ADFAS Evening Lecture - Embracing Brokeness 1904 - 1914 Visitor's Taster T...
Event Information
Description
Our Speaker tonight is Hilary Guise
Although Hilary is South African born, she is a British artist and art historian, trained initially as a painter at Central St Martins, London, with post graduate degrees in Fine Art and an MPhil in Classics specializing in Parthenon studies.
She is on the faculty of Florida State University and has worked for other colleges in the USA, Aix-en-Provence, Cape Town, and Cambridge University.
In addition to a great love of teaching, she runs an art practice in her studio in Docklands, exhibiting in France, Berlin, Cambridge, Ireland, and London. The passion for art has taken her from Portland Oregon, to Hobart Tasmania, California to Hamburg, Lithuania to Cape Town, and toured in the USA, she lectured at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC.
For the Arts Societies (originally NADFAS) Hilary has been privileged to contribute around 450 lectures covering the UK, Gibraltar, South Africa and New Zealand. She has clocked up 223 talks over a 5 year period! Very indicatative of Hilary's support of the arts.
Hilary lectures in the main museums in London for American universities, and she has also worked for the Art Fund, taught courses for Cambridge University, and has been a guest speaker on cruises.
Our Talk tonight is 'Embracing Brokeness: Is Art Prophetic?'
This theme is about the cultural build up to the outbreak of World War I, over the period from 1904 to 1914.
As the nineteenth century ended, beliefs and structures that had supported European culture for two millennia began to give way. The consequences of this sea change in the zeitgeist came to a head around 1913 – and within months, in August 1914, the love affair with destruction became a reality as the First World War broke out.
Hilary investigates why this happened, and what the consequences were in the disciplines making up our culture.
In all disciplines there was an overwhelming desire to break down traditions and to strip out the meaning. This happened in the visual arts through Cubism and Surrealism, and in literature through the loss of punctuation in “stream of consciousness” writing.
Primitivism was embraced, while Henri Rousseau’s moonlit jungles and snake-charmers tempted a return to a primitive, non-European world, and Gauguin’s artificial Tahitian idylls promoted a world untouched by the great canons of Classical Greek art and thinking that had been the bedrock of European, art, architecture, philosophy, and the sciences, for so long.
The Renaissance, quite suddenly, may as well never have happened.
These changes suggest that the idea of destruction and brokenness was irresistibly attractive in the early years of the twentieth century, and that it became a force sweeping through Western culture that finally manifest in the outbreak of the worst destruction Europe had ever seen.
How much were the artists to blame for this tragedy? Were they prophetic mystagogues, warning of this darkness to come?
For more details please to our ADFAS website page:-
Our objective is to significantly boost ADFAS annual Membership as the only way to provide the necessary secured finance to hold the Evening series of talks. Hence ADFAS reserve the right to restrict the individual use of these Taster tickets for visitors over a period.
