Programme  for  2015  

2nd  March  Anthony  Penrose*  

Lecture:  Hand  Grenades  Like  Cartier  Clips  

Two genres shaped the life of Lee Miller, Surrealism and the world of fashion. They informed each other and were both central to the way she saw the world. Her career as a fashion model began with an accidental encounter with Conde Nast, the proprietor of Vogue who put her on his front cover before her 20th birthday. She became the model for Lepape, Steichen, Genthe, Man Ray, Hoyningen Heune, Horst, Picasso and Penrose. She emerged as a fashion photographer, metamorphosing into a war correspondent and finally a combat photographer before returning as a distinctively witty photographer for Vogue post war. Lee Miller’s success on both sides of the camera has left us with enduring images that result from her unique way of seeing.

20th  April  Michael  Bligh**  

Lecture:  Some  Basic  Principles  of  Good  Garden  Design   Includes design considerations for the property entrance, property drive, parkland planting as well as the garden. It shall apply to both country and town gardens although there will be an emphasis on country gardens. Colour digital images will be used to show examples from within Australia as well as overseas.

18th  May  Charles  Harris*    

Lecture:  The  Great  Age  of  the  Poster  –Posters  of  the  Belle  Epoque  

This is the keystone lecture of the Poster Series relating the technical innovation, creative genius and remarkable craftsmanship that enabled the Poster to become the world’s first effective method of mass communication. From Manet to Cheret to Steinlen, Mucha and Toulouse-Lautrec, you’ll see inspirational work by the original Masters of the Poster. Learn how an effective poster is designed and how it plays on the mind; and why most posters today go unnoticed.

Special  Interest  Morning:    Alfons  Mucha  and  the  Creative  Process  

Alphonse Mucha, the man who literally wrote the book on Art Nouveau and went further with his designs and thinking than anyone else with his definitive Le Style Mucha, was rigorously disciplined in his constant quest to produce the highest quality artistic expression of everything he touched.

This half study day is as intensely beautiful as it is educational. From posters to jewellery, from biscuit tins to epic murals the presentation shows how Mucha learned to think and work three dimensionally, patriotically, naturally, religiously and respectfully. A deeply committed Christian, he was also pro-Jewish and so anti-German that he was one of the first people the Gestapo arrested when they confiscated Czechloslavakia in 1938.

His poster for Gismonda made both himself and Sarah Bernhardt immortal.

29th  June  Lee  Christofis**  

Lecture:  Putting  Australia  on  the  Ballet  Stage   For as long as there have been ballet companies in Australia, choreographers have wanted to create ballets about this land and its history. Outstanding amongst these works are Edouard Borovansky’s Terra Australia [1946] a tragic colonial story, Graeme Murphy’s Nutcracker [1992] set in 1950s Melbourne and Stephen Page’s Rites danced to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in 1997. This lecture will examine how choreographers and designers have interpreted this cultural landscape over sixty years. Other designers considered include Eve Martin, Elaine Haxton, Kenneth Rowell and Kristian Fredrikson, as well as Jennifer Irwin and Jacob Nash who frequently work with Sydney Dance Company and Bangarra Dance Theatre.

20th  July  Barry  Venning*  

Lecture:  True  Originals:  the  Art  of  Untrained,  Visionary  and  Compulsive  Creators  

Outsider art is the name given to work produced by artists from all over the world who are usually untrained and outside the mainstream of twentieth and twenty-first century art. Their output ranges from tiny drawings a few centimetres wide to the world’s tallest wooden house. The artists include at least two postmen, a coal miner, psychics, unskilled labourers, several prisoners, psychiatric patients, a Russian ex-gangster and an Indian roads inspector. The one thing they have in common is a compulsion to make astounding art. Few of them are well known – but they all deserve to be.

Special  Interest  Morning:  Art,  Design  and  Photography  in  Post-­‐Revolutionary  Russia    

We survey developments in art and design after the revolution, from the experimentation of the first decade to the stranglehold Stalin exerted upon the arts

during the 1930s. It is often assumed that this period in Russian art is characterised by pictures of heroic, muscular workers and adoring images of Lenin and Stalin, but no. Russian artists and designers such as Tatlin, Malevich, Eisenstein and the Constructivists attempted to design a new, unprecedented society. The session concludes with an evaluation of the Socialist Realism, the only permissible art form during the 1930s. It looks at the chilling ways in which photographs were cropped, manipulated and airbrushed to remove individuals from history whenever they fell foul of Stalin’s purges.

17th  August  Toby  Faber*  

Lecture:  Faber  and  Faber:  Its  History  and  Design    

This lecture traces the history of Faber and Faber through its designs – of book covers and logos, naturally, but also of new formats, from early innovations like the Ariel poems in the 1920s to apps for the ipad. It is a story that balances the need for continual reinvention with the conviction that Faber must remain true to its underlying values. And it attempts to answer the underlying question: what is the value of a publisher’s brand, when readers are interested in authors?

Slides will range from book covers, advertisements and photos of key individuals, to illustrations of the concepts behind the designs. The talk will also be peppered with personal insight and anecdote.

14th  September  Alexandria  Drysdale*  

Lecture:  Down  to  Earth  

This lecture makes a downward journey into the Earth and our own mortality, using painting and sculpture to enlighten us. We begin by making comparisons between Prehistoric Celtic earth monuments such as Silbury Hill, the phenomena of crop circles, and the art of contemporary land artists such as Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy. From burial mounds dedicated to the Earth Goddess to art made with an ecological conscience. Views from underground to views of food and sex childbirth, illness and aging all explored with honesty both horrific and delightful, through the works of Tom McGuiness, Henry Moore Hogarth, Renoire Soutine and Francis Bacon, Edvard Munch, Frida Kahlo and Rembrandt and his painting of the “Anatomy Lesson”.

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19th  October  Oliver  Everett*  

Lecture:  Treasures  from  the  Royal  Collection  

The Royal Collection contains over 485,000 objects collected by the Royal family from King Henry VIII to the present Queen. The lecture selects about 40 of the finest items in the Collection to demonstrate its range and magnificence, as well as showing the varying collecting interests of individual monarchs and other members of the Royal family. The objects include oil paintings, miniature paintings; old master drawings; sculptures; porcelain; gold and silver objects; Fabergé; jewellery; furniture and rare books and manuscripts; This lecture is showing us rare and valued treasures by the most famous artists in each field too numerous to name here but anyone alone worth seeing.