Programme Sep – Dec 2025

POST 1945 BRITISH ART
The aim of the programme is to address the opening up of art in Britain after 1945, to examine the broad range of exciting works that
were produced as a result and to explore their social and international significance. It will cover the artists who were loosely grouped together as the ‘School of London’, figurative painting, abstraction and Pop Art whilst not forgetting the impact of the Festival of Britain on architecture and design, as well as the effects of social changes on sculpture.

Wednesday, 10 September, 2025, 10:30 – 12:30, The Arc, Jewry Street, Winchester
‘Don’t Make Fun of the Festival’ – Art, Design and Entertainment at The Festival of Britain Illustrated seminar by Jo Walton
Intended to offer a ‘Tonic to the Nation’, the Festival opened to the public on May 3rd 1951, having been created on London’s South Bank. In the midst of the worst weather since 1815, with strikes, disputes and a plague of rats bedevilling the site, the press and public were surprised  and delighted to find an exhibition filled with ingenuity, whimsy and startling modernity. In this lecture, we’ll explore the origins of the Festival including the 1851 Great Exhibition and the 1900 Paris World Fair. We’ll hear what people and politicians really thought of the plans as they were being made and discover how the authorities catered for thousands of visitors in the difficulties of post-war London. We’ll explore the works created for the Festival by artists such as Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Ben Nicholson and many others. We will then
consider the lasting legacies of the Festival in the fields of architecture and design.

Wednesday, 1 October, 2025, 10:30 – 12:30, The Arc, Jewry Street, Winchester
Agents of Change: Women Working in Sculpture since the 1960s Illustrated seminar by Natalie Rudd
‘Women will actually be the major artistic drive in a few years’ George Fullard, sculptor, 1923-1973
This lecture will consider the contribution made by women to the field of British sculpture since the 1960s. It will begin with a close
examination of the ways in which women were excluded from sculptural discourse. Acts of discrimination included considerable
sidelining within art school sculpture departments, an evident lack of exhibition opportunities and limited critical endorsement. This
analysis will reference the work of a wide range of sculptors including Phyllida Barlow, Elisabeth Frink and Barbara Hepworth.
After a brief break, Natalie will explore how women circumnavigated this marginalization in creative ways. She will reveal how occupying
this overlooked and precarious space provided considerable creative freedom to experiment with a wider set of influences and methods.
Emerging in the late 1970s, a generation of women, including Cornelia Parker, Veronica Ryan and Alison Wilding, employed a wide
range of cheap or scavenged materials to test ideas of malleability, ephemerality and change. Their works and actions have fundamentally transformed the nature and direction of sculpture.

Wednesday, 8 October, 2025: Visit to Tate Britain : Edward Burra —Ithell Colquhoun Exhibition
A day at Tate Britain exploring the work of two influential 20th Century British artists, Edward Burra and Ithell Colquhoun. The ticket price includes welcome refreshments on arrival, a one-hour introductory lecture by a Tate guide, buffet lunch and entry to the exhibition. Transport to the gallery is not included.
Please note that booking for this event closes on 15 September (minimum number: 20).
Full details will be circulated separately.

Wednesday, 22 October, 2025, 10:30 – 12:30, The Arc, Jewry Street, Winchester
Pioneers of Abstraction Illustrated seminar by Sarah Ciacci
This lecture on the Pioneers of Abstraction will explore the artists who were instrumental in establishing this genre in Britain, commencing largely in the years following World War Two. They included artists such as Gillian Ayres, Terry Frost, Howard Hodgkin and John Hoyland. Whilst not a cohesive group, they were generally aware of each other’s work and were influenced by each other. Some of their number visited the USA, and Hoyland in particular became close to Robert Motherwell as well as Mark Rothko and Barne Newman. Gillian Ayres was highly influential, both as an artist and a teacher, spending time at Winchester School of Art amongst other institutions. This talk will explore the genesis and evolution of their work and the influences on them, as well as the effect that they had on subsequent artists.

Wednesday, 5 November, 2025, 10:30 – 12:30, The Arc, Jewry Street, Winchester
POP! Art in a Changing Britain Illustrated seminar by Diana Wooldridge
In the 1950s and 1960s a new generation of artists responded to a radically new cultural and social context. Four of the leading young artists were celebrated in Ken Russell’s 1962 BBC Monitor film Pop goes the Easel – Peter Blake, Peter Phillips, Derek Boshier, and Pauline Boty, a female pop art painter who died tragically young. These and other artists adopted imagery from a wide range of cultural sources including advertising, comics, science fiction and contemporary music, using new techniques such as screen printing and unconventional materials . This challenged thinking about art and mass media in the post-war period, questioning the traditional division between high and low art.
This lecture will explore and illustrate the following themes:
Man and Machine — exploring the human figure in an increasingly mechanised environment, by artists such as Nigel Henderson and Eduardo Paolozzi
Celebrity and Pleasure – an obsession with celebrity, promoted by mass media and culture
Youth and Liberation –‘Young Contemporaries’ – including Boshier and David Hockney – exploring personal narratives and identity
Colour and Production – the development of screen printing process and practice, enabling mass reproduction, multiples and series.
Politics and Society – the impact of nuclear threat and emerging revolutionary movements as reflected in art.

Wednesday, 26 November, 2025, 10:30 – 12:30, The Arc, Jewry Street, Winchester
The Spirit in the Mass: David Bomberg, Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach Illustrated seminar by Monica Bohm-Duchen
‘The Spirit in the Mass’ refers to a philosophical concept developed by David Bomberg which emphasises the connection between art and wider life. This lecture will begin with a survey of David Bomberg’s career up to c.1945, from his inauspicious beginnings as the child of poor Yiddish-speaking Jewish immigrants in the East End of London, through his brief notoriety as a leading member of London’s artistic avant-garde prior to the First World War, and his output during that war, to his fading thereafter from public view. It will then focus on the increasingly painterly and expressionist work he started producing from the late 1920s onwards, and above all on his profound influence – through his teaching at the Borough Polytechnic from 1946 to 1955 – on a small group of like-minded younger artists, most notably Leon Kossoff (born in 1926 into a similar milieu to Bomberg) and Frank Auerbach, born in Germany in 1931, who came to the UK as a child refugee from Nazism in 1939. Although Bomberg was to die in 1957 in relative obscurity, his most famous maxim – that an artist should aspire to express ‘The Spirit in the Mass’ – would remain at the very heart of both Kossoff’s and Auerbach’s artistic credos. The latter’s fame, in particular, has done much to ensure that in recent years, Bomberg’s magnificent later work has attracted an increasing amount of interest and admiration.

Wednesday, 10 December, 2025, 10:30 – 12:30, The Arc, Jewry Street, Winchester
A Figurative Four from the Fifties: Minton, Vaughan, Bacon and Freud Illustrated seminar by Dr Jan D Cox
A younger generation of British artists emerged during the Second World War and these ‘Neo-Romantics’ reached their zenith in the decade that followed. Anthony Cronin recalled: ‘In the forties… John Minton, Keith Vaughan, Ayrton and Craxton, were among the most praised of that generation of English painters who were known as the English Romantics. It was not, of course, to last. Fashions, by the mid-fifties had changed; it was the era of ‘the kitchen-sink’ in England, and to occlude matters, it was also the beginning of abstract impressionism there. The English Romantics belonged to the war and immediate post-war. They were old hat’. John Minton had looked to the French Neo-Romantics, Graham Sutherland and Robert MacBryde for inspiration, while Keith Vaughan also admired Sutherland and the semi-abstraction of Nicolas de Staël. Minton and Vaughan felt increasingly isolated – ‘like dinosaurs’- and Minton committed suicide in 1957. Vaughan continued for a further twenty years to critical – though not public –acclaim. Two painters did weather the stormy reaction against
figuration. Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud possessed a great mental strength that protected them; Bacon’s art represented ‘the atrocious world into which we have survived’, in tune with the zeitgeist of the era, while Freud’s portraits provided psychological insights into the
sitter that unsettled and disturbed the viewer.