LANDSCAPE OF PLEASURE/TROUBLE IN UTOPIA

VOL. 3-LANDSCAPE OF PLEASURE: In this program we are lulled and delighted by the greatest Impressionist, Monet's monumental paintings of his lily pond at Giverny. Then to Provence to look at CeÌzanne's sublime late paintings. The liberation of color as the great trigger of free feeling was started by Gauguin on his doomed journey to the Pacific and was amplified by Derain and Matisse in the South of France after 1900. This region and the Mediterranean were a "mental landscape," a generator of key images of well-being that permeated the greatest French art for several decades. Braque's magnificent studio interiors and Picasso's erotic paintings reflect the personalizing of ecstasy. VOL. 4-TROUBLE IN UTOPIA: German visionary architects such as Scharoun, Finsterlin, Luckhardt, Taut planned their Wagnerian dreams with glass palaces in the Alps, as did Italians such as Sant' Elia and Chiattone. Then, Bauhaus and the functionalist faith-Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, le Corbusier, and the worldwide spread of the glass-box international style, with their concomitant social programs and delusions. The great myth of the architect as social legislator culminated in the town plans of le Corbusier, the speculations of Buckminster Fuller and came to an end in the strange wasteland of Brasilia.