Forthcoming FAN Activities August-October 2008

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The Fine Arts Network and the Art History Discipline, School of Culture and Communication, present:

The Fine Arts Network 2008 Postdoctoral Lecture

Dr Ruth Pullin

A way of looking at nature: Eugene von Guérard in Europe and Australia

6:30 pm, Tuesday 16 September 2008, Elisabeth Murdoch Theatre, the University of Melbourne

All Welcome. FAN Members Drinks at 6.00 pm  RSVP drinks: AHCCA-FAN@unimelb.edu.au

Dinner with speaker after the lecture will be at Jimmy Watson's Wine Bar (333 Lygon St, Carlton). The cost is $60 for two courses. Coffee, tea and alcohol are charged on consumption, Please confirm in your rsvp if you require a vegetarian option. RSVP dinner: AHCCA-FAN@unimelb.edu.au

The discovery of a group of oil sketches painted by Eugen von Guérard in the 1840s has shed new light on the artist and his conception of landscape painting. Painted in the open-air under the influence of his teacher, the Düsseldorf landscape painter J.W. Schirmer, these truthful, botanically-specific studies constituted the ideal apprenticeship for the artist who sought to realize the goals for landscape painting expressed by Alexander von Humboldt. Von Guérard rose to Humboldt's challenge to landscape painters to ‘pass the narrow limits of the Mediterranean' and ‘to seize, with the genuine freshness of a pure and youthful spirit, on the true image of the varied forms of nature'. Studies of the environmentally-significant German Neandertal anticipate his response to Australian subjects such as Tower Hill while others of the volcanic Eifel region signal his commitment to geological subjects. In the Australian colonies he pursued his interest in the new science of geology, or geognosy , a discipline with direct relevance to landscape painting, through his responses to the volcanic geology of Victoria's Western District, the granite tors of Mount Kosciuszko, Victoria's dramatic coastline and the dolerite embankments on the southern tip of Tasman Island.

In this lecture it will be argued that von Guérard's extensive and often arduous travel throughout the south-eastern colonies of Australia to portray its landscape was driven by a scientifically-informed vision of landscape painting, a vision founded on the influential theories of scientists such as Humboldt and Carl Gustav Carus, practised by colleagues in the Düsseldorf school of landscape painting and confirmed by contemporary scientists and artists in Melbourne.

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The Fine Arts Network and the Art History Discipline, School of Culture and Communication, present:

The 2008 Margaret Manion Lecture

Robyn Sloggett

Director, Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation

The Living Object

6:30 pm, 22 October 2008, Elisabeth Murdoch Theatre, the University of Melbourne

The Fine Arts Network, in collaboration with the Art History Discipline, presents the 2008 Margaret Manion Lecture: 'The Living Object'. In this anniversary presentation which celebrates the 10th annual Margaret Manion Lecture, Associate Professor Robyn Sloggett, Director, Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation, explores how scientific enquiry, predominantly framed within cultural materials conservation studies, is used to gather evidence of how objects have been made, used or have traveled across time and place. With a capacity to 'humanize the humanities'; science draws out stories that help us to elucidate the past and make predictions for the future. These stories form the basis for this lecture. This lecture also pays tribute to Professor Manion for her work towards the establishment of Conservation as a discipline at the University of Melbourne.

 

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For FAN Membership forms and further information visit:

www.melbourneartjournal.unimelb.edu.au/FAN.

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