Great Courses – From Monet to Van Gogh: A History of Impressionism

The Pound Ridge Library is pleased to announce the continuation of a series of lectures which mark the eleventh year of courses which are part of the library’s continuing presentation of a new educational concept in life-long learning: a series of DVD seminars from The Teaching Company/The Great Courses encompassing a wide variety of subjects, given by outstanding scholars from major colleges and universities throughout the United States. This program, the first of its kind in the country, is designed to provide collegial, small group-setting for courses “you didn’t get to take at college, but wanted to.” The seminars, developed and moderated by Lawrence Brotmann of Pound Ridge, NY are held at the library on Thursdays at 12:30 pm and consist of four 30-minute (closed-captioned) lectures per session, most from 3 to 6 weeks per course.

Course Overview
They appeared in a period of upheaval. They saw the rebuilding of Paris, the rise of industrialism, the ruin of the Franco-Prussian war. They displayed their startling and shocking works in a series of exhibitions from 1874 to 1886. And by the 1890s, this “loose coalition” of artists who rebelled against the formality of the French Academy had created the most famous artistic movement in history. “They” were the Impressionists, and Professor Brettell is your expert curator and guide to a movement that created a new, intensely personal vision of the world.

Whether the subject was a city street, a holiday beach, a harvest field, or a demoiselle’s boudoir, they virtually invented the sensibility—urbane, contemporary, ever-changing—that today we take for granted as the “modern.”

Who were the Impressionists? What’s the difference between a Manet and a Monet? How does a Pissarro landscape differ from one by Cézanne? Were they really as personally scandalous as the Establishment alleged?

And why is Impressionism, a 19th-century phenomenon, still so appealing in the 21st?