Rodin, De Kooning and the Impressionists at SAS

The Scarsdale Adult School is offering an intriguing choice of art appreciation courses designed specifically to enhance your experience at current and upcoming exhibits in New York City museums. Don’t miss out on these courses on Rodin, De Kooning and the Impressionists.

On Tuesday, October 25, 2011, Jane Mayo Roos, professor emerita of art history at Hunter College and the Graduate Center in New York, traces the astonishing career of Auguste Rodin. The lecture explores how Rodin, who was born in poverty and denied artistic training, emerged to become one of history’s most renowned sculptors. This class meets from 1 to 3 p.m. at Wayside Cottage at a cost of $30.

“De Kooning and Friends: Exploring the New York School Post World War II” is a two-session series that complements and prepares students to view the de Kooning retrospective currently at the Museum of Modern Art. Instructor Rick Starr, on the art department faculty at Rye Country Day School, will delve into Willem de Kooning’s abstract expressionist paintings as well as his association with other New York artists such as Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky, Mark Rothko, and Robert Motherwell. This $50 class meets on Thursdays from 7:15 to 9:15 p.m. beginning October 27, 2011, at the Scarsdale High School.

In “The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde,” instructor Elizabeth Thompson Colleary, art teacher at the Scarsdale High School and consultant at the Whitney Museum of American Art, will lecture on the works to be featured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from February to June 2012. The American expatriate Stein family living in bohemian Paris—writer Gertrude, her brothers Leo and Michael, and Michael’s wife, Sarah—were among the first to recognize the talents of avant-garde painters like Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. The coming exhibition will be the first time in a generation that dozens of the Steins’ holdings, including works by Matisse, Picasso, Paul Cezanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Henri de Toulouse Lautrec, will be reunited. This $50 two-part lecture series meets on Mondays from 7 to 8:30 p.m. at the Scarsdale High School beginning November 7, 2011.

To register, please visit www.ScarsdaleAdultSchool.org or call (914) 723-2325 with any questions.