Tag: Art Gallery of NSW
What sort of director does the AGNSW need?
Saturday, January 21st, 2012 Blog,As a man walked down the aisle towards his bride-to-be, the best man whispered to him: “You are making the biggest mistake of your life.” Within a few months those words had rung true. Is it too late to stop the Art Gallery of NSW making the same mistake? When Edmund Capon announced last August […]
The Mad Square
Saturday, September 3rd, 2011 Art Column, International Art, Uncategorized,It happens from time to time that I fail to distinguish a cabaret from a crematorium – Joseph Roth From its traumatic birth, at the end of World War One, the Weimar Republic was an unstable experiment. The historian, Eric Hobsbawm charts its rise and fall in an introductory essay for the catalogue of The […]
David Aspden
Friday, August 26th, 2011 Art Column, Australian Art,Like Tom Roberts before him, David Aspden (1935-2005) was born in rural England and arrived in Australia around the age of fifteen. This is a time of life when the biggest part of one’s adult personality is already formed. Roberts, who grew up in the age of Empire, was never quite sure if he was […]
The last days of the Caponian empire
Tuesday, August 9th, 2011 Australian Art, Blog,What a deathly year it has been for artists! In quick succession we have lost Cy Twombly, Lucian Freud, and now John Hoyland. The latter was especially disturbing, as I had just contributed a catalogue essay to his exhibition with Charles Nodrum in Melbourne. Logically there is nothing surprising about someone dying at a ripe […]
Edmund Capon & his legacy
Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011 Art Column, Australian Art,This won’t be the first or last time that someone declares Edmund Capon a hard act to follow. In his thirty-one years as director of the Art Gallery of NSW, Capon has taken a provincial, down-at-heel institution and turned it into a Grade-A showcase for Australian and international art. Yet he leaves at time when […]
The Poetry of Drawing
Friday, July 15th, 2011 Art Column, International Art,Britain’s historic love of the written word has tended to overshadow all other cultural expressions. Shakespeare or Charles Dickens may be universally admired, but try to name a notable British composer for the period from the death of Henry Purcell in 1695, to the rise of Edward Elgar, (b. 1857). The visual arts have been […]
A fine new space for a somewhat muddled collection
Wednesday, May 18th, 2011 Art Column, Australian Art,First impressions of the new galleries devoted to the John Kaldor Family Collection are all good. This vast, clean, well-lighted space is an ideal environment for showing large works of contemporary art.
The 2011 Archibald Prize
Saturday, April 16th, 2011 Art Column, Australian Art,It’s appropriate the Archibald Prize should coincide with Easter, because the Trustees of the Art Gallery of NSW have repented of their sins of last year and asked to be forgiven. Not in so many words, of course. They have simply chosen a better, more credible exhibition and tried to put the horrors of 2010 […]
Photography & Place & An Edwardian Summer
Saturday, April 2nd, 2011 Art Column, Australian Art,In 1975 the International Museum of Photography in Rochester, New York, hosted the exhibition: New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape. It is still talked about as one of the most influential shows of the modern era, with an index of its significance being that second-hand copies of the original catalogue now change hands for […]
Justin O’Brien
Saturday, January 22nd, 2011 Art Column, Australian Art,Thinking of Justin O’Brien my memory flies back to a day in Rome when I was taking “Justin’s tour” with his old friend and fellow expatriate, Jeffrey Smart. As we approached the church of Sant’Agostino, which contains works by Caravaggio and Raphael, we were met with a blast of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue. A funeral […]