2 Audley Square
Mayfair, London W1K
UK
Established in 1994, THE COURSE offers exciting and innovative lectures in Art History, Literature, Music and Opera.
How can we know, before we ever go there, that a new place will exhilarate us? Painting, photography, fiction, travel-writing, and poetry can put us on the plane with expectations, and pictures in our minds, and of course we then match what they promise against the realities that await us. Afterwards, art and writing intensify what we found, show us sights we missed, clothing our memories of them in the aura of legend as they had our hopes, so we may wonder if they exist when we are not there. Exhilarating Places visits charismatic cultural centres of our world and others we have dreamed of and invented. They catch our eye and instantly deliver both real and imagined destinations in great art and writing.
Arcadia
The sub-title of Signac’s painting ‘The Golden Age Is Not In the Past’ seizes the idea of Arcadia as a blueprint for idyll in the present or future. Hesiod, Theocritus, Virgil, Catullus, Pausanias, Sidney, Sannazaro, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Marvell, Baudelaire, Stoppard, Whitman and Thomas crack its code in words, while art reveals it through Annibale Carracci, Poussin, Ingres, Corot, Lorrain, van Ruisdael, Böcklin, Gauguin, Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Chavannes, Maillol, and Thomas Cole.