LECTURES

Our lectures always start at 11:00 on a Tuesday. It is usually the last Tuesday of the month but do look at the actual details as that sometimes changes. The lectures are held at the Pavilion Arts Centre in Buxton with the Pavilion Gardens Car Park (off Burlington Road) near by.

She Loves You
(The Music of The Sixties 1960-64)

26 March 2024

The Beatles performing in Buxton in 1963
Do you recognise anyone?

By 1960 interest in rock ‘n’ roll had started to fade, its biggest star was moving on and a new generation of teenagers were seeking something different. It came in the form of the Beatles, who broke all the rules and all the records. This is the story of the first five years of the 1960s, one of the most creative and innovative periods in the history of music, featuring all the major artists, important songs and principle musical genres.

Steve King


Gender and the Body
Kept Behind Curtains: The Story of The Nude

30 April 2024

The nude is still seen in our modern age, and indeed has been seen for quite some time as the pinnacle of creative artistic perfection, but throughout the course of art history the notion of the perfect body and consequently gender has been constantly reshaped and redefined. This lecture will look at the continuing fascination with representation of the body in sculpture and in painting across the ages, with sculpture from the 4th century BC, painting from the Renaissance, and through to the modern age with paintings from the Impressionists. This span of time will encompass iconic works within this lecture by Botticelli, Raphael, Titian, Bernini, Degas, Renoir and Velázquez, to name but a few. Moreover this lecture will look at the reasons that lay behind the commissioning of such images. What were their purposes, who were the patrons behind these images, and what, if any, hidden riddles; signs and symbols are hidden within these seemingly enigmatic and flawless images of perfection. As this lecture charts the ever-changing attitude towards the nude as a subject we will look at the treatment of nudes by collectors and museums in the 19th century, as we set the scene and chart the many and varied approaches to this subject that has become synonymous with the very idea of art itself; indeed finally asking ourselves, ‘if this is art’, how did it become so and why?

Leslie Primo


The Explosive World of Cornelia Parker

21 May 2024

(note: a week earlier than usual)

Contemporary sculptor and installation artist Cornelia Parker is best known for her large-scale installations such as her (literally!) explosive work Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991), in which Parker took the archetypal British garden shed, and its contents, and had it blown up by the British Army!  The debris is then installed around a single light bulb, creating the dramatic effect of an explosion frozen in time. Intrigued as she is with the idea of ‘cartoon deaths’, of things being squashed, stretched, dropped from a height or detonated, she transforms everyday objects in order to investigate their nature and value. However, such destruction very often results in work of extraordinary beauty and maps an intriguing and unique thought process.

Rosalind Whyte

This lecture will be followed by the Arts Society AGM