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Jane Clark
Jane Clark was Curator of Major Special Exhibitions and of Australian Art at the National Gallery of Victoria; then Deputy Chairman of Sotheby’s in Australia; and is now Senior Research Curator at MONA, the Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, Australia’s largest private museum.
Far too few Australian artists have been the subject of comprehensive biographies. Gary Werskey mentions Humphrey McQueen’s 784-page Tom Roberts (1996) as an inspiration. Of course, there are art monographs and retrospective exhibition catalogues, but those are not life stories. With seventy-six colour plates and another fifty-one images in the text, Werskey’s thoroughly researched Picturing a ... (read more)
That Australia’s first national school of painters were ‘city bushmen’ is well documented. Tom Roberts began his career as a photographer in Collingwood, Frederick McCubbin in the family’s West Melbourne bakery and Arthur Streeton as an apprentice lithographer. Stories about their plein air painting excursions to Box Hill, Mentone, and Eaglemont are often told. The useful art historical la ... (read more)
Although this not-to-be-missed offering from the National Gallery of Victoria has been billed as a ‘two-part exhibition’, it is a much more complex entity than that. In the words of the three lead curators – Cathy Leahy, Judith Ryan, and Susan van Wyck – it ‘explores different perspectives on Australia’s shared history in two complementary exhibitions’. I recommend you stay long enou ... (read more)
Opportunities to see nineteenth-century American art are rare in Australia. This beautiful small exhibition offers fascinating parallels between Australian and American landscape painting of the period, both popularly admired as expressions of a national psyche, revealing comparable interests in territorial expansion, exploration, settlement, displacement of prior inhabitants, transplantation of E ... (read more)
This year is proving a good one for Symbolism. An international conference entitled ‘Redefining European Symbolism’ was held at the Musée d’Orsay in April, followed shortly afterwards by four days on ‘The Symbolist Movement: Its Origins and Consequences’ at the University of Illinois, in Springfield. A third conference is planned for October at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh ... (read more)
Reading this book is like taking a stroll through the exhibition with which it was published to coincide, in the wonderful company of its thirty-one expert, articulate, and enthusiastic authors. Visions Past and Present: Celebrating 40 Years – as both book and exhibition – celebrates the University of Melbourne’s art museum: launched as the University Art Gallery in 1972 and known since 1998 ... (read more)
For those who saw the recent Rupert Bunny retrospective in Sydney, Melbourne, or Adelaide, where there were accompanying lecture programs, an informative audio guide, a lively children’s guide, and frilly knickers and parasols afterwards in the gallery shop, Rupert Bunny: Artist in Paris is a fine record of the exhibition. If you missed the show, this book provides a very good ‘virtual tour’ ... (read more)
This fabulous-looking fiftieth issue of the National Gallery of Victoria’s more or less annual art journal, with its traffic-stopping Rosalie Gascoigne cover, is a birthday package. This year marks the Gallery’s 150th anniversary, and the essays in this Art Journal of the National Gallery of Victoria together reveal much about what the institution has been doing since its foundation in 1861. T ... (read more)