The Cowan Lecture Series

Wednesday, February 25, 2026

6:30 PM - 8:00 PM
Reception at 6:00 PM

Educator Members: Free
Non-Educator Members: $10
Non-Members: $20
Location: The MacMillan Institute | 518 East Wheatland Road | Duncanville, Texas 75116

A lecture series about things that matter in education and culture.

Wednesday, February 25: Dr. Robert Scott Dupree with a multi-media talk and presentation on “Three Masterpieces That Changed the Twentieth Century”

In the realms of art, music, and poetry, three works stand out as turning points in the development of twentieth-century modernism: Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (1913), and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). It is interesting to note that these three men were not only similar in a number of ways but Stravinsky later collaborated with Picasso and set some of Eliot’s poetry to music. In addition, their careers were also marked by parallels in their subsequent influences on some of the later primary shifts in themes and techniques of the decades to come of the century, from emerging anthropology and a reworking of classicism to the incorporation of emerging popular motifs not usually associated with the standard realms of the fine arts.

Below are two links from Dr. Dupree that provide a sense of how The Rite of Spring and The Waste Land were understood by succeeding decades of critics and others. 

  • Anthony Princiotti's Introduction to a series of podcasts devoted to explaining Igor Stravinsky's revolutionary music for the ballet The Rite of Spring: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPSZ9hasLss

  • Nancy Gish offers a helpful account of the reception of Eliot's most famous work in the six and a half decades following its publication. Read it here.

  • Dr. Dupree wrote a brief account of the reception history of Les Demoiselles. Read it here.

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