Slade Lectures examine England’s dreaming

The annual lecture series, hosted by the Department of History of Art, begins on Tuesday (October 13th) and will put forward a compelling alternative history of British culture over the last 150 years.

From the coronation of Queen Victoria to the Sex Pistols’ “God Save The Queen”, Professor Tim Barringer, from Yale University, will examine how art and music have explored the theme of an idyllic England belonging to a semi-mythical past in the face of industrialisation and modernity.

Over the course of the eight-week series, he will put forward radical reinterpretations of music by composers such as Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams, William Walton and Benjamin Britten – as well as groups like The Beatles and the Sex Pistols.

The lectures will explore, for the first time, the way in which this music is interwoven with the visual arts. Shared themes emerge in the work of artists including William Blake, Samuel Palmer, the Pre-Raphaelites, J. A. M. Whistler, Walter Sickert, John Piper, Graham Sutherland, Francis Bacon and Peter Blake.

The title for the series, “Broken Pastoral”, points to its overall theme, examining the distinctively English cultural response to accelerating industrialisation and technological advances over the last century and a half.

Music and art throughout this period have frequently referred to a longing for a return to an earlier era, one often associated with the countryside, but also sometimes linked to the medieval past or even a period of suburban plenty, as referenced in The Beatles’ “Penny Lane”.

At the same time, both art forms frequently refer to the impossibility of making this return, because the idyll has been disrupted and disfigured by the advance of modernity.

Tim Barringer is Paul Mellon Professor in the Department of the History of Art at Yale University. He has published and lectured widely, and curated exhibitions, on British art and visual culture, art and empire, art and music and on American art. He is a Cambridge graduate and has taught at Yale since 1998.

Professor Barringer’s books include Reading the Pre-Raphaelites (Yale, 1998), and Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (Yale, 2006), which won the Historians of British Art Book Prize for 2007.

The Slade Lectures will take place every Tuesday at 5pm in Room A, The Arts School, Bene’t Street, Cambridge. Entry is free and all are welcome. The full programme can be found at: www.hoart.cam.ac.uk