Southwood Lane
London N6 5EE
The 12th Annual Kyffin Williams lecture will take place in the Highgate School Museum on Southwood Lane at 7 pm on Monday the 3rd of February 2020. It will be delivered by Oliver Fairclough, former Keeper of Art at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, and his title will be: ‘Room for Welsh Art?: Kyffin Williams and the National Museum of Wales’
Sir Kyffin Williams RA taught art at Highgate from 1944-73 before retiring to Anglesey, the place of his birth, to paint full-time. He is remembered now as one of Wales’s best-loved artists. The talk will introduce the collections at the National Museum of Wales, including the invaluable contributions of the Davies sisters, and go on to explore the question as to whether the institution is a museum of Welsh art, or a gallery of Western European art located in Wales. It will also describe how Kyffin, a generous benefactor of the museum, was outspoken in his belief that the NMW should present a canon of Welsh ‘greats’ at a time (the 1980s) when the whole concept of national schools was increasingly suspect, and contemporary art in Wales was taking off in directions he found incomprehensible.
Oliver Fairclough is an Honorary Research Fellow at Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales, Cardiff, where he worked from 1986, becoming Keeper of Art in 1998 until his retirement in 2015. Previously he had held museum posts in Liverpool and Birmingham. He led the redevelopment of the art galleries at the National Museum to create the National Museum of Art for Wales between 2007 and 2011. His research interests include art collections and artists in Wales from the 16th century to the mid-20th century. He lives in the Brecon Beacons.
