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Spowers & Syme
January 24, 2023Spowers & Syme may sound like a firm of accountants, but we’re dealing with an entirely different order of creativity. Ethel Spowers (1890-1947), and Eveline Syme (1888-1961), were groundbreaking Australian artists at a time when women found it difficult to make any impression on an art scene dominated by self-confident and self-serving males. A touring […]
Sydney Morning Herald Column
Aotearoa Art
January 17, 2023A handful of big international art fairs are obligatory annual destinations for the world’s major collectors. Only among the second-tier fairs is there real competition, as cities compete to attract wealthy art tourists looking for something a bit different. All these fairs dream of getting the world’s über-galleries to participate, but the real interest lies […]
Sydney Morning Herald Column
2022 and Beyond
January 2, 2023There’s been plenty to think about in 2022, including war in the Ukraine, a looming global recession and floods along the north coast, but if one had to nominate Australia’s most momentous event of the year it would have to be the change of government. Whether this was equally momentous for the visual arts remains […]
Sydney Morning Herald Column
Alexander McQueen: Mind Mythos Muse
December 26, 2022“I don’t see fashion as curing cancer or AIDS – or anything else for that matter,” said Alexander McQueen. “At the end of the day they are just clothes.” This statement, like so many others uttered by this prodigiously talented designer, testifies to the contradictions that defined his career and character. For McQueen (1969-2010), fashion […]
Sydney Morning Herald Column
Sydney Modern Revisited
December 13, 2022“Campus” is word of the week. It seems to be a particular favourite of Art Gallery of NSW Director, Michael Brand, who kept using the term during the Sydney Modern launch. “My vision,” he writes in the book associated with the new gallery, “has been for the Sydney Modern Project to transform the Art Gallery […]
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Film Reviews
January 27, 2023
Tár & Babylon
Last week I thought Michelle Williams was unbeatable for Best Actress at this year’s Oscars, but after watching Tár, it’s hard to see Cate Blanchett coming second. Todd Field’s film about a musical genius who falls for the seductions of fame and power, is a classic Faustian tale. Blanchett’s Lydia Tár doesn’t exactly sell her […]
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Emily
January 21, 2023Emily Brontë remains one of the most mysterious figures in world literature. When she died at the age of 30 in 1848, she had written one novel and a sheaf of poems. The poems were immediately acclaimed for their “genius” but are little read today. The novel, Wuthering Heights, is a classic for the ages, […]
Film Reviews
The Fabelmans
January 13, 2023At a certain point in an illustrious career, many a writer has turned to autobiography. That moment usually arrives when an author has become so famous that he or she is more fascinating to the public than any work of fiction they may produce. It does, however, require a special kind of ego. Gore Vidal […]
Film Reviews
White Noise
January 6, 2023Some novels leave an indelible impression. I read Don DeLillo’s White Noise shortly after it appeared in the mid-1980s but can still remember whole passages and even certain sentences. It is a book of verbal gymnastics that Noah Baumbach has made into an equally wordy film, largely by quoting DeLillo verbatim. Baumbach shows an unusual respect […]
Film Reviews
The Banshees of Inisherin & A Man Called Otto
December 29, 2022It must be a great relief for Colin Farrell to finally be in a film in which he can speak with an Irish accent. A tragi-comedy of insularity, Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin is set on a island off the west coast of Ireland. There is no actual place called Inisherin, but one assumes […]
One Week in the Pilbara
January 7, 2023“What do you think of the Pilbara?” asked the hotel manager in Newman. “A lot of red dirt?” The immediate answer was: “Yes. A vast, seemingly endless expanse of red dirt, criss-crossed by trains carrying identically formed hillocks of iron ore. The trains stretch for kilometres at a time. You see them on the horizon, […]
Blog
Nicholas Harding 1956 – 2022
November 11, 2022When Nicholas Harding was awarded the 2022 Wynne Prize for landscape, one sensed it wasn’t simply a vote for a single painting, but for a lifetime’s achievement. This is not to detract from that winning canvas, Eora, a vast bushland scene, almost 2 by 4 metres – a scale that might have intimidated most artists, […]
Blog
The Archibald Prize 2022: Blak Douglas is the winner
May 14, 2022Politics is never far away from the Archibald prize, but it’s often that nebulous strain called “art politics”. This year, with the winner being announced in the middle of a federal election campaign, it was always going to be hard to keep attention focused on the aesthetics. Blak Douglas (AKA. Adam Hill), proved to be […]
Blog
Peter Powditch: Remarks at a Memorial Exhibition
May 13, 2022I feel like a bit of a fraud opening Peter Powditch’s memoral show, when so many other people in this room knew him a lot better than I did. – I didn’t ‘get’ Peter’s work at all when I first encountered it and didn’t meet him until some time after I’d first written – rather […]
John McDonald
For over thirty years he has been one of Australia’s best-known critics. He writes a weekly art column for the Sydney Morning Herald, a weekly film column for the Australian Financial Review, and contributes to a wide range of local and international publications.
Fred Williams, Werribee Gorge (10)(1977-78)
December 16, 2022By the time he discovered Werribee Gorge, in 1977, Fred Williams had nothing left to prove. He was the country’s leading landscape painter, and one of the most highly respected figures in Australian art. He sat on the Acquisitions Committee of the Australian National Gallery, as it was then known, and had served as a […]
Journals
Jeffrey Smart, Study I for Bus Terminus (1972-73)
A painting by Jeffrey Smart might begin with a sudden epiphany, a flash of inspiration found by the side of the road. Smart would make a quick sketch, and maybe a snapshot, then store the motif on an imaginary shelf, awaiting its day in the studio. At this point, the hard work would begin. An […]
Journals
Jeffrey Smart, Ticket Boxes, Catania (1964)
There’s a peculiar melancholy about an empty space designed to accommodate a crowd. Anybody who has ever visited a resort town out-of-season can testify to the sense of desolation one feels in such places, in which shops, restaurants and hotels are geared to the needs of tourists and pleasure-seekers. The brazen trappings of the leisure […]