Lectures 2008 - 2009

Unlike most National Collections of Art in Europe, the National Gallery in London did not acquire its works by absorbing a Royal Collection. It therefore had to start at the beginning and acquire painting by other means. This lecture illustrates how the collection was built up, as well as looking at a selection of works from the galleries and the stories behind them. Working from Early Italian pieces through to Impressionism, this lecture charts the growing demands made on artists over the years. As the title suggests – every painting has a story to tell.

Above: (Engraving, 1837, of 'The National Gallery - Charing Cross' from the design by William Wilkins.)

Frank Lloyd Wright is best known for his Prairie houses, designed to blend with the flat terrain around Chicago – the Robbie House of 1907-08 is exemplary.

Like his contemporary, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Wright conceived his houses as “total-works-of-art”, or the “Gesamtkunstwerk” – the architect controlled the design of all fixtures and fittings, including furniture and lights.

Not only beautifully designed, much of Wright’s work is beautifully made, falling under the heading of American Arts and Crafts. Many of his designs reflect the growing interest in native American arts and crafts. His colours are “earthy” brown and oranges with bold “tribal” decorative motifs. Wright’s stark but beautiful houses look forward to Modernism.

Unlike Mackintosh, Wright was able to evolve beyond the Arts and Crafts into the Modernist/Art Deco period between the two World Wars. He developed a new style, seen at its best in the Guggenheim Art Gallery, New York, with its organic curves pointing the way to the “bio-morphic” forms of the 1950s.

Innovator and traditionalist, Wright is considered to be one of the greatest architects of the 20th century.

Hasn’t Christmas gone downhill and got hopelessly vulgar? Wasn’t there a time when it was a celebration of real values?

In a light-hearted survey, we review some wonderful and some gloriously awful historic and modern Christmas imagery to explore the extent to which that’s true.

It turns out that our traditional notions about Christmas are a much more recent invention than we might think. But no question, our modern variety is often in downright poor taste.

But just what makes it so tacky? Sex, violence, pretension or just changes in fashion can all make for bad taste, but they rarely apply to Christmas imagery.

Only a brief look at art more generally, including some real park-railing specials, such as the famous “Green Lady” amongst less familiar horrors, reveals the key; imagery with an emotional punch – which all Christmas images share – but which has been overworked to the point of cliché.

What then turns cliché into kitsch is the exaggeration for commercial effect of emotive features, to the point of caricature. Pictures of children show the process, from haunting sketches by Rembrandt to rosy-cheeked Christmas horrors.

Now we are ready to chronicle Santa’s decline, through Haddon Sundblom’s Coca Cola Santas of the fifties to our own post-modern Christmas concoctions. But though we may agree about what’s happened to Christmas, no promises that in the end when it comes to distinguishing objects in general in good and bad taste, we’ll find we all agree about which are which – and which are kitsch.

The lecture is an examination of painting, sculpture and architecture produced in Renaissance Venice which lead to its rise as the greatest and most magnetic artistic centre in Europe.

When the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great decided to move his capital from Rome to the western shores of the Bosphorus, Byzantium was nearly 1,000 years old. Constantine was no fool. Strategically the location could not have been bettered – where Europe and Asia meet, and with control of the shipping between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean.

He called his city “the New Rome”, but it soon came to be known as Constantine’s City – Constantinople. A newly-converted Christian, he set about building churches as fast as he could.

The 6th century was a golden age for Constantinople. The Emperor Justinian re-shaped the city. He rebuilt Haghia Sofia with its huge dome; glittering mosaics and gleaming marbles lined the walls. By now the Byzantine Empire extended throughout the Mediterranean, from the Caucasus to the Atlantic, and from the Danube to the Sahara.

When, after over 11 hundred years of Byzantine rule, the city fell to the 21-year-old Ottoman, Mehmet the Conquerer, he too made the city his capital. That was in 1453. Domed mosques replaced Christian churches, the walls were now lined with beautiful Iznik tiles.

The high point in Ottoman history was reached during the reign of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, whose inspired architect, Sinan, built 24 mosques in Istanbul alone. The final curtain came down on this fabulous city in 1923.

The media promote an image of suave and sophisticated gentlemen art thieves operating in heists with beautiful paintings, elegant locations and connotations of an exotic millionaire lifestyle. The reality is that the art thief is no aristocrat. Stealing fine art and antiques affords criminals with a high value commodity, often poorly protected, difficult, but thankfully not impossible to identify, that can transcend national or international boundaries and reach those eager to deal with the discreditable and unsuspecting.

Utilising fascinating actual case studies, the lecture examines the trail and repatriation of stolen art.

Right: "The Music Lesson" by Vermeer, stolen from Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, in the largest art heist ever to have taken place. This painting and the others taken that night have never been found.

A richly illustrated history of an art form that incorporates all the others. From the birth of opera in late Renaissance Italy we move to Louis XIV’s Versailles, Handel’s London, Mozart’s Vienna, Verdi’s Italy,Wagner’s Germany and Gilded Age America and see the world-wide spread of opera in the twentieth century.

We consider patronage of the arts, the changing nature of audiences, theatrical architecture and stage design and the impact of such new technologies as electric lighting, recording, photography and film.

Above: Hogart's painting of a scene from the Beggars' Opera where the audience sits on the stage.

Bosch’s painting of devils, demons and deadly sins are truly unforgettable. At the same time, his extraordinary treatment of religious themes can be deeply moving. His works are among the most mysterious in the whole of European art, yet if we examine them in the context of contemporary politics and cultural sources we find that not only are they perfectly understandable, but they also provide an amazing insight into the society in which the artist lived.