Art & Art History

Please note that the ‘last booking’ date is only a guide. Courses may close earlier. In order to avoid disappointment, please be sure to enrol as soon as possible. Registrations may not be processed until the following day if received after 3pm. 

Public Art is often our first encounter with fine art; it may range from figurative sculpture, or a memorial, to a contemporary avant-garde piece. Liverpool is home to a vast collection of public artworks dotted throughout the city and wider Merseyside, some works are today highly controversial, others less so. Some reflect changing aesthetic tastes, whilst others seek to provoke discussion and contemplation. This five-week course introduces you to some of the most significant works of Public Art in Liverpool, encouraging you to look again at these often familiar, sometimes overlooked works. 

Number of Meetings

5

Course Leader

Ed Williams

CRN 28150/CEPD4000

Course Fees

Course Fee: Standard Fee: £80/Concession £40

Please note that the ‘last booking’ date is only a guide. Courses may close earlier. In order to avoid disappointment, please be sure to enrol as soon as possible. Registrations may not be processed until the following day if received after 3pm. 

The short, turbulent and fugitive life of Caravaggio is famously dramatic. This day-school returns to the paintings themselves, however, in order to explore their complex presentations with more precision. Join us, as we attempt to get the measure of the extraordinary powerful and original art that Caravaggio produced in Rome, southern Italy and the Mediterranean, and to place it back into its social, historical and art-historical contexts, so that it works on its own terms and stands somewhat apart from the life of the artist that produced it.

Number of Meetings

1

Course Leader

Dr Peter Finch

CRN 28154/CEPD4000

Course Fees

Course Fee: Standard Fee: £55

Please note that the ‘last booking’ date is only a guide. Courses may close earlier. In order to avoid disappointment, please be sure to enrol as soon as possible. Registrations may not be processed until the following day if received after 3pm. 

From about 2600 BC Egyptian art had evolved a very distinctive style. This included the use of registers, ideal proportions, a preference for figures in profile, a limited use of frontality, size as an indicator of status and the incorporation of more than one viewpoint and multiple moments of time, in a single image. The use of colour was also highly meaningful with many references in the Book of the Dead to which colour and material to use for a particular amulet.  This course will compare the traits evident in the principles of Egyptian art to two-dimensional representations from the Prehistoric Aegean and Ancient Greece during this period, highlighting similarities and differences. In addition, evidence for the use of colour in the art of the latter societies will be compared to its use in Egyptian art, providing an introduction to art and design in these two major ancient societies in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Number of Meetings

4

Course Leader

Dr Joanne Backhouse and Dr Gina Muskett

CRN 28152/CEPD4000

Course Fees

Course Fee: Standard Fee: £60/Concession £30

Please note that the ‘last booking’ date is only a guide. Courses may close earlier. In order to avoid disappointment, please be sure to enrol as soon as possible. Registrations may not be processed until the following day if received after 3pm. 

Spanning the tumultuous and uncertain years between 1848-1996 this course examines the rich visual history of Parliamentary political backbiting and popular agitation in Liverpool from about the time of the end of the European potato failure and the start of the Irish War of Independence. Through the media of political cartoons, paintings, engravings and drawings as well as the caricature of magazines such as 'Punch'; the difficulties of leading Liverpudlian figures of the day such as PMs Edward Smith Stanley and William Ewart Gladstone as well as MPs such as T. P. O'Connor and artists such as Walter Crane are adumbrated, in a bid to explain how and why Liverpool became such a hotbed of left wing dissent. Designed to appeal to anybody with an interest in Liverpool history, art, culture, social history and of course politics.

Number of Meetings

5

Course Leader

Dr Lee Kendall

CRN 28151/CEPD4000

Course Fees

Course Fee: Standard Fee: £80/Concession £40

Please note that the ‘last booking’ date is only a guide. Courses may close earlier. In order to avoid disappointment, please be sure to enrol as soon as possible. Registrations may not be processed until the following day if received after 3pm. 

This course will investigate the gradual emergence of a recognisably ‘Renaissance’ style of Italian art over the period 1400-1430, considering a range of centres of artistic production but with particular emphasis on Florence. We will look at a series of major works of painting and sculpture, in order to track how a new and distinctive style of art came gradually into dominance through a complex jostling and mixing of styles (not least through the paradox of artists inventing their own versions of an ‘antique’ classicism). 

The course aims to provide participants with a detailed account of the contest of styles in early Quattrocento art (especially in Florence), to help them understand the process that by 1430 had led to the emergence of an increasingly dominant and distinctive mix of characteristics that we now term the ‘Renaissance’ style of Italian art.

Number of Meetings

10

Course Leader

Dr Peter Finch

CRN 28153/CEPD4000

Course Fees

Course Fee: Standard Fee: £155/Concession £80