Visual Arts

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art is known for its large-scale, ‘blockbuster’ exhibitions. These are usually impressive, often enlightening. But sometimes it can be even more rewarding (and less exhausting) to visit a show on a much smaller scale. Such is the case at the moment at The Met, where six paintings by modern ...

For my return visit to the exhibition Fred Williams in the You Yangs at the Geelong Gallery, I decided to take the train instead of driving, as I usually do. Although the creeping suburban sprawl, especially around Melbourne, has narrowed the area without housing or industrial estates, there is still just enough left of the flat ...

Tate Modern excelled itself with its Giacometti retrospective. It’s not easy to take a familiar modern master and return a new and compelling view of his work. Many years ago, MoMA in New York failed the challenge abysmally. They had nothing new to say about the artist and ...

In the last seventy days of Vincent van Gogh’s short life, he painted seventy paintings. His intense life as an artist lasted for a single decade, from the age of twenty-seven to thirty-seven. Before that he had been, variously, a trainee preacher, an evangelist to miners, a labourer, and an ...

Opportunities to see nineteenth-century American art are rare in Australia. This beautiful small exhibition offers fascinating parallels between Australian and American landscape painting of the period, both popularly admired as expressions of a national psyche, revealing ...

The idea of visiting Paris in January to see six exhibitions and two repeats in five days may seem excessive to some people, but Paris’s museum offerings this northern winter were so impressive it was impossible to resist. At Frank Gehry’s lofty Fondation Louis Vuitton, hordes lined up ...

Some may be puzzled by an exhibition titling itself ‘Thenabouts’. As a portmanteau, the word seems confusingly to displace time onto space. The term was in fact neologised by James Joyce in Finnegans Wake (1939), where a character asks, ‘Where are we at all? and whenabouts in the name of ...

There is an underlying theme to Nude: Art from the Tate collection: the tussle between the desire to connect humanity to mythology by shrouding our naked forms in grand narratives, and the will to see human nudity both objectively and subjectively, but most importantly as entirely our own ...

Two very different touring exhibitions are showing in Canberra this summer. A History of the World in 100 Objects, from the British Museum at the National Museum of Australia, tells a two-million-year story through works from the collection of the British Museum. It is based on former BM ...