Christopher Menz

Whereas many look to Vienna for its imperial architecture, the city developed a rich and complex relationship with modernist forms when they exploded across Europe in the early twentieth century. In this week’s ABR Podcast, Christopher Menz, former Director of the Art Gallery of South Australia, explains this fascinating aspect of Viennese cultural history – including its surprising connection with Australia. Christopher Menz and ABR Editor Peter Rose will be leading a cultural tour of Vienna from October 13 to 24 for Academy Travel. Listen to Christopher Menz in conversation with Academy Travel’s Stuart Barrie here.

History of Modern Design has developed from a course of the same name at Drexel University in Philadelphia. In keeping with its didactic origin, the subject is presented in chronological order, illustrated with more than 500 images, 125 of which are reproduced in colour. The book is ambitiously broad in its coverage, commencing with the seventeenth century and ending in the twenty-first, focusing on design from Europe and North America, and ranging through furniture, interiors, metalwork, ceramics, graphic design, typography, and product design. A good two-thirds of the book is devoted to the twentieth century, which is presented in context from the preceding historical surveys. While the focus is on design for mass production and industrial processes, the crafts are not entirely neglected. An extensive bibliography on design, coupled with helpful reading lists, will prove popular in this useful introduction to the complex and wide-ranging subject of design. (CM)

Australia’s regional galleries hold rich collections that demonstrate a powerful communal need to collect and display art. Victoria’s regional cities, in particular, are notably well endowed with public art collections and handsome buildings to house them. The gold rush towns were at the forefront in establishing public art galleries: the first, in Ballarat, was founded in 1884; Bendigo followed in 1887. There are now nineteen of them fairly evenly positioned across the state – between one and six hours’ drive from Melbourne – from Warrnambool (1886) in the south-west and Mildura (1956) in the north-west to Bairnsdale (1992) to the east.

Frances Burke (1904–94) was the leading textile designer in Melbourne from the 1940s to the 1960s. Her modernist furnishing fabrics, preferred by architects, interior designers, department stores, and homemakers, were popular in domestic and commercial interiors, and her reputation was national. Her design skills were complemented by a good head for business and her command of all aspects of production, distribution, and marketing. The distinctive style of her textile designs is neatly summarised by the authors of this splendid volume: ‘ A single, bright colour and clean, simple linework printed on quality cotton or linen made Frances Burke’s designs modern in style, instantly identifiable and very appealing.’ Burke’s wide-ranging design sources included flora and fauna, indigenous and exotic themes, as illustrated in a selection of her titles: Canna Leaf, Tiger Lily, Seapiece, Totem, Rangga, Pacifica and Moresque.

Although most of the ten million annual visitors to the Louvre think of it as an art museum and former royal palace, for much of its history it has performed other functions. The Louvre has also played a defining role in many events in French history. Its raison d’être in the Middle Ages was as a fortification in the then most westerly part of Paris. Transformed into a royal palace during the sixteenth century, it has undergone more than twenty different extensions and renovations under successive rulers and administrations, emerging as the behemoth we know today. Surprisingly for a building that so much embodies Paris and feels so permanent, much of the Louvre was created during the third quarter of the nineteenth century under Napoleon III, when it was almost doubled in size and given its external ‘dizzying opulence’, as James Gardner describes it in this new book.

On May Day 1955, two years after his death, a colossal memorial to Joseph Stalin was unveiled on a prominent site north of central. Towering above the city and containing 14,000 tons of granite, it was the largest statue of the dictator ever created. Stalin was depicted at the head of a representative group of citizens, dubbed by some as a bread queue. Otakar Švec, a prominent Czech sculptor, had won the commission in 1949. After the work’s stressful gestation, he killed himself shortly before the work was unveiled; there had been constant interference and police surveillance, and his wife committed suicide in 1954.

Amid all the hoopla surrounding the centenary in 2019 of the Bauhaus – naturally more pronounced in Germany – it is gratifying to see such a fine Australian publication dealing with the international influence of this short-lived, revolutionary art and design teaching institute. Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond – written by Philip Goad, Ann Stephen, Andrew McNamara, Harriet Edquist, and Isabel Wünsche – explores the Bauhaus and its influence in Australia.

This year is huge for the Opéra National de Paris. It celebrates the 350^th anniversary of the founding of Académie Royale de Musique in 1669, the thirtieth anniversary of the inauguration of the Opéra Bastille in 1989, and the 150^th anniversary of the death of Hector Berlioz. Les Troyens (The Trojans) opened the ...

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, Baronet, (1833–98) to give him his full entitlement, is an artist who polarises people. Some relish his otherworldly and imaginative narrative subjects, the rich and saturated palette, the sumptuous decorative surfaces. Others respond in the same way as one of the ‘vivid young moderns’ overheard by ...

Grant Featherston (1922–95), the most prominent and successful furniture designer working in postwar Australia, is noted for his moulded, upholstered plywood modernist chairs from the 1950s, which combined comfort and style and which resembled work by Charles Eames ...