Professional, Public, Private
26 January 2027 - 2 March 2027
10.45 – 12.45 Tuesdays
£86.00 – £428.00
Description
Bankruptcy, murder, addiction or prosperity, monastic serenity and chess – for better or worse, the personal experience of the artist is reflected in their art. Taking a variety of artists, we will look first at their lives, from the monastery of Fra Angelico to the mental asylum of Richard Dadd or the decadence of Montmartre for Toulouse Lautrec, before examining their work and the way it reflects their experience.
“Nicole’s previous series on The English Renaissance was wonderful and greatly enlarged my understanding of those turbulent times. She is an exceptional lecturer”
Course Outline
26 January 2027 – “A Rare and Perfect Talent” – Fra Angelico (c.1395-1455)
Famously devout, John of Fiesole was known as the Angelic Friar, or Fra Angelico, long before his official beatification in 1982. Alongside the demanding routine of a Dominican friar, he painted manuscripts, altarpieces and frescoes and was said to pray before he painted and to weep whenever he painted a Crucifixion.
02 February 2027 – “This is a Terrible Woman” – Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-c.1656)
It was a rare woman who managed to make a reputation as a painter, let alone become one of the foremost artists in Europe, travelling to England to work for Charles I. Gentileschi’s gender is fundamental to her art, most of which focuses on female subjects, often triumphing bloodily over men, a reflection of her early, brutal rape.
09 February 2027 – “Bold and Vivacious”- Frans Hals (c.1582-1666)
Behind Hals’ vivid, joyous portraits, so characteristic of the Baroque, lay a life in which he never left the confines of his native Haarlem, and in which money worries were so constant that all his goods were once seized by bailiffs to pay a baker’s bill. A devoted father, he struggled to maintain his large family, creating masterpieces to feed the demands of his ever-present creditors.
16 February 2027 – “Portentous Visions” – Richard Dadd (1817-1886)
Not many artists make their reputations during 40 years in isolation. In 1844, Richard Dadd, a promising young artist, killed his father and spent his remaining years in Bethlem Hospital and Broadmoor. There, he continued to draw and paint, exploring over and again images from the world he had left behind but above all developing the “fairy pictures” which capture his fantastical imaginings.
23 February 2027 – “Moral Penury”-Henri De Toulouse- Lautrec (1864–1901)
Count Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse-Lautrec-Monfa may have been born an aristocrat, but, exiled from his class, he passed his life in the bars, brothels and cabarets of Montmartre. There he found companionship and not only captured the personalities and decadent spirit of the “fin de siècle”, but developed lithography into a medium for the diffusion of high art.
2 March 2027- Endgame – MARCEL DUCHAMP (1887–1968)
“Take one cubic centimetre of tobacco smoke and paint the exterior and the interior surfaces a waterproof colour”
One of seven children, four of whom became distinguished artists, Marcel Duchamp apparently abandoned art altogether in his thirties, to devote himself to chess. Nonetheless, this semi-reclusive outsider continued to exchange ideas with controversial artistic figures and lived to see acclaim by the Abstract Expressionists in the 1950’s and recognition as, possibly, the most influential artist of the 20th century.