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Visual Arts

Wordly riches at the Barnes

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July–August 2012, no. 343

In mid-May the Barnes Foundation opened at its new location in the cultural corridor of downtown Philadelphia. A cloud of controversy followed it to the end. The new building, handsome if flawed, from the gifted New York studio of Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, has attracted its share of criticism. The entrance, initially hard to find, is at the back of the building facing towards the car park and away from the parklands. The passage from entrance to galleries is awkward and inauspicious.

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The world of William Kentridge

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May 2012, no. 341

In 1981, William Kentridge journeyed from apartheid South Africa to the École Jacques Lecoq in Paris, renowned for its work in improvisation and physical theatre – theatre that creates itself in play. Though Kentridge would become an artist – working in drawing, printing, animation, film, opera, and sculpture – physical theatre and improvisation come closest ...

Patrick White in Canberra

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From the Editor’s Desk

Life-of-PWTo Canberra on 12 April for the opening of a new travelling exhibition, The Life of Patrick White.

First, though, a quick dash that morning to Sydney for a meeting with Bernadette Brennan and Hilary McPhee. The three of us hav ...

A welcome extension to the National Gallery of Australia

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November 2010, no. 326

The initial idea was for a new front door at the National Gallery of Australia. At least that is how Ron Radford, director of the Gallery, presented it to the one thousand or so guests in his remarks at the official opening of Andrew Andersons’ and PTW Architects’ Stage One ‘New Look’ at the NGA on Thursday, 30 September. Clearly, for the money involved and ...

It should be so, it must be so

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June 2011, no. 332

David Walsh is a tease; he enjoys wordplay. The founder and owner of the Museum of Old and New Art (he prefers Mona, not MONA) concedes that his private playground is entirely a matter of self-gratification, like ‘the sin of Onan’. Hence the cheeky titles ‘Monanism’ for his inaugural exhibition of some 460 works, and Monanisms for the beautifully pr ...

A Singular Voice: Essays on Australian art and architecture by Joan Kerr edited by Candice Bruce, Dinah Dysart, Jo Holder

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March 2010, no. 319

Although it is regrettable that A Singular Voice: Essays on Australian art and architecture by Joan Kerr, first proposed in 2003, when Kerr was still alive, has taken so long to appear, it has been worth the wait. The handsomely produced book displays Kerr’s writings to advantage, and the sparing but judicious use of images enhances and reinforces the egalitarian kind of art history that Kerr espoused.

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John Brack by Kirsty Grant et al.

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July-August 2009, no. 313
Chris Wallace-Crabbe reviews 'John Brack' by Kirsty Grant et al.

John Brack (1920–99) is one of the most remarkable of Australian painters, and a salient figure in the generation that included Arthur Boyd, Fred Williams, John Perceval, Leonard French, and John Olsen, of whom only two survive. Many viewers would see him as the imagination that made our suburbs viable as art; others have been in two minds about his clarity and perfectionism. Hard edges can make for tough responses.

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Modernism & Australia: Documents on art, design and architecture 1917–1967 edited by Ann Stephen, Andrew McNamara, and Philip Goad

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June 2007, no. 292
Anthony White reviews 'Modernism & Australia: Documents on art, design and architecture 1917–1967' edited by Ann Stephen, Andrew McNamara, and Philip Goad

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.

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Bill Henson and the anatomy of melancholy

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June–July 2005, no. 272
'Bill Henson and the anatomy of melancholy' by Luke Morgan

The late Susan Sontag suggested that the photograph ‘offers a modern counterpart of that characteristically romantic architectural genre, the artificial ruin: the ruin which is created in order to deepen the historical character of a landscape, to make nature suggestive, suggestive of the past’. On viewing the retrospective exhibition Bill Henson: Three Decades of Photography, which was organised by the Art Gallery of New South Wales and is now at The Ian Potter Centre: National Gallery of Victoria Australia (NGVA), this familiar idea of the photograph as memento mori struck me as peculiarly apposite. Although the experience of Henson’s photographs is not quite the eighteenth-century one of sighing over ruins, the tone of the exhibition is distinctly melancholic, something like a syncopated elegy in pictures.

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Rustic cubism: Anne Dangar and the art colony at Moly-Sabata by Bruce Adams

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March 2005, no. 269
Rustic cubism: Anne Dangar and the art colony at Moly-Sabata

Rooms do furnish a book. This book was inspired by a 1930s interior in a photograph that art historian Bruce Adams came upon when interviewing Sydney painter Grace Crowley (1890–1979) at her home in 1973. Two years later, Adams visited the building that had intrigued him: Moly-Sabata, on the left bank of the Rhone about sixty kilometres south of Lyon. In this account of the artists who lived there from the late 1920s to early 1950s, a big-faced, stiffly dressed, middle-aged Australian makes her presence felt. In contextualising expatriate painter Anne Dangar’s twenty-one-year tenure in the art colony, Adams shows what her aspirations were, why she turned herself into a village potter, and the political use that was made of her work.

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