the awareness of antiquity, a growing secular patronage, and the creation of new materials.

• The Art of Florence and Siena in the Fourteenth Century
• Fifteenth-Century Florentine Art
• High Renaissance and Mannerist Art
• Northern European Art in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries

Paid tickets required
$100 ($80 members)

Pablo Picasso once described his mural-scaled painting Guernica as revealing “the inside and outside of a room,” and Georges Braque called the simultaneous views of Cubist works “a house drawn in plan, section, and elevation.” This course explores the rich interplay between avant-garde artists and architects during the years highlighted by the Picasso and the Avant-Garde in Paris exhibition, when artists and architects struggled to give form to the modern Zeitgeist or “Spirit of the Times.”

• Cubism as Catalyst: Mondrian and the De Stijl Environment
• Building for Political Revolution: Malevich, El Lissitsky, and Constructivism
• From Glass House to Bauhaus: Expressionism and the International Style
• Architecture after Cubism: Léger, Le Corbusier, and Purism as Built Form

Paid tickets required
Members: $80
Nonmembers: $100

Clashes among artists are as timeless as art itself. This course examines four such rivalries, from the 1600s to the late twentieth century, when the rational/Apollonian artists often bitterly disagreed with the more irrational/Dionysian ones. In some cases, the conflict was especially sour. In others, the line between amicable collaboration and antagonistic competition was often blurred.

• The Line/Color Controversy: Nicolas Poussin and Peter Paul Rubens
• Pathos vs. Ethos: Eugène Delacroix and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres
• Conflicting Impressions: Edgar Degas and Édouard Manet
• Dissolving Boundaries, Creating New Ones: Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns

Paid tickets required
$100 ($80 members); ticket required (Buy the series and get the fifth lecture free!)

Why is Thomas Eakins’s Gross Clinic considered a masterpiece? Why was Philadelphia eighteenth-century furniture arguably the best in the colonies? Explore the Museum’s premier collections of American art— from porcelain to pewter and paintings from Peale to Pop Art —in this five-lecture course. Co-presented by the Museum’s Center for American Art

• American People, American Places: The Meaning of Portrait and Landscape Art, from the Eighteenth Century to the Civil War (KF)
• Impressionism and America’s Gilded Age (MM)
• Design and Decorative Arts in the Age of Industrialization (JB)
• Furnishings for American Homes, from William Penn to George Washington (DB)
• A Strand for Every Artist: The All-Inclusive Tapestry of American Art Since 1950 (MP)

Paid tickets required
Members: $48
Nonmembers: $60
Enrollment limited, please register in advance

Back by popular demand! There are many ways to approach a work of art. This course offers an opportunity for close study and informal discussions in the galleries. Each evening we’ll look at one work of art, allowing time for conversation and questions. As a group, we’ll enrich each other’s understanding. On the last evening, we’ll continue conversation over dessert and coffee. Especially recommended for those who are new to looking at art and recent college graduates, but all are welcome!