Arts

Of the innumerable books on the design work of William Morris (1834–96) that have appeared since the 1980s, the one that has remained the best and most informative is Linda Parry’s William Morris: Textiles (1983), published early on in her career as a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Since then, there has been much new research on Morris and many exhibitions of his work (at least six in Australia alone). In 1996 he was the subject of a centenary retrospective at the V&A, for which Parry was the curator and editor of the exhibition book. Two major biographies by Fiona MacCarthy – William Morris: A Life for our Time (1994) and The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination (2011) – add substantially to our understanding of Morris and his firm, Morris & Co. Interest in this remarkable Victorian – poet, novelist, artist, socialist reformer – appears to be stronger than ever, and demand for Morris-designed textiles and wallpapers is insatiable; many remain in production either as reproductions or adaptations. This new, extensively updated and rewritten version of William Morris: Textiles benefits from all these later publications and exhaustive new research, deftly contextualised by Parry.

Picasso at twenty-five was famous in Paris, comfortably off by 1914, wealthy and internationally recognised six years later. He married a leading ballerina, Olga Khokhlova, in Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. It turned out badly. Two of his mistresses, Fernande Olivier and FranÇoise Gilot, wrote tell-all memoirs, which he did his best, unsuccessfully, to repress. At least two other mistresses, Marie-Thérèse Walter and Dora Maar, have attained independent fame through his manic and magic portraits of them. He became a communist during World War II but was hooted down by the party when he drew Uncle Joe as a mustachioed gallant. He died in 1973 at the age of ninety-one after a tumultuous final decade of work. John Richardson and Marilyn McCully are engaged in a multi-volume biography, which, after three substantial tomes, has brought the story up to 1933.

When Paul Raphael Montford (1868–1938) settled in Melbourne in 1923, one press report claimed that he was ‘one of England’s best-known sculptors’, but despite having created works for the façade of the Victoria and Albert Museum and for Westminster Abbey, as well as numerous public sculptures in Australia, his work is not well known in either country. His reputation has always been overshadowed by his infinitely more successful and slightly older contemporary and rival, Bertram Mackennal.

We are used to modern science being conducted as a collaborative effort involving teams of researchers in laboratories, but imagine a huge research project requiring thousands of researchers and covering every corner of an entire continent (and beyond) being organised successfully with no telephone or Internet.

Such was the esteem of the Roentgens – father Abraham and son David – that fourteen years after David’s death in 1807, Goethe, whose father owned Roentgen furniture, knew that his readers would appreciate the metaphor. Probably not since the Great bed of Ware, c.1590 – referred to by Sir Toby Belch and in Ben Jonson’s Epicœne – had furniture such a famous literary champion. The Roentgens were not just ordinary cabinetmakers. Indeed, they were among the most celebrated European furniture makers of the second half of the eighteenth century.

Edwardian Opulence is the book for the sumptuous survey exhibition of Edwardian art which was shown at the Yale Centre for British Art from 28 February to 2 June 2013. It is a sweeping look at the visual arts in Britain in all its manifestations during the period roughly corresponding with the reign of Edward VII. This substantial book contains important essays by the curators, Angus Trumble and Andrea Wolk Rager, as well as contributions from leading art historians such as Tim Barringer, Pamela Fletcher, Elizabeth C. Mansfield, and Alexander Nemerov. Many of the paintings, sculptures, photographs, and works of decorative art in this publication reflect the supreme self-confidence and wealth of the ruling élite at that time. However, it was also a period of dramatic change; and this too is reflected in the publication.

Turner posed a conundrum when he withheld nothing from his bequest to the nation. On the positive side, the unsorted contents gave room to later, highly flattering interpretations of Turner, which a collection pruned to the taste of the Victorians would not have supported. On the downside, the digestive processes of posterity took Turner away from his roots in England between 1775 and 1851. In the 1970s, despite much excellent scholarship, English ideas about Turner’s creativity appeared to be as conflicted as ever: the Tate Gallery’s display of the bequest was an unsorted mix, further decontextualised by modern frames and modernist rooms. The following generation of curators, art history-minded, has sought to resolve the conundrum by showing Turner as an actor of his time and place. Accordingly, Tate curator Ian Warrell rummaged around in the bequest for a biographical portrayal of Turner from the Tate the exhibition now showing in Canberra.

It’s absurd to pretend that we are or ever have been no more than exiled Europeans … forever condemned to inhabit some irrelevant, Antipodean limbo.’ This statement encapsulates Joan Kerr’s determination to rewrite established codes of Australian art history and to expand the lexicon of its cultural heritage ...

Roy Strong was appointed director of the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in 1967 at the age of thirty-two. Today it would be astonishing to head one of the United Kingdom’s national collections at that age; five decades ago it was outrageous. Only Kenneth Clark at thirty was younger when he became director of the National Gallery. Strong’s ascent to the NPG has stayed in his mind as the fulcrum of his professional life.

Claude Monet as an emotive artist? Hitherto, I have viewed Monet’s painting – or at least Monet the Impressionist – as sensual but detached. Having seen Monet’s Garden at the National Gallery of Victoria, I am now of the view that the artist’s later painting (the exhibition focuses on the work made at Giverny from 1893 until the artist’s death in 1926) has a subliminal and even expressionist dimension. How else to characterise the elegiac quality of the wonderful water lily series and the late abstract-like garden paintings made with such abandon? Moreover, having learned more about Monet himself at this time, I appreciate that he was far more challenged by life experiences than I had presumed, in spite of the tremendous critical and commercial success he enjoyed in the last decades of his career.