2018.Q2 | Artonview 94

ARTONVIEW

WINTER 2018 | 94

National Gallery of Australia

Long lunch with Pollock He was an artist, a gardener, a baker and a party host. Discover a hidden side to Jackson Pollock with a Pollock-inspired menu on the Australian Garden terrace, some Pollock conversation and a walkthrough of our highly anticipated American Masters exhibition.

$120 NGA members, $140 guests Sunday 23 September 12.30 pm

Jackson Pollock Blue poles 1952, oil, enamel, aluminium paint, glass on canvas. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1973. Š Pollock-Krasner Foundation.

ARS/Copyright Agency, 2018

ISSUE 94 WINTER 2018 Editor Eric Meredith Guest contributors Tim Bonyhady, Professor, ANU College of Law Julia Greenstreet, former assistant curator, Contemporary Art, NGA Greg Lehman, consultant curator, Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery John McPhee, independent art historian and curator Contributors Franchesca Cubillo, Senior Curator, Aborginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Sally Foster, Curator, International Prints, Drawings and Illustrated Books Deborah Hart, Head of Australian Art Jane Kinsman, Head of International Art Simeran Maxwell, Curator, International Painting, Sculpture and Decorative Arts Sarina Noordhuis-Fairfax, Curator Australian Prints and Drawings Anne O’Hehir, Curator, Photography Advertising enquiries ArtonviewAdvertising@nga.gov.au Enquiries artonview.editor@nga.gov.au nga.gov.au/artonview © National Galley of Australia 2018 PO Box 1150, Canberra ACT 2601, Australia +61 (0)2 6240 6411 | nga.gov.au

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.

CONTENTS 4

DIRECTOR’S WORD Gerard Vaughan

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INTRODUCING OUR NEW DIRECTOR: NICK MITZEVICH

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WHAT AUDIENCES ARE SAYING ABOUT CARTIER: THE EXHIBITION

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IN BRIEF

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EXHIBITION LISTING

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MASTERPIECES FOR THE NATION JOHN OLSEN’S TOWARDS LAKE EYRE Deborah Hart reveals this year’s Masterpieces for the Nation Fund work

20 CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE CLUB ATE Julia Greenstreet spoke to Justin Shoulder about the Club Ate’s recent performance at the NGA

22 COMING EXHIBITION PICASSO: THE VOLLARD SUITE Jane Kinsman reveals the fascinating story behind this rare set of prints

28 COLLECTION DISPLAYS EUROPEAN ART IN THE NATIONAL COLLECTION Simeran Maxwell, Anne O’Hehir and Sally Foster highlight three aspects of the NGA’s new international art display from July

36 CURRENT EXHIBITIONS THE NATIONAL PICTURE Tim Bonyhady and Greg Lehman conjure up and interrogate colonial representations of Tasmanian Aboriginal people

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BALNAVES CONTEMPORARY INTERVENTIONS We spoke to the artists responsible for the Balnaves Contemporary Interventions

Views expressed by writers are not necessarily those of the NGA. Artonview may contain names and images of deceased Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

50 COMING EXHIBITIONS PERFORMING DRAWING

ISSN 1323-4552 ISSN 2208-6218 (Online)

54 DIARY OF AN OBJECT BAILLIEU AND TILLERS’S SELF-PORTRAIT

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

Sarina Noordhuis-Fairfax examines the act of drawing in art

John McPhee illuminates the fascinating story behind Marianne Baillieu and Imants Tillers’s collaboration

58 NEW ACQUISITIONS AND DISPLAYS UTA UTA TJANGALA Franchesca Cubillo delves into the history of Pintupi artist Uta Uta Tjangala

60 PAUL CEZANNE Jane Kinsman highlights Paul Cézanne’s extraordinary watercolour The orchard Cover: Cartier Paris Indian tiara 1923, transformed c 1937 (detail), platinum, diamonds, sapphires, pearls. Their Royal Highnesses the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester Opposite: Cartier: The Exhibition at the NGA, Canberra, until 22 July.

62 NEW ACQUISITIONS Mutuaga, Anne Ferran, Tacita Dean, Marco Fusinato, Colonial jewellery, Frederick Frith

66 SPONSORSHIP AND DONATIONS ARTONVIEW 94 WINTER 2018

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Clockwise from left: Marilyn Darling and Gerard Vaughan with some of the Albert Namajira works generous donated to the NGA by Marilyn and the late Gordon Darling, July 2017.

NGA curators and Defying Empire artists with Wesfarmers Arts representative Helen Carroll and Gerard Vaughan, May 2017.

Gerard Vaughan, Kerry Stokes, Prime Minister the Hon Malcolm Turnbull MP, Simon Baker and ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr at the opening of Tom Roberts, December 2015.

Gerard Vaughan with Catherine Pégard, President of the Palace of Versailles, and Christophe Lecourtier, then French ambassador to Australia, December 2016.

Gerard Vaughan with a group at the opening of Hyper Real, notably incoming NGA director Nick Mitzevich (far left), October 2017.

Artists and guests at the opening of Indigenous Australia: Masterworks from the National Gallery of Australia at the me Collectors Room in Germany, November 2017.

Naomi Watts, exhibition ambassador for Cartier: The Exhibition, Pierre Rainero, Image, Style and Heritage Director at Cartier, and Gerard Vaughan at the NGA, Canberra, March 2018.

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DIRECTOR'S WORD

DIRECTOR’S WORD Gerard Vaughan

Our current blockbuster Cartier: The Exhibition opened immediately

The exhibition will also tell our story: how the collection was

before Easter, and I’m pleased to say it attracted nearly five thousand

formed under the confident guiding hand of our inaugural director

visitors over the long weekend, a testament to its extraordinary quality

James Mollison and, above all, the controversy that occurred around the

and appeal. Since then, numbers have been building, and the exhibition

purchase of Jackson Pollock’s Blue poles 1952.

space is constantly full. Our audience has realised that this is truly a

If you have visited the NGA in the past month, you will

once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I am especially proud of the efforts of the

have experienced the first two commissions in our new Balnaves

entire NGA team to arrange, present, launch and promote the exhibition,

Contemporary Intervention Series: the tactile, playful and engaging work

which is everything we hoped it would be: an exhibition about cutting-

of Sarah Contos in our foyer and the captivating virtual world of New

edge twentieth-century design and unsurpassed craftsmanship, full of

York-based artists Jess Johnson and Simon Ward in our contemporary

glamour and social history.

galleries. This exciting new exhibition series has been made possible

In an interesting way, the exhibition extends our celebration of

through the engagement and generous support of Neil Balnaves and

French luxury design, from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

The Balnaves Foundation, and we’ve interviewed the artists about their

presented in our 2016–17 Versailles blockbuster to the twentieth century

respective projects on pages 44–9.

represented so powerfully by the innovative design values and global

Also in this issue is an interesting article focusing on a work in

marketing of the Maison Cartier. You still have a month and a half to see

the collection by Australian artists Marianne Baillieu and Imants

these Cartier masterpieces exclusively at the NGA in Canberra. There

Tillers. Written by John McPhee, who was the NGA’s senior curator of

are many rare, important jewels on view that have never been loaned

Australian art at the time the work was acquired, the article tells the

for public exhibition before—and may never be again, or not for a very

fascinating story of the Swedish-born Baillieu and the Latvian-born

long time!

Tillers’s collaboration on Self-portrait 1988 and other works for their

I would also like to draw special attention to the superbly designed

1988 exhibition To the Fatherland. Worth noting here is that a major

Cartier catalogue, a major book to be treasured for life. It is itself a kind

exhibition of Tillers’s work will open in July this year at the Latvian

of ‘must have’ luxury publication, and very reasonably priced to make it

National Museum of Art in his home city of Riga. We are proud to have

accessible to as many visitors as possible.

contributed important works from our collection to this exhibition and

Switching continents at the end of August, our forthcoming blockbuster American Masters 1940–1980 will showcase the broad scope

that our Head of Australian Art Deborah Hart will be presenting there.

As this will be my last issue of Artonview as Director, I would like

and depth of our twentieth-century American collection, which has

to thank you all personally for your support and involvement through

been described by some as arguably the best in the world outside the

my four years at the helm. My colleagues and I are grateful that you,

United States. Many works in the exhibition will be exhibited for the

our members, put your faith in us to manage, display, care for and to

first time in decades, as we simply do not have the space to permanently

grow our astonishing national art collection. We thank you for your

display them. Indeed, the NGA’s chronic lack of space is a problem

commitment to supporting the continuing evolution of this great

that can only really be solved with the construction of our planned

Australian institution. Supporting our national gallery is entirely a team

Stage 2 development, which would almost double the size of the

effort, and I know that the NGA will continue to thrive under our new

existing building.

director, Nick Mitzevich.

The next issue of Artonview will feature more on this special

You may have already experienced Nick’s great work at the Art

exhibition. Worth noting, however, is the fact that, with the advocacy

Gallery of South Australia or earlier at the University of Queensland Art

and support of our colleagues from the American Friends of the NGA,

Museum in Brisbane, or earlier still at the Newcastle Region Art Gallery.

we have been able to secure the loan, for up to ten years, of an exemplar

As NGA members, and our most dedicated audience, you will quickly

of what has been described as one of the most important American

learn to respect and enjoy his lively and creative approach to collection

sculptures of the twentieth century, Barnett Newman’s Broken Obelisk

building and to experiencing amazing art and art events. He is a great

1963/67. This monumental work now stands in pride of place at the

admirer of our former director the late Betty Churcher AO, and shares

front of the NGA, a worthy beacon to draw visitors into American Masters

with her a background in, and special enthusiasm for, art education.

1940–1980, which we hope will inspire a new generation of Australians

With 2 July as the day I hand over the baton to Nick, I have already

to engage with this critical period of American art—and be reminded

been asked by a number of journalists what I regard as the most

of just how controversial the acquisition of global abstraction was in

interesting and challenging aspects of my time at the NGA. You may

the 1970s.

recall our first steps, after my arrival, in reshaping the NGA experience,

ARTONVIEW 94 WINTER 2018

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particularly the monumental task of moving our Australian collection

to all who have assisted our efforts to do so, including your support for

downstairs to level one and installing our international displays upstairs.

our annual Members Acquisition Fund and Masterpieces for the Nation

With this change also came a new approach to displaying the collection,

Fund. I am pleased to announce that John Olsen’s Towards Lake Eyre (see

in which we have tried to strike a balance between presenting broad

pages 18–19), painted only this year, is the subject of our just-launched

collection highlights and exploring the collection by pursuing particular

Masterpieces for the Nation Fund. I also feel deeply touched that John

ideas and themes such as Australian Impressionism, Art Deco or

has chosen to donate a second work, Dingo country 2016, to mark my

depictions of 1960s and 1970s leisure across different media.

time as Director of the NGA.

I like to think it has been a time for some fresh thinking about how

perhaps most significantly the longstanding, continuing government

from our national collection that have attracted not only many locals but

cuts to our annual operating funding (ironically described as ‘efficiency

also a growing number of interstate and international visitors. We have

dividends’) and the ongoing questions about provenance of a number

enjoyed this process of change and experimentation, and I hope you have

of our Asian antiquities.

too. I also know that Nick will bring new ideas and different approaches once he arrives.

More active engagement with contemporary art was the next major

We have dealt with the cuts as best we can and are hopeful that recent recalibrations have delivered what is required. We certainly welcome the $16.6 million grant that was announced in the recent

step in refreshing the visitor experience, and we established a new

Federal budget. This injection over three years will enable important,

department of Contemporary Global Practice (Post-2000), bringing

and long overdue, upgrades to our forty-year-old heritage-listed building,

inspiring new works—many of global significance—into the national

safeguarding the national collection into the future. The Minister for the

collection and finding new ways to engage with the art of our time.

Arts the Hon Mitch Fifield is also providing $4.9 million this financial

Of special note is the recent acquisition of Yayoi Kusama’s The Spirits of

year to support these projects. This is excellent news, and it is great

the Pumpkins Descended into the Heavens 2015, one of her famous ‘infinity

to know that Government has engaged with our long-term lobbying

rooms’ in which the visitor enters a world of endless reflection, both

on this matter. We continue to work positively with Government on

physically and conceptually. Acquired through the great generosity of

making the NGA a great place to be and a great national asset.

Andrew and Hiroko Gwinnett, it is the first work by this global Japanese

We have been able to develop some very workable and appropriate

superstar to enter the national collection and will provide yet another

protocols for handling provenance, and it was pleasing to see, only

good reason to visit the NGA when it goes on display later in the year.

recently, a statement in one of the main New Delhi newspapers that

Collection development has been a special interest of mine, both here and in previous roles, and I am always aware that the generosity of so many people, including our members, has helped us acquire major

many in India regard our new protocols for dealing with illegally exported Indian antiquities as setting a standard for the rest of the world.

Notwithstanding these and other challenges, one of the reasons why

pieces for the nation. Only recently, donors to our Gala Dinner Fund

my time at the NGA has been so enjoyable is that the collections here

made possible the purchase of two monumental master paintings by one

are astonishingly rich and deep. Every day, I learn more and discover

of the original Papunya artists, Uta Uta Tjangala (see page 58–9).

masterpieces I did not know were here. A key part of our national role

Some other personal highlights during my time include the

is sharing the collections with as many Australians as possible, as well as

acquisition of Tom Roberts’s newly discovered and previously

lending overseas, and it has been heartening to know that, quite literally,

undocumented portrait of Louis Abrahams 1886, Arthur Streeton’s The

thousands of works of art—assiduously cared for by our curatorial,

Point Wharf, Mosman Bay 1893 and James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s

registration and conservation teams—have been shared. And it is always

Harmony in blue and pearl: The Sands, Dieppe c 1885, a small but highly

pleasing when wonderful things that have not been on display for a long

important cigar-box-lid painting. A special favourite is Paul Sérusier’s

time come out again.

masterpiece Woman from Savoy 1890, a truly significant European

Finally, I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to and respect

acquisition, recently supplemented by a large, important watercolour

for our staff, in all areas and at all levels—and I include, of course, our

drawing of around 1895 by Paul Cézanne (see pages 60–1), one of the

many very dedicated volunteers—as well as my colleagues on the NGA’s

initiators of the formalist approach to painting and drawing we now

Council, including our Chair Allan Myers AC, QC. I extend profound

designate as Post-Impressionism.

gratitude to our many generous donors, as well as to the Foundation

The Sérusier is captivating in its emphatically avant-garde use of flat, unmodulated colour, its formalist, spare composition and primitivising subject matter, and it will be a painting that I will continue to visit for

Board of Directors, particularly its Chair John Hindmarsh AM, for their dedicated support.

After nearly three decades in managerial roles in museums and

years to come, knowing that it will always delight and surprise me. Also,

galleries, I will again have the opportunity to pursue research and writing

remembering the NGA’s foundation commitment to collect and display

and to travel with Rose and, hopefully sometimes, with our grown up

the visual culture of our region, the highly important seventeenth-

children, Ali and Charlie. Rose and I will be regular visitors to Canberra,

century wooden ancestral figure of the god Mugus from Papua New

which we love, and particularly to the NGA. Thank you again for

Guinea is a work of incredible power and quality.

everything the members have achieved during my time here. The NGA

It has been a privilege to work not only with the entire NGA team, but also with key supporters such as yourselves. I am particularly grateful

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Of course, there have also been some big, complex issues to confront,

to use our collections. We have developed some wonderful exhibitions

DIRECTOR'S WORD

needs friends such as yourselves, and I know you will enjoy supporting and working with the new director.

INTRODUCING OUR NEW DIRECTOR NICK MITZEVICH When the decision on who would take over the NGA was announced on 10 April, soon-to-be director Nick Mitzevich was here in Canberra to introduce himself to staff in our James O Fairfax Theatre. It was a move that he and current Director Dr Gerard Vaughan AM felt was necessary, not only to make it ‘real’ to Nick and the staff here, as he said, but also to provide a sense of continuity, a seamless transition of the leadership of Australia’s premier arts institution. He will be the sixth director in the NGA’s history, following James Mollison AO, Betty Churcher AO, Brian Kennedy, Dr Ron Radford AM and, of course, Dr Vaughan.

Eschewing the lectern and a prepared speech, he took over the stage and put the crowd at ease with various anecdotes and analogies of his life experiences, predominantly leaving aside visions for the NGA’s future until he puts his feet under the desk on 2 July and learns how this institution works. Growing up on the family farm in regional New South Wales, Nick learnt the value of being disciplined and the importance of getting the basics right when it came to growing things—a lesson reinforced by his ongoing fervour for gardening.

‘When you have the basics right’, he says, ‘you can jump out of the box … you can do extraordinary things’. As the eldest of four siblings (he has three sisters), he was expected to take over the farm after leaving school. Instead, he went to university to study art.

He completed a Bachelor and Post-Graduate Diploma in Fine Art at the University of Newcastle, although soon realised that he was a ‘really bad artist’. So he shifted focus to art education, his natural charisma, confidence and passion for the visual arts making him well suited to teaching others about the role art and artists play in our community and in forming (and, at times, challenging) our identity.

It is a role also that, despite years in directorial roles, has never left him.

‘I still slip into the “teacher”’, he admits, which can only be a good thing considering the NGA’s primary goal is to increase ‘understanding, knowledge and enjoyment of the visual arts’.

Nick’s passion for learning is obvious when he speaks about ‘how the message of art can be transferred’. ‘Regardless of who you are, there’s always lots to learn’, he says, ‘collectively, we learn about art and we share it’, and he doesn’t mean classroom learning. ‘Learning can happen with people who are retired … with people in their forties. There’re a lot of different ways.’ He loves to think about what artists think and about the position of artists in our society, because he respects how they make work about the world we live in and believes a gallery’s role is to elevate and share these voices and perspectives with as many people as possible.

His proven skills as an educator, as both an art teacher and a gallery director, are just some of the tools in his backpack, he says.

He wants to put roots down in Canberra, to put an end to being a self-described ‘itinerant director’ after spending six years at the helm of the Newcastle Region Art Gallery, three years at the University of Queensland Art Museum in Brisbane and the last eight years reshaping the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide.

‘My job will be to make sure that the NGA is bursting at the seams and to make sure that, regardless of the geographical isolation, people can be a part of the NGA’, he says. How he aims to do this will be revealed in time. His past shows many ways in which he has grown audiences—with his 2005 Your Gallery national radio and online exhibition for the Newcastle Region Art Gallery, for instance, or by collaborating in Adelaide with the twenty-three venues and two universities that presented the last Tarnanthi: Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art, which attracted 390 000 visitors.

The success of Tarnanthi, he says, is due to embracing partnerships and by working collaboratively, namely with his colleague Nici Cumpston, who he describes as ‘the best friend-maker in the country’.

With the change of guard happening on 2 July, the next issue of Artonview will be delivered under our new director. In welcoming Nick to the NGA, then, we must also say goodbye and a very big thankyou to Gerard for his four years of innovation, adventure and surprises here at the NGA.

‘Collaboration’ and ‘the perspective of an artist’ are two others he mentions, although he no doubt has many more to drawn upon during his time as director of the NGA, which he hopes will be a long while.

Nick Mitzevich with former NGA director Betty Churcher, 2014. Photo: Saul Steed

ARTONVIEW 94 WINTER 2018

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WHAT AUDIENCES ARE SAYING ABOUT …

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT CARTIER: THE EXHIBITION ‘Each room is one breath-stopping moment to

‘A wonderful opportunity to immerse yourself

another. Absolutely mesmerising!’

within a fantasy world of diamonds and jewels imagining what it would be like to be a princess.’

‘A stunning exhibition so beautifully presented for those fortunate to be able to visit.’

‘The exhibition was incredibly put together and displayed the most beautiful pieces of jewellery

‘A world-class exhibition making me feel honoured

I’ve ever seen.

to have the opportunity to see these jewels without paying for an international airfare.’

‘Not to be missed—it sparkles, it impresses, it wows—it is FABULOUS.’

‘The exhibition was overwhelmingly beautiful.

It’s rare to enjoy an exhibit with so many items

‘One of the most stunning displays of exquisite

of such fabulous quality.’

workmanship!’

‘Pure excitement to witness such an elegant

‘Very well-designed exhibition leading one

display of masterpiece craftsmanship.’

through the history of a creative powerhouse and maker of beautiful pieces.’

‘The exhibition is spectacular and displays are marvellous.’

‘A magnificent exhibition that nourished the senses. A real joy to see such beautiful pieces and understand the social context reflecting the era they were made.’

Cartier: The Exhibition 30 March to 22 July 2018 Join the conversation #CartierNGA

ARTONVIEW 93 SUMMER 2017

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IN BRIEF CALIFORNIA COOL: PRINTS AND PHOTOGRAPHY FROM AMERICA’S WEST COAST From 6 October 2018

During the 1960s and 1970s, the centre of American art shifted from New York to Los Angeles. What had previously been considered a cultural backwater, whose contribution to American cultural life was limited to suburban sprawl and Hollywood cinema, became the nucleus for a young generation of artists drawn to the promise of freedom and the opportunity offered by the West Coast’s eternal sunshine, expansive space and shiny gleaming surfaces. A new aesthetic arose, one that personified the look and the aspirations of the American dream.

Images of sunshine, sex and unrestricted movement sat alongside those laying bare the reality of contemporary life, which was as easily defined by rising social inequality, loneliness, civil unrest and constraints of social and Above: John Baldessari Throwing three balls in the air to get a straight line (Best of thirty-six attempts) 1973 (detail), offset lithograph. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1981 Below: Family fun at the NGA, Canberra.

Opposite, from top: Andy Warhol Campbell’s Soup I 1968, screenprint. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, The Poynton Bequest, 2006. © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc/ARS. Represented by Viscopy; Aleks Danko Imagination c 1975, photographic reproduction. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, gift of Daniel Thomas, 1980

political freedoms. California Cool draws on the NGA’s substantial collection of international prints and photographs to highlight the way American artists responded to both the promise and the hard truth of life in America in the 1960s and 1970s.

TAILORING NGA PLAY When Kellie O’Dempsey’s The Never-Ending Line opens in our NGA Play space on Saturday 16 June, we’re introducing special times during the week that focus on activities for particular age groups. This change in format will operate during the school term and help parents with children of all ages to make an informed decision about when best to visit.

With extra storytelling and creative making every Monday to Thursday between 10.00 am and 1.00 pm, families with preschool-age children and babies will grow to love ‘Playtime’ at the NGA. Then, on Friday, we change the emphasis to school-aged kids with ‘Play Afterschool’ from 3.00 to 5.00 pm. Fun can still be had by all ages at anytime, but planning your visit to coincide with these special programs will ensure you get the most out of your time at the NGA.

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IN BRIEF

AMERICAN MASTERS 1940–1980 24 August to 11 November 2018

POWER AND IMAGINATION: CONCEPTUALISM 1966–1976

When the NGA purchased Jackson Pollock’s Blue poles 1952 in 1973,

11 August 2018 to 28 January 2019

the emerging national art collection made international headlines.

Featuring a hundred works from the national collection, this exhibition

The painting is now celebrated as one of Pollock’s greatest, and it remains the NGA’s best known and most visited work of art. Blue poles will soon move from its permanent home in the international galleries to be included in the upcoming major exhibition American Masters 1940–1980, which will showcase the NGA’s outstanding American holdings from 24 August.

American Masters tells the story of the formation of this incredible collection, bringing together important works and highlighting

provides fascinating insight into the minds of artists who used language, poetry, performance and film to expand and transform the nature of art. From Sue Ford’s accumulating self-portrait to Joseph Kosuth’s exploration of the fragile link between word and object, experience art that resists material convention in favour of idea, experiment and unabashed imagination. A series of related programs and performances will also be on offer.

the major movements and styles of the key period from 1940 to 1980: Abstract Expressionism, Colour Field, Pop Art, Photorealism, Minimalism and Conceptual, Land and Performance art. The exhibition explores how artists such Louise Bourgeois, Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, Claes Oldenburg, Eva Hesse and Chuck Close proposd new ideas about art, its subject matter, substance and form. Visitors will experience paintings without edges, objects made of strange materials, environments and ‘performed’ works of art.

Highlights include works by the New York School, Sol LeWitt’s huge Wall drawing no 380 a–d 1982, specially remade for the exhibition, and spectacular light works by Dan Flavin, Bruce Nauman, Keith Sonnier and James Turrell. This expansive and stunning exhibition is the first time the NGA’s celebrated American collection has been shown across six gallery spaces, allowing its depth and quality to be seen. American Masters is free and complemented by an exciting program of events.

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WINTER WELLNESS Creative Health, a recent UK report, found ‘that the arts can enable people to take greater responsibility for their own health and wellbeing and enjoy a better quality of life’.

So, although winter is a time of year that can really test your physical and mental health, there’s no reason to hibernate.

The NGA is offering a host of programs, under the banner of ‘Winter Wellness’, that will help you build your resilience to Canberra’s colder months by keeping your body and mind active with art and new ideas. The program will kick off in June with an event launch, Artidote, curated around the theme of wellbeing through creativity. With artist talks, music and performance art, it’s the first of three special Friday nights that will enliven your social calendar (see ‘Winter Nights’ opposite).

Participation and collaboration will be the hallmarks of the season. You can mix and match our ‘Winter Wellness’ events to tailor your own ‘creative support’ regime.

There are social events, workshops, live music, art performances, films, lectures and talks to choose from. The value of drawing, in particular, will be highlighted in conjunction with various exhibitions happening over winter.

We’ll also be hosting regular lunchtime yoga sessions in June, tai chi in July and meditation in August, and our weekly Art for Lunch in July will focus on what makes us happy.

WINTER FILM SERIES 2018 Wednesdays 13 June to 11 July 6.30 pm

Oren Jacoby’s 2017 documentary Shadowman is one of five films that will screen at the NGA in June and July as part of this year’s Winter Film Series. The film will have its Australian premiere at the NGA and tells the story of Richard Hambleton, the New York street artist who inspired Banksy.

During the booming art market of the 1980s, Hambleton was better known than his friends and fellow painters Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. While Haring and Basquiat died young, Hambleton lived on. Few people know what happened to his after those early days, despite the fact that he continued to paint and sell his work to collectors and dealers. Shadowman was filmed over a number of years, with exclusive access to this enigmatic artist, Jacoby describing Hambleton as a ‘brilliant painter who is, at heart, a loner, someone who struggles with addiction and pushes people away, but never stops making art’. The screening at the NGA will be followed by a Q&A with the director live from New York.

The Winter Film Series, curated by Simon Weaving, is now in its fifth year and lets you catch up with the latest films about art, fashion, culture and the extraordinary people involved in creating the world around us.

Full details, screening times and bookings at nga.gov.au/winterfilmseries

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IN BRIEF

THE LOST JEWELS: MASTERS AND MASTERWORKS LOST IN THE GREAT WAR Friday 10 August 7.30 pm Saturday 11 August 2.00 pm

Commemorating the end of the First World War, the NGA will present a concert of lost musical treasures by composers whose lives and careers were cut short before an armistice was reached. The concert, directed by local musician and composer Christopher Latham, assembles compositions for soprano, tenor, chamber choir, string quartet and piano by composers such as Frederick Septimus Kelly, Rudi Stephan, George Butterworth, Andre DeVaere and Claude Debussy.

Latham is the Australian War Memorial’s first musical artist-in-residence and is the director of ‘The Flowers of War’ project, which included a series of concerts in Canberra last year, the first of which was held at the NGA in September. The lost jewels: masters

WINTER NIGHTS 8 June, 6 July and 3 August 6.00–8.00 pm

Warm up in Canberra with friends and family, food and drinks at our first-Friday-of-themonth social events this winter. As part of our Winter Wellness program, these Friday nights will nurture your mind, body and soul and

Opposite, from top: Yoga with Pipilotti Rist’s Worry will vanish revelation 2017 at the NGA, Canberra, 2017; Richard Hambleton.

Photo: Ben Buchanan Above: Monet: The flowers of war concert at the NGA, Canberra, 29 September, 2017. Photo: Peter Hislop Below: David Hockney: Prints Party at the NGA, Canberra, 2 February 2018.

and masterworks lost in the Great War extends his research for the earlier series, and will be visually accompanied by works painted by artists who also died before the end of hostilities, including Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, Umberto Boccioni and Franz Marc, August Macke and Wilhelm Morgner.

Bookings at nga.gov.au/calendar

provide you with new insights into the NGA’s collection and exhibitions. Starting us off, Artidote on 8 June explores wellbeing through creativity in and around the exhibition Infinite Conversations exhibition and our Asian Art collection. Listen to live music, see a tai chi demonstration, hear artist talks and participate in artist-led creative making experiences.

Leading into NAIDOC week on Friday 6 July, Culture to Catwalk highlights the achievements of Indigenous women through art, adornment and fashion and connect with the NAIDOC theme ‘Because of her, We can!’. Then on Friday 3 August, we invite you to follow The Never-Ending Line in NGA Play and actively explore Kellie O’Dempsey’s living sketchbook. O’Dempsey will provide a performance accompanied by live music and dance. This NGA Play Friday night is for the adults only (18+ years) and will get you playing with shadow puppets, 3D drawing constructions and live animation.

Bookings at nga.gov.au/calenda

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DEFYING EMPIRE’S NATIONAL TOUR HAS BEGUN 24 March to 15 July @ Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory 28 July to 11 November @ UQ Art Museum

The NGA’s recent major survey of contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art Defying Empire: 3rd National Indigenous Art Triennial opens at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory on 24 March, launching its three-year national tour.

‘This exhibition reflects the strength, creativity, diversity and pride of contemporary Indigenous artists, highlighting the historical and ongoing activism by Indigenous people to gain equality in this country,’ said the curator of the exhibition Tina Baum, a Larrakia, Wardaman and Karajarri woman of the Northern Territory and Western Australia. ‘I am particularly proud that the exhibition opens first on my mother’s Country of the Larrakia people of Darwin, where my family and community experienced many of the inequalities shown in Defying Empire.’

Issues of identity, racism, displacement, Country, nuclear testing, sovereignty and the Stolen Generations are explored in Defying Empire, demonstrating the incredible range of contemporary Indigenous art practice today, by established, mid-career and emerging artists. The exhibition champions the artist’s voice and, with the fiftieth anniversary of the 1967 Referendum as a launching point, reveals some incredible insights into and perspectives on what it means to be Indigenous in Australia, both now and in the past.

See our website for full tour venues and dates

INDIGENOUS ARTS LEADERSHIP PROGRAM Applications open August

The NGA and Wesfarmers Arts have been working together for the past ten years to provide meaningful opportunities for Indigenous arts workers interested in developing their leadership qualities, gaining experience in and insight into the broader arts sector and creating lasting networks.

This partnership has championed an annual ten-day leadership program held at the NGA in Canberra, which aims to increase Indigenous representation across all levels of the visual arts sector. The program includes professional development sessions run by Indigenous curators, artists, former alumni and industry and community experts.

So, if you are an Indigenous Australian arts worker and passionate about making a difference in the visual arts sector, keep an eye on our website for further information, as our next program will be in November 2018, applications for which open in August.

Find out more at nga.gov.au/indigenousleaders

WELL FOR LUNCH Expand your body and soul with a series of six one-hour lunchtime yoga sessions at the NGA in June that will let you focus on your health and connect you with some of the greatest works in the national collection. Please arrive at 12.45 pm for 1.00 pm start. Feel free to bring your own yoga gear. A limited number of mats will be available on the day.

Tai chi in July will then maximise your harmony and balance, and August will provide focus through meditation in preparation for the last part of the year. On Friday lunchtimes from 15 June, you can also join our drop-in choir the BipARTisans, with Dianna Nixon, to sing your (he)art out with friends and colleagues this winter.

Details and bookings at nga.gov.au/calendar

Left: Jason Wing Captain James Crook 2013, bronze.

Purchased 2013 Opposite, from top: The 2015 Indigenous Arts Leadership participants in Fiona Hall’s Fern Garden at the NGA, Canberra; Weaving demonstration and workshop with the Tjanpi Weavers from the Central Desert, NGA, Canberra, April 2016.

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IN BRIEF

NAIDOC WEEK 2018 8 to 15 July: Because of her, we can!

NAIDOC Week is Australia’s annual celebration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander history, culture and achievements. It is celebrated not only in Indigenous communities across the nation but by all Australians, and will be held nationally this year between Sunday 8 and Sunday 15 July.

The 2018 theme ‘Because of her, we can!’ focuses our attention on the important contributions Indigenous women have made to families, communities and Australia’s rich history. ‘As leaders, trailblazers, politicians, activists and social change advocates,’ says the statement

by National NAIDOC Co-Chairs Dr Anne Martin and Ben Mitchell, ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women fought and continue to fight, for justice, equal rights, our rights to country, for law and justice, access to education, employment and to maintain and celebrate our culture, language, music and art’.

The NGA will honour the theme in correlation with our Winter Wellness program, where healing and community connection are the focus, including a guided meditation session and Indigenous adornment making. These events recognise the significant role Indigenous women have played in keeping culture and community strong in Australia.

For details on NAIDOC Week at the NGA, go to nga.gov.au

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LOVE AND DESIRE: PRE-RAPHAELITE MASTERPIECES FROM THE TATE 14 December 2018 to 22 April 2019

Enter a world of love and desire when masterpieces from Tate’s unsurpassed collection of Pre-Raphaelite paintings feature in the NGA’s summer blockbuster from mid December.

In mid-nineteenth-century Britain, a group of rebellious young artists emulated the spirit of early Renaissance painting in protest against the art establishment and society at large. Radically flaunting convention, these artists revelled in the use of brilliant colour, meticulous detail and complex layering.

The Pre-Raphaelites drew inspiration from the great love stories of history, the tempestuousness of lustful entanglements and the wonder of religious icons. They created a new artistic genre that combined medieval romanticism with modern life to produce literary scenes, portraits and landscapes rich in symbolism.

Love and Desire features fifty of Tate’s most famous and best loved works. These masterpieces are rarely lent, many never travel outside Britain, making this a once-in-generation opportunity for art lovers in Australia. The works will be shown alongside forty others from British and Australian collections. With masterpieces such as John Everett Millais’s Ophelia 1851–52, William Holman Hunt’s The awakening conscience 1853 and Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Proserpine 1874, this stunning survey promises to be one of the Australia’s most memorable exhibition experiences in recent times.

Tickets for Love and Desire and associated events will go on sale later this year, so join us on social media and watch our website for updates.

Above: John William Waterhouse The Lady of Shalott 1888, oil on canvas. Tate, presented by Sir Henry Tate, 1894 Right: Dante Gabriel Rossetti Proserpine 1874, oil on canvas. Tate, presented by W Graham Robertson, 1940

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IN BRIEF

EXHIBITION LISTING AT THE NGA

TOURING EXHIBITIONS

CARTIER: THE EXHIBITION

SILVER AND GOLD: UNIQUE AUSTRALIAN OBJECTS 1850–1910

Showcasing more than 300 spectacular items in exquisite settings, including royal tiaras, necklaces, brooches and earrings.

30 March to 22 July 2018 Adult $27.00 | Children 16 and under free Concession $25.00 | Member $20.00 Audio-guide hire $7.00 Book now at ticketek.com or 1300 795 012

AMERICAN MASTERS 1940–1980 Examining how a generation of Americans reinvented modern art.

24 August to 11 November 2018

ART DECO IN AUSTRALIA Stylish items from an age of jazz and flappers, glamorous fashion and design.

From 16 February 2018

INFINITE CONVERSATIONS: ASIAN–AUSTRALIAN ARTISTIC EXCHANGE Revealing a rich dialogue, as concepts of race and culture are provoked and explored.

10 March to 9 September 2018

THE NATIONAL PICTURE: THE ART OF TASMANIA’S BLACK WAR Curated by Prof Tim Bonyhady, working with Dr Greg Lehman.

12 May to 29 July 2018

BALNAVES CONTEMPORARY INTERVENTIONS Sarah Contos’s Nikola Tesla sends Theda Bara to Mars 4 May to 24 September 2018 Jess Johnson and Simon Ward’s Terminus 4 May to 26 August 2018

PICASSO: THE VOLLARD SUITE A rare opportunity to see one of the twentieth century’s greatest suites of prints.

6 June to 24 September 2018

WATERCOLOURS BY HRH THE PRINCE OF WALES

Works from the NGA’s significant collection of colonial Australian decorative arts and design.

20 April to 10 June 2018 @ Tamworth Art Gallery 16 June to 26 August 2018 @ Ipswich Art Gallery

DIANE ARBUS: AMERICAN PORTRAITS Powerful allegories of postwar America by photographer Diane Arbus.

17 March to 17 June 2018 @ Heide Museum of Modern Art 16 July to 30 September 2018 @ Art Gallery of South Australia

DEFYING EMPIRE: NATIONAL INDIGENOUS ART TRIENNIAL Contemporary art responding to the 50th Anniversary of the 1967 Referendum.

24 March to 15 July 2018 @ Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory 28 July to 11 November 2018 @ UQ Art Museum

ABSTRACTION: CELEBRATING AUSTRALIAN WOMEN ABSTRACT ARTISTS Revealing the contribution Australian women have made to abstract art.

1 June to 26 August 2018 @ QUT Art Museum

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

15 June 2018 to 19 August 2018 @ National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi

THE NED KELLY SERIES Sidney Nolan’s iconic paintings of the exploits of Ned Kelly and his gang.

3 August to 4 November 2018 @ Art Gallery of Western Australia

THE NATIONAL PICTURE: THE ART OF TASMANIA’S BLACK WAR Curated by Prof Tim Bonyhady, working with Dr Greg Lehman.

17 August to 11 November 2018 @ Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery

Celebrating HRH The Prince of Wales’s 70th birthday.

10 August to 18 November 2018

POWER AND IMAGINATION: CONCEPTUALISM 1966–1976 Language, poetry, performance and film in art.

11 August 2018 to 28 January 2019

PERFORMING DRAWING Bringing together drawings, photographs and audiovisual works from the collection.

From 1 September 2018

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18

JOHN OLSEN’S TOWARDS LAKE EYRE

M A S T E R P I E C E S F O R T H E N AT I O N

John Olsen’s Towards Lake Eyre Deborah Hart reveals this year’s Masterpieces for the Nation Fund work, John Olsen’s brand new masterpiece Towards Lake Eyre, which capture’s the artist’s extraordinary vision of Australia’s unique landscape.

John Olsen, who turned ninety this year, is one of Australia’s most

he witnessed it gradually turning back into a salty pink expanse. In

accomplished artists and among the few in this country to have had

public conversation in November 2017 with former Art Gallery of South

two major retrospective exhibitions in his lifetime. He has had a long

Australia director Nick Mitzevich (who will be taking over the helm

connection with and affection for the NGA, and we are keen to continue

here at the NGA on 2 July), Olsen spoke about his time at Lake Eyre,

to recognise and celebrate his achievement by choosing his evocative

remarking, ‘to be an Australian artist is to be an explorer … the rules that

masterwork Towards Lake Eyre 2018 for this year’s Masterpieces for

govern European landscape painting don’t apply here … What I’m trying

the Nation Fund. It is a painting that conveys his profound, ongoing

to do is to tell an old story in a new way’.’

response to the vast and beloved landscape of this country. It builds

Four decades after his first visit to Lake Eyre, Olsen recalls the rivers

on many aspects of his artistic development and is, indeed, a mature

that flow from the north across the Channel Country towards the

painting encompassing the lessons of a lifetime.

lake. In his painting, they become his characteristically animated lines

Yet there is also freshness and vitality in this work—one might

travelling towards the lake and entering into the vast expanse. Unlike

even say a sense of new beginnings—which is remarkable for an artist

earlier paintings in which the edges of the water are visible around the

in his ninth decade who still works as often as he can in his studio

circumference, here lake and ground seem to merge in a mesmerising

in the Southern Highlands. Facing onto a lake in the countryside,

space. The lake is depicted from an aerial perspective, which is tilted

the studio space has a sense of being a repository of memory. It is a

to show a thin strip of the most vibrant blue sky. While painted on

space for regeneration too. On the far wall are works from his student

a large scale, there is also a delicacy about the painting that gives it a

days through to more recent paintings and brush drawings. There are

mystical presence.

much-loved Aboriginal bark paintings in the studio as well as books,

In the studio, Olsen talked to us about ‘the continuity of memory’.

photographs and diaries. They are touchstones that resonate across time.

This recalled something he wrote in the 1956 catalogue Contemporary

Lined up along another wall are paintings that have been completed in

Australian paintings: Pacific Loan exhibition on board Orient Line SS Oracle,

the past few years. This was where I first saw Towards Lake Eyre, when

when he was at the very beginning of his career, about never wanting

NGA Director Gerard Vaughan and I visited Olsen earlier this year.

to lose the subject but also striving to tap into something larger than

Its striking animated mark making and line, spaciousness and unusual

himself: ‘My painting takes on its particular abstract quality because

rose-pink palette captured our attention.

only in this way can I express my search for direct mystical experience

The startling pink colour—in some areas soft and in others intensely

… The thing which I always endeavour to express is an animistic

vibrant—generates the initial impact of Towards Lake Eyre as an

quality—a certain mystical throbbing throughout nature’. Towards Lake

imaginative response. However, Olsen has long been aware that reality

Eyre fulfils this dream, a fruition of many journeys into the landscape

and imagination are closely intertwined. As many will know, pink lakes

and into art that keep opening up new and enriching possibilities.

do occur around Australia. The phenomenon was remarked upon by explorer Matthew Flinders in his 1802 journal when he saw Lake Hillier on the largest island of the Recherche Archipelago, off the south coast of Western Australia: ‘In the north-eastern part was a small lake of a rose colour, the water of which, as I was informed by Mr. Thistle who visited it, was so saturated with salt, that sufficient quantities were crystallised

Masterpieces for the Nation Fund 2018 Support your national collection by contributing to the acquisition of John Olsen’s Towards Lake Eyre 2018.

T (02) 6240 6408 | E foundation@nga.gov.au W nga.gov.au/giving

near the shores to load a ship’.

Lake Eyre (or Kati Thanda, as it is known by the Arabana people, the traditional Indigenous custodians of this area), in the north of South Australia, is another famous lake that at times turns pink. Olsen’s engagement with Lake Eyre goes back to 1974. After extraordinary floods the previous year, the lake was abundant with life. Over time, however,

Opposite: Towards Lake Eyre 2018, oil on linen. © John Olsen. Represented by Viscopy

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20

CLUB ATE

C O N T E M P O R A RY P E R F O R M A N C E

Club Ate Julia Greenstreet spoke to Club Ate co-founder Justin Shoulder about the collective’s recent work Skyworld Launchpad, performed at the NGA’s contemporary art party Maze on 4 May. Julia Greenstreet: The Carrion figure that you conceived of for a solo

these very intense other beings. I’m now drawn more and more by the

performance in 2016 recently reappeared in Skyworld Launchpad, which you presented at the NGA with Club Ate co-members dancer Bhenji Ra and musician Corin Ileto. How do you bring together your distinct practices in the collaborative process?

super sensorial and intimate nature of it, and the risk that artists subject

Justin Shoulder: Bhenji and I started Club Ate in 2014, mostly as a

her body as an archive. You have your own ancestral, cellular narratives

framework for a club performance night. It started as a community

themselves to when they perform. It’s very vulnerable. And there’s great value in things that are temporary, things that you can only engage with in that moment. I find that particularly exciting. Bhenji often talks about that you can bring out and tell through your body, so that’s a big part

event with different performances, and our families would cook and

of it for both of us as well.

share meals. It’s now become a cultural framework through which we

Julia: You’re well known for your elaborate costumes, and, for Carrion, you worked with Matthew Stegh to design a costume that features everyday materials to dramatic effect. Tell us about the concept?

collectively produce films, events, and performance.

We always think about water as a metaphor for the malleability and fluidity of identity. More recently, we keep thinking about how ideas rise to the surface. That feeling of a collective consciousness when spending time looking at Facebook feeds and Instagram, for example.

Or the way that web bots are programmed to draw people together or make particular ideas float to the surface. The ‘Launchpad’ idea works in a similar way. It’s an experiment within our group’s collective consciousness. We all have individual practices and particular things we’re investigating, and we just see how the ideas sit together. It’s similar to how the Filipino diaspora works. Through colonisation, there’s always going to be these multiple influences, layers, ideas and visions.

Our Skyworld, which draws on Tagalog mythology from the Philippines, is a way to visualise and physicalise that.

Carrion is one figure, and Bhenji has her own investigation. It’s about how we juxtapose our different ideas within the framework. We’ve often worked with Corin, who played live for the Carrion theatre work.

Whatever context, we shift the work a bit. In a club, it’s shorter, sharper and louder. But, in a gallery, there’s space to open up duration, there’s a different focus. It’s always taking into account the particular focus of the audience and how you can play with that, or subvert or work with it, to keep pushing the practice and to see how things refract in new ways.

Justin: The first part of the costume was the mask, which came from Monsta Gras, a costume ball we’ve been running for almost ten years.

The mask is a vac-form of my face, kind of like a death mask. I then found these iPhone cables, and it felt very Medusa-like. Matt and I sourced a model of a skeleton to make parts of the costume like the chest piece and the hands, which articulate and animate themselves on top of my hands. The big inflatable coat made from refuse clear plastic is like a frilled chrysalis for a royal figure or future leader that’s fallen.

A pump system we designed with another collaborator inflates the plastic, building with the tension in the performance. It’s also a good immersive spectacle.

Carrion is part of a greater body of work called ‘Phasmahammer’, phasma meaning ‘spirit’, hammer, ‘to smash’. It’s a body of work that’s an ecology of performative figures that are imagined mythologies. There are about twelve creatures now, which started off as extreme re-imaginings of the body, inspired by people like Leigh Bowery and other queer spectacle-based performance artists.

One of the spaces I particularly wanted to shift and transform was my flesh, predominantly using gesture. Carrion examines humanity, and the intersections between human, machine and animal. There was

Julia: What initially attracted you to performance?

something so uncanny about the figure when we first made it, and the

Justin: Although I’ve been training in BodyWeather, an offshoot of

deep horror of it really drew me in. The fact that I can puppet myself

Butoh, for a long time now, I didn’t start out as a performer. I’m from a visual arts background. When I studied digital media at the College of Fine Arts in Sydney, I was convinced I was going to go into photography, digital imaging and video. I then started going to queer nightclubs in Sydney, where I met a community of cabaret and circus performers—as well as my partner, Matt Stegh. That made me realise there’s different ways of telling stories, and I started participating in club shows.

I was quite a shy person, so it was a big challenge, but I felt so alive

like a marionette is also quite disconcerting for many people watching.

This embodiment is both an angry figure and a ghost reflecting on colonisation, climate change, white supremacy, cataclysm—the destructive forces of our time.

If you enjoyed this article, you may be interested in Club Ate: Ex Nilalang Currently on display at the NGA

in that temporal space. When I think back, I’ve long been obsessed by things like Chinese dragons and that performance style of becoming

Opposite: Skyworld Launchpad, performed at the NGA, Canberra, 4 May 2018.

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PICASSO: THE VOLLARD SUITE

COMING EXHIBITION

Picasso: The Vollard Suite Jane Kinsman reveals the fascinating story behind this extremely rare, celebrated set of prints by one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, Pablo Picasso.

Opposite: Sculptor, model and sculpted bust 1933, etching Above: The minotaur with a goblet in his hand and a young woman 1933, etching All works in this feature are from Pablo Picasso’s Vollard Suite. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1984. © Succession Picasso. Represented

by Viscopy

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The National Gallery of Australia is one of a few select galleries around the world fortunate to own a complete set of one hundred etchings, engravings and aquatints known as the Vollard suite, made by one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, Pablo Picasso. Engraved between 1930 and 1937, this celebrated set of prints was named after Ambroise Vollard, Picasso’s sometime art dealer and publisher who gave him his first Paris exhibition in 1901. As the majority of etchings were sold individually, complete sets are extremely rare. The Vollard suite contains several themes that were close to Picasso’s heart, in particular the classically derived subjects of the Minotaur (the man-beast) and Pygmalion (the artist obsessed with his model).

Previously Vollard had proposed that Picasso might like to illustrate Le chef d’œuvre inconnu (The unknown masterpiece) (1831) by Honoré de Balzac. Picasso admired Balzac’s story, as he could identify with the character of Frenhofer, an old master painter obsessed with his model who created an image of an exquisite woman who then appeared to come to life, just as she had in the myth of Pygmalion. In twelve etchings, Picasso explored this transformation and created imagery that was ambiguous, where the artist, model, sculptures and paintings appeared as either living creatures or works of art. This theme reappeared in the Vollard suite.

In a conversation with Christian Zervos, Picasso once said of the role of an artist, ‘it’s not what the artist does that counts, but what he is’. He identified himself, along with his own sense of artistic creativity and sexuality, with the mythical figure of the Minotaur. Nowhere is the link between the artist and the ‘untameable beast’, to use Picasso’s words, more apparent than in the Vollard suite. In these prints, the major emphasis was devoted to transformations of the artist into his alter ego, the Minotaur.

In legend, the Minotaur, who had the head of a bull on the body of a man, was the result of the coupling of Pasiphaë, wife of King Minos of Crete, with a white bull. Minos suffered the wrath of Poseidon, god of the sea, when he failed to sacrifice a white bull as he had promised. As retribution, the god mesmerised 24

PICASSO: THE VOLLARD SUITE

Pasiphaë and caused her to become infatuated with the bull. According to the ancient Latin poet Ovid’s account, Pasiphaë was overcome with lust for the bull and disguised herself as a cow, ‘so she could kneel to let the bull mount her and carry in her womb half-man, half-bull’ (Metamorphoses, Book VIII).

Picasso’s fascination with the classical tradition began early in his career. Throughout a lifetime of inventing and exploring styles, Picasso drew inspiration from classical sources both visual and literary. His foray into classicism was not based on academic conservatism, with its highly finished ideally proportioned figures of the type that figured prominently in conventional artistic circles towards the end of the nineteenth century.

Its roots lay elsewhere.

In 1905, the major retrospective exhibition of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres took place at the Salon d’Automne in Paris. This French Neoclassical artist, active from the turn of the eighteenth century, was championed one hundred years later by the avant-garde, including Picasso. What attracted the younger generation was not the meticulous painting or classically inspired subjects that characterised Ingres’s art. Rather, they admired the way Ingres was both inventive and artistically sustained by classical forms and gestures.

His figures in exquisite outline were at once well-rounded but strangely shallow in their depth, sensualised yet distorted. Ingres’s ability to refresh and recycle what had become a stagnant tradition was admired by the young Picasso. This became apparent almost immediately in his art.

Picasso’s attraction to classical themes was rekindled in 1928, when the young and enthusiastic Swiss publisher Albert Skira approached him to create images for his first artist’s book. At the suggestion of Henri Matisse’s son, Pierre, Skira suggested that Picasso should choose Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a richly poetic account of classical myths concerning mythological figures who are Opposite, from top: Reclining sculptor in front of a centaur and a woman 1933, etching; Nude woman in front of a statue 1931, etching Above: Nude woman with bent leg 1931, etching

miraculously transformed or expire though the acts of the gods or their agents. The poet’s writing had resonance for Picasso, as Ovid had approached the stories of Greco-Roman ARTONVIEW 94 WINTER 2018

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

gods and heroes with both a lightness of touch

and turned the ancient stories with passion

(Metamorphoses, Book X), is one that appealed

and intensity.

and inventiveness in Metamorphoses, so Picasso,

to many artists. King Pygmalion lived in

in the Vollard suite, transmuted themes of

Cyprus, the home of Venus. He encountered

woman, Marie-Thérèse Walter, who, with her

love and bestiality: sometimes the Minotaur

many Propoetides, women who, because they

extraordinary ‘classical’ countenance, became

usurps the role of the artist/lover in his studio;

didn’t recognise Venus as a goddess, were

both his lover and inspiration for his art—

sometimes the artist appears instead of a bull

doomed to a life of prostitution and hardship.

although he remained married to the former

in the ring of a bullfight, or is a participant in

To avoid encounters with these women on the

Russian dancer Olga Khokhlova. Soon after,

scenes of erotica or acts of rape and carnage.

island, the king resolved to sleep alone, and he

Picasso established a home in Paris for his new

Distinctions between what is god-like, human

developed an interest in art as a distraction.

mistress, whose features inspired his renewed

or bestial become blurred.

Pygmalion was also a talented sculptor, and

Around the same time, Picasso met a young

interest in classical imagery.

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While one principal theme for the Vollard

he created an ivory statue of a young woman,

Illustrating Ovid’s Metamorphoses was

suite prints was Picasso as the Minotaur,

Galatea, so beautiful that he fell in love with it.

important for Picasso’s artistic evolution and

another was the reworking of the legend

As Ovid tells it, Pygmalion was overwhelmed

foreshadowed for Picasso what was to become

of Pygmalion—the artist’s obsession with

with his passion for the sculpture, as ‘he had

his major exploration of classicism in the

his model. The story of Pygmalion, most

made it lovelier than any woman born, and fell

1930s, the Vollard suite. Just as Ovid twisted

inventively told in the poetry of Ovid

in love with his own creation’. This theme of

PICASSO: THE VOLLARD SUITE

erotica, beauty and male dominance appealed to Picasso.

As with the subject of the Minotaur, Picasso’s interpretations of Pygmalion were obviously autobiographical in tone, and his view of himself as an artist and lover figured largely in depictions of this theme in the Vollard suite—as does the woman he was obsessed with at the time. The relationship between Picasso and Marie-Thérèse echoed the theme of the artist and the model that appears in print after print in the Vollard suite, where we see permutations and transformations of the Pygmalion story. In constantly changing variations, Picasso explores the notion of metamorphosis even more so than in the images he devised for Skira’s book. A sculpted female form comes alive as the model (with the features of Marie-Thérèse) of an artist (Picasso). Sometimes the model is made of living flesh. In a group of prints made towards the end of 1934, we see the themes merge of the man-beast and the artist and model. When the Minotaur is finally blinded by his own unbridled passions and is led away by a young girl, whose physiognomy recalls Marie-Thérèse, she appears as Ariadne, daughter of Minos and Pasiphaë, leading her Theseus through the maze, only to be deserted by him.

Picasso was to say of his lack of fidelity to a style: ‘Basically I am perhaps a painter without style. Style is often something which locks the painter into the same vision … I myself thrash around too much, move too much.

You see me here and yet I’m already changed, I’m already elsewhere’. Marie-Thérèse was the lover who inspired Picasso in the classical look of the Vollard suite and, as Picasso abandoned its subjects and style, he abandoned her too, as he focused elsewhere in matters both of art and love.

This article is an extract from by NGA’s book Picasso: the Vollard suite, available at the NGA Shop.

Opposite: Four children watching a winged bull 1934, etching with burnishing Above, from top: Faun uncovering a woman 1936, etching, sugar aquatint, scraper and burin engraving; Blind minotaur led by a little girl at night 1934–35, aquatint, worked with scraper to represent mezzotint, drypoint and etching

Picasso: The Vollard Suite Art Gallery of Western Australia: 3 August to 4 November 2018 Murray Art Museum Albury: 22 November 2018 to 17 February 2019 Join the conversation #PicassoNGA

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EUROPEAN ART IN THE NATIONAL COLLECTION

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

EUROPEAN ART IN THE NATIONAL COLLECTION Simeran Maxwell, Anne O’Hehir and Sally Foster highlight three aspects of the NGA’s new international art display, as the great Americans currently on show are coming down in June to be prepared for the NGA’s major exhibition American Masters 1940–1980, opening on the cusp of winter and spring.

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EUROPEAN ART IN THE NATIONAL COLLECTION

VIVIENNE WESTWOOD Punk emerged in London and New York sometime in the mid 1970s,

and sometimes ripped shoulders and extremely long sleeves. D rings

and in cities around Australia around the same time—The Saints in

attached to the shoulders and clips at the sleeves were intended to restrict

Brisbane and The Boys Next Door in Melbourne, for instance. It was an

movement when connected. The thin shirts also included raw and

attitude of rebellion in music and fashion, the day’s youth expressing

fraying edging, adding to the distressed quality of the garment.

their anger at the oppressive economic and social conditions of the

Although the pair had an acrimonious breakup in 1983, and

time. According to some accounts, however, the British fashion designer

their various accounts of this period can be seen as inventive at times,

Vivienne Westwood is credited as the inventor of punk, and particularly

McLaren later described their collaboration on these iconic garments:

the punk look. While such an assertion is ridiculous for many reasons,

‘Vivienne had this wonderful idea for the T-shirt which was to be done

the influence that she and Malcolm McLaren, her then boyfriend-cum-

in muslin. I designed the “Destroy” image, the swastika with the cross

business-partner, had on the rise of punk, particularly in the United

upside down and the broken head of the Queen and then the big word

Kingdom, should not be discounted.

“Destroy”; they went on those marvellous T-shirts with the extra-long

Formally untrained, yet enterprising, Westwood began designing

sleeves that you could pull back with dog clips. They were all elements

and ‘improving’ clothing for her and McLaren from the beginning of

that we were taking from the fetish things and we were adapting them’.

the 1970s. In 1971, the pair then opened their own clothing shop, Let It

McLaren, here, is describing the front of one of the two bondage

Rock, at 430 King’s Road in Chelsea, selling old and upcycled clothing

shirts in the NGA’s collection, which are on display for the first time

and second-hand records. The fashion, designed by Westwood, adopted

from July. On the lower section of the shirt is a verse from the Sex Pistols

the then popular revival of the 1950s ‘Teddy Boy’ aesthetic. The following

song Anarchy in the UK: ‘I am an antichrist / I am an anarchist / Don’t

year, the shop was renamed Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die.

know what I want / But I know how to get it / I wanna destroy the

The fashions sold there also shifted to a slightly-heavier-rock style, and

passerby / I wanna be anarchy’. The other bondage shirt has been treated

Westwood began making T-shirts with short slogans in appliqué.

in a similarly bold manner, with two anarchist symbols overlayed with

In 1974, the name changed again, this time to Sex, marking another

scrolls that resemble ransom notes reading, ‘Anarchist punk gang’, ‘Create

distinct shift in style and influence. They began selling bondage- and

hell and get away with it’ and ‘The barrier between friend and foe is thin.

fetish-inspired clothes made from innovative materials such as rubber.

At certain times of day there are only us’.

The shop, with its iconic facade of large pink foam and rubber lettering,

These shirts were typically worn with a pair of bondage trousers,

became a haven for disenfranchised youth, and McLaren soon formed

features of which include several redundant zips on the back and the

the Sex Pistols with Glen Matlock, John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) and

front of each leg, restrictive straps between the legs and an irreverent

John Ritchie (aka Sid Vicious), young punks who either worked at or

terry-towelling semicircle attached to the hips with dog clips so that

simply hung around the shop. The band’s members wore Westwood and

it hangs over the bottom. These rather impractical but distinctive

McLaren’s designs on stage and for photoshoots and were the perfect

trousers—first introduced to floor stock toward the end of the Sex

marketing tools for fashions sold at the shop.

period, and just before Seditionaries—reference punk and fetish styles in

During Queen Elizabeth II’s silver jubilee in 1977, the Sex Pistol’s single God Save The Queen shot up the charts. The band’s success is now

equal measure.

‘Maybe punk came in part from New York,’ Westwood conceded in

part of music history—although, they became just as famous for their

her 2014 autobiography, ‘but the punk “look” evolved in our shop at 430

sartorial look and offensive and aggressive behaviour. Capitalising on

King’s Road. Malcolm and I changed the names and decor of the shop

this fame, Westwood and McLaren produced some of their most iconic

to suit the clothes as our ideas evolved. But punk didn’t mean anything

clothes. They were shrewd entrepreneurs, and had chosen, or perhaps

more than that at first. I did not see myself as a fashion designer but as

partly engineered, the right moment to market the punk aesthetic. Their

someone who wished to confront the rotten status quo through the way I

shop went through two more name changes, firstly Seditionaries in 1976,

dressed and dressed others. Eventually this sequence of ideas culminated

as it continued to produce punk-inspired fashion, and finally settling on

in punk’. Simeran Maxwell

World’s End (after the London neighbourhood in which it is located) at the end of the 1970s.

Westwood and McLaren’s irreverent, confrontational clothing designs between 1974 and 1978 represent one of the best examples of deliberate and aggressive social resistance through fashion.

The androgynous muslin or cheesecloth shirts, designed and sewn

by Westwood and emblazoned with slogans and provocative symbols

Pages 28–9: Jamie Reid God save the Queen—Sex Pistols c 1977 (detail), colour offset lithograph and photo-screenprint. Purchased 1981

and other metal hardware, they were known as bondage shirts and sold

Opposite: Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren (left) Anarchist punk gang design bondage shirt and Black bondage trousers 1974–78, screenprinted cheesecloth and metal and cotton drill, terrycloth, nylon and metal; (right) Destroy design bondage shirt and Red bondage trousers 1974–78, screenprinted cheesecloth and metal and cotton drill, terrycloth, nylon and metal. Purchased 1995

for £6.50. The general model for these shirts also included exposed

All works in this feature are from the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

thought up by McLaren, have become trademarks of the punk subculture. Oversized, frayed and bedecked with an array of D rings

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Above: Joseph Beuys Stripes from the house of the shaman 1964–72 1980, felt, wood, coats, animal skin, rubber tube, pamphlets, copper, quartz and ground minerals, pigments. Purchased 1981. © Joseph Beuys/ Bild-Kunst. Represented by Viscopy Left: Matt Kelso The completed work, Joseph Beuys’s ‘Stripes from the house of the shaman’, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1982, from the series Joseph Beuys installing the work ‘Stripes from the house of shaman’, gelatin silver photograph.

Purchased 1983. © Joseph Beuys/Bild-Kunst.

Represented by Viscopy Opposite, from left: Matt Kelso Joseph Beuys positioning one of the coats, Joseph Beuys adjusting one of the felt strips during installation and Joseph Beuys overseeing, as members of the installation team lay and straighten felt strips, from the series Joseph Beuys installing the work ‘Stripes from the house of shaman’ 1982, gelatin silver photographs.

Purchased 1983

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EUROPEAN ART IN THE NATIONAL COLLECTION

JOSEPH BEUYS In November 1965, visitors to Galerie Schmela in Dusseldorf arrived for

series of photographs by Klophaus, who documented Fluxus events

what they thought to be the opening of an exhibition of Joseph Beuys’s

and Happenings. A selection from this series will be on display for the

drawings only to find themselves locked out. Through the window, all

first time from July, along with some of Beuys’s multiples, his major

they saw was a seated Beuys, his head covered in honey and gold leaf.

installation Stripes from the house of the shaman 1964–72 1980, which was

Slowly standing up, he proceeded to spend the next three hours walking

first shown at the NGA in 1982, and a series of photographs by then

from one work of art to another, ostensibly explaining each to a dead

NGA photographer Matt Kelso.

hare cradled in his arms. Although the performance, How to explain

Kelso’s photographs capture Beuys and his team overseeing the

pictures to a dead hare, was witnessed by only a handful of people at

installation Stripes from the house of the shaman 1964–72, which the

the time, Ute Klophaus’s photographs of it have become one the most

NGA had acquired the year before. The installation incorporates many

recognisable markers of postwar avant-garde European art. Beuys was

personally resonant and symbolic materials and elements that appear

an enigmatic and hugely influential figure and a prominent member

throughout Beuys’s oeuvre: the aforementioned felt and fat; the hare,

of Fluxus, a loose international collective that sought to break down

present in the form of a hare-skin bag containing rock crystals and

the barriers between high art and the public.

hanging from an old shamanistic-looking sealskin coat, which had

His near death experience in 1944 as a Luftwaffe gunner during the

belonged to his mother; and a second coat, with its Swiss Army Medical

Second World War became the foundation of his self-styled shamanic

Corps’s insignia symbolising the healing power of the new style of

persona. The story goes that, after his plane crashed in frozen Crimean

shaman that Beuys had become. The work also incorporates piles of

wastelands, Tartar rescuers saved his life by rubbing him with fat and

iron phosphate, sulphur and cinnabar, substances he related to forces of

wrapping him in felt—two of the materials that would become highly

alchemical change and flux, to male and female principles.

symbolic and ritualised in his art practice. While the description of

Altogether, the work engages with notions of transformation and

his wartime experience changed over the years, and is still publically

renewal, incorporating elements of a doorway, an invitation to enter from

contested decades after his death, there is no question that this story,

one state into another, from the physical to the metaphysical. This notion

be it truth or myth, was an effective ‘moral tale for a defeated and torn

of transmittance is an important one for Beuys, and one that highlights

nation’, as curator Michael Desmond reflected in Islands: contemporary

the central role pedagogy played in his sense of self: ‘if I produce

installations from Australia, Asia, Europe and America.

something, I transmit a message to someone else’, he explained to Sharp

Beuys remained politically active throughout his long career,

in their discussion for Artforum. The years referred to in the work’s title

something that he took into his role as a teacher. ‘Teaching is my greatest

essentially bookend his shamanistic performance period: 1964 was

work of art’, he revealed when interviewed by Willoughby Sharp for

when he performed his important and well-known early work The chief:

Artforum in 1969. However, his unorthodox and anarchic approach

Fluxus chant in which he first adopted the hare as a personal totem, and

to teaching—advocating that everyone is an artist and encouraging

1972 was the year he was expelled from the Dusseldorf Arts Academy.

over-enrolments and open discussions—led him into difficulties with

By then, Beuys felt he had completed his private transformation into a

the Dusseldorf Arts Academy faculty, and he was dismissed from his

revolutionary, a journey he began eight years earlier, and he was ready to

post in 1972. His departure from the building was another occasion

move on to liberating contemporary political and educational thought

for a Beuys event, and the theatrics around the day are recorded in a

by other means. Anne O’Hehir and Simeran Maxwell

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EUROPEAN ART IN THE NATIONAL COLLECTION

MAX ERNST Following on from the Cubist’s formal experiments into new ways of seeing and depicting modernity, in around 1912, Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso introduced papier-collé (pasted-paper) elements—from newspapers, wood grain and floral wallpapers—to their drawings and paintings to reiterate their contemporary authenticity. These early twentieth-century experiments in method, technique and effect elevated collage, long associated with amateur handcraft, to the status of art, and it became inextricable linked to the major modern art movements of Cubism, Futurism, Dada and Surrealism.

Printed texts and photographic reproductions from newspapers and magazines, commercial signs and advertisements increasingly became both source and inspiration for innovations in modern art’s form, style and content. Following the First World War, collage was used by Dada and then Surrealist artists—notably Hannah Höch, Kurt Schwitters and Max Ernst—to articulate the systematic breakdown, displacement and irrationality of reason.

From July, a selection of early twentieth-century European collage from the national collection will be on display in our international galleries. Papiers collés and drawings, prints, illustrated books and photographs will all be shown with a selection of assembled sculpture and painting, illustrating the influence collage had on artists such as Picasso, Höch, Schwitters and Ernst as well as Juan Gris and Giorgio de Chirico. A rare original collage by Ernst was recently acquired for the national collection and will be exhibited for the first time at the NGA. Dating from around 1933 to 1934, the collage was made for La cour du dragon (The court of the dragon), volume three of Ernst’s ambitious and celebrated collage novel Une semaine de bonté, ou Les sept eléments capitaux (A week of kindness, or The seven capital elements). Ernst gave it to the French actress Simone Renant, with whom it remained until her death in 2004. With a final total of 182 collages chosen for publication, the seven novels of Une semaine de bonté were published in Paris in five instalments between April and December 1934. The original intention was to publish the set in seven volumes, corresponding with the days of the week. However, the first four books, Sunday to Wednesday, did not achieve the commercial success anticipated, so the final three books, Thursday to Saturday, were combined in the fifth volume.

sexuality, anticlericalism and the rejection of middle-class values and the nuclear family.

Using wood engravings found in natural science journals, nineteenth-century sales catalogues and popular illustrated novels, Ernst cut out pictures with extraordinary care and assembled images with such precision that his papiers collés appear almost seamless. The source material for the ‘dragons’ in The court of the dragon, for instance, is Gustave Dore’s illustrations in an 1881 Italian translation of John Milton’s classic Paradise lost. As dragons and serpentine creatures symbolising the fires of repressed desires and seething violence occupy the same pictorial and domestic space as the bourgeoisie, Ernst’s pointed social critiques and exacting techniques added to collage’s ongoing appeal among artists engaged in critical practices of creative social disruption. Sally Foster

Working in Germany, France and the United States of America, Ernst was pre-eminent among Dada and Surrealist artists. Engaged in a radical avant-garde practice of experimentation, his use of unconventional techniques extended most fully to collage. He described the technique in his 1936 essay ‘Beyond painting’ as ‘the exploitation of the chance meeting of two distant realities on an unfamiliar plane or, to use a shorter term, the culture of systematic displacement and its effects’.

He used collage to expertly describe, in visual terms, modernisation’s direct and indirect social disruptions as well as the more obvious chaos that had been wrought on European nations as a consequence of the First World War. As political instability continued to increase in Europe from the 1920s, themes of power, violence, catastrophe and the renunciation of patriotism were added to Ernst’s favoured themes of

Opposite: Max Ernst not titled (Original collage for The court of the dragon) 1934, collage of papers printed with wood engravings. The Poynton Bequest, 2018. © Max Ernst. Represented by Viscopy Above: Kurt Schwitters Colourful newspaper shreds 1947, collage of newspaper.

The Poynton Bequest, 2014

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THE NATIONAL PICTURE: THE ART OF TASMANIA’S BLACK WAR

C U R R E N T E X H I B I T I O N

The National Picture The Art of Tasmania’s Black War Tim Bonyhady and Greg Lehman conjure up and interrogate colonial Tasmania by examining representations of Tasmanian Aboriginal people produced at the time, particularly Duterrau’s ‘National picture’ project, as he was the only artist who chose to depict, on a substantial scale, their ‘conciliation’ or ‘pacification’ by the controversial George Augustus Robinson.

Benjamin Duterrau The conciliation 1840, oil on canvas.

Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, purchased with assistance from the Friends of the Museum Fund and the Murray Fund, 1945

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Left: Benjamin Duterrau Native taking a kangaroo 1837, oil on canvas. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1979 Opposite: after George Frankland Governor Arthur’s proclamation to the Aboriginal people 1829–30, oil on board. Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, presented to the Royal Society of Tasmania

by Mr A Boltar, 1867

Benjamin Duterrau was one of the little big men of Empire. In London,

observations, only Duterrau painted their spear-making, hunting and

where he was born in 1768 and spent his first sixty-four years, he was

ceremonial dance on a large scale. His anatomical modelling may be

an artist of modest talent, small ambition and almost no success.

poor but his paintings have a sense of life not found elsewhere and

In Hobart, where he arrived in 1832, he changed the shape of colonial

reflect his well-documented sympathy for Aboriginal people confronted

art, producing the first history paintings, the first etchings and some of

by a violent invading force. They provide us with a vital means of

the first sculptures and delivering the first lectures on painting, sculpture

conjuring the past.

and architecture in the Australian colonies. Above all, he conceived an

Most importantly, Duterrau’s The conciliation depicts a seminal

artistic project on a grand scale, depicting George Augustus Robinson’s

moment in the history of a people who, having occupied their country

‘conciliation’, or ‘pacification’, of Tasmania’s Aboriginal people on behalf

for more than a thousand generations, were being dispossessed in the

of the colonial government.

wake of the ‘Black War’—which increasingly found its way into print

The apogee of this project was A national picture, depicting Robinson engaged in his mission. It was the most ambitious painting of colonial

regular part of colonial language before. The conciliation is often thought

Tasmania, perhaps the most ambitious painting of colonial Australia.

to depict an agreement, perhaps a surrender, that brought an end to the

Duterrau hoped his A national picture would last through the ages,

Black War. For Aboriginal people, though, it is a scene of deception and

shaping understanding of Van Diemen’s Land, as Tasmania was then

betrayal that is emblematic of the ongoing treatment of Indigenous

known, and the complex relations between its European invaders and

people across Australia. Duterrau’s project stands today not only as a

Aboriginal inhabitants. Instead, it failed to find a purchaser during his

unique representation of the lives and culture of a people caught up in

lifetime and has since disappeared, but a small version, The conciliation,

a devastating war with an overwhelming imperial aggressor but also as

completed in 1840, has become one of the defining images of colonial

a reminder that the subject of treaty and reconciliation with Indigenous

Australia. The most powerful critique of Duterrau’s still-controversial

Australians remains compelling ‘unfinished business’ for the nation.

‘National picture’ project came already in 1835, and was directed not

This exhibition is also framed around an image conceived by

at what he wanted to depict but what he would not. Hobart’s The True

Tasmania’s Surveyor-General George Frankland almost three years before

Colonist railed that Duterrau would not be depicting ‘the dark history

Duterrau arrived in Hobart. The catalyst was Frankland’s discovery of

of the extirpation of the wretched original proprietors of the soil, which

drawings by Aboriginal people on trees and inside huts that included

Britain has seized, to plant civilized slavery and the vices of her outcast

depictions of colonists. Words having manifestly failed because of the

population in the room of the vices and the freedom of the savage’.

settlers’ ignorance of Aboriginal languages, Frankland thought art

Duterrau is at the core of the NGA’s exhibition The National Picture:

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from the early 1830s, once the war was over, but seems to have been a

could provide a novel means of communication and created a series of

The Art of Tasmania’s Black War because he was the colonial artist most

drawings, which he described in a letter to Britain’s Under-Secretary

interested in Tasmania’s Aboriginal people. For Tasmanian Aboriginal

of State RW Hay as depicting ‘the cause of the present warfare’ and

people today, his paintings provide a tantalising and rare visual record of

in another to Tasmania’s Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur the

the unique culture practice of their ancestors. While Robinson’s journals

‘real wishes of the government’ toward Aboriginal people, ‘the desired

include a number of small sketches that are vitally important firsthand

termination of Hostility’. His plan was that these drawings be reproduced

THE NATIONAL PICTURE: THE ART OF TASMANIA’S BLACK WAR

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THE NATIONAL PICTURE: THE ART OF TASMANIA’S BLACK WAR

and distributed around the bush, fastened on trees where Aboriginal

the milder exhibition of effigy and caricature’. But that the paintings

people were most likely to see them. In February 1829, he began

warranted attention was a different matter. The Colonial Times suggested

advocating this use of pictures as an experiment worth trying, as he

one should be sent to the House of Commons in London, and another

wrote in a letter to under-secretary RW Hay: ‘everything ought to be

preserved in Hobart by the newly established Van Diemen’s Land

tried to accomplish a reconciliation’.

Scientific Society.

By the end of 1829, at least one painting based on Frankland’s

While none received such an institutional home immediately,

drawings existed. In early 1830, more were in production, ‘said to

seven are known to have survived. As they have been discussed and

be representations of the attacks made by the black upon the white

analysed, reproduced and reworked by other artists, these paintings have

population, and in the background is to be seen a gallows with a black

become at least as iconic as Duterrau’s The conciliation, although almost

suspended; and, also, the same consequence to the white man, whom

everything about them is contested. What best to call them is one issue.

in the other picture is represented as the aggressor’, the Colonial Times

Having been characterised in many ways, they have become known

reported on 5 March. By the start of 1831, one hundred had reportedly

relatively recently as ‘proclamation boards’—a term we reject because

been produced, most likely painted by convict artists, with minor

there is little or no evidence that the boards were conceived this way

variations in their imagery and significant differences in their colouring.

when created and because the principal colonial use of ‘proclamation’

By the end of the year, there were probably two other designs, most

was for a particular form of legal document, which these paintings

likely produced in much smaller numbers, none of which have survived.

clearly were not. How to read these paintings, from top to bottom or

One band depicted ‘the soldiery … firing upon a tribe of the Blacks, who

from bottom to top, is as much an issue.

were falling from the effects of the attack’, reported The Tasmanian on

The production of these works occurred after a degree of coexistence

26 November 1830, while another depicted a different tribe, ‘decently

between Aboriginal people and the invaders ended in the mid 1820s

clad, receiving food for themselves and families’.

due to a marked increase in the number of colonists and land grants.

This report in The Tasmanian also provides the only account of a response to the paintings by an Aboriginal person: when one of these paintings was given to Eumarrah (‘Numarrow’ in the paper), a chief from the North Midlands, he ‘prized [it] very highly … spoke of it repeatedly, and carried it with him when he went away’. But, as historian Nicholas Thomas observed in the Tate’s recent Artist and Empire: facing Britain’s imperial past, Frankland was ‘surely naive to anticipate that the visual conventions that he employed would be intelligible cross-culturally’.

Some of Frankland’s contemporaries agreed. Hobart’s Colonial Times declared it could not ‘be expected a savage race will be influenced by

Above: An Aboriginal boy, not titled (Coastal scene with sailing ships) 1830s–40s, oil on board. Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston, gift of Philip L Brown, 1988. On loan with special permission from the QVMAG Aboriginal Reference Group Opposite: John Skinner Prout King Alexander, Tasmania 1845, watercolour. British Museum, London

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Left: Thomas Browne Walter George Arthur, Mary Ann Arthur and David Bruney 1847–48, daguerreotype.

Private collection Opposite: Julie Gough The consequence of chance 2011, calico, pine, cardboard, lights. Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart

As conflict intensified, killings grew more frequent. For a while, the

like Duterrau, he was of no public consequence while he in England,

conflict may have been relatively even, resulting in more or less equal

only to loom large in Australia. The turning point for him came in

deaths on each side. More likely, there was always a profound imbalance

March 1829, when he answered Lieutenant-Governor Arthur’s call in

in this war, with Aboriginal deaths outnumbering those of settlers

the newspapers for ‘a steady person of good character … who will take

four to one. The old and young were particularly vulnerable to the

an interest in effecting an intercourse with this unfortunate race’ on

government’s ‘roving parties’.

Bruny Island and was chosen for this post. On 1 December, Arthur then

One of the government’s responses in April 1828 was to deem all Aboriginal people who entered the ‘settled districts’ to be criminals, so they could be killed with impunity without knowing they had

with the aborigines’ of the Tasmanian mainland.

At one extreme, Robinson is seen as not just self-interested, venal

crossed the border into areas the government had not even defined.

and duplicitous but also ‘the chief exterminator of the Tasmanians’, as a

That November, the government introduced martial law, effectively

contributor to Melbourne’s The Age dubbed him in 1953. He is also

a declaration of war. In late 1830, it staged the Black Line, involving

lauded for his exceptional interest in Aboriginal history, language and

2200 men and costing half the government’s annual budget, which

customs, for providing them with at least some protection and, to some

was designed to drive the surviving Aboriginal people in the settled

extent, for acknowledging Indigenous rights. On this view, articulated

districts onto the Tasman Peninsula from where they were to be

by historian Lyndall Ryan in her 2012 book Tasmanian Aborigines: a

sent to one of the numerous smaller islands off the Tasmanian coast.

history since 1803, Robinson and Arthur always acted with good intent,

While the Black Line resulted in the capture of just two Aboriginal

believing that by removing the Aboriginal people ‘they were preventing

people, the government and colonists were on the verge of prevailing.

rather than enhancing their extermination’ and that it was ‘better the

A combination of disease, killing and profound disruption of Aboriginal

Aborigines should die in the arms of God than from the settlers’ guns’.

society, including the widespread theft of Aboriginal woman and

Ryan continues, ‘The only other solution would have been to remove

children, had resulted in a shocking diminution of the Aboriginal

the settlers from Van Diemen’s Land. But, at the time, such a suggestion

population from perhaps 6000 to a few hundred.

was unthinkable’.

In between, the government employed Robinson, a builder by profession, with intense evangelical commitment and ambitions. Much

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wrote to Robinson appointing him to ‘effect an amicable understanding

THE NATIONAL PICTURE: THE ART OF TASMANIA’S BLACK WAR

The likely fate of the Aboriginal people Robinson removed from their land was always obvious. While he was in charge of the mission

on Bruny Island, most of the people there died. When the Executive

It brings together five of the seven known Frankland boards for the

Council met to consider evicting all of Tasmania’s Aboriginal people

first time. It shows The conciliation, acknowledged by the Museum of

and confining them on a small island, Chief Justice Pedder argued

Australian Democracy as a founding document, in the national capital

against relocating the Indigenous population. He warned that they

for the first time and recreates A national picture through projection.

would pine away when they ‘found their situation one of hopeless

It brings together and juxtaposes, again for the first time, watercolours

imprisonment’, depriving them of ‘their known love of change of place,

by John Skinner Prout and Simpkinson de Wesselow painted on their

their periodical distant migrations, their expeditions in search of game,

joint visit in 1845 to Flinders Island, where Aboriginal people were

and that unbounded liberty of which they have hitherto been in the

exiled after their eviction from the Tasmanian mainland. It includes

enjoyment’. The question long asked, and increasingly answered more

what is likely to be the earliest known oil painting by an Aboriginal

in the affirmative than the negative, is whether the British committed

person. It includes the earliest known photograph of Tasmanian

genocide in Tasmania.

Aboriginal people after their return to Oyster Cove on Tasmania’s

One of the most striking features of the art related to these events

east coast. And it examines the continuing place in Australian art of

is how rarely it depicts conflict between the invaders and Aboriginal

Duterrau’s Conciliation and George Frankland’s boards, as later artists

people. The two lower bands of Frankland’s boards make them notable

have reprised and reworked these iconic images

exceptions. The drawings and painting depicting the attack on George Allen’s farm on Tasmania’s east coast are others. In general, colonial artists and their patrons did not want direct images of war, especially those episodes where colonists were killed or injured or their property destroyed. The National Picture is not so much concerned with fighting and battle scenes as with the war’s end and aftermath.

The National Picture: The Art of Tasmania’s Black War 12 May to 19 July 2018 Join the conversation #nationalpicture #dontkeephistoryamystery

This exhibition, the first such colonial show to have an Indigenous and a non-Indigenous curator, breaks new ground in many ways.

It places the work of Duterrau, the last significant colonial painter who has not been the subject of an exhibition, in its immediate context.

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C U R R E N T D I S P L AYS

Balnaves Contemporary Interventions We spoke to the artists Sarah Contos, Jess Johnson and Simon Ward, who are responsible for the first two interventions in the Balnaves Contemporary Intervention Series currently showing at the NGA. Contos’s Nikola Tesla sends Theda Bara to Mars will be on display until 24 September, and Johnson and Ward’s Terminus until 26 August.

Jess Johnson and Simon Ward with their work Terminus 2018, virtual reality experience in five parts: colour, sound. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, commissioned with the assistance of the Balnaves Foundation, 2017. Installed at the NGA, Canberra

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BALNAVES CONTEMPORARY INTERVENTIONS

‘It’s the most ambitious work that we’ve ever undertaken … and it is something we could never have achieved on this scale without the resources provided by the NGA and The Balnaves Foundation.’

Jess Johnson

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BALNAVES CONTEMPORARY INTERVENTIONS

NIKOLA TESLA SENDS THEDA BARA TO MARS Let’s start with the title, ‘Nikola Tesla sends Theda Bara to Mars’ … we are all curious.

my materials or outside stimuli. The vibe is the core which I can depart

Sarah Contos: In the early 1900s, inventor Nikola Tesla believed he could

describing the physical and psychological nature of the piece’s intent.

communicate with life forms on Mars by using wireless transmissions.

He proposed that the first image sent should be of Theda Bara, the silentfilm actress. Bara was portrayed by the film studio as an ‘exotic’ woman and the press reported her to have been born to an Italian sculptor and a French actress and raised in the shadow of the Sphinx. Her interviews were held in hotel rooms covered with velvet scarfs, furs and occult paraphernalia. In reality, Theda was a quiet Jewish girl living in a onebedroom apartment with her mother and brother. Her image was a total Hollywood construct. The idea that our first communication with

from and return to. It can usually be identified through a list of words My work is super-tangential, so I need to establish anchors to ensure that I do not drift too far. It also allows me to create something which has multiple layers of interpretation.

The idea of ‘casting’ comes from my one time aspiration to be a film director. I will draw in the mode of directing, thinking in terms of the cast (images), their costumes (materials) and the scenery (form/structure).

It is also about initiating dialogues between materials, texture and form to suggest a narrative. I want these exchanges to be ambiguous but genuine, otherwise I feel the audience will know it’s not authentic—like

alien life would have been derived from myth and fantasy is pretty great.

an actor ‘acting’.

It proposes interesting ideas about projected identities and fabricated

Tell us more about the key imagery and recurring elements in the work.

facts—concepts that are now more relevant than ever.

Your imagery and style suggests that the work is both an homage to cinema and a sentimental autobiographical work.

Sarah: The screen-printed imagery was sourced from a range of second-

Sarah: I am intrigued by cinema’s capacity to affect its audience,

my own personal possessions. All indicate a certain time period from the

as well the idea that it can function as both a private and public space.

Cinema is the perfect type of collage, all its facets in perfect sync with one another. I was interested in the way various elements of a film— music, gesture, story—can illicit different responses depending on the individual’s experience.

There is an interesting dichotomy in the format of film, which is both a very personal experience and one that is shared. My intent was to use these principles to make a work that the audience could connect with through familiar imagery, materials and forms, but to also perform a mash-up of these references to encourage a more individual and introspective encounter.

What sparked your exploration of these concepts?

Sarah: The NGA’s large foyer space was my starting point, given that the work would be site-specific. A film camera crane first came to mind.

The way it can capture an image in the frame from multiple angles, from below, above, side to side in sweeping, gestural movements. I was already starting to introduce cinematic approaches in my work, and the commission allowed me to explore ideas of movement, scale, framing, narrative, montage, cutting and editing—in a sense, creating my own ‘motion picture’.

The mobile form was the most suitable structure as it allowed the

hand books on cinema, twentieth-century design and theatre as well as 1930s to the 1980s. I then manipulated these with graffiti or applique.

By adding my own filter to these found elements, the installation became a giant collage recalling ad hoc backyard theatrical shows, mix-tapes and ‘smash-up’ decoupage on school books. I wanted the work to have that grungy, much-loved feel, which only occurs once something has been owned for a long time, as a direct contrast to the polished film industry.

The images have a universal resonance, referencing time, love, war, sex, desire and jealousy, among other things. The images are seen within frames, physical stainless steel frames, which the viewer can look through, around and outside of. This breaks down the illusion of the fourth wall (the theatrical convention which separates actors from the audience) and acknowledges that what is being seen is a fiction.

Ultimately, these images are flexible, not fixed. As the mobile turns, so do they. Some have two sides, suggesting outer and inner struggle or the shifting nature of perception. Their malleability refers back to the story of Theda Bara, a totally constructed and fabricated image.

Nikola Tesla sends Theda Bara to Mars 4 May to 24 September A Balnaves Contemporary Intervention Join the conversation #BalnavesNGA

images to move over one another, beginning a kind of dialogue between the various elements. Their interplay becomes similar to an exchange between characters, constructing an ambiguous narrative that changes depending on the viewer’s position in the space.

You often talk about your work having a ‘vibe’. Could you tell us about setting this particular vibe and your process of ‘casting’ materials?

Sarah: The ‘vibe’ is the footprint, gesture or feeling that I want to communicate. Often this is informed by a direct, guttural response to

Opposite: Sarah Contos with her work Nikola Tesla sends Theda Bara to Mars 2018, mixed-media installation. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, commissioned with the assistance of the Balnaves Foundation, 2017. Installed at the NGA, Canberra

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48

BALNAVES CONTEMPORARY INTERVENTIONS

TERMINUS Terminus is a fascinating mix of built environments, real and virtual, and the result of a long collaborative process that starts with your drawing, Jess. Tell us a little about that and what inspired the work.

journey while allowing them autonomy to explore for themselves.

Jess Johnson: My interests lie in world-building and the construction of

on as artists. Being able to physically immerse and emotionally capture

new realities. My drawings of recent years have documented an arcane realm continually increasing in complexity. The images I create are

What we’ve attempted to build is a ‘transformative’ journey for the audience to undertake, which was quite a heady quest for us to embark contemporary audiences is a massive undertaking, and it is something we could never have achieved on this scale without the resources

holographic mesh-works of grids, brickwork, architectural monuments,

provided by the NGA and The Balnaves Foundation.

humanoid clones and Messianic figures.

The titles for the five Terminus portals are enigmatic. Can you describe one or two of the concepts you are investigating?

My desire to give flesh to this world has driven my more recent interests in animation and virtual reality. The unique experiential nature of VR lends itself to investigation into areas such as infinite space, altered states, new physical perspectives and world-building. It’s a slow emergence of imagery and ideas. Time and labour is a really important part of the work. The long hours spent staring at paper and making hundreds of repetitive marks allows my mind to get to a place where the elements of the world begin to morph and fit together in new arrangements. Drawing lulls me into a pleasurably lucid state.

The inspiration simply comes from the world of previous drawings.

My practice is self-generating and now has its own internal language.

The imagery within just mutates and reconfigures and grows new limbs.

Jess: Each VR station has its own title and represents one of five stages in a longer journey of transformation for the viewer. The names reflect the core experience of any given stage: Fleshold Crossing, Known Unknown, Scumm Engine, Gog + Magog and Tumblewych. Considered archetypally, they are ‘The crossing’, ‘The respite’, ‘The lost’, ‘The tower’ and ‘The psychedelic’ respectively.

The VR station titled ‘Scumm Engine’ (The lost) refers to a game engine developed in 1987 by Lucasfilm Games (now LucasArts).

In this stage, viewers find themselves in a mechanical, boiler room–like planetary engine. The experience references a common stage in a heroic journey where the universal hero has to navigate a maze, puzzle or some

How central to your work is science fiction?

other kind of trial to find what they are seeking.

Simon Ward: I had a formative experience with science fiction growing

How do you see VR developing as more artists begin to work with the technology?

up, particularly in film. With the idea of the Terminus floor map being an initial building block for the work, Jess and I quickly started talking about the repetitive quests, the archetypes and the mono-myth that fill fantasy and sci-fi films—those paths have been tread by audiences so many times that it seems we’re stuck in a seamless loop, like Jess’s patterns or characters.

Jess: Growing up, science fiction in books and movies were incredibly formative in who I became as a person, both in terms of expanding my imagination and in how I viewed reality. As far back as I can remember, I’ve always viewed reality as slippery. I picture it as something malleable.

There are soft spots in reality that can be aggravated. My works are full of portals and wormholes and stargates, which reflect humanities exploratory longing to discover what lies beyond the world we can see.

Jess: As an artist, I’m really excited by the psychological implications of being able to position an audience essentially within my work. I think VR is the most effective conduit from one brain to another that’s ever existed. With VR you can seduce someone into accepting an entirely new reality.

VR technology has just started to be adopted by artists and has the potential to explode into new genres and art forms. The experience of VR can be really disorientating. You experience reality slippage. You can lose sense of where your physical body is and find yourself physically and mentally jostled by the different messages from your brain. Utilising this to push against people’s accustomed perceptions and comfort levels is appealing to us. It’s a much more challenging and visceral experience for

How does Terminus differ from your previous work? What challenges has it posed for you both, and what is the most exciting aspect of this opportunity?

both artist and audience.

Simon: In our previous VR and video works, we’ve attempted to

communication, expression and exploration.

recreate the look and feel of bringing Jess’s drawings to life. Now we’re hoping to build on the form of the journey within that world and the unique constraints that that world might have, or lack, as opposed to real‑world parameters.

Jess: It’s the most ambitious work that we’ve ever undertaken. We’ve

It will be artists who will harness the technology and use it in ways we can’t even imagine yet, opening up new genres in storytelling,

Terminus 4 May to 26 August A Balnaves Contemporary Intervention Join the conversation #BalnavesNGA

never had the space or resources to create this sort of guided, sequential journey with multiple VR experiences. We’ve had to think a lot more about how the audience will move through the space, how they’ll interact with the VR technology and how we can guide them on a

Opposite: Inside Jess Johnson and Simon Ward’s Terminus 2018. Image courtesy of the artists, Darren Knight Gallery, Sydney, Ivan Anthony Gallery, Auckland, and Jack Hanley Gallery, New York

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50

PERFORMING DRAWING

C O M I N G E X H I B I T I O N

PERFORMING DRAWING Sarina Noordhuis-Fairfax introduces Performing Drawing, an exhibition opening at the NGA in September, which examines the act of drawing through works of art by contemporary Australian artists.

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Pages 50–1: Gosia Wlodarczak Shared space Longin 2005, pigment and acrylic glazing. Gift of Dr Andrew Lu OAM, 2013. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program All works are from the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

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PERFORMING DRAWING

Pages 51: Silvana Mangano and Gabriella Mangano Drawing 1 2001 (still), single-channel digital video, colour, sound. The Rotary Collection of Australian Art, 2009. Image courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery

Above: David Moore Moon writing series 2001, six gelatin silver photographs. Purchased 2003. © Lisa, Michael, Matthew and Joshua Moore Opposite: Cameron Robbins Lunar solar drawing 2011, drawing in black pigment ink. Purchased 2014

Performing Drawing explores drawing as an act of attention. Forming

timescale of music by using all sixty-four pages of the archival score by

a record of concentrated inquiry, drawings directly track the link

the pioneering avant-garde composer John Cage as the basis for a series

between eye and hand. Emerging from blankness or darkness, marks

of intuitive drawing actions.

materialise onto paper, walls and screens, formed over time by processes

The action of making process-based drawings also reveals aspects

of chance and change. These drawings appear as poetic diagrams and

of the self and others. Collaborative drawings by Gabriella and Silvana

choreographed gestures made in response to the elements of fire, breath

Mangano have been described as an act of simultaneous portraiture.

and moonlight.

Their audiovisual performance Drawing 1 2001 explored the twin

As ideas in process, each drawing represents a culmination of

sisters’ intuitive response to the medium and to each other, and

time. These temporal aspects are clearly visualised in the durational

established their distinctive visual language of synchronised mirrored

works of David Moore and Cameron Robbins that track the passage

gestures and repetition.

of light. The lunar calligraphy of Moore’s Moon writing 2001 finds the

This instinctive approach can also be seen in the sustained

photographer taking long exposures of the night sky above his second

observational drawings of Gosia Wlodarczak, who creates complex

home in Tasmania while moving his hand-held camera like a drawing

visual networks from the outlines of people and objects that pass

tool. His final photographic series effortlessly balances the looped pale

through her field of vision. Shared space Longin 2005 is a cumulative

script within the regular format of the grid. At the opposite end of the

drawing formed from hours of observation. Over time the work became

day, Cameron Robbins traces the modulations of daylight in Lunar solar

a portrait of the artist’s husband, Longin Sarnecki, formed from overlaid

drawing 2011. Extending his timeframe of data collection over a month,

positive and negative shapes of his body within the surrounding space.

a pen placed against a huge paper-covered drum captured the intensity

Embodied exchanges also underpin a series of photographic portraits

of sunshine as the drum was rotated using solar energy. The vagaries of

by David Rosetzky and eloquent gestural videos by Ilka White and

daily weather determined the density and direction of the inked lines,

Nicci Haynes.

with gaps appearing each evening as the light faded. Robbins continues

As an interactive experience within this exhibition, a digital project

to dynamically visualise seasonal processes and patterns in his search

by Kieran Browne will map the trajectories of visitors through the

for underlying rhythms.

gallery space, performing a linear drawing in real time. Performing

Other intuitive interactions with landscape and time on display

Drawing gathers these diverse approaches together to offer a description

in Performing Drawing include John Wolseley’s experimental bushfire

of drawing as the recording of an encounter—visualising chance

frottage Landscape carbon document 2002–08, Sarah Mosca’s enigmatic

connections between people and place, time and memory.

camera-less photograph An empathetic gesture 2017 and a wall-drawing

by Antonia Aitken, which she will create in on Saturday 15 September.

Here, the act of drawing becomes a meditative action accompanied by the rhythmic sound of her breath recorded while walking. Alternatively, artist and musician Marco Fusinato’s large-scale drawing Mass black

Performing Drawing From 1 September 2018 Join the conversation #performingdrawing

implosion (Concert for piano and orchestra, John Cage) 2017 explores the

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54

BAILLIEU AND TILLERS’S SELF-PORTRAIT

D I A RY O F A N O B J E C T

Marianne Baillieu saw the exhibition Dreams of a summer night: Scandinavian painting at the turn of the century at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1986. This extensive survey of the work of thirty-eight artists from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden was later modified and shown at the Petit Palais in Paris in 1987. The exhibition introduced its British and French audiences to a much richer range of Scandinavian painting, far beyond the familiar work of Carl Larsson, Edvard Munch and Anders Zorn.

Baillieu’s reaction to the exhibition was intense. Here were reminders of the paintings she had grown up with, brought by her family to New Zealand when they emigrated from Europe. They were paintings evoking childhood memories and stories of life in Denmark and Sweden, of dark snowy winters and long summer nights, of a life ruled by the

Baillieu and Tillers’s Self-portrait

seasons. Baillieu bought a copy of the catalogue to give to her father in New Zealand as a Christmas gift. She knew he would appreciate this reminder of the life he had left behind, but then realised that it would also affirm his conservative notion of art. So, back in Williamstown, a bayside suburb in Melbourne, she began to ‘decorate’ the pages with her own painting as a challenge to his expectations. Her powerful, expressive brushstrokes, spills and blobs of paint covered the pages and began to obliterate the illustrations of works by painters such as Ejnar Nielson, Helene Schjerfbeck and Anders Zorn. In the end, the catalogue was never

John McPhee illuminates the fascinating story behind Marianne Baillieu and Imants Tillers’s collaboration on the exhibition To the Fatherland at Yuill/Crowley in Sydney thirty years ago. From that exhibition, the NGA purchased Self-portrait for the national collection.

presented as a gift, and the thick paint, not fully dry, resulted in pages stuck together. When later opened, the book’s damaged surfaces, with paper torn away, added a collage effect.

The catalogue, now a book of sketches, became a kind of talisman, a statement about her past and her life as an artist in Australia.

The glimpses of the often dark and brooding paintings, all too frequently belying the exhibition’s title, emerged from beneath Baillieu’s overlying paint and torn paper. The individual images, an unwitting collision of the past and the present, belonging very much to the late twentieth century, became a significant expression of the future direction Baillieu’s painting would take.

Imants Tillers also saw Dreams of a summer night, but in Paris in 1987, and, like Baillieu, was impressed with the paintings. This coincidental viewing encouraged the two artists to consider a collaborative project.

Collaborative projects were not new to Tillers whose collaboration with George Baldessin on According to des Esseintes, a series of etchings, in 1976 remains one of the most successful artist collaborations in contemporary Australian art. However, it was his collaboration with technology that was to have the greatest relevance to working with Baillieu.

In 1978, Tillers had used a new industrial inkjet printing process called ‘Neco’ to produce Untitled, which consisted of two Necoprinted canvases, both reproducing scanned reproductions of Hans Heysen’s Summer 1909. It was this process that formed the basis for his collaboration with Baillieu, for which Tillers selected seven illustrations from Baillieu’s painted copy of the London catalogue: Helene Schjerfbeck’s The door 1884, Peder Severin Krøyer’s Summer evening at the South Beach, Skagen 1893, Ejnar Nielsen’s The sick girl 1896 and And in his eyes I saw death 1897, Anders Zorn’s Self-portrait 1896 ARTONVIEW 94 WINTER 2018

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and Midsummer dance 1897 and Vilhelm Hammershøi’s The collector

of old customs. He began his Self-portrait while living in Paris and

of coins 1904. An eighth work, which was only included in the French

completed it after his return to Sweden. The exhibition catalogue

edition of the catalogue, was also included: Laurits Andersen Ring’s Soir,

quotes Zorn writing to his friend Isabella Stewart Gardner, a collector

vielle femme et in mort 1887. The finished Neco prints were then sent to

in Boston:

Baillieu’s Williamstown studio, where she worked over their surfaces for

At the time, my model was a beautiful Italian woman with a

a second time. These eight paintings were exhibited at Yuill/Crowley in

very rich head of red hair and, as I wanted to portray myself at work,

Sydney in 1988, making up the exhibition To the Fatherland.

I included her in the painting. But I painted her on such a large

The choice of the exhibition title was a reminder of their shared

her than in myself. For a long time I worked in desperation on my

and of both having fathers with a strong sense of their family origin.

painting without realizing my mistake … In order to turn it into a

It was both in honour of their homelands and a symbolic shedding of a

painting, I had to sacrifice the model … .I relegated the model to the

skin—a sloughing-off of that which is no longer of use, or significance,

shadows in the far background … I have rarely painted anything with

in going forward. Undoubtedly, the paintings, with their vigorous and

greater intensity than the model I had to sacrifice. It was a costly but

challenging painting over illustrations of works nearly one hundred

salutary lesson to me: I learned to sacrifice incidentals for the sake of

years old, looked forward and not back.

the whole.

Baillieu’s Self-portrait 1988 was painted over the printed scan of

56

scale that we began to compete for space—I was more interested in

experience of growing up in European households in the Antipodes,

Zorn depicted himself wearing an artist’s smock and taking a

the painting she had done over the top of the catalogue illustration

break in his studio, smoking a cigarette and still holding his palette and

of the Swede Anders Zorn’s Self-portrait. Zorn established himself as a

brushes. His bulky figure fills the foreground but is largely in shadow.

fashionable portrait painter in London and Paris in the late nineteenth

The model pulls a black cloth around herself and peers out from the

century. His clientele included society hostesses, businessmen and three

upper-right corner, her bare legs being the most obvious evidence of

United States presidents. His work consisted of portraits, nudes and

her presence. A rich darkness takes up most of the painting’s surface.

genre scenes, the later recording and encouraging the continuation

Zorn’s admiration for the dark spaces of Rembrandt and Titian is

BAILLIEU AND TILLERS’S SELF-PORTRAIT

obvious. It is a self-portrait by an enormously confident artist at the height of his fame.

Baillieu’s Self-portrait obliterates the palette and much of the artist’s figure with thick black paint into which patches of purple and red paint have been worked. Flecks of red fly across the entire surface, picking up on the spot of red originally painted by Zorn—a device used to lure the viewer’s eye into the darkness. The overall effect is of seeing something through a wild swirl of ectoplasm. The energy of Baillieu’s painted surface battles with the chiaroscuro of Zorn’s original, which is further flattened by its photomechanical reproduction. Zorn’s face is made even more mysterious. The model still looks on as an enigmatic observer.

When selecting this work as one of the eight, Tillers and Baillieu embarked on a collaborative self-portrait, although it is Baillieu’s painting that finally makes it a self-portrait of her more than of Tillers.

The swirling, flickering brushstrokes with which Baillieu covered the surface of the canvas are like handwriting. They are her creative signature, easily identified as hers and hers alone. While possessing a remarkable energy, they also have a magical will-o’-the-wisp quality, luring the eye into the unseen and the unknown. Like Baillieu herself, they are mercurial and mysterious, drawing energy from a deep source and wanting the viewer to experience and see what she sees.

I first met Baillieu on visits to Realities gallery in the Melbourne suburb of Toorak, where the exhibitions of the work of George Baldessin, Roger Kemp and Fred Williams jostled with an occasional show of Papunya painting or of carvings from the Bathurst and Tiwi Islands.

The last exhibition before Baillieu sold Realities in 1980 introduced Melbourne, and me, to the young Sydney painter Imants Tillers. Baillieu carefully revealed herself as a painter after the change of ownership of Realities, and she held regular solo exhibitions in the 1980s and 1990s.

It was then that I came to know Baillieu and her ability for friendship. As a curator, my visits to her studio were among the most enjoyable I experienced, not just for the way in which she presented her work and entertained you as a visitor but also for the remarkable experience of looking at art with its creator. Her enthusiasm for the act of painting, the joy of expressing herself in such a powerful manner, was always a delight. She also enjoyed the company of other artists. As a gallery director, she had encouraged and befriended many young artists.

As an artist, she maintained and developed those friendships. The mutual respect that developed between Baillieu and Tillers in the 1980s brought about the collaborative works of To the Fatherland.

of course, French champagne, and tinkling music, all carefully chosen.

Looking out to the garden full of roses, lavender, cyclamen, orchids and bottlebrush—a colourful mixture from the shadow to the light. As we talked about her original intention when painting over the catalogue illustrations, Baillieu said that, at the time, she was thinking, ‘I’ll give my dad a bit of myself on top of these. Not just a European nice painting’.

It is the perfect self-portrait.

As the then senior curator of Australian Art at the NGA, I visited the exhibition at Yuill/Crowley in November 1988 and selected Self-portrait 1988 for submission to the NGA’s Council in April 1989. The work conjures up for me a visit to her studio home in Williamstown on 30 August 2011 (one of several over the years), looking back across the bay to the city of Melbourne, with occasional container ships passing so close you could almost touch them. Pushing aside the gate, walking up the gravel path, wandering through native bushes and grasses and arriving on the porch of an eccentric Edwardian timber house to be met by Baillieu was always a great treat, as were meals shared on the back veranda overlooking the wild garden with the splashing sound of the runnel into the pool and birds calling. Poached salmon with a subtle dressing of dill in crème fraîche (as only a Swede can cook it), salad, cake and,

Page 54: Marianne Baillieu and Imants Tillers Self-portrait 1988, oil on photomechanical reproduction on canvas. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.

Purchased 1989 Opposite, clockwise from top left: Marianne Baillieu’s painted sketches over Halfdan Egedius’s The dreamer 1895, Eugène Jansson’s The outskirts of the city 1899, Kitty L Kielland’s Summer night 1886 and Helene Schjerfbeck’s The seamstress 1903–05, pages 76–7, 140–1, 160–1 and 238–9 in Dreams of a summer night: Scandinavian painting at the turn of the century, Arts Council of Great Britain, London, 1986. Photos: Jennifer Slatyer Above: Anders Zorn Self-portrait 1896, oil on canvas. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, purchased 1897

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

Uta Uta Tjangala

Between 1971 and 1972, a dynamic new painting movement drawing on a visually rich aesthetic that was tens of thousands of years old emerged from the Aboriginal community of Papunya in Central Australia. A small group of senior Aboriginal loremen were invited to share the ancient

Franchesca Cubillo delves into the history of Pintupi artist Uta Uta Tjangala, a major proponent of the Papunya movement of the early 1970s.

Two of Tjangala’s large-scale paintings were recently acquired for the national collection with the assistance of the NGA’s Foundation Gala Dinner Fund 2018.

narratives of their spiritual ancestors. Their repertoire of imagery, refined across multiple generations, was both eloquent and resolved. Cultural considerations were paramount as each ceremonial leader orchestrated and depicted the rich and complex visual language of Central Australia.

Approximately thirty Luritja, Pintupi, Anmatyerr, Warlpiri and Kukatja wati, or loremen, began to produce an extensive and diverse array of paintings on small pieces of board, numbering around one thousand.

These seminal works of art stand as a significant turning point in our understanding and appreciation of Aboriginal art today.

Uta Uta Tjangala was there at the very start of the Papunya Western Desert art movement in 1971 and was one of the original painters who drew upon their wealth of knowledge to share their rich cultural heritage with the broader community. He was born near an important Pintupi sacred site, Yumari (Dover Hills), in Western Australia around 1926. He led a traditional life, growing up on his Country and learning the ways of his ancestors with his family. Unfortunately, like many

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UTA UTA TJANGALA

Untitled 1984 and Untitled 1987, synthetic polymer paint on canvas. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased with the assistance of the Foundation Gala Dinner Fund, 2018. © Represented by Aboriginal Artists Agency

Aboriginal people in Central Australia at the time, he suffered the effects

the ‘General Painting Award’ at the National Aboriginal and Torres

of the great drought of the late 1950s. As a consequence, he and his

Strait Islander Art Awards in Darwin in 1985. He was one of Papunya’s

family made the epic trek across hundreds of miles of desert from the

few originating artists who consistently produced work of outstanding

west of the Northern Territory to the settlement of Ikuntji (Haasts Bluff).

merit throughout his career, from those humble beginnings of 1971 to

Arriving in late 1956, this was when Tjangala first saw European settlers.

winning Australia’s premier Indigenous art award fourteen years later.

He then moved to Papunya around 1970, where he was employed as the community gardener.

He was also a major proponent of the Outstation movement of the 1970s, whereby Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory lobbied

As a Pintupi ceremonial leader, however, Tjangala’s cultural

the Government for support to return to their homelands. As a result,

responsibilities far exceeded his domestic duties. So, when given the

Tjangala returned in the early 1980s to Walungurru (Kintore), near the

opportunity to illustrate, with pencils and paper, the ancient visual

Northern Territory’s border with Western Australia. He later established

narratives he had learnt growing up, he relished the chance. He was well

his outstation called ‘Muyin’ there, and it is where he remained until his

equipped with the extensive lexicon of Western Desert iconography

death in December 1990. Two of his major paintings from this period,

and well versed in its depiction as part of ritual practice. The small

Untitled 1984 and Untitled 1987 were recently purchased by the NGA

body of work he produced caught the attention of local art teacher

with the assistance of the Foundation Gala Dinner Fund 2018. They

Geoffrey Bardon. Tjangala would sit at the front of Bardon’s flat with

had been hanging in the main foyer of the Embassy of Australia in

fellow artist and Pintupi leader Yarta Tjapangati after a long day’s

Washington DC for several decades until last year.

work in the hot sun, drinking cups of tea and drawing pictures of his

Unfortunately, we do not have detailed information regarding

ancestors and their travels. Bardon once described Tjangala’s ‘explosive,

the Pintupi spiritual narrative they depict, as Crocker marketed them

boisterous laugh and a grimace that made him seem eccentric’, saying,

for their aesthetic value, not for their ethnographic content. Much

‘his vitality was apparent in his art where his vigour with the brush and

of Tjangala’s work, however, has been well documented across many

unselfconscious patterning were to produce a seemingly endless stream

collections in Australia. His stylistic transition is varied and yet to be

of loved and honoured imagery … Everything that came from him

chartered but, with further research, we will be in a position to identify

was genuine’.

the cultural content of these works in more detail and to showcase

The major theme in his work concerned the Tingari ancestors, particularly in relation to events around his place of birth. He became

Tjangala’s artistry across his extensive career.

These two works by Uta Uta Tjangala are monumental in scale

a master of monumental paintings about the Tingari, these works

and content and, thanks to the generosity of donors to the Foundation

emerging in the early 1980s under the visionary guidance of the Papunya

Gala Dinner Fund, are wonderful additions to the national collection,

Tula art advisor at the time, Andrew Crocker. His work has been

particularly as the collection includes only one other large-scale work,

collected by all state and national museums and galleries in Australia and

Tingari man at Kintore 1987, by this highly significant Papunya artist.

significant works have been in major exhibitions worldwide. He received

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

Paul Cézanne: a major drawing acquired for the NGA Jane Kinsman highlights the NGA’s recent acquisition of Paul Cézanne’s extraordinary watercolour The orchard (Le verger) c 1895, purchased with the assistance of the NGA’s generous supporters.

This newly acquired late nineteenth-century watercolour by Paul

The orchard bower depicted is likely to be at the estate of the old family

Cézanne shows a pivotal moment in this gifted and influential French

home at Jas de Bouffan in Aix-en-Provence in the south of France.

Post-Impressionist’s development as an artist and an important step in

It is a close-up view of a wooded glade, with the extending branches,

the history of modern art. The orchard marks a point when he moved

receding trunks and their surrounds condensed to create a unified yet

towards the realm of the abstract and away from what he then considered

complex sense of positive and negative space. The rich palette of colours

were the superficial appearances of the Impressionists.

intermittently highlights this merging of forms.

Cézanne had been close friends with the Danish-French

progressed to manipulate his forms both diagonally and vertically to

they often painted the same landscape scenes together and they both

provide a sense of volume and space. While lines of pencil and crayon

showed work at the first Impressionist exhibition of 1874. As they

drawing contribute to the sense of volume, the three-dimensional tree

progressed, however, their paths diverged. Cézanne sought to create an

forms are, for the most part, rendered with almost transparent brush

art less spontaneous and more solid in form. He found watercolour

strokes of green, blue, yellow, purple and red. Volumes are evoked but

conducive to this ambition, as he was able to create forms using the

not defined. For Cézanne, what he omitted was as important as what

brevity and lightness of translucent strokes and in brighter, purer colours

he included.

compared to his earlier denser painting style.

Cézanne is often credited as being the father of modern art.

Aside from Matisse and Picasso, other avant-garde artists of the early twentieth century found Cézanne inspirational, notably the Dutch-born

His significance in its development comes in part from the interest

Piet Mondrian. In his prewar period, Mondrian followed in Cézanne’s

both Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso showed in his work and by the

footsteps. He saw how the French master deliberately combined the

profound influence he had on their individual artistic developments and

negative space of the background and the positive element. He then took

radical innovations. Their different responses to and interpretations of

it a step further by flattening his motifs, like a pancake, which is evident

the older French master comprise an important story in the history of

his The grey tree 1911 at The Hague.

art of the last century. Picasso admired the deformations and voluminous

This key acquisition for Australia’s national collection would not

space of Cézanne’s art, while Matisse celebrated his constructions of

have been possible but for the generous donations received from the

colour and the merging of motif and background.

Margaret Olley Art Trust, members of the NGA’s Foundation and the

The orchard is precisely the kind of composition that Matisse

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This is a significant Cézanne landscape as it reveals how he had

Impressionist Camille Pissarro since the early 1860s. Over the decades,

supporters of our Cézanne Watercolour and Drawing Fund. The ongoing

treasured, the kind that was manifest in his own art. In this composition

Poynton Bequest, named after the NGA’s very generous donor the late

of a group of trees, Cézanne focused on the interrelationship of

Dr John Orde Poynton Esq, AO, CMG, also provided assistance in the

foreground and background, the subject and the space in between.

purchase. To all these individuals and organisations, the NGA is grateful.

PAUL CEZANNE

Cézanne Watercolour and Drawing Fund Murray Bail Dr Elaine Baker and John Cruthers Helen Brack Joanna Capon Wendy Edwards Susan Elder Roly Gill in memory of Annette Gill Merle Gowan Theodore Jenkel and Georgette Grezak Ross Lansell Prof Miles Little Rosemary Mayne-Wilson Graeme Morgan

Jinx Nolan Dr Penelope Olsen Porters Lawyers John Sharpe and Claire Armstrong Andrea Simpson Alice Spigelman and the Hon James Spigelman AC, QC Imants Tillers Adrienne Tuart and Ralph Dayman Lyn Williams AM Melanie Wilson Susan Wyndham and an anonymous donor

The orchard (Le verger) c 1895, watercolour, crayon and pencil. Purchased with the assistance the Poynton Bequest, Margaret Olley Art Trust, Cézanne Watercolour and Drawing Fund and NGA Foundation, 2018

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NEW ACQUISITIONS MUTUAGA Mutuaga is the only Papua New Guinean artist active in the nineteenth century to whom a body of work can be attributed. His work is characterised by small yet monumental figurative sculptures, which often represent people engaged in activity. A work recently purchased by the NGA, with the assistance of Sue and Steve Dyer, is no exception.

The figure’s slightly hunched posture and clasped hands give the impression of a person in humble prayer, and it is likely a member of the Kwato Island Mission church congregation. The body, oversized head and fluidly bent arms are stylised with great delicacy.

Mutuaga was unable to fish or hunt to make a living due to a disability in one leg, so he specialised in woodcarving. His talent was recognised within his community, where he earned the nickname of Otiau (The carving man), and by westerners alike. Living near the mission, established in 1891, he quickly developed a friendship with the missionary Charles Abel, who became his patron and provided an unparalleled outlet for his work, which reached Europe and America.

Through Abel, Mutuaga’s world view also opened up and he began to innovate his style. The ellipsoid eyes and pointed nose are hallmarks of his later carving period, and he deviates from the region’s style with the three-legged stool—likely to have been inspired by Victorian furniture at the Kwato mission. Crispin Howarth, Curator, Pacific Art

ANNE FERRAN Anne Ferran is one of a generation of photographers whose influence on contemporary Australian photomedia has been profound, as both an artist and an educator. She taught for many years at the Sydney College of the Arts and has maintained an active national and international exhibition profile since the mid 1980s.

For the last twenty years or so, she has worked primarily and extensively with historical collections and sites, following an impulse toward examining lost or difficult histories and giving voice to oppressed, colonised or disregarded people through photography. She is interested in what we don’t know and can’t know of people’s lives, especially those whose lives essentially leave little or no trace behind. Her projects have explored the experience of women incarcerated in prisons, asylums and hospitals.

In 1999, Ferran was awarded a New South Wales Women and Arts Fellowship to work on an archive of thirty-eight photographs of women who were psychiatric patients incarcerated in Gladesville Hospital in Sydney. Ferran found copies of the photographs in the Government Printing Office Archive by typing ‘asylum’ into the state library’s database.

The reason for taking and archiving the photographs, dated to 1948, is no longer known. Ferran was unable to discover the names of the women or why they were committed, as she was neither a patient’s family member nor a medical researcher. Because of this, she was unsure how, or if, she should proceed.

Above: Mutuaga Praying figure c 1900–20, wood.

Purchased with the support of Sue and Steve Dyer, 2017

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NEW ACQUISITIONS

In the end, however, she decided to make what she described in an interview with Jonathan Holme, published in Anne Ferran: the ground,

TACITA DEAN Tacita Dean is known for her work in the medium of film, print and drawing. She is highly regarded internationally as one of the most important and influential contemporary artists to have emerged in Britain during the 1990s and has lived and worked in Berlin since 2000. Her work explores the passage of time and its effect on memory.

The Russian ending 2001 is a portfolio comprising twenty photogravures. The title refers to a practice that occurred in the early twentieth century in Denmark’s export film industry in which movies made for North American and Russian markets required alternative endings: happy endings for the United States and tragic endings for Russia. The images in the portfolio are derived from historic photographic postcards collected by the artist at European flea markets. Most of them depict accidents and disasters, both manmade and natural. Inscribed on each image are notations in the style of film directions, with instructions for lighting, sound and camera movements, suggesting a storyboard for a film shot with ‘Russian endings’.

Dean’s long-term exploration of narrative and the mechanics of the analogue film industry and her interest in collecting and archiving truth and fiction are clearly evident. By prompting viewers to imagine the events leading to the tragic scenes depicted, she implicates her audience, in the complex construction of memory, interpretation and meaning. Sally Foster, Curator, International Prints, Drawings and Illustrated Books

the air, as a ‘second, shadow archive’. She made four books from the archival material, each focusing on different details of the original images, as well as a series of photographs titled ‘1–38’. which she recently gifted to the NGA for the national collection.

The highly emotive series shows only the women’s midsections.

The images are tough, almost unbearably moving and difficult, at times, to look at. Hands anxiously clutching, reaching out for reassurance, arms held awkwardly. The inmate’s clothing is makeshift, sometimes little more than a hospital gown, and often crumpled and institutionalised.

The viewer does not need the faces of these women to understand on some level what is going on here. The women’s anxiety and suffering is writ large in their gestures. They either stand forlornly alone or their confined state is reflected in the gestures of the nurses who reach in from the side to steady their patients or to keep a firmer hold of them.

This is a powerful and intense work by Ferran, and one that continued her interest women who were on the edges of society.

Anne O’Hehir, Curator, Photography

Above, from top: Tacita Dean Ballon des Aerostiers de Campagne and Story of Minke the Whale, from The Russian ending 2001, photogravure. The Poynton Bequest, 2018 Right, from top: Anne Ferran No 8 and No 18 from the series 1–38 2003, pigment injket prints. Gift of the artist, 2018. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program. © Anne Ferran.

Represented by Viscopy

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MARCO FUSINATO Marco Fusinato’s Mass Black Implosion (Concert for Piano and Orchestra, John Cage) is a drawing composed of sixty-three framed sheets. To use the term ‘composed’ here is particularly appropriate, as the artist has drawn over a 1957 archival orchestral score by the experimental composer John Cage, ruling straight lines from musical notes that energetically radiate out toward the viewer.

Although diagrammatic, the lines (which one might associate with scientific precision and discipline) visually contribute their own sense of choreography, movement and dynamism to Cage’s score.

Fluctuating between compositions that are dense and sparse, the work is overwhelmingly effective in illustrating the ‘rhythm’ of Cage’s composition, which runs for almost half an hour when performed from beginning to end. In true Cage fashion, however, the score, he suggests, can be played in its entirety or in part or by a full orchestra or as a solo, duet or by any number of musicians. Fusinato takes this idea further by performing the score visually, encouraging us to consider the relationship between aural and graphic, abstract and concrete, artistic and diagrammatic.

The work marks a continuation of Fusinato’s Mass Black Implosion series, which began in 2007 and has included scores from the likes of avant-garde and groundbreaking composers such as Béla Bartók, Cornelius Cardew and Anestis Logothetis. Ella Morrison, Curatorial Assistant, Australian Prints and Drawings

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NEW ACQUISITIONS

Above: Marco Fusinato Mass black implosion (concert for piano and orchestra, John Cage) 2017 (installation at Anna Schwartz Gallery and detail), ink on archival facsimile of score. Purchased 2017. Photos: Zan Wimberley. Images courtesy the artist and Anna Schwartz Gallery Opposite, from top: Unknown maker Green maireener shell necklace c 1880, rope twist gold chain and maireener shells. Gift of Trevor Hancock, 2018; Edward Schafer Gold brooch with seaweed arrangement c 1880, gold, seaweed varieties.

Purchased 2018; Frederick Frith (attributed to) Portrait of Laura Lilias Scratchley, wife of Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Stratchley, Melbourne, January 1863 1863, American Ivorytype. Purchased 2018

COLONIAL JEWELLERY Collecting marine specimens, particularly seaweeds and shells, was a popular pastime in the mid nineteenth century, with Queen Victoria herself known to indulge.

In Australia, educated Victorian ladies exhibited their amateur collections at major public exhibitions, and the craze even found expression in jewellery design, two rare and exceptional examples of which were recently acquired by the NGA. The first, designed by Melbourne jeweller Edward Shafer, is a gold brooch with a massed foliate decoration surrounding a collection of delicate seaweed specimens arranged as a basket of flowers. Brooches were a key element of a Victorian woman’s ensemble and a symbol of wealth and status—their size, workmanship and ornamentation indicative of the importance of their owner and the accomplishment of their maker. This exquisite example may depict specimens collected by its owner, positioning her as both a highly fashionable woman and an educated and sophisticated amateur scientist.

The second, donated by Perth colonial antique specialist Trevor Hancock, is an unusual solid rope twist chain decorated with seven engraved bell caps, each holding a single maireener shell of Tasmanian origin. The selecting and threading of these shells into long looped necklaces is an unbroken tradition of Tasmanian Aboriginal women and has become one of their most significant cultural expressions. The unknown jeweller of this work was not only talented, as drilling holes into the shell’s brittle surface requires great skill and patience, but also imaginative, as he or she has incorporated local Indigenous custom into a fashionable late Victorian necklace. Lara Nicholls, Curator, 19th-Century Australian Art

FREDERICK FRITH The NGA has just acquired its first example of an Australian sennotype (also called an ‘American Ivorytype’). It is a portrait of Laura Lilias Scratchley, made in Melbourne in January 1863. Laura was the sister of Thomas Browne, author of Robbery under arms (1888), and the wife of Peter Scratchley, who became Commissioner of Defences of the Australasian Colonies in 1878 and Commissioner for the Protectorate of New Guinea in 1885. The extraordinary quality of the portrait suggests that it was made by Frederick Frith, who had originally trained as a painter and whose photographic work was noted for the beauty of its handcolouring.

The sennotype was a short-lived and very labour-intensive photographic process intended to replicate the effect of painted portraits on ivory. Its history is a case study in the economics of early photography—a highly competitive and speculative market in which innovations were often quickly rendered obsolete. The process arrived in Australia in 1862 with the entrepreneurial American Charles Wilson, who worked with Frith for a short time before they became involved in a hostile battle over the ownership of the process: Frith had attempted to patent a ‘chromo-sennotype’ process in August 1862, yet Wilson falsely claimed to have invented the process.

Just a few extant Australian sennotypes are known, and this example will take a proud place in the NGA’s efforts to illuminate the history of photography in Australia. Shaune Lakin, Senior Curator, Photography

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SPONSORSHIP AND DONATIONS PRIVATE DONORS

Colin Hindmarsh and Barbara Hindmarsh

Philip Bacon AM William Bowness AO Sir Ronald Brierley Adam Brooks Kay Bryan Andrew Buchanan PSM and Kate Buchanan Robyn Burke and Graham Burke AO Julian Burt and Alexandra Burt Terrence Campbell AO and Christine Campbell Krystyna Campbell-Pretty Michel-Henri Carriol and Julie Carriol Maurice Cashmere James Darling AM and Lesley Forwood Julian Goldenberg and Neta Saint Richard Griffin AM and Jay Griffin Andrew Gwinnett and Hiroko Gwinnett Peter Hack Jennifer Hershon Sue Hewitt Sinclair Hill AM, OBE, and Wendy Hill Sam Hill-Smith and Margo Hill-Smith John Hindmarsh AM and Rosanna Hindmarsh OAM Brooke Horne Gail Kinsella Wayne Kratzmann Paul Little AO and Jane Hansen Dr Andrew Lu OAM and Dr Geoffrey Lancaster AM Dr Peter Lundy RFD and Dr Maureen Bremner Jan McGovern and Peter McGovern AM Sandra Mackenzie Susan Maple-Brown AM Dr Michael Martin and Elizabeth Popovski Fiona Martin-Weber and Tom Hayward Baillieu Myer AC and Sarah Myer Roslyn Packer AC Kenneth Reed AM Gina Rinehart Denis Savill and Anne Clarke Penelope Seidler AM David Shannon and Daniela Shannon Jane Smyth and Dr Warwick Smyth Ezekiel Solomon AM Victoria Taylor Mandy Thomas-Westende and Lou Westende OAM Sally White OAM and Geoffrey White OAM Peronelle Windeyer and James Windeyer Wright Burt Foundation Jason Yeap OAM and Min Lee Wong

Foundation Board Publishing Fund

Heather B Swann Fund

Ray Wilson OAM

Arthur Roe

The NGA acknowledges the support of its many private donors and recognises, below, their donations made between 7 October 2017 and 22 March 2018.

You have our thanks.

Alan Scott Collection of Papunya Boards and Photographs American Friends of the National Gallery of Australia John Wilkerson and Barbara Wilkerson Ray Wilson OAM

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

Arthur Streeton The Point Wharf, Mosman Bay 1893 Maurice Cashmere in memory of Sarah Cashmere John Hindmarsh AM and Rosanna Hindmarsh OAM Claire Parkhurst in memory of Sarah Cashmere

Australian Prints Zoe Croggon The Rossi Foundation

Cézanne Watercolour and Drawing Fund Dr Elaine Baker and John Cruthers Susan Elder Lyn Williams AM Melanie Wilson

Council Exhibitions Fund Rhonda White AO

Donation Margaret Anderson Neilson Foundation

Exhibition Patrons: American Masters Terra Foundation for American Art

Exhibition Patrons: Arthur Streeton: The Art of War Sir Michael Hintze AM The Hintze Family Charitable Foundation

Exhibition Patrons: Cartier: The Exhibition Krystyna Campbell-Pretty Fiona Martin-Weber and Tom Hayward

Exhibition Patrons: Hugh Ramsay

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Foundation Gala Dinner Fund 2018

SPONSORSHIP AND DONATIONS

James Whistler Harmony in blue and pearl: The Sands, Dieppe 1885 American Friends of the National Gallery of Australia Dr Lee MacCormick Edwards Charitable Foundation Andrew Sisson and Tracey Sisson

Kenneth Tyler Print Fund Kenneth Tyler AO and Marabeth Cohen‑Tyler

Masterpieces for the Nation 2017 Margaret Brennan and Geoffrey Brennan Deb Carroll Maureen Chan Lorraine Downey Ross Gough Roger Gransbury Sybil Griffiths Graham C Hobbs Donald James and Frances James William James and Judith Reid Arun Karthik Rajagopalan Prof Ian McDougall and Pam McDougall Diana Mildern Neil Mulvaney Maria Nicoll and Paul Nicoll Rosamond Shepherd Graham Thomas and Pamela Thomas

Masterpieces for the Nation 2018 Sue Dyer

Members Acquisition Fund 2017–18 Lenore Adamson Ken Alexander and Margaret Alexander Robert Allmark Margaret Anderson Carl Andrew Debra Askew and Michael Askew Margaret Aston Michelle Atkinson Helen Austin and John Austin Judith Avery Prof Peter Bailey Sheryl Ballesty Lesley Barker The Beddoe family Janet Bedloe Andrew Bennett Martin Bennett Virginia Berger John Besemeres and Anna Besemeres Marianne Beuzeville and Neil Miley Judith Bibo David Biddles and Suzanne Biddles Martin Black and Norma Black Peter Boege and Irene Kaspar Valerie Boot and Dr Mac Boot Gillian Borger Max Bourke AM and Margaret Bourke Yvonne Brereton

Vicki Brown Jennifer Bryson Bundaberg Eye Clinic Jane Burger Janis Butt Robert Cadona Joan Cairns John Caldwell and Judith Caldwell John Calvert-Jones AM and Janet Calvert-Jones AO Rear Admiral David Campbell AM Jane Carver Maureen Cashman David Charles and Lorraine Charles Jan Cheetham and Andrew Cheetham Christine Clark Heather Clark Dr Patricia Clarke OAM Jeannette Clarke Carolyn Cleak Patricia Coats Wendy Cobcroft Dr Arthur Conigrave and Dr Kate Conigrave Natalie Cooke Paddy Costanzo and Karen Costanzo Helen Croaker Catherine Crompton Helen Crompton D’Arcy Slater Foundation Maria Magda Damo Rowena Danziger AM and Ken Coles AM John Davidson and Paula Davidson Sue Daw OAM Michael de B Collins Persse MVO, OAM Susan Dimitriadis James Dittmar and Percita Dittmar Jennifer Dobbin Murray Doyle AAM Melanie Drake Kathleen Draper in memory of Patricia Ryan Margaret Duggan and Paul Duggan Peter Eddington and Joy Williams Sarah Elliott Roz Elliott Pauline Everson Geoff Farrell Anthony Felgate William Ferrier and Noelene Ferrier Jan Finley and Philip Finley Peter Flanagan and Cherie Flanagan Jo-Anne Flatley-Allen Anna Fletcher Michael Flynn Trevor Francis and Lesley Francis David Franks Mr and Mrs Donald Fraser Dr Peter Fullager and Helen Topor Dorothy Galvin Robert Gardiner Richard Gate Helen Gee and Mark Gee Joan George Sylvia Glanville

Moya Gnezdiloff and Robert Gnezdiloff June Gordon Geoff Gorrie and Lyn Gorrie Ross Gough Elizabeth Grant AM and Sue Hart Elizabeth Haddad Megan Hall Lady Harders Glenys Harris Eleanor Hart Antony Harvey Pat Harvey and Frank Harvey Bruce Hayes Leah Hayes Tony Hayward Heather Henderson Sue Hewitt Elizabeth Hewson Colin Hill and Linda Hill Lybbie Hillman and Mike Hillman Elisabeth Hilton Judith Hlubucek and Dr Jospeh Hlubucek Julie Hoolahan and Alice Hoolahan Chris Hoy and Phoebe Hoy Margaret Hughes Jill Hutson John Hyndes and Danielle Hyndes Dr Peter Ingle and Rosemary Ingle Angela Isles Clifford Jahnsen and Suzanne Jahnsen Lynette James Gabrielle Jarvis Lawrence Welyczko and Dr Connie Katelaris Carol Kee Margaret Kellond Judith Kennett Ian Kenny and Anitra Kenny Helen Kenyon Kate Kerr and Harold Kerr Grahame Kime and Victoria De Mestre Christine King Robert King and Wendy Holgate Rory King and Lisa Watson Ann Lancaster Dian Langley Ian Latham Josette Laudereau and Dr John McEwan Robert Laurie and Diana Laurie Dr Clara Lawson and Dr Robert Dingley Marion Le Faye Lee Thomas Leffers and Corrie Leffers Jean Linnett and Ian Linnett Peter Londey and Christina Spittel Christine Longworth Hazel Ludovici and Lawrie Ludovici Michael Lynch and John Lynch Frances McArdle Father Dermid McDermott Kerry McGlinn Judith MacIntyre Sandra Mackenzie

Dr Robin McLachlan and Joanna McLachlan Selma McLaren Cheryl McLennan and Graham McLennan Svetlana Manns and Peter Manns Bruce Marshall and Robin Coombes Kathleen Marshall Robyn Martin-Weber Kay Martinelli Anne Maslin Paul Mattiuzzo and Deborah Mattiuzzo Graeme Mayo Betty Meehan Jillian Mihalyka Diana Mildern Neil Arthur Miley Bernard Milford Dr Robert Miller and Mary Miller Tony Minchin and Elizabeth Minchin Caroline Minogue and Nick Minogue Bevan Mitchell Dr Cathryn Mittelheuser Catherine Moore Dr Elizabeth Morrison Janet Moyle Bruce Muir and Heather Muir Janet Munro Stephen Murphy Susan Myatt Maria Helena Nicoll Kathleen Nowik Marie Oakes Gillian Oldham Colin Jack Paine Anabel Parbury Beth Parsons Elaine Paton AO The Hon Thomas Ian Pauling AO, QC Robert Pauling Paula Pelosi Jonathan W de B Persse Gerry Phillips and Sharon Phillips Tony Purnell and Kaye Purnell Muriel Rafferty Emer Prof Thomas Smith Reeves and Mary Jo Reeve Mark Robertson and Anne Robertson Jan Rodgers Peter Roeper and Khurshid Roeper Arjen Romeyn Dr James Ross and Heather Ross June Rozen and Alan Rozen Diana Ryan and Michael Ryan Dorothy Sales Raoul Salpeter and Roslyn Mandelberg Mark Sampson and Ruth Sampson The Sargeson family Catherina Savoca Fiona Sawyers Roma Sinclair Jennifer Smith Wendy Jane Smith Barry Smith-Roberts Dr Peter Southwell-Keely and Diana Southwell-Keely

Ian Spilsted Andrew Spilva and Vivian Spilva John Stead Cheri Stevenson Charles Storey and Nea Storey Susanne Storrier Steven Stroud and Annaliese Williams Charles Stuart and Gay Stuart Janet Taplin Emer Prof Ken Taylor AM and Maggie Taylor The Taylor-Cannon family Robyn Thomas Dr Alison Thomson and Lincoln Smith Dr Owen Thomas and Edwina Thomas Sonia Tidemann Sylvia Tracey Susy Tregonning Niek Van Vucht and Jenny Van Vucht Tony Waide Derrian Walsh Andrew Watkins Gabrielle Watt Jennifer Watt and Raymond Watt Alexandra Wedutenko Tony Weir and Christine Weir Dr Julie West and Glenn Hughes June Westmacott Rowena Whittle George Wilkins Dr Wayne Williams Gwen Wilton and Jack Wilton Richard Windsor and Robin Windsor Belinda Wise Sandra Young

Members Acquisition Fund 2018–19 Steve Dyer

Rotary Fund Rotary Club Belconnen

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CORPORATE PARTNERSHIPS Strategic Partner

Presenting Partner

Indigenous Art Partner

Contemporary Art Partner

Major Partners

National Collecting Institutions Touring & Outreach Program

Supporting Partners

Media Partners

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Corporate Members

Beverage Partners

Signage Partner

Promotional Partners

Aesop The Brassey of Canberra Clayton Utz Forrest Hotel & Apartments

Coopers Brewery Archie Rose Lerida Estate

Flash Graphics

Audi Centre Canberra Canberra Airport Canberra Centre Qantas Holidays Yamaha Hyatt Hotel Canberra

SPONSORSHIP AND DONATIONS

Exclusive to the National Gallery of Australia

FINAL WEEKS UNTIL 22 JULY Cartier Paris Crocodile necklace 1975 (detail), special order, gold, diamonds, emeralds, rubies.

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

Photo: Minna Gilligan

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ANDREW ROGERS A display of maquettes of major works 1995–2015 from the permanent collection of the NGA. Including the screening of the land-art project film Rhythms of life— a connected series of 51 major stone structures visible from space and involving over 7500 people in sixteen countries across seven continents.

I am 2005, maquette, bronze National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, gift of the artist, 2015. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program

From 14 July

nga.gov.au

The wave of sound leaves you changed.

Life is better with music cso.org.au

Proud partner of NGA in 2018 15% off online wine purchases for subscribers Use Coupon Code NGA2018

www.leridaestate.com.au

EXPERIENCE THE ART OF CANBERRA AIRPORT

Bringing the world closer Andrew Stead, Qantas Dreamliner Pilot Experience the Qantas Dreamliner. Now flying Perth to London non-stop. qantas.com/andrew *Aircraft and flight schedule subject to change. Flights are subject to government and regulatory approval.

www.canberraairport.com.au/art

+61 498 059 661 | info@aaada.org.au | #aaada

consigning now important fine art + indigenous art

AUCTION • AUGUST 2018 • SYDNEY

for appraisals please contact SYDNEY • 02 9287 0600 mELBOUrNE • 03 9865 6333 info@deutscherandhackett.com www.deutscherandhackett.com

ARTHUR STREETON Minarets, Cairo, 1897 (detail) oil on canvas on board 102.0 x 33.5 cm est: $300,000 – 500,000 SOLD for $976,000 (inc. BP) Important Works of Art from the Estate of the late James O. Fairfax AC August 2017, Sydney

Until 29 July

Thomas Bock Woureddy, native of Brunè Island, Van Diemen’s Land 1837, watercolour. Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart, presented by the Tasmanian Government, 1889