Dates:
November 04, 2010
Repeats every Thursday until November 18, 2010.
Times:
Thursdays, 5:30 p.m.
Location:
The Strand Theatre, Rockland
|
SERIES OVERVIEW: This three-part series conducted by Farnsworth Director of Education Roger Dell examines the idea of beauty throughout the ages in Western Europe and America, as well as in Asia, Africa, and Oceania. Using images from museums abroad and in this country, including works from the Farnsworth collection, Dell will trace the idea of what was considered beautiful in early Greek and Roman society to the different theories of beauty in other countries and finally to the current controversies about beauty in today’s art world.
November 4
The Body Perfect: The Greek and Roman Ideals of Beauty In the fifth century B.C. in Athens, the sculptor Polycleitus created a piece called “The Spear Bearer,” which depicted a male athlete standing in a relaxed pose while shouldering a spear. Polycleitus also calls the sculpture “The Canon,” because for him it summed up his theory of beauty which centered on symmetry. Moreover, he wrote a canon of beauty that outlined in theoretical mathematical terms the proportions a male should have if he is to be the perfect specimen of manhood. This lecture will consider the Greek words for beautiful (kalos) and beauty (to kalon) in their aesthetic, as well as moral, context. The lecture will conclude with a discussion of Roman portraiture and the differences between the idea of beauty during the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire.
November 11
Beauty Comes from Use: The Art of Asia and Africa Western theories of beauty are not universal; over time, other cultures and civilizations independently developed their own unique ideas about beauty. This lecture will survey theories of beauty from select countries as diverse as India, China, Japan and Africa. The bronze gods and goddesses of Gupta India, towering landscape paintings of Sung China, lopsided tea cups demonstrating wabi sabi from Muromachi, Japan, and seventy-five- pound wooden masks from West Africa will be discussed from the point of view of indigenous ideas about beauty. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Western artists discovered the art from these faraway places and began to reconsider their own ideas of beauty.
November 18
The Body Abject: The Death and Rebirth of Beauty During the “culture wars” in America of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the very words “beauty” and “the beautiful” were banned in certain academic and cultural circles. To some, those words were no longer relevant to the highly politicized period the country was experiencing, and they did not in any way describe the art that was being produced. This lecture will examine the work of artists Kiki Smith, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano and others who were at the center of controversies about the anti-aesthetic in art. Finally, the current state of affairs regarding the arts and the beautiful will be discussed with an eye toward the future of beauty in America.
Roger Dell is the Director of Education at the Farnsworth Art Museum. He has been the head of education at the Honolulu Academy of Arts, Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Fitchburg Art Museum. He has taught art history at the University of Hawai’i, Hofstra University, the University of Vermont and many other schools of higher education. For ten years he taught object-based teaching and learning in the Arts in Education Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He currently teaches museum education in the Museum Studies Program at the Harvard Extension School.
Location: Strand Theatre, Rockland
Cost: Series ticket—$20 members, $25 nonmembers; Individual ticket—$8 members, $10 nonmembers Reservations: please call 207-596-0949
|
|
Base Price: $20.00