Note: to celebrate the 10th anniversary of TAS Trent Valley, this lecture will be followed with 'bubbles and bites'.  We hope you can join us to raise a toast to our very successful society.

The conventional story of modern art inevitably runs from Monet and Cezanne through to Picasso, Kandinsky, Duchamp and Dalí. This lecture showcases the lives and careers of many unsung female artists who contributed to the modernist European Modernist movement.  They include Berthe Morisot, Hilma af Klint, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Helen Saunders, Sonia Delaunay and Sophie Taeuber-Arp.

Rosamund Bartlett is a writer, lecturer and translator whose work ranges across the arts, and across the cultures of Europe, from Italy to Norway. She began her career as an academic in Slavic studies after completing her doctorate at Oxford, and has held fellowships both in the UK and at the European University Institute in Florence. In 2024 she became a Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Brasenose College, Oxford. 

The author of several books, including biographies of Chekhov and Tolstoy, and a study of Wagner's influence in Russia, she is also well known as a translator - her publications include acclaimed editions of Anna Karenina and Chekhov's stories for Oxford World’s Classics. She has written on music and literature for institutions including the Royal Opera House, the National Theatre and the Salzburg Festival, and about art for Apollo and The Burlington Magazine. She is currently writing a book about the revolution in the arts which took place in early 20th-century Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kyiv and Odesa, and its connection to modernist developments in Paris, Munich and Milan. 

She has led art, architecture, design and music tours throughout Europe, and contributes regularly to Proms events and opera broadcasts on the BBC. Her lecturing work has taken her from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford where she lives, to the V&A in London, and to the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney.