Painting

John Timberlake, Another Country: Nuclear War as False Memory

Simon Faulkner, Reversing the Flow of Time

The project is designed to initiate new relationships and exchanges among the academic, policy, curating and artistic communities. Supported by the European Science Foundation (Humanities in the European Research Area, HERA). Traumatic pasts have complex and often dramatic influences on the present. The conference will explore creative engagements with controversial pasts in art practice, curating and museums, establishing a dialogue among diverse participants. Read more about our theme and aims on the project website www.open.ac.uk/Arts/disturbing-pasts/.

This is one of five podcasts produced by the Open University to accompany the exhibition ‘The First Actresses: Nell Gwyn to Sarah Siddons’ at the National Portrait Gallery, London 2011-2012. This show presents a vivid spectacle of femininity, fashion and theatricality in seventeenth and eighteenth-century England. It features portraits of some of the best known female performers of the period, who ranged from royal mistresses to successful writers and businesswomen, and accomplished musicians.

Discussion of Titian’s work, Titian’s paintings in the British Isles and his career; a significant European Artist

Spike Bucklow, Everyday Alchemy

Part of the lecture series on 'Art & Alchemy: Transformation & Contemporary Art' A two day conference across Cambridge and Norwich exploring ideas of alchemy and transformation, and the role of crystals in contemporary artistic practice and theory from Graeco-Roman Egypt to Surrealism and contemporary art.

The Bowes Museum also houses 'The Last Communion of Peter Nolasco' (1611), part of a series of six paintings executed by Francisco Pacheco (1564-1654) for the Mercedarian convent of Seville. Although this painting has strayed far from its original home, the curator Jon Old shows how its material fabric, currently under conservation, retains physical traces of Seville.

The Bowes Museum collection of Spanish art is second in the UK only to that of the National Gallery and was acquired along with other works by the Bowes' agent, at a sale in Paris in 1862. Among its treasures are key works by El Greco (1541-1614) and Goya (1746-1828). The museum's 2010 exhibition on Goya highlights his key work 'Interior of a Prison' (1793-4). This work offers a very different kind of subject from El Greco's eloquently Catholic 'The Tears of Saint Peter' (c.1580), while generating an equally intense expressivity.

Discussion 1 This symposium explores the controversial status of Futurist movements in art history, and some of their ‘avant-garde’ practices. Speakers engage with various forms of Futurist art, performance and film, including the use of manifestos and demonstrations. Italian Futurism will be viewed in relation to other radical art practices across Europe. The Futurists’ disdain for traditional values and their pursuit of an ‘art of modern life’ will be explored in relation to prevailing concepts of modernity and ‘avant-garde’ utopias.