The La Trobe University Art History Alumni presents, with the National Gallery of Victoria, the fifteenth annual Rae Alexander Lecture.

The lecture is our premier event for the year and it is our great pleasure to be in partnership with the National Gallery of Victoria for this, the seventh occasion.

This year we welcome Dr Lisa Beaven, Lecturer in Art History, La Trobe University as our speaker.

Dr Beaven is a lecturer in art history in the History program at La Trobe University. She specialises in the history of art patronage and collecting in seventeenth century Rome and has published widely in this field. In 2010 her book, An Ardent Patron: Cardinal Camillo Massimo and his artistic and antiquarian circle: Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin and Diego Velazquez, was published by Paul Holberton Press, London and the Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica (CEEH), Madrid. She was the global baroque specialist for Phaidon’s monumental, The Art Museum (2011).

The restoration of the NGV’s Crossing of the Red Sea provides us with a timely opportunity to re-evaluate its creator, Nicolas Poussin.

He is one of the most studied, but also one of the most misunderstood, of seventeenth-century artists. Traditionally he has been seen as a strict classicist who valued reason above all else. And yet in a series of paintings from the 1640s, such as Landscape with a man killed by a Snake, idyllic landscapes not only fail to deliver the safety they seem to promise, but instead bring violence and death. The expression of extreme states of emotion, not reasoning, is at the heart of these works, and Lisa will argue that they represent a direct response to his immediate intellectual environment.

The Rae Alexander Lecture is named in honour of the first president of the Art History Chapter of La Trobe University Alumni, established in 1996.

Venue: Clemenger BBDO Auditorium, NGV International
180 St Kilda Rd, Melbourne
(Enter through the North Entrance via the Arts Centre Forecourt)

Booking is essential. Please return RSVP slip with payment

Image: Nicolas Poussin (1595–1665), Massacre of the Innocents, c. 1628, Chantilly, Musée Conde
Photo credit: Renaud Camus