“Mas­ter­pieces of West­ern Art” has been a degree require­ment at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty since 1947. The long-estab­lished  course is not your tra­di­tion­al his­tor­i­cal sur­vey. Rather, it focus­es on a select num­ber of artists and mon­u­ments, with the larg­er goal of help­ing stu­dents think crit­i­cal­ly about art. Over on iTunes, you can find some videos from the course. They cov­er the Amiens Cathe­dral, Raphael, Michelan­ge­lo, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling­wa­ter. These videos aren’t in lec­ture for­mat. Instead, they’re per­haps bet­ter described as visu­al tours. Although the clips don’t real­ly form a coher­ent whole, there are cer­tain­ly some good nuggets here. For 200 free uni­ver­si­ty cours­es, see our big list here.

Relat­ed Con­tent

Art­Bab­ble: The New Des­ti­na­tion for Art Videos

The Gates of Hell

The Art His­to­ry Web Book

World Dig­i­tal Library

The Frank Lloyd Wright Lego Set

Curi­ous piece in the Tele­graph. It starts:

He is known as the tor­tured genius who cut off his own ear as he strug­gled with men­tal ill­ness after the break­down of his friend­ship with a fel­low artist. But a new study claims Vin­cent Van Gogh may have made up the sto­ry to pro­tect painter Paul Gau­guin who actu­al­ly lopped it off with a sword dur­ing an argu­ment…

Ge the full sto­ry here.

This real­ly caught my eye…

If you did­n’t make it to the Mark Rothko exhi­bi­tion at the Tate Mod­ern (and chances are you did­n’t), then you can still see it vir­tu­al­ly. As you’ll see, the Tate Mod­ern has cre­at­ed a fan­tas­tic web site that lets you take a panoram­ic tour of the Rothko col­lec­tion. Once you enter the tour here, you should switch into full screen mode (look toward the bot­tom of screen), then use the arrows and your mouse to move around. You can move from room to room, and zoom in on var­i­ous paint­ings. Quite the way to see an exhi­bi­tion if you can’t make a long jour­ney.

Let me bring this to your atten­tion. Erwan Bom­stein-Erb, the founder and direc­tor of Canal Edu­catif in Paris, has released a doc­u­men­tary (in Eng­lish) about The Gates of Hell, a mon­u­men­tal project that Auguste Rodin worked on, not nec­es­sar­i­ly con­sis­tent­ly, for 37 years. On its own, this video is worth your time. But you should also know that this is one of ten films about major art­works that Bom­stein-Erb plans to pro­duce in HD. Canal Edu­catif is all about using the inter­net to pro­vide glob­al access to “cul­tur­al cap­i­tal.” A goal that we can whole­heart­ed­ly sup­port. This kind of phil­an­thropic ven­ture is hard to fund, espe­cial­ly dur­ing these dif­fi­cult times. So Bom­stein-Erb is look­ing for spon­sors and part­ners to sup­port his mis­sion. If you would like to get in touch, you can drop him a line through Canal Edu­cat­if’s web site. Last­ly, you should check out the Canal Edu­catif chan­nel on YouTube. Good luck Erwan.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Art His­to­ry Web Book