Director’s word It is my considerable pleasure to announce that the great Italian Renaissance comes to Canberra in December, bringing to Australia for the first time remarkable works by Raphael, Botticelli, Mantegna, Perugino, Bellini and Titian and lesser-known artists such as Vivarini, Crivelli, Carpaccio, Lotto, Tura, Moroni and many more. Some of you would have been to Italy and others will be familiar with Renaissance paintings through reproductions, but we are proud to offer you the once-in-a-life-time opportunity to experience the actual works in Australia for the first time. The exhibition comes from Italy, the heartland of the European Renaissance, from the exquisite collection of the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo. Exclusive to Canberra, Renaissance: 15th- and 16th-century Italian paintings from the Accademia Carrara, Bergamo will be a blockbuster the likes of Masterpieces from Paris: van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne and beyond, our 2009–10 exhibition of Post-Impressionist works from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. With timed-tickets,
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available through Ticketek, we will avoid lengthy queues and ensure more visitors can enjoy this rare opportunity to see paintings of such aesthetic and art historical significance. Renaissance will be the first exhibition in Australia to concentrate exclusively on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian Renaissance painting. Indeed, never has there been an exhibition that includes fifteenth-century Italian works in Australia. Paintings by Raphael, Botticelli, Bellini, Mantegna and Perugino have never before been seen in Australia; they are absent from Australian collections. On 12 August, we launched the retrospective Fred Williams: infinite horizons. Williams is unequalled in his innovation as a twentieth-century painter and observer of the Australian landscape. Who else could have achieved the seemingly impossible task of renewing the gum tree and scrub as a subject of Australian painting in the twentieth century, or of finding affinities between contemporary abstraction and early colonial topographical drawings and watercolours.
Since landscape was the central concern of Australian art for much more than a century before Williams created his groundbreaking body of work, his position in our visual culture is immensely important. His classic open landscapes of the 1960s helped Australians view the repetitious, afocal quality of much of our sparsely treed country as an essential part of Australia’s infinite and subtle beauty. Nobody had painted Australia like this. For the first time the three former directors of the National Gallery of Australia gathered at the official opening to pay tribute to this remarkable Australian artist. An exquisite and insightful book accompanies the exhibition. Written by curator Deborah Hart, the book is a full retrospective look at the art of Fred Williams. Out of the West: art of Western Australia, which was launched in July, continues into 2012. It is the first survey exhibition outside Western Australia to present a large sample of works from the state, from the past to the present and in a diverse range of