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Click to access the NPR podcast of Dr. With's lecture:  Kandinsky  

Wednesday, March 24, 6:45 pm, Goethe-Institut

Illustrated Art Lecture, "Wassily Kandinsky and the Rise of Modernism, 1890 - 1930"

by Christopher With, Senior Lecturer, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Abstract art was the most important innovation of the twentieth-century and the painter Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was a pivotal part of its evolution.  His initial training and first non-objective images were created in Munich between 1896 and 1914.  Forced to return to Russia as an enemy alien during the war, Kandinsky returned to Germany in 1922, this time as a faculty member of the Bauhaus.  Following the dissolution of the Bauhaus in 1933, Kandinsky moved to Neuilly-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris, where he died in 1944.   

Throughout his entire development as an artist and his maturation as a theoretical writer, Kandinsky's central belief was his devotion to inner beauty, to a deep spiritual desire; in short, to the dictates of a personal inner necessity.  In this realm both color and line express the artist's experience of a subject rather than describe its objective nature.  In art works created according to "inner necessity" colors and lines are freed of all narrative obligation and exist in their own right.  In a complex rhythmic dance they overlap and interplay one with another in a very free way to form paintings of extraordinary force and visual complexity.  This complexity--or internal disjunction--challenges the viewer to participate in the visual imagery and to recreate it according to his or her own radically subjective and purely phenomenological "inner necessities."   

Kandinsky likened this experience to listening to music and frequently gave his paintings titles like Improvisation and Composition.  Although the musical notes are ethereal, the listener composes an image in his/her mind according to the auditory prompts provided by the sounds and their notational arrangements.  "Color is the key." Kandinsky penned in 1912, "The eye is the hammer.  The soul is the piano with its many cords.  The artist is the hand that, by touching this or that key, sets the soul vibrating automatically."

Kandinsky's art has had incredible staying power in the decades since his death and it continues to be relevant among a broad array of contemporary painters around the world.  This is due both to the art works he created as well as to his explicit tracts on the theory and purpose of  abstract art.  His art exemplifies his theory and his theory is illustrated by his art.  Together they comprise the starting point and directional guide for all artists interested in non-representational painting. 

Composition X (1939), Wassily Kandinsky, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf/Germany

Refreshments will follow the lecture. 

Click here to RSVP.  Please specify 'AGS Lecture' 3/24 in the subject line.

Wednesday, May 19, 6:45 pm, Goethe-Institut

Annual Philosophy Lecture, "Erich Fromm:  The Development of Critical Social Theory"

by Martin J. De Nys, Associate Professor of Philosophy, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia.

Click here to RSVP.  Please specify 'AGS Lecture 5/19' in the subject line.

2010 Archive 

Wednesday, January 27, 6:45 pm, Goethe-Institut

Illustrated Literature Lecture, "The Tales of ETA Hoffmann"

by Dr. Francien Marxx, Assistant Professor of German, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia.

German writer, composer and painter ETA Hoffmann is known for stories in which supernatural and sinister characters move in and out of people's lives.  In this illustratec lecture, Dr. Marxx will use two of Hoffmann's tales to illustrate how his works and many talents inspired generations of authors and artists.

2009 Archive

Thursday, November 12, 6:45 pm, Goethe-Institut

Music Lecture, "Handel, Haydn and Mendelssohn:  Connections"

by Dr. Stephen Ackert, Head, Music Department, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

      G.F. Händel                                                        Joseph Haydn                                                             Felix Mendelssohn

Noting the coincidence between the 250th anniversary of the death of Georg Friedrich Handel (in 1759) and the 200th anniversary of the death of Josef Haydn and the birth of Felix Mendelssohn (both in 1809), Dr. Stephen Ackert, head of the music department at the National Gallery of Art, will lecture on the connections among the three composers.  Dr. Ackert will discuss the musical environments in which they were trained, which included Halle, Hamburg, and Vienna in the late 17th and early 18th century, and Berlin in the early 19th century.

Other connections to be discussed will include Haydn's encounters with the music of Handel while he was in England, Mendelssohn's indebtedness to both of his forebears, and the importance of the German language in the creative output of all three composers.

Admission is free and all are welcome.

Refreshments will follow the lecture.

Wednesday, May 13, 6:45 pm, Goethe-Institut

Philosophy Lecture,  "Hegel's Romance of Reason"

by Dr. Peter Kalkavage, Tutor, St. John's College, Annapolis, Md.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770 - 1831) was one of the last German Idealist philosophers whose system of thought grew out of the Critical Idealism of Immanuel Kant.  Hegel developed a dialectical process of logic in which the conflict of thesis and antithesis resolves at a higher level of synthesis, thus expounding a logic not of mere being but of becoming.   Hegel's first great work, Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), describes how the mind has risen from consciousness through self-consciousness, reason, spirit, and religion, to absolute knowledge.  Hegel's influence on academic disciplines such as history, law and religion, as well as on the ideas of existentialism and Marxism, has been immense.

Following the lecture, Dr. Kalkavage will be available to sign his book, The Logic of Desire:  An Introduction to Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, copies of which will be available for purchase courtesy of AGS for $15. 

Refreshments will follow the lecture -- including our annuall Waldmeisterbowle.

Wednesday, March 25, 6:45 pm, Goethe-Institute

"Max Beckmann," an illustrated art lecture

by Christopher With, Lecturer

National Gallery of Art

The work of expressionist painter and printmaker Max Beckmann (1884 - 1950) reflects the tragic events of the 20th century.  Forced to resign his professorship in Frankfurt after the Nazis declared his art 'degenerate', Beckmann fled to Amsterdam in 1937 and emigrated to the United States in 1947. He developed his mature style in St. Louis and subsequently in New York.  Among his most important works are the late triptychs which, though retaining many of his early violent themes, nevertheless affirm Beckmann's unshakable belief in the survival of the human spirit.  His numerous self-portraits provide a moving account of his spiritual journey.  For further information on Beckmann, his life and work, click here for a Wikipedia article (in English) or here for information (auf Deutsch) from the Burda collection.

Refreshments will follow the lecture.

2008 Archive

Thursday, May 8, 6:45 pm, Goethe-Institut

Lecture, “Schopenhauer’s Theory of Morality,”

by Professor Dale Snow

Loyola College in Maryland

Our philosophy lecture this year features Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860) who is generally considered the philosopher of pessimism. His main work of 1819, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Representation), presented a radical critique of Enlightenment belief in human reason as the ability to shape our environment – the world – and our own development as free and moral individuals. He was the first to introduce Buddhist principles into German philosophy. He saw self-abnegation and contemplation as the only defense against the overwhelming power of physical reality that constitutes our own bodies as well as the world in which we have to live. In the face of dominant Hegelian thought during the first half of the nineteenth century Schopenhauer did not find recognition until late in life. His work, Parerga und Paralipomena of 1851, which contains the “Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit”, made him widely popular. After his death, his thought exerted a powerful influence on such thinkers and artists as Nietzsche, Wagner, and Thomas Mann.

Despite his pessimistic world view Schopenhauer yet made room for moral behavior in his philosophy, presented in his work of 1841, Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik (The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics). In her lecture Professor Snow will focus on Schopenhauer’s insistence on moral responsibility. She will place Schopenhauer’s views in the context of twenty-first-century thinkers’ and scientists’ attempt to reduce human behavior to the operation of genes, family dynamics, or environments.

Refreshments to follow the lecture.