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Course 8 – Summer School on Campus

Monday 22- Friday 26 June 2026

Dr Natalia Murray

£695

Course Description:

This course examines the role of collectors, dealers, and exhibitions in the formation of modern art in Paris, Vienna, London, Moscow and Munich. In these lectures and during afternoon visits, we shall discuss the ways in which dealers directed collectors’ purchases and thereby helped shape contemporary taste. We shall also explore if and to what extent dealers influenced what artists created, and how these works were presented, disseminated and received, by way of prominent exhibitions, and in art journals and reproductive prints.

Picasso’s dealer, Daniel Kahnweiler, was responsible for the titles of Picasso’s and Braque’s Cubist paintings, while the Berlin-based dealer Paul Cassirer provided German artists with access to the paintings of Van Gogh, without which German Expressionism might not have developed. The critic, painter and arbiter of taste Roger Fry introduced British audiences to avant-garde French art in his groundbreaking exhibitions at the Grafton Galleries in 1910 and 1912, for which he coined the label ‘Post-Impressionism’. And the major promoter of Impressionism, Paul Durand-Ruel, who sent Monet’s Haystacks��to the 1896 Impressionist exhibition in Moscow, was pivotal in Kandinsky’s decision to become an artist and to pursue abstraction. The sponsorship of leading collectors meanwhile enabled artists to create some of their most outstanding work – Sergei Shchukin, for instance, commissioned Matisse’s Dance��and Music.