Arts
Billy Griffiths reviews 'Rattling Spears: A history of indigenous Australian' art by Ian McLean
This beautifully illustrated book explores the ways in which Indigenous Australians have responded to invasion through art. ‘Where colonists saw a gulf,’ writes art historian Ian ...
... (read more)Francesca Sasnaitis reviews 'Inside the Art Market: Australia’s galleries: A history 1956–1976' by Christopher Heathcote
Like any good storyteller, Christopher Heathcote begins by setting the scene: ‘one of those scruffy unpaved streets on the outer fringe’ of Melbourne on a wintry day in 1956 ...
... (read more)Miriam Cosic reviews 'The Art of Rivalry: Four friendships, betrayals, and breakthroughs in modern art' by Sebastian Smee
It seems a particularly masculine take on the processes of art to examine the way rivalry spurs on creativity and conceptual development. Yet this is not the book the Boston Globe’s ...
... (read more)Patrick McCaughey reviews 'Art in Britain 1660–1815' by David H. Solkin
A major revolution swept through British art history in the 1980s. It shook up its genteel ways and turned it resolutely, even militantly, towards the social history of art ...
... (read more)Simon Caterson reviews 'Brett Whiteley: Art, life and the other thing' by Ashleigh Wilson
Notwithstanding the fact that he died alone in a hotel room following a heroin overdose at the age of fifty-three, Brett Whiteley led what for an Australian artist ...
... (read more)Margaret Robson Kett reviews 'The Singing Bones' by Shaun Tan
In 2012, Shaun Tan was commissioned to make pictures for a German publisher's edition of fifty of the Brothers Grimms' fairy tales, retold by Philip (His Dark Materials) Pullman. Pullman's challenge is that the tales do not necessarily benefit from illustration – he dismisses most as 'art school exquisiteness'. Tan's response was to return to his boyhood ...
Jane Grant reviews 'Modern Love' by Lesley Harding and Kendrah Morgan
In December, John decided there was nothing to lose and that he would write to Picasso asking him to view Nolan's work in storage. Sunday translated the letter into French, but even in draft form in English it read as sycophantic and sentimental ... They went to Picasso's apartment to hand deliver the letter and were met at the door by the artist's factotum. One wonders what Picasso ma ...
Patrick McCaughey reviews 'Rendez-vous with Art' by Philippe de Montebello and Martin Gayford
Philippe de Montebello was Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for thirty-one years. The astonishing length of his tenure is matched by the brilliance of his reign. Every part of the museum's forty-plus acres of exhibition space was renewed or transformed during those years, from classical antiquity to twentieth- and twenty-first-century art. Not a tatty corn ...
Masterpieces from the Hermitage: the Legacy of Catherine the Great (NGV International)
Eight galleries of NGV International have been radically reshaped to host Masterpieces from the Hermitage, invoking the world of unbounded opulence of Russia’s Catherine the Great (1729–96). The installation, designed by the NGV’s Ingrid Ruhle, is dazzling, mimicking as it does the grand style of the State Hermitage Museum and incorporating some ...
Peter Hill reviews 'Australian Artists in the Contemporary Museum' by Jennifer Barrett and Jacqueline Millner
I like a book jacket that tells you clearly, in words and images, what it is about. Australian Artists in the Contemporary Museum does just that: ‘The authors’ central argument is that artists’ engagement with the museum has shifted from politically motivated critique taking place in museums of fine art, towards interventions taking place in non-art mus ...