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!

 John Singer Sargent captured the spirit of the Gilded Age with his lavish portraits of wealthy society patrons and their families. 

Growing up in Europe as the son of expatriate Americans who exposed him to European art and culture at every opportunity, and living in many different countries, he soaked up their culture,  becoming fluent in many languages. But he was also an outsider. In Europe he was the American expat. When he later moved to England he was the sophisticated Parisian painter. When he finally traveled to America he was the famous European artist.

Perhaps being an outsider gave him the perspective to paint his subjects objectively, and he became highly sought-after as a portraitist. His paintings were mostly highly admired, sometimes scandalous, and always captivating. But eventually he tired of portraits, and in his later years he returned to his first love, travel, and he painted countless images of his time in Europe, North Africa and America, traveling with his artist friends.

We look at Sargent's fascinating life, mixing with high society and meeting famous people, but also traveling simply and painting whatever caught his eye.

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.

 Although the Italian Impressionist Giuseppe De Nittis is almost unknown today outside Italy, he was a prominent and highly successful artist in Paris during his lifetime, closely connected with the other French Impressionists like Monet, Manet, and Degas, who are household names today. His short career was so intense that it captured everything that was happening in Europe at the time, from rural life in southern Italy where he was born, to the 1872 eruption of Mount Vesuvius that he witnessed first-hand, to everyday life amongst the bourgeoisie and middle class of Paris and London.

De Nittis chronicled the rise of industrialization, the repercussions of the Franco-Prussian War, and the Belle Epoque that followed it, a time of peace and prosperity in Europe, which he depicted in glorious detail in Paris and London, often presaging the work of the later French Impressionists.

Free admission.