Ever walk into MOMA and say, What the heck? I just don’t quite get this.
That’s the goal of an upcoming class I’m teaching this August, Thursday afternoons. My subject is modernism in the history of the arts. Using a series of “case studies,” I’m trying to describe what these works were trying to do and why they came along when they did.
Why did surrealism and abstract art take over the museums in the Roaring Twenties? How did symphonic music jump from Beethoven to Stravinsky, and why was Charlie Parker’s version of jazz one that broke from his peers? How were the revolutionary choices these artists made echoed in poetry, which suddenly dropped pretense along with its punctuation? What did the novels of Virginia Woolf have in common with Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs? And what was up with Duchamp and his bathroom fixtures?
My goal is to set these disruptions in the creative world in the context of cultural and political history by focusing on them as case studies. Rather than rush through a flurry of all the –isms, the tack taking by most modern art survey courses, I will focus just a few. Instead of stuffing in everything from a single art form, I will cross forms in an interdisciplinary way.
The class will cover eight iconic works by Picasso, e.e. cummings, Mondrian, Charlie Parker, Stravinsky & Njinsky, Virginia Woolf, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Marcel Duchamp.
These four two-hour afternoon sessions will help decode MOMA for you in a new way and provide a methodology to approach other works created in the early twentieth century.
The course is $100 and taught through OLLI East Bay. OLLI courses are unique in offering a chance to cover college-level topics without college-level papers, quizzes, exams, or grades. Participation during class will be encouraged but not required.
OLLI East Bay offers courses year-round, some in person in Concord, California, but many others, like mine, available online to any member.
For more information and registration, go online and view the August course schedule by clicking the link here. (Note, the online course description mentions Faulkner, but we’re going to cover Woolf instead.)
Questions? Feel free to send me a comment, and I can follow up.