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The people above are looking at an early painting by Picasso. What are they thinking? When they begin to discuss it, what might they say? And if there were another picture hanging beside it, as in the double image below, what might they say then?

Would they wonder if both of these were real people? If both children were the same age, the same sex, from the same social background? They might compare the expressions on the two faces: what are the childen feeling—what are the artists feeling? If that gets too subjective, they might discuss technical things instead: which painting is the more realistic, and what does each artist do with the non-realistic elements? How do the colors in each comprise a chord? What is the difference between Picasso's background and Gauguin's? Which picture makes them most conscious of the action of painting, of attacking the canvas with a loaded brush? And what… and which… and why…? There are many questions.

	At home with my grandfather

So what toolkit do you need in order to talk meaningfully about the arts? Some historical knowledge helps, of course, but that is easily enough acquired. Far more important is the ability to look, read, and listen, and the willingness to open your mouth. For asking questions of an artwork is the first step to insight, and one discussion leads to another, building experience and comfort and, yes, even knowledge. So this is a class built entirely on comparison and discussion. Rather than showing pictures or videos as illustrations of some theoretical point I may make, we shall start with the artworks themselves and I'll fill in the facts later. The goal is to use the process to build up that toolkit-for-talking, discovering as we go why some kinds of question typically prove more fruitful than others.

The first hour of each class will be devoted to the visual arts, because such comparisons are easy to set up and take less time to digest. Rather than attempting a chronological structure, which would put too early a premium on historical knowledge, I shall start with art that may be more familiar: Impressionists, Post-Impressionists, and later representational art. We'll then go on to various themes: art that tells a story, art that expresses a faith, and so on; some of these classes may tread on ground covered in previous courses, but this time we'll be looking with new eyes. Finally, we should be ready for periods, movements, and other art history stuff, such as the differences between renaissance and baroque. Along the way, I hope to introduce various modes of seeing proposed by writers in the past, but only after we have made discoveries of our own.

Fernand Khnopff: Listening to Schumann (detail, 1883)

In the second hour, I hope to introduce various other media, mostly music and poetry; I have given up my original intent to cover all the arts! The point is to see how far the technique of simple comparison can take us in each case. But I can't pretend to systematic coverage or that there will be much of a link between the two hours in most classes. Since these things take longer to digest than still images, I may post some texts, video clips, and/or recordings in advance for those who want to give them time, though I will play them again in class; all will be under 5 minutes.

I have had some formal study of most of these areas myself, though not all. But it's not necessarily an advantage. All too often, I find myself walking through a gallery, making mental notes like "That's a late Titian" or "That's influenced by Mannerism," and moving on. But then I'd realize that I had been checking things off, not really looking at them. I know there will be people in the class who have had considerable exposure to many of the fields under discussion. But the key to looking or listening is to postpone for as long as possible the moment when your knowledge kicks in, and approach everything as if for the first time. The more you know, the harder it can be!

Titian exhibition, Gardner Museum, Boston, December 2021. Guard approaching to stop me taking photos!

The classes will be delivered on Zoom. I hope to use various methods to elicit discussion and spread it as widely as possible among the participants, such as polls, chat-boxes, breakout rooms, and show of hands; it won't all be done by open mic. Given the experimental nature of the course, both the classes and the calendar will be shaped by your response; the classes listed below are proposals rather than predictions. Once the RESOURCES link under the images below turns GREEN, you can click on it to access any advance materials before class, and the usual gallery and video links after it. However, it makes no sense in this kind of course to issue my normal paper syllabus or class handouts in advance or work from written scripts.

Thank you for signing up! Roger.

The picture above, and those for each of the classes below, is in fact a double image, showing one of the comparisons that we shall discuss in class. Click on the pictures to alternate between them.

For the first class, we will start with what should be familiar territory: paintings by the French Impressionists. As they were friends and worked together, comparisons can be both close and meaningful. The two pictures above, for example, were painted by Monet and Renoir working side-by-side on the same day at a resort on the Seine. As their individual styles diverged, though, and many of the original group went their own ways, the comparisons become more complex. The second hour will be devoted to short descriptive pieces of piano music by Claude Debussy.

Two more artists, friends for the time being, painting the same subject in a similar style: Van Gogh and Gauguin in Arles. Gauguin would pack his bags in a few weeks and move to other phases in his career, exemplifying the ways in which these Post-Impressionist artists, together with Cézanne and others, would each make a giant leap away from Impressionist naturalism, and produce work that would inspire artists of the next century. In the second hour, we will compare moments from music and ballet by Maurice Ravel.

A classic portrayal of American life with (when you click) two of its predecessors. While remaining in the general period of the late 19th and early 20th century, we roam more widely to look at how artists have treated people in contemporary settings, alone or with others. The second hour will be devoted to poetry that reflects situations and inner states similar to those we shall have seen in the paintings. The title reflects the fact that all the pictures and poems happen to deal with people eating or drinking, whether in a cafe or on a picnic.

Moving beyond the relative quietness of the previous classes, we now look at paintings that explore extreme mental states or are otherwise charged with strong emotion. Not all will be as Angst-riddled as these three, however; other artists have used similar techniques to express energy or euphoria. Our second hour will be devoted to orchestral music.

With this class on landscape, we begin a series of four looking at different genres across a wide range of time, to see how artists adjusted the facts of the physical world to suit their own intentions. Shown here is one of the large-scale sketches that Constable typically made for his exhibition paintings; click to get the final work. In the second hour, we shall look again at poetry, this time as written in response to a special place.

Artists who earned their keep by painting portraits had to give their sitters what they wanted—or persuade them that what they get is what they really wanted but didn't know it! This dance between the sitter's actual appearance, their expectations, and the artist's own style gives portait-painting a unique fascination. In the second hour, we shall compare actors who have portrayed the same real person on film—a different kind of portraiture.

Two Victorian-era paintings of people on a boat. One of them tells a story. The other, despite containing an equal amount of detail, does not. What are the elements that make a picture into a narrative? And how have artists used them over the ages both to illustrate well-known stories and, more rarely, to tell new ones? We shall follow in the second hour with some music videos and short narrative movies.

When Jesus celebrated the Last Supper with his disciples, he was observing the Jewish celebration of Passover; despite its poor condition, Leonardo da Vinci's fresco in Milan is probably the best-known version of the story. So what does it mean when an Israeli artist makes his own version of the original, posing a photograph with his fellow soldiers during army service? We shall look at this and other comparisons that explore a genre where the spiritual meaning of an artwork is more important than the object itself. In the second hour, we will listen to religious music.

In the the final four classes, we will venture into questions of form and style, and how you distinguish between one period and another. The two slides above (which you can alternate by clicking) show different versions of a similar subject, one executed in the 1400s, the other in the early 1500s; art historians refer to this as the quattrocento and cinquecento respectively, or "Early Renaissance" and "High Renaissance." What are the fingerprints of each period, and can one apply such criteria to works by other artists? In the second hour, we shall explore the interplay of form and content in a different medium, poetry, with six sonnets about love, covering a span of four hundred years.

As a parallel to the images for the previous class, we see a similar comparison of two paintings and two sculptures, one of each pair from the High Renaissance and the other from the Baroque era of the 17th century. What are the differences between them? The title of this class might offer a clue, and it is a point we shall tease out further over a good range of artworks (mostly religious, but not all). For the second hour, we shall change periods completely, to look at another art of motion, the pas-de-deux in ballet.

Romantic painting of the earlier 19th century encompasses so many subjects that it is hard to choose just one to illustrate. The pictures by Delacroix and Goya shown here are both often cited as examples of the movement. Both depict revolutions; they have similarities, but are also very different. [Both these painters will be addressed in class, but the sequence of examples chosen has turned out to be rather different.] We shall attempt to tease out the various strands of a period that extolled the drama of violent adventure and unbridled imagination. We will continue in the second hour with films of the supernatural.

The comparison above is about as straightforward as we will get. The rest of this final class will focus on the arts of the Postmodern period since 1945, the breakdown of both realism and abstraction, and the search for new ways of putting real-world references into a pictorial composition and vaulting over the normal constraints of context, whether formal or historical. The result will be a collection of strange bedfellows and unexpected juxtapositions, in the visual arts, on the concert stage, in music videos, or in dance. A bit of stimulating bafflement to end the course!

My thanks to Uri Avin for his stimulus in developing some ideas for this course,
and to Aaron Sherber for helping make the technology work. rb.