Sheridan Palmer

Sheridan Palmer is an art historian, curator and an Honorary Research Fellow at CoVA and the University of Melbourne. She edited the third edition of Bernard Smith’s European Vision and the South Pacific, released in 2022 by Miegunyah Press.

Sheridan Palmer reviews 'Growing up Modern: Canberra’s Round House and Alex Jelinek' by Roger Benjamin

June 2023, no. 454 • 24 May 2023

Childhood memories often merge real life with imaginary nostalgia, but in Growing up Modern, Roger Benjamin’s memoir of his family’s 1956 modernist Round House, in the then rural Canberra suburb of Deakin, we find adolescent memories collaged with a mix of archival, architectural, social, and personal histories. It is set mainly during Australia’s postwar years of the 1950s when reconstructi ... (read more)

Sheridan Palmer reviews 'Australian Galleries: The Purves family business: The first four decades 1956–1999' by Caroline Field

April 2020, no. 420 • 20 March 2020

Australian Galleries opened in Melbourne in June 1956. One year later, Andy Warhol established Andy Warhol Enterprises in New York. Warhol’s art of making money became an art form in itself, with the artist elaborating that ‘good business is the best art’. Gallerists Anne and Tam Purves would have agreed. This husband-and-wife team took selling art seriously and introduced a professionalism ... (read more)

Sheridan Palmer reviews 'The Boy from Brunswick: Leonard French, A biography' by Reg MacDonald

March 2019, no. 409 • 22 February 2019

Old friendships and close collaborations between author and subject can be either a blessing or a curse in biography – a tightrope between discretionary tact and open fire. Both call for intimate but balanced subjectivity, especially where virile egos are concerned. The Boy from Brunswick, a massive tome with sixty chapters and 540 pages, offers a bit of everything. Jan Senbergs, who knew and a ... (read more)

Sheridan Palmer reviews 'A Most Generous Scholar: Joan Kerr: Art and Architectural Historian' by Susan Steggall

July–August 2013, no. 353 • 26 June 2013

It’s absurd to pretend that we are or ever have been no more than exiled Europeans … forever condemned to inhabit some irrelevant, Antipodean limbo.’ This statement encapsulates Joan Kerr’s determination to rewrite established codes of Australian art history and to expand the lexicon of its cultural heritage. If an egalitarian consensus of colonial cultural creativity were to be achieved, ... (read more)

Sheridan Palmer reviews 'Artists in Conversation' by Janet Hawley

March 2013, no. 349 • 07 March 2013

A conversation is an interactive exchange usually of a spontaneous nature. Janet Hawley’s essays are a mix of journalistic intention, conversational ruminations, observations, enquiries, and a gentle goading of her subjects about the ‘twin crucibles’ of creativity – the personality of the artist and what occurs in his or her sanctum, the studio. Assuming the role of confessional nursemaid ... (read more)

Sheridan Palmer reviews 'Face: Australian Portraits 1880–1960' by Anne Gray and 'The Naked Face: Self-portraits' by Vivien Gaston

February 2011, no. 328 • 04 May 2011

Revealing the self Sheridan Palmer Face: Australian Portraits 1880–1960 by Anne Gray National Gallery of Australia, $39.95 pb, 160 pp, 9780642334152 The Naked Face: Self-portraits by Vivien Gaston National Gallery of Victoria, $49.95 pb, 111 pp, 9780724103348 Roy Porter wrote that ‘the portrait (above all the self-portrait), the diary and the biography (esp ... (read more)