International Art
David to Cézanne
Saturday, October 16th, 2010 Art Column, International Art,“It is often said that true collectors have somewhat deranged minds,” writes Louis-Antoine Prat, in a magisterial essay for the catalogue of David to Cézanne: Master Drawings from the Prat Collection. The 101 works on display at the Art Gallery of NSW form an impressive testament to the obsessions of the collector and a source […]
Chuck Close
Saturday, September 25th, 2010 Art Column, International Art,Chuck Close is celebrated as an artist who has made creative use of his disabilities, although one might say he has simply refused to be beaten by them. Struck down by a collapsed spinal artery in December 1988, he has been in a wheelchair ever since, painting with brushes strapped to his wrist. Close’s stroke […]
Valentino, Retrospective: Past/Present/Future
Saturday, September 18th, 2010 Art Column, International Art,Philosophers should make a comprehensive study of Valentino Garavani, because if he isn’t a genuinely happy man this proves human happiness is an unobtainable ideal. The great couturier retired in 2008 at the peak of his fame, adored by the world’s most glamorous and influential people. His life-style, as revealed in Matt Tyrnauer’s documentary, Valentino: […]
Titanic
Saturday, September 4th, 2010 Art Column, International Art,This week the column remains in Melbourne, and remains, more-or-less, at the movies. After Tim Burton at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, the other big attraction in the southern capital is Titanic: The Artefact Exhibition at the Melbourne Museum. It is a subject that has been etched on the popular imagination by its […]
Man With a Blue Scarf
Wednesday, September 1st, 2010 Book Reviews, International Art,Man With a Blue Scarf On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud By Martin Gayford In 1980 James Lord published a slender book called A Giacometti Portrait. It detailed his experience of sitting for a portrait by Alberto Giacometti, whose biography he would write five years later. The book struck a chord with readers […]
Tim Burton
Saturday, August 28th, 2010 Art Column, Film Reviews, International Art,In his bravura performance as the Joker in Batman (1989), Jack Nicholson delivers a line that says a lot about director, Tim Burton. “We mustn’t compare ourselves to regular people,” he tells Kim Basinger. “We’re artists.” One should never underestimate middle-class mediocrity as a spur to greater achievement. Burton’s entire career as graphic artist, animator, […]
Art Setouchi 2010
Saturday, August 21st, 2010 Art Column, Art Essays, International Art,In his book, The Inland Sea, Donald Richie extolls a unique part of Japan in elegiac tones. From one point of view, Richie’s account is a classic of travel writing that is not only a celebration of a disappearing world but a journey of self-discovery. From another, it is a classic of self-indulgence, alleviated by […]
Shen Jiawei: the Art of Politics
Sunday, August 1st, 2010 Art Essays, Australian Art, Chinese Art, International Art,Shen Jiawei became an artist during the Cultural Revolution, making his first major works in the service of the state, embodied in the figure of the Great Helmsman, Mao Zedong. For roughly a decade, from 1966 onwards, every aspect of daily life in China was politicised in a way that seems to defy logic. It […]
William Kentridge; Phillip King; Gareth Sansom
Saturday, July 31st, 2010 Art Column, International Art,Dimitri Shostakovich was 22 years old and freshly out of the Leningrad Conservatory, when he wrote the opera, The Nose. The piece is based on Gogol’s famous short story of 1836, in which a minor civil servant wakes to find his nose missing from his face. The protagonist pursues the fugitive organ through the streets of […]
Vincent Van Gogh: The Letters
Sunday, November 1st, 2009 Book Reviews, International Art,Vincent Van Gogh – The Letters. The Complete Illustrated and Annotated Edition. Leo Jansen, Hans Luitjen & Nienke Bakker eds. “For the present I feel calmer than last year, and the turmoil in my head has really abated so much.” These words are taken from the last letter Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his mother […]