Art Gallery of South Australia

Studies of ‘regional modernisms’ have frequently framed the non-metropolitan in strictly Northern Hemisphere terms, construing London or New York as centres of innovation, and cities and towns further afield – but still in the same country or region as those art-world capitals – as the belated adopters of phenomena that are often perceived as the province of metropolitan actors and audiences. Margot Osborne’s monumental volume The Adelaide Art Scene: Becoming contemporary 1939-2000 tells a far more complex story of modernism’s reach, impact, and legacies in twentieth-century art practice. In forensic detail, Osborne and her contributors explore the ways in which modernism’s significance was expressed in and affected a city that found itself both connected to and rival with Sydney and Melbourne, as well as with the established international centres. Whether through the training or travel of artists who called South Australia home at one point or another in their lives, Adelaide has been an important node in those movements for longer than many might imagine.

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.

Encompassing installation, sculpture, drawing, photography, and the moving image, Patricia Piccinini’s fifteen-year survey exhibition of sixty-five works at the Art Gallery of South Australia coincides with the period of her exploration of issues surrounding genetic modification/manipulation in the biotech era. Piccinini’s investigations are, as the exhibition’s title suggests, cautionary tales.

One of the notable things about living in a small country is that you can enjoy many first-rate second-rate things. Given the post-Renaissance domination of the visual arts by painting, prints have for a long time been driven into a supplementary role by artists, historians, and the market, and, as a result, have tended to be treated as minor works, curios, or historical illustrations. Because, moreover, Australia was a far-flung colony of the British Empire for much of its modern history, treated by its masters as ancillary to ‘the main game’, this situation mitigated against the acquisition of many exceptional paintings. Australians bought prints instead. State galleries acquired staggering print collections, from Dürer through to Rembrandt, Piranesi, Blake and Goya to the present. As its subtitle suggests, A Beautiful Line: Italian Prints from Mantegna to Piranesi showcases one important local collection, in Adelaide. Running the gamut from Renaissance to Rococo, the exhibition presents 135 prints ranging from the iconic to the obscure, culminating with works by such luminaries as Canaletto and Giambattista Tiepolo.

Curated by Tracey Lock-Weir, Misty Moderns: Australian Tonalists 1915–1950 at the Art Gallery of South Australia presented a re-evaluation of Max Meldrum (1875–1955) and the influential Australian tonalist phenomenon of the first half of the twentieth century. This recent exhibition was accompanied by an elegant publication in which Lock-Weir’s substantial essay (divided into readily digestible chapters) makes the claim that Meldrum and his tonalist doctrine had a more far-reaching impact than has previously been recognised. Accordingly, paintings by Meldrum and his followers – including Clarice Beckett, Colin Colahan, A.D. Colquhoun, John Farmer, Polly Hurry, Justus Jorgensen, Percy Leason, A.E. Newbury and Hayward Veal – were augmented by the work of artists more fleetingly influenced by his ideas, such as Roy de Maistre, Elioth Gruner, Lloyd Rees and Roland Wakelin. Although William Frater and Arnold Shore produced a number of tonalist paintings, Lock-Weir observes that by 1926 they had ‘broken away into colour and line’, later becoming the leading proponents of modernism in Melbourne.

The art gallery of South Australia has assembled a cast of expert contributors for the catalogue that accompanied its recent exhibition of European decorative arts. Empires & Splendour: The David Roche Collection, is the most expensive publication to date from AGSA and was published with assistance from David Roche.

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.