ART TOURS


Overview

It is no surprise that we find art interesting and enjoyable. New for 2007, Kalyan Parker has started presenting art history tours in the City of Chicago. Parker's tours are presented in an informed and exciting manner for all audiences, from children to tourists to senior citizens. 



Tour Locations

Most of our tours take place or begin at the Art Institute of Chicago. If your group requires an art tour at an alternative location, please let us know, and if possible, we will make arrangements to accommodate your request. If there are enough participants, Kalyan Parker can conduct art history tours in major cities across the United States and Europe.

 

Twentieth-Century Art Tour

This tour is an exciting survey of the history of painting, sculpture, and architecture of the United States from 1900 to the present. The tour begins with the influence of European styles upon American artists at the 1913 Armory Show. The tour then traces the transformation of art through WWI and WWII where American art comes to dominate the world stage during the Cold War. As American culture developed and changed during the Cold War, so too did its visual culture; major artists such as Georgia O'Keeffe, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Franz Kline, Marcel Duchamp, and Andy Warhol will be surveyed.

 
Late-Nineteenth-Century Art Tour

This enlightening tour focuses on the later nineteenth century art movements, primarily the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist movements.  Painters including Monet, Degas, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Seurat, Gauguin, and Matisse will be surveyed. The new forms of painting developed by these artists to represent their experience of the modern world will be explored. Themes will include the image of Paris and its suburbs in Impressionism, the relation between painting and the new media of photography and cinema, the rise of abstraction, the idea of the "primitive" in Post-Impressionism, and the gendered nature of modern art.

 
Nineteenth-and-Twentieth-Century Art Tour

This tour reveals the depth of Modernism. Many people are actually surprised to learn how all of the art movements during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries played a role in the origin of the Modernist movement. This tour will explore how each movement tried to make a clean break from the past. The range of artistic roles will be examined, including the artist as revolutionary, entrepreneur, isolated genius, and impassive observer. The century's formative movements and major artists-such as Courbet, Delacroix, Turner, Rodin, Manet, Monet, and Van Gogh-will be surveyed.
 

Seventeenth-Century and Eighteenth-Century European Art

This awe-inspiring tour surveys the major stylistic iconographic trends in seventeenth- and eighteenth century painting in Italy, Spain, France, Holland, England, and Germany. The tour will focus on the impact on art and artists by religious orders, emerging modern European states, capitalism, and global expansionism. The stylistic and iconographic trends such as the Baroque, Rococo and the origins of Neoclassicism will be discussed through the works of such diverse artistic personalities as Caravaggio, Velasquez, Poussin, Rembrandt, Rubens, Boucher, and Fragonard.