Live and Online Lecture

Mondrian and Jazz

By Tom Parsons

Wednesday 22nd July at 6pm

We are running a series of live and online lectures and we do hope you will bring an aperitivo and join us for an hour before dinner. We have chosen subjects to stimulate new interests and conversation, ready for the imminent return to socializing. We invite you to join 15 minutes early to hear information on AHA’s plans for the future and there will be time for questions and answers at the end.

Mondrian and Jazz

Mondrian was a serious, sober artist who lived in a monk-like, ascetic fashion painting rectangles in black, white and few primary colours. Their radically reduced simplicity stood, for him and for a handful of admirers during his lifetime, as metaphors for an unseen, eternal spiritual realm which the artist could access and express in visual form. At the same time we know that whilst producing these high-minded, purified abstract images in his small and rather lonely apartments in Paris, Hampstead and finally New York he also listened to Jazz, particularly boogie-woogie records then coming out of America, dancing apparently by himself. It seems something of a contradiction but there is in fact a fascinating connection between the two…..

Tom Parsons Tom studied English and Art History at York in the 1980s where he also completed an MA on Matisse.  He’s lectured for AHA on and off for many years now, whilst also working freelance for the Education Departments at the National Gallery and Tate.  He has published books on Post-Impressionism, Rodin, Renoir and a guide to the Royal Collection at Buckingham Palace.  Since 2000 he has taught art history at St Mary’s School Ascot but one day will return to live in Rome, reading Byron and sipping the odd grappa.

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Please contact [email protected] if you have any queries