Across the opening weekend of The Picasso Century, hear from academics, historians, and specialists alongside NGV curators as they examine the socio-political and cultural frameworks in France and Europe at the time of Picasso and his contemporaries. Discussions cover art, war and politics in Picasso’s era, creative communities as catalysts for change, and themes of gender, feminism and identity.
ART, WAR & POLITICS
The twentieth century saw immense, often confronting change, including the trauma of multiple wars across geographies, increasing mobilisation, migration and trades among countries and continents, and social and cultural revolutions that impacted the way that people lived, worked and interacted. In this panel, specialist commentators discuss the socio-political contexts that existed in France and Europe at the time of The Picasso Century, and how Picasso and other artists and members of the community worked with, reacted to, or struggled within this.
Host
Laurie Benson, Curator, International Art, National Gallery of Victoria
Speakers
Lara Anderson has published extensively on many aspects of Spanish food discourse, such as culinary nationalism, food and politics and food and gender in leading international journals. She has, also, co-edited a journal issue entitled Transhispanic Food Cultural Studies, which delineates the emerging field of Hispanic Cultural Food Studies, inserting Hispanist voices into the arena of food studies and making food central to a praxis of cultural studies in the transhispanic world. She also writes about Australian food culture, in particular food multiculturalism, culinary xenophobia and refugee and migrant food initiatives. She has written, too, about Latin American food culture in the context of Australian food multiculturalism and can supervise on any of these areas. She has also written several research articles on teaching related topics such as the place of WIL in the tertiary language setting, the place of food studies in tertiary language studies and the role of visual art and art galleries in language teaching. She has a special interest in Picasso’s Guernica which is the subject of an intermediate Spanish Cultural Studies subject.
Peter McPhee AM was appointed to a Personal Chair in History at the University of Melbourne in 1993. He has published widely on the history of modern France, including A Social History of France, 1780-1914 (2004) and Liberty or Death: the French Revolution (2016). He was appointed to the position of Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) in 2003 before becoming the University’s first Provost in 2007-09. He was awarded a Centenary Medal for services to education in 2003 and became a Member of the Order of Australia in 2012. He is currently the Chair of the History Council of Victoria, the state’s peak body for history.