Tuesday 8th September  2026 at 3.00.pm 
15 Wellgarth Road NW11 7JP courtesy of Gordon and Frances Rustin

Following the success of last year’s teatime talk, your committee has arranged another very special talk with tea and cakes.  

This talk will be about Beethoven.  His deafness was just a minor part of the physical and psychological problems he suffered from during his life. He communicated his daily struggles in his own voluminous diaries and correspondence. In this talk Professor Silman will consider his declining health and this will be compared with extracts from his most magnificent compositions. How he composed these masterpieces despite these adversities remains a mystery but also a sign of true genius.

The talk is given by Professor Alan Silman.  Alan is currently a Professor of Medicine at Oxford University and Senior Research Fellow at Green Templeton College Oxford.  Prior to this for 8 years he was Medical Director of the charity Arthritis Research UK (ARUK - now called Versus Arthritis).  He is an epidemiologist with a particular interest in diseases of bones, muscles and joints.  He has authored over 700 research publications and a number of textbooks.  He is amongst the top 100 published scientists across all disciplines in UK universities.

Alan is passionate about the arts and has researched intensively the medical history of well-known individuals.  From these researches, he has developed a series of lectures addressing how the lives of such individuals were affected by their health.  These talks have been given widely to a number of audiences across the UK to U3A, Probus and other community and professional groups.  He is an accredited Arts Society Lecturer.  Alan is a lover of theatre and an amateur drama enthusiast, and he directed his first play in 2024! 

Gordon and Frances Rustin have again kindly offered to host the talk at their home at 15 Wellgarth Road NW11 7JP and tea and cakes are offered.  Please come and join us on 8th September 2026 at 3.00 pm for the lecture by Professor Alan Silman

We will be making a charge of £25 (£30 for non-members if there is space), and this will include tea and delicious cakes 

There are only spaces for 35 guests so please come in good time to avoid disappointment. 

15 Wellgarth Road is a 10 minute walk from Golders Green.  The 268 and H2 bus serves it as well and there is a stop near the end of Wellgarth Road  

The cost for this event is £25.00 per person (non-refundable). 

For a map and payment details, please click here

MOMENTS AND MOODS IN MODERN HISTORY

The arrival of photography from 1839 was to change the course of painting forever. Cindy Polemis explores the relationship between painting and photography from the late 19th century to present day, looking at works from the 'pictorialists’ photographers, to the contemporary photorealist works of Gerhard Richter.

Cindy Polemis is an art historian and an independent lecturer. She has a B.A in History from Oxford University  and as a mature student she graduated from Birkbeck College, London University with a B.A  and then M.A.  in History of Art. She spent many years as a radio producer and presenter for BBC World Service. Since 2016 she has been a lecturer and official art guide at Tate Modern and Tate Britain. She is a specialist guide at Frieze Masters London. Cindy has accumulated a wide range of art historical knowledge ranging from 18th century European and British art to the contemporary international art scene. She was a trustee for six years at London’s Museum of the Home, previously known as The Geffrye Museum.

In a 1976 catalogue essay, American-born artist R.B.Kitaj coined the still-used term 'The School of London' to refer to a small group of London-based painters - most of them, significantly, born elsewhere - who despite the primacy of abstract art in the previous two decades, remained firmly committed to the depiction of the human form in all its vulnerability and psychological complexity. Kitaj himself was one of the group; the others included Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff and Lucian Freud - all now considered towering figures in the history of contemporary British art.

Monica Bohm-Duchen is an independent, London-based lecturer, curator and writer. The institutions for which she has worked include the Tate, the Royal Academy of Arts, Sotheby's Institute of Art and the Courtauld Institute of Art.

In the mid-1980s she acted as researcher and co-curator for the pioneering exhibition 'Art in Exile in Great Britain 1933–1945' (Berlin and London). At Birkbeck, University of London, where she is Associate Lecturer, she teaches a course entitled 'The Immigrant Experience in Modern British Art'. Her many publications include After Auschwitz: Responses to the Holocaust in Contemporary Art (Lund Humphries, 1995, contributing editor) and Art and the Second World War (Lund Humphries, 2013).

She is the initiator and Creative Director of 'Insiders/Outsiders: Refugees from Nazi Europe and their Contribution to British Culture', a nationwide arts festival taking place from March 2019 to March 2020.

Antoni Gaudí is well known and much loved. In this lecture, his work will be explored in detail. It will be shown how he engaged with nature in the most innovative and extraordinary ways. Inspired by honeycombs and spiders' webs, armadillo skins and mushrooms, trees and whales' bellies, he worked with extraordinary ceramicists, iron workers, tilers and decorative artists. We will look at his public and private buildings and his relationship with a wealthy and demanding patron. Private shy and retiring he was also humorous and witty in his extravagant style. However, it will also be the aim of this lecture to uncover some of the other architects working in Barcelona over the turn of the twentieth century; Domenech y Muntaner and Puig y Cadafalch. Attention will be paid to several significant and ravishing buildings and some less well-known buildings in Barcelona.

Jacqueline is Managing Director of Art and Culture Travel, running residential courses in Andalucía, Southern Spain in the art and culture of the region as well as curated tours to Madrid, Tangiers, Barcelona, Paris and Venice. Jacqueline is a course director and lecturer at the V&A and also lectures at The Royal Academy,  She has toured New Zealand and Australia for The Arts Society. Her specialist field is Spanish Art, but she also lectures on European Art 1790-1950. 

In a relatively short time, Keith Haring went from tagging the New York subway to being shown and represented in some of the most important galleries in America.  Collaborating with people like John Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, his relatively short life was ended by AIDS in the early 1990s. His reputation and his influence on the world of graffiti street art has only grown since then. This lecture will look at his life and examine how his aesthetic has influenced graffiti and street artists working today.

Pepe Martinez qualified as a London blue badge tourist guide in 2011, graduating at the top of his class. Since qualifying as a guide he has specialised in the graffiti and street art of East London.

In the year 2000, having been a Curator  in the Greek And Roman Department of the British Museum  for 13 years, Louise decided to escape. Given a  trowel with a diamond and silver casing in the handle as a leaving present, she set off on a series of extraordinary archaeological adventures. In this richly illustrated talk she will take you with her to a  mysterious and atmospheric ancient city on the coast of southern Albania, to the banks of the two great rivers of Mesopotamia -  the Euphrates and the Tigris  - and then to the wild and wonderful mountains of northern Ethiopia.

Louise Schofield is an archaeologist who was Curator of Greek Bronze Age and Geometric Antiquities at the British Museum from 1987-2000. Her book, The Mycenaeans, was co-published by the Getty Museum and the British Museum in 2007. She now writes, lectures and runs international archaeological projects - previously in south-eastern Turkey, Greece and Albania and currently in Ethiopia. And rather wonderfully she has just been appointed Visiting Professor of Archaeology at the American University of Rome.