The Slade Picnic: Christopher Nevinson

delivered by Alan Read

Continuing from Alan's hugely successful series of 2021, he will be looking at the work of the artists pictured in the Slade Students’ Picnic photograph of 1912. This extraordinary generation represented a galaxy of stars of Modern British Art.

Fri 25/3/22: Christopher Nevinson

Christopher Nevinson (1889-1946) was the only British artist fully to embrace the principles of

Futurism. Applied to his experience of the First World War the result was a powerful series of

paintings and his appointment as Official War Artist. Later known for his urban views of London,

New York and Paris, Nevinson failed to sustain his early success and his style became outmoded by

the fashions of the mid-twentieth century but his war paintings alone are sufficient to make him

among the most important British artists of the early twentieth century.

Fri 1/4/22 Stanley Spencer

Cookham was the birthplace and unlikely setting for most of the visionary paintings of Stanley

Spencer (1891-1959): The Resurrection, Cookham (1927) and Sandham Memorial Chapel (1927-32)

are among the masterpieces of Modern British Art. He was equally adept at portrait commissions

and landscapes/still lifes, which found a ready market. Both Spencer’s wives were Slade-trained

painters; having divorced Hilda Carline he married Patricia Preece and she was the subject of some

striking (even disturbing) nude portraits. This lecture will examine the life and work of this major

British artist.

Fri 8/4/22 William Roberts (Adrian Allison & Isaac Rosenberg)  

Born in Hackney, William Roberts (1895-1980) followed a similar path to many of his contemporaries into the Slade and on to become a war artist. He was part of the Vorticist movement which made him one of the most cutting-edge artists of the time. In the 1920s he evolved a new style of ‘English Cubism’ and London remained his home and the life of Londoners his subject. He continued to work into his eighties and to exhibit at the Royal Academy. This lecture will also briefly look at the work of Adrian Allinson (1890-1959) and Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918).

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Richmond Old Town Hall, Whittaker Suite

Whittaker Ave, Richmond TW9 1TP

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