| Status: | Active, open to new members |
| Leader: |
Robert Sedgley
|
| Group email: | History & Appreciation of Art group historyofart@u3aoliva.org |
| When: | Monthly on Tuesday afternoons 5:00 PM-7:00 PM |
| Venue: | Biblioteca de L'Envic |
| Cost: | Free |
The activity of the group is to further our understanding and appreciation of art through an illustrated talk from the leader and with contributions from the group. All are welcome; whether expert or not come and join in the conversation, find out more about the wonderful and surprising world of art.
We have now been running for about eight years and have come in our chronological survey up to the beginning of the Twentieth Century, and are looking at the revolution in the visual arts that we call Modernism. For new members who wish to acquire a background understanding of what went before I recommend reading the notes of previous meetings. These are complete from the earliest paintings on the walls of caves, up to the early moderns: Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism and Futurism. However, this is by no means compulsory – we are not an exam group!
All are welcome; whether expert or not come and join in the conversation, find out more about the wonderful and surprising world of art!
Leader: Robert Sedgley
Next meeting
The topic of the February meeting will be the Dada movement. Dadaism burst on an unsuspecting public in 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire, started by Hugo Ball. This "anti-art" movement, a protest against war, against all bourgeois values, against romanticism and expressionism and anything associated with convention and the old order which had brought the world to the conflagration of the First World War, erupted in many cities around the same time: Berlin, Cologne, Hanover, Paris, Barcelona and New York. A disparate group of artists and writers came together for a few electrifying years when they upended the notions of art and respectability, In a spirit of provocation they organised 'art' exhibitions of detritus and found objects which confused the viewer, readings of sound poetry without meaning and performances which invariably (and deliberately) ended in the audience rioting. The world and art were never to recover: although this 'movement' would inevitably end in quarrels and retribution among its authors, Dada lives on; in art, in satire and comedy (The Goons and Monty Python), in fashion and fake news and the ability to doubt everything.
Tuesday 4th. February 5.00 p.m. at Biblioteca l'Envic
Dada doubts everything. Dada is an armadillo. Everything is Dada, too. Beware of Dada. Anti-dadaism is a disease: selfkleptomania, man's normal condition, is Dada. But the real dada's are against Dada.
–Tristan Tzara
"I am a painter and I nail my pictures together" –Kurt Schwitters
"I could see no reason why used tram tickets, bits of driftwood, buttons and old junk from attics and rubbish heaps should not serve well as materials for paintings; they suited the purpose just as well as factory-made paints." –Kurt Schwitters
Every page must explode, whether through seriousness, profundity, turbulence, nausea, the new, the eternal, annihilating nonsense, enthusiasm for principles, or the way it is printed. –Francis Picabia