DFAS

The can-can girls, the cabaret, the expositions and the artist. Baudelaire urged Manet to become a flaneur – to go out and paint the real heroes of modern life. This lecture, covering art history - from classical academy painting to Picasso’s arrival at the squalid Bateau Lavoir in Montmartre - sums up the enormous energy and eccentricity in Paris at this time.

This lecture traces the development of ‘progressive’ architecture and design, encompassing Mackintosh and the Vienna Secession, Frank Lloyd Wright in the USA, the Bauhaus in Germany, De Stijl in Holland and Le Corbusier in France.

Modernism promised a new style for a brave new world, being linked to socialism and even communism, in Germany.

The classic period of Modernism is said to be the 1920s but emerged as an international phenomenon after WW2. Scandinavian modern, and the emergence of the IKEA style, exemplify the post-war period and the search for a style ‘for everybody’. All our lives have been influenced by Modernism: metal and glass furniture, minimalism and the current tend for laminate floors!

Some wonderful and some gloriously awful historic and modern Christmas imagery will be reviewed to explore if Christmas has indeed become tasteless. Although our traditional notions about Christmas are a more recent invention than we might think, our modern variety is often in downright poor taste. But what makes it so tacky? Looking at art more generally, we discover that what they have in common with Christmas paraphernalia is a starting point in pictorial cliché but one with an emotional punch like images of Santa himself. In this lecture we will explore what raises an artwork to the level of true kitsch! The lecturer assures us that 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.

A leading figure in 20th century art, Mondriaan (1872-1944) completes the trilogy started by Rembrandt and van Gogh, that made Holland stand out in the history of European painting. How this son of a provin-cial school headmaster achieved his worldwide reputation is a fascinat-ing story. Driven by a great interest in all the possibilities of modern-ism initiated by the impressionists, expressionists and later cubists, and by his philosophical ideas about society and art, he searched for a universal visual language that could express his thoughts. This lecture will follow his career from the first figurative landscapes to the final line dance.

Right: Claire Portheine at our January meeting

This lecture will tell the story of this fabulous city. It had already existed for 1000 years when the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great moved his capital here making it ‘the New Rome’, but it soon came to be known as Constantinople. Churches were built with glittering mosaics and gleaming marbles Then after 1100 years, the city was conquered by the Ottomans who replaced the churches with domed mosques and walls were lined with beautiful Iznik tiles. The final curtain came down in 1923.

The media promote an image of sophisticated gentlemen art thieves but in reality the art thief is no aristocrat. Stealing fine art and antiques gives criminals a high value commodity which is often poorly protected, difficult to identify and transcends national boundaries reaching the discreditable and unsuspecting. Our lecturer will utilise fascinating actual case studies to examine the trail and repatriation of stolen art.

Right: "The Music Lesson" by Vermeer, stolen from Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, in 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. This lecture will move from the birth of opera in late Renaissance Italy to Louis XIV´s Versailles, Handel's London, Mozart's Vienna, Verdi's Italy, Wagner's Germany, Gilded Age America and the worldwide spread of opera in the 20th century.

Mr. Snowman will 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.

Probably the most well-known and popular artist of the 20th century, Dali was a self-publicist filling gossip columns with accounts of his eccentricities for over 60 years. His paintings of the invisible world of the unconscious mind were considered shocking even among a group of extremists like the Surreal-ists, and after joining them he quickly became their most exotic and well-known member. His soft watches and huge animals with stick-insect legs are among the most memorable invented images of our time, and his Christ of St. John of the Cross is a highly original reworking of one of Western art's central themes .