Australian Art

This impressive volume surpasses most assumptions about the scope, depth and eloquence of an exhibition catalogue. Curator and editor Terence Lane has gathered together thirteen of Australia’s leading art historians, historians and curators, all recognised experts in their fields.

Julie Blyfield is the most recent subject in a series of monographs on South Australian living artists. They are commissioned by the SALA Inc. Board and produced in association with the annual South Australian Living Artists Festival, now in its tenth year. Handsomely produced and elegantly designed, these abundantly illustrated volumes do much to promote the art and artists of South Australia. Not all the artists in the series, which began with Annette Bezor: A Passionate Gaze (2000), are well known in other states. Notable absentees are Fiona Hall and Hossein Valamanesh, both of whom have received major state and national institutional recognition, through solo exhibitions and publications.

Among those in the field, Bob Noye was known for his exhaustive collection of, and research into, the history of nineteenth-century South Australian photography. The website he established was the most detailed information available on the topic, yet he was extremely secretive about his holdings. When Noye died suddenly in 2002, several institutions vied for his collection, with the Art Gallery of South Australia the fortunate recipient of the Noye family’s goodwill. With generous funding assistance, AGSA acquired the collection, which comprised nearly five thousand photographs and negatives, plus his research archive. This publication, and the exhibition it accompanies ­– the first to focus on the first hundred years of South Australian photography – is dedicated to Noye and is founded upon his passion.

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 no denying the ‘dynastic monument’ that is the fourth edition of the The New McCulloch’s Encyclopedia of Australian Art. Three generations of McCullochs have contributed to this volume, which covers everything from Anita Aarons to Reinis Zusters. With the added title ‘New McCulloch’s’ giving it a personal touch, this edition has more than 8000 listings and includes an extra 1500 entries on artists, awards, directors, critics, exhibitions and galleries; and essays on topics such as abstraction, new media, surrealism and women artists. It is well promoted and marketed, with special editions for the AGNSW and the NGV. It is beautifully produced and an impressive achievement. But is it really Australia’s art ‘bible’?

Handsomely illustrated, beautifully produced and authoritatively written, Gavin Fry’s monograph on Albert Tucker aims to establish him as an important artist within the Australian twentieth-century canon. Fry begins his introduction with the statement that Tucker ‘was a man who inspired strong feelings and his work likewise required the viewer to make a stand. Many found his work difficult, some even repellent, but the artist and his art demanded attention. Equally gifted as a painter, and possibly more so as a draughtsman than his contemporaries Nolan, Boyd and Perceval, Tucker belongs with this élite who revolutionised Australian painting in Melbourne in the 1940s.’ But is this really so? Was Tucker really so much better than his contemporaries, or even as good as them?

A striking work by Adrian Feint and Hera Roberts appears on the cover of Modernism & Australia: Documents on Art, Design and Architecture 1917–1967. It shows an aeroplane, a locomotive and an ocean liner travelling in opposite directions through a vivid landscape of radiating lines and concentric circles. On the circular forms, which are reminiscent of abstract paintings by the French artist Robert Delaunay, we read the legend ‘Paris, Rome, New York, Cairo’; on the diagonal lines, ‘Hobart, Melbourne, Brisbane’. This 1928 work is typically modernist for its celebration of the exciting possibilities of modern technology, and in its use of bold colour areas and geometric shapes. It is also a declaration of a perceived, or wished-for, globalisation of culture, which Feint and Roberts, by adopting styles from international modernism, have realised in the work’s very design.

The publication of a third major book on Howard Arkley begs the question: does he deserve such attention while other Australian artists of his generation and significance remain invisible on bookshop and library shelves? Has Arkley’s untimely and sensationalised death in 1999 been the main driver behind his broad appeal, or is he an artist who warrants further critical investigation? John Gregory’s impressive book, Carnival in Suburbia: The Art of Howard Arkley, proves unquestionably that the latter is the case, and tackles some of the myths that have been perpetuated, especially since the artist’s death.

Jan Senbergs’ art is not easy to like. Sombre, brutal, austere in colour, it nevertheless represents one of the most sustained meditations on the industrial landscape in Australian art. Patrick McCaughey, well-known gallery director, academic and critic, has written about the artist and his work in a way that deliberately blurs biography, autobiography and visual critique. The result is an engaging and unusually meticulous account of the evolution of an artistic career, documenting the emergence of ‘Senbergs country’ as a force in the Australian aesthetic imagination.