Arts

Romantic Moderns,like this year’s wisteria in England, is catching the attention of many. Both are very English phenomena; and while Oxbridge colleges and London’s residential streets drip purple blossom, this new title has won the Guardian newspaper’s first book award and been shortlisted for two other eminent prizes. Public interest has been further stimulated by word of mouth, while excellent packaging, in terms of product design and well-chosen illustrations, has turned this book into a popular gift. It is also the subject of much debate. Few would deny that by the late 1930s in England a concerted project of national self-discovery was under way. But surely this was a shameful retreat? Didn’t it mean a return to the past, to safe traditions and to a ‘Little England’ mentality, after the wider and more progressive embrace of international modernism? Or is Alexandra Harris right to talk of a modern English renaissance which, as it unfolded fully in the 1940s, proved bold, timely, necessary, and of undeniable cultural significance?

This is the second major retrospective of the art of Eugene von Guérard (1811–1901). In 1980 he was seen as Nature-inspired, like the German Romantics and the Humboldtian visionaries Frederick Church and Thomas Moran (American painters of von Guérard’s own generation). This time, the viewpoint is science.

Percy Lindsay was the eldest and least well-known of the remarkable Lindsay brothers (the others were Norman, Lionel, and Darryl). He was born at Creswick, Victoria, in 1870, where he received his initial artistic training before moving to Melbourne in 1895. It was there that year that he first exhibited paintings, in a group show that included such luminaries as David Davies, E. Phillips Fox, and Walter Withers (the latter also taught him). Lindsay continued exhibiting his paintings until 1951: he had seven solo exhibitions between 1926 and 1935. In 1901 he took up illustrative work, which he produced for the remainder of his career. Lindsay married in 1907 and moved to Sydney in 1918, where he lived until his death in 1952.

Art, Love and Life accompanies the exhibition of the same name at the Queensland Art Gallery. This substantial book contains eight short essays by six authors, with a brief checklist of the works included in the exhibition towards the end of the publication. There is also a useful chronology.

This is a wonderfully ambitious book. There has been no other publication on Australian art photography that so richly illustrates a period: 400 illustrations from 1980 to the present, by 190 individual photographers. And their work looks impressive – diverse, energetic, sophisticated. The selection is satisfyingly broad, covering an eclectic range of approaches, styles, and concerns.

The painter and outdoor draughtsman John Wolseley is utterly unusual among artists in this country. Marvellously accomplished yet old-fashioned, he could be seen as an artist who cheekily leapt from  traditional to postmodern without passing through any of the intermediate stages. His deeply natural pictures can’t be categorised easily, for all that they are entrancing. In Lines for Birds, they are reproduced side by side with the comparably responsive poems of Barry Hill.

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.

The Hare With Amber Eyes tells the migration story of ‘a very large collection of very small objects’, specifically 264 netsuke (pronounced like ‘jet ski’, from the Japanese characters for ne and tsuke, meaning ‘root’ and ‘attach’). Netsuke are small pieces of ivory, wood, metal, ceramic, or some other material, carved or otherwise decorated, and perforated for use as a toggle that tucks behind the belt or sash of a kosode or kimono (obi). From it a purse or more usually a small box with compartments (inro) may be suspended by a stout silken cord, and fastened with sliding beads (ojime). Netsuke evolved in seventeenth-century Japan to embrace an almost limitless number of decorative forms and shapes, increasingly prized, through the eighteenth century, as miniature sculptures on their own, nevertheless conforming to the basic requirement of their original function: namely, to allow a cord to be threaded through some sort of eye – in the case of the eponymous hare with the amber eyes this is achieved by the contrivance of a cocked hind leg; such strategies became more and more ingenious as netsuke proliferated – and also adhering to a roughly uniform size of between one and two inches in diameter, occasionally more. Ideally, netsuke nestle comfortably in the palm of the hand. Indeed, part of their aesthetic appeal is to the sense of touch, so deployed.