
The Bard Travel Program has been a longstanding part of the MA program. Led by faculty, these two-week international trips not only give the first-year MA class a chance to see many of the objects, artwork, and architecture covered during their first year of studies, but offer behind the scenes access to collections. Anchored by our international partnerships with the Royal College of Art, the Ecole du Louvre, and the Humboldt University in Berlin, we’ve recently added the opportunity for students to participate in archaeological fieldwork in Greece as part of this program. We look forward to resuming this trip in the summer of 2022.
A series of guided tours to museums and architectural monuments left us happily exhausted each evening. In addition to the predictable museum visits, including the magnificent Neues Museum, renovated by David Chipperfield, the Bode Museum, where we were privileged to have a curatorial tour by chief curator Julien Chapuis, and the Museum der Dinge, we spent a fascinating morning at the Tieranatomisches Theater, part of the Hermann von Helmholtz Center for Cultural Techniques at the Humboldt University, with its director and curator. We walked the perimeter of the highly controversial new Humboldt Forum, hearing about its transformation over the course of the twentieth century, from Hohenzollern Royal Palace to People’s Palace to what it is about to become, Berlin’s Ethnological Museum and Museum of Asian Art. Berlin’s difficult past is never far from the surface, as we found as we toured the former Luftwaffe Headquarters, the Propaganda Ministry, the reconstructed Reichstag, and the vast outdoor Holocaust Memorial designed by Peter Eisenman. A city with both fascinating and profound local history, and global reach, Berlin was an ideal destination for our first-year students.
At the Louvre, seminars concentrated on the apartments of Napoleon III (with curator Anne Dion) and the newly-installed galleries of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French decorative arts (with curator Frédéric Dassas); at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the group looked in depth at the creative dialogue between Asian and European ceramics (with curator Béatrice Quette) and at the distinctive materials, methods, and styles of French furniture making from the fourteenth through nineteenth centuries. Capping a focus on late nineteenth-century Paris at the Musée d’Orsay, the group visited what all agreed was a standout of the program: the sumptuous love nest (now a private club) constructed on the Champs-Élysées for the Russian-born courtesan Esther Lachmann, soi-disant marquise de la Païva, who spared no material, iconography, or expense to announce her arrival at the top of the city’s demimonde and the power of a liberated woman to achieve her dreams.
The project focuses on a sanctuary of Apollo and Artemis which flourished from Archaic times. In recent years the site produced exceptionally interesting material, such as a deposit of votives (terracotta figurines, ivory plaques, faience vessels, and jewelry) sealed under the floor of the main temple as well as domestic structures pre-dating the establishment of the sanctuary. The finds provide rare insight into the political dynamics of the region that led to the consecration of the site and the motivations that prompted worshippers to visit this remote sanctuary and address its deities with gifts.
Students were trained in relevant field skills, such as stratigraphic and
architectural recording and the processing of small finds. They examined finds
from previous years in the store rooms of the Paros Museum and were given an
introduction to the architectural restoration program by the marble carvers
working on Despotiko. Other highlights included a visit to the underground
quarries on Paros, famed throughout antiquity for their pure-white lychnitis
marble, and regular opportunities for recovery from physical toil at nearby
beaches and gastronomic établissements.