2017.Q4 | Artonview 92

Cartier comes to Canberra

In 2018, step into the dazzling world of the Maison Cartier with two exclusive member events.

Discover the stories behind Cartier’s glittering collection, enjoy a premium cocktail package or dining experience and an after-dark viewing of this highly anticipated exhibition.

Members preview, Thursday 29 March Curator’s dinner, Friday 1 June Cartier: The Exhibition showcases more than 300 spectacular items in exquisite settings, including royal tiaras, necklaces, brooches and earrings.

Find out more at nga.gov.au/members See your exclusive invitation, included with Artonview, for more details.

Vitrine at the 1925 Exhibition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Arts in Paris, displaying the Berenice set: the shoulder necklace and tiara. Cartier Archives. © Cartier

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CONTENTS

ISSUE 92 SUMMER 2017

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Editor Eric Meredith

DIRECTOR’S WORD

Gerard Vaughan

Guest contributors Claire Summers, Executive Director, Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair Foundation

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EXHIBITION LISTING

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EDUCATION AND LEARNING HYPER KIDS

WHAT AUDIENCES ARE SAYING ABOUT HYPER REAL

Rose Marin explores the playful side of Hyper Real and the benefits of bringing children to this major new exhibition

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Strait Islander people.

ISSN 1323-4552 ISSN 2208-6218 (Online)

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Designed by Kirsty Morrison

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NEW ACQUISITION AND COLLECTION DISPLAY A POST-IMPRESSIONIST MASTERPIECE BY PAUL SERUSIER

Gerard Vaughan explores the milieu in which French Post-Impressionist Paul Sérusier painted his Woman from Savoy

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Opposite: Arthur Streeton The Point Wharf, Mosman Bay 1893 (detail), oil on canvas.

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased with the assistance of Allan and Maria Myers and the NGA Foundation, 2017

COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT DARWIN ABORIGINAL ART FAIR Claire Summers highlights DAAF’s growing reputation and the NGA’s increased involvement this year

62 Cover: Cartier Paris Panther clip brooch 1949, platinum, white gold, diamonds, sapphires.

Cartier Collection. Photo: Marian Gérard, Cartier Collection. © Cartier

COMING COLLECTION DISPLAY ART DECO Deborah Hart provides a snapshot of some of the remarkable Art Deco treasures from the national collection that will be on display from 17 February

Printed by CanPrint, Canberra, on FSC and PEFC certified paper using vegetable-based inks FSC-C017269 | PEFC/21-31-41

COMING MAJOR EXHIBITION CARTIER: THE EXHIBITION Alison Wright interviews Cartier’s Director of Image, Style and Heritage Pierre Rainero and Simeran Maxwell looks at the love affair four of the world’s most glamorous twentieth-century women had with the timeless jewellery of Cartier

and images of deceased Aboriginal and Torres

CURRENT MAJOR EXHIBITION HYPER REAL Deborah Hart interviews Patricia Piccinini, one of Australia’s most internationally celebrated and successful contemporary artists, and Jaklyn Babington speaks to the playful, intelligent and a little bit dark Ronnie van Hout

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Views expressed by writers are not necessarily those of the NGA. Artonview may contain names

DONOR PENELOPE SEIDLER Maryanne Voyazis interviews Penelope Seidler, member of the NGA Foundation Board, about her philosophy of giving and passion for art

28 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.

COLLECTION DISPLAY THE ART OF GIVING Deborah Hart highlights Rosalie Gascoigne’s incredible Letting go, currently on show at the NGA with other important recent gifts of Australian art

nga.gov.au/artonview © National Galley of Australia 2017 PO Box 1150, Canberra ACT 2601, Australia +61 (0)2 6240 6411 | nga.gov.au

NGA PLAY INDIEGUERILLAS Kirsten Paisley highlights the outrageously fun Indonesian-pop world of the latest exhibition in NGA Play, opening on 15 December

Advertising enquiries ArtonviewAdvertising@nga.gov.au Enquiries artonview.editor@nga.gov.au

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Contributors Jaklyn Babington, Senior Curator, Contemporary Arts Practice—Global Deborah Hart, Head of Australian Art Rose Marin, Program Coordinator Simeran Maxwell, Assistant Curator, International Painting and Sculpture Kirsten Paisley, Deputy Director Gerard Vaughan, Director Maryanne Voyazis, Executive Director, NGA Foundation Alison Wright, Assistant Director, Engagement and Development

NEW ACQUISITIONS

Arthur Streeton, Mugus, lord of pigs, Sidney Nolan, Clifton Pugh, Tommy McRae

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SPONSORSHIP AND DONATIONS ARTONVIEW 92 SUMMER 2017

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DIRECTOR’S WORD Gerard Vaughan

Fifty years ago, on 1 November, Australia’s then prime minister Harold Holt announced in Parliament that the Australian Government had

exhibition, many items are being exhibited publicly for the first time.

decided to create a new peak arts body, the Australia Council, and to

The astonishing Cartier jewellery loaned from the Royal Collection

accept the recommendations of the 1966 Lindsay Report to build a

in London, and from Her Majesty The Queen’s personal collection,

national gallery in Canberra. All great institutions can claim a series of

accompanies equally dazzling pieces from the Cartier Collection, from

fundamental ‘establishment’ dates, and this one is certainly worth noting.

Prince Albert of Monaco, who is lending major pieces owned by Princess

As you may have recently read, I have been appointed for another

Grace, and from the Qatar Museums Authority, as well as masterpieces

year as Director of the NGA, until my planned retirement in October

from other major world museums. Many celebrities are kindly parting

2018. The last three years have certainly been challenging, but always

with their personal jewellery for the show—but you will have to guess

immensely rewarding. We have explored many new approaches to how

who many of them are, as understandably (given the value of the pieces)

we organise ourselves and operate, especially with our exhibitions and

they wish to remain anonymous. We will reveal more on Cartier in the

programs, and have many more exciting plans for the future. The year

next issue of Artonview.

ahead is particularly ambitious, which you will discover in more detail

In February a wonderful, rich show of Art Deco drawn from the

when you receive our new annual program brochure in February.

national collection, will be installed. These stylish items represent all

You can, of course, also go to our website for regular updates to find out

media, including sculptures in bronze and precious materials, paintings,

what special events we are offering over summer.

porcelain, furniture, prints and drawings.

Hyper Real has been buzzing ever since its opening in late October,

Another great reason to visit the NGA over the summer is the

as has David Hockney’s prints, which opened more recently. And the

opportunity to see some of the remarkable works of art we have recently

much-anticipated Arthur Streeton: the art of war, a fitting finale to the

purchased or received as gifts to the nation. The special installation

nearly five-year rolling centenary of the Great War, is about to open.

of Australian Impressionism, which will now continue through the

All three of these important new exhibitions are accompanied by

whole summer due to public demand, has just been enriched with three

informative catalogues, beautifully designed and illustrated. A full list

major paintings. Among them is a recently acquired 9 by 5 cigar-box-lid

of forthcoming NGA exhibitions is on page 8. Coupled with a new

painting by important American artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler,

interactive NGA Play exhibition by contemporary art duo Indieguerillas

Harmony in blue and pearl: the sands, Dieppe c 1885, which introduces

and our vibrant and regularly changing collection displays, many of

the group by Tom Roberts, Charles Conder, Arthur Streeton and

which constitute serious mini-exhibitions, every visitor to the NGA this

Frederick McCubbin from the notorious ‘9 by 5 Impression Exhibition’

summer will find something of special interest. There will be exhibitions

of 1889, Australia’s first exhibition of radical art. We know Roberts saw

and installations for all ages and tastes—for all the family.

a collection of Whistler’s cigar-box-lid panels in London in 1884, just

For this issue of Artonview, Deborah Hart, our Head of Australian Art, has interviewed Hyper Real artist Patricia Piccinini, who is one of

before he returned to Australia, so the link is clear.

The second is our new Streeton, The Point Wharf, Mosman Bay 1893,

the today’s most successful contemporary artists. Her show in Brazil

which we believe was the last of his early major Sydney Harbour views

last year was the most attended contemporary exhibition of 2016

still in private hands. He painted it in his first years in Sydney, after the

globally. The intelligent and humorous Ronnie van Hout also provides

economic depression drove him and other artists out of Melbourne.

some insight into his compelling doppelgangers in the show. And the

McCubbin was the exception thanks to his teaching job at the National

NGA Foundation’s Maryanne Voyazis speaks candidly with donor

Gallery of Victoria Art School. He remained in Melbourne and produced

Penelope Seidler, who was among the many international players

Bush Idyll 1893, one of his most important figurative landscapes and

in the production of Russian collective AES+F’s video installation

arguably his major work of the 1890s. The work is now on long-term

Inverso mundus 2015, shown in the round for the first time ever in

loan to the NGA thanks to the willingness of its generous owner to share

Hyper Real—a 360-degree visual feast. As a Foundation director and

it with the public. All of these works make a sensational impact on the

major benefactor to the NGA, Penelope also shares her philosophy

already notable Australian Impressionism display.

on giving.

Our next major show is, of course, Cartier: The Exhibition, which

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Through the exceptional generosity of the lenders to the

And that is not all. Not too long ago, we acquired a masterpiece of French Post-Impressionism, Paul Sérusier’s Woman from Savoy 1890,

I hope you’ve all put into your calendars for the end of March. In this

which he painted in Brittany in the company of his friend and mentor

issue, Cartier’s Image, Style and Heritage Director Pierre Rainero shares

Paul Gauguin. Around this superb work, we have curated a contextual

with us the story of Cartier, and we highlight some of the twentieth

display of paintings and prints that reflect the radical style of the

century’s most glamorous style leaders, whose Cartier jewellery will be

group that formed around Gauguin in Brittany and Paris. The display

on show.

also includes Sérusier’s Mother and child in Breton landscape 1890 and

DIRECTOR'S WORD

Below: Sam Jinks The deposition 2017 (detail), silicone, pigment, resin, fabric, human hair. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, commissioned 2017. Installed in Hyper Real, 20 October 2017 to 18 February 2018

Emile Bernard’s figurative Head of a woman 1889, both generously on

one of Australia’s vital community-driven Indigenous art events.

loan from the Kerry Stokes Collection.

It happens every year and is well worth your time to visit, and it is

We have also recently acquired and installed a Mugus ancestor figure, an exceptional masterpiece of art from the Markham Valley in Papua

of course timed to coincide with the annual Telstra Awards.

We were also thrilled in October to hear of Philip Brackenreg’s

New Guinea and one of our most important PNG acquisitions ever!

decision to return the rights to Albert Namatjira’s work to the

The quality is exceptional and the work retains a great deal of original

Namatjira Legacy Trust, through the good offices of Dick Smith.

pigment. Of special note is that it is extremely old, certainly eighteenth

The NGA was pleased to play a quiet, behind-the-scenes advocacy

century, although new scientific research may prove earlier. This is a

role in this, as it is something we have believed should happen and

masterpiece from our region, acquired with the full support of the

have been fighting for for many years. As a result of this outcome, we

Board and Director of PNG’s National Museum and Art Gallery. Nearby,

are extending the display of the Gordon and Marilyn Darling Gift of

opposite our shop, is a special group of five works produced by Sidney

works by Albert Namatjira through the summer and will be producing

Nolan in 1964, following his visit to Antarctica, acquired from the estate

a special, beautifully illustrated publication (previously unachievable)

of Lady Nolan with funds generously provided by the NGA Foundation.

documenting the Darlings’ Namatjira gift, which will make the perfect

In our Australian galleries, as visitors enter the foyer, we have displayed a group of large-scale new works, all donated by friends and supporters. Rosalie Gascoigne’s nine-panel Letting go 1991, gifted by

Christmas present for friends and family.

I wish you all a safe and enjoyable festive season and my colleagues and I look forward to seeing you here over the summer.

her daughter Hester, makes a powerful impact. It’s hard to believe that Gascoigne produced such a large and cohesive corpus of work in her cramped studio, which was always full of the eclectic materials she gathered and transformed into her astonishing art. Similarly, Brian Blanchflower’s enormous four-part painting Canopy XXVIII—Stochastic Cloud (Homage to Iannis Xenakis) 1991–92, gifted by James and Jacqui Erskine, makes a huge impact. The art of giving is alive and well at the NGA, and you can collect a map showing you where all of our major new works can be discovered on your next visit.

Finally, I’d like to remind you of the importance of this year as the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Referendum on Indigenous recognition.

With our third National Indigenous Art Triennial, Defying Empire, at the centre, our exhibitions and programs during 2017 have celebrated the art and cultures of Australia’s First Peoples, not only here in Canberra but also around the nation with our touring show Resolution: new Indigenous photomedia. We also launched an important exhibition of the NGA’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander masterworks at Me Collectors Room in Berlin in November. If you are in Germany over the next few months, don’t miss it.

I was also very pleased to have been invited to open the Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair (DAAF) in August, where I gave an address, in this very special year, on the national perspective on Indigenous visual culture and its impact and on where the NGA stands in relation to supporting Indigenous visual culture. Franchesca Cubillo, our Senior Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art, is the Chair of the DAAF Foundation, and her colleagues here, Tina Baum and Kelli Cole, were also present to give their support. It was inspiring to meet up with so many of the alumni of our Wesfarmers Arts Indigenous Leadership program, who were participating in DAAF’s inaugural curators symposium, which has the support of NGA Council member Tim Fairfax AC, through the Tim Fairfax Family Foundation. DAAF is

ARTONVIEW 92 SUMMER 2017

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WHAT AUDIENCES ARE SAYING ABOUT HYPER REAL

‘Thought provoking and visually stimulating’ ‘Beguiling, intriguing, intimidating and impressive. A surprise for the senses and to expectations as well; and deserving of its title, both literally and figuratively’ ‘confronting but innovative and ahead of its time’ ‘Wow! What an experience!

Interactive, exciting, an unreal journey through ultra reality.

Thank you!’

‘Dizzyingly real’ ‘Felt like going to a very strange life drawing class. A test of what is reality versus what could be’ ‘not a hair out of place!’

‘Pheeeeeew! I’m blown away … lost for words. Hmmm … I love being surprised, intrigued and being made to wonder and this exhibition did it all’ ‘Mind blown!!!! They looked so real! Very impressive, creative and extraordinary!!!!!’

‘I enjoyed being here with my kids’ ‘Amazing, creepy, intriguing, fascinating, awesome!’

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WHAT AUDIENCES ARE SAYING ABOUT …

ARTONVIEW 92 SUMMER 2017

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EXHIBITION LISTING AT THE NGA

TOURING EXHIBITIONS

HYPER REAL

LIGHT MOVES: CONTEMPORARY AUSTRALIAN VIDEO ART

From the work of the earliest hyperrealists to their contemporary successors, this exhibition brings the human body into sharp focus.

20 October 2017 to 18 February 2018 Adult $25.00 | Children 16 and under free Concession $22.50 | Member $20.00 Audio guide hire $7.00 Book now at ticketek.com or 1300 795 012

RUSSIAN AVANT-GARDE Drawn from the NGA’s significant collection of Russian avant-garde art a century after the 1917 October Revolution.

19 August 2017 to 29 January 2018 Free

ANGELICA MESITI Five works by Angelica Mesiti explore the silent and the unspoken through the medium of video.

9 September 2017 to 2 April 2018 Free

NAMATJIRA: PAINTING COUNTRY Celebrating the donation of Gordon and Marilyn Darling’s collection of watercolours by the critically acclaimed Albert Namatjira.

15 July 2017 to 3 April 2018 Free

ARTHUR STREETON: THE ART OF WAR An important survey exhibition of Arthur Streeton’s war art, bringing together key works from collections around Australia and overseas.

15 December 2017 to 29 April 2018 Free

DAVID HOCKNEY PRINTS: THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF AUSTRALIA COLLECTION Explore the history of David Hockney’s printmaking practice through key works from the NGA’s representative collection.

11 November 2017 to 27 May 2018 Free

AUSTRALIAN IMPRESSIONISM An unprecedented opportunity to experience the depth and richness of the NGA’s major Australian Impressionist works.

Ongoing Free

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EXHIBITION LISTING

A selection of video art since its early days in the 1960s to now.

25 November 2017 to 4 February 2018 @ Wangaratta Art Gallery Free

SILVER AND GOLD: UNIQUE AUSTRALIAN OBJECTS 1850–1910 Works from the NGA’s significant collection of colonial Australian decorative arts and design.

10 December 2017 to 25 February 2018 @ Castlemaine Art Museum Free

INDIGENOUS AUSTRALIA: MASTERWORKS FROM THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF AUSTRALIA Organised by the NGA and drawn exclusively from Australia’s national collection.

17 November 2017 to 2 April 2018 @ me Collectors Room, Berlin Free

PICASSO: THE VOLLARD SUITE An incredibly rare opportunity to see one of the twentieth century’s greatest suites of prints, a highlight of the NGA’s collection of prints.

2 December 2017 to 15 April 2018 @ Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art Free

ABSTRACTION: CELEBRATING AUSTRALIAN WOMEN ABSTRACT ARTISTS A visually exhilarating exhibition revealing the contribution Australian women have made to abstract art.

2 March to 27 May 2018 @ Tweed Regional Gallery Free

Exclusive to the National Gallery of Australia

Opens 30 March

Cartier Paris Crocodile necklace 1975 (detail), special order, gold, diamonds, emeralds, rubies.

Cartier Collection. Photo: Vincent Wulveryck, Cartier Collection. Š Cartier

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E D U C AT I O N A N D L E A R N I N G

Rose Marin joins a conversation Duane Hanson’s Two workers are having about children and the hyperreal figures in the NGA’s major exhibition Hyper Real, on show until 18 February 2018.

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HYPER KIDS

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Worker 1: Hi Rose. I was just saying that, for anyone born since the

together. For me, it’s ageing and mortality that I have the most difficultly

turn of the millennium, the experience of reality is a vastly different

with, but I see some of the works here deal with those topics very

proposition to those of previous generations. It’s always been that,

sensitively, which is a relief.

for children, the boundaries between our created and natural worlds

Worker 1: There’s also fantastic creatures that my littlest two will love.

are flexible. These days, though, they’re literally growing up with

Plenty of things, really. I’m a little surprised by how much. I’ve got six

hyperreality. I think a show like this helps them unpack that. Do you

kids, so you can imagine how hard it is to find something for us to do

have kids, Rose?

as a family.

Rose: Yes. It’s my profession, too. So I totally get it, how difficult, but

Rose: I bet your kids will love Shaune Gladwell’s VR piece,

important, it can be, as a parent, or carer, to help them navigate and find

Orbital vanitas.

meaning in the endless stream of imagery they encounter

Worker 2: Your eldest might also find a kindred spirit in the

Worker 1: Especially in the media.

Tony Oursler.

Rose: Yes. How they decipher and absorb these experiences is important

Worker 1: Bit weird for my tastes, but you’re probably right. You know,

to their sense of self and to their relationships to others and the world

you grow up your kids, but they still surprise you with what they’re

around them.

thinking and how mature they can be.

Worker 2: My thirteen-year-old is having a bit of trouble with that. She’s

Worker 2: Millennials, they’re hard to pick.

having a hard time at school and finding her place among some, lets

Worker 1: Don’t I know it. But you want to provide them with all the

face it, unrealistic expectations put on her by the media and society

experiences you didn’t have. We’ll be back a few times, both of us, with

in general.

our families, because we’ve booked some of the creative workshops.

Worker 1: My boy, too. There’s plenty in Hyper Real to spark that

You’d know the ones, Rose.

discussion, I think, to help them out a bit with the what’s occupying

Rose: Absolutely. The NGA is super keen on having options for children.

them and with their emotions.

We’re running workshops over summer where kids can explore some of

Rose: Absolutely, and art galleries like the NGA are a great places to talk

the materials used to create hyperreal sculpture.

about life’s big issues and really examine concepts and ideas, and feelings.

Worker 2: Same as they use in movie special effects, right?

Worker 1: Kind of ironic that we’d have to bring our kids to an art gallery

Rose: Some of them, yes. We also have a little booklet for them, a free

to get a dose of reality.

children’s trail, that encourages them to consider their emotional

Worker 2: And then some. I guess that’s why they call it ‘hyper-reality’,

responses to the exhibition and the thoughts and feelings they read from

instead of just reality. There’s more reality here than in the real world.

the different human forms on display. The trail also connects to wall

We’re evidence of that. Even the nudes a couple of rooms in.

labels, which introduce concepts and pose questions to think about.

Rose: So you’re not overly worried about the nudes?

Worker 1: And there’s the children’s audio tour. Don’t forget the audio

Worker 2: Not really.

tour. We’re the star vocal talents on that. It was a lot of fun making it,

Worker 1: A little. I mean, the nude isn’t something new in art, but the

actually. And I hope it’s as much fun to listen to.

reality of these figures is a bit confronting at first. Take Ron Mueck’s

Worker 2: Educational, too, of course. Well, Rose, I’m sorry but

Pregnant woman and his Wild man, for instance. Then you realise they’re

I promised to meet up with the two Ronnies at the other end of the

just ordinary folk like us …

exhibition about now.

Worker 2: … but naked. Maybe they don’t have our keen sense of

Rose: I’ll see you guys later then. It’s been fun having this chat.

fashion …

Worker 1: Yes. Well, it’s a fun exhibition in my humble opinion.

Worker 1: … and we’ll be there to talk about that. Clearly, those

I’m going to get Spider Man’s autograph. I’ve been trying the catch him

figures are a little healthier than the two of us, but they’re still honest

all day. Do you think he’s the real deal?

representations of real people. And they all seem confident and capable

Worker 2: No, but what’s real these days?

in their own skin, which is an empowering message. It’s just biology in the end, right? Or humanity, depending on how you look at it.

See pages 28–37 for more on Hyper Real. (The adult stuff.)

Rose: Well, seeing the sculptures like this can actually be a way to discuss the human body and self-esteem and, for older children and teenagers, positive body image. The NGA recognises that these can be challenging conversations to have with children, but art can evoke genuine responses that can be tailored by parents, or anyone bringing children into the exhibition, to suit different ages and perspectives.

Worker 2: And, like you said, seeing them in a place like this helps, because it encourages them to open up to you about things that are not always easy to talk about. And, you can be there, having that moment 12

HYPER KIDS

Pages 10–11: Duane Hanson Two workers 1993, cast bronze, oil paint, mixed media, accessories. Stiftung Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn. © Estate of Duane Hanson / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2017 Opposite: A young boy marvels at Ron Mueck’s Pregnant woman 2002.

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N G A P L AY

INDIEGU  14

INDIEGUERILLAS

Kirsten Paisley highlights the latest iteration of NGA Play, opening on 15 December, for which artist-duo Santi Ariestyowanti and Miko Bawono (the Indieguerillas) have produced an outrageously fun Indonesian-Pop world for children to explore.

ERILLAS ARTONVIEW 92 SUMMER 2017

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NGA Play, our dedicated family and children’s gallery, presents a newly commissioned exhibition every six months, with the aim of introducing art and the NGA’s diverse collections to the young and young at heart. The space has been developed with the support of NGA Council member Tim Fairfax AC, in memory of Betty Churcher AO, to support families to engage with art in fun and playful ways.

Santi Ariestyowanti and Miko Bawono, known collectively as Indieguerillas, have a background in graphic design and are known for their social experiments, creating surprising spaces conducive to community engagement and participation. They are creating a bespoke environment for NGA Play, comprising all new works of art designed and inspired by the our Indonesian textile collection and their recent visit to Australia.

As an introduction to the space, the artists have created two animated avatars of themselves, bespoke puppet people who serve as the pseudofictitious artists of the exhibition. Since the eleventh century, puppet theatre has been performed, and still is today, in the Indonesian court and the Sultan’s palace, with the great Indian epics such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata dominating the repertoire. In the Javanese adaptations of these iconic tales, a unique set of servant clown characters known as the Punakawan appear.

The Punakawan crack jokes and ridicule each other, but they also reflect wisdom and truth. Their jokes often touch on, and criticise, current political issues. The Punakawan consist of the four characters Semar, Gareng, Petruk and Bagong, and it is these characters that the Indieguerillas often incorporate into their works, creating contemporary versions or, at times, playing the parts themselves.

Visiting the NGA earlier this year, Ariestyowanti and Bawono explored our Indonesian textile collection to inspire their NGA Play installation, opening 15 December. They took a special interest in two batik cloth works from the late nineteenth century, a ceremonial cloth (kain batak) featuring scenes from the Mahabharata, with figures depicted in wayang style, and a skirt cloth (kain panjag) created during the Japanese occupation of Indonesia. Both batiks include the Punakawan figures.

On the skirt cloth, a wartime scene includes warrior figures from the Mahabharata, who are depicted driving tanks and armoured cars, battling

Pages 14–15: Indieguerillas This social scenery 2015, aluminium, wood, electric and light devices, acrylic on canvas Above: Indieguerillas Sons of the beach 2010, digital print on acrylic sheet mounted on wood panel Both © Indieguerillas. Images courtesy of Indieguerillas and Mizuma Gallery.

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INDIEGUERILLAS

against the Japanese, whose flags flutter from the opposing vehicles while Semar parachutes onto the battlefield. The Indieguerillas have created a mural-scaled, interactive colouring wall of epic detail, which includes a menagerie of different characters, logos and motifs. Among many references, Semar’s face, with a parachute above his head, can be found.

When viewing the ceremonial cloth, the Indieguerillas were reminded of the wayang beber tradition, a form of storytelling that is performed through the use of scroll paintings. This tradition is no longer prolific in Indonesia, and the Indieguerillas were inspired to bring it back in their own unique way, creating for NGA Play a customised wayang bike. Peddling the bike mobilises a scroll-like screen, through which Bagong takes us on a journey into the NGA’s significant international collections, particularly incorporating imagery by globally influential artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol and others in our important twentiethcentury American collection.

Also, as a wayang performance is traditionally accompanied by an Indonesian gamelan orchestra, the artists have created a gamelan bike that generates music when peddled. In this way, the Indieguerilla’s bikes encourage riders to work together. The idea of the bikes was further inspired by the artist’s recent visit to Australia. As they were interested in responding to relevant issues such as obesity and the dominance of screen culture in children’s lives, Ariestyowanti and Bawono were compelled to make art that would provide physical activity, promote fitness and inspire cooperation.

Other aspects of the exhibition are designed to foster responsibility for the home environment. In the circus tent, for example, children must clean up the room to activate audiovisual projections as their reward. Visitors can also make their very own Indieinspired puppets to take home. Children of all ages will be inspired by this playful, interactive introduction to Indonesia’s unique contemporary art aesthetic not only to create their own colourful and imaginative art projects but also to learn about Australia’s nearest neighbor with their every visit to NGA Play over summer.

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C O L L E C T I O N D I S P L AY

The art of giving Deborah Hart highlights Rosalie Gascoigne’s incredible Letting go, currently on show with other important recent gifts that have enhanced the NGA’s Australian art collection.

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THE ART OF GIVING

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Rosalie Gascoigne’s Letting go 1991 has been a revelation to most visitors who have seen the new display ‘The art of giving’ at the NGA in recent months, even those people who have come to know this artist’s work well. Unveiled for the first time in a public gallery, this remarkable, large nine-panel work was a generous gift to the nation from the artist’s daughter Hester in honour of her mother. It represents a major addition to the national collection, strengthening our representation of the artist’s work and adding an important dimension to the Australian collection.

The NGA has a pre-eminent collection of Australian art, greatly enhanced by the generosity of our donors, who give specific works of art or provide funds to facilitate their purchase. The installation of ‘The art of giving’ celebrates the ongoing generosity of those who do so much to build the national collection. Other gifts in this display include those

by James and Jacqui Erskine and Tom Lowenstein as well as Philip Wolfhagen’s multi-panelled magnum opus A litany of vapours 2007, which was acquired with the generous support of the many contributors to the annual Foundation Gala Dinner Fund.

The expansiveness of Letting go, as a whole, captures the vastness of the landscape in which Gascoigne found herself when she moved from Auckland to Mount Stromlo in Canberra, where her husband worked as an astronomer at the observatory. Her time at Stromlo, from the middle of the Second World War to 1960, was arguably the formative period of her artistic career. Even though it was years before her distinctive practice as an assemblage artist emerged to take the art world by storm, she was quietly yet determinedly building up her reserves, both visually and experientially, of the country around her. It was a place where she discovered firsthand the breadth of the countryside shaped by winter frosts and scorched summer ground, blossoming springtime and autumnal leaves. And it was a time for her art to incubate, as though the seeds of her future life were sown to germinate a couple of decades later.

By the time she created Letting go, Gascoigne had accumulated decades of experience and a plethora of materials. An inveterate collector, she always liked the idea of having ‘plenty of stuff’ with which to work—sorting, selecting, reshaping and classifying like elements and incorporating them into her art. The more time one spends with this multi-panel assemblage, the richer it becomes in its intricacy and associations. As her son Martin has written in his forthcoming catalogue raissoné of her work (to be published by the Australian National University in 2018), this is one of some fifty works that employ linoleum, which was often sourced from local dumps such as the one in Captain’s Flat, where she had made the discovery of a ‘whole lot’ of very good linoleum. With typical humour, she noted that, at times, ‘the lino was subtly awful’. Yet it was what she did with it that transformed it and gave it new, evocative life, including the floor-based installation Step through 1980 in the NGA’s collection.

Gascoigne’s selection of different patterns and tonalities is shown to great effect in the various panels in Letting go. She noted that the process of tearing the linoleum was akin to drawing for her. Some pieces are torn into very small fragments, while others are larger and appear to float and swirl across the grey-brown backing boards. In areas, the surface is washed with subtle white pigment, evoking leaves floating across a bleached landscape. Hester Gascoigne recalls that her mother’s studio wasn’t very large, saying, ‘It is quite extraordinary that she was able to

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THE ART OF GIVING

keep hold of the complex variations on the scale of this work’. Despite

In the midst of these paintings, centred in the gallery space, is Akio

its domestic origins, the linoleum here conveys more about natural

Makigawa’s elegantly proportioned sculpture MCMXCIII—I 1993, which

phenomena. In its new configurations, it evokes land, light and air.

combines a modern take on classicism and Japanese aesthetics with

Air was important to Gascoigne. As she wrote in a 1996 statement about

personal recollections of his past. As he said, ‘These archetypes in my

the work, ‘The trees let go their leaves. Obedient to season they hold up

work are transformed into a personal story, and vice versa. The mountain/

their arms and let go. The air is full of falling leaf’. Letting go is also about

island is a recurring theme. I lived near a mountain when I was young.

personal freedom and having the courage to be true to oneself.

There was a beach and water. These are clear memories to draw on, with

A commonality in the recent gifts on display in ‘The art of giving’, aside from the obvious, is the artists’ engagement with the natural world, albeit in quite distinctive ways. Philip Wolfhagen’s A litany of vapours,

powerful images of boats, mountains, clouds. They are fundamental pleasures. I treasure them’.

The works in ‘The art of giving’ display so generously gifted or

depicts cloud formations as they arc over the landscape. It is a celebration

supported by our donors are already treasures of the national collection.

of the transient nature of weather patterns and their effect on the

Each is also a highly significant example of the artist’s oeuvre, and we are

earth. Like British romantic painters John Constable and JMW Turner,

forever grateful to be able to include them in the collection, and in the

Wolfhagen finds the humble cloud a thing of great beauty, worthy of

public domain, to inspire visitors of all ages in perpetuity.

contemplation and exploration. To stand before this work is to feel as though you are floating among the clouds, immersed in nature.

The heavens and infinite space are at the core of Brian Blanchflower’s major work Canopy XXVIII—Stochastic cloud (Homage to Iannis Xenakis) 1991–92, one of the two gifts by James and Jacqui Erskine in this display. The textured hessian ground emphasises the materiality of the surface, and provides a striking counterpoint to a sense of the world without boundaries. The title refers to Blanchflower’s fascination with the idea of charting the intangible. Also evoking a sense of the sky, albeit in very different ways, is Ildiko Kovacs’s Full moon 2011. In this work, the reduced, luminous palette is combined with a bold, linear expression, conveying a sense of poetic feeling along with a mastery of painting.

Opposite: Rosalie Gascoigne Letting go 1991 (detail), assemblage of torn linoleum pieces on weathered wood panels. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, gift of Hester Gascoigne in honour of her mother Rosalie Gascoigne, 2015. © The estate of Rosalie Gascoigne. Represented by Viscopy Pages 18–9: Letting go installed in ‘The art of giving’ display at the NGA, Canberra, October 2017.

Above: Philip Wolfhagen’s A litany of vapours 2007, Akio Makigawa’s MCMXCIII—I 1993 and Brian Blanchflower’s Canopy XXVIII—Stochastic cloud (Homage to Iannis Xenakis) 1991–92 in the ‘The art of giving’.

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DONOR

Penelope Seidler Maryanne Voyazis interviews Australian architect Penelope Seidler, member of the NGA Foundation Board and former member of NGA Council, about her philosophy of giving and passion for art. Penelope also shares her adventure in Moscow in 2014 as a player in AES+F’s video installation Inverso mundus 2015, presented in the round in the NGA’s major exhibition Hyper Real, on show until 18 February 2018.

Maryanne Voyazis: You have given so much time, expertise and

until I studied architecture that we had Lloyd Rees, who taught us art

leadership to the arts. Do you think there’s such a thing as a

history, and art. He was such a wonderful teacher. He chose all of the

philosophy of giving?

slides of all the great masterpieces in the world and talked endlessly

Penelope Seidler: It’s not so much giving, it’s sharing. It’s nice to share

about them and how he reacted when he first saw them. When I see

things. And, if you’ve got the wherewithal to facilitate enjoyment for others, it’s sharing.

Maryanne: That’s a very generous way of looking at it. When you’re like me and in the business of asking people to share their resources, it’s important to remember that.

Penelope: Sure. Don’t you find that people get excited about it?

those paintings now, I remember every word he said. When I speak to others who were there too, they have the same experience. I had a deep love of the history of art and, of course, when I married, Harry was very concerned with art. You know, the art world was much more intimate then, in the fifties. You sort of knew everyone, and we used to go to all the art openings and enjoy the company of artists. Harry actually opened an exhibition of paintings by Peter Upward.

Maryanne: Do you enjoy the process of giving?

Maryanne: At Gallery A?

Penelope: Oh, yes. It’s wonderful. And I think people should give while

Penelope: No, Terry Clune. Long before Gallery A. It was 1961.

they’re alive, because you have the fun of it. It’s not like when people leave things in their will. If you give, particularly money, when you’re alive, you can see what they do with it. It’s inclusive. However, there’re different points of view about that.

Maryanne: Do you remember the first work of art that made you feel or think differently?

Penelope: Feel differently? I don’t know. My parents collected art, modestly but they were always interested. There was always discussion about modern art. A lot of people thought it should just be representational—‘photographic’, if you like. I can remember all the fuss about the Archibald the year that William Dobell won it. There was a court case about it, and a lot of discussion. So I always did think about these things. I can remember visiting the art gallery and being on the side of the progressives, the moderns, rather than the ones who decried it.

I saw a film once about Picasso and thought it was amazing. He could do anything. One line and it was an artwork.

When I left school and went to Sydney University, you couldn’t study art history then. There was nothing. It wasn’t on the syllabus. It wasn’t

We bought a piece then, and I have a picture of me looking at that piece. We were very excited about that show, and Harry used Peter Upward’s works in buildings that he was doing at the time. He had bought Josef Albers’s work because he had been a student of his at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. He had bought them in America before he came to Australia. I don’t remember that we bought much at all in the first few years, when we bought the Peter Upward.

It wasn’t until we built the house, which is fifty years old now, finished in 1967, that we wanted to get the right artworks for the particular spots. That took about three or four years before we filled the house. And there they are, they’re still there, they’re not going to move because it’s part of the architecture. We’ve got the Helen Frankenthaler, the Sam Francis, the Frank Stella. They do happen to be American, but that’s just by the way. We had no particular brief for American artists.

It just seemed to happen that the scale that they were doing at the time, and the colours, fitted what we wanted.

Maryanne: That’s really interesting. I assumed that it was a more determined focus on American art, more planned or more purposeful.

Opposite: Penelope Seidler in the top-floor apartments of the Harry Seidler offices, Sydney, with works by Rover Thomas and Lin Utzon in the background, August 2017.

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Penelope: Not particularly. It’s just that, at that stage in America, it was the big Abstract Expressionists, and that’s the sort of ethos we were attracted to. There were things like that going on here, but the scale was different. We used to follow the scene here. Peter Upward did these great things. We were pretty keen on him. Michael Johnson at the time.

I remember Gunter Christmann, all those people. But they didn’t do big enough works.

Maryanne: So it was the scale of the works that also was appealing?

Penelope: Indeed. We didn’t want little. Well, there’s a postage-stamp one but that’s deliberate. We just wanted one masterwork in a place.

Maryanne: I’m really interested in this idea of living with art.

How does that feed into the life of a building and the life of its occupants?

Penelope: It’s integral. They’re not going to be moved around. They’re there for the building. It’s part of the building, if you like. It’s all part of it. Until we filled those walls, we were hungry to complete it. And now, when you walk in, there it is.

Maryanne: If the works weren’t there?

Penelope: It wouldn’t be right. I feel like the king of the castle when I open the door and walk in. There it is, just as I like it. I can tell immediately if there’s anything out of place. The vase or the this or that, it’s just got to be there. The chairs, the furniture is all original.

Maryanne: It’s the entire experience?

Penelope: The entire experience, yes!

Maryanne: Then, taking something like Theo van Doesburg’s Space‑time construction #3 1923, which you donated to the NGA in 2010 in memory of your husband. That is a work that was obviously really precious to you because of its influence in connection to Harry.

Penelope: Yes. Harry was alive when we found out that this work was available to buy. It was in Germany, although he had seen it in an exhibition in MoMA in the forties, when he lived in New York.

He always showed the slide of that painting as a way of describing modern architecture.

I said, ‘We have to get it’, and we had it hanging up in the study in Killara. But it’s quite fragile, it’s on paper, and people would come and say, ‘Oh, you shouldn’t have it there all the time’. So, in the end, I just put it in a cupboard. It’d been there for a long time. And Harry

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Above: Theo van Doesburg Space-time construction #3 1923, graphite, ink, gouache. Gift of Penelope Seidler AM in memory of Harry Seidler AC, 2010. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program

had always said the only gallery in Australia that could accommodate

Opposite, from top: Paul Klee and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy Postcards for the Bauhaus exhibition 1923, lithographs.

Gifts of Penelope Seidler AM in memory of Harry Seidler AC, 2010. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program

Sitting in a cupboard is no good. Of course, it has also been properly

All works from the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

rare, quite valuable now. They’re all 1923, which is the year he was

PENELOPE SEIDLER

it is the National Gallery, because they have a significant international collection of that period. So, soon after he died, I gave it to the gallery. conserved now. I’m very happy about that.

Then I collected these original Bauhaus postcards, one a year, and gave them to Harry for his birthday. They’re lithographs really, quite

born. They were just up there framed. And, again, I thought, there was a Paul Klee, it’s an original Paul Klee, and a Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and a Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, so I thought they should all go to the National Gallery.

Maryanne: Did I read correctly that you were a volunteer guide at the Art Gallery of New South Wales?

Penelope: I was when they started them in the sixties. They didn’t have any guides at that stage. As I said, you couldn’t study art history at Sydney University until the Power Institute started. I was at Sydney University studying architecture when that happened. That created a whole new world. I used to audit a lot of their lectures. The gallery started putting on lectures. Terry Smith used to give a lot. Quite a large number of mostly women would go to them, because they were on midmornings. Then they decided that they would have guides, because there were always women interested in walking around the gallery and participating. Sandra McGrath, an American who was part of it, said, ‘In America, we have all these guides’. So they started that. It’s still going. It’s huge now. It’s absolutely huge. Then I started being more involved with the office. I’ve got a real love of art, and history of art, too.

Over the years, of course, so much has happened in contemporary art. You’ve got all the video art now, and performance art. It is amazing the way it’s evolving.

Maryanne: And you remain engaged with that.

Penelope: I do, I do.

Maryanne: Very engaged in some instances, as you’re actually in AES+F’s video work Inverso mundus, which is in our Hyper Real exhibition. How did that come about?

Penelope: Let me tell you about AES+F. They were the Russian exhibitors at the biennale in Venice in 2007. I remember walking in and being knocked out by Last riot. Absolutely amazing! I watched it again and again and again. I actually bought a piece from it, not a video but a still, which I have in my apartment in the city. The subsequent biennale, or it might have been the one later, they showed work offsite, because, having been the Russian artists once, they weren’t the next time. Then they did The Feast of Trimalchio, where the people come to the island for the holiday. It was fantastic, and I’ve got a huge one of those. I just love their work. I met them in Venice and really liked them.

The first time I saw their work was at the biennale in Sydney in 2004, when they had large photographs of children holding ammunitions, Action Half Life. I bought one. I’ve just really followed their work since then. Once, I gave them a party here. Well, Tatiana was the only one that was here. The others hadn’t arrived, but we had a lovely party here.

Judith Neilson came. She liked their work, too. Tatiana was saying that they were making a new film. I said, ‘Oh I’d love to be in it. What do I have to do to be in it?’ She said, ‘You can be in it. I’d love you to be in it. I want you to be in it, too’. You say these things and then, of course, she kept in touch. And Judith really wanted to go, too, so we went to Moscow in 2014.

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Above: AES+F Inverso mundus 2015, seven-channel HD video installation. © AES+F | ARS New York.

Courtesy of the artists, Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, Anna Schwartz Gallery and Triumph Gallery

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PENELOPE SEIDLER

Maryanne: That was a big year for you. That was also when Fiona Lowry’s portrait of you won the Archibald. Did you at any point feel nervous or afraid about acting in an artwork?

Penelope: Oh no, I was thrilled about it. You had to do things on set, well as much as you do with various things. We were there just under a week I think, and we went out to the film studio every day. There was a lot of sitting around to do, but there were people of all ages and cultures, a complete cross-section, so it was rather fun sitting around with them all and chatting away.

In the studio, you weren’t quite sure what you were doing but they’d say, ‘Look up and walk and do this’. They’d tell you what feeling to have. Scenes where you were walking, you had to do on a treadmill.

You didn’t know what was going on. I thought, ‘How are they going to put it all together?’ But they did. I think we were there in March in 2014, something like that. Then the film wasn’t ready until May the next year.

It premiered in Venice, and we were there.

Maryanne: I think it really does speak to a sense of adventure and a sense of the world offering opportunities …

Penelope: Yes, well it was a daring thing to do, I suppose, to go to Moscow. It was good though. I’d do it again.

Maryanne: I think it’s a really interesting choice for Hyper Real, and I think people will be really fascinated.

Penelope: According to The Art Newspaper, visitors to Patricia Piccinini’s show in Brazil topped …

Maryanne: A million. It was mind blowing.

Penelope: You have plenty of her pieces.

Maryanne: In the collection, yes. Hyper Real also has a room dedicated to her. Actually, Australians feature strongly among the international artists, with multiple works by Ron Mueck and Sam Jinks. Mueck’s Pregnant woman will be back on display after travelling for so long, and one of Jinks’s works was specially commissioned for the exhibition.

Penelope: I think people will be very curious.

Maryanne: I think so, too.

Penelope: It’s a bit different. It will attract attention.

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HYPER REAL

CURRENT MA JOR EXHIBITION

Deborah Hart interviews Patricia Piccinini, one of Australia’s most internationally celebrated and successful contemporary artists, about her work in the NGA’s current major exhibition Hyper Real, on display until 18 February 2018.

Deborah Hart: When we initially started talking about Hyper Real, we were keen, with the curator, Jaklyn Babington, to open it up to new ideas and new mediums. Your earliest work in the exhibition, The Breathing Room, a video work from 2000, seemed like an exciting first step toward this. Tell me about it.

Patricia Piccinini: I was trying to create a natural response from an artificial form, which I’ve done before with works such as Swell.

The work is artificial, but the response to it is a very natural, bodily one. And since, at the root, most of my work is about our changing understanding of what we consider ‘natural’ and what we consider ‘artificial’, to have something natural come out of something artificial is very interesting for me. This is especially as more and more of our lives are going down that track. For example, natural love in our times often seems shaped by the internet.

In the lead-up to 2000, there was this huge anxiety about the new millennium and the Y2K bug. It was palpable. People thought airplanes were going to fall out of the sky. A lot of my work is about time and place, so I wanted to reflect this. However, the sort of panic and anxiety that the work evokes is very primal and timeless. When you enter The Breathing Room, it feels like you’re inside some kind of body, like the gut of a whale. However, it is ambiguous. It is both familiar and completely unknown.

Deborah: It’s like the skin on a body that is breathing.

Patricia: We’re not sure what kind of body it is. It looks like a human body but we don’t know what it is. That’s actually a common theme in my work. So this body breathes normally, and then the breathing becomes heightened and the body starts to panic, it starts to almost hyperventilate … Inside the work, when that happens, I still feel a strange anxiety or embarrassment at the sense of it being so intimate, at witnessing this intimate recurrence. Breath is also really part of being close to somebody. You don’t hear breath, you don’t feel it, unless you’re really close to somebody. It’s this very intimate thing.

Left: Bootflower and Meadow 2015, silicone, fibreglass, human hair and polyethylene, thermoplastic polymer.

Detached Cultural Organisation, Hobart, and collection of the artist. Installed at the NGA, Canberra.

All works in this feature courtesy of the artist, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery, Sydney, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne and Hosfelt Gallery, San Francisco

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HYPER REAL

But it has this duality. You feel close to this organism, who is doing

on this white, soft felt surface’, because any baby is beautiful. They signify

something, yet you feel this anxiety because it’s out of your control.

potential for life. But then you think, ‘It’s not a human baby. This is

You can’t press the button and make it stop or make it go faster. It does

something else’. And that pushes you away because you don’t recognise it,

what it wants to do. And it’s that kind of anxiety, of not being able to

it’s not familiar. We’re taught to be suspicious of things like that. You’re

control stuff. When you’re out of control, things seem more heightened.

pulled in and pushed away. That dynamic doesn’t happen very often.

I wanted to get that heightened feeling in the viewer and that duality.

Like in the media, things are black or white. With this, though, it’s not

It’s neither good nor bad. It’s something else. It’s very sensual, very

good and not bad, it’s somewhere in there. It opens up a space for the

experiential and totally digital, all at the same time.

viewer to be present (using a meditative term) on what they actually

When I made it, it was at the beginning of the whole ‘digital explosion’. Now, you don’t see a picture in the media that hasn’t been doctored … My work is not about the process or the medium, it’s

think about this. You can spend a few moments coming to a realisation about yourself as the viewer, and about the artwork.

I guess people will have different experiences. Some people will

actually about the form, the ideas behind it, the interaction between the

know the baby’s nose comes from a bat and that bats have echolocation.

viewer and the work and the intentions of the work that come from me.

So some people will have that in their background, which will inform

Deborah: On a deep experiential level, you become very aware of your own breathing, of your own mortality. If you don’t breathe you’re not alive. Breathing is life. That’s part of the anxiety. It’s palpable, like going into the centre of something.

their understanding of this work. Some won’t have that, and they’ll have some other experience.

Deborah: With The long awaited, there’s a lot about youth and ageing and there’s this strange, wondrous creature. How did that come about?

Patricia: When you’re in it, you become very self-aware. Most of the time,

Patricia: I was really interested in dugongs. I’ve always been fascinated by

watching a movie, for example, we’re not self-aware … Whereas this work

their forms and the way they exist in the world. Of course, they are often

brings you back into yourself.

cited as the inspiration for the stories of mermaids, and, in real life, they

Deborah: As an artist, you often challenge people with things that they might feel awkward talking about, like emphasising orifices or transforming body parts, making the familiar unfamiliar or visa versa.

The works make us question our own foibles and embarrassment.

Patricia: And that’s what happens across all my work. But it happens in different ways. With Prone, for example, you think, ‘What a lovely baby

are the only herbivorous aquatic mammal, the cows of the sea. They’re Opposite: Prone 2011, silicone, fibreglass, human hair, felt. Collection of the artist Above: The long awaited 2008, silicone, fibreglass, human hair, plywood, leather, clothing. Detached Cultural Organisation, Hobart

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very placid and nurturing. They keep their children on their backs for

that her acceptance of his nurturing is an incredible display of inner

two years to help them to breathe, and I find the image of that quite

strength. I feel it is much easier to nurture someone else than to allow

moving. They don’t have a lot of offspring, so, if they die, it’s significant.

them to nurture you. People don’t like to be pathetic, vulnerable or

They’re not exactly endangered, but they are at risk. They’re threatened

helpless. We don’t like that at all. But, at the end of life, we do need a lot

by the waters warming up. A lot of my work is inspired by things I read

of nurturing.

about the natural world. For example, whales feed their babies with

Deborah: Nature itself is really quite mind-blowing.

Deborah: For me, your Eulogy is an example of the adage that truth is often stranger than fiction. Audiences might be forgiven for thinking this is one of your inventions but the blobfish tenderly held by this ordinary-looking man actually does exist in nature.

Patricia: Amazing. That is where the inspiration for the dugong figure in

Patricia: Mostly in my work I try to imagine what could be or might be,

breast milk that is as thick as toothpaste so it doesn’t dissipate in the water. I love this sort of fact!

The long awaited comes from. However, I also wanted to depict an older figure because I am interested in the relationships between generations.

It is important to me that she is a grandmother figure. She doesn’t have what people consider to be a perfect body. In fact, what disturbs people most is her fat and wrinkles. But that’s a natural process. Everyone will get wrinkles and a lot of us will get fat. It is interesting that people are more disturbed by the ageing than by the human-dugong chimera aspect of the work.

Deborah: We often have superficial, judgemental attitudes to such things. If we take time with your works, we might reconsider and find fresh responses.

Patricia: In this situation, what I’m most drawn to is that the dynamic of the boy comforting her. Usually it is the other way, but I think

but isn’t. But I am often struck by how restrained my own inventions are when compared to the truly bizarre creatures that actually do exist.

In nature, there are beings so strange that they would be difficult to accept if they were not actually real. The blobfish is one such miraculous aquatic creature. It lives in the deep seas to the south of Australia, and was relatively unknown to science until fishing boats started pulling them up in the 1980s, victims of collateral damage resulting from crab trawling. In the short time since then, they have been driven to the brink of extinction. Not deliberately, not because we wanted something from them, but basically by accident.

I find it hard to imagine a ‘Save the Blobfish’ campaign. It is a marvellously uncharismatic creature, and even its name is discouraging.

It is certainly no panda or mountain gorilla. However, despite all that, to me, the blobfish is extraordinary. Its gelatinous body is almost the same density as seawater, making it perfectly adapted to the immense

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Above: Newborn 2010, silicone, Forton, steel, human hair, possum pelt. Collection of Paris Neilson

pressure of its deep-sea home.

Opposite: Eulogy 2011, silicone, fibreglass, human hair, clothing. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Warwick and Jane Flecknoe Bequest Fund, 2015

existence of the blobfish. It is a eulogy for this particular specimen,

HYPER REAL

This sculpture is a celebration of the simple, gormless, wonderful supported in death by a very ordinary-looking man. Perhaps he is one

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HYPER REAL

of the millions of ordinary people who neither know nor care much

raising somehow. Children, on the other hand, are open to ideas. They

about the fate of the blobfish. Even so, he seems genuinely moved by the

don’t have preconceptions, they just respond to the essence of whom

fate of this unprepossessing fish. There is hope in that.

they’re with.

Deborah: Extraordinary aspects of the real and the wildly imaginary come together in The welcome guest. Indeed, one could say that the peacock and the sloth are among the most hyperreal looking creatures of the natural world.

Patricia: The title comes from a Goethe quote that ‘Beauty is everywhere a welcome guest’. It includes a peacock, an animal that has evolved to be visually extraordinary. His feathers have no other use beyond being beautiful to a female. Yet, when we think of artificial evolution, we think only in terms of utility. If nature can produce an incredible, astonishing bird of beauty like this, can we also select for beauty when we change nature? We already change nature for what we imagine to be rational reasons, for profit or convenience. It seems okay for us to do that. This work is asking, ‘Is it okay to create something that is just beautiful?’

The first time I made this work, I showed it in Turkey in this big white landscape. But it was a little bit too alien, not of this world.

The white landscape made it seem like a fairytale, whereas the bed is from the world we live in. It gives it a sense of possibility. It allows us to suspend disbelief, even though it’s not true. I try to use reality to talk about things, to make them conceivable enough for us to contemplate them. That’s why I’m interested in realism. It’s a way to allow people to engage with the work.

My friend is a philosopher, and she was telling me about this guy in New South Wales who has a genetic intervention that works to stop cellular degradation. He’s been taking medication for a year that changes him at a cellular level. Everyday conversations bring stories like this, and works like mine don’t seem unimaginable any more.

creature welcome in our life? Because it’s only here for beauty’s sake,

Deborah: Yes, and also the bed is a great metaphor because it is a place of dreams. Peacocks are dreamlike animals. They are amazing.

Sometimes there needs to be a reckoning with the remarkable nature of the world we live in.

for art’s sake. It’s not here to provide meat or be our servant. It’s not for

Patricia: Exactly, peacocks are just inconceivable. But they are real.

use. Sloths are actually really interesting animals, as extraordinary as the

I’m not interested in telling the future. I’m interested in today, in how

peacock. They have ribbons of muscle and can just hang all day. They

we relate to the world and to the nature we change and in the myriad

also have a beautiful face, quite a human face, too. I tried very hard to

possibilities of what that might mean.

On the bed, there is this creature that’s based on a sloth, with these ridiculous claws and amazing hair patternation, neither of which are useful. Yet the little girl finds it wonderful. Is that enough? And is this

make its back really beautiful. It’s like a baroque scroll.

Why is it okay to change nature for the sake of human utility but not for beauty? The girl doesn’t question it. She is just open to this creature, and the creature is open to her. They have a connection. We look at it and think ‘That isn’t right. They’re too close’, and it’s a bit anxiety-

Opposite: The welcome guest 2011, silicone, fibreglass, human hair, clothing, taxidermied peacocks. Collection of the artist Above: The Breathing Room 2000, three-channel video.

Collection of the artist

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Ronnie van Hout Jaklyn Babington poses a few questions to artist Ronnie van Hout, whose work in Hyper Real is playful, intelligent and a little bit dark.

Jaklyn: Ronnie, some people laugh out loud at your works and others find them quite disturbing. Is this deliberate?

Ronnie: The audience I play to is not the art world one, but a general one. What’s said about your work can be funny and interesting. A person’s interpretation either tells you something about that person or can be a terrible reminder of how much you failed to proselytise. It’s often the angry responses that are closest to the truth. The ones that say I’m mad and weird, and need help, show an understanding of the work, but they also make the mistake of thinking that the work is about me. We all come to art with preconceptions of what it is and its role, and I find it challenging to live up to, or down to, those expectations. The best responses are usually from children, because they don’t have those preconceptions.

I honestly don’t set out to make disturbing, or even humorous, work. I set out to explore an idea, and the work is the outcome.

I possibly go for a mood, or a tone, and one that is probably most like the people I know, sarcastic or cynical, with a great deal of wordplay and wit thrown in as entertainment. I accept all interpretations of my work. Like many songs I love to sing to myself, I don’t really think too deeply about meaning, because that’s just quantum physics.

Jaklyn: Personally, I find your work has an infectious, dark and wicked sense of humour.

It’s nice to be described as infectious, dark and with a wicked sense of humour. I try not to take things too seriously. Comedy was a way my friends and I connected and learnt about each other when I was at school. Over time, I began to understand the complexity of comedy and its social purpose. The joke and its

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HYPER REAL

play with words, how that touched how we

does your interest in the repetition of self

larger than life on an illuminated screen in

understood our collective world and how it

come from?

the eternal night of the cinema. I am there

flirted with the repressed.

Ronnie: A question might be ‘Why don’t

on my own, consuming junk food, allowing

Jaklyn: What are your thoughts on the

other artists use themselves more?’ The figure

hyperreal genre?

Ronnie: I didn’t really know there was a genre called ‘hyperreal’ before this exhibition. The fact I’ve made figures with varying degrees of likeness to actual people and myself has more to do with my interest and study of film.

Cinematic montage is probably the only way I know how to put things together. Montage is where one plus one equals three. Like many filmmakers, I’ve come to realise that genre is a format I work with. I’ve made horror, sci-fi and comedy. Partly my interest in using some subjects is to address a structural arrangement.

Other times, I am looking at a film that is always in the background of my thinking, like John Carpenter’s The Thing.

with my face and hands is a man-child, on the verge of adulthood, always becoming but never stepping through the threshold into being, which describes me to a certain point.

By repeating the figure, I wanted to take it to a place where it became something else, an army, or too many to take in. It changes the meaning of the work. In some ways, most art is a form of cloning, or a critique of this form of symbolic representation.

I try to avoid

in what the day forbids. I quickly went from Shakespeare to Samuel Beckett via Monty Python, the Goons, Dave Allen and Tony Hancock and came to understand the artist as having an element of the prankster, the outsider and the strange, weird one.

Like a great stand-up comic, an artist is merely pointing at things and saying, ‘Look at that’. It’s not so much about my personality coming out in my work, as that assumes too much intention on my behalf.

It’sabout what I do with art and that it fulfils an acceptable social

subjects and meaning

role for me. Luckily, no one has

when making things

developed a blood test, like the

but enjoy a replicating

one in The Thing, to determine

alien, animated

the real artist from the fake artist.

skeleton or dead

Jaklyn: Your works in Hyper Real share the

person come to

doppelganger theme with The Thing. Where

life projected

Ronnie van Hout Sitting figure I and Sitting figure II 2016, painted polyurethane, cast epoxy resin fibreglass, polystyrene, clothing, wig, stainless steel. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 2017, and Raft Studio, Melbourne. © Courtesy of the artist and STATION, Melbourne

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CARTIER

COMING MA JOR EXHIBITION

Alison Wright interviews Pierre Rainero, Cartier’s Image, Style and Heritage Director, about the philosophy behind one of the world’s biggest luxury brands in the leadup to the NGA’s major exhibition of over three hundred exquisite and innovative Cartier pieces on display from 30 March to 22 July 2018. The exhibition explores Cartier’s glittering international clientele that included royalty, aristocrats, socialites and stars of the stage, cinema and music.

Pierre Rainero, Image, Style and Heritage Director, Cartier. © Cartier

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‘Nothing was set in stone. Cartier style is founded on a vision, values and a sense of beauty—a philosophy.’

Alison Wright: How do you approach defining Cartier style in what

many different things through that common language. This is what

is a very changing world for us today, from both a technical point of

makes Cartier so unique.

view but also from a craftsmanship and design perspective?

Pierre Rainero: First of all, Cartier style is a living style, and has been ever since Louis Cartier. He believed that Cartier style should evolve with time. Nothing was set in stone. Cartier style is founded on a vision, values and a sense of beauty—a philosophy.

Every time we create a design, we aim at bringing something new.

We have a twofold vision. First, beauty, which is at the centre of everything Cartier does. This sense of beauty, and the very concept of beauty itself, is something that evolves with time. So, if you consider beauty as an objective, then decade after decade, or generation after generation, this will imply something different. The eye has a different sense of beauty.

That’s one consideration.

The second, equally important, consideration is that the objects we create will become part of our customers’ lives. How they will live with our creations requires us to understand their way of

Alison: What are you most looking forward to in this exhibition?

Pierre: I see it as a rare opportunity to discover pieces that the vast majority of people wouldn’t normally see, because most of these items are part of someone’s private life or are ceremonial items. It’s an opportunity to share the different facets of Cartier, too. The story behind the piece, the making, developments in technique and innovations such as platinum mounts and the different kinds of settings that Cartier used. Another example is the introduction of the baguette cut, which Cartier first used in the 1910s.

Then, of course, we see jewellery in connection to people, the human dimension. An item of jewellery or a precious item such as a clock becomes an intimate part of our customers’ lives, and so there are many stories that go with them and that tell us about the bond between the necklace or the watch and its owner. Often, these items are associated with some of the most important moments in our customers’ lives.

life. Of course, lifestyles also change over time,

Alison: As the ‘guardian’ of style and heritage,

so a sense of today, and sometimes even a sense

as you look at designs for the future, would

of tomorrow, is central to every Cartier creation

you say that history is always informing

and to the evolution of Cartier style.

those designs?

Alison: For visitors to the NGA, what is exciting

Pierre: It does in many ways. You have the

about the Cartier exhibition is they will get to

object itself, which of course says a lot about the

experience that evolution of style and design.

Pierre: The notion of style in the decorative arts can be linked to a certain form of expression, such as Art Nouveau, for instance, and these are styles that can come and go. Or it can be more about how things are made. Furniture, for instance, think of Boulle in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there you have a style that is recognisable because of a specific technique.

Cartier goes beyond that, which is why we consider our style to

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style, the sense of proportion, colour, detail, line, curve and many other things. But, beyond that, what we look for in our heritage and as a lesson for today is the ‘how’ and the ‘what’, by which we mean the philosophy behind it. What matters today is that we stick to the same philosophy and the same values. This is why we are always keen to understand the context, the explanation of how something was created, and not just focus on the object.

I don’t like the word ‘guardian’ so much, as it implies keeping things

be a living style, a living language. In fact, it’s a language in many ways

as they are, when, in fact, the idea of constant evolution, the living style

because we immediately recognise a Cartier creation. It can be a clock,

we talked about earlier, is ingrained in everything we do. Having said

a watch, a necklace or a tiara, it can be figurative or abstract, it can

that, ‘guardian’ is appropriate in terms of the values we uphold. Our role

be colourful, all white or black and white, but there will always be a

ultimately is to bring excellence and beauty to as many areas of our

common style, what we call a common language. And we can express

customers’ lives as possible.

CARTIER

Above and left: Cartier Paris Reversible Basculante wristwatch 1936, yellow and pink gold, leather strap. Photo: Nick Welsh, Cartier Collection Opposite: Cartier Paris Panther clip brooch 1949, platinum, white gold, diamonds, sapphires. Photo: Marian Gérard, Cartier Collection All works in this feature are from the Cartier Collection. © Cartier

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Cartier Paris Model A mystery clock 1918, platinum, gold, nephrite, rock crystal, sapphire, diamonds, enamel. Photo: Marian GĂŠrard, Cartier Collection

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CARTIER

Cartier Paris Hindu necklace 1936 (detail), special order, platinum, white gold, diamonds, sapphires, emeralds, rubies. Photo: Vincent Wulveryck, Cartier Collection

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Above: Cartier Paris Scroll tiara 1902, special order, silver, gold, diamonds. Photo: Vincent Wulveryck, Cartier Collection Opposite: Cartier London Necklace 1932 (detail), special order, platinum, diamonds, emerald.

Photo: Vincent Wulveryck, Cartier Collection

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CARTIER

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Cartier Paris Necklace 1951/53 (detail), platinum, gold, diamonds, rubies. Cartier Collection. Photo: Vincent Wulveryck, Cartier Collection. Š Cartier

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CARTIER

‘Big girls need big diamonds’ Elizabeth Taylor

Icons of style Simeran Maxwell highlights the love affair four of the world’s most glamorous twentieth-century women had with the timeless jewellery of Cartier, making them the icons of style we have all come to love, admire and envy.

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ELIZABETH TAYLOR The stunningly beautiful actress Elizabeth

originally a gift from her third husband, Mike

Taylor became just as famous for her eight

Todd. The gift, now part of the historic Cartier

failed marriages as she was for the fifty-odd

Collection, was made to commemorate her

films she appeared in. One of her enduring

pregnancy, and a home movie shows Todd

romances, however, was with jewellery, which

placing it around her neck for the first time

she describes in her 2002 memoir My love affair

in the garden, her face wreathed in smiles as

with jewellery. After her death in 2011, her

the gems sparkled under the sun. The pointed,

incredible collection was sold at Christie’s and

geometric form of the bib derives from Indian

raised in excess of $137.2 million for her AIDS

archetypes and was designed and made by

foundation, making it the most valuable private

Cartier Paris six years earlier. The necklace was

collection of jewellery ever offered at auction.

created with the option to wear it as a tiara and

Amongst the 1778 lots sold was a stunning Burmese ruby and diamond bib necklace,

was used in several advertising campaigns prior to Todd purchasing it.

Elizabeth Taylor wearing the ruby-and-diamond necklace and pendant earrings given to her by Mike Todd in 1957. © Photofest Above: Cartier Paris Necklace 1951/53, platinum, gold, diamonds, rubies. Cartier Collection. Photo: Marian Gérard, Cartier Collection. © Cartier

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CARTIER

MARIA FELIX A series of special orders designed specifically

In 1968, she ordered a necklace in the form

to capture the colourful and daring personality

of a snake. Encrusted with 2473 brilliant- and

of Mexican actress María Félix define the

baguette-cut diamonds, the creation took a

synergy that existed between certain clients

whole year to complete and is a triumph of

and the House of Cartier. Félix was one of

Cartier craftsmanship. Platinum and white

their most famous clients of the 1950s, living a

and yellow gold segments are used to create

lavish lifestyle both in Mexico City and Paris.

the snake’s articulated form, and the diamonds

She came to define the ideal femme fatale,

reflect light as it shifts with the wearer’s body.

with her sultry, dark features and strong, fiery

The underbelly of the snake is also a feat of

personality. Four marriages and a flamboyant

design, with black, red and green enamel

lifestyle ensured she remained tabloid fodder

sections mimicking serpentine scales while

for much of her life. Her eccentric character

affording a level of comfort.

and taste for extravagant luxury items were reflected in the pieces she commissioned from Cartier Paris.

María Félix, 1980. Photo: Lord Anthony Snowdon Above and right: Cartier Paris Crocodile necklace 1975, special order, gold, diamonds, emeralds, rubies.

Cartier Collection. Photo: Vincent Wulveryck, Cartier Collection; Snake necklace 1958, special order, platinum, white and yellow gold, diamonds, emeralds, enamel. Cartier Collection. Photo: Nick Welsh, Cartier Collection. Both © Cartier

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GRACE KELLY The 1956 engagement of Hollywood star Grace Kelly to Prince Rainier III of Monaco was made complete with a 10.47-carat emerald-cut diamond ring made by Cartier Paris. Kelly wore the ring on screen in her last film, High society, where she played the role of wealthy socialite Tracy Samantha Lord. Cartier worked closely with the new monarch to create her sophisticated, royal and, above all, glamorous look, which reflected the fairytale nature of her changing role.

A wedding gift presented to the new princess was a grand necklace of brilliantand baguette-cut diamonds set in platinum, which she wears in her 1959 official portrait, along with her engagement ring and a set of three diamond and ruby clip brooches converted into a tiara using a special fitting.

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Official portrait of Her Serene Highness Princess Grace of Monaco, 1959.

Princess Grace is captured in a simple and

From top: Cartier Paris Necklace 1953 (detail), platinum, diamonds. Photo: Nils Herrmann; Engagement ring 1969, platinum, diamonds. Photo: Vincent Wulwerick.

Both © Princely Palace of Monaco

organdy, tastefully covered head to toe in

CARTIER

elegant strapless Lanvin gown of ivory silk Cartier jewellery.

WALLIS SIMPSON One of Cartier’s most significant customers

hand in the creation of some. For example,

was the American divorcee Wallace Simpson,

he provided the diamonds and the twenty-nine

whose engagement to Britain’s Edward VIII

large amethyst stones used in the spectacular

was romantic but also scandalous, famously

1947 commission of an Indian-inspired

leading the monarch to abdicate so that

bib necklace.

they could marry without opposition.

The duchess was also extremely active in

Her vivacious personality and classic

the design process of much of the jewellery and

style dominated contemporary taste from

worked closely with French Cartier designer

the 1930s.

Jeanne Toussaint to ensure her specific ideas

As the Duchess of Windsor, Simpson’s

came to fruition. In keeping with Simpson’s

eclectic and unique jewellery collection was

fairytale love story, many pieces were inscribed

not only enormous but also synonymous

with intimate messages from the duke

with her husband, who chose many of the

referencing personal moments the couple

pieces as gifts for his wife and even had a

had shared.

The Duke and Duchess of Windsor dancing at the Patio Club in Palm Beach, 19 March 1957. Photo: Hulton Archive/Getty Images Above, from left: Cartier Paris Flamingo brooch 1940, special order, platinum, gold, diamonds, emeralds, sapphires, rubies, citrine. Cartier Collection. Photo: Nils Herrmann, Cartier Collection; Bib necklace 1947 (detail), special order, gold, platinum, diamonds, amethysts, turquoise. Cartier Collection. Photo: Nick Welsh. Cartier Collection. Both © Cartier

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C O L L E C T I O N D I S P L AY

Art Deco Deborah Hart provides a snapshot, through the lens of close familial relationships, of some of the remarkable Art Deco treasures from the national collection that will be on display from 17 February.

Travel, glamour, fashion, the home and a penchant for classicism and symbolism gave shape and substance to the movement and diverse stylistic approaches became known as Art Deco.

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ART DECO

‘ With his left hand, Napier Waller painted a golden age of peaceful civilization and industrious rebuilding [after the war] …

Beauty lived within and beyond the body, redeeming its pain.’

Ana Carden-Coyne, 2009

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C O L L E C T I O NÂ D I S P L AY

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ART DECO

Art Deco is widely associated with the 1920s and 1930s, an age of jazz and flappers, an age of glamorous fashion and design. Following the First World War, it was also an age in search of a more spiritual or mythological consciousness. It represented a faith in social, spiritual and technological awareness, as new forms of travel and expanding news coverage promised a more connected global society. A focus display drawn from the national collection and opening at the NGA in February will reveal the variously nuanced ideas of Art Deco, which has its origins in the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris in 1925.

It first became known as a style ‘moderne’, referencing its French roots, and it was not until decades later, in the 1960s, that the term ‘Deco’ was coined.

As befits this rich and fascinating theme which saturated the visual arts, architecture and design in the 1920s and 1930s, the NGA’s display will include decorative arts, prints, photographs, paintings, sculptures, fashion and more. It will be shown across two rooms, the one primarily referencing lifestyle and the home, and the other focusing more on theosophical or mystical ideas, classical and neo-classical sources with an emphasis on the human body.

Among the works on display is on one of the NGA’s great hidden treasures, Napier Waller’s triptych I’ll put a girdle round about the Earth 1933, rarely exhibited here since its first outing when the building opened in 1982. This enormous three-panel painting was salvaged for the nation in 1979 thanks to the foresight of the NGA’s founding director James Mollison AO. It had been folded in storage for decades and over the past couple of years, our expert painting conservators have been lovingly restoring it so that visitors can see Waller’s vision in all its original splendour.

Waller showed tremendous courage in his life. While serving in the First World War, he was seriously wounded in May 1917 and had to have his right arm amputated. During his recovery, he trained himself to draw with his left hand, making both his intricate and his large-scale works all the more remarkable in their accomplishment. In a self-portrait in the display, The man in black 1925, he depicts himself with both arms, elegantly attired in hat and cape with his mural design for the Melbourne Public Library (completed in 1928) behind him.

I’ll put a girdle round about the Earth is the preliminary painting design for the mural commissioned by Theodore Fink, an enlightened patron of the arts, for Newspaper House on Collins Street in Melbourne.

Comprising thousands of shimmering mosaic tiles, it is given presence by the strength of the bold underlying design. Fink selected the theme from a line in Shakespeare’s A midsummer night’s dream spoken by the character of Puck, who vows to Oberon that he will travel the circumference of the earth: ‘I’ll put a girdle about the Earth/In forty minutes …’ The idea of global travel in Shakespeare’s time related to Sir Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of the world in an epic sea voyage that lasted three years from 1577 to 1580. By the time of Waller’s commission, centuries later, the term ‘I’ll put a girdle around the earth’ referred to dramatic changes in communications, as submarine cables promised to bring news bulletins quickly from one part of the world to another—the idea befitting the newspaper home of the mural.

Pages 52–3: Napier Waller I’ll put a girdle round about the Earth 1933, oil on canvas. Purchased 1979 Opposite: Napier Waller The man in black 1925, linocut.

Purchased 1975 Above: Napier Waller Study for ‘Christian Waller with Baldur, Undine and Siren at Fairy Hills’ 1931 or 1932, pencil All works in this feature are from the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

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Above, from left: Christian Waller The shepherd of dreams and Lord of Venus 1932, from The great breath: a book of seven designs, linocuts. Purchased 1977 and 1976

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ART DECO

In his 1978 book on the artist, Nicholas Draffin described Waller’s monumental work as ‘a jubilant celebration of man’s potential to use technological advances for both material and spiritual fulfilment’. As the central naked figure plays his music, he appears to be heralding a new dawn. Youth and old age, diverse modes of travel, industry and nature’s fecundity inhabit the same space. Across the whole design, the work’s integration of neo-classical figures and dense patterning forms a powerful portrait of the time in which it was painted.

The symbolism emphasises both spiritual and secular progress and accentuates the idea of an international consciousness. It draws on the past while announcing the possibilities of a new global future.

Waller was an extremely literate artist. He immersed himself in the classics of Homer and Virgil and was also deeply inspired by the Utopian Socialist visions of William Morris and Walter Crane, who espoused the idea that a work should aspire to the greater good of society. While Waller was a free thinker and a humanist, he was also interested in biblical themes, including the Revelation of St John the Divine and its apocalyptic vision of a new heaven and new Earth. He shared these interests with his wife, Christian Waller (née Yandell), an important artist in her own right, whose deep study of theosophy and astrology in particular informed some of the complex symbolism in his works.

Both Napier and Christian Waller became known as among Australia’s leading stainedglass artists. Christian’s works are important to the story of Art Deco in Australia in terms of her remarkable design aesthetic. A talented printmaker, book and magazine illustrator and designer, numerous works by her are included in the display, including The great breath, first published in April 1932 by Tatlock Miller’s Golden Arrow Press. It is a small masterpiece of Deco design. Christian cut the linoblocks herself and printed them on her 1849 press in her studio at Fairy Hills in Ivanhoe in the Arts and Crafts house she shared with Napier.

She also designed and produced the elegant cover. The book comprises seven designs that reveal her considerable graphic abilities; the striking designs combining dynamic angular repeated shapes and directional lines, along with complex symbolism drawn from theosophy, particularly the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn movement. Mysticism was at the core of her creative being, and she became increasingly reclusive as time went on. The portraits that Napier drew and painted of her have been said to represent a distancing in their relations but they also reveal her ethereal beauty and enigmatic presence.

By the late 1930s, Christian Waller had become estranged from her husband but their legacies are firmly entwined, as are the links with her niece Klytie Pate, who became one of this country’s foremost ceramicists. When she was eleven, Pate became the model for the character of Alice in her aunt’s illustrations for an adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s adventures in Wonderland (although this was more in a Pre-Raphaelite vein than Art Deco).

A couple of years later, after her father died, Pate took exception to her stepmother and went to live with the Wallers in their house at Ivanhoe. Through them, she was inspired by Art Deco, Greek and Egyptian mythology and William Morris’s Arts and Crafts moment.

She always championed and acknowledged Christian’s huge impact on her life, and their work shares much in common.

The works by Pate in the NGA’s Art Deco display show diverse aspects of her approach to modern design. Her Lamp base 1941 reveals a penchant for diverse cultures and the exotic, while High diving c 1950 is a particularly impressive example of what might be termed ‘Classic Deco’ design. In the latter, the way that the two diving figures convey a passion for the athleticism of the human figure recalls the vitalism of the style in its earlier incarnations.

Among other things, she was renowned for her glazes, especially her use of beautiful glossy emerald green and turquoise, referred to as ‘Klytie blue’. Her success as a ceramicist was recognised in a retrospective at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1983, and her work is represented in some depth in the NGA’s collection.

Above, from top: Klytie Pate Lamp base 1941 and High diving c 1950, glazed earthenware. Purchased 1985 and 1981

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DARWIN ABORIGINAL ART FAIR

C O M M U N I T Y E N G AG E M E N T

Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair Claire Summers highlights the Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair’s growing reputation for innovation, diversity and cultural integrity and the people it’s bringing together from all walks of life. This year, the NGA got involved, with Director Gerard Vaughan opening the event and Senior Curator Franchesca Cubillo playing host.

Red Flag Dancers performance at DAAF 2017, Darwin. Photo: Dylan Buckee Right: Mark Crees, Director of Araluen Cultural Precinct, Franchesca Cubillo, Senior Curator at the NGA and inaugural Chair of the DAAF Foundation, and Gerard Vaughan, NGA Director, at DAAF 2017, Darwin. Photo: Dylan Buckee

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The Darwin Aboriginal Art Fair, affectionately known as DAAF,

encouraging but also validates, at a national level, the important role

and art and design aficionados to purchase art directly from Aboriginal

community-driven art events such as this one have in promoting and

and Torres Strait Islander-owned and -incorporated art centres. DAAF

supporting Australia’s Indigenous art sector. Among the thousands

was originally conceived and designed to complement the National

of visitors we receive every year is a growing number of emerging

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (Telstra NATSIAA)

and established Indigenous art professionals and curators, who come

and to bridge the tyranny of distance, connecting the Indigenous art

to strengthen their ties with the remote and regional communities

industry with artists and arts workers who live in some of the most

represented. They help support, mentor and encourage the Aboriginal

remote regions of the country. DAAF has also formed close partnerships

and Torres Strait Islander artists and arts workers at DAAF and, in turn,

with the National Indigenous Music Awards and the Garma Festival.

have the opportunity to learn firsthand from these communities in

Together, these four prestigious events mark the most significant

developing their exhibitions and programs.

national celebration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts in the world.

This year’s DAAF, the eleventh, was held from 11 to 13 August,

With the support of NGA Council member Tim Fairfax AC, through the Tim Fairfax Family Foundation, and the Australia Council for the Arts, an Indigenous Curators Program and Symposium was

and the DAAF Foundation was delighted to welcome NGA Director

initiated this year to facilitate these discussions in an open forum

Gerard Vaughan, who officially opened the event. The occasion was

for the benefit of everyone attending. Twenty curators with different

marked by a spectacular performance by Darwin’s One Mob, Different

backgrounds and experiences came together for the inaugural program,

Country dancers and a Larrakia Welcome to Country from Dorrie-

facilitated by Cubillo, to discuss the complex nature of the sector,

Anne Raymond, with Franchesca Cubillo, DAAF Foundation Chair

identify current priorities and strategies and develop best standards

and Senior Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art at the

practice, including methodologies and policies that strengthen the

NGA, as the master of ceremonies. The opening event focused on the

sector and increase audience engagement.

idea that DAAF has become a ‘home’ for artists, curators, collectors

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The NGA’s additional involvement in the 2017 DAAF is not only

provides an amazing and genuine opportunity for arts industry buyers

DAAF 2017 showcased a record sixty-seven art centres representing

and industry professionals, a place where they can come together to

many of Australia’s unique and diverse Indigenous nations, including

build stronger relationships across the sector. And we were particularly

those in Arnhem Land, the Central and Western deserts, the APY

delighted this year to open up our home to twenty-five of the NGA’s

(Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara) Lands of South Australia, North

guides, who wanted to discover more about some of the artists whose

Queensland and the Torres Strait Islands, Western Australia, Victoria

work they’ve seen and learnt about through their volunteer work at

and Tasmania. It has never been more important to find new platforms

the NGA.

to celebrate and connect with Indigenous artists, art and culture.

DARWIN ABORIGINAL ART FAIR

DAFF grows every year, and it is constantly listening to its art centre

The DAAF panel discussion, supported by the NGA’s Indigenous Art

membership, who determine the innovative ways in which we reach out

Partner Wesfarmers Arts, was facilitated by Cubillo and included Marcia

to Australian audiences and beyond.

Langton AM, Djon Mundine OAM, Gail Mabo and Mervyn Street.

While the DAAF exhibition space was certainly a feast for the senses,

The discussion focused on the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Referendum

the incredible public program of artist workshops and traditional dance

and how art has played a role in Indigenous politics. The conversation

performances added to the excitement and to the genuine engagement

was a sombre reminder of the fact that little has changed or progressed

DAAF aims for. A children’s activity station was a highlight and included

to rectify the hurt and destruction of Australia’s treatment of its First

a screening of the popular cartoon Little J and Big Cuz, starring Deborah

Peoples. Yet, understanding and learning can be a two-way exchange, and

Mailman and Miranda Tapsell. A stunning display of the skirts from Iltja

the arts has a vital role to play in this connection.

Ntjarra Many Hands Art Centre lit up the exhibition halls. DAAF was

DAAF was proud to present the Northern Territory launch of the

also honoured to exhibit the 'Uluru Statement from the Heart' painting

Namatjira Project, in partnership with BIGhART, at its film gala evening.

and invited visitors, artists and arts workers alike to show their support.

It was an honour to host a discussion after the film with Kevin and

In response to the demand from its art centre membership, the

Kumantjai L Namatjira, the grandchildren of Albert Namatjira. This

foundation extended its repertoire of activities to include a film gala,

discussion also echoed the sentiments of the panel discussion. Kevin

fashion show and panel discussion. The fashion show ‘From Country to

and Kumantjai dreamt the very same vision that their grandfather

Couture’ was a sell-out event, involving textile and jewellery designs from

had decades before them: ‘For the family to own a little piece of land’.

fourteen different art centres. Audiences were delighted with the displays

However, despite his work being loved and admired for many years by

of colour and styles on the catwalk, and the show has fired the national

countless Australians, Albert Namatjira’s family still has no place to call

thirst for Indigenous textile and fashion design.

home. And, until October this year, after more than thirty years, they did

When the foundation is asked why new events and activities are

not even own copyright to his work, which can be an important source

introduced to the program, the answer is always a simple one: ‘To

of income for artists and their families. Perhaps, as Philip Brackenreg

ensure that all people have an opportunity to engage with Aboriginal

did when he finally returned the rights to the Namatjira Legacy Trust,

and Torres Strait Islander artists, their communities and their culture’.

we should all be considering how we can contribute to a fairer future,

Whether it is visual art, textiles or fashion design, public discourse, film,

one where the Namatjira family’s circumstances cannot be repeated.

dance or music, these universal tools of communication ensure that everyone can interpret the message of reconciliation. The arts create a middle ground, a fundamental standpoint where we can say we want to engage with each other.

From far left: Bula’bula Arts artist workshop at DAAF 2017, Darwin. Photo: Dylan Buckee; DAAF 2017 exhibition space. Photo: Murray Hilton; ‘From Country to Couture’ fashion show, DAAF 2017, Darwin. Photo: Murray Hilton

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62

A POST-IMPRESSIONIST MASTERPIECE BY PAUL SERUSIER

N E W AC Q U I S I T I O N A N D D I S P L AY

A Post-Impressionist masterpiece by Paul Sérusier Gerard Vaughan explores the milieu in which French Post-Impressionist Paul Sérusier painted his Woman from Savoy, recently acquired by the NGA and now on display with other works from the national collection and loans from the Kerry Stokes Collection that elicit the experience of Brittany in French art of the 1880s and 1890s.

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Paul Sérusier’s Woman from Savoy (La Savoyarde) is a major acquisition for our modernist collection. Painted in Brittany in 1890, it represents the work of the still-young artist under the direct influence of his friend and mentor Paul Gauguin, whose disciple he considered himself to be. Sérusier was central to the diffusion of the new ideas about the possibilities of contemporary art invented by Gauguin, Emile Bernard and Vincent Van Gogh in the late 1880s.

Sérusier first met Gauguin in the Breton village of Pont-Aven at the end of the summer of 1888. Many artists had made Pont-Aven a summer base, given both the cheapness of living there and the picturesque landscape and peasant subjects. It was something of a world apart, which the modernity of late nineteenth-century Paris and the process of industrialisation seemed to have bypassed.

While Gauguin’s earlier work might easily be seen as within the trajectory of Impressionist technique, he had begun to rethink radically what a picture might be, simplifying his forms, concentrating on surface values, rejecting the kind of vanishing point perspective taught in the Academy and deliberately veering towards simple, even crude forms, patches of flat unmodulated colour and distortions that he believed made the image more powerful in an emotional sense. Sérusier was fascinated by this radical approach, and Gauguin agreed to give him a kind of painting lesson to demonstrate and explain the new synthesist style. The outcome of this first contact with Gauguin was Sérusier’s famous cigar-box-lid panel The talisman (Le talisman) 1888, in which he explored these ideas for the first time.

The talisman, now in the Musée d’Orsay, is consistently used in art historical literature to introduce the first stirrings of abstraction, where the colours and forms themselves seem to have a life and value of their own, independent of a definable subject. In the same year he painted the Woman from Savoy, Sérusier’s close friend the artist Maurice Denis, who also looked to both Paul Cézanne and Gauguin for inspiration, wrote in his now famous Art et Critique article the following definition of painting: ‘We should remember that a picture—before being a battle horse, a nude woman or some other story—is essentially a flat surface covered in colours, assembled in a certain order’.

A new modernist avant-garde had emerged, and Woman from Savoy is one of the finest outcomes of the influence and diffusion of Gauguin’s style, and arguably the closest Sérusier ever came to capturing his mentor’s approach. The work was not actually painted in Pont-Aven but in the nearby village of Le Pouldu, where Gauguin and his friends Pages 62–3: Paul Sérusier Woman from Savoy (La Savoyarde) 1890, oil on canvas. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 2016 Above: Emile Bernard Head of a woman (Tête d’une femme) 1889, oil on canvas. Kerry Stokes Collection, Perth Opposite, from left: Paul Sérusier Mother and child in a Breton landscape (Une mère et son enfant dans un paysage Breton) 1890, oil on canvas. Kerry Stokes Collection, Perth; Emile Bernard Bretonneries 1889 (title page), lithograph, handcoloured in watercolour. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, The Poynton Bequest, 2005

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A POST-IMPRESSIONIST MASTERPIECE BY PAUL SERUSIER

spent the summers of 1889 and 1890, preferring to be left alone and not be distracted by the other realist artists who flocked to Pont-Aven.

The subject is a peasant girl, who is noticeably not wearing the typical Breton costume, which has become so familiar to us through the pictures of Gauguin, Van Gogh and Sérusier, but rather a form of dress originating from another part of France. It represents all the stylistic and compositional qualities outlined above.

One of the special attractions of Brittany was the rural simplicity of its peasant culture. All the radical artists of this period were interested

in concepts of primitivism, which related both to subject matter and to

to Cubism and Abstraction. At the time it was painted, it would have

the way in which objects were drawn and painted—simple, sometimes

been thought of as both Impressionist and Synthetist—the term

crude and distorted and often adopting subjects that removed the viewer

‘Post‑Impressionism’ was only invented many years later by the English

from the complexities of modern life, concentrating more on the remote,

critic Roger Fry, whose articles about the legacy of Cézanne, Gauguin,

the spiritual and the exotic.

Van Gogh and the Nabis group of which Sérusier was a part came to

While Sérusier may well have had a model pose in the studio to work

define modern painting, particularly in the English-speaking world.

out the basic composition, the face of the girl is hardly a portrait. Indeed,

Think, for example, of the Scottish Colourists and the Camden Group,

it has been commented that she has an almost Southeast Asian or Pacific

all of whom influenced the Australian artists who flocked not just to

appearance, and perhaps this is not surprising. We know that Gauguin,

Paris but also to London in the early twentieth century. In many ways,

who finally managed to exhibit his work at the Café des Arts on the edge

having this picture in the collection informs our understanding of the

of the great 1889 Paris World’s Fair (the centrepiece of which was the

work of Australian modernists such as George Bell, Roland Wakelin

engineering marvel of the Eiffel Tower), became obsessed with visiting

and Roy de Maistre, and all those who followed.

areas like the Javanese village, with troupes of Javanese dancers imported

The work is currently on display at the NGA as the centrepiece of

to perform for the Parisian public, and it is also recorded that he

an installation dedicated to the experience of Brittany in French art

collected a group of photographs of Cambodian life and people, which

of the 1880s and 1890s. It is accompanied by two very fine contemporary

he took with him back to Brittany and which he would have shown

works generously loaned from the Kerry Stokes Collection, Sérusier’s

to his artist friends. It might be argued that, from a modern Parisian

Mother and child in a Breton landscape (Une mère et son enfant dans

perspective, the picture already exhibits a kind of subliminal exoticism.

un paysage Breton) 1890 and Bernard’s Head of a woman (Tête d’une

Within a year, Gauguin had abandoned Brittany and his artist friends

femme) 1889, accompanied by prints of the same period from the NGA

and sailed for Tahiti, via Melbourne and Sydney (a little known fact!).

collection, from Gauguin to Bernard’s suite Bretonneries 1889.

This acquisition transforms the NGA collection and points the way to the great experiments in modernity that were to come, leading

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NEW ACQUISITIONS ARTHUR STREETON In December 1892, Arthur Streeton moved from Melbourne to Sydney, joining his close friend Tom Roberts at Curlew Camp near Mosman, where he spent the next four years captivated by the harbour and the artistic opportunities afforded by the prosperous industry and middle-class leisure pursuits prevalent along its shoreline.

Streeton’s The Point Wharf, Mosman Bay 1893, recently acquired by the NGA, is a bold treatment of the Sydney Harbour landscape.

Fresh and brilliant, it declares the pivotal influence of the city on the young Australian Impressionist. Although he returned to Sydney on numerous occasions, Streeton’s works from the early 1890s remain his most immediate and daring responses to the harbour city. At the time, commentators responded to these landscapes with rapt admiration. The Age reported, ‘One has only to turn to Mr. Arthur Streeton’s … The Point Wharf—Mosman’s Bay, to realise again all the splendor and light of the Australian atmosphere. This is sustained in all its brilliancy in every object’.

As Ann Galbally noted in her 1971 monograph on Streeton, this work has ‘an intensity not found in the softer, more romantic Victorian paintings’ of the preceding years, with its ‘greater realism … balanced by a concise selection of pictorial elements, based upon Whistlerian decorative principles’. Just below the wharf a rowboat sets out across the shimmering reflection of Curraghbeena Point’s sandstone cliffs. The brilliant bursts of blue and yellow are balanced by a blush of smoke rising from a ferry as it pulls alongside the jetty. The movement of paint across the surface of the canvas is unlaboured, with confident daubs of pure red and white added at the water’s edge to sharpen the loose narrative detail.

This is one of Streeton’s most striking responses to the landscape of Sydney’s Middle Harbour. The wharf was located on the eastern side of Curraghbeena Point, opposite Cremorne, and was most likely painted from the Cremorne boathouse. Unlike other 1890s depictions of the harbour, which employ foreground detail to lead the viewer’s eye through the water up towards landscapes sloping across a horizon line, this work finds strength in the uninterrupted passages of colour in the lower half of the composition, radical in painterly terms.

The Point Wharf, Mosman Bay has been included in major exhibitions of Streeton’s work and now forms part of the NGA’s major display of Australian Impressionist works from the national collection. The display has now been extended over summer due to popular demand, with the addition of Frederick McCubbin’s Opposite: Adzera people Mugus (ancestor figure) 18th century or earlier, wood, pigment. Purchased 2016 Above: Arthur Streeton The Point Wharf, Mosman Bay 1893, oil on canvas. Purchased with the assistance of Allan and Maria Myers and the NGA Foundation, 2017

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NEW ACQUISITIONS

highly significant oil painting Bush Idyll 1893, generously on long‑term loan to the NGA, and a newly acquired 9 by 5 painting

by American James Abbott McNeill Whistler, showing his remarkable influence on the work on this group of Australian painters. Emma Kindred, Curator, 19th-Century Australian Art

MUGUS, LORD OF PIGS This figure is one among a small number of sculptures from Papua New Guinea that have been radiocarbon dated. It is at least 220 years old and as much as 450. It is a true relic of an almost forgotten way of life for the Adzera people, as missionaries quickly brought an end to many aspects of traditional culture after arriving in the Markham Valley in the early twentieth century. Before then, the Adzera people lived in a perpetual cycle of hostilities, raids, ambushes, warfare and cannibalism. A central part of the ritual of cannibalism was the re-enactment of a primordial struggle between the terrible blind god Mugus and the twins born to put an end to his reign of terror—the killing of a god to bring life back to the land.

In an age when heaven and earth were very close, gods and people alike were terrorised by Mugus, lord of pigs, who could change his form from a giant boar with curled tusks and a wasp’s nest on his forehead to a giant man who fastened claws to his hands to tear at people. Although blind, this man-eating god could follow people’s scents, hunting them down and devouring everyone he could find. Perhaps the sculpture’s emaciated ribs are a visual allusion to his ever-hungry nature. He ate entire populations, leaving desolation behind him, until finally the last remaining human survivors fled from the region and only an old woman remained behind.

The woman, described as ‘Mother of the Earth’, was too frail for the long journey to safety, so she hid in a cave. According to legend, she formed two children from her blood, twin brothers. One was left-handed, the other right-handed, and they acted together as one. They grew at astonishing speed into men, and the old woman taught them how to fight. After an epic battle with Mugus, the man-eating god was slain. The twin brothers, victorious, prepared a feast of his remains, and the gods who had fled returned to take part. Heaven then moved away from the earth and became the sky, and people repopulated the valley undisturbed by the gods.

Aside from ritual cannibalism—in which the victim’s body became that of Mugus and the killer, or killers, took on the role of the ancestral twins—one of the most important traditional festivals for the Adzera people was the yam harvest celebration called ‘Mugus’. Yams are connected to the spirit world and are believed to have personalities and genders. During the festival, a carved post topped with an image of Mugus was set up and the figure was almost obscured by elaborate cane framework heavily festooned with yams. This sculpture of Mugus, with its malicious smile and protruding tongue, is one such decorative top. The connection between Mugus and yams is unclear but it may relate a pig’s appetite for yams. Crispin Howarth, Curator, Pacific Arts

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Above: Sidney Nolan Antarctica, Antarctica and Antarctica, from the series Antarctica 1964, oil on composition board. Purchased with the assistance of the National Gallery of Australia Foundation, 2017. © Sidney Nolan Trust Right: Clifton Pugh Europa and the bull 1959, oil on composition board. Purchased 2017. © the family of Clifton Pugh

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NEW ACQUISITIONS

SIDNEY NOLAN In January 1964, Sidney Nolan and author Alan Moorehead visited Antarctica for eight days as guests of the United States Navy Antarctic Support Force. Truth and revelation were Nolan’s immediate responses when arriving on the ice. He reflected in a radio broadcast two months later: ‘One felt this instantaneous fear at the first sight of it, that it would annihilate one, but this was overcome straight away by a sense of wonder in it’. Travelling by helicopter between research stations, Nolan recorded his impressions in watercolour on two hundred blank postcards.

On his return to London, he produced a complex and highly personal series of paintings responding to the region, interweaving direct observation with childhood memories, literary references and folklore. The Antarctica experience required substantial gestation and reflection for Nolan, and he did not begin to paint in earnest (sometimes seven or eight works a day) until August, six months after his return. This year marks the centenary of his birth, and the NGA has recently acquired three landscapes and two portraits from Nolan’s Antarctica series with the assistance of its Foundation.

The three mountain-scapes, most likely painted alongside each other in late August, reflect his fascination with the environment’s unique geological composition and colour scheme. He conceived the region as a series of abstract configurations of densely knitted and angular patterns, employing wet-on-wet techniques to create

CLIFTON PUGH Clifton Pugh’s Europa and the bull was a standout image in the famous, and infamous, Antipodeans exhibition, held at the Victorian Artists’ Society in August 1959. This was a difficult place to make an impression.

The exhibition, and its accompanying manifesto, sought to challenge the rising prominence of abstraction and to defend the tradition of figurative art. Pugh was already an established artist by the time he became embroiled in the Antipodean controversy. His distinctive style was directly informed by the Australian landscape—its colours, forms and spirituality. Europa and the bull is a critically acclaimed work that represents not only an important period in Pugh’s oeuvre but also a significant moment in the history of Australian art.

The story and subject of Europa and the bull are drawn from

vigorous streaks in caramels, yellows and greys to approximate the effect of frozen water. He gave his impression of the environment in The Australian Women’s Weekly in September 1965: ‘It is black, ochre, dark green, and blue, with an oyster-coloured sky and an indigo sea. The colours appear as if under intense moonlight’.

By September 1964, he had started embedding explorers into his paintings, small figures dwarfed by the immensity of the landscape.

A few weeks later, he was presenting the explorers in close-up portrait format. These particular works are multi-faceted and conflicting constructions: factual and fictional, comic and revered. Hollow eyes and dishevelled beards led Nolan to describe the figures as a mixture between ‘Robinson Crusoe + Father Christmas’. Characteristically, they also have a literary parallel. Nolan was greatly inspired by Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s chilling memoir The worst journey in the world,

Greek mythology. Enamoured by the Phoenician princess Europa,

which recounted Robert Scott’s ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition.

the supreme god Zeus transformed himself into a tame, white bull to

Frozen parkas and cacoons of ice formed upon cloth and facial hair

seduce her. His gentle but majestic demeanour attracted the princess.

give visual expression to Cherry-Garrard’s detailed accounts.

She caressed him, and Zeus knelt to gain her trust before suddenly

While his helmeted Ned Kelly and desiccated carcasses have

rearing and abducting her. It is the very moment of deception that Pugh

grown into internationally recognised signifiers of Australian

has chosen to depict. The darkened and voluptuous figure of Europa

identity, Nolan’s more unfamiliar subject matter reveals his most

stretches her whole body in supplication as the beast, monumental and

intrinsic interests and motivations: a passion for exploration and

rotund, consumes the space around her. This work is one of Pugh’s finest

experimentation, of new worlds and mediums, and a fundamental

paintings and sheds new light on mid-century modernism in Australia.

preoccupation with mythology and narrative. Bianca Hill, Assistant

Bianca Hill, Assistant Curator, Contemporary Art Practice—Global

Curator, Contemporary Art Practice—Global ARTONVIEW 92 SUMMER 2017

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TOMMY MCRAE These three remarkable drawings by Tommy McRae allow the NGA to form one of the most complete pictures to date of this nineteenth-century Aboriginal artist’s oeuvre. Born around 1835 near the Upper Murray region, he grew up witnessing the threats to his culture and traditions, as colonists cleared the land and claimed its resources. He swiftly adapted and successfully negotiated with the growing settler population, selling fish, poultry, possum-skin rugs and sketches from his family camp on the edges of Lake Moodemere, close to the Victorian border town of Wahgunyah.

Almost all of McRae’s drawings are in sketchbooks such the ones in the national collection, and even many of his single‑sheet drawings that have survived to date were originally from sketchbooks.

Instantly recognisable by their extreme economy, vitality and suggestion of space, his drawings not only clearly show an extensive knowledge of tradition but also provide an Indigenous perspective to the broader colonial experience, such as his depictions of Chinese farmers and musicians. One of his favourite subjects was the story of William Buckley, the so-called Wild White Man, an escaped convict who lived with Aboriginal people in Victoria for thirty-three years. Two of the newly acquired works depict McRae’s interpretation of Buckley encountering the local Indigenous people.

McRae enjoyed a close relationship to his Wahgunyah neighbour, postmaster and vigneron Roderick Kilborn, who supplied him with ink and a small sketchbook on learning of his artistic abilities. Kilborn subsequently collected many of McRae’s drawings, including these three works, which have been passed down through family and now have the opportunity to reach a wider audience as part of the national collection.

Natives crossing lagoon in canoe, purchased with the assistance of Penelope Seidler AM and Geoffrey and Leigh Pack, is included in the NGA’s Indigenous Australia: masterworks from the National Gallery of Australia, currently on show at Me Collectors Room in Berlin. Elspeth Pitt, Senior Curator, Australian Prints and Drawings

From top: Tommy McRae (Kwatkwat people) Hunting parrots. Gift of Brian Cox, 2017.

Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program; Natives crossing lagoon in canoe. Purchased with the assistance of Penelope Seidler AM and Geoffrey and Leigh Pack, 2017; Meeting the white man. Purchased with the assistance of Sue and Steve Dyer, Tom Hayward and Fiona Martin-Weber 2017 All works c 1890, pen and iron-gall ink. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

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NEW ACQUISITIONS

SPONSORSHIP AND DONATIONS PRIVATE DONORS

Deborah Winkler and Abdelkareem Abdelmaksoud

The NGA acknowledges the support of its many private donors and recognises, below, their donations made between 22 March and 6 October 2017. You have our thanks.

Exhibition Patrons: American Masters

50th Anniversary of the 1967 Referendum Fund

Ezekiel Solomon AM

Exhibition Patrons: Cartier: The Exhibition Lady Potter AC

Meredith Hinchliffe Claudia Hyles David Paul Neta Saint and Julian Goldberg Ray Wilson OAM in memory of James Agapitos

Exhibition Patrons: Fiona Hall: Wrong Way Time

Alan Scott Collection of Papunya Boards and Photographs Fund

Ezekiel Solomon AM

Julian Beaumont OAM and Annie Beaumont Tony Berg AM and Carol Berg Berg Family Foundation John Hindmarsh AM and Rosanna Hindmarsh OAM Anthony Maple-Brown Susie Maple-Brown AM Ezekiel Solomon AM Ray Wilson OAM

Art and Dementia Fund The Lansdowne Foundation Prudence MacLeod

Art Education and Access Programs Tim Fairfax AC in honour of Betty Churcher AO

Cézanne Watercolour and Drawing Fund Susan Elder Roly Gill in memory of Annette Gill Merle Gowan John Sharpe and Claire Armstrong Andrea Simpson

Contemporary Interventions The Balnaves Foundation

Council Exhibitions Fund Warwick Hemsley John Hindmarsh AM

Donations Lenore Adamson Marion Amies Stephen Box Carolyn Cleak Stephanie Cole De Lambert Largesse Foundation Bernard Hughson Edward Kruger and Geraldine Kruger Malcolm Lamb and Margaret Lamb Steve Lambert and Ruth Lambert Roger Mauldon Jeanette Richmond

Susan Armitage and the Hon Dr Michael Armitage

Exhibition Patrons: Hyper Real Foundation Board Publishing Fund Philip Bacon AM Julian Beaumont OAM Robyn Burke Terrence Campbell AO and Christine Campbell John Hindmarsh AM Allan J Myers AC, QC Ezekiel Solomon AM

Foundation Fundraising Gala Dinner Fund 2017 Antoinette Albert Julian Burt and Alexandra Burt Philip Colbran and Esther Colbran Dr Helen Jessup Dr Andrew Lu OAM and Dr Geoffrey Lancaster AM

Heather B Swann Fund Arthur Roe

James O Fairfax Theatre Fund Bridgestar

Japanese Art Fund Andrew Gwinnett and Hiroko Gwinnett

Masterpieces for the Nation 2016 Margaret Anne Cockburn John Jackson and Ros Jackson Morna Vellacott

Masterpieces for the Nation 2017 Meredith Adams Antoinette Albert Robert Albert and Libby Albert Ken Alexander and Margaret Alexander Cynthia Anderson John Anderson Debra Askew and Michael Askew Margaret Aston Maria Athanassenas Michelle Atkinson Judith Avery Dr Russell Ayres and Dr Marie‑Louise Ayres Sheryl Ballesty

Richard Banks and Chrissie Banks Paul Bard Lesley Barker Belinda Barrett Patrick Barrett and Margaret Barrett Maria Bendall Jenny Benjamin Martin Bennett Noel Birchall Robert Blacklow Marjorie Boorman Lynne Booth and Max Booth Ivor Bowden and Caroline Bowden Assoc Prof Phillip Braslins Diana Brookes Howard Brown and Jennifer Brown Ian Bruce Darren Bryant Tony Buckingham Rosanna Burston Alexander Cairns and Robyn Cairns John Caldwell and Judith Caldwell Rear Admiral David Campbell AM Sarah Carlson and Simon Hansen Jane Carver Belinda Casey Charles Nodrum Gallery Andrew Cheetham and Jan Cheetham Dr Ian Clark and Dr Margaret Clark John Clements Jan Clemson Trevor Cohen and Heather Cohen Dr Arthur Conigrave and Dr Kate Conigrave Bruce Cook Graham Cooke and Cassandra Hampton Natalie Cooke Kerry-Anne Cousins Neil Cox and Kay Cox Merrilyn Crawford Georgia Croker Catherine Crompton Helen Crompton and Bob Crompton Patrick Crone Lyn Cumming Charles P Curran AC John Davidson and Paula Davidson Antony de Mestre and Eleanor de Mestre Robyn Dean and Phillip Dean Dr Moreen Dee Jane Diamond Susan Doenau In honour of Rose Donaldson Captain Murray Doyle AAD Shaun Duffy and Susan Duffy Barbara Duhig Robyn Duncan Brian Elliot and Lyn Elliot Tania Ezra and Jason Ezra Emer Prof Norman Feather AM Anthony Felgate Peter Flanagan Jo-Anne Flatley-Allen Lynn Fletcher and Wayne Fletcher

Gillian Foley David Franks Margaret Frisch Peter Fullagar Anne Galbraith Dorothy Galvin Roy Garwood Bill Gibbs and Gerry Gibbs June Gordon Jeremy Grainger Dr Elizabeth Grant and Sue Hart Barbara Green Richard Griffin AM and Jay Griffin Peter Hack Claire Haley Megan Hall Beverley Hammond Cheryl Hannah and Helen Mckenna Margaret Hargraves Glenys Harris John Harrison and Danielle Kluth Pat Harvey and Frank Harvey Bruce Hayes Janet Hayes Bill Hayward and Alison Hayward Heather Henderson Avril Hetherington Elizabeth Hewson Colin Hill and Linda Hill Gordon Hill and Pamela Hill Dr Marian Hill John Hillman and Jennifer Hillman Meredith Hinchliffe Rosemary Hirst Dr Joseph Hlubucek and Judith Hlubucek Graham C Hobbs Diana Houstone and John Houstone J Garth Hughes and Margaret Hughes Jill Hutson Claudia Hyles Jane Hylton Danielle Hyndes OAM Dr Anthea Hyslop Peter Ingle and Rosemary Ingle Dr Alexander James and Dr Ann James Victoria Jennings Arun Karthik Rajagopalan Antonia Kasunic and Nicholas Craft Karin Keighley David Kennemore and Rosemary Kennemore Pamela Kenny in memory of Peter Helen Kenyon Hertha Kluge-Pott Robyn Lance Naomi Landau Marjory Langridge Thomas Leffers and Corrie Leffers Lady Jodie Leonard In memory of JB Leslie Diana Letts Frank Lewincamp and Barbara Lewincamp Dr Frederick Lilley and Penelope Lilley Elizabeth Loftus

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Robyn McAdam Paul J McCarthy In memory of JH McCauley Ian McCay Patricia McCullough Dr Dermid McDermott Patricia Macdonald Judith MacIntyre Sheila Mackay and Hugh Mackay Michele McKenzie Colvin Karen McVicker Alan Mallory and Linda Mallory Richard Mann and Mary Curtis Jennifer Manton Graeme Marshall and Dr Walter Ong Robyn Martin-Weber Rosamond Mason Sally-Ann Mason Stewart May and Wendy May Graeme Mayo Janet Medley Betty Meehan Ralph Melano Diana Mildern The Hon Geoffrey Miller and Rhonda Miller Tony Minchin and Elizabeth Minchin Bevan Mitchell Ingrid Mitchell Barbara Mobbs Lisa Molvig Anthony James Moore Catherine Moore Andrew Moorhead Dr Elizabeth Morrison Anne Moten and John Moten Janet Moyle Frances Muecke Angus Muir and C Wilenski Philp Mulcare and Patricia Mulcare Joananne Mulholland and David Rivers Janet Munro Geoff Murray-Prior and Gillian Murray‑Prior Susan Myatt Donald W Nairn Heather Nash in memory of Bill Nash Claude Neumann Jim Notaras and Sophia Notaras Marie Oakes Jackie O’Brien Diana-Rose Orr Dr Milton Osborne Jill Parsons Susan Boden Parsons Brian Partridge and Helen Partridge Tony Patis Andrew Patrick Robert Pauling The Hon Tom Pauling AO, QC Jonathan Persse Dr David Pfanner and Dr Ruth Pfanner Margaret Plant Suzannah Plowman Dr Michael Priest

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SPONSORSHIP AND DONATIONS

Anne Prins Shahnaz Punthakey G Quintal Wendy Rainbird Colin Rea Kenneth Reed AM Andrew Reeves and Cora Trevarthen Lucie Reeves-Smith Ardyne Reid The Hon Margaret Reid AO Helene Rey Lyn Riddett Paul Robilliard and Hanan Robilliard Kathleen Rochford Catherine Rogers Susan S Rogers Helen Rose and Alan Rose James Ross and Heather Ross Peter Rossiter and Linda Rossiter Alan Rozen and June Rozen Mary Ryan Annette Sadler Raoul Salpeter and Ros Mandelberg Mark Sampson and Ruth Sampson Murray Sandland Sally Saunders Annette Searle Michael Shelley and Judith Shelley Rosamond Shepherd Dr Mike Slee and Dr Judith Slee Elizabeth Smith Jan Smith and Richard Smith AO Jennifer Smith Barry Smith-Roberts Ann Somers Paul Spence John Spora and Frances Spora David Stanley and Anne Stanley Helen Stead John Stead Rex Stevenson AO Heather Stokoe Robyn Stone Marilyn Stretton and Alan Stretton Charles Stuart and Gay Stuart Elinor Swan Lynette Swift Peter Szydlik The Taylor-Cannon Family Helen Topor Noel Tovey Judy Twist Niek Van Vucht and Jenny Van Vucht Derek Volker and Susan Volker Maryanne Voyazis, Fred Smith and Olympia Smith Pamela Walker and Ron Walker Brenton Warren Karrenza Warren RFD Emily Warwick Jill Waterhouse Wendy Webb Alexandra Wedutenko Dr Julie West and Glenn Hughes Angela Westacott

Anne White and Peter White Helen White Dr Romany White and Dr Russell White Dr Ian Wilkey and Hannah Wilkey George Wilkin Emer Prof David Williams AM and Margaret Williams Dr Jonathan Williams and Cathryn Williams Joy Williams and Peter Eddington Warwick Williams Andrew Williamson Shirley Wilmot Susan Wilson Zandra Wilson Belinda Wise Ellen Woodward Diane Wright Michael Wright and Robyn Wright Barbara Young AO

Members Acquisition Fund 2016–17 Robin Amm AM Assoc Prof Phillip Braslins Deb Carroll Maureen Chan Jan Clemson Angela Compton Elizabeth Cowan Neil Cox and Kay Cox Maria Magda Damo Shaun Duffy and Susan Duffy Tania Ezra and Jason Ezra Anna Fletcher Ross Gough Lynnere Gray Pauline Griffin Yvonne Harrington Chris Howard and Mary Howard Rosemary Huff-Johnston and William Huff-Johnston Anthea Hyslop John Jackson and Ros Jackson Pamela V Kenny Eric Koundouris Lady Jodie Leonard Richard Longes and Elizabeth Longes Lisa Molvig Frances Muecke Geoff Murray-Prior and Gillian Murray‑Prior Victor Noden and Barbara Noden Christine Pidgeon Claire E Scott Helen Stead In memory of Carol Sullivan Pamela Tallents Richard Telford and Sue Telford Karenza Warren Dr Ian Wilkey and Hannah Wilkey Alan Wyburn

Staff Travel Fund Judy Rogers and Andrew Rogers

Paul Bangay Garden Fund Fiona Geminder The Pratt Foundation

Tom Roberts Louis Abrahams 1886 Krystyna Campbell Pretty in memory of Dr Harold Campbell-Pretty

Tommy McRae Fund Sue Dyer and Steve Dyer Tom Hayward and Fiona Martin-Weber Geoffrey Pack and Leigh Pack Penelope Seidler AM

Treasure a Textile Maxine Rochester

CORPORATE PARTNERSHIPS Strategic Partner

Presenting Partner

Indigenous Art Partner

Major Partners

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Supporting Partners

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Media Partners

Corporate Members Aesop The Brassey of Canberra Clayton Utz Forrest Hotel & Apartments

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Promotional Partners Audi Centre Canberra Canberra Airport Canberra Centre Qantas Holidays

ARTONVIEW 92 SUMMER 2017

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‘the hardest and finest work I ever performed’ Arthur Streeton to Charles Bean

Arthur Streeton The art of war 15 December – 29 April Exhibition patron: The Hintze Family Charitable Foundation

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Arthur Streeton The tunnel-mouth, Bellicourt, the Hindenburg Line: the southern entrance

SPONSORSHIP AND DONATIONS to the tunnel 1918 (detail), oil on canvas. Sir Michael Hintze AM Collection, London

David Hockney Prints

11 November – 27 May

‘I love new mediums. I think mediums can turn you on, they can excite you …’

David Hockney: Paper pools

David Hockney A diver, paper pool 17 (detail), from the series Paper pools 1978, lithograph National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1979

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Art Gallery of New South Wales

1 1 Nov 2017— 18 Feb 2018

Our spirit flies further Introducing Qantas Dreamliner

Subject to government and regulatory approval. ABN 16 009 661 901

9 771323 455204

ISSN 1323-4552

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