Art Talks with Martin Randall

TUCSON ART TALKS brings Art Talks on a wide variety of art history topics to your public library, school, residential facility, business, auditorium or home. With years of experience speaking at museums, libraries and other venues in the Tucson area, these highly popular and engaging talks are sure to fascinate and delight!

 Georgia O'Keeffe has been called 'The Mother of American Modernism'. In this talk, through her paintings as well as through archival photographs and quotes from her letters and interviews, we examine the remarkable life and work of Georgia O'Keeffe, from her humble childhood on the plains of Wisconsin, through her time in New York with the renowned photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, and focusing especially on her time in New Mexico where she spent the last five decades of her groundbreaking life capturing the rugged beauty of this stark landscape. 

Free admission.

 For much of his life the French artist Paul Gauguin searched for an escape from 'anything that is artificial and conventional'. He traveled first to Brittany to live a simple, uncluttered life among the rural communities there, far from the bustle of the increasingly industrialized and materialistic life in the cities. Dissatisfied with that, he ventured deeper, to Martinique in the Caribbean, and then to the distant South Pacific islands - first to Tahiti, and finally to the even more remote Marquesas Islands. 

We explore the sometimes controversial life and work of Gauguin as he delved deeper and deeper into the mystic in search of the authentic, and look at the astounding images he created, particularly during his time in Tahiti and the Marquesas, sometimes blending reality with imagination, bringing a vision of a paradisiacal world that most of us will never ourselves see.

Free admission.

If you missed the recent fabulous Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam - the Exhibition of the Century by some accounts - you will love the Vermeer in Amsterdam talk. We were fortunate enough to visit the exhibition ourselves, and this talk brings a first-hand account of our visit to the show.

Vermeer's output was small - only about 37 existing paintings are attributed to Vermeer. 28 of them were on display at this beautifully curated show.

Experience this amazing exhibition up close, with detailed discussions of each of the 28 paintings on display, in a fascinating talk about one of the most beloved painters of all time.

Free admission.

Gustav Klimt's career straddled two worlds - the world of classical art that first made him famous, and the new and exciting world of Symbolism and Art Nouveau that would change the world of art forever.  He was instrumental in shaping this new world, with his daring compositions, his new ways of looking at art, and his dazzling use of gold and his use of themes from the ancient world that made his paintings both timeless and hyper-modern. 

We'll look at Klimt's life and career, from his humble beginnings and his classical paintings for theaters and museums, through his break with the past in helping form the Viennese Secession, and his bold and dramatic new style of mythical themes, his portraits of women, and his landscapes, that helped shape the world of fin de siecle Vienna.  

Free admission.