Themes in art history

Course Content:
The Story of Art



Term one begins in the late Middle Ages and takes us through the various periods of the Renaissance, followed by the Baroque and Rococco periods and into the 19th century with the Romantics, Realists and Impressionists.


Term two takes us from the 19th century into the 20th and 21st - making sense of all those twentieth-century 'isms': Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, Pop, etc, etc - right up to the so-called Young British artists, Tracy Emin and Grayson Perry.


Term three will look at the influence of art on design. We'll be looking at: product and decorative design; architecture; graphics; furniture, fabrics and fashion from the time of the Great Exhibition in 1851, through The Arts and Crafts movement in Britain, Art Nouveau and Art Deco, De Stijl in the Netherlands, The Bauhaus in Germany and the Russian Constructivists. All these movements included several artists we shall be looking at in the second term. We shall look at their influences on Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe and other important modern architects and see how fashion designers like Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiaparelli worked with artists on their designs. Later, we'll look at the post-modern, pop art-inspired furniture design of Robert Venturi in the USA and the Memphis group in Italy, and more contemporary designers like Ron Arad, Saha Hadid and others.