Arts

During the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair (CIAF) held this August in far north Queensland, the city was buzzing with the visit of many of the country’s leading contributors to contemporary indigenous arts and culture. I ran into some of the most significant visual, performing and literary indigenous artists and arts professionals, many with hereditary links to the region, such as internationally renowned artists Vernon Ah Kee, Ken Thaiday Sr, and Daniel Boyd, and leading arts advocates, mingling with emerging artistic practitioners.

A thirty-year correspondence between two Australian artists is notable, but when the artists are father and daughter it is doubly interesting. Hans Heysen and Nora Heysen corresponded regularly throughout their lives: Hans writing from The Cedars, the family house near Hahndorf, in the Adelaide Hills; and Nora from Sydney, London, New Guinea, Pacific Islands, or wherever she happened to be. Hans Heysen is celebrated for his landscape paintings – those South Australian views of eucalypts in a landscape, which changed the way generations looked at the Australian countryside – and for his desert landscapes of the Flinders Ranges. Nora, the only one of his nine children to become an artist, is known for her still lifes and portraits. Their work is well represented in Australian public collections. Hans was unquestionably the better artist, and always had the greater reputation. Nora, however, won major prizes (including, somewhat controversially, the 1938 Archibald Prize) and managed to forge an independent career for herself; she by no means lived in her father’s shadow.

One section on Australian photography slowly growing on my bookshelves is devoted to anthropological and ethnographic photography. Philip Jones’s latest book, Images of the Interior: Seven Central Australian Photographers, belongs there because of the amount of anthropological material it contains. But it could also take its place among books devoted to vernacular photography, because none of the seven photographers Jones has selected was professionally trained. All were keen amateur photographers who produced substantial bodies of work during the time they lived and worked in Central Australia. The book deals with an epoch of dramatic change, beginning in the 1890s with some of the earliest European photographs of the Centre, and concluding in the 1940s.

Frank Hinder’s abstractions, light works, and kinetic art have appeared in several recent survey exhibitions and publications, arousing renewed interest in the Sydney modernist (1906–92). It is thus timely for the first Hinder monograph, written by the curator Renee Free, with a chapter by the artist and teacher John Henshaw. No revisionary account, it began decades ago as a collaboration between the authors and the artist following the retrospective on Hinder and his wife, Margel, that Free curated at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1980. After Frank Hinder’s death, Free continued working with his family. This self-published book – accompanied by an online catalogue of works of art, compiled by Adam Free, her son – is a labour of love by both families.

Britain in the later nineteenth century witnessed a radical rethinking of the role of art and design in society, one in which the earlier generation’s enthusiasm for industrial innovation and material betterment was replaced by a growing recognition of the necessity of beauty – in art, in literature, in furnishings, and in fashion – as the foundation stone of modern living. Emerging from bohemian artistic circles and avant-garde design, a new concept of beauty developed that was expressed in a variety of forms. These ranged from pictures whose meaning no longer resided in their narrative or moral content, but in the decorative balance of colour and line (summed up by the phrase ‘Art for Art’s sake’ and epitomised by the exquisite paintings of Albert Moore and James McNeill Whistler); to books of verse by William Morris or Algernon Swinburne, in which the elegance of the metrical form was matched by the stylishness of the type and cover design; to the ideal of the ‘House Beautiful’, where the subtlety and harmony of one’s arrangement of wallpaper, furniture, and objets d’art were now recognised as valid expressions of refinement and individuality.

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.

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 150^th 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. There are twenty-six articles by twenty-seven authors; twenty-two of them current NGV staff members, including the current director and his deputy. It is a great team effort and a beautifully produced volume, with excellent spot-gloss-varnished illustrations throughout, presenting original scholarly research in an enjoyably accessible format.