About Moi: Dr. Beverly Held

Art and Travel are the touchstones of my life. With degrees in Art History (University of Pennsylvania - B.A. & M.A.) and a doctorate in Art History (University of Michigan), traveling for me means art. After a stint teaching Art History at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, and several years teaching art history at Bay Area colleges and universities from Stanford to San Francisco State, I founded a non-profit educational organization dedicated to life long learning. For fifteen years, I organized week long educational programs in and around San Francisco on a variety of topics, among them Art and Architecture, Food and Wine and Theater and Symphony, each drawing upon the rich cultural, culinary and viticultural resources of San Francisco and the Bay Area.

Soon I began to think about how I could welcome adult learners to the Dordogne, southwest France, an area with which I had fallen in love during my many trips to France. I found a property that I developed into a living and learning facility to accommodate 20 students. I offered programs on Cultural History and Food and Wine. I added a painters’ studio and began welcoming artists. I loved introducing people to the prehistoric caves and market towns; bastides (medieval planned towns) and historic chateaux; wineries and truffle farms.

In the past few years, I have begun spending more time in Paris. For an art historian, there is no better place in the world to be. The permanent collections of major art museums, like the Louvre and Musee d’Orsay are wonderful, of course, but it is the temporary exhibitions at the Grand Palais, Petit Palais and Luxembourg to which I am drawn. Of all the many opportunities to see and appreciate art in this wonderful city, what I await most eagerly are the temporary exhibitions that happen with wonderful frequency at the small museums of the city - those of collectors like the Jacquemart-Andre and Cognacq-Jay and those of artists like the Maillol, Marmottan, Zadkine and Bourdelle. I find the exhibitions at these small museums to be intellectually engaging and challenging. They often offer new insights, interpretations, contextualizations, indeed, new lenses through which we may look at works of art.