Arts
Peter Hill reviews 'Burning Issues: Fire in Art and the Social Imagination' by Alan Krell
On the evening of 24 May 2004, fire destroyed hundreds of works of art stored in Momart’s warehouse in Leyton, East London. (An arsonist was reputedly to blame.) Among those lost were Tracey Emin’s notorious tent, entitled Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995, Jake and Dinos Chapman’s Hell, and Chris Ofili’s Afrobluff. Valued at around $100 million, whole collections, including Charles Saatchi’s, were destroyed.
... (read more)A welcome extension to the National Gallery of Australia
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 ...
Vivien Gaston reviews 'Brett Whiteley: A sensual line 1957–67' by Kathie Sutherland
What to do with Whiteley? Forget the gutsy audacity and visual energy; in Bernard Smith’s estimation he was ‘egocentric, pseudo-profound and self-pitying’ (Australian Painting 1788–2000). Smith could not abide Whiteley’s ‘incapacity for detachment’; his cult of personality, poured into every last crevice of his work. With the hegemony of the social and theoretical construction of art, the actual person of the artist has been an increasing problem for art critics. Whiteley’s work, driven by personality and fuelled by sensation, is easily viewed as a romantic indulgence.
... (read more)Angus Trumble reviews 'Man with a Blue Scarf: On sitting for a portrait' by Martin Gayford
‘I kept thinking: if his face looks like this, what must his balls look like?’ David Hockney’s assessment of the craggy countenance of W.H. Auden is clipped and convenient, but I suspect Auden would have been far more interesting on the subject of sitting for Hockney. Given the concentration and quality of the encounters between English portrait painters or sculptors and their subjects, it is slightly odd that more writers have not published accounts of the experience of sitting for their portrait.
... (read more)Patrick McCaughey reviews 'The Donald Friend Diaries' by Ian Britain
For some sixty years Donald Friend kept a diary, making his final entry just days before his death in 1989 at the age of seventy-four. The National Library of Australia published them in four massive volumes between 2001 and 2006. They were intractable. You needed an axe to cut through the stream of consciousness which flowed from an uncensoring pen ...
... (read more)Brenda L. Croft reviews 'Desert Country' by Nici Cumpston with Barry Patton and 'Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route' by National Museum of Australia
During the Cairns Indigenous Art Fair (CIAF) held this August in far north Queensland, the city was buzzing with the visit of many of the country’s leading contributors to contemporary indigenous arts and culture. I ran into some of the most significant visual, performing and literary indigenous artists and arts professionals, many with hereditary links to the region, such as internationally renowned artists Vernon Ah Kee, Ken Thaiday Sr, and Daniel Boyd, and leading arts advocates, mingling with emerging artistic practitioners.
... (read more)There is so much beauty around us if only we could take the time to open our eyes and perceive it. And then share it. Love is the key word.
(Carol Jerrems, A Book About Australian Women)
In 1973, Carol Jerrems photographed a little girl, Caroline Slade, at her fourth birthday party in Toorak. Standing coyly with ha ...
Helen Ennis reviews 'Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century' by Peter Galassi
Everyone, I suspect, has a favourite photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson. Mine shows two couples picnicking beside what I have always thought was the Marne River but turns out to be somewhere else altogether. Juvisy (1938), as it is now titled, depicts urban workers relaxing near a man-made pond in the suburbs of Paris. This is indicative of the exhaustive research of Peter Galassi and his colleagues, who have brought to light a huge amount of new information on Cartier-Bresson and his photographs. Their book has been published to accompany a Cartier-Bresson exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where Galassi is chief curator of photography.
... (read more)Christopher Menz reviews 'Victorian Visions' by Richard Beresford
For an Australian collector to have amassed one substantial and internationally recognised collection of Victorian art during the late twentieth century is unusual. Having parted with the first and replaced it with a second, amassed in the twenty-first, is extraordinary. But then John Schaeffer ...
... (read more)Christopher Menz reviews 'Heysen to Heysen: Selected Letters of Hans Heysen and Nora Heysen' edited by Catherine Speck
A thirty-year correspondence between two Australian artists is notable, but when the artists are father and daughter it is doubly interesting. Hans Heysen and Nora Heysen corresponded regularly throughout their lives: Hans writing from The Cedars, the family house near Hahndorf, in the Adelaide Hills; and Nora from Sydney, London, New Guinea, Pacific Islands, or wherever she happened to be. Hans Heysen is celebrated for his landscape paintings – those South Australian views of eucalypts in a landscape, which changed the way generations looked at the Australian countryside – and for his desert landscapes of the Flinders Ranges. Nora, the only one of his nine children to become an artist, is known for her still lifes and portraits. Their work is well represented in Australian public collections. Hans was unquestionably the better artist, and always had the greater reputation. Nora, however, won major prizes (including, somewhat controversially, the 1938 Archibald Prize) and managed to forge an independent career for herself; she by no means lived in her father’s shadow.
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