Programme Jan – Jun 2025

THE USE OF COLOUR IN WESTERN ART
The intention of the theme is to address the use and significance of colour and colour theory in the practice and development of Western art over the centuries and across different media. This will range from medieval churches to Op Art, and include Victorian art, Scottish Colourists, Fauvism, Hockney and Divisionism/Pointillism along the way

Wednesday, 15 January, 2025, 10:30 – 12:30, The Arc, Jewry Street, Winchester
Introduction to Colour and Culture in Western Art Illustrated seminar by Barry Venning
The first talk in this series attempts an overview of the theme of colour through the work of the brilliant art historian, John Gage (1938-2012) and, in particular, his magisterial book, Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction, the publication of which in 1993 led him to be regarded as the pre-eminent historian of artistic uses and theories of colour in western cultures. In his work, Gage addressed myriad problems and issues to do with colour: problems to do with light and pigments, rainbows and printing, stained glass and mosaics, religion and heraldry. He demonstrated how Turner’s use of colour was affected by his interests in science and poetry, he explored the chromophobia (fear of colour) that often afflicted academic teachings from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries and he examined the theories of colour from the Greek philosopher Democritus to the abstract painter Kandinsky and beyond. Gage’s firm belief was that ‘all colour practices have their specific contexts and their specific rationale, so that colour must be at last not simply a branch – and a minor one – of formal analysis, but must be fully integrated into the history of art.’

Wednesday, 29 January, 2025, 10:30 – 12:30, The Arc, Jewry Street, Winchester
Colour in Victorian Art Illustrated seminar by Dr Anne Anderson FSA
The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1848-1853) overturned artistic convention by emulating the vibrant colours seen in Italian quattrocento
paintings. To a public accustomed to the dark palette of seventeenth and eighteenth-century oil paintings, bright colour was a visual affront. To achieve the translucent colour of egg tempera and fresco painting, the Pre-Raphaelites utilized the laborious technique of the wet-white ground. The results can be seen John Everett Millais’ iconic Isabella (1849) and William Holman Hunt’s Rienzi vowing to obtain justice for the death of his young brother (1849), their first Pre-Raphaelite works. Victorian sensibilities were once again assailed at the London International Exhibition held in 1862, as one of the key innovations were the rainbow colours of aniline dyes. While William Henry Perkins was attempting to create artificial quinine to cure malaria, he discovered aniline dyes could be distilled from coal tar. His first mass produced chemical dye, mauveine, was soon to be seen in every fashionable drawing room. Punch, the comic magazine, was quick to lampoon the ‘mauve measles’. After mauve went out of fashion, there was Perkin’s green, magenta and solferino (fuchsia) to overwhelm the eye. There was bound to be a reaction, with such hues decried as vulgar. The aesthetes, led by James McNeill Whistler and Oscar Wilde, called for subtle
colours, soft greens, pale yellows and indigo blues, the ‘greenery-yallery of the Grosvenor Gallery’ as pilloried by Gilbert and Sullivan in the comic opera Patience. William Morris’ wallpapers and fabrics set the colour tone for the fashionable aesthete who aspired to the ‘House Beautiful’. As the century drew to a close, the Yellow Book and Wilde’s green carnation came to define the decadence of the Naughty Nineties.

Wednesday, 12 February, 2025, 10:30 – 12:30, The Arc, Jewry Street, Winchester
Colour in Op Art Illustrated seminar by Sarah Ciacci
‘To experience the presence of a work of art is more important than to understand it’ – Victor Vasarely.
Op (Optical) Art, was a major art movement in the 1960s that used geometric forms to create optical effects. Artists such as Bridget Riley,
Jesus Raphael Soto and Victor Vasarely used a framework of purely geometric forms as the basis for its effects, as well as colour theory and
ideas around perception to confound the normal processes of perception. In this talk we will look at how Op Art became a recognised movement with the 1965 MoMA exhibition The Responsive Eye, its antecedents, main practitioners, critical responses and its influences. We will also explore how colour pattern, light and movement were used, as well as the resulting effects such as after-images, dazzle and vibration to reveal the richness of this often overlooked movement.

Wednesday, 19 March, 2025, 10:30 – 12:30, The Arc, Jewry Street, Winchester
The Scottish Colourists and their Contemporaries Illustrated seminar by James Knox
The Scottish Colourists, S.J. Peploe, J. D. Fergusson, G.L. Hunter, and F.C.B. Cadell, are widely recognized as Scotland’s most experimental and distinctive artists of the early twentieth century. Their radical vision was forged in Paris in the years running up to WW1, when the ferment of the French avant-garde emboldened the Scots to explore the frontiers of contemporary art, from the emerging Post-Impressionist giants, Cezanne and Van Gogh, to the Fauves (wild beasts), led by Matisse and Derain, whose work in the 1905 Salon d’Automne cut loose from representational values to convey an emotional reality through an expressive, often brutish, use of colour. The Scots were not the only British artists to absorb the shock waves of this revolution. Bloomsbury’s Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant exhibited radical work at the two controversial Post-Impressionist exhibitions in London. While Welsh artists John Dickson Innes and Augustus John, along with Irish
pioneer, Roderic O’Connor, brought a colour-expressive approach to landscape. Meanwhile Sickert and the Camden Town Group, revealed a
more nuanced approach to the lessons of the French. Based on his concurrent breakthrough show in Edinburgh*, Knox will challenge hitherto accepted conventions as to who really were the leaders of the British avant-garde in the early years of the twentieth century.
* The Scottish Colourists and their Contemporaries, 7 February – 28 June, 2025 at the Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh

Wednesday, 2 April, 2025, 10:30 – 12:30, The Arc, Jewry Street, Winchester
David Hockney: “The Old Master of the Modern World” Illustrated seminar by Douglas Skeggs
From the early sixties, when he left the Royal College of Art more famous than his teachers, Hockney’s paintings have shown a charm and humour that sets them apart from others of his generation. A naturally gifted draftsman, his love of ingenious visual devices has led him to experiment with a whole range of techniques, from stage design to coloured paper making. From the early abstract expressionist images, through his famous Californian scenes of swimming pools to the photo-montages of the mid eighties, this lecture follows the career of an artist whose wit and imagination have never faltered.

Wednesday, 23 April, 2025, 10:30 – 12:30, The Arc, Jewry Street, Winchester
Matisse and the Fauves Illustrated seminar by Dr Jacqueline Cockburn
When André Derain met Maurice de Vlaminck in 1900 on a train bound for Chatou, outside of Paris, they started a conversation about art which would lead to their tiny ‘School of Chatou’. They met up with Matisse who had spent time with Signac in his home in Saint Tropez in 1904 and decided to show their work as a group with other like-minded artists in the Salon d’Automne of 1905 in Room 7 at the Grand Palais. The opening on 15 October led to an outcry amongst the critics who saw the artists as ‘wild beasts’- Les Fauves, an epithet they did not seem to mind, for their explosive colours, laid thickly and unevenly onto the canvases gave them a mutual purpose and sharing of ideas for a few subsequent years. Along with other artists such as Raoul Dufy, Charles Camoin and Georges Braque, and cheered on by the dealer Ambroise Vollard, they treated colours like sticks of dynamite and revelled in what they saw as a modern outlook on life. Influenced by Cézanne, Sérusier, Seurat and Signac amongst others, they were accused of flinging a pot of paint at the public. In this lecture we will consider the impact of their work and the negative criticism which only fuelled more painterly excitement.

Wednesday, 14 May, 2025, 10:30 – 12:30, The Arc, Jewry Street, Winchester
The New Jerusalem: The Battle for Colour in Medieval Worship Illustrated seminar by Dr Gillian White
In a modern, post-Reformation country, it is often difficult to imagine the role that colour played in medieval worship. We know, of course, that churches – and especially the great cathedrals – were filled with colour in paintings, textiles and sculptures, illuminated by the passage of light through stained-glass windows. We may have some sense of the liturgical colours that divide the religious year, or that certain colours ‘represent’ familiar figures, like the blue of the Virgin Mary’s robe. Some recollection of the description of the New Jerusalem from the Book of Revelation may persuade us that the earthly church was adorned to be a foretaste of the heavenly city with its foundations of luminous precious stones. But how did this polychrome world of spirituality arise? Here in the Middle Ages, we are faced not with the aesthetics of the artists but with the beliefs of the theologians. We must forget all thoughts of the spectrum, or primary and secondary colours, let alone the colour wheel, and turn, instead, to the interplay of theological debate and technological advance. And at the heart is a fraught and complex battle ground: is colour composed of light and thus divine in nature, or of matter and thus base, a concealment or a revelation of truth?
Followed by the AGM

Wednesday, 4 June, 2025, 10:30 – 12:30, The Arc, Jewry Street, Winchester
Divisionism and Pointillism Illustrated seminar by Dr Kathy McLauchlan
The term ‘divisionism’ refers to a method of painting developed by Seurat and his followers during the 1880s. It involved using pure, unmixed dabs – or ‘points’ – of oil paint, which seen from a distance would combine in a way that emulated the brilliance of colour in nature. The leading figure in these experiments was Seurat, but he was soon joined by others including Paul Signac and Camille Pissarro. Together they sought to build on the achievements of the Impressionist painters of the 1860s and 1870s, who had advocated outdoor painting and the use of vibrant colour combinations and open brushwork to capture transient light effects. Divisionism aimed to turn their experiments into a system, to break up colours according to scientific understanding of how colours interact and the visual impact they make on a viewer.