The Course / The History of Art in Ten Colours (Black) 9/10

When:
June 27, 2019 @ 10:45 am – 12:45 pm
2019-06-27T10:45:00+01:00
2019-06-27T12:45:00+01:00
Where:
The Course at The University Womens Club
2 Audley Square
Mayfair, London W1K 1DB
UK
Cost:
£59.00
Contact:
Mary Bromley
020 7266 7815

Established in 1994, The Course offers exciting lectures in Art History, Literature and

Music.Hockney “I prefer living in colours”

The very term ‘colour’ is used differently in the C21st. This course traces the fascinating history of pigments: where they came from, how they were created, and how they have changed the course of art history. It’s a story that will take us from a single mine in Afghanistan to the serendipitous discovery of a fraudulent alchemist in Berlin to a contemporary patent for the blackest black imaginable. We’ll consider both the materiality of colours – for instance, the impact of ‘fugitive’ pigments and dyes that disappear in time – and their shifting symbolism in different cultural contexts. Re-discover paintings you thought you knew by seeing them digitally returned to their ‘real’ colours and forge new connections between artists.

Black Hans Arp

“The black grows deeper and deeper darker and darker before me. It menaces me like a black gullet. I can bear it no longer. It is monstrous. It is unfathomable”

One of the most difficult colours to paint with, see how masters such as Frans Hals, Caravaggio, Degas, Goya, Manet, Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, and more succeeded in using black. What did Malevich mean by his iconic ‘Black Square’? How is bone black made? From the drawings of Aubrey Beardsley to the fashions of Coco Chanel, to Picasso’s ‘Guernica,’ and the innovations of Anish Kapoor, see this colour in all its manifestations.