International Art
Enrique Martínez Celaya / Michael Johnson
Saturday, May 7th, 2011 Art Column, International Art,Enrique Martínez Celaya is an overachiever by any standard. An American artist of Cuban extraction, he has been feted and praised as only the United States can fete and praise.
Singapore Biennale
Saturday, March 19th, 2011 Art Column, International Art,In his grotesque installation, My We (2011), Filipino artist, Louie Cordero looks at a spate of violent murders perpetrated on people who sing Frank Sinatra’s My Way in Manilla’s karaoke bars. This is certainly the best story of the 2011 Singapore Biennale, and one with a sly message for the hosts. In a country recognised […]
Gustave Moreau
Saturday, January 15th, 2011 Art Column, International Art,In Hollywood’s version of the past the critics were always hostile and blinkered, while the misunderstood genius struggled for a recognition that it is now given freely. We’d like to believe that a great artist is always ahead of his or her time, making work for future generations, but this romantic idea rarely survives close […]
21st Century
Saturday, January 8th, 2011 Art Column, Australian Art, International Art,In 1942 Peggy Guggenheim opened her Art of this Century gallery in New York, designed by the Austrian architect, Frederick Kiesler. The gallery’s Abstract Room featured paintings suspended in mid-air. A Surrealist Room had concave walls, from which pictures were cantilevered on wooden joints made from sawn-off baseball bats. In a Kinetic Room the viewer […]
Peggy Guggenheim
Saturday, January 1st, 2011 Art Column, Australian Art, International Art,Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) was one of the twentieth century’s most celebrated art collectors but she belonged to a relatively “poor” branch of an illustrious family. Her grandfather, Simon, had arrived in the United States in 1847 as a penniless Jewish migrant from Switzerland. So astutely did those early Guggenheims manage their affairs that by World […]
Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer's Life
Saturday, November 27th, 2010 Art Column, International Art,Annie Leibovitz’s career reads like one long cautionary tale on the fickleness of fame – a condition the poet, Rilke, famously described as “the sum of all misunderstandings”. As the world’s leading photographer of celebrities she has become a celebrity in her own right. This is the main reason her exhibition at the Museum of […]
Annie Leibovitz: a preview
Saturday, November 20th, 2010 Art Column, International Art,Every aspiring amateur should find inspiration in the Annie Leibovitz exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, for it suggests that one can be the most famous, most highly paid photographer in the world, and rarely produce anything that might be called a masterpiece. Leibovitz is known for her portraits of celebrities, and by the ineluctable […]
Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi 2010
Saturday, November 6th, 2010 Art Column, Australian Art, International Art, Uncategorized,In one of her detective stories Dorothy Sayers wisely observes: “For some reason, the word ‘artistic’ produces the most alarming reactions in those who know anything about art.” As such, it would be inadequate and belittling to describe Sculpture by the Sea as one of Sydney’s most eagerly awaited ‘artistic’ events. This annual sculpture-fest is an […]
Leon Kossoff
Sunday, October 31st, 2010 Art Essays, International Art,In a recent interview Lucian Freud expresses his exasperation that no-one seems to have noticed that Leonardo da Vinci was a really bad painter. This opinion, at first so vehement and startling, begins to make sense when one looks at Freud’s own drawings and working methods. Leonardo, the epitome of the Renaissance’s uomo universale, was […]
Leon Kossoff, Ben Quilty and James Powditch
Saturday, October 30th, 2010 Art Column, Australian Art, International Art,Looking at recent reports on the Paris art fair, FIAC, it was morbidly interesting to learn about the most eye-catching works and the prices they fetched. For instance, Barry X Ball’s Sleeping Hermaphrodite – a black marble quotation of a famous Roman sculpture, went for US$ 623,000. A bronze sculpture by Paul McCarthy, with the […]