The popular series of talks returns with a new programme. Combining art history, biography and critical analysis you will learn about the lives and works of some important artists and topics.
What did these artists do? Why did they do it? Why does it matter?
Each session will incorporate discussion, PowerPoint presentations, handouts and recommendations for further study.
This short course is suitable for beginners and/or intermediate students, learning will take place in a relaxed and friendly environment, without formal assessment.
Course tutor, Richard Dean MA, is a practicing artist and experienced lecturer who has lectured at universities and art colleges in London and the southeast and at Tate Britain.
7 July
Richard Gerstl
A contemporary of Klimt and Schiele, Gerstl was a strange and gifted man. His work was rediscovered decades after his death and now he’s recognised as one of Austria’s greatest painters, someone far in advance of his time. Let’s look and see why.
14 July
Killer Collector
Paul Guillaume was a French art dealer who built a major collection of modern art – Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani. Today it’s all in the Orangerie in Paris, alongside Monet’s waterlilies. How it got there is a story of greed, conspiracy, murder and scandal.
21 July
Marsden Hartley – American in Exile:
Hartley wandered over America and Europe looking for himself and for the real subject of his art. He found both in his home state of Maine and become one of America’s most important 20th century artists.
4 August
Matisse and His Muses
Matisse did not become a great artist all by himself. At the beginning of his career his wife Amelie was his main model and greatest support. And later his secretary Lydia was the force behind the great works of his old age.
11 August
Somerset Maugham - Purely for His Displeasure
Maugham loved art and writing about artists. He built an important collection which, when he put it up for auction in his old age, started a family feud and an international sensation involving a daughter suing her father, a father trying to disinherit his daughter and adopt his 50ish male secretary as his son and a lot of lawyers. Quel affair!
18 August
New Objectivity
In the 1920s German art was dominated by a new approach to painting which combined the Northern European tradition of expressive realism with subject matter that was political, personal and soaked with the weird energy of the Weimar period.
1 September
Felix Nussbaum
During World War 2 Nussbaum and his artist wife Felka were forced to hide from the Nazis in a Brussels attic. In appalling conditions, he painted some of the most powerful images of war and persecution ever made. “Don’t let my work die” he said. “Show it to the people” - so come and see it.