2015.Q4 | Artonview 84 Summer 2015

National Gallery of Australia

CHANGING NGA New displays and Blue poles revealed under new light

TOM ROBERTS Australia’s greatest Impressionist

ARTS EDUCATION Lifelong learning and enjoyment

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ISSN 1323-4552

ISSUE NO 84 | SUMMER 2015 A$9.95 Slumbering sea, Mentone 1887 (detail), National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

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Get Smart Support the Members Acquisition Fund ‘Jeffrey Smart’s The salvagers 1946 will be our first significant early work by the artist. Acquiring this work is a real triumph as it enables the NGA to tell the full story of Smart’s career.’

Gerard Vaughan, Director

Call our friendly Foundation staff on (02) 6240 6408 or send us an email, foundation@nga.gov.au, to make your tax-deductible donation to Jeffrey Smart’s The salvagers.

Call us on +61 (0)2 6240 6408 or send an email to foundation@nga.gov.au Jeffrey Smart The salvagers 1946, to make your tax-deductible donation to Jeffrey Smart’s The salvagers oil paint on canvas

© The estate of Jeffrey Smart

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Issue 84 | Summer 2015 Cover: Sally Smart working on the installation of her work The choreography of cutting (the pedagogical puppet projects) 2012–15 in the new Australian galleries at the NGA, 2015 Guest editor Katie Russell, Head of Learning and Access Editor Eric Meredith Designer Kristin Thomas Proofreader Meredith McKendry Photographers Sam Birch, Alanna Bishop, Eleni Kypridis, Lisa Mattiazzi, John Tassie, Dominic Thomas Pre-press Michael Tonna Printing CanPrint, Canberra Guest contributors Rika Burnham, Head of Education, The Frick Collection Katina Davidson, Exhibition Curator, Kuril Dhagun, State Library of Queensland Kimberley Moulton, Curator and Project Officer, Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre Contributors Anne Gray, Head of Australian Art Deborah Hart, Senior Curator, Australian Painting and Sculpture Post 1920 Michelle Fracaro, Program Coordinator, Learning and Access Peta Jane Jones, Archivist, Research Library Jane Kinsman, Senior Curator, International Prints, Drawings and Illustrated Books Shaune Lakin, Senior Curator, Photography Anne O’Hehir, Curator, Photography Simon Underschultz, Special Collections Officer, Research Library Joye Volker, Chief Librarian Editorial artonview.editor@nga.gov.au Advertising artonview.advertising@nga.gov.au Reproductions copyright@nga.gov.au Back issues nga.gov.au/artonview National Gallery of Australia PO Box 1150 Canberra ACT 2601, Australia +61 (0)2 6240 6411 nga.gov.au Membership nga.gov.au/members | 1800 020 068 Artonview is free with membership, which comes with additional perks such as reciprocal benefits at art institutions nationally Donations +61 (0)2 6240 6691 Sponsorship +61 (0)2 6240 6740 The National Gallery of Australia in Canberra is a not-for-profit entity.

Many acquisitions, exhibitions and programs are made possible through private and corporate supporters. © National Galley of Australia Published quarterly. Copyright of works of art is held by the artists or their estates. Every effort has been made to identify copyright holders but omissions may occur.

The views expressed by writers are not necessarily those of the National Gallery of Australia. Artonview may contain names and images of deceased Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

ISSN 1323‑4552 Printed on FSC and PEFC certified paper using vegetable-based inks.

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Crystal Palace: The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nuclear Nations (UK, Russia) 2012–13, uranium glass beads and crystals, metal structure, UV lighting

© Ken + Julia Yonetani. Image courtesy the artists and Mizuma

Art Gallery, Tokyo. Photo: Catherine Brossais

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FEATURES

Lessons from Picasso | 40

REGULARS

The Last Temptation | 8

Jane Kinsman extracts, from her essay for the new book Workshop, the heady first decade on Ken Tyler’s path to master printer

Exhibitions | 4 Director’s word | 6 Acquisitions | 58

Deborah Hart examines the strange and beautiful work of Julia and Ken Yonetani

Moving the camera | 11 Anne O’Hehir and Shaune Lakin take a look at how photographers’ views of the world have changed over the last century

Changing NGA | 14 Gerard Vaughan introduces the NGA’s new collection displays

Beyond the hype | 24 Patti Adler speaks to Eric Meredith about what it was like growing up with Jackson Pollock’s Blue poles and other masterpieces of Abstract Expressionism in the living room

Painting the nation | 30 Anne Gray illuminates the art and life of Tom Roberts, the great interpreter of Australian narratives at the turn of the century and an integral part of our art history

WHACK! Experience without words | 44 Rika Burnham shares her passion for the ‘experimental edges’ of art education

Enriching art scholarship | 52 Joye Volker, Peta Jane Jones and Simon Underschultz highlight the most valuable resources of the NGA Research Library’s unique collections

Australian curriculum and the arts | 55 Michelle Fracaro takes a look at the new Australian Curriculum and its relevance to arts institutions such as the NGA

Legacy | 56 Kimberley Moulton and Katina Davidson share their experiences as this year’s Indigenous Art Fellows

Tom Roberts, Yinka Shonibare, Paul Cézanne, John Wardell Power, Yang Yongliang, Jan Nelson, Jeffrey Smart

Members news | 66 Thank you … | 67

Exhibitions NGA CANBERRA Tom Roberts (pages 30–9) Level 1, 4 December – 28 March Adult $20.00 | Children 16 and under free Concession $17.50 | Member $15.00 Season passes and packages also available Book now at ticketek.com or 1300 795 012 The world is beautiful (pages 11–13) Level 1, 4 December – 10 April Happy birthday Inge Level 1, until 14 February Behind the scenes (pages 40–3) Level 2, 4 December – 3 May Black Level 2, until 13 June The Last Temptation (pages 8–10) NGA Contemporary, 12 December – 3 April NGA ELSEWHERE Impressions of Paris Murray Art Gallery Albury, 4 December – 31 January Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery, 6 February – 29 March Stars in the river Geelong Art Gallery, until 21 February Light moves Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, until 31 January Cairns Regional Gallery, 12 February – 10 April William Kentridge Ian Potter Museum of Art, until 17 January Art Gallery of Ballarat, 23 January – 17 April Capital and country Canberra Museum and Gallery, until 21 February

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Tom Roberts A break away! 1891 (detail), oil on canvas. Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, Elder Bequest Fund, 1899

Editorial It is a great pleasure to be involved in this summer edition of Artonview, which reveals the significant changes that have taken place at the NGA. In these pages, we celebrate the reorganisation of the national collection in newly revamped and re-lit galleries.

NGA Director Gerard Vaughan discusses these changes, the new vision and thematic approaches being taken in both the Australian and international art galleries in a richly illustrated article. There is now an inherent dynamism to the displays that builds a desire to see more of the NGA’s rich and varied collection, and this is the intention for the future: to regularly changeover the displays to share more of the collection with our visitors over time.

A visit from an old friend is also detailed in an interview with Patti Adler, who was reunited for the first time in forty years with Jackson Pollock’s Blue poles 1952—for two decades, her family’s most treasured painting before it was sold to Australia in 1973. Her visit not only reminds us of one of many bold and courageous decisions that set the standard and direction of the NGA in its formative years but also, hearteningly, beyond the fanfare, it’s a story of the human aspect of great art.

NGA Contemporary, on Canberra’s lakeside, reopens in December and plays host to The Last Temptation: the art of Ken + Julia Yonetani. Deborah Hart delves into the surprising mediums and methods adopted by this international artist-duo to bring their geopolitical installations to fruition. Anne O’Hehir and Shaune Lakin present the best of twentieth-century photography, where the world is indeed beautiful and infinite in its variety. Anne Gray probes paintings in our major exhibition to reveal the qualities that made Tom Roberts such a significant figure in forming a uniquely Australian visual identity.

Education is also a focus, as we examine the intersections between art and learning.

While you may no longer be part of the formal education sector, the NGA sees all its

visitors as lifelong learners. In a precursor to her impending visit in January for the National Visual Art Education Conference, Rika Burnham of the Frick Museum in New York gives us a WHACK!, detailing how acts of interpretation can occur ‘implicitly, without words’. The process Burnham reveals in her article is an exciting alternative teaching method, a departure from her regular practice of learning through conversation in galleries.

We very much look forward to hearing more from this agent-provocateur of art education when she comes to Canberra.

Another revelation is the rich seam of material held in the NGA Research Library.

Joye Volker and colleagues explain how researchers can ‘walk the many paths taken by key figures in the visual arts’ by accessing the unique archive and ephemera collections at the NGA. Two dynamic Indigenous professionals, Katina Davidson and Kimberley Moulton are leading the way in the interpretation of Indigenous cultural material. They share their experiences as the NGA’s 2015 Indigenous Arts Fellows, a mentoring program now in its sixth year with the support of Wesfarmers Arts.

Arts education programs, whether in-depth mentoring or fun activities or informative tours, rely on the generosity of government and organisational grants and on private donors such as Tim Fairfax AC, who has recently given a significant gift to the NGA to help realise the full potential of our education programs. The gift was made in honour of former NGA director the late Betty Churcher AO, and will allow the NGA to fulfil her important dictum, espoused in her awardwinning 1974 book Understanding art: ‘A work of art cannot exist in a vacuum, its value lies in its ability to extend our awareness and satisfy the imaginative aspect of our natures. In other words, it needs you to make it a work of art’.

Recent additions to the NGA’s collection speak to universal themes, reminding us once again of the boundless variety of global art practice. A work by British-Nigerian artist

Yinka Shonibare goes intergalactic while pointing to deeper implications for those who remain earthbound. A great modern master, Paul Cézanne enters the collection in a new medium—a gift that prefigures the introduction of the NGA’s Cézanne Watercolour and Drawing Fund. A still life by little known abstract painter John Wardell Power adds another piece to the puzzle of Australian twentieth-century art (Lara Nichols would like to acknowledge Dr Ann Stephen’s assistance in researching her article on Power).

Yang Yongliang’s exquisite photographic scroll has a quality specific to China yet with global significance. Two recent works in Jan Nelson’s long-running series Walking in tall grass capture the vagaries of youth in technicolour.

Perhaps most profound, however, is the journey taken by Roberts’s portrait of close friend Louis Abrahams. It was first seen by the NGA’s Director in a Christie’s advertisement on the back of the spring issue of Artonview this year and has since been secured for the national art collection with the very generous support of Krystyna Campbell-Pretty, in memory of Harold Campbell-Pretty, and Allan and Mavourneen Cowen. The painting joins, for a limited time, a companion portrait of Abrahams’s wife, Golda, in our summer exhibition, which was opened by Prime Minister the Hon Malcolm Turnbull MP in early December.

Finally, we acquired a work by Jeffrey Smart, a work through which he cemented his unmistakable iconography and payed homage to earlier great masters. Along with other works in the national collection and the very important early work, The salvagers 1946, which we are seeking to acquire through the Members Acquisition Fund, we hope to present a full picture of Smart’s undeniable influence on Australian art.

For more than a glimpse of life, the universe and everything else, come to the NGA! Katie Russell, Head of Learning and Access

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Installing Jackson Pollock’s Blue poles 1952 in its new home on Level 2, where its intensity becomes palpable under low ceilings and new LED lighting

DIRECTOR’S WORD Gerard Vaughan

Just over a year has passed since I began at the NGA, and it’s been a year characterised by major change. Of course, change is always expected with a new director, and it’s one of the first things you’re asked about in any job interview; but it’s more than that. In the past twelve months, the NGA team has undertaken some very ambitious projects and schedules to bring about a decidedly new NGA experience.

This kind of evolution usually happens over years, not months, and, to be honest, we’re just getting started.

Certainly, since midyear, much of it, at least in terms of the new collection displays, has happened behind screens and walls, first for Australian art, then international. But a lot has also happened in the public eye, in the media and, of course, through Artonview.

In some ways, it began with the lifting of the ‘no photography’ policy at the beginning of the year. This simple move opened up the collections to the public like never before, allowing everyone to take snaps of their favourite works or pictures of themselves with

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their chosen treasure and, moreover, to share the experience with their family and friends around the world. It was the first of many steps underpinning our ambitious schedule of exhibitions, events and openings that are happening right now, in December, and in the coming months.

We have our definitive Tom Roberts exhibition, the astonishing work of Ken and Julia Yonetani, Ken Tyler and the American print revival and the best of the world’s photographs, all of which are covered in some way in the pages that follow. We also have a very interesting take on the use of colour in twentieth-century art—especially in the post Second World War period—in the simply titled Black and, of course, the Inge King centenary exhibition. But I want to take this opportunity to reflect briefly on some of this year’s most memorable achievements, all made possible by our very committed teams of professionals.

We decisively tackled the issue of Asian art provenance and have put into place rigorous

procedures both to prevent problems in the future and to sort out problems from the past.

The initial findings, and subsequent review process, have gone well, but the project will continue for some time—those interested can keep up to date on the progress of this immensely important undertaking by visiting our website. We remain in close touch with government and professional colleagues in India, and they have complimented us on the review processes we have developed.

Also important to our relationships close to home is our twinning project with the Papua New Guinea National Museum and Art Gallery. The project, promoted and funded by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, began earlier in the year and we sent curators, conservators and other experts to help reinvigorate their institution in celebration of their country’s fortieth anniversary.

Our Deputy Director Kirsten Paisley attended the opening of their relaunch exhibition Built on culture in September. I understand that it was spectacular. And, of course, their museum’s

director Andrew Moutu was here in Canberra in August for the opening of our sister exhibition of Sepik River art, Myth and magic, to which they made generous loans.

We completed an extensive rebranding process, the results of which can be seen in our new visual identity and what we hope will become a more identifiable NGA style.

As part of this, our signage has been rethought and I hope you will agree it is better and more useful, incorporating digital technologies to help visitors find their way around or in making new discoveries. In this respect, much more will be rolled out over the coming year.

We want to transform the visitor experience, to invite new audiences to engage with us on site and remotely and to make regular visits both common and eagerly anticipated. I have outlined much of this before, but it’s now time to start showing you what we’ve been doing. So, come to the NGA for the exciting exhibitions, come for the new displays—and to reconnect with Blue poles 1954 in its new setting, as Patti Adler for the first time in forty

years did in October (see pages 24–9)—and come for the new atmosphere. We hope you’ll find it a relaxing and interesting place to be.

Very importantly, our role as a centre of education will also have a renewed focus next year. We hope to be inspired in this endeavour by the speakers at the National Visual Art Education Conference at the NGA in January, as we already have been by the generous support this year of our Council member Tim Fairfax AC, who has given a substantial sum for the NGA’s education program in memory of the considerable and infectious passion Betty Churcher AO brought to this aspect of community engagement with the arts.

Finally, I would like to pay special tribute to L Gordon Darling AC, CMG, who passed away in August. He has been an essential part of the Australian art world and, with his wife Marilyn, a powerful force in the world of philanthropy for many decades. Gordon also had a particularly close relationship with the NGA and helped shape this institution as

its Chair from 1982 to 1986. He spearheaded the formation of the American Friends of the National Gallery of Australia and created the Gordon Darling Australia Pacific Print Fund.

Our Hermannsburg School gallery is named after him and his wife, Marilyn, and we will continue to honour his memory. I had the privilege of speaking at Gordon’s memorial event at the National Portrait Gallery, addressing his contributions both overall to the Australian art world and in particular to the NGA. Lastly, I would like to thank all NGA staff and volunteers for the huge contributions they have made through the past year and to wish all of our supporters a happy holiday season, which I hope will include a visit to the NGA to see not only our major Tom Roberts exhibition but also the reinstalled permanent collections and the many smaller supporting shows in both Australian and international art.

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THE LAST TEMPTATION Deborah Hart examines the strange and beautiful work of Julia and Ken Yonetani

Artists Ken and Julia Yonetani present a sumptuous visual feast this summer at NGA Contemporary. In two major installations, The Last Supper 2014 and Crystal Palace: The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nuclear Nations 2012–13, a sense of plenty is underpinned by the notion that, although the world appears rich in natural and material resources, the wellbeing of the planet is held in precarious balance.

In the awesomely beautiful The Last Supper, made entirely out of salt sourced from the Murray–Darling Basin, the Yonetanis have created a work rich in symbolism. Drawing its title from Leonardo’s great Renaissance mural of the same name, this work plays with the idea of the final meal—the endgame of how

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we utilise our natural resources. The artists’ use of salt came out of a residency working with scientists at the Murray–Darling Freshwater Research Centre, where their research focused on the question of how to deal with rising salt levels in the water irrigating crops in a region regarded as a food bowl. Their initial concerns broadened, however, to include the impact of salinity in a global sense, noting that the subject of salt has been fraught since the beginning of human existence.

On a practical level, the medium of salt posed great difficulties for the artists due to its solubility. They experimented with a range of binding agents, making a hundred moulds with little success until, finally, they broke one open to find their first intact salt

work. It was an emotional moment that set the scene for what was to follow. After their initial smaller works, the creation of a ninemetre salt banquet table replete with an array of foodstuffs and objects—oysters, lobsters, bread, lemons, grapes, cutlery, crockery and candelabras—was a labour of love and a great challenge. It connects with a long tradition of still-life and banqueting subjects in the history of art, as well as alluding to different religious traditions. As Julia noted in a 2014 video for Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Arts Centre:

Although the work isn’t necessarily a religious comment, The Last Supper is obviously connected to biblical stories, and salt is very much connected to not only the bible but a lot of religions, including in Japan—it’s seen as a very sacred material.

Opposite: Ken and Julia Yonetani with their Crystal Palace: The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nuclear Nations at Artereal Gallery, Sydney, 2012 Photo: Mark Evans / Newspix. © News Ltd

Above: The Last Supper 2014, salt Photo: Silversalt. © Ken + Julia Yonetani. Image courtesy the artists and Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Arts Centre, Sydney

The Yonetanis were interested in the potency of salt as a preserver and taker of life. While the many objects and the idea of banqueting both imply abundance, the whiteness of the food and table, despite their tantalising ascetic beauty, might also suggest devastation or, as Ken described it, a ‘kind of Armageddon’.

Julia agrees that this is a work for the twentyfirst century, laden with the anxieties of the current age. While, upon reflection, the idea of plenty may be deceptive, it is part of the artists’ paradoxical point. To tempt is to entice, and the consequences—as for Alice in Wonderland travelling down the proverbial rabbit hole— may lead us into a world full of questions and paradoxes.

Beauty, desire and uncertainty are interwoven in The Crystal Palace: The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nuclear Nations. The impetus for it came out of the Yonetanis’ concern about the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant disaster in Japan—both their immediate anxiety for Ken’s family and the wider implications for many locals. As in their more recent work on The Last Supper, their research broadened to include the global arena. They conceived of an installation in which the size of each chandelier corresponded with the output of nuclear power plants in each of the thirty-one nuclear nations of the world, the three largest chandeliers being the USA, France and Japan.

The design elements of each chandelier also correspond aesthetically with the country in question.

The idea of using the chandelier was sparked when the Yonetanis were entranced by displays in shop windows while on a bus ride in London. Tempted by the beauty of antique chandeliers and their history in the evolution of electric light, they envisioned a contemporary take on The Great Exhibition of 1851 in the Crystal Palace, which aimed to showcase the world’s latest technologies (those of the Industrial Revolution). This set the stage for the artists’ idea of nuclear nations.

Faced with the challenge of how to represent radiation, they hit upon using uranium glass

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beads and ultraviolet light bulbs that make the green of the beads fluoresce in the dark. While their chandeliers are entirely safe, the idea of recycling a uranium by-product that glows in the dark appealed to the artists.

Life and death, fullness and emptiness, are recurring themes in their work. In The Five Senses 2011, ornate salt frames sit empty on the wall, questioning the impacts of a lifestyle of abundance. The work, inspired by Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens’s painting The five senses 1617–18 (also known as Allegory of the senses) in the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, focuses on sight, touch, taste, hearing and smell in sumptuous detail. As Julia wrote in recent correspondence:

Brueghel the Elder and Rubens’s work depicts a new world based on consumption of luxury goods, at a time when expanding markets, colonisation, and agricultural revolutions were feeding the increasingly lavish and abundant tables of the European upper class. In our work The Five Senses, in place of lavish depictions of a vast variety of agricultural produce and foodstuff, we find only ornate frames that have turned to salt. The viewer is invited to question the impacts of a lifestyle of abundance, the unsustainability of transferring this system on a global scale.

Come March 2016, Julia and Ken will stage a second feast as part of the NGA’s exhibition to coincide with Canberra’s Enlighten festival: an edible work of art also titled ‘The Last Temptation’. This cross-cultural event will recall the banquets of the past and reference

the endangered Great Barrier Reef within a Zen-inspired aesthetic that also relates to Japanese gardens. As with their other works, the artists remind us in diverse, inventive and multilayered ways to engage mindfully with the precarious beauty of the natural world and to be aware of our place in it. For, in the end, the future is up to us.

THE LAST TEMPTATION A veritable feast of the extraordinary work of Ken and Julia Yonetani. At the NGA from 12 December to 3 April For the diary: Artist talk, Ken and Julia Yonetani, James Fairfax Theatre, 12 December, 2.00 pm

Crystal Palace: The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nuclear Nations 2012–13, uranium glass beads and crystals, metal structure, UV lighting © Ken + Julia Yonetani. Image courtesy the artists and Mizuma Art Gallery, Tokyo. Photo: Catherine Brossais

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MOVING THE CAMERA Cindy Sherman Untitled #92 1981, chromogenic colour photograph. Purchased 1983

Anne O’Hehir and Shaune Lakin take a look at how photographers’ views of the world have changed over the last century

© The artist and Metro Pictures, New York. Image courtesy Metro Pictures

In 1928, Munich-based publishing house Kurt Wolff Verlag AG brought out a rather modest volume of one hundred photographs.

The photographer, Albert Renger-Patzsch had opted for the somewhat prosaic title ‘Die Dinge’ (‘Things’), but the publisher had insisted that ‘Die Welt ist schön’ (‘The world is beautiful’) would have more commercial appeal. Some socially engaged critics at the time, such as Walter Benjamin and Franz Roh, were dismissive of its non-political stance.

But, despite a few detractors, the book was enthusiastically received and has gone on to iconic status.

Quoted in The book of 101 books, RengerPatzsch believed, ‘one should surely proceed

NGA begins its new exhibition of outstanding photographs from the national collection, and it is from Renger-Patzsch’s landmark book that the exhibition takes its title, and also its sense of the very particular relationship to things in the world made available by the camera.

The NGA holds 121 rare vintage photographs by Renger-Patzsch. Many of them were among the hundred reproduced in his book and the others similarly reflect his exacting and cool vision. Renger-Patzsch’s photography, however, is but one example among many that illustrate the marvellous quality and importance of the photography collection. A department dedicated to the medium was established at the NGA in 1980

from the essence of the object and attempt to represent it with photographic means alone, regardless of whether it is a human being, landscape, architecture or something else’. Die Welt ist schön was in many ways an astounding study of the world, celebrating beauty wherever the photographer found it—in nature, of course, but also equally in the industrial and the man-made, as technology was hailed as the carrier for a new sense of beauty in the modern world.

The book came at the end of what is arguably one of the most exciting decades in photographic history, a time when photographers embraced new ways of seeing aligned to new ways of thinking. It is where the

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Left, from top: William Klein Christmas shoppers, near Macy’s, New York, 1954 1954, gelatin silver photograph.

Purchased 1993 Garry Winogrand World’s Fair, New York 1964, gelatin silver photograph. Purchased 1978 © The estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Opposite, clockwise from left: Albert Renger-Patzsch Sempervivum percarneum 1922–23, gelatin silver photograph. Purchased 1983 Imogen Cunningham (Magnolia Blossom) 1925, gelatin silver photograph. Purchased 1978 Tina Modotti Mexican sombrero with hammer and sickle 1927, gelatin silver photograph. Purchased 1980

with the appointment of Ian North as the first curator, although much of the groundwork had already been done in the previous seven years by then director James Mollison and assistant director Robert Deane, who identified early on the significance of photography in telling the story of art in the modern age.

Many portfolio collections by prominent photographers, including Brassaï, August Sander, W Eugene Smith, Ansel Adams, Garry Winogrand and André Kertész, came into the collection in those early years.

These compilations, often printed under the supervision of the artist, were promoted widely in the 1970s as public museums started collecting photography and the market grew.

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Surprisingly, at the time, the market placed more stock in portfolio collections than it did in vintage prints, which, only after 1980, were placed at a higher value by those in charge of the collection. From those bold beginnings in the 1970s, the national photography collection has grown to over thirty thousand items—those early portfolio purchases added to over the years with strategic purchases and gifts of work of great depth and rarity by photographers right across the world.

The NGA’s exhibition The world is beautiful mines this incredible collection to provide an account of one of the medium’s fundamental attributes: its capacity to develop relationships with subjects based on the camera’s physical

proximity to them. Indeed, one of the most basic decisions that a photographer makes is simply where he or she places the camera in relation to the subject. Close up, far away and in-between each carry quite different associations and connotations. One of the aspects that distinguished photography in the 1920s was the propensity for photographers to get really close to the subject, resulting in images that are startling in their unfamiliarity and strangeness. Leading photographers from the period, including Imogen Cunningham and Edward Weston in America and Lázló Moholy-Nagy, Dora Maar and Man Ray in Europe, all experimented with proximity to their subjects, producing unexpected and often

provocative results. The appeal of the close-up has since remained a constant in the work of many photographers, and examples by Robert Mapplethorpe and Annette Messager in the 1980s play off earlier photographs in new and exciting ways.

Photojournalism then essentially dominated the world of photography in Europe, America and Australia from the thirties to the sixties, and work produced during this period tends to be preoccupied with distance and space.

As photographers roamed city streets and the open road, their images began to reflect shifting attitudes to space and our engagement with it. Now, the multiplicities and changes accompanying the move from analogue to

digital have opened up the world in entirely new ways. At each stage, the acclaimed photographers of their time step forward to illustrate our tale: W Eugene Smith, Bill Brandt, Diane Arbus, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Eikoh Hosoe, Cindy Sherman, Thomas Ruff, Helen Levitt, Lee Friedlander, Robert Frank, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Tina Modotti, Walker Evans and a host of other greats, including some of Australia’s leading exponents, Max Dupain, Olive Cotton, Bill Henson and Michael Riley.

Friedlander, whose ironically witty and complex vision of America began in the 1960s, is quoted in Peter Galassi’s 2005 book on the photographer as once having said of his career, ‘I never dreamed I would be having this much

fun’. In presenting some of the most moving and most loved images in the collection, the NGA seeks to capture for its audience some of the evident delight that photographers take in turning their cameras on the world and re-imaging it, making it beautiful through the power of their vision and understanding in ways that, in turn, can miraculously change our way of experiencing it.

THE WORLD IS BEAUTIFUL An exhibition of the most important photographs ever created. At the NGA from 4 December to 10 April For the bookshelf: The world is beautiful is available at the NGA Shop and selected bookstores nationally

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CHANGING NGA Gerard Vaughan introduces the NGA’s new collection displays

There’s been a great deal of activity both behind the scenes and in front of your very eyes at the NGA. In addition to our summer blockbuster, Tom Roberts, visitors now have the opportunity to see the collections in an entirely new arrangement and configuration, marking a break with the way we have presented them in recent times.

With the prospect of our new building hopefully not too many years away, we’ve entered an interim period in which—with a vast, growing collection still confined to a building designed in the early 1970s—we are no longer trying to offer the whole picture of Australian and international practice but rather a focused series of significant and interesting ideas and themes and areas of special strength.

By bringing the Australian works of art previously installed on level 2 down to level 1, as the first galleries to be encountered by visitors, we can link the Indigenous collections with the non-Indigenous, so that the whole panorama of Australian visual culture, historic and contemporary, will be available together to create interesting dialogues. The international collections, which had been so prominently displayed on level 1 since we opened in 1982, are now on level 2, offering fascinating new perceptions of many of our familiar global masterpieces—not least of which is Blue poles 1952, resplendent with our new LED lighting, enabling us to see colours and details hardly visible before.

The first thing you’ll notice about the Australian collections is that we have moved away from the normal chronological hang and created a series of rooms and spaces where issues relevant to the Australian experience are explored. This means that in some rooms we are mixing up media—you’ll find paintings, photographs and drawings, and sometimes

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video, presented together—with themes that might begin from an early historical period and be carried right through to now. Others will be more self-sufficient.

One of the benefits of this is that up to fifty per cent of the Australian rooms will be changed every six months. So, over a period of a year or two, if you come regularly, you will constantly see new and surprising things.

While it is essential that the key masterpieces are always on display, as they are clearly public favourites—our destination works, particularly required by teachers who are aligning a visit to the NGA with curricula—we are also getting out many works that have not been seen in decades. Indeed, some sixty per cent of works in our new displays have not been on show in recent times.

Upstairs, on level 2, we have also devised new arrangements for the international collections.

Above all, Blue poles is now in its permanent new home, looking fantastic. It’s not the first time Blue poles has been hung in a room with a lower ceiling height. Also in this issue, there is an interview with previous owner Ben Heller’s daughter Patti Adler and photographs of Blue poles as it was originally installed in their apartment in New York. And it was also in a smaller room with a lower ceiling when it was lent to the National Gallery of Victoria as part of the celebration of the 2003 reopening of its building after its redevelopment and as part of the NGA’s own twentieth-anniversary program of major loans to other Australian public galleries. Many people in Melbourne felt that they were experiencing Blue poles in an entirely new way, so it will be interesting to see how our audiences react here in Canberra.

The upper gallery will also contain an exhibition of over one hundred of the most important Australian and international

photographs from the collection. I think it would be hard to find a more inspiring and enriching experience in relation to key moments in the history of photography. Many of our greatest works will be on view.

You may not instantly recognise some of the new spaces on level 2 when you visit. One of the first things we did was demolish all the secondary walls that had crept into those spaces over the years, as successive directors and curators tried to create more wall space for the NGA’s rapidly growing collections. But what we realised when we made those demolitions was that we were looking, for the first time in many years, at the spaces designed by Col Madigan, as they were when the building first opened in 1982. Many architectural details have been revealed. It will not just be the works of art displayed in a different way but also a different spatial experience.

We want to make a visit to the NGA a very relaxed and enjoyable experience from the moment you arrive, including NGA Contemporary down by the lake—which, given that we have recently appointed our first ever Senior Curator of Contemporary Global Practice, Jaklyn Babington, will be largely dedicated to individual artists’ installations.

Make sure you see the current Ken and Julia Yonetani installation curated by Deborah Hart; it is utterly breathtaking.

So there is a lot to see, and we hope you will enjoy exploring the building and collections anew, along with the Tom Roberts exhibition, which we believe is a really significant opportunity for Australia’s national gallery to present a definitive exhibition on one of our greatest artists. I hope that you will all come back to the NGA over the summer, with your family and friends, to enjoy these new experiences.

COLONIAL VIEWPOINTS Portraiture enjoyed great popularity in the nineteenth century as colonists sought to record their presence and deeds for posterity

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FEDERATION AND EXPATRIATES Grand nation-making pastoral landscapes, allegorical themes and grand Edwardian portraits referencing artists’ experiences of London’s Royal Academy, the Paris Salon and occasionally the avant-garde

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LIFE IN THE MACHINE AGE Embodying Australia’s vibrant modernity, artists distilled complex subjects into ideal forms through Cubism and abstraction to convey movement, motion and the effects of mechanisation

SURREALISM As fixed orthodoxies collapsed following the First World War, a cohort of artists in Australia flocked to adopt the possibility of Surrealism, with James Gleeson as one of the foremost exponents

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POP, BEACH, SEX AND SUN The revolutions, counterculture and the lust for life that characterised Australian art and society in the 1960s and 1970s

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NOW Brought together by a concern with process and the proposition that the experience of art can be transformative

COLLECTION HIGHLIGHTS The most significant works of artists held in considerable depth in the national art collection

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BEYOND THE HYPE Patti Adler speaks to Eric Meredith about what it was like growing up with Jackson Pollock’s Blue poles and other masterpieces of Abstract Expressionism in the living room. She’s joined by her husband, Peter

Eric: Patti, you’re the daughter of art collector Ben Heller, who previously owned Blue poles 1952. And you lived with the work for many years as a child through to adulthood.

Patti: Yes, he [Ben] purchased the piece in 1957, so I was six, and sold it in 1973.

Eric: The work toured pretty extensively during the 1950s and 1960s.

Patti: It was in and out of the apartment a lot.

It was very exciting every time it left because it was too big to fit through the front door.

We lived in an apartment building [in New York], on the tenth floor, so they basically took one wall of this historic building and made a gigantic window. They would take the entire window out, put Blue poles in this big box and block off the street—Central Park West!—and they would have seven guys out there, with

these ropes and pullies, taking it out of the window and lowering it down to street level and putting it in the van.

Eric: We have some great pictures of that actually.

Patti: The Seven Santini Brothers.

Eric: So, what was it like the last time it went through that window in 1974.

Patti: Oh, we were all really sad leading up to that. We assembled in the living room the day before it left, and we, as a family, had a chance to talk about it. Everybody went around in a circle and said their feelings about it. Things have come and gone but, for some reason, this was the biggest loss we all experienced.

Peter: As an outsider who was there, it seemed almost like losing a pet.

Patti: There was a lot of crying.

Eric: And now, after seeing it again?

It was an emotional reunion. Has it stirred particular memories?

Patti: It really is impressive. I’m blown away by it. The frenzy, power and intensity of Blue poles, it’s spectacular, and it’s really done well to overcome its detractors. Blue poles was more than an object to us. It was so special.

And I really hope our visit has added a new dimension to the painting—showing the world the great value and love that it was raised in in our family. It is a piece of our history, a piece of my family and a piece of me.

Eric: And a piece of Australia’s history, too.

Although not always so loved here. When the NGA purchased Blue poles in 1973, it caused

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quite a controversy, a lot of it was whipped up by the media. It was a scandal: the amount of money that was spent, Pollock’s drinking habits were brought into question, allegations of Tony Smith and Barnett Newman contributing to the work. How much of all that were you aware of?

Peter: Very little. All of the hoopla in America was that it was the most ever paid [US$2 million] for an American painting.

It was a record that stayed in the Guinness Book of World Records for ten years, so it was quite ahead of its time in terms of its price.

Obviously, the Australian government got its money’s worth. But we were not aware of any of the controversy in Australia.

Patti: Jackson Pollock was a very, very wellknown, very well-respected painter in the United States, so we had long since passed the time where people were saying, ‘Any

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kindergartener could do this’. ‘Jack the Ripper’, all that kind of stuff, was long gone. He was well established as the leader of the Abstract Expressionism movement.

Eric: But the main controversy in America was just the US$2 million?

Peter: I would say its competitors—of his masterpieces—Echo 1951 and One 1950, hang in the Museum of Modern Art, so, I guess, you could call it controversy that it was going out of America, among the art world. Whereas, Patti’s dad felt it was very important that as many people get to see it as possible. And one of the things he wanted to say [to the NGA] was that he’s so happy the way you’ve handled it, and that you’re sending it to London [for the exhibition Abstract Expressionism at the Royal Academy of Arts in September 2016], and it’s his kind of vision coming true.

Patti: He was very involved with this art movement from its early years, and there was a struggle among these American artists to gain recognition. Even in America, the European painters were getting all the attention and prestige. So, he worked very hard with the dealers and the painters and the museums to try to establish Abstract Expressionism as an important movement. It was very, very important to him that these major works land in major museums.

Eric: You mentioned One, which MoMA has now, and that also caused a bit of controversy when your father bought it. Not only was it your father’s first Pollock but also the most money spent on one of the artist’s at that time and the largest to go into private hands.

Patti: It was. He went down to Pollock’s studio when he first met him and spent some time

Page 24: Blue poles 1952 in the living room of Patti Adler’s childhood home in New York, early 1970s Image courtesy Patti Adler

Page 25: Patti reunited with Blue poles for the first time in forty years at the NGA in Canberra, October 2015 Opposite: Ben Heller’s New York apartment, showing his extraordinary collection, early 1970s Images courtesy Patti Adler

Right: Blue poles being removed from the apartment to start its journey to Australia, 1974

with him. He went down one day and then he went every day all the rest of the summer. They talked a lot about music and art and he asked if he could buy it. Jackson said he would sell it—I don’t think he’d ever sold a really large drip painting before; I think it was the first he ever sold. He asked for $8000, so my father said, ‘Can I buy it on an instalment plan?’

He gave him four years to buy it. He [Ben] was twenty-eight years old. His parents thought he was crazy.

Eric: I can imagine. He has said the decision to buy One was made by him, Pollock, Lee Krasner and your mother, Judy Heller.

Patti: No. Well, he went to Lee and he said, ‘Lee, do you think he would sell me this painting?’, and she said, ‘If it were me, I wouldn’t but, talk to Jackson, maybe he will’. But, together, Lee, my father and Jackson

decided on the name for it. They were sitting around one evening after dinner talking about things and the painting, and Jackson said that he felt really relaxed and at one with nature when painting it, so they all decided that it should be called One—not the number ‘one’ but ‘at one’, in harmony. It’s very different to the intensity of Blue poles.

Eric: Yes, he talks about it in a MoMA interview of 18 April 2001. Was there ever a time you were involved in decisions on purchasing art?

Patti: I used my babysitting money to buy something from Leo Castelli—my first work of art. And, when I was young, my dad said to my brother, sister and me, ‘I’d like to start you on your first art collection, so here’s a dozen pieces that I’ve paid 1000 dollars or less, and you can each pick one’. I was maybe twelve.

My sister took some sculpture of a dog and my brother took something, I forget what. I was the oldest and I was really enamoured with my father. I wanted to grow up and be just like him. I said to myself, ‘These are the things that he is collecting’, and I had already bought my first [Roy] Lichtenstein with my babysitting money, so I picked this piece by Robert Rauschenberg. I hauled it all over to college, to graduate school, lived with it, hung it on the wall. Long past when my father had sold all of his, I still had it.

Almost ten years ago, my husband and I were building a home in Hawaii, so we said, ‘Let’s sell the Rauschenberg’. That was also very sad for us because we’d had it for fortysomething years. It was a piece of our lives.

We put it to auction at Christie’s, and I listened on the phone from my office in Boulder, Colorado. My parents were there on the cell

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Left: Unloading Blue poles in Sydney, 1974 Opposite: Blue poles pulled from the Santini Brothers crate for the first time in Australia, 1974

phone, listening to the auctioneer selling this painting, which had been estimated to bring in maybe US$400,000 to US$600,000.

I listened as the auction went on: 400, 450, 500, 550, 600, 650, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, until it finally sold for a million and a quarter.

All the people sitting around my father, they said, ‘Congratulations to your daughter.

It’s wonderful. How much did she pay for it?’ He says, ‘Well, she didn’t pay anything.

She got it from me’. And they said, ‘Well, what did you pay for it?’, and he said, ‘$400’.

Eric: Quite some time ago, though.

You obviously had a good eye at the beginning.

Patti: I guess so.

Eric: And does art still play a role in your life?

Do you collect still?

Patti: We do. We have some Perle Fines, some Miriam Shapiros from the East Hampton years.

We had a Newman we sold around the same time as the Rauschenberg. But we’re retired now, so we needed to liquidate our assets so that we could afford to travel to Australia.

Eric: And come visit Blue poles.

Patti: That’s right. My father just turned ninety. We had a large birthday party for him about a week ago. Everybody was there, and we all talked about it. It’s one of those things, you want to live life with no regrets. There’s something that I didn’t do one time that I regretted that my brother went and did: a

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funeral that he went to, but I never went to, and it’s something I’ve regretted all my life.

But, I always felt that, because he went, a little piece of me went with him. So, I feel like I was coming for my family and bringing a piece of them with me to see the painting. Everyone who was there at the party felt so emotional about missing out. No one has seen it since it left the house that day.

Eric: Even before we bought it, Blue poles had its influential champions, America’s Frank O’Hara leading the charge. In 1951, he described it as ‘the drama of American conscience, lavish, bountiful and rigid’.

He said it was ‘one of the great masterpieces of Western art’, and went on further to say it was America’s ‘Raft of the Medusa [1818–19, Théodore Géricault] and … Embarkation for Cythera [1717, Jean-Antoine Watteau] in one’.

But what was it to you growing up? Did you have a sense of that when you were a child?

Patti: Living with this art was so special growing up. My dad was also into classical music and used to have small orchestra ensembles come play in the living room.

We had an amazing living room worth of art. Anyone who would come to my house would have their breath taken away because it was so stunning and so spectacular.

There were so many people coming through the apartment because, in the early years particularly, the museums didn’t have American art collections. The dealers and the

museum directors would bring people from other parts of the United States and from Europe, gallery owners and museum curators, to the apartment to see the finest works of Abstract Expressionism.

And, in addition to the paintings, he collected a lot of antiquities, sculptures of Indian, Cambodian, African, Egyptian works. These are all in together. It was a really amazing collection but living with these things is different from seeing them in a museum. Because, I think, when you’re grown up, you might say to yourself, ‘Nobody really owns art, art is for everybody’, but when you’re a child you don’t feel that way. When you’re a child, you feel like you own it. And to live with it made it a part of the fabric of our lives every day. We took our portraits every year in front of it, and we would sit and talk about it.

It was really special. It was very intimate.

Eric: You mentioned the antiquities. I was reading something your father wrote for MoMA on his collection, about being a collector. He said there how they collected antiquities and then started collecting contemporary art, and they had a really troubled beginning with it. They bought a few pieces and then got rid of them. It took a little while for them to learn how to experience it. I was wondering whether you— also as an educator (albeit retired)—have any thoughts on that idea of educating people on how to experience art?

Peter: I can speak as someone who walked in in 1970 with eight of my friends, and we weren’t expecting to see this, and I knew right away that I was among masterpieces. I thought, becoming a member of the family, I better start reading really fast. Even though Patti says these were after the days that people said kids could have done it, people were still making fun of it and saying that it’s just work that wasn’t even thought out and things like that. I think, even to this day, we’re educating people that still say, ‘I don’t get it’.

The power, to be in that living room with four Rothkos and two Pollocks, it was just amazing. You can’t really describe that.

That’s why Patti’s dad felt that it had to be in museums, where there were people who did know about it and who could describe it and explain to people how it was made. It was really important to him. He expressed that to us just last week. He really feels good about this. There were people who thought he was crazy to give it [One] to MoMA. He has a few little pieces left from some of these artists but really not very much. He did sell some. He was basically a collector in the early days, and his dad was in the textile industry. He took over that company and then sold it and went into art dealing. But, from the forties to the seventies, he was an art collector, and he wasn’t really looking to make money. With Blue poles, he said to us, ‘I wasn’t Rockefeller. When they offered that kind of money, at some point, I had to say,

“Yeah, I have a family”’. It was a business deal but, obviously, as you can tell from Patti’s voice, it was much more than a business deal.

The emotion involved for him to make that decision was tremendous.

Patti: Even just last week, we asked again, ‘Why did you sell it?’, and he said that he felt he wanted to grow as a collector and experience new works.

Peter: In fact, he went to Alfonso Ossorio, another collector [and painter], to buy another Pollock—he thought he could buy it for some of the money he got for Blue poles—a piece called Lavender mist 1950, which he loved.

But, eventually, Ossorio never sold it to him.

He was able to buy other art, obviously, to keep his collection going, but that was the painting he had on his mind when he sold Blue poles.

Ossorio lived in the same neighbourhood as he did, and he was friends with him. He thought he could talk him out of it but he wasn’t able to.

Patti: It’s a passion, collecting. It really is.

Eric: He actually said once, about selling art, you sell works to bring in new experiences, and you can’t afford to have both.

Peter: Exactly. Patti went to the Metropolitan Museum [of Art] with him last week and there was a [William] de Kooning there, and they passed it by, and he goes, ‘Oh yeah, I brought that home’, as if you bring home a piece of furniture. He said, ‘It just didn’t work for me’, and there it was in the Met.

Eric: Well, anything works in a gallery, doesn’t it, in a fashion? It’s much harder to curate the shows at home.

Peter: I think you used it to refer to Patti, the phrase ‘having an eye’. I think, Ben Heller, he was the man who had the eye, along with Leo Castelli and a few other people. He was friends with these guys. He recognised them.

He was a patron. They loved him because he loved what they did at a time nobody had that eye. In 1948 is when he bought his first work of art. He was twenty-two years old. He was born in 1925. And then that story Patti told you: his first Pollock at twenty-eight. If you look at it in history, it just seems improbable, this collection that a man amassed at such an early age. We all just toasted him at his ninetieth birthday, happy that he’s alive. Really, what he did for the art world, and for the world in general, it’s an amazing legacy.

We had this idea about a year ago to make this pilgrimage. We wrote a letter to Gerard [Vaughan, Director of the NGA] back in March. He answered within twenty-four hours.

Everybody’s been just so welcoming to us.

We’re not Ben himself but we’re his emissaries.

And we can’t be happier about how it’s turning out. We just thought we’d walk into the museum and look at it at first, without even telling anyone. But, that it’s coming at this time [so near to Ben’s ninetieth birthday], we’re just tickled and it’s really the highlight of our lives, this day.

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Self-portrait 1924, oil on canvas. Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, gift of the artist at the request of the Trustees, 1924

PAINTING THE NATION Anne Gray illuminates the art and life of Tom Roberts, the great interpreter of Australian narratives at the turn of the century and an integral part of our art history

Tom Roberts was a great Australian artist.

He is arguably one of Australia’s best known and most loved artists, standing tall among his talented colleagues at a vital moment in local painting. His work was pivotal to the development of Australian art in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

He painted many remarkable images with technical prowess, which offer considerable insight into the life and people of his time.

A man of Empire, Roberts was a person of two places, Britain and Australia. He was born in Dorchester, Dorset, in the south of England and spent his first twelve years there.

He studied in London, at the Royal Academy Schools, from 1881 to 1884 and returned to England in 1903 to live and work for around twenty years. He spent almost half of his life, however, in Australia, a country dear to his heart. Indeed, Australia was the key subject of his art, and he made a major contribution to the creative depiction of this land.

Roberts was brown eyed and, in later life, brown bearded and prematurely balding.

He had a trim figure, which he maintained through exercise (walking, horse riding, cycling, gardening and tennis). As is the case with many, his eyesight deteriorated as he aged, and he had to wear thick glasses; he also became rather deaf. He spoke with a British accent, in clear incisive tones.

Throughout, he was determined to succeed and had the courage and capacity for endurance. As well as his love of art, he was fond of books and music, particularly the writings of Thomas Hardy and the works of composers Beethoven, Schubert and Wagner.

Among his greatest achievements are works of art that have become embedded in the Australian psyche. These include the four major national narratives—Shearing the rams 1888–90, A break away! 1891, The Golden Fleece 1894 and Bailed up 1895—which present everyday scenes of Australian bush life that are distinctly his own. He sought to paint works that showed the unique character of the country and depicted ‘strong masculine labour’ and celebrated Australia’s pastoral industry. He maintained

in the Argus of 4 July 1890 that ‘by making art the perfect expression of one time and place, it becomes art for all time and of all places’.

Roberts carefully orchestrated his figures in both Shearing the rams and The Golden Fleece. He masterfully arranged one figure next to another in a sequence of related but different poses, giving them a sense of physicality so we can sense the tension in their bodies, their muscles at work.

His repetition of arched, bending figures, each with slight variations, progressing down the length of the shearing shed is in the manner of Eadweard Muybridge’s studies of motion. They are deservedly Australian icons. Table Talk declared on 30 May 1890 that ‘Shearing the Rams is a work that will live, and a work by which Mr. Roberts’ name will always be remembered’. As The Age wrote on 30 May 1890, when Shearing the rams was first exhibited, it is a ‘most important work of a distinctly Australian character’.

In A break away! Roberts created a complex action picture, the rush of drought-stricken

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sheep maddened by the scent of water in arid pastoral land. He conveyed the swirling dust blowing through the trees and covering the sheep under a stark blue sky on a still, dry, hot day. In his image of the heroic stockman straining to rein in his sheep he visualised a distinctively Australian figure: strong, athletic, skilful and courageous. But this horseman is engaged in an utterly futile attempt to still the stampede of sheep. As Jane Hylton observes in the catalogue to the major new exhibition Tom Roberts at the NGA this summer, this is one of Roberts’s ‘majestic, dense images full of action and visual interest that reflected a tough era in the country’s history …’

And Roberts himself claimed that A break away! was the one painting in which his art most nearly realised his idea.

He embraced modernity and paid homage to city life in his memorable image of marvellous

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Melbourne Allegro con brio, Bourke Street west c 1885–86, a lively composition, painted quickly with spirit (or fire), in which Roberts used a light touch to convey an apparently instantaneous impression. Roberts cropped buildings and people at the edges to suggest that the scene continues outside the image— presenting only a segment, a moment in time.

He intensified the sense of excited movement by using diagonals that run out of the picture space. Indeed, the apparent casualness of the composition is like that of a snapshot and could well have been influenced by photography. As with many of Roberts’s best works there is tension between the abstract and the realistic brought together into an organic whole. Moreover, no artist before Roberts had captured the fierce glare of the hot Australian sun to such an extent as he did in paintings such as Allegro con brio and A break away!.

Above: A break away! 1891, oil on canvas. Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, Elder Bequest Fund, 1899 Opposite from top: Allegro con brio, Bourke Street west c 1885–86 and 1890, oil on canvas, National Library of Australia and National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1920 by the Parliamentary Library Committee Shearing the rams 1888–90, oil on canvas mounted on board. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Felton Bequest Fund, 1932

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Left: A summer morning tiff 1886, oil on canvas mounted on board. Art Gallery of Ballarat, Victoria, Martha K Pinkerton Bequest Fund, 1943 Opposite: ‘Evening, when the quiet east flushes faintly at the sun’s last look’ c 1887, oil on canvas.

National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, WH Short Bequest, 1944

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Roberts created a new way of looking at the bush in his ‘figures in a landscape’ narratives such as A summer morning tiff 1886. In these, he telescoped in on a small segment of the bush to depict treescapes in which the sky is absent and the eucalypts are viewed in close focus, creating works that were radically different from the wide panoramic viewpoints of earlier Australian landscape painters. As an interpreter of the Australian bush, the tangled wilderness, undergrowth and tall trees, Roberts has no equal, apart from McCubbin.

Likewise, he was a master of capturing nature’s moods in works such as the magical, evocative and meticulously planned views Slumbering sea, Mentone 1887 and ‘Evening, when the quiet east flushes faintly at the sun’s last look’ c 1887. In the former, Roberts depicted the carefree activities of people enjoying themselves: a boating party at a cliff-enclosed

beach on a hot, windless midsummer day.

He and his friends wanted, among other things, to create paintings that expressed a mood, and often did so by using poetic titles such as Slumbering sea to contribute to the meaning of their works. In ‘Evening, when the quiet east flushes faintly at the sun’s last look’, Roberts delighted in capturing a panoramic view and the specific effect of light: the warmth that embraces the landscape at the end of the day. By depicting this afterglow, he conveyed a deep, reflective emotion. Many years later, in RH Croll’s 1935 Tom Roberts: father of Australian landscape painting, Streeton commented on Roberts’s sensitivity to the quiet stillness of dusk: ‘… the exquisite and delicate variation in colour and tone of the eastern sky at sunset …’

By emphasising formal aspects, Roberts achieved a degree of abstraction in some of

his late Australian landscapes. As Deborah Edwards has observed in Tom Roberts, in Sherbrooke Forest 1946, he created ‘a deliberate construction: a screen design of attenuated light and dark patternings cut by curved foreground form’. He emphasised the height of the trees and the repeated sequence of trunks, painting the whole in muted colours.

Although broad-ranging in his choice of subject and spending the best part of his last ten years almost entirely on landscapes, portraits were central to Roberts’s work.

He was Australia’s leading portrait painter of the late nineteenth century and, for many years, portraiture was a principal source of income. Portraits also played a major role in establishing his reputation: a portrait of Sir Henry Parkes was among the earliest works that he exhibited at the Royal Academy in London, and he attained success again at the

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Academy in 1910 with two portraits, Madame Hartl 1909–10 and April girl (Miss Nettie Hollander) 1909. But Roberts did not think of himself primarily as one kind of painter or another; he was an artist who created a great many portraits among other work.

Literary critic and editor AG Stevens, writing as Titian Redde in The Bookfellow on 29 April 1899, commented that Roberts had ‘an instinct of accuracy which makes good likenesses, and an instinct of art which makes charming likenesses. The distinction may come from a turn of the chin [as in An Australian native 1888 and Lily Stirling c 1890], or the softening of bright eyes and cheeks under a gossamer veil [as in Eileen 1892], or from a bare hand holding a glove, or a cunning bit of colour in the hat [as in A French hat 1900] …’

Roberts painted many profile portraits, including the head and shoulder portraits of

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his friends Alexander Anderson, SW Pring, Smike (Arthur) Streeton, Miss Isobel McDonald and Florence Greaves. In a manuscript to his son Caleb, quoted in Croll’s 1935 book, Roberts recounts his photographer friend H Walter Barnett’s suggestion that the left side of the face was most often ‘the likeness’ side. Roberts agreed with the observation, as many of his profile portraits show. He was possibly working under the influence of contemporaries such as James McNeill Whistler, Carolus-Duran, Edouard Manet and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. He could also have been expressing admiration for the works of the great portrait painters of the past, such as Alesso Baldovinetti’s early Renaissance profile Portrait of a lady c 1465, which he could have viewed at the National Gallery, London, and other Renaissance profile portraits seen during his travels in Italy. He may also have been

influenced by Diego Velásquez and his profile portraits such as A woman as a Sybil (Dama, Juana Pacheco) 1632 in the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid and The water seller of Seville c 1620 in the Wellington Collection of Apsley House in London.

Roberts’s diverse range of striking portraits include Miss Minna Simpson 1886, Madame Pfund c 1887, Mrs L Abrahams 1888 and Elizabeth and Carmen Pinschof 1900. He had the ambition, moreover, to create a medley of famous people in his series of panel portraits Familiar faces and figures 1896–99. Roberts was also unique among his close associates in sympathetically depicting Indigenous Australian people such as Aboriginal head, Charlie Turner c 1892 and Aboriginal woman (Mariah, Yulgilbar) 1895. He was the only one among his intimate colleagues to have such an interest. In his portrait of Charlie Turner,

Opposite, from left: Madame Pfund c 1887, oil on canvas. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, purchased 1948 Eileen 1892, oil on canvas. Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, purchased 1892 Right: Aboriginal head, Charlie Turner c 1892, oil on canvas on paperboard. Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, purchased 1892

Roberts created a remarkably individualised figure whose floating head and upward-looking eyes give him a melancholic look. Indeed, the focus on his subject’s eyes conveys a sense of inner life and spiritual vision. There is, however, another way of viewing the portrait: to see Charlie’s upturned eyes as expressing fear, as if he was looking at some threatening authority. The portrait of Charlie Turner was particularly admired by the reviewer of the Sydney Morning Herald on 2 September 1892, who described it as having been painted with strength and fidelity.

In 1901, Roberts accepted a commission to paint Opening of the first parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia by HRH The Duke of Cornwall and York (later King George V), May 9, 1901 1903 (commonly known as ‘The Big Picture’). The decision to commission Roberts came from his reputation as a portrait

painter of individuals. He was moved by the historic event and found the shaft of sunlight that came down from the central dome of the exhibition building, spreading across the assembled crowd to the royal couple on the dais, to be emblematic. From that experience, he made a lively oil sketch capturing this fleeting effect of light and later extrapolated the small oil composition to a large canvas by the traditional means of squaring up. He also made individual portraits—some in pencil and some in oil— of all the main figures and then placed his many portraits into the outline of the large canvas, attempting to remain faithful to the sitter. Visitors to Tom Roberts at the NGA this summer will be able to see for the first time this painting at eye level and with the small oil sketch and portrait studies showing how he developed the image.

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On the completion of the picture, Roberts was both relieved, and proud, as he wrote to the then Australian prime minister, Alfred Deakin, ‘You know how proud I am to have put my little bit to Australian history’.

While working on the painting for two and a half years, Roberts was well remunerated, receiving over 1500 guineas for the painting (more than Streeton received for the sale of his celebrated Golden summer 1889, and twenty years before that sale). For once, Roberts had no concerns about money.

After his final return to Australia in 1923, Roberts painted many images in which he conveyed his intense visual delight in what he saw. Jessie Traill commented about these works in Croll’s 1935 book: There was something in the artist that, seeing beauty, could communicate it to those with him—never looked hills so blue and dreaming

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distant; never trees on the nearer slope so finely traced; never clouds massed so bold and luminous as when his appreciation beside one seemed to see it into one’s own eyes.

Roberts had an impact on his contemporaries McCubbin, Streeton, Conder and, later, Jesse Traill. He was a born leader and mentor and worked hard to promote the status of the artist and of art as a profession. He was articulate and had the courage to stand up to art critic and gallery trustee James Smith and others at the Argus who were critical of his and his friends’ work. He had learnt during his time in London at the Royal Academy, and by observing the behaviour of Whistler, the importance of self-promotion and the cultivation of society. As James S MacDonald later wrote in 1932 in the catalogue to A memorial exhibition of paintings by the late Tom Roberts, Roberts ‘convinced by his arguments;

he convinced by his painting … he convinced by his presence’.

Younger Australian artists such as Elioth Gruner, Lloyd Rees, Fred Williams and Arthur Boyd also looked to Roberts’s work for inspiration. More recently, Imants Tillers painted View 1989, a variation on Roberts’s The camp, Sirius Cove c 1899, which Tillers superimposed with numerals from Colin McCahon’s Numbers 1966. Elsewhere, Tillers described his response to Roberts’s 9 by 5 sketch Mentone 1888 in the autumn issue of Art and Australia in 1981: ‘I remember being drawn to its soft atmosphere—so reminiscent of the nostalgic haze produced by the earliest camera techniques …’

Aboriginal artist Dianne Jones has also created her own version of Roberts’s iconic painting in her Shearing the rams 2001 in which she emphasised the contributions

Left: Opening of the first parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia by HRH The Duke of Cornwall and York (later King George V), May 9, 1901 1903, oil on canvas. Royal Collection Trust, presented by the Commonwealth in 1904, on permanent loan to Parliament House, Canberra Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2015

Below: Mentone 1888, oil on cedar panel. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, purchased 1955

of Indigenous Australians to our pastoral industry by substituting images of her father and brother in place of two of Roberts’s shearers.

Ron Radford, in his introduction to the 1996 Roberts retrospective, described Roberts as ‘a creator of Australia’s self-image’ who reminds us of the pleasure of seeing and experiencing Australia. Roberts was a leader in Australian art, introducing a modern approach to Australian painting. As Boyd told Sandra McGrath for her 1982 book The artist and the river, ‘all Australian paintings are in some way a homage to Tom Roberts’.

TOM ROBERTS A retrospective of Australia’s premier Impressionist, who built for us a national identity as the country embarked on the journey to become a Federation.

At the NGA from 4 December to 28 March For the bookshelf: Tom Roberts is available at the NGA Shop and selected bookstores nationally For the diary: ‘Tom Roberts: in the dark’, audio adventure, 23 January, 6.00 pm ‘Bush breakfast’, Sculpture Garden, 30 January, 9.00 am ‘Conversations on Tom Roberts’, a lively series with authors, broadcasters, artists and cultural commentators, starts 17 February, 6.00 pm ‘Quintessential’, four special events for members and their guests, 4 &18 February & 3 & 17 March, 6.00 pm Members curator’s dinner, 19 February, 6.00 pm

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LESSONS FROM PICASSO Jane Kinsman extracts, from her essay for the new book Workshop, the heady first decade on Ken Tyler’s path to master printer

Master printer and publisher Kenneth Tyler AO has collaborated with some of the most gifted artists in America and mentored younger emerging artists of the day. Many of the artists were breathtaking in their innovation and virtuosity in the context of a revitalised era in printmaking, and were testament to the notable collaboration between artists and the master printer. He also worked with more idiosyncratic individuals who were not involved in the mainstream art world. In tandem with this important role in developments in American art, Tyler trained an extensive group of printers, who became practitioners of many techniques and are now established in the printmaking world

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internationally. As an active participant in advances in printmaking in America, it was Tyler’s ambition to tell the story of this medium’s extraordinary flowering in the latter half of the twentieth century—in which he and his workshops played a major part.

Tyler was born in East Chicago, Indiana in 1931, one of three siblings. His father Paul Tyira (who changed his Romanian name to Tyler in 1940) was born in Sagvar, Hungary, in 1903. His mother Elizabeth Ida Szilagyi was born in a small town outside Budapest the following year. Both parents immigrated to America as young children.

To gain an education, Tyler toiled in the blast furnaces of the Gary Works steel mill

Above: Josef Albers White line squares. A boxed portfolio containing 17 lithographs 1966, lithographs.

Purchased 1973 © The Josef and Anni Albers Foundation/Bild-Kunst.

Represented by Viscopy

Opposite: Frank Stella Star of Persia II 1967, lithograph. Purchased 1973 © Frank Stella/ARS. Represented by Viscopy

during the summer of 1951 and from January to September in 1952, working full-time during the day and studying night school at Indiana University Extension in Gary. It had been Tyler’s desire to follow with studies at the Sorbonne in Paris and to experience the world of Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse.

The Korean War that began in 1950 was ongoing, and when he applied for a passport in September 1952 Tyler was instead drafted into the army. He was allowed an early discharge and was able to continue his education after the ceasefire was established in July 1953. After part-time studies at the University of Chicago and full-time attendance at the Art Institute of Chicago, Tyler graduated with a Bachelor of

Art Education in 1957 and worked in teaching and sales research. Tyler took up studies in lithography with Garo Antreasian in 1962–63, receiving a Masters of Education at the John Herron School of Art, Indianapolis, where he continued his interest in printmaking.

In his early thirties, Tyler decided to gamble everything and become an independent printer and later a printer publisher. In September 1965, Tyler and his wife Kay established a print workshop, Gemini Ltd. Despite the success of his first year as an independent printer at Gemini, Tyler lacked the resources to fully realise his ambitions. He told Karen Thomas in a 2012 interview that he had been inspired by a lecture at the University of Southern

California in 1965 by William Lieberman, the then curator of Prints at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, who argued: ‘Don’t waste your time on art that doesn’t matter. Work with the very best you can because great art is made by great artists’. Tyler saw this as ‘a very good morality tale to tell a young man starting’.

On 1 January 1966 Gemini Graphic Editions Ltd (Gemini GEL) was established as a fineprint publishing house with the intention of creating state-of-the-art prints with various artists. Tyler partnered with Los Angeles arts patrons Stanley Grinstein and Sidney B Felsen, who provided funding and their business expertise for this newly expanded configuration. Instead of ‘jobbing’ for other

publishers and galleries, the idea was that the workshop would carry out both functions under the same roof.

An inspired Tyler aimed ‘to go to the very top’ and sought to collaborate with some of the postwar greats in the American art scene.

He set out to entice the most gifted artists of his day with the promise, ‘Here is a workshop, there are no rules, no restrictions, do what you want to do’, as he said in the 1976 documentary Reaching out. In his approach Tyler took a lesson from Picasso’s methods of printmaking where the rule book was thrown out.

For his ‘shopping list’ of artists Tyler sought ideas from a number of sources, including friends Irving Blum, John Coplans, Phil

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Leider, Barbara Rose and Henry Hopkins.

The art magazines Art Forum, Art International and occasionally Art News also played a role. Another early source of inventive and adventurous young artists was the New York gallery of Leo Castelli, whose stable included Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Frank Stella and Roy Lichtenstein.

While Tyler’s triumphs were many in the decades of the resurgence and regeneration of printmaking in postwar America, there were some instances that provide us with interesting information about the art scene of this period. Not everyone recognised the enormous potential that the new era of printmaking provided, and some approaches came to nothing.

One New York School artist in Tyler’s sights was Mark Rothko, whom he visited at his studio in October 1966. The idea that prints

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were simply reproductions of other mediums still had a wide currency in the art world and, like other artists at this time, Rothko viewed printing as replication. ‘He … wanted me to reproduce one of his watercolors and offered to give it to me to take back to LA’, Tyler recalled in correspondence with me earlier this year.

Tyler had the same initial response from Willem de Kooning when he visited him in late 1966. Indefatigable as ever and keen to ‘go to the top’, Tyler remembered one of his visits to see de Kooning: I brought lithographic transfer paper with me and asked him to try making a print using crayon or tusche on the transfer paper.

He expressed interest and I left him some papers.

Later I asked him if he would like to draw directly onto lithographic plates and this became a drawn out affair … As I guided him through the process of making layer drawings on the plates with tusche, he became enthusiastic with the process.

Tyler had to grapple with the phenomena where, when artists became richer and more sought after, their entourage of advisers grew.

De Kooning’s advice givers were getting uneasy about the artist working directly with the printer, as Tyler recalled: ‘Lee Eastman, his lawyer and friend, and Xavier Fourcade, his dealer … had ideas about publishing color silk screen reproductions of his paintings’.

De Kooning’s drawings on the lithographic transfer papers that Tyler had left with the artist were not returned. Instead, they were given to Irwin Hollander to print and publish at his workshop in New York. But both artist and printer persevered through this upset, and Tyler’s greatest disappointment was yet to come.

He recalled in February 2015 that, starting out in his career, a major collector and one of his Swedish dealers, Eva af Burén from

Opposite, clockwise from top left: Jasper Johns in front of proofs for his series Black numeral, Gemini GEL, Los Angeles, California, 1968 Photo: Malcolm Lubliner

Willem de Kooning drawing tusche washes on aluminium plates during Kenneth Tyler’s visit with the artist at his East Hampton, Long Island, New York studio, 1972 Photo: Kenneth Tyler

David Hockney observing Kenneth Tyler pulling a lithographic impression during proofing session for Hockney’s series A Hollywood collection, Gemini Ltd, Los Angeles, California, 1965 Josef Albers and Kenneth Tyler discussing Tyler’s registration device, Tamarind Lithography Workshop, Los Angeles, California, 1963 Right: Robert Rauschenberg Booster from the series Booster and 7 studies 1967, lithograph, screenprint.

Purchased 1973 © Robert Rauschenberg/VAGA. Represented by Viscopy

Galerie af Burén, visited her friend Pablo Picasso and provided him with photographs of the Josef Albers prints made with Tyler and Robert Rauschenberg’s series Booster and 7 studies 1967. Picasso ‘expressed an interest in possibly working with me if I could set up a large lithographic press in Paris to make 6 foot prints’. Sadly for Tyler:

The idea was out of the question given my financial status and the fact that I did not speak French. I was flattered that my idol Picasso would even consider working with me. This was the late 60s and my schedule for the next several years would have made this impossible at best. If I have one regret in my printing career, it would be that I never had the opportunity to work with Picasso!

Despite this regret and some drawbacks, Tyler’s career in printmaking and his persistence in approaching artists to collaborate with him at his workshops over the years created a rich reservoir of the exciting printmaking that took place in America in the second half of the twentieth century. Thanks to his generosity, the NGA in Canberra is privileged to hold such an extraordinary resource in its Tyler collection.

BEHIND THE SCENES Some of the most extraordinary prints of the twentieth century. At the NGA from 4 December to 8 May For the bookshelf: Workshop: the Kenneth Tyler collection is available at the NGA Shop and selected bookstores nationally For the diary: Curator’s tour, Emilie Owens, 6 February, 12.45 pm

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Jackson Pollock Brown and silver I c 1951, enamel and silver paint on canvas. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid © Pollock-Krasner Foundation/ARS. Represented by Viscopy

WHACK! EXPERIENCE WITHOUT WORDS Rika Burnham shares her passion for the ‘experimental edges’ of art education, before she arrives to participate in the National Visual Art Education Conference at the NGA in January

The room fills with the soft sounds of paper rising and falling. The paper feels cool to the touch, then warmer as it is activated. Within moments, it takes on a small life force of its own, balancing in one hand and then hovering as it is passed to the other, seeming to shift from weight to weightlessness. Breezes skitter through the room. I ask everyone to glance again from paper to Pollock. Next I ask that each participant take their piece of paper by its corners. Ever so slowly, ever so carefully, I say, crumple the paper. There is a moment of hesitation. Sounds of paper crumpling begin to fill the room, softly at first, then rising to a roar. Each of us hears our own sheet crushed within an immense field of noisy activity. It is the briefest of intensities, followed by a thinning of the sound, then a few wisps drifting, carrying us into silence.

Now we each hold a crumpled ball, a sheet of paper silenced, solid and still. We look again at Pollock. I ask everyone to toss their paper ball into the air above us. The paper balls hang suspended for the briefest moment, just long enough for the illusion of our paper blobs to blend in the mind’s eye with Pollock’s painted realm.

Silence returns. It feels as though the space between us and the work of art disappears, as though we are all now in the painting and are momentarily one. I ask that we now—quickly!—unfold our pieces of paper.

Again sound fills the room—but different now. The paper, having absorbed the energy of our hands, is softer, more pliant, and we see networks of lines and flat shapes, hearing in memory the noise we made. We look back to Pollock. Running our hands over the surfaces of our creased and wrinkled paper, we see and feel topographies of webs and blobs—traces of sound, pentimenti of our physical actions.

As we layer our experience into the paper, our awareness expands outward. Words have long since been edged aside as irrelevant to our converging toward, even merging with, the work of art. This is an experience excavated in and from silence, through which acts of interpretation occur implicitly, without words.

In gallery actions structured in this way, we can create events that take us together through secret portals, the back doors of the work of art, where it whispers, cajoles, insists— then disappears.

The museum educators who participated in this event were surprised—and delighted. Even for us, seasoned museum professionals, such an in-gallery activity felt rebellious, outside the normal run of museum education activities— such as drawing, writing poems, making storyboards, imagining new titles for works of art, organising theatrical exercises—all of which are conscientiously designed to address different modalities of learning. Indeed, the value of performative events such as this paper action lies precisely in their unorthodoxy, as they transform the museum into a realm of activity improvised in response to the work of art, a creative moment of choreography directly inspired by the object. To instruct and participate in this way is to seek the unpredictable: we risk, we may fail, we plunge daringly into a wordless space, trusting only that something will happen.

At the very beginning of my career as a museum educator, as an intern at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, I participated in a then (and still now) radical education program called ‘Arts Awareness’, which was run out of the Met’s education department from 1972 to 1974. Thomas Hoving, a curator

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Left: The dance performance Exhibitionism at the NGA, Canberra, 2008 Opposite, from top: Arts Awareness program in action at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, late 1970s Rika Burnham in Paper by dancer-choreographer Nancy Zendora, 1979

and scholar who had been appointed the Met’s director in 1967, is remembered today for spearheading a massive renovation and expansion of the museum and for his liberal, experimental and energetic campaign of public outreach. Yet, as an educator, I recall Hoving above all as a man passionate about infusing the Met with the new consciousness of the late sixties. His mandate was to open the doors of the museum to the people: all the people, people from every one of New York City’s boroughs and beyond, from every neighbourhood; people of every colour, rich and poor.

Arts Awareness would empower museumgoers by affording them direct access to works of art, without art-historical ‘interference’.

The central premise of the program was that certain elements are common to all the visual and performing arts—texture, line, colour, shape, space—and that these elements are translatable from one art form to another.

For example, a curved line drawn on a sheet of paper can be observed in a similar curved form in a piece of sculpture, or heard in a melodic line of music or in the rhythmic line of a poem, or felt in the rhythm of a dance.

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The result was a teaching method that aimed to help people learn how to see and experience art directly and, by extension, to enrich their experience of the world around them.

For some years, the Met hired artists— dancers, poets, painters, filmmakers, writers, photographers—to teach students in the galleries. I was lucky enough to be one of these artist-educators. I learned to rebel against the art history I had studied, and to replace the transmission of knowledge with improvisatory events in the galleries. I learned to teach outside the box—a box I had scarcely then learned to teach inside—and, in so doing, learned the value of the unorthodox. Young museum educators at the Met, and across the country, believed that the students who came to our museums needed real access to the art and that art history wasn’t giving it to them.

We had the confidence of revolutionaries overthrowing the old guard, and the fervour of radicals taking back the art for the people.

Arts Awareness gave everyone a way to matter, understand and participate: to feel more alive.

In the world of Arts Awareness, no matter who you were, what your background and what work of art, we believed you could

appreciate the arts. We shared a democratic ideal, the dream of a common language we could share with our visitors and students.

The ideal of a lingua franca uniting all art forms was exciting; our belief that you didn’t need to know anything to look at art was liberating. Imagine: you no longer needed to rely on curators or art historians; all you needed was to be invited by museum artisteducators to move, draw, write, paint and take photographs in the galleries.

As I look back, I remember this early period in my career as richly inventive. The museum teemed with energy and ideas; the program pushed the boundaries of what was thought either acceptable or possible in a museum gallery. It was new and daring and brave.

Yet Arts Awareness occupied the Met only briefly. It probably pushed too far, too fast.

At the time, I never questioned the value of Arts Awareness. Its political agenda was too seductive, its promise too great. But over time, my conviction faded, and I came to see Arts Awareness as a flimsy, failed pedagogy, a system of haphazard formal analysis that skimmed over the surfaces of works of art while evading the educator’s responsibility for guiding the

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Left, from top: Students on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, mid 1980s The Big Draw at the NGA, Canberra, 2015 Opposite: Cy Twombly Untitled 1967, oil and wax crayon on canvas. Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, gift of Richard Brown Baker, BA, 1935 Photo: Yale University Art Gallery

visitor to deep understanding and significant knowledge. Too many of the in-gallery activities sanctioned by the program, especially those devised for younger visitors, were glib, obvious, trivial or arbitrary. There were too many simpleminded sessions in which trusting students came to the Met, for example, to study Jacques-Louis David’s The death of Socrates 1787 but found themselves in the galleries in a futile tableau vivant mimicking the positions of Socrates, Plato and the other figures David depicts. Others spent their visit folding pieces of newsprint into fours and drawing random details of assorted African sculptures in each quadrant. The most egregious activities had students perceiving negative spaces in the architecture of the museum, hunting for triangles in every single work of art they saw or lying down on big sheets of paper for hours tracing one another’s ‘body portraits’.

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Nonetheless, some of the principles of Arts Awareness were sound, and a few were invaluable, such as the program’s insistence on the students’—and educators’—intrinsic freedom to see and think and question for ourselves. Likewise, some activities were worth preserving. The poet Howard Levy developed what he called ‘word structures’ as the basis of written improvisations, using verbs and nouns, for example, as formal elements; and the artist Randy Williams invented an array of focused drawing activities: both approaches provoked thoughtful looking. To this day, I myself keep alive a few of my pedagogical strategies dating back to the Arts Awareness period, ways of guiding visitors through improvisatory actions that have the power to immediately focus participants’ attention, opening them to direct apprehension of works of art in ways that words alone may not.

I use these strategies sparingly—but I use them. Still, in discussing them here, I do not mean in any way to diminish the essential value of the dialogical approach to gallery teaching I have long advocated, and which is detailed in Teaching in the art museum, a book I co-authored with Elliot Kai-Kee in 2011. I find myself most drawn to create such events as ways into abstract paintings, which some visitors are still inclined to dismiss or respond to with bafflement. Wordless physical actions provide a thrilling shortcut, replacing a protracted initial phase of suspicion and doubt, curiosity and contempt; sometimes these actions precede or punctuate dialogue, but they can also comprise an entire session.

In recent years, I have developed actions for Brancusi sculptures at the Art Institute of Chicago, a Donald Judd sculpture at Crystal Bridges and a Cy Twombly painting

at the Yale University Art Gallery. All were improvised to provoke the work of art.

The sequence of actions previously outlined, in which simple sheets of paper were deployed to lead viewers deeply into Pollock’s Brown and silver I, is a representative example of the kind of event that can charge the work of art itself with a unique energy and open potent spaces within the visitors’ imaginations. Such in-gallery actions are intrinsically performative.

Constructing shared performative actions that, except for the educator’s quiet directives, take place outside the realm of words is a way to make possible a certain kind of shared experience that mediates between the seen and the unseen, between the known and the unknowable—and even between the reverence and the seldom-acknowledged trepidation that museum going often entails. As we ‘perform’ in the presence of and in response to the work

of art, we move from seeking to understand what the work may represent to being simply present with it. Activated in this way in our presence, for example, Brown and silver I does not resist ambiguity of interpretation but revels in it—whether viewers’ interpretations are offered aloud or not.

Although I am confident of the affective power of these actions, I must confess that I am not entirely certain how to understand them theoretically or where to locate them in the context of twenty-first century museum education. Although they could be perceived as falling loosely within the domain of ingallery museum education activities, such actions are largely improvised, and in this sense they challenge many orthodoxies of museum education activities, with their emphasis on predictable and measurable results. Moreover, they are not based on any

prescriptive pedagogy, but emerge, rather, from years of experimentation with ways in which educator and participants together can yield to the directives of the work of art itself, which are often most effective when executed apart from dialogue, as independent performative acts.

Actions without dialogue can offer exceptionally direct access to works of art, and the educator can in fact implement such events without specific learning goals or defined pedagogical strategies in mind.

Indeed, such actions tend to elude the grasp of the normative values that underlie museum teaching, and are better situated conceptually at a convergence of contemporary art practice and recent developments in affective theoretical art history. As I read back in the reports on the program issued by the Metropolitan’s education department, notably

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Arts Awareness II, I was struck by references to students being ‘turned on’ and feeling more comfortable in the museum environment.

‘The way they explained it’, says Elliott Kai-Kee, ‘didn’t adequately explain what the actual practice was—there was a disjunction between actual practice and theory. Phil Yenawine [who founded the program] believed the kids were engaged in informal learning. But looking back, it was an activities approach, about not understanding the art in the normal way’.

High-profile performance artists such as Marina Abramović have made direct nonverbal audience engagement a central theme and tactic of their work for decades. As part of her ten-week-long retrospective The artist is present at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2010, Abramović sat immobile and silent for many hours each day in the galleries while visitors took turns sitting across from

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her on the other side of a small, plain table.

Her practice, she has said, always requires the participation of observers.

In a related development radical new art historians have moved, over the last two decades, away from the iconographic and historical study of objects to simply witnessing their thingness, to seeing them as requiring no less and no more than our intense attentiveness. Michael Ann Holly, for example, has explored the paths not taken by art history, asserting in her Samuel H Kress Lecture that ‘Works of art are about something far more magical, mysterious, and poetic than the transmittal of subject matter. The presence of an historical work of art in our contemporary visual world momentarily shifts the magnetic poles of what is seen and known’. Nathaniel Prottas, in a forthcoming article in the Journal of Aesthetic Education, posits such thinkers

as natural allies for museum educators, with shared methodological and theoretical affinities. And, while museum education has so often throughout its history seemed to lag behind the work of both artists and art historians, it appears to me now that, despite its shortcomings, Arts Awareness was in these terms a bold and even futuristic effort: of, but also ahead of, its time.

In his Confronting images: questioning the ends of a certain history of art, Georges DidiHuberman writes movingly about a detail in Johannes Vermeer’s The lacemaker, in the Louvre. Contrary to what we think we know ‘as’ Vermeer, there is one blob of red paint on the canvas that, even under intense scrutiny, cannot be recognised or identified as any single thing. Didi-Huberman calls it a ‘pan’, a detail without identity. Didi-Huberman is not the first to remark upon this tiny feature

Opposite: Marina Abramovic: The artist is present at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2010 Photo: Andrew Russeth

Right, from top: Students in the Frick Collection, New York, 2015 Photo: Lucas Chilczuk

Students with Robert Smithson’s Rocks and mirror square II 1971 at the NGA, Canberra, 2015

of The lacemaker 1669–70; he quotes the French poet and dramatist Paul Claudel, who saw the same tiny stroke as ‘a flash loosed by the soul’. Didi-Huberman adds that it ‘gushes forth’ and ‘unravels madly before us, like a sudden affirmation’. In an effort to make this idea comprehensible in English, Didi-Huberman and his translator render pan colloquially as ‘a whack’ of colour: a ‘distressing zone of paint’.

Didi-Huberman would, I think, be at home with the museum educators who gathered with me before Pollock’s painting at the Thyssen.

Vermeer’s red blob of paint, Pollock’s floating white blobs and our crumpled papers are what he would call ‘sovereign accidents’ that urge us to be disobedient, to resist logic, to move away from ‘content’, narrowly defined. In our paper action, we are ‘whacked’ awake into an intense awareness of Pollock’s world, just as action painting in its day ‘whacked’ centuries-

old conventions of representation. The entire painting, and the whole field of activity we generate before it in the gallery, then becomes the pan. We gush and unravel. We make the flat world of the canvas a playing field, creating an active realm, a potent space in which we exist with and in the object, powerfully and with agency. I believe that this constitutes a new opening for museum education in the twentyfirst century.

When we guide our groups through actions without words in our museum galleries, silence creates the transactional space where we ‘WHACK!’ the works of art and our own habits of looking and talking. The space is charged; we are immersed; we emerge changed. Objects come alive in ways our logical minds do not understand. Ours is a sense of surprise and newness. When we ask for engagement without words, beyond words,

collapsing the space that separates us from the object, we adhere to the work of art in some not wholly explicable way. Our action feels like a kind of magic, if you will, that enables us to merge in mind, heart and imagination with the work of art. The object itself ushers us into its presence as we cross this frontier to arrive in a place where actions occur without words, experiencing the work of art as summoned to new life. Artists such as Abramović and art historians such as Didi-Huberman distinguish themselves above all by their courage. We as educators should face the experimental edges of our teaching with equal bravery.

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ENRICHING ART SCHOLARSHIP Joye Volker, Peta Jane Jones and Simon Underschultz highlight the most valuable resources of the NGA Research Library’s unique collections

The NGA Research Library is the world’s foremost research centre for studying the visual arts in Australia, including developments in Asian, Pacific, European and North American traditions. It houses the most extensive collection of visual arts literature in Australia.

But the literature is only part of the appeal.

It is the special collections that distinguish the institution.

The library is known for its special collections of catalogues raisonné, rare books and early serials. More importantly, its unique collections of personal, organisational, gallery and ANG/NGA papers, artist ephemera files and interviews allow researchers to be drawn into historical conversations and to walk the many paths taken by key figures in the visual arts.

The archive collections, for instance, offer a veritable treasure trove of unique, unpublished material, including correspondence, diaries, photographs, ephemeral documents and much more. These collections allow us a glimpse into the minds and lives of artists and the organisations and galleries who helped cultivate them. They offer a significant and invaluable research source that expands our knowledge about art and artists and how they reflect Australian society, issues and ideas, both historically and today.

There are 130 archive collections, and they cover a wide range of subjects. Personal papers held at the library include those of artists represented in the Australian art collection, individuals who have contributed significantly to the arts in other ways, important art organisations and commercial galleries.

More recently, too, the library began collating

material to preserve and make available the cultural and institutional memory of the NGA. The ephemera collection files are used by researchers both nationally and internationally because they are a source of information that can’t be found in traditional publications.

Exhibition material that is normally discarded such as invitations, small exhibition catalogues, posters, pamphlets, leaflets, handbills, cards, menus and photographs have been actively collected over the past thirty-five years. Over time, these seemingly peripheral items can paint a very unique picture of an artist’s career or an organisation’s history. Opening an

artist’s file is like clicking on a hyperlink to their past, with readers often finding not only factual details but also a new perspective on art history they have not seen before.

The challenge for the library, however, is in making these collections more visible and easier to access, particularly remotely.

In an effort to increase public access to the special collections, the NGA is digitising all of its promotional posters, with the goal of making them discoverable online. It is also producing high-quality images of some of the library’s most treasured items, such as the bold 1974 City Hall poster advertising the showing of Blue poles in Brisbane—

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Page 52: Poster advertising the ‘last days’ of the exhibition of Blue poles 1952 at the City Hall in Brisbane during the painting’s initial tour in 1974 Page 53: Simon Underschultz and Simon Blight digitising the NGA’s promotional posters for posterity, 2015 Letter from Auguste Rodin to National Gallery of Victoria director Bernard Hall, 27 April 1907, from the Papers of Bernard Hall

the second destination in its four-city tour on its way to Canberra. Posters advertising exhibitions that include Australian artists represented in the national collection serve to document the artists’ past activities here, at home in Australia, and abroad.

Creating visibility of ephemera and archives is one of the library’s most important priorities, and it offers a reference service that is integral to navigating the rich resources of these unique holdings. The publication of ‘finding aids’ on the NGA’s website allows people to search across many references to Australian artists and to discover new and fascinating relationships. A major project to catalogue every artist held in the Australian Art and Artist Files has been completed and has expanded awareness about these important primary resources for researchers. Digital ephemera is stored and made accessible through PANDORA, Australia’s web archive, as well as through Trove, the National Library of Australia’s website for Australian content.

In the past year, the NGA Research Library has had over four thousand reference and research requests by telephone, email, online query form and in person from researchers and the public in Australia and internationally.

Access to these unique collections will continue to grow as the library does its bit to promote awareness of its resources and to enrich art scholarship in Australia.

RESEARCH LIBRARY nga.gov.au/research | +61 (0)2 6240 6530 Home to the most comprehensive collection of visual arts literature in Australia. Visit our website to learn about accessing the library and archive

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AUSTRALIAN CURRICULUM AND THE ARTS Michelle Fracaro takes a look at the new Australian Curriculum and its relevance to arts institutions such as the NGA

The first Australian Curriculum was released under a Labor government in 2012. But, when the Liberal government came to power in September 2013, many of the new curriculum documents entered a period of review, which ended in September 2015. When and how the curriculum is implemented is a matter for each state and territory school and curriculum authority to decide. For institutions with national mandates such as the NGA, however, the curriculum presents a long-awaited national approach to education, a consistent platform from which to speak to both teachers and students. We now have one curriculum to which we can align teaching resources.

In the new look Australian Curriculum, the learning area The Arts is made up of five subjects: Visual Arts, Dance, Drama, Media Arts and Music. While these art forms have close relationships and are often used in interrelated ways, each involves different approaches to critical and creative thinking that reflect distinct bodies of knowledge, understanding and skills. Beyond The Arts, however, there are many learning areas relevant to visual art collections, particularly History, English and Geography but also, to a lesser degree, Maths and Science. These areas are all represented in the NGA’s recently revealed ‘new look’ education webpages, which group works of art from the national collection into curriculum sets for easy use in the classroom and during onsite visits.

Other dimensions to the curriculum are the ‘general capabilities’ and ‘cross-curriculum priorities’. The general capabilities encompass knowledge, skills, behaviours and dispositions that assist students to live and work successfully in the twenty-first century. The three cross-curriculum priorities—Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and culture, Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia and Sustainability—are taught through the discipline-based learning areas.

The national art collection held at the NGA is an excellent way to engage with the crosscurriculum priorities. In particular, a range of education programs focus on the NGA’s

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander galleries, the largest and finest display of Australian Indigenous art in the world, and the worldclass Asian art collection, a great resource for engaging with the Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia priority.

The NGA aims to provide a wide variety of printed and digital learning resources related to its exhibitions and areas of the collection.

Notably, resources written for touring exhibitions such as Capital and country: the Federation years 1900–1914 and Bodywork reach audiences around the country. Many of the digital resources are produced in partnership with other education organisations. This includes the 116 resources developed in partnership with Education Services Australia for the teacher portal Scootle. These resources incorporate videos that link the collection to the cross-curriculum priorities and various learning areas, including The Arts, History and Geography. In a more recent partnership, curriculum-based resources for the ABC Splash portal combine groups of videos from the NGA’s extensive library with informative texts written specifically for teachers to create digital learning resources with links to The Arts and History.

The NGA also uses the Times Education Supplement Connect Australia (TES) portal, which contains over 140 NGA resources linked to curriculum. With nearly 2.7 million registered online users in over 274 countries and territories, TES connects over fifty million teachers and students globally. Home to more than 600 000 individually crafted teaching resources developed by teachers for teachers, this unparalleled collection helps to guide, inform and inspire educators around the world.

Ten new education resources are being developed in partnership with Kimberlin Education and in conjunction with the new collections displays at the NGA, the last of which will open to the public in early December 2015. Covering all levels of education, all collection areas and many aspects of curriculum, these new resources,

available online progressively from January 2016, celebrate the national collection like never before. The resources aim to bring the collection to the classroom, particularly for those who cannot make the trip to Canberra to see the NGA’s national treasures firsthand.

Also in January 2016, the NGA will host the third National Visual Art Education Conference. The two previous conferences have attracted teachers and museum educators from across Australia and provided professional development that is current and crucial for those teaching the visual arts across Australia. Keynote speakers include Professor Howard Gardner and Professor Ellen Winner from Harvard Graduate School of Education (appearing via video link), Rika Burnham from the Frick Collection in New York and internationally renowned artist Christian Thompson. Importantly, Phil Lambert, General Manager of the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, will also be speaking. The conference is an opportunity to update all delegates on the rollout of the much awaited curriculum and many other aspects of arts education and will inform the future directions of curriculum-related content at many cultural institutions around Australia, including the NGA. Now is a new and exciting time for art education in Australia.

NGA SCHOOLS Discover the NGA’s school programs and resources, which include a variety of tours, study sessions and scholarships for students as well as professional development sessions for teachers nga.gov.au/education

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LEGACY Kimberley Moulton and Katina Davidson share their experiences as this year’s Indigenous Art Fellows

Earlier this year, two of Australia’s emerging Indigenous arts workers travelled from their hometowns to take up fellowships at the NGA in Canberra and Kluge-Ruhe in Charlottesville, United States of America. Katina sought to introduce legacy to our experience of art while Kimberley discovered and shared the legacy of another. These are their stories: Katina Davidson I am a descendant of the Purga Mission, just outside of Ipswich in Queensland, and the Kullilli and Yuggera people. I am an artist and a curator and, most recently, the recipient of the 2015 Indigenous Arts Fellowship at the NGA. After arriving in the capital in July, and the initial shock of the sub-zero temperatures of a Canberran winter (quite different to the subtropical climate of my hometown of Brisbane), I was ecstatic to begin the intensive professional development and mentoring fellowship at the NGA. As an alumnus of the NGA’s 2014 Leadership Indigenous Arts program, it was not a daunting adjustment, and I was able to navigate my way around the city and the NGA with relative ease—

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and, after the six-week program, with almost total confidence.

As a curator, I am interested in the engagement between audience and installation. For the Fellowship, however, I chose to pursue my related and growing interest in public programming, which I had begun to consider a lot more in my current role as Exhibition Officer at kuril dhagun at the State Library of Queensland, Brisbane.

I wanted to further investigate and, in some ways, agitate audience interactions and to explore relationships in flux. Isolated from the distractions of my work at kuril dhagun, I was able to take the time to nurture what this meant and develop some program concepts.

To start, each program concept had to meet two core conditions. The first was that the concept had to bring Indigenous interpretations to the national collection without being restricted to the Indigenous galleries. The second was to constantly find ways to build relationships between Indigenous communities and institutions by developing culturally sound programs that will actually benefit the communities in meaningful ways, not just statistically.

Some of the concepts for programs were artist interventions, community consultation resulting in acquiring new knowledge, multidisciplinary juxtapositions with performative aspects and even physical activity disguised as audience participation.

A total mixed bag (just like my suitcase after I had filled the little spare space I had with publications from all of the major institutions).

The core idea from the Fellowship that made the most impact on my creative direction was ‘legacy’. Legacy became the focus of the program concepts because, just like my time at the NGA, everything is fleeting. I wanted to ensure that there is some kind of lasting ripple effect on participants and producers of my programs—whether it is a physical memento or outcome or a slight shift in opinion that might gain traction.

I’m currently managing a significant cultural revitalisation project at the State Library of Queensland, culminating in an exhibition in 2016. The fellowship has given me the tools to critically and creatively design programs to complement this exhibition with an ongoing legacy.

Below, from left: NGA Senior Curator Franchesca Cubillo, Kluge-Ruhe Director Margo Smith and curator Kimberley Moulton raise the ‘sea rights’ flag for Where the water moves, where it rests, 2015 Image courtesy the Kluge-Ruhe

Katina Davidson discusses concepts with Head of Education Katie Russell and curators at the NGA, Canberra, 2015

Kimberley Moulton In July, I had the honour of being the inaugural recipient of the NGA’s International Fellowship, which, this year, was at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection in the United States of America. My journey to this point comes from the support of my family, community and ancestors and from incredible programs such as the Indigenous Leadership program at the NGA—I was one of ten people selected for the inaugural year in 2010.

During my six-week fellowship at the Kluge-Ruhe, I collaborated on an exhibition of work by Yolngu leader Djambawa Marawili, which I titled ‘Where the water moves, where it rests’—quoting Marawili’s declaration for sea rights in the 1999 book Saltwater: Yirrkala bark paintings of Sea Country. Having never before worked with the art of Yolngu people, it was an opportunity to research and learn more about the cultures of the mob from north-east Arnhem Land; and I had the chance to develop my curatorial skills in writing and presenting Indigenous art and culture to an international audience.

As I developed a methodology for the exhibition, I thought about how, as a Yorta

Yorta woman, I could decolonise the process of representing Australian Indigenous cultures in an institution and within a colonial-settler landscape such as Charlottesville, which has attempted to erase its own first people’s sovereignty and voice. I also wanted to explore Marawili’s work in a global context, looking at messages of culture, community, sea rights and art as evidence to extend the connection his works have with Australia’s first people and to provide a space where these themes could speak to a broader indigenous experience, with a focus on America.

While these bigger narratives were a part of the dialogue, I also wanted to ensure that Marawili’s voice and cultural messages, through his work, were present as much as possible in the exhibition. It was an exciting moment when his bark paintings arrived and I could connect with them directly, seeing the intricate diamond patterns whirling across the bark telling stories of Baru the crocodile and Burrit’ji the lightning serpent and the movement of the ochres telling us ‘where the water moves’ and ‘where it rests’.

Working with the team at the Kluge-Ruhe and sharing in this cross-cultural experience

has strengthened my understanding of how Indigenous Australian culture can be represented and shared internationally in a respectful and collaborative way. I will bring many new skills back to my practice in Australia, both at my position at Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre at Melbourne Museum and in my writing and curatorial work outside that.

This fellowship has given me a broader scope on where Australia’s Indigenous cultures sit internationally and reaffirmed the importance of opportunities like this fellowship, which supports emerging and mid-career Indigenous people within the arts.

INDIGENOUS LEADERSHIP The NGA supports Indigenous leadership in the arts, including through training programs, fellowships and scholarships offered in partnership with Wesfarmers Arts nga.gov.au/indigenousleaders

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Right: Tom Roberts Louis Abrahams 1886 © Christie’s Images Limited (2015)

Opposite: Yinka Shonibare Refugee astronaut 2015 © Yinka Shonibare, courtesy the artist and James Cohan Gallery, New York and Shanghai

A close friend Tom Roberts Louis Abrahams 1886 oil on canvas 40.6 x 35.5 cm Purchased with the assistance of Krystyna CampbellPretty in memory of Dr Harold Campbell-Pretty and Allan and Mavourneen Cowen On display: Tom Roberts In this portrait of his good friend, the painter and etcher Louis Abrahams, Roberts located his subject in a setting typical of the aesthetic of the time, with a screen, Asian cane chair and Turkish rug. On a shelf, behind the sitter, are a few small oil sketches, presumably painted en plein air by Abrahams, and a green umbrella, for outdoor painting.

Roberts depicted Abrahams’s face, hands and suit in a tight, precise manner, using beiges and greys. The background is a deep red, a colour he adopted in a number of portrait settings. Roberts divided the composition into a series of geometric shapes, the larger and smaller right angles formed by the pose of the sitter, the frame behind him and the screen to the left, reflecting Roberts’s consistent concern with structure.

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Two years later, Roberts painted a portrait of Abrahams’s wife, Golda, also seated in a wicker chair and surrounded by objects appropriate to his sitter. In placing these subjects within such settings, Roberts may have been influenced by Manet’s 1868 portrait of Emile Zola, which Roberts may have seen soon after Manet’s death, in his January 1884 retrospective at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. Manet also surrounded Zola with things he found important, including a Japanese print and screen.

Born in London in 1852, Abrahams arrived in Australia in 1860, aged eight. He studied at the National Gallery School, Melbourne, where he formed close friendships with Roberts and Frederick McCubbin. He worked with these artists at the painting camps at Box Hill, Mentone and Heidelberg. McCubbin later recalled these times, writing to Roberts in 1910: ‘Do you remember looking at the Tea trees at Sandringham that evening long ago when you first came back from England.

The Don [Louis Abrahams], you and I, and you showed us its glorious colour. I have never forgotten’.

Abrahams’s paintings of this period include watercolours painted en plein air, and in 1886

and 1887 he exhibited paintings and etchings with the Australian Artists’ Association.

Abrahams’s family were importers of cigars and Louis supplied the cigar-box lid panels that the artists used for many of their ‘9 by 5 Impressions’. He was, however, unable to give much time to his art because he yielded to his father’s wishes to join the family business.

Tragically, he committed suicide in 1903.

This is the only known formal portrait that Roberts painted of his close friend, although he did include him, a year earlier, with his back to the viewer in A quiet day on Darebin Creek 1885 and as the central figure earnestly frying eggs in The artists’ camp 1886. Moreover, it is possible that he and Golda are the couple shown seated on the ground enjoying an intimate picnic in A Sunday afternoon picnic at Box Hill c 1887. In 1887, Abrahams was also the subject of a portrait by John Mather, in which he depicted the artist from the back, seated at his easel.

Anne Gray, Head of Australian Art

For the bookshelf: This article is from Tom Roberts, available at the NGA Shop and selected bookstores nationally

Survival instincts Yinka Shonibare Refugee astronaut 2015 fibreglass, printed cotton, net, wood, metal and plastic objects 208 x 93 x 90 cm On display: Level 2 A traveller in an unknown world, the Refugee astronaut seems both under- and over-prepared for his trip. From the spherical helmet, spacesuit and moon boots, we might imagine him about to embark on an intergalactic journey. But the jumble of possessions and the makeshift nature of his backpack suggest another story. On closer inspection, the objects he carries, the fabric of his clothing and several other signs point to a compelling reading for our times.

Yinka Shonibare’s reputation as an artist stems, in part, from his use of richly patterned fabrics and their application across sculpture, painting, photography, film and performance work. Born in London of Yoruba heritage, Shonibare grew up in Nigeria and Britain, studied at Byam Shaw School of Art and Goldsmiths College and now lives and works in London. Shonibare represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2001, and his work features in many public collections in Britain and internationally.

Most of Shonibare’s figures are headless, but he has recently used globes to represent various extreme weather events around the world. In Refugee astronaut the austerity of the mirrored helmet serves to emphasise the artist’s signature Dutch wax fabrics.

At a distance the suit appears as military camouflage; but, up close, we can disentangle bright yellow clocks from the amorphous roots. The astronaut’s air pack and tubes are covered in another batik-like green, red and black cloth. Printed cotton fabrics of this type were produced in the Netherlands and Manchester from the nineteenth century, originally intended as a cheaper, mass‑produced alternative to batiks made in Indonesia. When Indonesians rejected the foreign fabrics, they were exported to West Africa and became a symbol of national pride and independence. Using a range of references from pop culture, history

and imperialism, Shonibare plays with expectations of Afrocentric authenticity and explores attitudes to nationalism.

The astronaut is a recurring theme in Shonibare’s work; sometimes his figures are arranged as a family group and sometimes they are suspended from the ceiling. The lone Refugee astronaut, however, is firmly anchored, stepping forward, shoring up his load. Where is this traveller going and from what does he seek refuge? In his bundle of possessions, we see survey equipment, a hastily rolled tarpaulin, an enamel jug and bowl, pencils and other drawing items, even a toothbrush.

The prominence of the circular butterfly net wedged into the backpack, above the figure’s head, is equally intriguing.

When first shown in Rage of the ballet gods, the artist’s solo show at James Cohan Gallery in New York, Refugee astronaut was juxtaposed with several other works featuring butterfly wings. The butterfly, as a metaphor for chaos, is a symbol of cause and effect. Is our astronaut a predator of butterflies or does he offer them a means of escape? These types of dualities occur throughout Shonibare’s work. Refugee astronaut is a compelling work, demonstrating a unique blend of notions of identity, globalisation, climate change and survival instincts in a contemporary world.

Lucina Ward, Curator, International Painting and Sculpture

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Paul Cézanne Mountainous landscape near Aix c 1895

An artist’s obsession Paul Cézanne 1839–1906 Mountainous landscape near Aix c 1895 watercolour and pencil on paper 31.4 x 47.6 cm Gift of anonymous donor, 2015. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program Paul Cézanne’s art was one of the foundations of modernism, with particular influence on Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso and other Cubists.

Despite his significance as an artist, however, Cézanne has a relatively small representation in public institutions in Australia, and opportunities to acquire his art are limited.

Mountain landscape near Aix is, then, a very generous gift for all Australians to enjoy.

As a young man, Cézanne was befriended by Impressionist Camille Pissaro, and he exhibited with the Impressionists in their first and third

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exhibitions of the ‘New Painting’, in 1874 and then 1877. Cézanne rejected certain tenets of the Impressionists and, instead, developed an idiosyncratic style. He was living back in Aixen-Provence by 1895, perfecting landscapes of his home and its environs. The motif of Mont Saint-Victoire was a particular obsession, and he returned to it frequently.

Cézanne’s watercolour technique was radical. This particular work is an unusual view of the mountain range and takes as its central subject the Chaîne de l’Etoile—he also included the understated but recognisable Cathédrale Saint-Sauveur. This is an example of a mature composition in which brushstrokes both define and articulate the motif and translucent washes of colour create form.

He has depicted the landscape not as a transitory view of surface, pursued by many Impressionists, but with the profundity that

characterised his personal style. It demonstrates why Cézanne was central in the development of French art and why he was so widely influential in the twentieth century.

The NGA hopes to acquire a select group of his works, which is why it has established the Cézanne Watercolour and Drawing Fund. To date, seven generous donors have contributed. Their gifts and donations, and yours, will help the NGA achieve this goal.

Jane Kinsman, Senior Curator, International Prints, Drawings and Illustrated Books

CEZANNE WATERCOLOUR AND DRAWING FUND Help build an important collection of works by Cézanne for all Australians to enjoy foundation@nga.gov.au | +61 (0)2 6240 6408 Donations above $2 are tax deductible

John Wardell Power Basket of fruit c 1936

Finding the abstract John Wardell Power 1881–1943 Basket of fruit c 1936 oil and gouache on linen 65 x 50 cm Discovering lost and forgotten paintings is always a great source of excitement for curators and art lovers. When a rare and hitherto lost John Wardell Power abstract still-life painting from a private collection in the Netherlands appeared last year in an Australian auction, the NGA was eager to acquire it for the national art collection. Dynamic and lyrical, Basket of fruit was painted in Paris in 1936, two years after Power opened his highly influential inaugural solo exhibition at the Abstraction‑Création gallery in Paris.

Illustrated in volume II of his incomplete self‑made catalogue raissoné, the work was last seen in a charity exhibition for former Soviet prisoners of war at the Galerie Rene Drouin, Paris, in 1945.

Although a little-known artist today, Power was arguably the most significant Australian-born exponent of European abstraction and Cubism in the early twentieth century, exhibiting alongside greats such as Albert Gleizes, Juan Gris, Wassily Kandinsky and László Moholy-Nagy in Paris.

Abstraction‑Création was not only the name of a gallery but also the name of a group that published the magazine Abstraction-Creation Art Non Figuratif, which Power helped

establish and finance in the 1930s. The group brought together diverse strands of the avantgarde, namely the geometric abstractionists and Cubists alongside those more concerned with an organic or a biomorphic abstraction.

Power’s Basket of fruit certainly shows his espousal of a more organic form of abstraction with its fluid golden unifying line and the soft forms of the fruit. Shape is delineated by colour and the forms seemingly mould together in rhythmic cadence.

The University of Sydney holds two preparatory drawings for Basket of fruit, which reveal much about his painting practice.

The first is a freehand sketch in red chalk, laying down his compositional plan in a free

form manner. The second is a highly ordered and annotated mathematical ‘plan’ of the work on graph paper, almost like a blueprint for the finished work. Power was a perfectionist whose work had solid philosophical and theoretical underpinnings, and he thought deeply about the display of his paintings. He was fanatical about the framing of his works, and each frame was custom made to his specifications. Basket of fruit is of added importance as it is displayed in one of his original gilt frames made by the English frame-maker Rowley.

Lara Nichols, Assistant Curator, Australian Painting and Sculpture

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Sinking history Yang Yongliang The sunk ship 2008 from the series On the quiet water inkjet pigment print on canvas scroll 51.9 x 403.9 cm Gift of Jason Yeap OAM and Min Lee Wong, 2015 Yang Yongliang’s The sunk ship is a montage of photographic fragments showing a vast harbour city undergoing what looks like constant reconstruction. Laid out on a traditional Chinese scroll, this highly detailed panorama provides a visually and conceptually complex view of contemporary China.

Typical of Yang’s work, the picture plays with the expectations of viewers: what appears

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at first to be a picturesque ancient landscape on a scroll is revealed, on closer inspection, to be an image of modernity and progress gone mad. What look like rock formations are in fact hundreds, perhaps thousands, of high-rise buildings, and cranes work at creating more superstructures on reclaimed land. To the left, a small forest of pine trees is actually a cluster of power lines. To the right, a cargo ship sinks in water that has become so polluted as to be unnavigable.

Yang was born in Shanghai in 1980 and has become one of the leading proponents of contemporary photography in China.

As a young student he studied traditional Chinese painting and calligraphy, before

attending the Shanghai Art and Design Academy and the China Academy of Art, where he studied graphic design and was introduced to digital imaging processes and photography.

These educational experiences have enabled Yang to develop and maintain a practice that skilfully engages new digital technologies with images and practices that have a long history in China. These include shanshui (landscape painting) and the painted scroll and fan. New media, including video, and digital printing technologies provide the artist with a set of tools with which to make contemporary Chinese art that maintains a strong relationship with the formal structures,

Yang Yongliang The sunk ship 2008 © Yang Yongliang

traditions and historical conventions of Chinese art.

There is a direct relationship between form and content in Yang’s work. As well as bringing together traditional and contemporary media and forms, his pictures usually consider the impact of modernisation. In some ways, this intention is enacted in a quite literal way: the beautiful mountains, trees and rivers of traditional shanshui iconography are replaced with high-rise buildings and freeways. Mist and atmosphere have been displaced by smog and polluted waterways. Nature and its poetic or romantic associations have almost completely given way to technology and the economics of modern urbanism.

While Yang’s images provide wonderful spectacles, they are also decidedly ambivalent about both the state of contemporary China and the artistic traditions on which he draws.

‘The city, the landscape—I love them and hate them at the same time,’ Yang stated in a 2012 interview with David Rosenberg. ‘If I love the city for its familiarity, I hate it even more for the staggering speed at which it grows and engulfs the environment. If I like traditional Chinese art for its depth and inclusiveness, I hate its retrogressive attitude.’

The sunk ship was recently donated to the national collection by NGA Council member Jason Yeap OAM and Ms Min Lee Wong.

The title of the work alludes to both the ship

seen sinking in the harbour and to the place depicted. As Yang noted in a 2013 interview, Chinese progress, urbanisation and economic expansion are in effect ‘erasing’ Chinese history.

The sunk ship provides a very uncertain view of contemporary China—a place where progress challenges many of the country’s cultural and historic foundations.

Shaune Lakin, Senior Curator, Photography

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Jan Nelson Marion 2 2010 and Shelby 2 2011

Picturing adolescence Jan Nelson Marion 2 2010 and Shelby 2 2011 from the series Walking in tall grass oil on linen 74 x 55 cm and 79 x 56 cm Warwick and Jane Flecknoe Bequest Fund, 2015 On display: Australian galleries In an interview for the exhibition In the flesh, Jan Nelson described the title of her series Walking in tall grass as an analogy for the vulnerability and defiance of adolescence: ‘you can’t go back, you can only go forward, but you can’t see where you’re going’. These two recent works from Nelson’s ongoing study of young people have joined the NGA’s earlier examples from the series, Carter 2001 and Tim 2003.

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© Jan Nelson

Nelson’s portraits capture the way teens use fashion to express individuality. But the averted attention of her models, as they retreat from the gaze of the viewer into a private world, is suggestive of deeper self-contemplation, desire and doubt. These are moments of ambiguity and introversion. The photorealistic portrayal of Shelby and Marion contrasts with the brightly coloured backdrops, heightening the sense of disengagement of the youths from their surroundings. This disjuncture of inner and outer experience is further amplified by the girls’ mirrored sunglasses, which add an additional barrier to their interior life as well as revealing an ambiguous view of the external world from their perspective.

The psychedelic and consumer-cultural elements reference recent digital aesthetics, but the paintings provide more than a simple snapshot of trends captivating youth today. The retro-revival fashions that Marion and Shelby wear—which are perhaps akin to what Nelson herself would have worn while growing up in the 1960s and 1970s— particularly evoke nostalgia for bygone youth and resonate with the timeless personal challenges that are experienced so intensely through the teen years, such as grappling with one’s own identity and the tension of trying to fit in while asserting individuality.

Alice Desmond, Curatorial Assistant, Australian Art

Homage to a master of the still life Jeffrey Smart 1921–2013 The bicycle race (Death of Morandi) 1966 oil painting on hardboard 58.5 x 68 cm Warwick and Jane Flecknoe Bequest Fund, 2015 Jeffrey Smart painted The bicycle race (Death of Morandi) at a critical point in his career.

Three years earlier, he had painted the iconic Sydney scene Cahill Expressway 1963 before returning to Europe. Living in Rome, Smart travelled regularly to a friend’s villa, Il Bacio, in Florence, developing along the way a rich repository of iconography for The bicycle race, considered one of his masterpieces from this seminal period.

In the work, Smart captured some of the prevailing pictorial concepts and visual metaphors he would include in later work.

The enclosed urban landscape without a vestige of the natural world, the curved sweeping road and its geometric markings, the dissected street and advertising signs and the unidentified, lone figure all complete the stage for a human drama that will never unfold, forever frozen by Smart’s enigmatic knack for stillness. Two years earlier, Italian artist Giorgio Morandi had died, and the obscured signage in the upper-right corner of the painting is probably Smart’s oblique homage to this master of the still life whose retrospective was held in Bologna in the same year Smart painted this work.

Jeffrey Smart The bicycle race (Death of Morandi) 1966 © The estate of Jeffrey Smart

Smart was born in Adelaide in 1921.

He became great friends with artist Jacqueline Hick, and the pair travelled to Europe and London in 1948. On his return to Australia in 1950, Smart’s career developed significantly with a number of solo exhibitions and the award of the Commonwealth Jubilee Art Prize for Wallaroo 1951, also in the national collection. He permanently settled in Italy in 1964, where he acquired the farmhouse Posticcia Nuova, on the outskirts of Arezzo, heralding a sustained period of stability. Smart died in 2013 and the NGA in Canberra hosted an official memorial in his honour.

Lara Nichols, Assistant Curator, Australian Painting and Sculpture

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MEMBERS NEWS Members will discover the NGA anew this summer with the now reopened Australian and international galleries, Tom Roberts and a host of amazing events

Quintessential

Art after hours

Four entertaining events in the Sculpture Garden Restaurant celebrate Australian culture this February and March. Each event has its own special characteristics inspired by Tom Roberts’s quintessential portraits: discover the best local beer thanks to Roberts’s close friend Arthur ‘Smike’ Streeton, find out the limits of your knowledge on trivia night under the watchful eye of headmistress Madame Pfund, explore site-specific art installations with family friend Mrs L Abrahams and tickle your funny bone with a night of comedy in honour of comedian and performer George Selth Coppin.

Come 10 and 11 December, you can enjoy tours of the stunning new Australian and international art displays at the NGA with just a select few. Your guides on the journey to rediscover the collections are Deborah Hart and Christine Dixon. The depth and knowledge these two powerhouse curators have between them could fill a library or you would at least have a good start to one.

On 19 February, we host a dinner to celebrate Tom Roberts with exhibition curator Anna Gray—a library unto herself. Also in conjunction with Tom Roberts, a 9 am bush breakfast in the Sculpture Garden on Saturday 30 January will mark the perfect beginning to a summer weekend. Summer is a great

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time in Canberra and the NGA’s garden is the best place to soak in the season and art from around the world with a picnic or hamper.

Extending our ‘Meet the maker’ series, Canberra-based furniture maker Elliot Bastianon opens up his workshop for NGA members on 5 March. And later, in April, we have another mystery tour for those of you willing to take a leap into the unknown.

MEMBERSHIP nga.gov.au/members | free call 1800 028 068 Play your part in the life of the National Gallery of Australia and enjoy the many benefits of membership.

Visit our website for exclusive programs for members or to join today

THANK YOU …

Exhibitions, programs and acquisitions at the NGA are realised through the generous support of:

GRANTS

DONORS

American Friends of the National Gallery of Australia Inc, with the generous assistance of Kenneth Tyler AO and Marabeth Cohen-Tyler Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne Australian National University Centre for European Studies

Includes donations received from 11 July to 9 October 2015 Donna Bush Dinny Killen

Masterpieces for the Nation Fund 2015

The Dick and Pip Smith Foundation Ezekiel Solomon AM

Judith Avery Suzanne J Baker-Dekker Janet Bamford Judith Bibo Eileen Bond Assoc Prof Phillip Braslins Iain Buckland and Julie Buckland Kathleen Burns Maureen Chan Wendy Cobcroft Graham Cooke Patrick Crone Ted Delofski and Irene Delofski Matilda Emberson Jan Finley and Philip Finley Jo-Anne Flatley-Allen Clare Fletcher in memory of Victor Bugler Ariana Dodd (‘a little girl’) Karen Greenfield Sybil Griffiths Dr Christopher Baker and Kerri Hall Suzanne Hecker and Wolfgang Hecker Doyne Hunt and Beatrice Hunt Donald James and Frances James Wal Jurkiewicz and Penelope Jurkiewicz Margaret Kellond David Lewis OAM Jillian Mihalyka Helen Mitchell The Hon Tom Pauling AO, QC Judie Pettitt Helen Roberts and Alan Roberts Bernard Spilsbury and Margaret Spilsbury Prof Ken Taylor AM and Maggie Taylor Karina Tyson Gabrielle Watt

Members Acquisition Fund 2015–16

NGA Art Education and Access programs

Cézanne Watercolour and Drawing Fund One anonymous donor

CORPORATE PARTNERS

Gift of work of art

ABC Radio ACT Government, through Visit Canberra Aesop The Age Australian Government International Exhibitions Insurance Avant Card Barlens The Brassey of Canberra Canberra Airport The Canberra Times Clayton Utz Coopers Brewery CSIRO Deloitte Eckersley’s Art & Craft Flash Graphics Forrest Hotel and Apartments Goodwin Aged Care Hotel Hotel Hotel Realm Maddocks Moët-Hennessy Australia Molonglo Group The Monthly National Capital Authority National Collecting Institutions Touring and Outreach Program, an Australian Government program aiming to improve access to the national collections for all Australians National Gallery of Australia Council Exhibitions Fund Nine Network Australia Novotel Canberra Palace Cinema Qantas Airways Qantas Freight Radio National The Saturday Paper The Sydney Morning Herald Ticketek Tourism Papua New Guinea True North Luxury Adventure Cruises Wesfarmers WIN Television

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Chris Bell Nicholas Coppel Warwick and Jane Flecknoe Bequest Fund Robert Forbes and Sandy Forbes Klaus Friedeberger and Julie Friedeberger Professor Ben Gascoigne AO and family Hester Gascoigne Dr Anne Gray Mark Henshaw and Dr Lee Kerr Kathy Littlewood Donald Love The MacDougal family in memory of their parents Adair and Selina MacDougal Vanessa Martin and Stella Palmer Charles Nodrum Robert Owen Selina Redman AO Enrico Taglietti Julie Wood and Ian Wood

Terrence Campbell AO and Christine Campbell

Fiona Hall ‘Wrong Way Time’ Fund

Dr Michael Priest

Tim Fairfax AC in memory of Betty Churcher AO

Tom Roberts Fund Robert Champion de Crespigny AC and Melanie Champion de Crespigny

Opposite: Australian galleries at the NGA, Canberra, 2015 Right: Inge King Capricorn 1989, steel painted black. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, gift of the artist, 2015. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program

SUMMER 2015 | ARTONVIEW 67

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Like art, law can be open to interpretation. It can be complex, detailed, provocative. Law can be simple.

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Hilda Rix NicHolas The Shepherd of Knockalong, 1933 oil on canvas 99.5 x 80.5 cm EST: $180,000 – 250,000 To be offered at Deutscher and Hackett, Sydney, 2 December 2015

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Issue 285 / November 2015

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Maxine Beneba Clarke meets Hugh Jackman

End of an error: how Turnbull triumphed When Malcolm Turnbull met Warren Truss to resolve a new Coalition agreement on Tuesday morning, he walked around to the Nationals leader’s office.

Truss, as deputy prime minister, still technically outranked the freshly elected Liberal leader, and Turnbull would need the support of the Nationals to be sworn in as prime minister.

Visiting Truss in his office, rather than summoning him, was a display of deference and a deliberate signal that the autocratic style many in the Coalition remember from Turnbull’s stint as opposition leader was gone.

For that is the first thing Turnbull wants his colleagues to know about how he will lead. He spelled it out immediately after ousting Tony Abbott late Monday, promising to be a “thoroughly consultative” leader, heading a “traditional cabinet government”.

It was, Turnbull’s supporters say, a restoration of process rather than a revolution.

Turnbull wanted to distinguish himself from his predecessor’s captain’s picks and the command-and-control approach of Abbott’s office, but also from his own reputation for arrogance.

“The prime minister of Australia is not a president,” he said in some of his first comments as leader on Monday night. “The prime minister is the first among equals.”

The second thing he wants his colleagues to know is that he will represent their views and not his.

Turnbull met with Truss to listen to what the Nationals wanted and then give it to them. In writing. Even if it clashed with principles he had publicly owned on climate policy and same-sex marriage.

It’s a message he needs to get across to his conservative colleagues, but it may be a hard sell to the broader public, whose affection for Turnbull is

GETTY IMAGES

After a long campaign to woo shock jocks and conservatives, Malcolm Turnbull has beaten Tony Abbott with the promise of rebuilding the Liberals’ ‘broad church’.

Sophie Morris reports.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull during question time on Wednesday.

SOPHIE MORRIS

is The Saturday Paper’s chief political correspondent.

based to a great extent on his passionate defence of his principles.

And that’s where the third prong of the Turnbull strategy comes in: he’s relying on his silver tongue to explain away his conversion.

Launching his challenge just after 4pm on Monday, he pitched himself as the great explainer, who could offer “advocacy, not slogans”. His supporters argue he will be able to debate the big issues and engage the community, without it descending into an argument and confrontation for the sake of political pointscoring. “He will talk to people,” says one Turnbull backer, “not at them.”

That’s Turnbull’s promise to voters: he will lift the standard of debate. “We need,” he said, “to respect the intelligence of the Australian people.”

His pitch related mainly to his ability to sell an economic vision. It was a brutal demolition of Abbott and, by implication, treasurer Joe Hockey. But his first challenge has been to explain his own recalibration. He may respect the intelligence of the Australian people

but that is not to say he will advocate the positions they expect of him.

Predictably, Labor leader Bill Shorten used question time to accuse the new prime minister of having “sold out his principles to achieve his personal ambition”.

Turnbull rose to the occasion, arguing eloquently and unashamedly against his earlier views.

On both climate and same-sex marriage, he resorted to process, rather than principle. The ends, he argued, mattered more than the means.

“It does not matter how you cut emissions as long as they are cut,” Turnbull declared, heartily endorsing the Coalition’s Direct Action scheme and emissions reduction targets. In 2010 he called the scheme a “recipe for fiscal recklessness”.

On a same-sex marriage plebiscite, he did not shift from Abbott’s position: “Giving everybody a say on an important issue is surely a very legitimate and reasonable approach.”

It was a performance that Labor

frontbencher Tony Burke summarised as “a nicer suit, but basically it was Tony Abbott with elocution”. That’s what Labor wants voters to think: nothing has really changed. It’s the same line the Coalition used when Labor twice rolled their leader and prime minister.

In his first comments on Monday night, Turnbull also promised to lead a “thoroughly Liberal government committed to freedom, the individual and the market”.

By the following day, he was already tempering these sentiments, telling colleagues he understood the party was a “broad church”, combining both Liberal and Conservative traditions.

It’s a description frequently invoked by John Howard, with whom Turnbull had already spoken.

In the Liberals’ party room meeting on Tuesday, he harked back to the Howard era by promising Coalition MPs CONTINUED ON PAGE 4

RICHARD ACKLAND 16 SUSAN CHENERY 18 DAVE FAULKNER 20 WENDY ZUKERMAN 28

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ISSUE NO 84 | SUMMER 2015 A$9.95 Slumbering sea, Mentone 1887 (detail), National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

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