Betty Churcher

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.

The Art of War is published ‘to accompany the television series’ produced by Film Australia and to be broadcast on SBS. The television spin-off is an attractive genre for an art book. Writers have to keep to the point. There is a conventional picture-book formula, comprising a potted artist’s biography, a bit of art-historical placement and sometimes too little about what is specific to the work. Lola Wilkins’s Artists in Action: From the Collection of the Australian War Memorial (2003) is a good example. But a television producer knows that the words must concentrate upon the works we are staring at: forget the biography and the art history; just look at the art. Betty Churcher, like Sister Wendy, is very good at looking at works of art. For vivid specificity, take Colin Colahan’s striking Ballet of wind and rain (1945), men suddenly glimpsed leaning into the midwinter elements on a recently liberated airfield. Churcher suggests that it was so titled ‘perhaps because he has danced his brush across the canvas to simulate wild gusts but more likely because the four RAAF airmen duck their heads in unison like the cygnets in the dance from Swan Lake’.