Art History Course | Framing the Landscape: Postwar Abstraction
10.30am–1pm
£45 each or book all three for £125
[ Special Event )
Buy Tickets >Join us for the final session in our art history course focussed on the development of postwar abstraction.
The session will feature two engaging lectures with opportunities for questions, plus a coffee break (refreshments provided) in between.
In the introductory lecture, writer and curator Michael Tucker will look at the rise of abstraction in postwar British art, exploring how artists moved away from direct representation towards a more exploratory approach to depicting the landscape.
The lecture considers Ben Nicholson’s belief in the modern artist’s search for “the poetic idea”. For Nicholson, this offered a way for contemporary art to recover the deeply lived or spiritual quality which he admired in the cave paintings of early people (London Magazine vol.1, no.4, July 1961). This illustrated talk addresses Nicholson’s key concept in the context of the development of postwar British abstraction and the parallel persistence of a sense of place in the work.
A concluding lecture by Dr Melanie Vandenbrouck, Chief Curator at Pallant House Gallery, will focus on Prunella Clough (1919-1999), whose work sits between abstraction and observation. Her paintings reveal a sensitivity to overlooked urban and industrial environments, rendered through subtle textures and muted colour.
The session will feature two engaging lectures with opportunities for questions, plus a coffee break (refreshments provided) in between.
Please bring anything you would like to make notes with and let us know when booking of any special dietary or access requirements.
£45 per session or book all three for the discounted price of £125.
Add all three sessions to your basket to receive the discounted price when you check out.
Other sessions in this course are:
Wednesday 23 September, 10.30am–1pm: Interwar Printmaking
Wednesday 7 October, 10.30am–1pm: Surrealism, Neo-Romanticism and War
Dr Melanie Vandenbrouck
Dr Melanie Vandenbrouck is Chief Curator at Pallant House Gallery. Formerly Curator of Sculpture 1900–Now at the V&A and Curator of Art Post-1800 at Royal Museums Greenwich in London, she has led major contemporary art initiatives. Her wide interests include the porosity between artforms and the ways in which art and identity intersect. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, she holds a PhD from the Courtauld Institute and trained at the École du Louvre and Sorbonne University in Paris as well as Sussex University.
Michael Tucker
Michael Tucker (born 1948) is a writer and lecturer, jazz critic and painter. Author of Dreaming With Open Eyes: The Shamanic Spirit in 20th-Century Art & Culture (1992) and Jan Garbarek: Deep Song (1998) he was Professor of Poetics at the University of Brighton, where he curated a number of touring exhibitions of British and European, Scandinavian and Australian Aboriginal art. A holder of the (examined) degree of Doctor of Letters, awarded by the University of Sussex for “ distinguished contributions to the advancement of learning”, his publications include material on a range of British artists, e.g., Paul Benjamins, Roberta Booth, Harvey Daniels, Alan Davie, Gary Goodman, Ivon and John Hitchens, Andrzej Jackowski, Patrick Kirby, Ian McKeever, Ian Potts, Jemma Powell, Brian Rice, Judy Stapleton and Tony Wilson.
