In the first class we will look at images of aging by artists associated with the avant-garde and modernism after 1850 and up to World War II. We will discuss ways in which images of old men and old women related to artistic goals, cultural contexts, the gender of the artists and subject, and attitudes toward time, medicine, death and dying. You will be invited in this first session to consider reasons why in western art modernists depicted aging in problematic ways.
