Tag: Australian art
Rupert Bunny
Saturday, December 19th, 2009 Art Column,Rupert Bunny’s mother gave him some sage advice at a young and impressionable age: that he must never be a bore. So well did he heed his mother’s words that one might forgive Bunny (1864-1947) almost anything. He was the most personable of artists – charming, well-read, a good conversationalist and a musician of exceptional […]
Russell Drysdale
Tuesday, December 1st, 2009 Australian Art, Book Reviews,Russell Drysdale By Lou Klepac Lou Klepac’s weighty monograph on Russell Drysdale was first issued in 1983, less than two years after the artist’s death in June 1981. I remember reviewing that volume for a student newspaper, regretting that I never had the chance to meet the artist. At that time the book seemed like […]
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 […]
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 […]
Gunybi Ganambarr
Tuesday, September 1st, 2009 Aboriginal Art, Australian Art,In many people’s minds there could be no art-form less open to change than bark painting. It is one of the world’s oldest living forms of artistic expression, probably dating as far back as those rock paintings done 40,000 years ago. Yet bark painting is also one of the abiding paradoxes of contemporary art, for […]