A series of alternating lunchtime lectures and in-person museum visits and walking tours celebrating Jewish art. This series is run in partnership with the Lyons Learning Project.
Lunchtime lectures begin at 1pm; in-person visits meet at 2.30pm. Streaming links for online events will be sent out shortly before each event. See below for full details.
JR has an ethical ticketing policy and is offering free tickets to the lunchtime lectures, but if you can afford it, please donate to support our work. We are proposing denominations of 18 – the numerical value of the Hebrew word 'chai', meaning 'life'.
Header image: Primavera (aka The Lovers) by Rebecca Solomon, 1864 © Simeon Solomon Research Archive
Previous events
Tuesday 3 May
Lunchtime Lecture: Women in Biblical Art
Well known feminist art historian and cultural analyst Professor Griselda Pollock talks about depictions of biblical women in paintings from the Renaissance to the present day. Since 1977, Pollock has been one of the most influential scholars of visual culture in the UK. She is a major influence in feminist theory, feminist art history and gender studies, renowned for her innovative feminist approaches to art history, which aim to deconstruct the lack of appreciation and importance of women in art as more than objects for the male gaze.
1pm. FREE or suggested donation. ONLINE.
Tuesday 10 May
Walking Tour: Sacred Art at the National Gallery
Rabbi Sybil Sheridan, director of the Lyons Learning Project, is joined by Revd Dr Ayla Lepine, the Howard and Roberta Ahmanson Fellow in Art and Religion at the National Gallery, to explore the NG’s collection of biblical paintings. Our theme will be ‘Crossing Borders’, inspired by Orazio Gentileschi’s The Finding of Moses and The Rest on the Flight into Egypt. We will also follow-up on Professor Griselda Pollock’s talk from the previous week, viewing paintings including Guido Reni’s depiction of Lot and His Daughters, and Artemisia Gentileschi’s self-portraits as Judith and Bathsheba.
2.30pm. £15. The National Gallery, WC2N 5DN.
Tuesday 17 May
Lunchtime Lecture: The Artist Siblings
Julia Weiner, associate professor of Art History and director of content for Liberal Arts at Regent's University London, introduces three Victorian Jewish painters from the same family. Abraham Solomon was well known and popular, while his sister Rebecca worked for the famed Pre-Raphaelite Millais and their brother Simeon was associated with The Brotherhood until a sex scandal resulted in him being sent to the workhouse.
1pm. FREE or suggested donation. ONLINE.
Tuesday 24 May
Walking Tour: Obsession and Intrigue at the Royal Academy
Dr Aviva Dautch, executive director of JR, who in a previous life co-curated the Royal Academy of Arts’ 250th anniversary project, Objects of Obsession, leads a tour of depictions of Jews in the RA and explores the art, lives and complicated family intrigues of Jewish Royal Academicians, from Solomon J Solomon to Lucian Freud.
2.30pm. £15. Royal Academy of Arts, W1J 0BD.
Tuesday 7 June
Walking Tour: East End Jewish Artists
Join Rachel Kolsky, Blue Badge guide and author of Jewish London, on a walk around London’s Jewish East End. Discover the home of British painter Mark Gertler; site of the Russian Vapour Baths, which inspired David Bomberg’s Mud Bath; childhood home of “the girl who paints like Raphael” Clara Klingoffer; and the church immortalised in Leon Kossoff’s post-war paintings; before finishing the tour at Whitechapel Art Gallery, where poet and artist Isaac Rosenberg spent his formative years next door at the Whitechapel Library.
2.30pm. £15. Meet at the goat statue in Bishops Square, E1.
Tuesday 14 June
Lunchtime Lecture: The Whitechapel Boys (and Girl)
Artists and intellectuals from the Jewish East End contributed enormously to the culture of Britain during the early decades of the 20th century. This illustrated talk by Irene Wise, first art director of JR magazine and honorary fellow in Media and Culture at the University of Roehampton, focuses on four artists living in Whitechapel, who trained at the Slade School of Art: Isaac Rosenberg, Mark Gertler, David Bomberg and Clara Winston (née Birnberg).
1pm. FREE or suggested donation. ONLINE.
Thursday 16 June*
Walking Tour: Postwar Modern
Art historian and Insiders/Outsiders founding director Monica Bohm-Duchen gives a tour of the Barbican Centre’s fascinating exhibition, Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain, 1945-1965. The display brings together art produced in Britain in direct and indirect response to the upheaval and trauma of World War II. Of the artists featured, some are Jewish refugees, such as Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, Eva Frankfurther, Franciszka Themerson and Gustav Metzger. Read more about Postwar Modern in the Spring 2022 issue of JR.
2.30pm. £15. Barbican Centre, EC2Y 8DS.
*Please note: this event has been rescheduled from Tuesday 21 June due to planned tube strikes. If you have already booked a ticket and can no longer make it, please contact programming@jewishrenaissance.org.uk ASAP.
Tuesday 28 June
Lunchtime Lecture: The Émigrés Who Transformed the British Art World
Get to know the émigrés who, having fled Nazi Europe, embraced the future and introduced avant-garde European and British artists to the public and press. These pioneering dealers, three of them fearless women, transformed the London gallery scene. Discover how profound an impact the artists’ work made then and now with Sue Grayson Ford, who founded and ran the Serpentine Gallery for its first 13 years and is a qualified Blue Badge Guide, plus art advisor and art historian Cherith Summers who, together with Grayson Ford, co-curated Brave New Visions: The Émigrés who Transformed the British Art World at Sotheby's in 2019.
1pm. FREE or suggested donation. ONLINE.