Tag: Art Gallery of NSW
David to Cézanne
Saturday, October 16th, 2010 Art Column, International Art,“It is often said that true collectors have somewhat deranged minds,” writes Louis-Antoine Prat, in a magisterial essay for the catalogue of David to Cézanne: Master Drawings from the Prat Collection. The 101 works on display at the Art Gallery of NSW form an impressive testament to the obsessions of the collector and a source […]
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 […]
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 […]
Victorian Visions
Sunday, June 13th, 2010 Art Column,In the early 1960s Lord Leighton’s masterpiece, Flaming June (1895) was put up for auction but failed to sell for its reserve price of US$140 – roughly US$840 in today’s money. In 1963, the London dealer, Jeremy Maas, managed to dispose of the picture for the equivalent of US$10,000, to a politician from Puerto Rico […]
Wilderness
Saturday, April 17th, 2010 Art Column,Looking at Wilderness, a new survey of contemporary painting, at the Art Gallery of NSW, I had the familiar suspicion that the artists had been chosen before the title. The procedure goes something like this: 1. Select a group of artists who seem to be cool enough to appeal to your peer group. 2. Think […]
Utamaro
Saturday, March 6th, 2010 Art Column,Those dismayed by Senator Conroy’s heavy-handed attempts to censor the internet might spare a thought for Japanese publishers of the late eighteenth century completely at the mercy of an imperial regime that imposed bans and restrictions at will. This is what happened in 1790 when a new Chief Councillor set out to correct the “decadent” […]
Garden & Cosmos
Saturday, January 16th, 2010 Art Column, Uncategorized,We know that something in our world has changed when India is issuing travel advisories to its citizens, warning that Melbourne is a dangerous place. The subcontinent, with its poverty; its heartless caste system; its heritage of religious strife, bloodshed and social unrest, has suddenly turned and pointed the finger at the barbarous practices of […]
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. […]
I Blame Duchamp: My Life’s Adventures in Art
Thursday, October 1st, 2009 Book Reviews,I Blame Duchamp: My Life’s Adventures in Art By Edmund Capon This is not the book many people have been expecting. After more than thirty years as director of the Art Gallery of NSW it might seem that Edmund Capon has earned the right to publish a lively, candid, slightly scandalous memoir. There is a […]
Intensely Dutch
Saturday, July 18th, 2009 Art Column,All curators at major institutions know that the witty, allusive, poetic titles they dream up for exhibitions will probably have to give way to something banal but comprehensible. What a clever title New Worlds From Old was – but nobody seemed to realise it referred to a show of Australian and American paintings from the […]