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St Bees Arts Society
Programme 2011-2012

Wednesday 28th September 2011

'Imagining the impact of Northern Renaissance art in the fifteenth century',
Dr Jeanne Nuechterlein Senior Lecturer in the Department of History of Art, University of York

Jeanne Nuechterlein was born in Canada, grew up mostly in the United States, and first came to the UK as a postgraduate student in 1998. She has taught Northern Renaissance art history at the University of York since 2000. Her first book, Translating Nature into Art: Holbein, the Reformation, and Renaissance Rhetoric, examines the paintings and prints of Hans Holbein the Younger in the context of Reformation and Renaissance debates about the nature of worldly reality. Currently she is working on a second book, Fictional Histories of Early Netherlandish Art, which uses fictional modes of writing to explore how viewers in the 15th- and early 16th-century Low Countries might have reacted to the artworks they encountered in their everyday lives.

About the talk she writes
We respond personally to art when something in it speaks to us directly: the colors, the subject matter, the composition--or perhaps something indefinable. Art historians usually respond to artworks in a different way, by asking why they were made and what they meant in their particular historical contexts. This talk will aim to combine these two approaches by presenting a fictional narrative of a 15th-century woman looking at and responding to artworks connected to her parents, and which thus have for her a strong emotional as well as aesthetic impact. Although this story has been invented, it highlights both the visual power of 15th-century artworks and the ways in which they could have been meaningful to viewers at that time.

Wednesday November 23rd 2011

Venice Portrayed 1400-1900 

Francis Milner
Venice has been portrayed in many different lights
--as holy city of miracles caring for the apostle Mark's remains
--as glittering capital of a great Mediterranean empire
--as Grand Tourist pleasure dome of excess and folly
--as bankrupt polity sinking beneath the waves
Looking at the pictures of, amongst others, Bellini, Veronese,Canaletto, Turner and Monet we will examine the various portrayals of Venice -to itself
and by the rest of the world

Frank Milner, previously Head of Art Galleries Education at The National Museums And Galleries on Merseyside and author of a number of books on both the French Impressionists and 19th Century British painting after 30 years at The Walker Art Gallery Liverpool, now spends his time freelance lecturing and exhibition organising, guiding in Italy and spending as much time as possible in Venice. He has most recently been involved writing part of the catalogue for the current major Atkinson Grimshaw exhibition .

Wednesday 25th January 2012

Ploughs, Clocks and Spectacles

Inventions, innovations and discoveries of the Middle Ages
Charmian Robson

Mediaeval is often used almost as a term of abuse but it is to the Middle Ages that we owe such important innovations as horse collars, stirrups, water & wind mills, clocks as well such refinements as buttons, underpants, spectacles, playing cards and the use of zero in mathematics. This talk will explore some of these many developments, and their consequences, with the aid of contemporary art.

Charmian Robson is a graduate of the Courtauld Institute of Art. Over the years she has taught many evening classes for the W.E.A and for the University of Newcastle Centre for Lifelong Learning, tutored Open University Courses, and before she retired, was Head of History of Art at St Bees School in Cumbria.

Wednesday February 22nd 2012

John Ruskin and the Value of Use in Art

Alistair Hudson has been Deputy Director of Grizedale Arts since 2004, He was educated at Goldsmiths’ College 1988 – 1991 and has previously worked at the Henry Moore Institute (1993-94), Anthony d’Offay Gallery London (1994-2000) and The Government Art Collection (2000-04) where, as Projects Curator, he devised a public art strategy for the new Home Office building with Liam Gillick.
Grizedale Arts is a research and development agency for artists and creative practitioners, based in the Lake District National Park. Whilst its origins are in the early 1970’s as a forest sculpture park, it has recently acquired a significant reputation for pioneering new approaches to artistic production and exhibition alongside its established residencies. This programme is distinct from others, as it actively engages with the complexities of the rural situation and places process and ideas above the requirement for finished artistic product. Its priority is to generate ideas and pilot schemes which can be taken up by others, having a constructive role in the development of culture and society.

Wednesday March 28th 2012

The difficulty of portraiture: late 18th century British portraits

Hugh Belsey  is one of the foremost authorities on British eighteenth-century art.
After studying at the universities of Manchester and Birmingham he became Curator of Gainsborough’s House in Sudbury, a post he held for twenty-three years. During his time there the collections were transformed and when he left he was awarded an MBE.
He is now a Senior Research Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art with the task of writing the definitive catalogue of portraits by Thomas Gainsborough. He was recently introduced: ’This is Hugh Belsey who knows more about Gainsborough than he did himself’.

Britain has always had an insatiable appetite for portraits and in a highly competitive market there were many ways to advertise. Artists used different strategies which included showing work in public exhibitions, making engravings and painting portraits of the famous to show in their studios. Production increased with the competition and the great artists of later eighteenth century Britain were always seeking new ideas, but it took its toll.

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