DFAS

Season 2005 - 2006

Tuesday 4th October 2005

'Landscape into Sound'

The Interface between
Painting and Music

Digby Hague-Holmes

This lecture describes the illusory interface between painting and music, using slides and taped samples to illustrate how artists have painted performers and instruments, and how certain paintings have inspired various composers throughout history. The lecture includes 19 musical extracts.

Tuesday 8th November 2005

The Arts and Crafts of Mexico, Past and Present

Chloë Sayer

Chloë Sayer is an authority on the art and culture of Mexico. She has made ethnographic collections and carried out fieldwork in Mexico and Belize for the British Museum. She has lectured, curated exhibitions and organised event in Great Britain, Canada and ireland. In 2004 she was invited by Swan hellenic to be the guest NADFAS lecturer on the "Mysteries of the Maya" cruise.

Chloë has also worked on a number of television documentaries about Mexico and the Maya for the BBC and Channel 4.

In Mexico, arts and crafts remain an essential part of life. While textiles, ceramics, silverwork and other ancient skills combine Aztec, Maya and Spanish traditions, they are a living force, not a nostalgic evocation of a vanished past. Mexican folk art is sought after by private collectors and major museums, including the British Museum with its modern Mexican collections.

Above: Earflare with turquoise inlays, from the National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico.

Tuesday 6th December 2005

Three Wise Men: Gold, Frankincense & Myrrh

The Traditions of the Magi

Christopher Bradley

Christopher Bradley is an expert in the history and culture of the Middle East. As a professional tour guide and lecturer he has led groups throughout Africa, the Middle East and Asia. He has written extensively on Arabia and is the author of The Discovery Guide to Yemen. As a photographer, he has pictures used by  numerous quality newspapers and magazines. Christopher has a broad range of lecturing experience, including to the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Institute of British Architects. As a film producer and cameraman, he has made documentaries for the BBC, National Geographic TV and Channel 4.

The term 'magi' refers to the Zoroastrian priest-sages, anonymous wise men who were specialists in medicine, religion, astronomy and magic and who travelled from 'The East' - variously identified as any country from Arabia to Persia. Tradition places the number of magi at three, relating to gold, frankincense and myrrh, but earlier versions put the number between 2 and 12. The story of the magi is one of the most famous legends used by storytellers and artists alike, with Caspar of Tarsus, Melchior of Persia and Balthasar of Saba becoming universal symbols and representations, such as the three ages and races of man. The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem was erected in 329 by Queen Helena, in the area where Jesus was born. Her attempts to find traces of the magi and sacred relics led her envoys around the Middle East, and take us on a journey to Constantinople, Milan and Cologne.

Tuesday 10th January 2006

Russian Art under
the Last Tsar

Dr Rosamund Bartlett

Dr Rosamund Bartlett is the enthusiastic and energetic Head of the Russian Department in the University of Durham, and is also an associate lecturer in Music. Previous positions include Leverhulme Research Fellow in Russian Cultural History. Assistant Professor of Russian Literature University of Michigan, Lecturer in Russian Language, Literature University of Manchester and is a Fellow of the European Humanities Research Centre at the University of Oxford. She has published widely on Russian music and literature. Her most recent book is a biography of Chekhov based on the places with which he was associated.

Russian culture took a long time in coming to maturity: it was dominated by the Orthodox church until the end of the 17th century, then forced to adopt Western styles and techniques allowing secular art forms to flourish. It was only in the late 19th century that Russian cultural identity was consolidated, after the emergence of creative talents like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Repin and Bryullov, Musorgsky and Tchaikovsky.

Under Nicholas II, the last Tsar, the arts flourished as never before, fuelled by Russia's belated embrace of capitalism, and the knowledge that they were living on the edge of a volcano.

This lecture explores how Russian merchants became the new art patrons, financing Stanislavsky's Moscow Arts Theatre, and establishing priceless collections of works by Picasso, Cezanne, Matisse and the French Impressionists. It looks at how fearless young Russian artists shocked polite society with their revolutionary exhibitions of radical new work, and the role played by Diaghilev's epoch-making Ballets Russes. Finally it examines how Kandinsky and Scriabin strode boldly into abstraction and atonality and how Rachmaninov wrote brooding symphonies and concertos, whose sweeping melodies speak of his passionate attachment to his native land.

Above: Stanislavsky's Moscow Arts Theatre.

Tuesday 7th February 2006

The Rivalry between Leonard and Michelangelo

Dr James R. Lindow

Dr James R. Lindow has a doctorate in History of Art at the joint institutions of the Royal College of Art and the Victoria & Albert Museum. He also has an MA in Advanced Art Historical and related Studies and a degree in Art History of Art and Architecture from the University of East Anglia. He lectures frequently at conferences and has been involved in a major exhibition at the V&A on Renaissance Domestic Interior.

Leonardo de Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti are two of the most familiar figures in Italian Renaissance art. While their names are well known to all of us, the rivalry and indeed antipathy that existed between these two artistic giants remains a story without an author. The lecture throws light on these themes by construing select examples of their works which it is argued hold the key to understanding the motivations for their animosity but ultimate respect for each other´s distinct artistic talents. Particular emphasis is given to the commission bestowed upon both artists to undertake frescoes for the great council chamber in Florence. Though unfinished, the surviving designs place Leonardo and Michelangelo in direct competition with one another, as well as indicating their differing artistic approaches.

Tuesday 7th March 2006

The 'New' Berlin:

Art and Architecture

Eveline Eaton

Eveline Eaton is a free-lance art historian, lecturing and guiding art trips all over the world. She was educated at the Study Centre for Fine and Decorative Arts, London, and obtained her BA Hons degree at London University's Courtauld Institute. Originally from Germany, Eveline has lived in London since 1973.

Since unification of East and West in 1989, the formerly battered and divided city has miraculously risen like a phoenix from the ashes to become once again the German capital and a veritable cultural treasure-trove. Everywhere in Berlin, spectacular buildings are being erected, designed by leading architects from all over the world. Sir Norman Foster's new Reichstag is only one of many famous examples.

Rich art-collections are presented all over the 'new' and 'old' Berlin in splendid museums and historic palaces. The talk will be infused with "Berliner luft", that typical Berlin atmosphere that the lecturer can add as a born-and-bred native of the metropolis !

Left: The Chancellery.

Below: the new German Reichstag.

Tuesday 4th April 2006

The Cobra Movement

Lieve Dejonghe

Lieve Dejonghe has a degree in Art History from the University of Leuven (Belgium) and in English from the University of Villanova (Pennsylvania, USA). She is professionally active as an independent free-lance lecturer at several museums in Brussels and as a tour guide in Belgium, and in that capacity is well known to ADFAS; we last saw her as our guide to the Symbolism in Russia exhibition in Brussels.

The name Cobra came from the first letters of the home cities involved, COpenhagen, BRussels and Amsterdam. Strong colouring was typical for the artists of the group who were influenced by fairy tales and myths, children´s drawings, primitive art, and by the art of their contemporaries. Impressions from these different fields made it possible for the artists to incorporate a variety of symbols and images from the fantastical and humorous to grotesque, absurd forms. It was common for a group of artists or artists and poets to collaborate producing a poetry-painting. The Cobra ideology manifested itself in all forms of art, particularly paintings, sculptures, ceramics and poetry. Although it only last 3 years, its revolutionary ideas and awakening of self-realization are still powerfully alive in modern art. The movement posed an important link between the rational and irrations, abstract and figurative and between art and nature.

Tuesday 9th May 2006

A Garden Tour of Europe

Maggie Lamb

Maggie Lamb specialises in photography, plants and garden history. She has education and horticultural qualifications; having trained as a teacher, she also has theatre experience. She has published articles for specialist plant societies, and has been lecturing to horticultural, flower and garden groups since 1992. Maggie Lamb also speaks for the National Trust, the Royal Horticultural Society and the Women's Institutes.

Many of the famous gardens of Europe are visited as we journey from the Moorish Gardens of the Alhambra Palace to the influential early Northern Italian Renaissance and baroque period villa gardens. In France we see the grandeur of the impressive formal gardens of Le Notre, and many other interesting gardens such as the charming Château de Bagatelle. Some present-day gardens in Holland and Belgium are also included.

Above and left: the Alhambra gardens.

Tuesday 13th June 2006

Oriental Influences in European Art in General and in Dutch Decorative Art in Particular

Claire Portheine

Claire Portheine studied History of Art at Leiden University where she graduated in 1968. She started her professional activities as a researcher in historical archives, but discovered the thrill of guiding people in looking at art while living abroad. She started giving courses and lectures as soon as she returned to Holland after ten years. Her particular interest is in modern and applied art, and in the perception and communication in visual language, which is what art is mainly about.

Even in the Middle Ages artifacts from the mysterious East, such as rare pieces of Chinese porcelain and silk, were treasured in cathedrals and at courts. From the Renaissance on, explorers sailed the seven seas and brought home huge amounts of objects, described generally as "chinaware" and "japanned objects". Eagerly collected, these things were also soon imitated, and their style of decoration became quite a rage in various periods.