Art Essays
Geoff Dyer, Stephen Bird, Etsuko Fukaya, Joanna Braithwaite
Saturday, February 11th, 2012 Art Column, Art Essays, Australian Art,When Thoreau wrote: “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”, he probably wasn’t thinking about art dealers. Yet the phrase springs to mind when one considers the sluggishness of the commercial art scene over the past couple of years. While the art market weathered the GFC better than was generally expected, an extended […]
Impressions: Painting Light & Life
Saturday, February 4th, 2012 Art Column, Art Essays, Australian Art,A survey of portraiture by Australian artists of the late nineteenth century would seem to be long overdue. Despite the institutional obsession with all things contemporary, the works of the so-called Australian Impressionists – Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton, Fred McCubbin and Charles Conder – remain the most popular drawcards in our public collections. The problem […]
Wim Delvoye
Saturday, January 28th, 2012 Art Column, Art Essays, International Art,Adolf Loos, the outspoken Austrian designer and critic, argued: “the modern person who tattoos himself is either a criminal or a degenerate.” Loos was writing in 1929, and one can only wonder what he would make of the present day vogue for tattoos that cover an arm and half a torso. He would probably see […]
Elisabeth Cummings
Saturday, January 21st, 2012 Art Column, Australian Art,A recent press release from the National Gallery of Australia announces an exhibition of 200 years of Australian landscape to be held at the Royal Academy, London, in September 2013. This is a long-overdue event, and it is to be hoped the NGA takes the opportunity to make the show something more than a historical […]
Brian Wallace
Saturday, January 14th, 2012 Art Column, Australian Art, Chinese Art,Over the past two decades Chinese art has made inroads into the Australian museum and gallery world, prompting Brian Wallace of Bejing’s Red Gate gallery, to put together a travelling exhibition for his native land. To welcome in the year of the Dragon, the City of Sydney will host Two Generations – 20 years of […]
Renaissance in Canberra
Saturday, January 7th, 2012 Art Column, Art Essays, International Art,There will be some in Canberra who find it ironic that Ron Radford is hosting a show devoted to the Renaissance at the National Gallery of Australia, when his first significant act as director in 2006 was to send the museum’s small collection of Old Masters on permanent loan to Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide. As […]
Matisse: Drawing Life
Saturday, December 17th, 2011 Art Column, Art Essays, General Art Essays, International Art,Henri Matisse was almost certainly the finest colourist in modern art but the bulk of his work contained no colour at all. Although the mention of his name conjures up thoughts of The Red Studio, The Joy of Life, or perhaps the kaleidoscopic Woman with a Hat, over the course of a long career Matisse […]
Picasso – In Living Colour
Thursday, December 15th, 2011 Art Column, Art Essays, General Art Essays, International Art,Pablo Picasso never travelled to Australia. He never even visited the United States, where his reputation as the leading artist of the twentieth century was set in stone. It’s a different story for those works Picasso loved best, which have recently been seen in Madrid, Helsinki, Moscow and St. Petersburg; before crossing the Atlantic, to […]
Pablo Picasso & the Dobell Prize for Drawing 2011
Saturday, December 10th, 2011 Art Column, Art Essays, Australian Art, General Art Essays, International Art,According to Hendrik Kolenberg, the Art Gallery of NSW’s Senior Curator of Australian Prints, Drawings and Watercolours, the Dobell Prize for Drawing is the most serious art award in Australia. This doesn’t mean the show is all grey and humourless, it is essentially a comment on the medium. Drawing is the armature of an artist’s […]
Picasso- Five Highlights
Thursday, December 8th, 2011 Art Column, Art Essays, International Art,It is difficult to choose only five works from an exhibition which covers all the major periods in Picasso’s career, from the earliest days, through his Blue and Rose periods, his experiments with Cubism, the neo-classical pictures of the post-war years, his flirtation with Surrealism, and the variations of his later life. Neither should we […]