Public Programmes

The Courtauld Institute of Art aims to help visitors of all ages and experience gain further understanding of The Courtauld Gallery collections. Our Online Learning resources foucs on the exhibition programme in the gallery.

For details please contact Joff Whitten:
t: 0207 848 2705 e: joff.whitten@courtauld.ac.uk

For podcasts, videos and a virtual tour of the Gallery, please see our multimedia pages

• Toulouse-Lautrec and Jane Avril: Beyond the Moulin Rouge

• Life, Legend, Landscape: Victorian Drawings and Watercolours
• Cézanne's Card Players
• Michelangelo's Dream
• Frank Auerbach: London Building Sites 1952-62
• Beyond Bloomsbury: Designs from the Omega Workshops 1913-19
• Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence: The Courtauld Wedding Chests
• Paths to Fame: Turner Watercolours from the Courtauld
• Courtauld Cezannes
• Renoir at the Theatre: Looking at La Loge
  
  
  

---

Currently at the Courtauld Gallery

Mondrian || Nicholson: In Parallel

16 February - 20 May 2012

Image credits, l-r:  Ben Nicholson, 1937, The Courtauld Gallery, London, Piet Mondrian Composition C (No III) with Red, Yellow and Blue, Private collection on loan to Tate © 2012 Mondrian/Holtzman Trust c/o HCR International Washington DC; Piet Mondrian in Hampstead, c.1939-1940, photographer: John Cecil Stephenson, Tate Archive, London; 

This exhibition explores the largely untold relationship between Piet Mondrian and Ben Nicholson during the 1930's. At this time the two artists were leading forces of abstract art in Europe.

Their friendship culminated with Mondrian moving to London in 1938, at Nicholson's invitation, where the two worked in neighbouring Hampstead studios at the centre of an international community of avant-garde artists. 

The exhibition brings together an extraordinary group of major paintings and reliefs to explore the parallel paths Mondrian and Nicholson charted during this exciting decade. It reveals how each was driven by a profound belief in the potential of abstract art to create new forms of beauty and visual power. 

.

Download a copy of the Teachers' Resource

Find out more about the exhibiton and our related events

---

PREVIOUS EXHIBITIONS at the Courtauld Gallery

Toulouse-Lautrec and Jane Avril: Beyond The Moulin Rouge

16 June – 18 September 2011

Jane Avril, the dancer, was one of the stars of the Moulin Rouge in the 1890s.  Known for her alluring style and exotic persona, her fame was assured by a series of dazzlingly inventive posters designed by the artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Jane Avril became an emblematic figure in Lautrec’s world of dancers, cabaret singers, musicians and prostitutes. She was also a close friend of the artist and he painted a series of striking portraits of her which contrast starkly with his exuberant posters.

This landmark exhibition is the first to celebrate this remarkable creative partnership which has to come to define the world of the Moulin Rouge. Bringing together Toulouse-Lautrec's most famous paintings, posters and prints from international collections, it captures the excitement and spectacle of bohemian Paris in the 1890s.

Download a copy of the Teachers' Resource: Toulouse-Lautrec and Jane Avril

Exhibition Events

Find out more about the exhibiton

LIfe, Legend, Landscape: Victorian Drawings and Watercolours

17 February - 15 May 2011

This exhibition presents a rich selection of Victorian drawings and watercolours from The Courtauld Gallery’s world-famous collection. Many of these works will be shown for the first time. They range from exquisite highly finished watercolours to informal sketches and preparatory drawings for paintings and sculpture.

Major artists of the Victorian era are featured, from J.M.W. Turner and Edwin Landseer to Whistler and Aubrey Beardsley. Among the highlights are striking works by the Pre-Raphaelites Rossetti, Millais and Burne-Jones.

Splendid landscapes, intimate portraits and scenes from literature and everyday life reveal the Victorian preoccupation with nature, myth and legend, as well as the living model. More

Download a copy of the free gallery resource leaflet: Drawing on the Past

Exhibition Events

---

CÉZANNE'S CARD PLAYERS

21 October 2010 - 16 January 2011

Paul Cézanne’s famous paintings of peasant card players have long been considered to be among his most iconic and powerful works. This landmark exhibition is the first to bring together the majority of these remarkable paintings alongside a magnificent group of closely related portraits of Provençal peasants and rarely seen preparatory oil sketches, watercolours and exquisite drawings.

The Courtauld Gallery’s two masterpieces from this series, The Card Players and Man with a Pipe, are joined by exceptional loans from international collections, including the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, to offer a visual feast of some of the artist’s finest paintings.

Find out more about the exhibition.

A series of events accompanied the exhibition.

Watch three films about the exhibition


Download a copy of the free gallery leaflet


Download a copy of the Teachers' Resource

---

Michelangelo's Dream

18 February - 16 May 2010

Michelangelo’s masterpiece The Dream is one of the greatest of all Renaissance

drawings. This complex work shows a nude youth being roused by a winged spirit

from the vices that surround him.

The Dream was probably part of the celebrated group of drawings which Michelangelo made as gifts for Tommaso de' Cavalieri, a young Roman nobleman with whom he had fallen passionately in love. With loans from international collections, the exhibition unites The Dream for the first time with these extraordinary drawings.

Michelangelo’s Dream also included a selection of previously unexhibited handwritten

poems which the artist composed for Cavalieri. Further closely related drawings by

Michelangelo as well as works by Albrecht Dürer and others shed light on the meaning of Michelangelo’s enigmatic masterpiece.

Accompanying the exhbition was the full resources we offer to teachers, lecturers and educators including Teachers Packs, Online Videos, Podcasts and free exhibition in context leaflets. There was also a special series of events focussing on the exhibition including gallery talks, late events in the gallery, gallery music events, focussed school projects and creative links with partner Higher Education Institutions.

Find out about the special event series

Watch three movies about the exhibition

Listen to five podcasts of sonnets by Michelangelo

To download a copy of the free gallery leaflet on paper and paper conservation click below

Works on Paper: Michelangelo's Dream in context

To download a copy of the Michelangelo Teachers' Resource click below

MICHELANGELO'S DREAM TEACHERS RESOURCE

---

EXHIBITIONs Archive