Modern & Contemporary Art
Art History Courses Online & In London

Frida Kahlo was just one of many Mexican artists who brought together politics, identity, and an avant-garde spirit in their air, making Mexico City one of the most exciting art centres of the 1920s and 1930s. Looking at murals, prints, photographs, and paintings, this course in an introduction to a brilliant and thought-provoking movement.

Explore Romanticism as an international movement, focusing on Francisco Goya (1746-1828) as its key example, considering issues such as historic context, biography, material experimentation and artistic and theoretic interests.

This course will examine visual culture borne of World War One - experiences and responses, propaganda and commemoration in paintings, prints and sculptures.

This Friday Late art history course spotlights the work of artist Lubaina Himid, one of Britain's most thought provoking artists.

Discover how British design ideas influenced German design schools in the late nineteenth century and how that influence was reversed in the 1930s when artists, designers, writers and architects embraced Bauhaus and Modernist design as a way to revitalise postwar Britain, and Bauhaus teachers were refugees in London. But did they succeed in making Britain modern?

Study the stages of Picasso’s experimentation, including the Blue Period and Cubism, and key works, such as Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Guernica, within a variety of contexts - biographic, historic, political and artistic.

This course looks at key artists, movements and ideas in Western art from the late 1940s to the 1970s. From late modernism into postmodernism, it explores artists responding to World War II and social and cultural shifts. Examining how ideas, materials and form shaped artistic practice, movements covered include Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism, Arte Povera and Land Art, with case studies on Francis Bacon, Andy Warhol, Eva Hesse and Carolee Schneemann.

Explore the work of six influential female and non-binary photographers across a century of practice from 1920. Featuring Claude Cahun, Lee Miller, Dora Maar, Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, and Zanele Muholi, this course examines how each artist challenged convention, documented social realities, redefined the creative act of photography and the experience of being behind the lens.

Study work of artists such as Richard Hamilton, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol within the context of the international Pop Art movement and the changing world of mass culture, consumerism, and celebrity.

Marking a century since Gaudí’s death, this study-day explores his extraordinary architecture, and the rich world of Catalan Modernisme. From the Park Güell and Sagrada Família to the paintings of Ramon Casas, discover how Gaudí and his contemporaries transformed Barcelona.

Explore Impressionism as an art movement, focusing on Auguste Renoir (1849-1919) as its key example, considering issues such as social change, biography, material experimentation and artistic and theoretic interests.