Art Column
Nora Heysen
Saturday, November 28th, 2009 Art Column,Millions are spent nowadays in futile efforts to combat the aging process, but Nora Heysen (1911-2003) seemed to grow more stylish as she got older. Look at the earnest, stolid young woman in her self-portraits of the 1930s, then at the photographs taken in later life. The younger Nora habitually wears her hair pulled back, […]
Misty Moderns
Saturday, November 21st, 2009 Art Column,Max Meldrum did not paint masterpieces. This alone is enough to distinguish him from the ranks of Australia’s most celebrated modern artists, who will be forever associated with a few iconic works. Think of Nolan for instance, and one thinks inevitably of Ned Kelly. Think of Drysdale and the image that springs to mind is […]
Sculpture by the Sea & The Miniature Show
Saturday, November 14th, 2009 Art Column,Sculpture by the Sea is thirteen years old and – judging by its current incarnation – still in the throes of puberty. Aside from long-running institutions such as the Archibald, or the Mosman Art Prize, most annual competitions and group exhibitions never last for a decade. The most dramatic example must be the one-and-only Melbourne […]
Gunybi Ganambarr
Saturday, November 7th, 2009 Art Column,As colonial values spread across the continent in the nineteenth century it was widely believed that the first Australians were doomed to disappear. This was a fixed idea even for pioneering anthropologists such as Baldwin Spencer, who spent the year 1901-02 touring the outback, visiting the inhabitants of those remote regions. For Spencer and his […]
40 Years: Kaldor Public Art Projects
Saturday, October 31st, 2009 Art Column,Ever since Christo and Jeanne-Claude put Little Bay under wraps in October 1969, John Kaldor has enjoyed a reputation as one of Australia’s most innovative art patrons. The current exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW is both a survey and a celebration of the projects that Kaldor has initiated over the past four decades. […]
McCubbin: Last Impressions & Aida Tomescu
Saturday, October 24th, 2009 Art Column,There can be few more disconcerting feelings than being the only one at a party who isn’t having a good time, but this is roughly how I felt as I wandered through the exhibition, McCubbin: Last Impressions 1907-17, at the National Gallery of Australia. Having never thought much of this period of McCubbin’s work I […]
Sidney Nolan: The Gallipoli Series
Saturday, October 17th, 2009 Art Column,When Alan Seymour wrote his famous play, The One Day of the Year, in 1960, the Anzac legend was at a low ebb. The war in Vietnam was beginning to ignite, and Australia would soon be sending troops. The burgeoning youth culture of the era was repulsed by the spectacle of Anzac Day, with its […]
Museum of Contemporary Art: Making it New
Saturday, October 10th, 2009 Art Column,“Have you noticed that maps are like newspapers, shirts and obsessions? Once you’ve unfolded them there’s no way you can get them folded up again.” Fred Vargas ‘Maps and obsessions’ could serve as a subtitle for the range of work currently on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art. On the top floor one finds Louisa […]
Ben Quilty & Idris Murphy
Saturday, October 3rd, 2009 Art Column,B.S.Johnson, a sadly neglected British novelist, has a short story collection entitled: Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing your Memoirs? This would have been an appropriate title for the exhibition that goes under the much groovier label: Ben Quilty Live! With an exhibiting career of only seven or eight years it is extraordinary that […]
Salvador Dalí
Saturday, September 26th, 2009 Art Column,There was a sublime moment in Matthew Collings’s successful TV series, This is Modern Art, when he showed footage of Salvador Dalí camping it up and singing the praises of money. “I love tremendously money and gold!” Dalî expostulates. And again, switching to the third person: “Dalí sleep best after one day of work receive […]