2 Audley Square
Mayfair, London W1K 1DB
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.
Bruges
George Rodenbach’s powerful story Bruges-la-Morte inspired an opera and a novel made into a film often acclaimed as the greatest ever (Hitchcock’s Vertigo). It was the first work of fiction to be published with photographs, featured here alongside Lucien Levy Dhurmer’s own atmospheric illustrations, the art of Jan van Eyck, Hans Memling, The Master of the Legend of St Lucy, Hugo van der Goes, Gerard David, Henri Le Sidaner, Pissarro and Bruges’s Gothic and Renaissance architectures.