MEMBERS of Mornington’s Australian Decorative and Fine Arts Society will attend their regular monthly Friday evening talk on the work of Edvard Munch’s work The Scream on Friday 7 July and then, the next day, Saturday 8 July, they will hear a presentation at Beleura House and Garden entitled Rubens to Rembrandt: The Art of Brabant, Flanders and the Dutch Republic.
ADFAS offers members and their guests an opportunity to learn more about the arts. Lectures are held at the Peninsula Community Theatre, Wilsons Rd, Mornington, 5.30pm on Friday evenings. The hour-long lectures are illustrated and are followed by light refreshments and an opportunity to meet the lecturer and fellow members.
The July speaker is British art historian Gerald Deslandes who teaches art history and visual studies and is a consultant to museums and galleries. He also leads cultural tours to France, Italy, Austria, Germany, Norway and the Netherlands as well as to many areas of the UK.
On the Friday evening Mr Deslandes will focus on the Norwegian artist Edvard Munch. The lecture, Munch and the Nordic Imagination, will compare Munch’s suggestion of a remote and claustrophobic world of frustration and emotional extremes to the fantastical imagery of the Viking sagas.
Mr Deslandes will discuss Norwegian landscape artists, such as Hans Frederik Gude and Eilif Peterssen, as well as the work of two women artists: Harriet Backer, whose intense lamp-lit interiors resemble those of Munch, and the painter and activist Aasta Hansteen, who became a model for Lona in Ibsen’s The Pillars of Society.
The talk will conclude by discussing whether such ideas have continued in the larger-than-life characters and violent narratives of Jo Nesbo.
Mr Deslandes in Saturday’s talk will discuss Rubens to Rembrandt: The Art of Brabant, Flanders and the Dutch Republic. He will compare the art of Protestant Holland to the triumphant reassertion of Catholicism in the work of Rubens, Van Dyck and Jacob Jordaens, showing how the artists of the Counter Reformation used drama, movement, light and colour.
The cost of attending is $20 for non-members.
For more information, memberships or to make a booking, call 9787 2092.