National Gallery of Australia

Symbolist art has received an unusual amount of attention recently. First there was Denise Mimmocchi’s Australian Symbolism: The Art of Dreams at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (which Jane Clark reviewed in the September 2012 issue of ABR). Now Sydney Long: The Spirit of the Land celebrates Australia’s foremost exponent of the movement. Sydney Long (1871–1955) was born in Goulburn, so the National Gallery in Canberra can claim him as a local talent. More importantly, they have staff with relevant expertise to mount this major retrospective. Anne Gray, the exhibition’s curator, is an authority on Edwardian Australian art. Ron Radford, the NGA director, was one of the first to look seriously at Art Nouveau in Australia; he curated a landmark exhibition on the subject as far back as 1981.

The writers of two books about Fred Williams published in the 1980s, Patrick McCaughey and James Mollison, were friends of the artist, and involved with him in their roles as art critic/historian and gallery director. Their respect for Williams led them to write against the grain of their usual modes. Mollison, professionally always on the knife-edge of making judgement, held back, exploring with great precision within the factual boundaries of materials and processes, numbers, dates, and sequences. McCaughey, too, looked between art and artist rather than to mainstream contemporary art. In a new chapter written for the 2008 edition of his book, McCaughey endorsed the insights of younger writers, thereby providing a springboard for Deborah Hart.

In May 1990, Betty Churcher, then director of the National Gallery of Australia, Bill Wright, deputy director of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, and I stood outside what had once been the seat of Count Ostermann. This impressive building sits right off the Garden Ring, which surrounds inner Moscow. It is now the All-Russian Decorative, Applied and Folk Art Museum. All three of us, on our first trip to Moscow, were investigating the possibility of putting together a major exhibition of Russian and Soviet art.

What is it about the Ballets Russes that resonates with so many people? Is it the magic of a redeemed art ordained in a marriage of artists, dancers, and composers overseen by a master celebrant – Sergei Diaghilev? Is it remembrance of a creative fire that burst onto the stage in 1909 and assured a strong future for ballet around the world? The answer is ‘yes’ to both, but I think that what attracts us most is nostalgia for a particular moment in time; the desire to have witnessed those famous performances in the early decades of the last century.

Imagine living in a world also inhabited by the spirits of the ancestors, whose goodwill is essential to the ongoing fertility and prosperity of the community. Life, Death and Magic: 2000 Years of Southeast Asian Ancestral Art reveals this view of the cosmos, and explores the relationship between art and the world of the ancestors in South-East Asia. It is published in association with the ground-breaking exhibition of the same name curated by Robyn Maxwell, Senior Curator of Asian Art at the National Gallery of Australia, where it was recently on display.

In 1961 the Tasmanian Historical Research Association published Clifford Craig’s Engravers of Van Diemen’s Land, which proved to be the first of several books in which Craig attempted to document every nineteenth-century print with a Tasmanian subject produced in Tasmania, mainland Australia and overseas. Craig, in the next two decades, produced follow-up volumes expanding the area covered and including recently discovered prints. His work remains unique in Australia. Sadly no other collector, scholar, curator or librarian has taken up the challenge and attempted to document the printed images of another state.

There is something immensely satisfying about a work so ambitious and comprehensive as Deborah Edwards’s Margaret Preston, published by the Art Gallery of New South Wales to accompany its current retrospective on this pre-eminent Australian modernist. From the outset, we are introduced to Preston’s perennial capacity to stimulate not only debate but also downright factionalism. The introductory chapter takes the form of multiple quotes, leaving no doubt that Preston continues to ignite debate over issues surrounding an authentic Australian vision.

Margaret, Margarethe, Grete, Gretl, Gretele are all the same person: the biographer Helen Ennis prefaces her book and arouses our curiosity with the note that she has used the names depending on the context. Margaret Michaelis was born Margarethe Gross in 1902, in Dzieditz (Austria, later Poland); when she died in 1985, in Melbourne, she was known as Margaret Sachs. She studied photography at the Institute of Graphic Arts and Research in Vienna. In the late 1920s she worked in studios in Prague, and then Berlin. There she met and married Rudolf Michaelis, an archaeological restorer and an anarchist. After the Nazi takeover, the couple fled to Spain in 1933; they separated soon after their arrival. In Barcelona, and after 1939 in Sydney, Michaelis managed her own photographic studios. In 1960 she married Albert Sachs, a Viennese-born émigré and moved to Melbourne.