Art Column
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: […]
Slow Burn, Charles Blackman
Saturday, September 11th, 2010 Art Column, Australian Art,Hopefully it won’t be viewed as a sign of ingrained male chauvinism that I’ve taken so long to talk about Slow Burn: A century of Australian women artists from a private collection, at the S.H.Ervin Gallery. The exhibition, which is proving extremely popular, is due to run for another week. There has been a […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Alfred Stieglitz
Saturday, July 24th, 2010 Art Column,In his poem, On the Manner of Addressing Clouds, Wallace Stevens describes those billowing masses as “gloomy grammarians in golden gowns”. Passing through the skies, clouds elicit high-minded tributes from poets and artists, yet drift on indifferently. Clouds are ephemeral, yet monumental. The work of art aspires to permanence and monumentality, yet it too is […]
European Masters
Saturday, July 10th, 2010 Art Column,It must be easier to promote an international blockbuster when magical words such as “Paris” or “New York” appear in the title. Matters become more complicated when the city of origin is Frankfurt, known as a centre of commerce rather than culture, even though it has at least three major art museums. One of the […]
Paths to Abstraction
Saturday, July 3rd, 2010 Art Column,Cézanne’s lesson, according to Picasso, was not to be found in his beautifully painted apples, but in his anxiety. This is echoed in the words of the artist, Paul Signac, who reported that Matisse was “anxious, madly anxious”, in the year of 1905, when the Fauves made their cataclysmic debut at the Salon d’Automne. It […]