Art

Rosalie Gascoigne seems exemplary of the popular fable of the late-blooming woman artist. Famously, her first exhibition was in 1974, when she was fifty-seven. This swiftly led to national recognition, then international exposure at the 1982 Venice Biennale. So this is a story for the times. But the achievement of Nicola Francis, the artist’s biographer, is to unpack how, in Gascoigne’s case, artistic success in later life was the result of long, careful training in two other creative pursuits: flower arranging, as taught by the English authority Constance Spry; then, crucially, training and a thriving career in the most radical form of ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement, through the Sogetsu School popularised in Australia by Norman Sparnon.

This book is welcome. The purchase of Blue Poles, the most expensive American painting ever bought by an Australian gallery – for more than US$2 million in 1973 – brought into focus a range of Australian cultural and political attitudes of the 1970s. But what are we to make of the subtitle? Was Blue Poles really ‘the painting that changed a nation’?

The diaries of Fred Williams (1927-82) invite the inevitable, unfair, but instructive comparison with those of Donald Friend; unlike the latter, they are not a masterpiece of witty and incisive prose, filled with insightful and indiscreet comments about contemporaries, the life of the artist, and the social and cultural world of the author’s time. They are plainly written observations on the day-to-day life of a hard-working painter, with an emphasis on the practical; it would be wrong to describe them as modest or self-effacing, for manifestly they were not written with any thought of publication. Friend, steeped in the culture of past centuries, was well aware of composing a literary work like the great diarists of earlier generations; Williams was jotting down, especially at the outset, largely professional notes in a standard page-to-a-day business diary.

Photography finds itself at yet another crossroads. In an era of artificial intelligence, the photograph’s role as a document of evidence has again come under the spotlight. Entering this disruptive space are two new documentary photography books: Juno Gemes’s Until Justice Comes: Fifty years of the movement for Indigenous rights. Photographs 1970-2024 and Stephen Zagala’s Imagining a Real Australia: The documentary style 1950-1980. The focus of these books is vastly different. Gemes offers a contemporary history of Australia, whereas Zagala is more concerned with the documentary genre. Their existence affirms that, while the truthfulness of photography may be contested, as it has been since the medium’s nascent years, the intrinsic value of documentary photography remains undiminished. In fact, at this juncture, documentary photography may prove even more important as we grapple with notions of what is ‘real’.

At the beginning of Hamlet (Act I, sc. 3, 177 ff.), Laertes warns Ophelia against becoming too attached to the young prince.

No movement in the history of art is so beloved as that which we label ‘Impressionism’, and no artists’ names are as familiar as those of its stars: Manet and Monet, Pissarro and Morisot, Degas and Renoir. But why did Impressionism blossom at a particular moment in Paris and in that form? Sebastian Smee’s brilliant new book offers compelling answers.

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.

Juan Davila is a major figure in contemporary Australian art. His fluent appropriations of other artists’ styles and motifs (all neatly numbered and labelled), combined with an assertive iconography of sexual desire and transgression (all bare thighs and thrusting tongues and mutant genitalia), made him one of the most interesting painters of his generation – the postmodern, theoretical, Art and Text push of the 1980s. He has represented his country in northern hemisphere exhibitions from Paris to Banff, and has maintained strong connections across his native Latin America. The New South Wales Vice Squad’s infamous impounding of Stupid as a painter in 1982 cemented the artist’s ‘bad boy’ reputation with the general public, as well as within the art industry, while his painting of a semi-nude, hermaphrodite Simón Bolivar giving the finger actually created a full-scale diplomatic incident involving Chile, Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador. Davila’s regular output of polemical essays, his gloriously rude lampoons of political leaders and his more recent, sober protests against refugee detention have ensured his work has a place in public discourse. A comprehensive survey is long overdue.

If you think you know about John Glover (1767–1849) and his achievements, then think again. Read this publication and you will discover fresh and compelling information about Glover, his life in Australia, and his house and garden.

The relationship between artists and their sitters has long been a topic of fascination and enquiry – not least for artists themselves. The study of portraiture is often informed by investigations of this relationship as well as that with a third party: the viewer.