This talk celebrates Turku, the Cultural Capital of Europe 2011. One of the smallest nations in the world and the most northerly in Europe, Finland punches above its weight with regard to its contribution to world culture, and here the music of Sibelius looms large.

Finland was part of Sweden until 1809 and subsequently an autonomous Grand Duchy of an increasingly oppressive Russian empire. Finland’s birth as an independent nation in 1917 owes everything to the artists, writers and musicians who helped forge its cultural identity.

This talk explores the crucial role played in this process by Jean Sibelius who bravely and unfashionably decided to embrace native themes in his music while still a student in Vienna. His works such as the symphonic poem Finlandia and Symphony No. 2 were immediately championed as symbols of Finnish nationalism by fervent patriots anxious to liberate their country from Russian rule.

Sibelius became a national figure and beloved spiritual leader.

More about Jean Sibelius and his music can be found on the Wikipedia website, where you can also find out more about the city of Turku.

You can listen to his music on Youtube.

Sargent's
"Madame x".

The scope of Sargent’s work is truly astounding. Having studied in Paris in the late 1870’s, he deeply understood Impressionism and established a close, life-long friendship with Claude Monet.

He moved to England from Paris in 1885 and established his reputation with “Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose” which was exhibited at the Royal Academy and bought for the nation by the Chantrey Bequest.

During the 1890’s he was the most successful portrait painter in London and indeed in the United States.

His brilliant portraits are full of life, vigour and freshness. Although a successful portrait painter, Sargent wanted to spend more time on landscapes, and in 1907 he finally closed his Chelsea studio to portrait sitters.

In the late 1890’s he became a regular visitor to the Palazzo Barbaro on the Grand Canal in Venice, where he met Henry James, Robert Browning and many other artists. Here in the summer months, Sargent painted the most dazzling watercolours of Venice, often seen from below as he sat in a gondola.

He also painted oils and watercolours in Spain, North Africa, the Alps and Egypt, often visiting these places with friends whom he placed in his pictures.

In 1917 he became an official war artist. His most famous picture ‘Gassed’ shows the horrors of gas warfare.

A tireless painter, he also worked on murals for the Boston Public Library in the meantime.

In addition to being a great artist, Sargent was a fine musician. Percy Grainger, composer and close friend, believed that he could have been a professional concert pianist. He also played the guitar and sang. He was an amazing linguist being bi-lingual in French and Italian and fluent in German and Spanish. He was truly an extraordinary man.

This talk examines his landscapes, portraits and watercolours as well as looking at his friends and colleagues.

More about John Singer Sargent can be found on Wikipedia.

This talk celebrates the 150th anniversary of the birth of Victor Horta.

Art Nouveau had its fullest flowering on the European Continent during the 1890s, a time when progressive architects and designers renounced traditional styles in favour of a ‘New Art’.

They took as their inspiration a reinterpretation of historical styles, nature, and the clarity of Japanese design.

English designers such as William Morris, Charles Voysey and Aubrey Beardsley were the first to break with the past, and influential stores such as Liberty’s of London played a crucial role in the early development of Art Nouveau.

Art Nouveau flourished in various countries in continental Europe as well. Victor Horta in Belgium and Guimard in France chose to display intensely organic, plant-like forms, with their whiplash curves, while in Spain Gaudi used his deep love of nature not only as a decorative means but as a structural basis for a brand new form of architecture. In Norway the coastal town of Alesund suffered a major fire in 1904 and was rebuilt in the prevailing ‘Jugendstil’, the corresponding German term for the period.

Finally, quite a different manifestation of Art Nouveau is shown by the rectilinear forms of Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Scotland and his Austrian counterparts, Olbrich and Hoffman in Vienna.

The talk also brings the work of the American architect Louis Sullivan into context and closes with the exquisite glass designs of Louis Comfort Tiffany.

More about Vicor Horta and Art Nouveau can be found on the Visit Brussels website. There is a list of Art Nouveau architects on the Wikipedia website as well as more information about Art Nouveau.

Take the combustible mix of a centenarian architect with life-long left wing views, the tropical ambiance of a country which glories in Latin American exuberance and the artistic concept of rational modernism, and you have the paradoxical work of Oscar Niemeyer.

Born in 1907, he is now aged 104 and still counting.

It was the French-Swiss architect, Le Corbusier, who upon undertaking consultancy work in Brazil in the 1930s, drew attention to the anti-rational spirit of local Baroque architecture. Baroque themes were part of Niemeyer’s design for the Ministry of Education building in Rio de Janeiro, to which Roberto Burle Marx contributed tropical gardens on the rooftop of the podium.

Likewise, in the Pampulha Garden Suburb of the provincial capital Belo Horizonte, the white cubist forms of modernism were suffused with florid curves drawn from the regional Baroque heritage.

Niemeyer’s best-known work was built in the nation’s new capital, Brasilia, the master plan of which was begun by his colleague Lucio Costa in 1956. His Presidential Palace, Cathedral and Government Assembly soon became icons of modernism.

The United Nations building in New York (a rather acrimonious collaboration with Le Corbusier), the Communist Party Headquarters in Paris and the Mondadori offices in Milan later affirmed Niemeyer’s status as an international architectural superstar.

“I visited him in 2007, in his studio overlooking Copacabana Beach, and found his enthusiasm for the sculptural forms of modernism undimmed. I can promise a stimulating if controversial presentation.” - Mervyn Miller

More about the architecture of Brasilia can be found on the Wikipedia website.

Brasilia

The talk is based on the Islamic manuscript, the Padshahnama (chronicle of the King of the World) which is the unique official history of the Mughal Emperor, Shah Jahan, who ruled in India from 1628 to 1659. He is best remembered for the building of the Taj Mahal as a tomb for his favourite wife, Mumtaz Mahal.
The Padshahnama is illustrated with 44 of the finest Mughal paintings in the world. They vividly depict the very dramatic events in the Emperor’s life and reign. Most of the important individuals in Shah Jahan’s court can be identified and the paintings tell the remarkable story of the intrigues of court life as well as the Emperor’s Coronation, royal weddings, bloody battles and hunting scenes.
The book is the finest Islamic manuscript in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle and was given to King George III in 1797 by the ruler of the north Indian state of Oudh.

More about the Taj Mahal can be found on the Wikipedia website.

The Belgian artist René Magritte was one of the leading painters in the Surrealist movement. His art is familiar to a huge audience, many of whom are unaware of his name. His images have been used to sell books, typewriters, cosmetics, wallpaper, chocolates and clothes.. They are frequently witty, sometimes shocking, but always memorable. Often depicting the most banal objects or situations in totally unexpected juxtapositions, like a castle-topped rock floating above the sea, a pair of boots transforming themselves into a pair of human feet or birds of stone winging lightly through space, he succeeds in enchanting, puzzling and amusing the viewer.

He has been described as a poet and philosopher, and his intriguing paintings make us look with new eyes at the world around us.

More about Magritte can be found on the Wikipedia website.

This talk will feature the city of Guimarães, European Cultural Capital in 2012.

The architecture and gardens of Portugal are not widely known but offer many visual delights to the visitor.

This talk will explore the development of Portuguese architecture through a series of outstanding buildings.

In mediaeval times there was the great Cistercian abbey of Alcobaca in purest early Gothic as well as the wonderful lace-like carved decorations on the late Gothic royal abbey of Bathalha.

Portugal produced its own version of the Renaissance known as Manueline, a unique combination of classical forms enriched with a vocabulary of decoration influenced by Portugal’s great seafaring tradition. It can be seen in the wonderful monastery of Tomar.

The wealth of the country in the 17^th and 18th centuries is reflected in its many Baroque and Rococo palaces and villas. Again Portugal produced its own particular vigorous interpretation of these styles as can be seen in the beautiful University library at Coimbra, the Rococo royal palace at Queluz, and the delightful villa of Mateus, amongst other examples.

Many Portuguese buildings are beautified by azuelos, the traditional coloured pictorial tiles. These appear on fountains as well as in the lining of garden canals. Indeed in Portugal many unspoilt early formal gardens survive, and these are one of the little explored delights of this beautiful country.

As elsewhere the 19^th century there was a period of revivals and the talk will conclude with a look at the astonishing royal neo-Manueline palace and its gardens at Busaco.

On the Wikipedia website you can find out more about the architecture of Portugal and the city of Guimarães.

The Brontë children were profoundly imaginative, creative and gifted. Their childhood was taken up with intensely absorbing private worlds which they invented and which became for them more real than the actual world in which they lived. Not only did these imaginary worlds dominate their complex and detailed “plays”, but the children created histories, political structures, enormous casts of characters and dramatic and tragic events which they chronicled in prose, poetry and pictures.

All were talented artists as well as budding writers. Indeed Branwell Brontë was to study with the portrait painter William Robinson and the sculptor Joseph Leyland.

Engravings by John Martin also decorated the walls of the parsonage where they lived. These were filled with apocalyptic scenes of Biblical events, buildings with massed colonnades and battlements, and thronged multitudes fearfully fleeing and fighting.

This talk explores the influence of these and other works on their creativity and looks at some of their own art.

On the Wikipedia website you can find out more about the Brontës. You can also learn about their stay in Brussels on the Brontës in Brussels website.