Gallery notes

Collecting the British

May 2005, no. 271

What should an Australian museum collect? How should permanent collections affect exhibition policy? Who should decide what to buy? These are three provocative questions raised by the current survey of English art over several centuries at the Art Gallery of South Australia, an exhibition drawn exclusively from its permanent collection.

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Gallery Notes by Patrick McCaughey

by Patrick McCaughey •

February 2005, no. 268

We had agreed to meet at the Frick Collection. My train from New Haven was late, but there they were – Chris Wallace-Crabbe and Father Peter Steele SJ – waiting at the trim and modest entrance of one of New York’s noblest institutions. I had looked forward to a day of gallery-hopping with two poets and old friends, both with an appetite and an aptitude for the visual arts. What would their take be like on a pleasantly random group of shows?

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John Glover and the Colonial Picturesque edited by David Hansen

by Mary Eagle •

March 2004, no. 259

Mary Eagle reviews 'John Glover and the Colonial Picturesque' curated by David Hansen

John McPhee put John Glover in the picture, identifying him as the foreground figure with sketchbook sharing our view of the Tamar River at Launceston. David Hansen saw that Glover marked his Hobart Town house in special colour at the centre of a distant panorama of the town, the viewpoint for which is across the Derwent in a sportive scene of indigenous Tasmanians at Kangaroo Point. For that work, the artist’s point of view (and ours) doubles with that of the Tasmanians, and the artist, looking at the neat settlement under frowning Mt Wellington, sees himself in it. I like the verbal image, which joins the painter to the scholar in viewing a work and imagines the artist as one who searches for meaning. It may not correspond with the deep perspective of art history, however, and the authors of John Glover and the Colonial Picturesque have preferred to look back with hindsight. An intriguing aspect of this gentle, though magisterial, text is what the writers saw.

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Gallery Notes

by Chris Wallace-Crabbe •

August 2003, no. 253

Art is a strange posing of discoveries, a display of what was no more possible. For it is the task of the creative artist to come up with ideas which are ours, but which we haven’t thought yet. In some cases, it is also the artist’s role to slice Australia open and show it bizarrely different, quite new in its antiquity.

Half a century ago, Sidney Nolan did just this with his desert paintings and those of drought animal carcasses. I recall seeing some of these at the Peter Bray Gallery in 1953 and being bewildered by their aridity: a cruel dryness which made the familiar Ned Kelly paintings seem quite pastoral. Nor could I get a grip on his Durack Range, which the NGV had bought three years earlier. Its lack of human signs affronted my responses.

The furthest our littoral imaginations had gone toward what used to be called the Dead Heart was then to be found in Russell Drysdale’s inland New South Wales, Hans Heysen’s Flinders Ranges, and Albert Namatjira’s delicately picturesque MacDonnells. Nolan’s own vision was vastly different: different and vast. It offered new meanings and posed big new questions.

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Gallery Notes

by Patrick McCaughey •

September 2001, no. 234

Ten days in Australia in July brought a remarkable round of studio visits plus an exhibition of new Australian painting, Phenomena, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Painting has had a hard time of it lately. Michael Wardell, curator of Phenomena, goes further: ‘throughout the twentieth century, painting has been under threat,’ claims the slightly melodramatic opening sentence of his otherwise modest and useful catalogue. The claim became even more of a reach at the AGNSW where, on the floor below Phenomena, you could see the pictures from the Orangerie with superb Cézannes, Picassos, Soutines and Rousseaus. None of them looked particularly threatened to me.

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