The Prince's Drawing School

2010

22 January: Timothy Hyman: Ambrogio Lorenzetti and the image of the city in Sienese painting: The 46-foot frescoed wall of The Well-Governed City - painted in Siena by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (1288-1348) - is a visionary microcosm whose imaginative scope has never been surpassed. But his preparations must have involved a great deal of architectural drawing, far more than most of our contemporary artists would stoop to. Ambrogio was heir to thirty years of Sienese experiment in the relation of architecture to figure: by his master, Duccio; his rival, Simone Martini; his brother, Pietro. Echoes of this great panorama would reverberate a hundred years later in Sassetta and Giovanni di Paolo and even in Brueghel, as well as in many late twentieth-century painters such as Kitaj and Bhupen Khakhar.

27 January: William Feaver: On Frank Auerbach: Born in 1931 in Berlin, Auerbach was sent to England in 1939 to escape Nazism. He attended St Martin's School of Art and the Royal College of Art and studied with David Bomberg in night classes at Borough Polytechnic. During his studies he developed a friendship with fellow student Leon Kossoff. He has used three principal models throughout his career: his wife Julia, who first posed for him in 1959; Juliet Yardley Mills ('J.Y.M.'), a professional model whom he met in 1957; and his close friend Estella (Stella) West ('E.O.W.'), the model for most of his nudes and female heads prior to 1973. Rarely leaving Britain, he lives and works in London and has had the same studio since the 1950s.

3 February: Jeremy Lewison: Alice Neel, Looking and mirroring: A retrospective of the American painter Alice Neel (1900-84) will open this July at the Whitechapel Gallery. She emerged from the "Social Art" of the 1930s, to become - in an art world dominated by abstraction - the supreme portraitist and "collector of souls" of postwar New York. Her imagery always began with a very direct drawing, often straight onto the canvas. Neel's difficult, in some ways heroic life was beautifully evoked in the recent film directed by her grandson (and screened here last summer); in which the commentary by Jeremy Lewison was especially illuminating.

10 February: Tania Kovats: In conversation with William Feaver: Kovats trained at Newcastle Polytechnic and the RCA . Her work deals with the experience and understanding of landscape. She is primarily a sculptor but drawing has become an increasingly important element of her practice. One recent project involved mapping around 2000 individual islands that surround mainland Britain resulting in a series of drawings on translucent paper. Recent Solo shows include: 'Meadow' – The transportation of a wild flower meadow from Bath to London via the canals and inland waterways of the UK and Kovats installation artwork 'Tree' was selected for the Darwin Canopy commission at The Natural History Museum.

17 February: Tracey Emin,The Southbank Show (dir. Aurora Gunn, 2001, 53 min.) Introduced by William Feaver

Tracey Emin talks about her life, career and works including My Bed and the embroidered tent Everybody I Have Ever Slept With.

24 February: Hockney: The Secret Knowledge, (dir. Randall Wright, 2002, 72 min.) Introduced by Randall Wright. Hockney demonstrates his thoughts and findings in studying the grand masters of painting from early Rennaissance till the modern invention of photography in the middle of the nineteenth century.

3 March: Sickert’s London: (dir. Jake Auerbach, 1992, 48 min.) Introduced by Jake Auerbach. With music by Jools Holland and Sickert’s writings read by Alan Bennett this film manages to conjure up the spirit of one of Europe’s greatest artists.

10 March: Chuck Close, (dir. Marion Cajori, 2007, 116 min.) Introduced by Jake Auerbach. The feature-length documentary of painter Chuck Close examines his personal working process and place in contemporary art as the reinventor of portraiture. Close's subjects - family, artists, friends - provide insight to his work and their own, rendering a collective portrait of a whole creative generation.

17 March: Giacometti (dir. Michael Gill, 1965, 14min.) Arts Council of Great Britain. With sparse narration in English and brief comments by the artist in French, this film documents Alberto Giacometti at work in his small Paris studio and presents examples of his work. And: William Kentridge: the Felix Films (selected shorts by the artist) Introduced by Timothy Hyman. William Kentridge is a South African artist, born in Johannesburg in 1955, who films a drawing, making erasures and changes, and films it again. He continues this process meticulously, giving each change to the drawing less than two seconds' screen time.

2009

22 January: Timothy Hyman: Bonnard on Drawing - A new Space for the Shelf: From about 1916, Pierre Bonnard was already almost Fifty, he threw away his camera and developed the radical drawing procedures that would serve his painting for the next thirty years. In a conscious reversal of French Academic tradition, Bonnard wrote: “ Drawing is Sensation, Colour is Reasoning”.

29 January: Michael Landy: In Conversation with William Feaver: Michael Landy (born 1963) is an English artist, one of the so-called Young British Artists (YBAs). He is best known for the performance piece cum-installation, Break Down (2001), in which he destroyed all of his possessions. In 2008 he exhibited a series of portrait drawings in a solo show at the Thomas Dane Gallery.

5 February: Julian Bell: Drawing as “Mirror of the World”:

2008 saw the publication of Julian Bells extraordinary- some would say, doomed- attempt to cover the whole of world art, from cave painting to the present, in one volume. Beautifully brought out by Thames & Hudson, “Mirror of the World” has been hailed as a remarkable achievement. While continuing to work and exhibit as a painter, Julian Bell has published many substantial essays, in the “New York Review of Book”, the TLS, and the London Review of Books.

12 February: David Gentleman: In conversation with William Feaver: Gentleman studied under Edward Bawden and John Nash, he has worked in watercolour, lithography and wood engraving. His work is in collections including Tate Britain, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Fitzwilliam Museum.

19 February: ARTISTS ON FILM: Alice Neel: Directed by Andrew Neel, Produced by Ethan Palmer,Introduced by Tim Hyman: Portrait painter Alice Neel (1900-1984) was a self- described collector of souls who recorded her sitters on canvas through six decades of the 20th Century, from her own family and neighbours in Spanish Harlem to Andy Warhol and Allen Ginsberg. Alice Neel’s grandson, puts together the pieces of the painter’s, life using intimate one on one interviews with Neel’s surviving family.

26 February: ARTISTS ON FILM: Balthus: Directed by Mark Kidel, Produced by Emma Crichton-Miller, Introduced by Emma Crichton-Miller: Balthus, who for most of his life lived in seclusion and shunned publicity, was one of the last century's most enigmatic painters. This film is based around a series of conversations with the artist at home in Switzerland, and offers a fascinating insight into his personality as he talks about his inspirations, his subject matter and the modern world. Contributions from family and friends including Thadee Klossowski and Jean Clair, Director of the Musée Picasso in Paris.

5 March: ARTISTS ON FILM: Gerhard Richter: Directed By Gerald Fox, Introduced by Gerald Fox: In this documentary, the artist Gerhard Richter talks about his life growing up in East Germany, attending the Dresden art academy and his escape to the west just before the Berlin Wall was built. He also discusses his work and success. This is the only film Richter has ever made in English and is a unique portrait of this shy but fascinating man at home and in his studio.

12 March: ARTISTS ON FILM: Paula Rego: Telling Tales: Directed by Jake Auerbach,Introduced by Jake Auerbach: Born in Portugal, Paula Rego is one of Britain’s leading artists. This intimate film follows the artist from her retrospective at the Reina Sofia in Madrid back to the privacy of her studio in London while she talks with humour and candour about her compulsion to produce works that, though accessible, deal with the most private themes.

19 March: ARTISTS ON FILM: David Hockney: A Bigger Picture: (working title & work in progress) Directed and filmed by Bruno Wollheim, Edited by Christopher Swayne. Introduced by Bruno Wollheim: Filmed over three years, this documentary captures David Hockney’s return to Yorkshire to take on the heroic English Landscape tradition. With unprecedented access to the artist as he paints through the seasons and in all weathers, it follows his efforts to re-invent and re-invigorate his art - and culminates in the largest picture ever made outdoors. It is at once the story of a homecoming and a revealing portrait of what motivates and inspires Hockney in his later years.

23 April: Astrid Schmetterling: ‘Something wildly eccentric’ – Charlotte Salomon's “Life? or Theatre?”: After training in Berlin, the 25 year old Charlotte Salomon began her picture –novel “Life? Or Theatre?” in 1941; two years later she was murdered in Auschwitz. Combining over seven hundred watercolours with a witty and poignant text, she tells of a Jewish family caught up in a tragic era. Astrid Schmetterling will show how Salomon’s astonishing testament “moves between multiple genres and styles, and challenges the artistic conventions of her time.” Astrid Schmetterling teaches at Goldsmiths. She has published widely and her book “Charlotte Salomon: Bilder Eines Lebens” came out in German in 2001. “Life? Or Theatre?” was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1998.

30 April: Timothy Hyman: On the Carnivalesque: Some of the greatest European art, from Brueghel to Goya and Ensor, touches on the Festivities before Lent - the “Carne- Vale”, or “Goodbye to Meat”- a time of licence, of “turning the world upside down.” In his famous “History of Laughter”, Bakhtin traced its medieval origins, but also conjured a wider, anti-authoritarian “carnivalesque”. We’ll end with Red Grooms’ Ruckus Manhattan and his film “Fat Feet”. Timothy Hyman exhibits at Austin / Desmond, next solo show scheduled for October 2009. He collaborated in 2000 with Roger Malbert for the Hayward Gallery touring exhibition, “Carnivalesque”.

7 May: Bob and Roberta Smith: In conversation with William Feaver: Born 1963, Smith studied at the University of Reading and Goldsmiths College London. He has had more than 15 solo shows at galleries including Perogi Gallery, New York and Hales Gallery, London. He is most well known for his painted signs on banners and discarded boards of wood with musings on art, politics and popular culture. Smith also performs music, often with a group known as The Ken Ardley Playboys and he hosts The Bob & Roberta Smith Radio Show called 'Make your own damn music' which is on Resonance FM.

14 May: Catherine Lampert: L’enlèvement - On Rodin's drawings: Rodin’s eyes seize his subject. Many of his rapid sheets skirt the concept of an “enlèvement”- not so much a rape, as “a carrying away”. During the sculptor’s last decades, long sessions with the model generated some of the most astonishing line-drawings and watercolours ever made: linking forward to Matisse, and back to the Romantics – as well as to Symboliste Art in general. Catherine Lampert was Director of the Whitechapel Gallery 1988-2001. She has curated exhibitions of Rodin and Auerbach at the Royal Academy, and of Freud in Dublin. Her Euan Uglow catalogue raisonné was published by Yale in 2007. She is currently a Visiting Professor at University of the Arts London.

28th May: Paul Winstanley: In conversation with William Feaver: Winstanley was born in Manchester in 1954. He studied at Lanchester Polytechnic, Cardiff College of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art. Known for his paintings based on photographs of uninhabited interiors and landscape Winstanley works with a range of subtle effects taken from photographic technologies. Recent solo shows include Maureen Paley Interim Art, London, 1301PE ,Los Angeles, Vera Munro, Hamburg, Winstanley has shown in the John Moores four times.

4 June: Timothy Hyman: Domenico Tiepolo -The Punchinello drawings and the peepshow: The Frescoes and wash-drawings made late in life by Domenico Tiepolo (1727-1804) are among the great “rediscoveries” of modern times. His father was long dead, the Republic of Venice was disappearing, and the melancholy absurdities of the “Life of Punchinello” supplied his theme. A key mentor for Goya, Domenico has inspired artists as various as Guston, Hockney and Paula Rego. Timothy Hyman first published on Domenico in 1986.

11 June: Alan Kane: In conversation with William Feaver:

Born in Nottingham in 1961, artist Alan Kane spent seven years creating the Folk Archive with Jeremy Deller. The archive brings together drawing, painting, film, performance, costume, decoration, political opinion and humour, it celebrates activity from a vast range of British pastimes and pursuits.. The archive was first exhibited at the Barbican in 2005 and is now owned by The British council. Alan Kane has recently had solo exhibitions with Artangel and Ancient and Modern Gallery, London.

30 September: Tom Lubbock: The drawn image: Writing in The Independent week after week, Tom Lubbock has published some of the liveliest art criticism of recent years. Opinionated, sometimes curmudgeonly, he engages with the whole range of ancient and modern, especially in his brilliant series of "GREAT WORKS" at the back of the newspaper. His essay on Goya's album drawings, published in the Hayward Gallery's exhibition catalogue in 2001, is outstanding.

7 October: David Rayson: In conversation with William Feaver: London-based artist David Rayson (b. 1966, Wolverhampton) is the Professor of Painting at the Royal College of Art, his earlier work concentrated on meticulous paintings of urban and suburban scenes, and in particular, the Ashmore Park Estate in Wolverhampton where he grew up. His work has developed over the past few years becoming increasingly more restless, playful, and physiclogical. He has spent the past five years exclusively drawing, and these works have been exhibited at Tate Britain, Tate Modern, The Whitechapel Art Gallery, Kettles Yard, Maureen Paley/Interim Art, and recently in his largest show of drawings to date at the Marlborough Gallery entitled 'The Everyday Fantastic'. His next project 'The Ship', involves a return to painting, as well as drawing, map making, collecting objects and travelling to exotic new lands without leaving his armchair.

14 October: Timothy Hyman: Between painting and drawing: Born in 1946 and trained at the Slade, Timothy Hyman began to show at the end of the 1970s. His current solo exhibition, "The Man Inscribed with London", is at Austin/Desmond (Pied Bull Yard, opposite the British Museum, 7 October to 6 November). In this talk, he'll focus especially on how a drawing may develop – through interpretation, and sometimes, misinterpretation – into a large-scale painting.

21 October: Sara Fanelli: In conversation with William Feaver: Sara Fanelli was born in Florence. She came to London to study art and has been working there as a freelance illustrator ever since graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1995. She has worked for a diverse range of clients internationally, dividing her time between general illustration work, books and self- generated projects. Her clients include: The New Yorker, Penguin Books, Faber and Faber, Tate Modern Tate Britain, BBC Worldwide, Ron Arad, the New York Times and The Royal Mail. She has also written and illustrated a number of children’s books which have been published in many languages throughout the world. She has won several international awards including twice being the overall winner of the Victoria and Albert Museum Illustration Award and three D&AD pencils. She was the first woman illustrator to become an Honorary Royal Designer for Industry and her work has been exhibited in venues all around the world.

28 October: Alison Wright: Early Renaissance drawing - perspective, poetics, play: Italian drawings are often seen in terms of preparatory study and drawing from the model. But Alison Wright will explore fifteenth-century drawings by painters such as Pisanello, Uccello and Botticelli – with their new use of pen and chalk – as works of the imagination, equivalent to intellectual speculation and poetry. Dr Alison Wright is Reader in Italian Art at University College London. In 1999 she co-curated the National Gallery's exhibition about Florentine artists in the 1470s. Her award-wining monograph on The Pollaiuolo Brothers was published by Yale University Press in 2005.

4 November: William Feaver: The Pitmen Painters: The Ashington Group, mainly pitmen from the mid-Northumberland coal field, embarked in 1934 on what was termed 'an experiment in art education' : painting for themselves. Their work attracted the attention of surrealists, modernists, documentary photographers and Mass Observers. William Feaver became involved with the Group decades ago and his book about them is the basis of a play by Lee 'Billy Elliot' Hall that has been through three seasons at the National Theatre (Best New Play: Evening Standard awards) and, after a national tour, is to transfer to Broadway. This lecture is about the Group, their art and their aspirations.

11 November: Tony Bevan: In conversation with William Feaver: Born in Bradford, Bevan graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in 1976. His first solo exhibition was held that year and was followed by significant UK retrospectives at the ICA (1988), Whitechapel Art Gallery (1993) and Milton Keynes Gallery (2003). His figurative paintings in acrylic, charcoal and pigment often show large human heads from awkward angles and are sometimes described as 'psychological portraits'. Bevan was elected an RA in 2007, his works are in many collections including that of the National Portrait Gallery and Tate Britain.

18 November: Timothy Hyman: Ken Kiff and "the sequence":
Emerging late, Ken Kiff (1935-2001) became a key figure in the art of the 1980s. A revelatory draughtsman, illustrator and printmaker, always alert to the processes by which each image is formed, his greatest achievement may be in his acrylic-on-paper "Sequence" – eventually numbering more than 200. Kiff placed an emphasis on "the feminine"; he was an influential teacher at the RCA and elsewhere. His shows at the Serpentine and the National Gallery were especially memorable, but we're still waiting for a retrospective. Timothy Hyman wrote an introductory essay to Kiff's Serpentine exhibition. His monographs on Bonnard and Sienese Painting are published by Thames and Hudson.

2008

1 May: Timothy Hyman: German drawing, Part One: Cranach and his times: To coincide with the Royal Academy’s exhibition of Lucas Cranach (1472 – 1553), Timothy Hyman explored his relation to his great contemporaries: Grunewald, Altdorfer, and Durer. Cranach is in some respects the humorous counterpart to their more visionary and apocalyptic imagery. Seen together, their drawings offer a wonderful alternative to the Florentine / French mainstream.

8 May: Alison Watt: In conversation with William Feaver.

15 May: Dexter Dalwood: The torn line and the cut up: The recent work of Dexter Dalwood could be seen as a retrieval of ‘History Painting’ – but nearly always without figures, and constructed always as a fragmentary collage, out of culturally disparate imagery. Strongly interested in drawing, he spoke about some of the problems and procedures of his own practice. Trained at St Martin’s and the RCA, with a stint at Baroda between, Dalwood has emerged as one of the most prominent British painters of his generation. He exhibits at Gagosian, in London and in New York.

22 May: Peter Blake: In Conversation with William Feaver.

29 May: Timothy Hyman: German drawing, Part Two: Beckman and his times: The painter Max Beckmann (1884 - 1950) saw his own life work unfolding as a five act drama, dominated by two world wars. As a draughtsman he developed within a rich 20th century German tradition that is still relevant. Baselitz's pronouncement that "All the best German art is ugly art" defines one aspect; but there are also spatial and confessional possibilities undiscovered within Parisian modernism.

5 June: Cornelia Parker: In conversation with William Feaver.

12 June: Eamonn McCabe: In conversation with William Feaver.

19 June: Liza Dimbleby: I Live Here Now: Writings and drawings from Glasgow, London and Moscow: As a student on the Drawing Year, Liza Dimbleby consolidated her practise of making rapid street drawings – sequences that often ran parallel with her writing. As a young PhD student, she’s come to know Moscow intimately, but she now returned as an artist, freighted with memory. In recent years she has continued to explore the meanings of this city wandering – which might be characterised as a “poetry of pleasurable displacement”. Her book, 'I Live Here Now', was published in 2008.

2 October: Alison Wright: Pollaiuolo and the invention of drawing: The first great Florentine “Maestro del Disegno”: Antonio del Pollaiuolo (1431-1498) shaped a cult of the nude male in action; in particular his engraving, The Battle of Ten Nudes. Wright will discuss his use of pen and his relation to Mantegna and Leonardo.

9 October: Steve Bell: In conversation with William Feaver: Steve Bell is an English political cartoonist, whose work appears in The Guardian and other publications. He is known for his left-wing views and distinctive caricatures and has won many awards for his work.

16 October: Timothy Hyman: On Fernand Léger – his drawing, his ideas, his influence: Drawing became a central activity for Léger when he moved away from abstraction after the First World War. His interaction with Le Corbusier and other architects changed twentieth century design; and he influenced painters, from Beckmann to the pop artists. Woodrow is a British sculptor who emerged in the late 1970s. His early work was made from materials found in dumps and scrap yards and he went on to use large consumer goods, such as refrigerators and cars.

30 October: Brendan Prendevile: Drawing On Water: Brendan Prendeville focuses on drawing’s potential to capture the flow of appearance – what he calls the “Heraclitean Flux” of visual experience. He will discuss artists (including Van Gogh, Twombly, Oscar Muñoz, and V. Celmins).

6 November: Kenneth Currie: In conversation with William Feaver: Kenneth Currie is a Scottish painter whose paintings are concerned with how the human body is affected by illness, ageing and physical injury, social and political issues or philosophical questions.

13 November: Timothy Hyman: English Illuminations In The Era Of Byzantium – From Drawing To Wall: English Medieval painting survives mainly in manuscript books. The lecture will explore how the raciness of Anglo-Saxon drawing becomes transformed – partly through Byzantine contacts – to the monumental walls of the English High Romanesque.

20 November: David Gentleman: In conversation with William Feaver: Gentleman studied under Edward Bawden and John Nash, he has worked in watercolour, lithography and wood engraving. His work is in collections including Tate Britain, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Fitzwilliam Museum.

2007

25 April: Timothy Hyman: ‘Englishness’: Hogarth, London and drawing now: British artists of previous generations have usually looked to Europe, or, more recently, to America, for their exemplars. Did the Tate’s recent ‘Hogarth’ exhibition – and the Louvre’s decision to purchase Blakes and Dadds etc for their new English wing– raise the possibility that British art might, after all, offer a resource?

9 May: Jon Bird: Leon Golub: Baying at the cosmos: For over fifty years, Leon Golub produced images that addressed the most demanding, difficult and dangerous of themes; the body under duress, the abuse of power, the necessity to bear witness. An American History Painter in the tradition of Goya and Courbet, Golub’s dark vision disturbs the peace and commands our attention. Jon Bird has published monographs on Golub and on Nancy Spero, and curated the Golub retrospective that came to the South London Art Gallery in 2000. He is Professor of Art and Critical Theory at Middlesex University, and is an alumnus of the Drawing Year.

23 May: Christopher Le Brun, RA: On drawing: The painter Christopher Le Brun first came to prominence in the 1980’s, soon after leaving The Slade. His recent exhibitions at the Marlborough Gallery and elsewhere have raised many issues – about subject-matter and symbolism, and about the interplay of drawing with printmaking and sculpture. Christopher spoke about the role of drawing in his own work, and showed some of the drawings he loves most. In 2002 Christopher Le Brun was appointed Professor of Drawing at The Royal Academy. He currently Chairs the Advisory Board of the Prince’s Drawing School.

6 June: Timothy Hyman: James Ensor and Carnival: In Ostend in the 1880’s, James Ensor (1860 – 1949) produced some of the most radical art in Europe, including arguably the greatest body of etchings since Rembrandt. He was born into a dynasty of shopkeepers specialising in carnival goods, especially in masks, and his art was nourished by the traditions of the Flemish Carnival. Timothy Hyman contributed an essay to the Barbican’s 1997 exhibition, James Ensor : The Theatre of Masks. In 2000 he curated the Hayward Gallery’s touring exhibition, 'Carnivalesque'.

20 June: Joe Kerr: The shape of London: Both as a former Routemaster bus driver (he still drives two days a week) and as Director of Critical and Historical Studies at the Royal College of Art, Joe Kerr has an exceptionally passionate love for London in all its untamed chaos. In 1995 he curated ‘Strangely Familiar: Narratives of Architecture and The City’ (RIBA). He recently gave guided Routemaster tours as part of the Tate’s ‘Disappearing London’ season. Among his many books are ‘Autopia: Cars and Culture’ (2002) and ‘London from Punk to Blair’ (2004).

11 October: Nurit David: About her work: Nurit David is a past student of the Drawing Year postgraduate programme and is now a leading Tel Aviv painter. In 2006 she was awarded Israel’s major painting prize, and in 2007 her retrospective was mounted at the Tel Aviv Museum.

18 October: Jake Chapman: In Conversation with William Feaver: Jake Chapman works with his brother Dinos Chapman to produce sculpture, prints and installations that examine, with humour politics, religion and morality. The Chapmans gained much attention in the early 1990s with their recreations of Goya’s series of etchings, The Disasters of War.

25 October: Timothy Hyman: Balthus, the Body and the Street: The artist we now know as ‘Balthus’ was a half-Jewish prodigy (Balthasar Klossowski, b.1908) who produced much of his greatest work in the 1930’s, including the 'Wuthering Heights' drawings and 'The Street'. His imagery is focused on the body, nourished by Rilke, Bataille, Derain, Giacometti… It sets in question most accounts of the twentieth century painting.
Timothy Hyman exhibits at Austin/Desmond. His long essay, 'Balthus: A Puppet Master', was published in Artscribe in 1980. He is one of the curators of 'British Vision' which opened at Ghent in October 6th.

1 November: Michael Sandle RA: About His Work
Michael Sandle RA is one of Britain’s outstanding sculptors; and one of the few contemporaries to have achieved a political imagery. In the 2007 RA Summer Exhibition, his fifteen foot drawing of the Blairs expelled from Downing Street, flanked by Baghdad and Guantanamo Bay, won the main Drawing Prize.

8 November: David Anfam: On Philip Guston: Drawing was the chief medium by which Guston (1913-1980) made his dramatic shift in the late 1960's: From a beautiful, elusive abstraction to a cartoon-visionary Figuration. At first vilified as a betrayal of modernism - "a mandarin pretending to be a stumblebum" - Guston's imagery now seems one of the defining achievements of recent painting. David Anfam has published several of the outstanding texts on American painting, ranging from the catalogue raisonne of Mark Rothko, to essays on Gorky, Avery & Hopper. He has been a visiting professor at Brandeis University & editor at Phaidon Press.

15 November: Timothy Hyman: Goya; the Album drawings and the Late works: Virtually all Goya’s drawings and etchings date from after the age of fifty, when he was already deaf; beginning with the Suenos (Dreams) that later became The Caprichos, and culminating in the work of his eighties in Bordeaux. All this largely a twentieth-century rediscovery, and much still remains enigmatic …
Timothy Hyman has written on Goya in Modern Painters and in RA Magazine.

22 November: Humphrey Ocean RA: In conversation with William Feaver: Humphrey Ocean had his first major solo exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London in 1984. He has since shown at the Tate Liverpool and the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London. In 2002 he was artist in residence at Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, the culmination of which was an exhibition of his work, how's my driving. Many of his portrait commissions are in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London. He is Visiting Professor of Drawing and Painting at Camberwell College of Art, London.

2006

1 February: Anthony Green RA: ‘If You Can’t Draw It, You Can’t Picture It’: Over a 40 year period Anthony Green has fulfilled an astonishing project, exploring every aspect of his marital and family life in elaborate, irregular shaped paintings of altarpiece scale. After the Slade (where he won the Drawing Prize) and a Fulbright scholarship in the USA, Anthony Green exhibited regularly at the Rowan Gallery. Major exhibitions have been staged at the Royal Academy, in Japan, at the Sainsbury Centre, and elsewhere; recently his sculpture Resurrection toured British Cathedrals. He has been the subject of several TV programmes.

15 February: Timothy Hyman: On Fuseli and Gillray – ‘How very Necessary His Mock – Sublime Mad Taste…’: In response to the major exhibition at Tate Britain in 2006. Timothy Hyman spoke about Henry Fuseli (1741 – 1825) – the ‘Wild Swiss’ who became keeper of the Royal Academy; artist of ‘The Nightmare’ but also of splendid erotic drawings. He helped to fertilise not only William Blake, but also London’s greatest satirical draughtsman, James Gillray.

22 February: Professor Bryony Fer: On drawing: Focusing on two very different drawing strategies, Bryony Fer looked mainly at the art of a father and son: the Chilean born Roberto Matta (linked to the generation of Gorky and de Kooning) and the sculptor Gordon Matta-Clark, whose work has continued to influence a wide range of contemporary artists. Bryony Fer teaches at University College, London. Among her many distinguished writings on recent art have been ‘The Infinite Line’ (Yale) including discussion of Agnes Martin and Eva Hesse, and her essay in the Phaidon monograph on Vija Celmins.

1 March: Sharon Beavan: On Her Drawings: Produced mainly in notebooks across a 20 year span, Sharon Beavan’s drawings are some of the most compelling and beautiful to come out of contemporary London. Since 1990 she has been working chiefly on a single large painting, ‘The view from Blackfriars Bridge to Westminster Bridge.’ Sharon Beavan trained at Falmouth and the RCA. She won the Cheltenham Drawing Prize in 1994 and has exhibited widely, most recently at the RA and in Visions of London at Michael Richardson’s Artspace.

8 March: Glenn Sujo: All the Bones in the Valley: Focusing on some of the works that have been formative for his own consciousness, Glenn Sujo will explore ‘a category of image that, as artists, we process or transmute or generate from the deep.’ Glenn Sujo studied simultaneously at the Slade and the Courtauld Institute, and his activities both as artist and as curator have continued in parallel ever since. His own work is in several public collections and has been widely exhibited. Among his remarkable exhibitions have been ‘Drawing on These Shores’ (1993) and ‘Legacies of Silence’ (Imperial War Museum 2001).

27 September: Timothy Hyman: Bonnard and Drawing - A New Space for the Self: None of the recent exhibitions of Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) have sufficiently emphasised his drawing. From about 1916, when he was already almost fifty, he ceased to use the camera and began to develop the radical drawing procedures which would serve his painting for the rest of his life. In a conscious reversal of French academic tradition, he wrote: ‘Drawing is Sensation, Colour is Reasoning’. Timothy Hyman’s monograph on Bonnard was published by Thames and Hudson in 1998.

4 October: Neil Walton: Mondrian, Drawing in a City Street to Reveal the Deepest Part of Being: Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) saw himself as a new kind of philosophic artist. More recently, critics have valued his art, but dismissed his writings as muddled and overblown. The painter and lecturer Neil Walton explored - and ‘tested against contemporary disbelief’ – how Mondrian could sketch in an ordinary street and conceive himself to be Unveiling the Truth: ‘unconcealing the deepest part of Being’. Neil Walton studied painting at RA Schools, and History of Art at Birkbeck. He teaches widely in art schools and elsewhere.

18 October: Professor Paul Hills: Donatello, Sculpture as Drawing in 15th Century Italy: In the reliefs of Donatello (1386-1466) light and form are created by scored lines in the surface. The art historian Paul Hills looked at the way several leading 15th Century sculptors used line – in terracotta, bronze and stone. Paul Hills is Professor of Renaissance Art at the Courtauld Institute. Best known for two books published by Yale – ‘The Light of Early Italian Painting’ (1987) and ‘Venetian Colour’ (1999), he also curated the Tate’s 1981 retrospective of ‘David Jones’.

25 October: Richard Billingham: In conversation with William Feaver: Richard Billingham, photographer and former nominee for the Turner Prize discussed his work with William Feaver. Richard showed slides of and spoke about his family photographs such as ‘Ray’s a Laugh’ as well as his work in landscape and their connections with drawing and painting.

1 November: Professor Tamar Garb: Cézanne - Slow Painting, Fast Drawing?: Marking the 100th anniversary of the death of Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) the art historian Tamar Garb considered his drawings of – and from – the human figure and how tied his drawing is to the transcription of an observed world. Tamar Garb is Durning Lawrence Professor at University College, London. She has written on several French 19th century painters, including Morisot, Caillebotte, Seurat and Cézanne. ‘Bodies of Modernity’ was published by Thames and Hudson in 1998, in 2007 Yale brought out ‘The Painted Face: Portraits of Women in 19th century French Art’.

15 November: Timothy Hyman: Reflections on Stanley Spencer and ‘Slade Drawing’: It is awful after five years at the Slade to find oneself not in possession of an imaginative capacity to draw, but to find instead that one has contracted a disease.’ What did Spencer mean by this? Together with students from the Drawing Year Timothy explored the implications of Spencer’s conflicts.
Timothy Hyman was lead curator for the Tate’s Stanley Spencer retrospective in 2001.

29 November: Posy Simmonds: In conversation with William Feaver: The unrivalled Posy Simmonds whose graphic novel Tamara Drew, an everyday story of literary folk in rural parts features in the Saturday Guardian discussed her books and other aspects of her work with William Feaver.

2005

19 January: Helen Wilks: Drawing and “Thinking to Oneself”
Emphasising the private and exploratory function of drawing (rather than the analytic or virtuosic), this anthology ranges across a wide territory. Helen Wilks is a painter, trained at Corsham and Reading; her paintings were exhibited at the Freud Museum (“Childhood Fragments”) and reviewed in Modern Painters in 1999. She now lives between London and Mallorca, and currently teaches at City and Guilds.

26 January: Brendan Prendeville: Seurat’s Drawings -The Depth of Surface: Some of the most poignant images in all Western drawing are here matched by an exceptionally subtle critical intelligence. Brendan Prendeville gave last year’s lecture on Agnes Martin. Trained at St Martin’s and the Courtauld, he now teaches at Goldsmith’s and is the author of Realism in Twentieth Century Painting (Thames and Hudson 2000). He has recently published on Seurat in Perception and the Senses (Francke Verlag, 2004) and the Oxford Art Journal will bring out his essay on Discernment.

2 February: Timothy Hyman: From Drawing to Book to Wall - The Metamorphosis of English Romanesquel: The greatest of all english paintings remains still largely hidden in medieval books scattered across the world. Focusing on one astonishing sequence this lecture will show a linear imagery - first triggered by the arrival of Charlemagne’s psalmbook in Canterbury around the year 1000 - gradually becoming transformed into grandly monumental colour compositions. The “pocket Frescoes” culminate in the cosmic compartments of The Paris Psalter (now in the Bibliotheque Nationale) which were painted in Canterbury in about 1200. Timothy Hyman exhibits at Austin/Desmond; he first wrote about English Romanesque in Artscribe in 1984. His book on Sienese Painting was published by Thames and Hudson last year.

9 February: Sargy Mann: Drawing I like, what it can do and what it is: In an approach to drawing that gives attention to the whole sheet (to the white spaces as well as to the marks inscribed upon it) Sargy Mann creates a revelatory anthology. He trained at Camberwell (where he also taught for almost twenty years) and has continued, despite the onset of blindness, to exhibit his ever-more-ambitious paintings at the Cadogan Gallery. Sargy Mann has contributed introductions to several Bonnard exhibitions, and co-curated the Hayward Gallery’s Bonnard at Le Bosquet in 1994; he has also published a monograph on Bonnard Drawings.

12 October: Ed Krcma: Matisse, The Truant Hand and Cinematic Drawing: Starting out from Matisse’s late Themes and Variations, Ed Krcma explored some of the issues that cluster around sequential drawing. Ed Krcma is an art historian, with a PHD from University College, London.

2 November: Timothy Hyman: The Passing Show - Degas, Lautrec, Sickert: In response to Tate Britain’s major Autumn Exhibition ‘The Decadents’ held in 2006, Timothy Hyman focused on the way all three artists find a linear language for ‘Modern Life’ - for the ephemeral, transitory spectacle.

16 November: Merlin James: Freehand: Interspersing his own drawings within a wide-ranging anthology (from the 18th century, Pietro Longhi to Rouault and LS Lowry, Helion and Katz) Merlin James set out a personal canon. Merlin James exhibits at Andrew Mummery and in New York. He has been a regular contributor to the Burlington Magazine and other journals. His essay on Alex Katz’s drawings was published in 2005 by the Albertina, Vienna.

30 November: Nigel Glendinning: Goya’s ‘Universal Language’: The interaction of word and image becomes crucial in Goya’s drawings and aquatints; one of Nigel Glendinning’s starting point was the enigmatic phrase inscribed on a drawing for ‘The Sleep of Reason’ (the original frontispiece to The Caprichos) “Idioma Universal”. Nigel Glendinning is one of Britain’s leading Hispanists. Among his many publications are ‘Goya and his critics’ (Yale) and a monograph on 18th Century literature in Spain.

2004

28 January: Timothy Hyman: Domenico Tiepolo, the Punchinello drawings and the Peepshow: The extraordinary drawings and frescoes made by Domenico Tiepolo (1727-1804) late in life (and long after his father, Giambattista, had died) are among the great ‘rediscoveries’ of modern times. The vision of Domenico Tiepolo is contra The Enlightenment, nourished by the commedia dell’arte and the absurd. His imagery has inspired artists as various as Guston, Hockney and Rego; he was also the key mentor for the youthful Goya.

4 February: Merlin James: ‘Drawing per se’: Challenging the prevailing assumption that drawing is above all a preparatory activity, Merlin James aimed to establish the value of drawing ‘in itself’. He spoke about drawings he admired and from his own work.

24 March: David Anfam: On Phillip Guston: The retrospective of Phillip Guston (1913 - 1980) at the Royal Academy (2004) provided an opportunity to reassess one of the most influential painters of the late 20th century. His art went through several transformations – from his allegories of the 1940s, to his beautiful elusive abstract works; only to emerge in the late 1960’s with a new monumental figuration, whose desolate imagery was closely related to R. Crumb and other cartoon-visionaries. Drawing, and a graphic, linear clarity supplied the engine for Guston’s dramatic shift. Condemned as ‘a mandarin pretending to be a stumblebum’, Guston now seems part of a ‘carnivalesque’ tradition that includes Beckmann, Ensor, Goya and Tiepolo. David Anfam is one of the world’s leading experts on Rothko, and has published widely on New York painters, including Gorky and Guston. He is an editor at Phaidon, and has been a visiting professor at Brandeis University, Massachusetts.

19 May: Tom Lubbock: ‘Marring a face’: Exploring the territory of the humorous drawing – including artists such as Max Beerbom and George Grosz – the writer Tom Lubbock took us to the frontiers of caricature. Tom Lubbock is art critic of The Independent, also contributing a weekly satirical collage. His outstanding essay on Goya’s album drawings is published in the Hayward exhibition catalogue, 2001.

2 June: Professor Deanna Petherbridge: ‘The infuriating subject of the human figure in the age of the cyborgs’: Perhaps because her own drawings have usually delineated an architecture emptied of people (they are sometimes seen as a critique of our mechanistic society) Deanna Petherbridge has an acute eye for the potential pitfalls in a contemporary art centred on the human figure. Deanna Petherbridge is professor at the University of the West of England. She was Professor of Drawing at the RCA, where she launched the Centre for Drawing Research in 1997, the first doctoral programme in Drawing in the UK, and has mounted two important touring exhibitions: ‘The primacy of drawing’ and ‘The quick and the dead’. Her lecture on Durer was among the highpoints of our lecture series in 2003.

9 June: Timothy Hyman: Blake’s line, the ‘hand and wiry line of rectitude’: Looking at the much softer and more atmospheric line of his pencil drawings. The contemporaneous Tate exhibition rightly emphasised Blake’s books, with his unique fusion of word and image culminating in the single coloured copy of Jerusalem. In the twentieth century, Blake was enormously influential for both poets and painters. Timothy looked at whether his message is still important in the twenty first.

16 June: Ann Dowker: ‘Why does Matisse think that’s a woman?’: In talking about her own work, as well as the wider traditions of drawing that have nourished her, Ann Dowker emphasised the separateness of the drawing image from whatever-in-the-world- first generated it. Ann Dowker was trained at Corsham and Central St Martins, and has exhibited widely including several London solo shows. She has long been a key teacher of drawing in London, at the National gallery, at the Byam Shaw and as a member of the Prince’s Drawing School’s faculty.

13 October: Timothy Hyman: Goya’s Drawing Cycles: Only in 1796, at the age of fifty, does Goya emerge as a draughtsman. Over the next three decades, in nine ‘private’ albums, he would accumulate more than 500 numbered images. For the deaf artist, drawing joined sign language as another visible speech, and like the dream, it suggested a ‘universal idiom’. Goya’s final imagery – fed by his early encounters with Piranesi and Domenico Tiepolo, as well as with English caricatures, was dominated by a tragic comic absurdity.

27 October: Dennis Creffield: In pursuit of ‘the spirit in the mass’ - reflections on 50 years of drawing from nature: From 1948 to 1951, before going on to the Slade, the young Denis Creffield attended the legendary Borough classes of David Bomberg, marking the beginning of an extraordinary sustained drawing quest, which had many episodes. In 1987, he set out to respond to each of the 26 English medieval cathedrals. ‘From February to November I drove all over England in a motor caravan…. each day I drew them – each night I slept in their shadow…’

3 November: David Fraser Jenkins: Gwen and Augustus ‘the same thing, really?’: The Tate’s 2004 exhibition of Gwen and Augustus John presented brother and sister alongside each other, in all their contrast. The curator, David Fraser Jenkins, compared their use of drawing, both as preparation for painting and as autonomous image. A leading scholar of modern British art, David Fraser Jenkins is based at the Tate.

24 November: Timothy Hyman: Jacopo Pontormo – transcending the renaissance figure drawing: Recognised as the most gifted master of ‘disegno’ in the generation after Michelangelo, Jacopo Pontormo (1494-1557) developed strangely, baffling Vasari and his contemporaries. His compelling drawings were rediscovered in the late twentieth century. Many are posed studio-boys, but made to convey a sexual and existential anxiety that remains profoundly troubling. Pontormo’s late diary survives, and helps us to reconstruct his lost Last Judgement cycle. Timothy Hyman’s ‘Sienese Painting’ was published by Thames and Hudson in 2003.

2003

30 April: Timothy Hyman: Max Beckmann - ‘Not Leaving Anything Out’: Tate Modern had a major retrospective of Max Beckmann (1884-1950) in 2003. Timothy Hyman focused on Beckmann’s shifting language; his discovery, after his 1915 breakdown, of the linear, and of the mask, to create a visual idiom of unparalleled complexity. As he said in the 1930s, ‘Basically my thing originates in an almost demented mirth, but then it aims at not leaving anything out.’

14 May: Professor Tamar Garb: A Dance to the Music of Line - Degas and Drawing: Starting out from her thoughts about the nineteenth century ballet. Professor Garb explored Degas’ lifelong involvement with figures moving to music. Tamar Garb is among the best known international scholars at work on French nineteenth century art: her books include Sisters of the Brush (Yale 1994), ‘Bodies of Modernity’ (Thames and Hudson, 1998) and several writings on Berthe Morisot.

21 May: Ansel Grut: On his drawing: Born in South Africa, and trained at the Royal College, Ansel Grut emerged early as a leading London Painter in the 1980s, exhibiting at Fischer Fine Art, Jason Rhodes, and, more recently, with George Adams in New York. His early pictures often conjured mythological tableaux within a murky tonality: in his recent imagery, learning partly from Guston, he has arrived at a starker and sharper vision. Ansel Grut was a prize winner in 2002’s Jerwood Drawing Exhibition.

28 May: Catherine Goodman: On her drawing and painting: Catherine explored her own development, as well as looking at some of the artists who nourished her, Catherine Goodman offers a rare glimpse of her practice. Founder and Director of The Prince of Drawing School, Catherine Goodman has preserved her own intense working life. Catherine won the National Portrait prize in painting in 2002.

4 June: Timothy Hyman: Kirchner and the Experience of the City Street: The drawings and graphic images of E.L.Kirchner (1880-1938) are among the most vivid of the entire twentieth century, reaching a peak in Berlin shortly before the First World War.

8 October: Timothy Hyman: Drawing and Cosmology – Artists who Map the World:Some of the most exciting medieval imagery - from Spanish ‘Beatus’ manuscripts to the abbess Hildegarde of Bingen; from the English Romanesque world map in Hereford Cathedral to the Siena of Ambrogio Lorenzetti and Giovanni di Paolo – sets out to make graphic sense of the totality of the Cosmos. Early last century, the Swiss ‘Outsider’ Adolf Wolfli (1864-1930) made his own ‘alternative world’ and the will ended with the contemporary drawings of Simon Lewty.

22 October: Brendan Prendeville: On Agnes Martin: Regarded by many as among the greatest of all living artists, Agnes Martin (b.1912) emerged in postwar New York, but has worked in New Mexico since 1967. Her astonishingly refined drawn lines create a meditative, sometimes transcendent or trancelike, art. Brendan Prendeville trained as an artist and teaches at Goldsmiths. His book on Realism in Twentieth Century Painting is published by Thames and Hudson.

29 October: Timothy Hyman: On James Ensor: Although James Ensor (1860-1949) is often seen as a twentieth century master, all his finest paintings were created in a brief flowering in the 1880’s. Working above the family shop, its trade centred on the Ostend carnival, he developed a magnificent imagery of the mask; his art also reflects his half-English ancestry, with Turner’s impastoed light and Gillray’s satirical vision strangely fused. In his etchings, he emerges as one of the greatest graphic artists of all time.

12 November: Ken Currie: On Drawing: When Ken Currie (b.1960) emerged in Glasgow he made his name with a graphic socialist imagery that owed much to Rivera and Leger. His work has changed, but he remains a radical and lucid thinker about contemporary pictorial issues and the politics of art. Ken Currie has exhibited widely in Britain and internationally. He is a visiting professor at Glasgow School of Art and has been a judge of the Jerwood Drawing Prize.

19 November: Charles Hewlings and Gina Medcalf: On Drawing and Abstraction: The painter Gina Medcalf and the sculptor Charles Hewlings live and work together in South London. Hewlings, who trained at Newcastle and St Martins, emerged as a leading sculptor in the late 1970s, has taught at Wimbledon and the RCA and spent two years in Duisberg on a Lehmbruck scholarship. Medcalf was trained at the Central and spent 15 years in New York working mainly on photography (receiving a National Endowment For the Arts award). Her paintings have been exhibited at John Moores’ and in Flowers’ Survey of British Abstract Painting. Both artists share a thoughtful commitment to abstraction and spoke about drawing in relation to that tradition.

2002

16th January:Timothy Hyman: Balthus, A Puppet Master: Concentrating mainly on the Wuthering Heights drawings, The Guitar Lesson, The Street and other works of Balthus’s twenties, this lecture incorporated newly published letters from the then current Venice catalogue.

30 January: Andrzej Jackowski: On his relationship to drawing: One of the leading painters of his generation, Jackowski exhibited at Purdy Hicks. Until 2002, he had shown few of his drawings, but had a full-scale survey of works on paper for 2003. Timothy Hyman, who has known Jackowski for almost 25 years, led the discussion – covering his sources (from viking ships to advertising photos) and his enthusiasms (including Carlo Carra and the cinema of Tarkousky).

13 February: Christopher Le Brun, RA: In conversation withTimothy Hyman: A member of The Prince of Wales’s Drawing Studio Advisory Board, Christopher Le Brun has had a complex relation to drawing. His exhibition in 2002 at the Marlborough Gallery raised many issues – about subject matter and symbolism, and about the interplay between painting and printing and sculpture. Le Brun is Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy; he took part in a previous public dialogue with Hyman at the Tate in 1999.

20 February: Michael Peppiatt: In the Studio of Giacometti: The author of the best biography of Francis Bacon, Michael Peppiatt spent many years in Paris as editor of Art International and became friendly with Giacometti’s intimate circle. He curated the 2002 Giacometti exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre, Norwich.

27 February: Susan Wilson: On Drawing: Perhaps best known for her remarkable sequence of self-portraits, as well as for her exploration of her New Zealand back ground, Susan Wilson has had a lifelong commitment to drawing.

2 October: Timothy Hyman: Bonnard’s Drawing Language - “Let it be felt that the Painter was there”: From about 1916, when Bonnard was already almost fifty, he ceased to use the camera and began to develop the radical drawing procedures which would serve his painting for the rest of his life. In a conscious reversal of French academic tradition, Bonnard declared “Drawing is sensation, colour is reasoning”.

23 October : Roger Malbert: On Curating Exhibitions of Drawings - The End of the Line: As originator and sometimes co-curator of a long series of Arts Council / Hayward Gallery touring exhibitions, Roger Malbert has been instrumental in fostering a wider appreciation of drawing in Britain. Drawing exhibitions offer a special opportunity to juxtapose contemporary and historical works, as in Deanna Petherbridge’s The Primacy of Drawing (1991) and Michael Craig-Martin’s anthology at the Whitechapel. Roger Malbert was trained as an artist and still draws.

6 November: Wendy Smith: Lines of Thought: The artist Wendy Smith has been engaged over many years in research at the interface of drawing and philosophy, especially in relation to Wittgenstein’s theory of representation. Her lecture challenged prevailing assumptions about drawing: what drawing is “supposed” to be, and why it is important …Dr Wendy Smith was Head of Fine Art at Camberwell. In 1998 she received a Leverhulme award for research in aesthetics at York.

13th November: Timothy Hyman: Reflections on Stanley Spencer and “Slade Drawing”: “It is awful after four years at the Slade to find oneself not in a possession of an imaginative capacity to draw, but to find instead that one has contracted a disease”. What did Spencer mean by this?

27 November: Paul Hills: Venetian Drawing: An art historian with exceptional range and sympathy (he curated the Tate’s David Jones retrospective in 1981) Paul Hills has lectured widely on Venetian art. He will focus here especially on the drawings of Titian and Tintoretto, contrasting their ‘painterliness’ to the more linear (and more autonomous) sheets of their Florentine contemporaries. Paul Hills is the author of The Light of Early Italian Painting and Venetian Colour, both published by Yale University Press.