What's On

This year we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the birth of Charles
Darwin and the 150th anniversary
of the publication of his treatise On
the Origin of Species. Join us for an
outline of Darwin's life and the way
animals are represented in art.

In conjunction with the National Portrait Gallery, the NGV is pleased to present this lecture by William Feaver international guest speaker and world renowned specialist on Freud and Auerbach. Do not miss this opportunity for insights on two of the current leading contemporary portrait painters.

Lecture Six: Confidence
and Longing
Sun 28 Nov, 2pm
This lecture explores two major themes of the nineteenth century. One is the cult of Romanticism, which emphasised longing for various unattainable things: the past, fusion with nature, the divine. The other is the confident conviction that art can heal and help society. These two themes come together in the work of the art critic, social reformer and colossus of Victorian intellectual life, John Ruskin. No other writer in the history of the West has had such immense ambitions for art, nor such determination to put those ambitions into practice. Although Ruskin was a great champion of the art of the past - he especially loved the old Italian cities of Venice, Sienna and Pisa and the paintings of Tintoretto and Turner - he set himself the mission of creating an art of equal stature in his own time.

Lecture Seven: Freedom and Tradition

This lecture will look at the intimate, charming world of the Bloomsbury movement. It was a transitional movement. It emphasised individual freedom to live and love as one liked, it placed a high value on pleasure and personal creativity. It was concerned with conversation, as much as with writing, gardening and painting. Bloomsbury saw itself as casting off the dead weight of Victorianism. Yet, paradoxically, Bloomsbury was a product of nineteenth century wealth and the opportunities this created. It was an aristocratic movement in democratic disguise. In retrospect, its values are traditional: craftsmanship, beauty, the amateur, the country house. In fact Bloomsbury looked as much to the past (to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) as it did to the future. It is perhaps best understood as a 'renaissance' - a reanimation of old ideals newly adapted to current needs.

Lecture Eight: Guilt, Complexity - and Restoration?
The cataclysmic destruction in Europe, over three decades from 1914 to 1945, ushered in a new era. The old order appeared to have destroyed itself. The sophistication and huge cultural accumulation of old Europe had been no guarantee of peace, wisdom or beauty. On the contrary, it had all somehow led to trench warfare, Revolution and totalitarianism in Russia, Fascism, the bombing of cities and the death camps.

The new era was understandably marked by guilt, and the profound loss of confidence that guilt brings with it. What place could there now be for grace, dignity, elegance, pride and serenity? And so the art of the new age was marked by a rejection of the great tradition. And where do we go now?