Forthcoming lectures
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Thursday 21st October 2021 at Phyllis Court
10.45am and 2.15pm Lecturer: Colin PinkGustav Klimt and Fin de Siecle Vienna Society  Turn of the century Vienna was a melting pot of new ideas in science (Hertz and Boltzmann);
philosophy (Ludwig Wittgenstein);
psychoanalysis (Sigmund Freud);
modernist architecture (Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos);
twelve tone music (Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern);
modernist literature (Karl Kraus, Robert Musil and Arthur Schnitzler);
and in art (Klimt, Kokoschka and Schiele).
Gustav Klimt led the Secession movement, which broke free from nineteenth century academic art, to create a highly decorative and potent form of imagery, drawing inspiration from art nouveau, symbolism, Byzantine and Mycenaean art. Klimt created a highly decorative and sensual visualization that explored the power of sex in the age of Freud. We will examine the ramifications of Klimt’s sexually charged images in the context of Viennese art and society.
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Venue: Town Hall (please note venue)
Wednesday 3rd November 2021 10.30am AGM followed by lecture
Morning lecture only, members onlyLecturer: Rosamund BartlettPsychology of a City: The Architecture of St Petersburg St. Petersburg’s dignity and grandeur is everywhere apparent. Peter the Great had before him a vast tabula rasa when planning his future capital at the beginning of the 18th century. The city he built was truly sumptuous – but it came at a price. This lecture tells the story of the buildings of St. Petersburg, but also the life that went on inside the buildings, focussing particularly on the city’s writers, musicians and artists, for whom St. Petersburg definitely had a personality – sometimes enigmatic, sometimes tragic - which they immortalised in their paintings, music and literary works.
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Thursday 18th November 2021 at Phyllis Court
10.45am and 2.15pm Lecturer: Anne SebbaThe Story of the Cook Sisters and How They Used Opera to Save Lives  Ida and Louise Cook were destined never to marry after decimation of the men of their generation in World War One. When Ida became a successful Mills and Boon novelist they used their earnings to indulge their love of opera, travelling all over the world but especially to Salzburg. Familiarity with Austria enabled these two eccentric opera loving sisters to undertake dangerous undercover missions in the 1930s rescuing Jewish musicians and others from the Nazis. (Please click on the blue print above to continue reading)
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Thursday 20th January 2022 at Phyllis Court
10.45 repeated at 2.15pmLecturer: Angela FindlayArt Behind Bars: The Role of the Arts in Breaking the Cycle of Crime, Prison and Reoffending Years of working as an artist within the Criminal Justice System in England and Germany have given Angela unique insights into the destructive and costly cycle of crime, prisons and re-offending.
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Thursday 17th February 2022 at 10.45am repeated at 2.15pm
at Phyllis CourtLecturer: David RosierImperial Chinese Court Art and Portraiture: Emperors, Ancestors and Jesuits This lecture explores the origins and evolution of the nature and function of paintings created under an Emperor's patronage by artists of the Imperial School of Art.
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Thursday 17th March at Phyllis Court
10.45am repeated 2.15pmLecturer: Stephen DuffyThe Rise and Fall of Napoleon Bonaparte Illustrated with many wonderful works of art, this lecture tells the extraordinary story of the rise of the son of a lawyer in Ajaccio, Corsica, to become Emperor of the French before finally being defeated and sent into exile on the island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic. It also attempts to explain the nature of his genius as an administrator and a military commander, assessing his achievements and his failures, his strengths and his weaknesses.
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Thursday 21st April 10.45am repeated 2.45pmLecturer: Julia KornerIdentifying the Forgotten Gems of the Art World: A Conservator’s Experience Since 1997, when I left Christie’s Auctioneers after 20 years, I have been based beside the River Thames in Chiswick and have maintained full-time studios involved in the conservation of paintings, frames, and polychrome sculpture and the making of handmade frames & display cabinets.
I have been reminded repeatedly that an object of value, whether financial or sentimental, tends to have a history, even if unknown to the owner. As an art historian, conservator of oil paintings, and maker of handmade frames, I want – and am determined, so far as is possible - to find out the history of the work of art with which I have been entrusted. So often that history is there for a skilled practitioner: in the image, in the pigment, and in other detail, underneath layers of dirt, opaque varnish and other discolouring. One has to look - and look again - as one sets out to establish how pictures looked in their original state.
(Please click on the blue print above to continue reading)
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Thursday 19th May at Phyllis Court
10.45am repeated at 2.15pmLecturer: Jacky KleinThe Era of Anything: Decoding Contemporary Art Many of us find contemporary art challenging, strange, provocative or downright silly. How are we meant to respond to and appreciate art that so often seems to provoke, to reference its own (sometimes arcane) histories, to shock or confound? This lecture helps to unravel the step changes in art that have taken place since the 1870s, exploring how we got from Impressionist paintings of light-dappled rivers that sought to reflect the realities of modern life in all its fleeting beauty to the interactive, immersive, ephemeral and ‘post-medium’ art of today.
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Thursday 16th June at Phyllis Court
10.45am repeated at 2.15pmLecturer: Lois OliverBetrayal: The Story of Samson and Delilah in Art and Music  Erotic and exotic, the tale of the man who killed 1,000 Philistines armed only with  the jawbone of an ass but who was fatally unmanned by the wiles of Delilah has proved irresistible to artists and composers through the ages. Handel’s oratorio on the subject was an instant box-office smash, and later Saint-Saëns produced some of his most alluring and sensuous music for Delilah and the Dragon-worshipping revellers in his opera Samson et Dalila. (Please click on blue print above to continue reading)
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Thursday 15th September at Phyllis Court
10.45am repeated at 2.15pmLecturer: Alexandra EppsAn Artist’s Best Friend: The Dog in Art Dogs are man’s most loyal friend. They are often used in art, as in life, to project our ambitions and anxieties. From the poignancy of Landseer, Queen Victoria’s favourite animal painter; to the dachshunds of Bonnard and Picasso; the xolos of Kahlo; the whippets of Freud and many more, explore how dogs have provided inspiration, solace and companionship throughout artistic lives.
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Thursday 20th October at Phyllis Court
10.45am repeated at 2.15pmLecturer: Joanna MabbuttRiver Thames: Theatre of Pageantry and Pleasure London’s grandest thoroughfare for centuries, the Thames has hosted royal weddings and state funerals, fireworks and pyrotechnics, music and masques, coronations and Lord Mayors’ pageants, processions and civic festivities. Teaming with life and busy with shipping, the City’s life-blood has also been the playground of both royalty and the common man.
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Venue: Town Hall (please note venue)
Wednesday 9th November AGM at 10.30am followed by lecture (morning lecture only)Lecturer: Harry VenningThe Art of the Cartoonist Harry Venning has been a professional cartoonist for thirty years, during which time he has provided cartoons for several high profile UK publications (The Guardian, Radio Times) as well as for countless more obscure titles (British Journal Of Wound Care).
 He was awarded UK Strip Cartoonist Of The Year for his Guardian strip Clare In The Community, which he adapted into a Radio 4 sitcom.
(Please click on the blue print above to continue reading)
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8th December 2022 at Phyllis Court
10.45, repeated at 2.15pmLecturer: Sandy BurnettChristmas in Bach’s Leipzig: The Christmas Oratorio of 1734/5 Sandy Burnett’s close relationship with Bach’s music stretches back for decades; between 1997 and 2010 he directed a complete cycle of Bach’s sacred cantatas in West London.
 Bach Haussmann
In this illustrated talk he explores how Bach brings the Christmas story alive in his Weihnachtsoratorium or Christmas Oratorio, written for Lutheran congregations in 1730s Leipzig.
(Please click on the blue print above to continue reading)
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Thursday 8th December 10.45am repeated 2.15pmLecturer: Sandy BurnettChristmas in Bach’s Leipzig: The Christmas Oratorio of 1734/5 Sandy Burnett’s close relationship with Bach’s music stretches back for decades; between 1997 and 2010 he directed a complete cycle of Bach’s sacred cantatas in West London. |
