A new century brought with it aspects of the traditionalism of the previous era, with some artists continuing the themes of the Pre-Raphaelites. However, key factors, including the significant number of women artists studying at the Slade and Roger Fry’s organisation of a Post-Impressionist exhibition in London, contributed to the development of modernism. Two World Wars devastated a generation of young men and artists both at home and at the Front responded with both horror and sympathy to what they witnessed. Pop Art celebrated the optimism of post-War Britain in the Swinging Sixties. This confident attitude continued during the ‘Cool Britannia’ of the 1990s with the Young British Artists (YBAS). The artists who dominated this latter movement became household names, their work and attitude scandalised and fascinated in equal measure. 

This era was marked by political upheavals including two World Wars. Course 2 will look at how artists responded to such catastrophes. Subjects not visible to the naked eye, such as the human psyche were explored in very different ways in both Abstraction and Surrealism. Dadaism, a protest against society and the futilities of war, gave us some of the most radical works in the history of art. Artists such as Picasso, who had spent the first decade of the Twentieth Century upending the conventions of art, would abandon such aims and instead call for a ‘return to order’, celebrating classical art. We will look in-depth at the key figures and styles which dominated European art in the first half of the 20th Century and consider how their efforts would ultimately transform art on a global level.

France, by the 1800s was seen by many as the main centre for developments in the avant-garde art of the time. Walter Benjamin described Paris as 'the capital of the 19th Century', home to some of the most progressive artistic minds in history and a city determined to be at the forefront of artistic expression. As the Capital evolved politically, socially and culturally, its artists responded either enthusiastically or with reservation to these new changes. From the Napoleonic era to the Haussmanisation of Paris during the Second Empire and the rise of the bourgeoisie; artists including Édouard Manet were confronted with new sights and attitudes which became subjects for their work. Set against this progression was the Paris Salon, a bastion of academic traditions and at odds with radical artists. This course looks at key movements from Romanticism to Impressionism, Post-Impressionism and Symbolism.

This course traces the developments and trends, which dominated European art, from the dawn of the Renaissance in the early 15th Century, through to the first decades of the 19th Century when Romanticism came to the fore in both art and literature. We will explore the social, cultural and political factors, which contributed to the practices of painters and sculptors from a range of European locations. We will discover how many of these styles were often a reaction against those preceding them. Part 1 traces painting, sculpture and architecture from the Early Italian Renaissance to the Dutch Golden Age of the 17th Century.

In Part 2 we will examine the French Rococo of the 1700s and its spread across other European centres. British artists at this time had a very different approach to the subjects they depicted, influenced by the dramatically changing world around them. Neoclassicism, an antidote to the frivolity of Rococo, coincided with the excavation of major ancient sites including Pompeii and Herculaneum. The course finishes with an exploration of Romanticism, a European-wide movement unlike any style which had gone before it and one which celebrated the natural world but also visionary scenes of imagination, heroism and tragedy.