SUBSCRIBE

Australian Art

Art Essays

Abstraction

Saturday, September 17th, 2011 Australian Art, International Art, Sydney Morning Herald Column,

Among the unsolicited art emails that appear in my mail-box every week, one recent posting came from the Martos Gallery in New York, who were holding an exhibition called We Regret to Inform You There is Currently No Space or Place for Abstract Painting. The image that came with the email showed this sentence written […]

Art Essays

Fred Williams

Saturday, September 10th, 2011 Australian Art, Sydney Morning Herald Column,

When the previous retrospective of an artist’s work contained no fewer than 417 pieces, it is inevitable that a new exhibition of about 120 pictures will be known as the ‘smaller’ show. That earlier Fred Williams’s mega-retrospective was held at the National Gallery of Australia in 1987, but I still have a vivid recollection of […]

Art Essays

Din Q. Lê: Erasure, Cairns Indigenous Art Fair 2011

Saturday, August 27th, 2011 Aboriginal Art, Australian Art, Sydney Morning Herald Column,

It was astonishing to learn that in a recent opinion poll Australians rated border protection as a more important issue than health, education, transport or housing. This is one of those statistical miracles that testify to our growing sense of social paranoia and the power of political scare campaigns. The facts are well known but […]

Art Essays

Tonsorial philosophy

Friday, August 26th, 2011 Aboriginal Art, Australian Art, Blog,

My barber is a philosopher. By this, I don’t mean to compare him to those hairdressers who style themselves “creative artists working in the medium of hair”. Dimitri Kokinelis, barber of Gardeners Road, Rosebery, is a genuine thinker who devotes his time between haircuts to pondering questions of truth, wisdom, justice and nature. He has […]

Art Essays

David Aspden

Friday, August 26th, 2011 Australian Art, Sydney Morning Herald Column,

Like Tom Roberts before him, David Aspden (1935-2005) was born in rural England and arrived in Australia around the age of fifteen. This is a time of life when the biggest part of one’s adult personality is already formed. Roberts, who grew up in the age of Empire, was never quite sure if he was […]

Art Essays

The last days of the Caponian empire

Tuesday, August 9th, 2011 Australian Art, Blog,

What a deathly year it has been for artists! In quick succession we have lost Cy Twombly, Lucian Freud, and now John Hoyland. The latter was especially disturbing, as I had just contributed a catalogue essay to his exhibition with Charles Nodrum in Melbourne. Logically there is nothing surprising about someone dying at a ripe […]

Art Essays

Edmund Capon & his legacy

Wednesday, August 3rd, 2011 Australian Art, Sydney Morning Herald Column,

This won’t be the first or last time that someone declares Edmund Capon a hard act to follow. In his thirty-one years as director of the Art Gallery of NSW, Capon has taken a provincial, down-at-heel institution and turned it into a Grade-A showcase for Australian and international art. Yet he leaves at time when […]

Art Essays

Goodbye Margaret, hello Brisbane

Sunday, July 31st, 2011 Australian Art, Blog,

There are a number of phone calls that I dread, although they are inevitable. One arrived last Wednesday when the SMH Arts Editor, Clare Morgan, rang to tell me that Margaret Olley had died. Margaret has been a fixture on the Australian art scene since the 1940s, and it would be difficult to think of […]

Art Essays

Margaret Olley 1923 – 2011: An Appreciation

Monday, July 25th, 2011 Australian Art, Sydney Morning Herald Column,

“Hurry, hurry, last days!” Margaret Olley would cry when someone tried to involve her in another hopeful project. It usually involved Margaret making a donation of some sort, or simply gracing an event with her presence. At the end she found it easier to write a cheque rather than face a room full of people […]

Art Essays

Eugene von Guérard

Saturday, July 23rd, 2011 Australian Art, Sydney Morning Herald Column,

In the entire history of Australian art, no painter has ever been through greater extremes of adulation and neglect than Eugene von Guérard (1811-1901). In the 1860s he was recognised as the finest landscapist in the colony, but by the 1870s his reputation was in decline. In the following century he was all but forgotten. […]