Luke Morgan

Peter Bishop’s book on bridges is the latest in the Objekt series published by Reaktion. It joins other books on the factory, the aircraft, the motorcycle, the dam and the school. The series focuses on the last hundred years, although Bishop traces the story of the bridge back to the early nineteenth century. Bridge is not, however, a straightforward linear history. Instead, it seeks to examine ‘the bridge (bridging and bridge-ness), along with the cultural practices – from the civic to the military, architectural to engineering, artistic, poetic and philosophical – that have circulated through it over the past two hundred years, from the onset of modernity to the dawn of the new millennium’. The result is an interesting and accessible, though necessarily selective, account of bridges and their cultural significance. ... (read more)

Bernard Smith’s new book, The Formalesque: A Guide to Modern Art and Its History is aimed directly at those school and university students who, he writes, ‘may need an introductory primer to the art history of the 20th century’. Although it offers a lucid and accessible survey of familiar territory, The Formalesque is by no means a straightforward textbook. Smith’s persuasive, even pugnacious style has remained remarkably undiminished by time (the author is now in his nineties and this, as he himself has said, will probably be his last book).

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In the early seventeenth century, the German princely territory of the Palatinate burst on to the centre of the European political stage. In August 1619 the Elector Palatine Frederick V – ruler of one of the most prosperous and culturally vibrant territories of the Holy Roman Empire, and a leader of Protestants throughout Europe – was elected king of Bohemia. This put him in opposition to the newly elected Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand II, an Austrian Hapsburg and leader of the Catholic forces, who had been deposed a year earlier by the same rebellious Bohemian estates which then elected Frederick. These events quickly fuelled what has come to be known as the Thirty Years War (1618–48), one of the most ferocious in Europe’s bloody history.

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Some years ago, Robert Hughes bemoaned the capitulation of art museums and galleries to ‘the whole masterpiece-and-treasure syndrome’. Although made in the 1980s, Hughes’s point may still be valid, especially if the number of recent exhibitions with the word ‘master’ in their titles is anything to go by. A quick check reveals that, in Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria is particularly fond of the word. In Melbourne last year, we had ‘Dutch Masters from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam’ and ‘Albrecht Dürer: Master of the Renaissance’. In 2004 the NGV put on ‘The Impressionists: Masterpieces from the Musée d’Orsay’.

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Arthur Boyd and Saint Francis of Assisi is based on Margaret Pont’s Master’s thesis, which she wrote at the University of Melbourne under the supervision of the medievalist Margaret Manion. During the 1960s, Arthur Boyd made more than twenty pastels depicting various events from the saint’s life. He followed this with a series of lithographs, all of which are listed in Pont’s detailed catalogue. Then, from 1972 to 1974, Boyd had twenty tapestries woven by the Manufactura Tapecarias de Portalegre in Portugal, to cartoons produced from transparencies of the original pastels. These works, which have never been exhibited together in their entirety, continue to gather dust in the Hume storage depot of the National Gallery of Australia. Pont also includes in her catalogue a number of related drawings, unfinished pastel sketches and three oil paintings dealing with the theme of St Francis.

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In a 2004 article for Art AsiaPacific, Simon Winchester reflected on a ‘sermon’ he had attended by Benjamin Buchloh, one of the ‘high priests’ of contemporary art theory and criticism. To his dismay, Winchester found Buchloh’s paper (on the German artist Gerhard Richter) completely baffling. ‘Save for a scattering of prepositions, I understood not a single word of what he said that day. He spoke in a language that I found entirely unfamiliar, about a subject I found impossible to determine.’ Undeterred, Winchester set himself the task of trying to understand Buchloh’s language. After two years of diligent study, however, he remained nonplussed. His conclusion is that Buchloh speaks as Benjamin Disraeli’s ‘sophistical rhetorician’ wrote: as a ‘man inebriated by the exuberance of his own verbosity’.

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