14 October 2009  –  Careful Collector: Fakes, Forgeries & Reproductions

“Woe is me!” cries the careless collector who brings home a poisonous toad in mistake for a Ming bowl. This talk is more opportune than it has ever been and has been reconstructed to take in the huge number of spurious works now on the market.  90% of all lots offered in the ‘Antiques’ section of a well-known Internet auction site are brand new.

Lecturer: David Battie FRSA worked in Sotheby’s Departments of Ceramics and Oriental Works of Art and was appointed a Director in 1976.  He has written The Price Guide to 19th and 20th Century British Pottery, is the editor of Sotheby’s Encyclopedia of Porcelain, co-editor of the companion Encyclopaedia of Glass, and was the General Editor of Reader’s Digest Treasures in Your Home and The Antiques Roadshow book. He has appeared on the Antiques Roadshow since the first programme in 1979.

11 November 2009  –  Art Deco: High Style in the Roaring Twenties

This illustrated lecture will trace the development of Art Deco and the impact of Modernism in the 1920s and 1930s, through dress, architecture, interiors, furniture, glass, ceramics, metalwork and jewellery.

Lecturer: Anne Anderson  BA PhD FSA was a Senior Lecturer on the Fine Arts Valuation degree course at Southampton Sole University, where she specialized in the Aesthetic Movement, Arts and Crafts, Art Nouveau and Modernism.  She is currently Hon.Research Fellow at Exeter University; a Fellow of the Huntington, CA; Researcher for Lord Frederic Leighton’s Studio-House and exhibition Curator at Southampton City Art Gallery.

9 December 2009 –  The Incas and other Peruvian Civilisations seen through their Art and Textiles

Ancient burial grounds in Peru have yielded up dazzling goldwork, fine ceramic vessels, and some of the richest textiles in the world. Even today — nearly 500 years after the Spanish Conquest – textiles remain central to life in the Andes. This lecture will be accompanied by a display of Peruvian weavings and will celebrate Peru’s unique textile heritage.

Lecturer: Chloë Sayer BA (Hons) is a freelance specialist in Latin American art and culture.  A Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute, she has made ethnographic collections and carried out fieldwork in Mexico and Belize for the British Museum.  Her many books include Mexican Textiles, The Arts and Crafts of Mexico, The Incas – The Ancient World,  and Textiles from Mexico.  She is the co-author of The Skeleton at the Feast: The Mexican Day of the Dead, Traditional Mexican Architecture and Mask Arts of Mexico.

13 January 2010 – Renaissance Treasures in the Ashmolean Museum

The Ashmolean is one of the world’s greatest university galleries, with an astonishing range of Italian Renaissance paintings and drawings. The lecture will illustrate and discuss some of the major works, including paintings by Paolo Uccello and Giorgione and show how several other paintings offer intriguing glimpses into the way Renaissance paintings functioned and the world of the painters who created them.

Lecturer: Julian Gardner taught at the Courtauld Institute before moving to Warwick to found the Department of the History of Art. He has lectured in many countries around the world and been a visiting professor at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley. He is a specialist in late mediaeval and early Italian painting and sculpture.

10 February 2010  –  Keeping Up Appearances: Prehistoric jewellery in Britain

About 4,500 years ago the inhabitants of Britain suddenly started wearing and being buried with jewellery.  Subsequent centuries saw objects being fashioned out of amber, jet, gold, copper, bone and faience in a bewildering variety of forms.  This unprecedented explosion of decadent display requires explanations that archaeologists are only just beginning to grasp.

Lecturer: Ben Roberts  BSc, MPhil (Distinction), PhD is Curator of Early Prehistory at the British Museum. He is a Graduate of Sheffield and Cambridge Universities and has published and lectured widely on Prehistoric Europe.

3 March 2010  –  Modern Art and the Legacy of 1968

Many people feel that modern art is more difficult to understand than art of the past. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the divisions between painting, sculpture, architecture and design have become blurred, and many works of art are hard to categorise. By looking at and discussing a wide variety of images this lecture will aim to provide guidelines about how to appreciate modern art better and how to discover continuity between the art of earlier periods and our own.

Lecturer: Mary Acton  BA Hons Courtauld Institute, F E Diploma was Course Director of Undergraduate Diploma and Advanced Diploma in the History of Art at Oxford University Department for Continuing Education and continues to teach there.  Lectures at Art History Summer School, Cambridge University. Author Learning to Look at Paintings, Learning to Look at Modern Art and Learning to Look at Sculpture.

12 May 2010  –  New and Modernized Museums in Britain; Their Architecture, Changing Roles, and Visitor expectation

This talk considers the new and modernized museums, many architecturally striking, which have proliferated in Britain in the post war period.  What does the visitor expect? How are the roles of museums changing?

Lecturer: Marina Vaizey MA Cantab BA read history at Harvard and Cambridge.  She has been an art critic for The Financial Times and for the Sunday Times. Has curated exhibions on fine arts, photography and decorative arts.  Author of 100 Masterpieces of Art, The Artist as Photographer and Great Women Collectors.  Edited the Art Quarterly and The Review for the National Art Collections Fund.  Currently chair of the Friends of the V&A. A past member of the Arts Council and the Crafts Council.

9 June 2010  – In the Wake of Handel – the impact of Handel and his music on 300 years of British culture

Despite his German birth, and his Italian musical training, Handel remains one of the most important composers that England ever nurtured.  Not only did his music have direct influence on his musical contemporaries, but his larger-than-life personality had a profound effect on the literary, visual and decorative arts as well – both in his lifetime and after his death, in 1759.  The lecture assesses the cultural influences Handel had on a nation, as he once wrote, from which I have receiv’d so generous a protection.

Lecturer: Peter Medhurst GRSM ARCM is a musician and scholar, giving recitals and delivering illustrated lectures on music and the arts.  He studied singing and early keyboard instruments at the Royal College of Music and at the Mozarteum in Salzburg.