Around 1900 Vienna was the capital of a vast empire and one of the most exciting artistic laboratories in the world. It produced Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, Freud, Mahler and Wittgenstein. Looking at these and others figures Gavin asks how the City of Dreams became such a cultural hotbed.

A writer and broadcaster. Appears on BBC Radio 3 and 4, and contributes to newspapers, magazines and opera and concert programmes worldwide. Lectures widely about the culture of Central Europe. Recent appearances include Klimt and The Kiss in cinemas worldwide, and talks for the Hay and Cheltenham Literature Festivals, the Royal Opera House, the National Gallery, the National Trust, the National Theatre, the British Museum and the V&A. His first book, A Home for All Seasons, was published in 2022; his second, The Gay Apocalypse: Queer Life and Culture in Vienna 1900 will be released next year.

The eccentric paintings of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo went largely unnoticed in her lifetime. It was only after her death, age 47, that her career exploded. She produced more than 150 images of herself. ‘I am the subject I know best’ she wrote and many of them can be seen in the major exhibition of her work now showing at Tate Modern.

Cindy Polemis is an art historian, independent lecturer and art guide. She has a BA in Modern History from Oxford University and as a mature student she went back to university to study first for a BA and then for a Masters in History of Art at Birkbeck College, London University. Before that she spent many years as a radio producer and presenter for the BBC World Service working in news and current affairs. Since 2016 Cindy has worked as  a lecturer and an official art guide at Tate Britain and Tate Modern. She has also been a trustee at the Museum of the Home, formerly the Geffrye Museum. Cindy has accumulated a wide range of art historical knowledge ranging from 18th European and British art to the contemporary international art scene. She has been an official guide for  Frieze Masters art fair in London. She is particularly keen to draw parallels with art and social history and her lectures are accessible and engaging, drawing out the stories of art and artists which are steeped in human emotions and experiences which we all share.

Sculpting the human body has a long history, beginning with abstracted forms in clay and stone. Later artists used pose, gesture, perspective and the surface texture of the material to achieve more realistic figures. Sometimes sculptors let the materials express the character of the figure, releasing the ‘statue from the stone’ as Michelangelo put it.

The lecture will be followed by the New Members coffee morning in the Garden Café.

After officer service in the Royal Navy Justin had a long career in business management, latterly as Director of Studies for executive colleges in Oxford and Washington DC. He was one of the earliest consultants in knowledge management and e-learning, advising the UK Government, until he retired from business in 2000. Justin then studied the History of Art and Architecture at Oxford, and later studied Classical culture with the University of Athens. While researching for a doctorate in naval history, Justin was invited to join the Bodleian Library as a senior academic manager, advising external researchers and graduate students, editing manuscripts in the Bodleian's collections, and acting as the Bodleian’s internal consultant on maritime documents and artworks. He is a published historian. A qualified teacher, he is a tutor in the History of Art and Architecture and Classical Studies for independent colleges at Oxford and for private graduate students. He was recently commissioned to write a university preparation course on human creativity and innovation in the age of Artificial Intelligence. A member of the Arts Society West Oxfordshire, Justin is a frequent lecturer for The Arts Society with a wide range of talks, study mornings and study days on art history, painting, sculpture, architecture and decorative arts across cultures from antiquity to the modern era.

A professional cartoonist for thirty years, Harry Venning adapted his Guardian strip cartoon Clare in the Community into a Radio 4 sitcom. He will be tracing the history of his profession and creating cartoons fresh on the page. Yes, Harry will be drawing live for us!

The lecture will be followed by our Christmas lunch in the Green Table Café

Harry Venning is a cartoonist, comedy writer and performer based in Brighton. Harry’s cartoons have appeared in publications as diverse as Mathematics Today, Radio Times, Music Teacher and The Stage. For twenty five years he provided The Guardian with the weekly strip cartoon Clare In The Community, about an unaware and empathy free social worker. In 2004 he developed Clare In The Community into a successful BBC Radio 4 sitcom starring Sally Philipps which ran for twelve series. When not at a desk , Harry tours his cartoon workshop around schools, theatres, arts centres, cruise ships and festivals. He is an accredited lecturer with the UK Arts Society, an Honorary Fellow of the English/Creative Writing departments of Aberystwyth University, resident cartoonist with the Blue Hat team building organisation, UK Social Workers Union honorary ambassador, winner of a Sony Radio Award for Comedy and a former UK Strip Cartoonist Of The Year. He cannot draw hands or horses.

An author as well as an illustrator, Lizzy Stewart won the Waterstones Children’s Book prize with her debut picture book There’s a Tiger in the Garden. A lecturer in illustration at Goldsmiths College, she will use a range of children’s books to show how illustrations bring stories to life.

Lizzy Stewart has been a freelance illustrator since graduation from Edinburgh College of Art in 2009. In 2013 she completed an MA in Communication Design at Central St Martins. She was selected as one of It's Nice That's Graduates 2009 and was nominated for a British Comic Book Award in 2013. Her inspirations include folk culture, flora and fauna and life in far-flung cities and a compulsive need to tell stories. Lizzy lives in London, where she lectures for Goldsmith College and teaches on behalf of the National Portrait Gallery.

Paintings and other works of art from the past show us not only what historical instruments looked like but also the social context in which they would have been played. Sophie explores the instruments in selected works and gives live demonstrations on the instruments.

Sophie is a musician well-known for her prowess on the English border bagpipes and has become one of the foremost players of the instrument in the UK. She also plays a variety of early woodwind instruments such as shawm, rauschpfeife, crumhorm and recorder. She’s also one of a handful of British players of the baroque musette, an 18th century French bagpipe similar to the Northumbrian smallpipes. When not touring with GreenMatthews, Sophie also makes instruments (she made her own baroque oboe) and works with respected luthier Tony Millyard on his flutes. Sophie is self-taught on all of her instruments.

From his early abstract expressionist images, through the Californian swimming pools to the photomontages of the mid eighties, this lecture follows the career of an artist whose wit and imagination has never faltered. He left the Royal College of Art more famous than his teachers and has never looked back.

Douglas read Fine Art at Magdalene College Cambridge and has been a lecturer on paintings since 1980. In that time he has given over 8000 lectures to universities, colleges and art societies. He was the director of  The New Academy of Art Studies for three years and is presently a regular lecturer at The Study Center, Christie's course 'The History of Art Studies' and other London courses. Among his more improbable venues for lectures are the bar on the QE2, MI5 headquarters, the Captain's Room at Lloyds, and an aircraft hanger in a German NATO base. Overseas he has lectured in Belgium, France, Germany and Spain, and has taken numerous tours around Europe. He has written and presented various TV documentaries, notably the Omnibus programme on Whistler and the exhibition video on William Morris. Three one-man exhibitions of his paintings have been held in England and Switzerland. He has published five novels, which have been translated into 8 foreign languages, and his book on Monet, River of Light, has sold 30,000 copies in England, America and France.

The Museum of the Year Competition celebrates excellence, innovation and creativity by curators across the UK. Using examples of past winners, an Art Fund specialist sets out the challenges facing museums and galleries as they try to attract new audiences.

Whether it is Paul Nash or Stanley Spencer, Laura Knight or Eric Ravilious, Henry Moore or Barbara Hepworth, the two world wars led British artists to produce some of their most profound work. And not just on the battlefield. Art historian and curator David Haycock explores artists’ response to war.

Dr David Boyd Haycock is an established freelance art historian and curator. He is best known for his 2009 book, A Crisis of Brilliance: Five Young British Artists and the Great War, and the subsequent exhibition he curated at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Educated at the University of Oxford, and a former curator at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, he is a specialist in British art and culture in the period 1860 to 1940. His latest books include a new biography of the young Augustus John, and a new biography of the equestrian painter Lucy Kemp-Welch. An Arts Society lecturer since 2011, he is based in Oxford.

We explore the birth of the Silk Road and how silk fuelled trade ushered in the first era of globalisation. How do you get from moth to cloth? Chris unravels the story of silk and why more of the population in Uzbekistan is involved in sericulture than in any other country.

The lecture will be followed by our AGM and summer party.

Chris Aslan was born in Turkey and was raised there and in war-torn Beirut. This set him on a course for an adventurous life and he has spent two years at sea, and lived in Central Asia for 15 years. He started off in Khiva, a desert oasis in Uzbekistan, establishing a UNESCO workshop reviving fifteenth century carpet designs and embroideries, and becoming the largest non-government employer in town. He was deported as part of an anti-Western purge, and took a year in Cambridge to write A Carpet Ride to Khiva. Chris then spent several years in the Pamirs mountains of Tajikistan, training yak herders to comb their yaks for their cashmere-like down. Next came a couple more years in Kyrgyzstan living in the world’s largest natural walnut wood and establishing a wood-carving workshop. Since then, Chris has studied and rowed at Oxford and now divides his time between lecturing for the Arts Society, writing fiction and non-fiction in his mountainous home overlooking the sea in North Cyprus where he is overrun by cats, and returning to Central Asia to lead tours whenever he can, having left a large chunk of his heart there. His latest book is Unravelling the Silk Road.