LIVING IN THE PAST.
How artists, architects and designers re-imagined the Classical and Mediaeval to transform 18th and 19th century Britain.
A series of three lectures exploring how the visual culture of the past was used to reimagine and reorder political, religious, domestic and social life. The art and architecture of the past were setting an example to the present. In part, this was an aesthetic idea that the present would look better if it looked like the past. But, more than that, the Classical and Medieval Revivals were an attempt to use art to shape how people lived.The arts and designs of the past would also encourage people to recreate the morality, ethics, politics, religion and social order of the past. The past would set an example to the present.We might think this is all a rather strange way for artists to think. We are used to artists striving for novelty, looking to shock us with radical new forms and ideas. Art is (and has been for over a century) about “making it new” (to borrow the phrase of the poet Ezra Pound). But what the 18th and 19th century revivals show us is that art is also about “making it old”, about looking to and living in the past. They also show us that most radical of ideas which will find almost no support in the modern art establishment – the idea that perhaps the past is worth preserving, imitating and using in order to make the present a little more attractive and bearable. That by drawing on the past, you might give meaning to the present.
PICTURES ON THE EDGE. AN INTRODUCTION TO THE GROTESQUE
https://www.arthistoricallondon.com/event-details/paintings-on-the-edge-an-introduction-to-the-grotesque
I am giving an online lecture to Art Historical London. Grotesques are bizarre, playful, highly imaginative, make-believe decorative images. They take their name from the Roman wall decorations discovered in 1480 (they were found underground as so thought to have been painted on the walls of grottoes). They quickly became a hugely fashionable form of decoration and once they were adopted at the Vatican by Raphael and his workshop, they spread throughout Italy and north into France, the Netherlands and Germany. As a decorative, ornamental art, it is charming and witty. But the grotesque is more than mere decoration: it also suggests the dark, the menacing, the monstrous and the frightening. In the Renaissance, the grotesque was described as representing “the dreams of painters”. Come and look at these dreams and see how they turned into nightmares.
ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM. AN INTRODUCTION.
16th October 2020.
https://www.arthistoricallondon.com/event-details/abstract-expressionism-an-introduction
I am giving an online lecture to Art Historical London. I will be giving an introduction to this important and influential 20th century American art movement. We will look at the background to Abstract Expressionism, and then consider the work of some of the major artists such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Willem de Kooning and Barnett Newman.
Click on the link above or on the image which is Clyfford Still’s Untitled R no.1 1947
ITALIAN RENAISSANCE LANDSCAPE PAINTING
On 14th August at 11.00am, I will be giving an online lecture to Art Historical London. The subject is Italian Renaissance Landscape Painting. Booking details are available by clicking on image above which might or might not be a landscape (all will be revealed): or, by following this link:
https://www.arthistoricallondon.com/event-details/italian-renaissance-landscapes
andrew james taylor 