Art Student Book Four 1971-72

If you wanted to enjoy yourself back in 1968, and were so inclined, you might possibly think about going to Art College, perhaps in London, and spending your summer holidays wandering around the great galleries of Europe including the Louvre, the Prado and the Vatican, as well as visiting the Parthenon, the caves of Altamira and Pompeii.
This account of such indulgence, a mosaic of short episodes, is the platform for presenting the History of Art, Literature and especially Film as it was encountered, using hyperlinks for reference and illustration. A series of five books presents the whole rose tinted reminiscence beginning with the first book in Bournemouth-by-the-Sea, all that time ago, when Modern Art was, indeed, still relatively modern.
The many references to Literature and History, throughout the books, reflect what the Fine Arts once enjoyed. This was a happy synthesis between Art, History and Literature. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the Fine Arts were deprived of this by other Art forms, which included Illustration, Photography, and particularly Film. The consequence of these developments was an ideology of what little remained. This was called Modern Art.
Book Four begins with the Picasso Museum in Barcelona, then down to watch Whirling Dervishes in Tangiers and then back up to Toledo and Madrid where they saw a bullfight and went to the Prado: Goya, Titian and Velasquez. They stayed in a palace in Santander and visited the caves of Altamira before Paris: the Louvre, Napoléon’s grave, the Sacré-Coeur and l’Orangerie.
This was his last year at Wimbledon. Giles met Derek Jarman in the first term, acquired Prunella Clough as his tutor for the second, attended the Private View of the William Scott Retrospective at the Tate Gallery and, just as he was supposed to be gearing up for the last term, exam, thesis and show, he fell in love; it was a disaster academically but diverting nevertheless.