Andrew Montana

Andrew Montana is a senior lecturer and researcher in art history at the Australian National University. A PhD graduate of Melbourne University, he is the author of the Art Movement in Australia: Design, Taste and Society 1875–1900 (2000), and many articles on art and design, most recently a chapter for the interdisciplinary, illustrated anthology, The Ballets Russes in Australia and Beyond (2011). He is currently preparing a cultural biography of the lives and work of Loudon Sainthill and Harry Tatlock Miller.

Andrew Montana reviews 'The Poisoned Chalice: Peter Hall and the Sydney Opera House' by Anne Watson

November 2017, no. 396 • 27 October 2017

Researching Australia’s most iconic building and writing about its beleaguered history from the time Jørn Utzon resigned in 1966 until it opened in 1973 might result in an indigestible plot for many of the building’s enthusiasts. Yet narrating the fraught circumstances behind the completion of the Sydney Opera House by Australian architect Peter Hall and the newly formed consortium Hall, Todd ... (read more)

Andrew Montana reviews 'Vienna: Art and Design: Klimt, Schiele, Hoffmann, Loos' by Christian Witt-Dörring et al.

July–August 2011, no. 333 • 29 June 2011

‘Vienna has little to offer its great while they are alive. But when they have departed, a funeral monument and a place in the museum is arranged for them.’ So wrote the critic Oskar Marus Fontana, with veiled anti-Semitism, in a Munich periodical when the Wiener Wersktätte (WW) closed in 1932. From 1903 this famous Viennese design firm created innovative and finely crafted decorative arts, a ... (read more)