Info

Please be aware that there are no trailers before the performance.

• Fri 2 Oct to Fri 6 Nov
• 120 minutes

Synopsis

Roger Simpson presents a series of 6 talks on
Art History - Reality!

£10 per talk, £51 for all 6 bought in advance in one transaction

Oct 2nd. The Masks of God. Reality in a world of Magical thinking, from the first human art through the ongoing attraction of mythology.

We assume that Empirical thought must be right, and Magical thought must be wrong. Yet the latter kept civilisation intact for 4000 years, while many are coming to believe that the former is bringing it to the brink in just 300.

Oct 9th. Joseph Wright of Derby, “Experiment on a Bird in an Air Pump.” Reality in an Age of Reason.

For a brief period in the English Enlightenment no one really believed that Pure Reason would kill God. Joseph Wright would create an altarpiece to a moment of equipoise between Magic and Reason.

Oct 16th.  Jacques Louis David. Reality run amok. Revolution and the roots of Propaganda.

Did the Enlightenment end humanity’s need for deities in the face of pure Reason? The Romantic Movement would say No. The stirrings of modern revolutionary thought gave a resounding Yes.

October 23rd. The Peredvizhniki. Ilya Repin, Russian Social Realism and The Reality of the Many.

In the mid-19th century, a new definition of Reality emerged—Social Realism. Amid concerns for a)the state of the poor, and b)their potential for social violence, Social Realism looked at them in (it hoped) a non-judgmental way. Reality as reportage? Next stop: Stalinist Socialist Realism.

October 30th. Full Circle 1. Symbolism and the denial of rational thought. Reality as the magical inner workings of the mind

Romanticism was a search for Mystery in a rational world. We still search for it. Symbolists like Puvis de Chavannes and Odilon Redon, in the formative years of psychotherapy, looked inside themselves for “eternal” symbols.

November 6th. Full Circle 2. Stanley Spencer’s Masks of God.

We live in a world dominated by the Reality of reason. But we are not finished with magic. While Symbolists sought a Jungian Universal Iconography, Stanley Spencer returned to an older, simpler and humbler reverence for the reality of the divine.