Art Essays
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 […]
Still Life / Frank Hurley's Antarctica
Wednesday, September 1st, 2010 Book Reviews,STILL LIFE: Inside the Antarctic Huts of Scott and Shackleton Photography by Jane Ussher, Essays by Nigel Watson FRANK HURLEY’S ANTARCTICA By Helen Ennis When Picador decided to issue a series called Travel Classics in the mid 1990s, their first volume was Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World. Cherry-Garrard was a zoologist […]
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 […]
Curious Colony
Saturday, August 7th, 2010 Art Column, Australian Art,In 1814, Newcastle was “a forlorn cluster of makeshift buildings whose sole purpose was to provide shelter and basic necessities for the inhabitants.” This assessment, by historian Elizabeth Ellis, is uncontroversial. For the 305 white settlers – including 249 convicts – who made their homes in this isolated outpost, perhaps the only solace was to […]
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 […]
Super Cooper
Thursday, July 15th, 2010 General Art Essays,Despite a ludicrous survey conducted by the Australia Council that tells us 93 per cent of Australians are actively involved in the arts, the politicians are not fooled. They know that art is a minority pursuit, with no votes to be won or lost. One of the reasons for this stasis is the age-old connection […]
Brett Whiteley: A Sensual Line 1957-67
Tuesday, June 1st, 2010 Australian Art, Book Reviews,Brett Whiteley: A Sensual Line 1957-67 By Kathie Sutherland Looking through a recent auction catalogue I was struck by the estimate given for a picture of a blue and white bird by Brett Whiteley. This attractive but undoubtedly minor work is expected to sell for $500,000-$700,000 – a ludicrous sum for a painting that would […]
Tommy Watson & the politics of the indigenous art market
Friday, January 1st, 2010 Aboriginal Art, Australian Art,Yannima Tommy Watson is said to have painted his first picture in 2001, in the community of Irrunytju, twelve kilometers south-west of the tri-border, where South Australia meets Western Australia and the Northern Territory. The white man’s borders don’t mean much to the inhabitants of this remote settlement, also known as Wingellina, but it is […]