Course Description

Après Atelier examines how a group of canonical atelier trained artists—Édouard Manet, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec—were exposed to traditional academic training and then redirected it into the groundbreaking work of late 19th and early 20th century art. Rather than treating the atelier as something these artists rejected, this class approaches academic training as a set of foundational tools that can be selectively reassembled. Through guided analysis, the course tracks how these artists repurposed those tools: how value is compressed, flattened, broken into strokes, or replaced by color; how drawing shifts from description to structure to symbolism; and how compositional logic persists even when finish and naturalism are abandoned.

Each session pairs atelier-based exercises with focused studies of these artists’ works, asking students to translate traditional methods into alternative modes of decision-making. Concepts such as proportion, shape replication and design, light effect, color, line, and gradient will be explored both in their application to traditional realism and in their residual presence within more stylized representations of life. The goal is not to imitate style—far from it—but to establish an understanding of how technical fluency can be repurposed: how a disciplined foundation can support clarity, intention, and invention.

Students should plan to spend at least four hours outside of class each week painting.

This class welcomes artists with some prior oil painting experience. This class is not for absolute beginners. If this is your first time working with oil paint, please enroll instead in Painting Orientation or Painting Light & Color 1.

The class will be conducted on the Zoom platform and is a live online experience.