Artonview 108 - Summer 2022

“The Ouroboros is the symbol of eternal return, cycles of birth, death, and renewal” LINDY LEE

PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE: Celebrating 40 years of the National Gallery with Steve Martin, Judy Watson & Helen Johnson, Robert Rauschenberg & Jasper Johns, Cressida Campbell, Mabel Juli and Superman Summer 2022

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Contents

On the cover Lindy Lee, holding a maquette of Ouroboros, in her studio in northern New South Wales.

Photograph: Sam Cooper.

This page Judy Watson, Waanyi people, judy with global land, ocean temperature anomalies, baler shell and leaves (jamba, malu, yimbira), 2021, © Judy Watson/Copyright Agency, 2022.

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Rauschenberg & Johns An audience of each other

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Director’s Word

Editor’s Letter | Contributors

Sculpture Garden Spot the difference

Lindy Lee Reaching for the stars

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Jeffrey Smart The sitters

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Mabel Juli The moon and the stars

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Cressida Campbell Family matters

Warwu Mrs N. Yunupiŋu Remembering the Yolŋu artist

American Friends Actor Steve Martin shares his collection

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Judy Watson & Helen Johnson The red thread of history

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Rebecca Horn Love machine

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40 years of collecting Grazia Gunn on James Mollison’s vision

Storylines 1982 vs 2022

Kiki Smith

The Bequest Circle

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The Exhibitionists A new film goes behind the scenes

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Superman At the National Gallery

Celebrating 40 years Brutal beauty

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Daniel Crooks Enlighten 2022

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Director’s Word

Gooroo Burri, 2022 marks the 40th anniversary of the opening of the National Gallery.

While the Gallery was formally established in 1967, the national collection began in 1971 when then-Prime Minister William McMahon appointed James Mollison as inaugural Director, 11 years before the building was opened by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. As we mark our fourth decade in this building and reflect on the success of the past, we want to focus on the next 40 years while continuing to highlight what is important to the National Gallery, including elevating Australian art, bringing the building to life and revitalising the Sculpture Garden.

From its foundations, the National Gallery was always ambitious. To create a national collection in the 1970s was a tall challenge because by that time several Australian state galleries had already been collecting for more than 100 years. Add to that the selection of the architect Col Madigan and the scale and boldness of the building itself, which highlighted the ambition the country had for its national collection and the national art gallery.

That ambition is the key reason the national collection is so significant; we started with ambition and I want to mark the coming decades in the manner that we commenced.

We continue to build on the legacies of my predecessors to guide the National Gallery into the future. Artist Lindy Lee is a significant part of that; she embodies that original ambition, yet the commissioning of her Ouroboros also represents our future.

Lindy is one of Australia’s most important artists, working at the height of her powers, and for the next two years we will collaborate to bring one of the most significant works of her career to the public.

again to our collection 40 years after the first acquisition.

I love the dualities of Ouroboros, which is both an architectural statement and a sculpture in one: it can be viewed from the outside and you will also be able to walk inside it for a more immersive experience.

Architecture has always been an important element of the National Gallery. When it opened in October 1982, the building articulated the ambition and goals of presenting the national collection in the modern world through its brutalist architecture (see Max Dupain’s images of the empty Gallery just prior to opening on page 52).

While we celebrate our anniversary we continue to be a work in progress as we change displays to give you a new perspective on Australian and First Nations art, as well as our international collections.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy the new Australian art: Storylines on level 2, which brings together works by First Nations and non-Indigenous artists from across Australia, Asia and the Pacific, and current exhibitions Jeffrey Smart, Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now, Part 2 and the 4th National Indigenous Art Triennial: Ceremony which opens this month both in the Gallery and in the Sculpture Garden.

Nick Mitzevich The National Gallery acknowledges the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples, the Traditional Custodians of the Kamberri/Canberra region, and recognises their continuous connection to culture, community and Country.

Ouroboros will be one of the most prominent public sculptures in Australia when it is unveiled in 2024 because of its scale, its technical complexity, its reference to life and the universal themes: the snake swallowing its own tail representing eternal return, cycles of birth and death and renewal.

This work anticipates a new master plan than we have for the Sculpture Garden to become a much more important attraction for visitors to the Gallery that will be unveiled over the coming months.

National Gallery Director Nick Mitzevich in the Jeffrey Smart exhibition, featuring: (left to right) Jeffrey Smart, Holiday, 1971, Private collection, Courtesy of Menzies Art Brands, and Labyrinth, 2011, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/ Canberra, Purchased with the assistance of the Margaret Olley Art Trust and Mr Philip Bacon AM in honour of Ron Radford AM, Director of the National Gallery of Australia 2004–14, 2014, 100 Works for 100 Years © The Estate of Jeffrey Smart.

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Lindy’s sculpture is part of a continuation of the strength of the national collection and is a milestone in her own personal connection: James Mollison bought one of her first works, White Sacrament, in 1985.

I remember seeing it in Lindy’s 2020-21 retrospective, Moon in a Dew Drop, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney.

As Lindy says in our cover story on page 6, Ouroboros “brings full circle” her connection to the National Gallery, returning her once

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Contributors

Carolyn Fletcher AM Carolyn Fletcher AM is Chair of the American Friends of the National Gallery of Australia (AFNGA) and a former chair of the National Art School. Carolyn curated the exhibition 50 Years of Aboriginal Art, featuring works from the collections of Steve Martin and John Wilkerson, at the Australian Consul General in New York where she resides. Read Carolyn's interview with Steve and John on page 36.

The British artist Henry Moore once said: “Sculpture is an art of the open air. Daylight, sunlight is necessary to it, and for me, its best setting and complement is nature.”

I’ve loved sculptures ever since my first art class in high school, when I studied Alberto Giacometti for an assignment that sparked an interest in his surreal, elongated bronze figures that was soon followed by an obsession with Degas’ ballerinas. Then, during a trip to the Louvre in Paris as a young adult I began to marvel at marble when I first came across The Winged Victory of Samothrace. The sight of the messenger goddess at the prow of a ship looming so large over the Daru Staircase literally took my breath away.

Nell Campbell Nell Campbell (pictured at right) is best known for her turn as Columbia in 1975’s cult film The Rocky Horror Picture Show and running Nell’s nightclub in New York. She is also the sister of artist Cressida Campbell (pictured at left), whom Nell interviewed for this issue for Cressida's upcoming exhibition.

Read their wide-ranging discussion about art, life and Cressida's recent brush with death, on page 24.

Will Stubbs A former criminal lawyer, Will Stubbs is the coordinator at the Buku-Larrnggay Mulka Centre in Yirrkala, Northern Territory, and a passionate advocate of First Nations arts and artists. Read Will’s beautiful tribute to his mother-in-law, the late Yolŋu artist Mrs N. Yunupiŋu, on page 30.

That captivating experience is something Lindy is bringing to the National Gallery with her Ouroboros, which was commissioned for the Gallery’s 40th anniversary this year and will be situated in the Sculpture Garden.

Lindy’s Ouroboros and Paul’s scar trees are the newest additions to the Sculpture Garden, celebrating the future of the Gallery in a year marking a milestone of its birth 40 years ago.

Happy 40th, National Gallery!

Summer 108 The National Gallery acknowledges the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples, the Traditional Custodians of the Kamberri/ Canberra region, and recognises their continuous connection to culture, community and Country.

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Editor Sophie Tedmanson Copy Editor Tom Lazarus Rights and Permissions Eliza Williams

Sophie Tedmanson Henry Dalrymple Chief Content Officer

Contributors Jessica Barnes, Tina Baum, Jed Cooper, Sam Cooper, Sally Foster, David Greenhalgh, Karlee Holland, Nick Mitzevich, Sarina Noordhuis-Fairfax, Lucina Ward

@sophieted All images by the National Gallery of Australia unless otherwise stated.

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To celebrate the National Gallery’s 40th anniversary we delved into the archives and found this image of the Sculpture Garden in 1982 when works of art – including Bert Flugelman’s Cones, Mark Di Suvero’s Ik ook, and Emile Bourdelle’s Penelope – were first laid in place among thousands of seedlings of Australian flora. Four decades on and the garden is so verdant and vibrant the gum trees, wattle flowers and bird life take just as much pride of place as the sculptures themselves.

Grazia Gunn Art scholar Dr Grazia Gunn was a founding member of the National Gallery curatorial team, working in the International Art department from 1981 to 1989. Grazia is currently writing a book about Founding Director James Mollison, to be published by Black Inc. In celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Gallery opening, Grazia looks back at Mr Mollison’s legacy of collecting on page 62.

Indoors or outdoors, sculptures create their own artistic environment wherever they are placed, and with whatever surrounds them. I recently ran past Henry Moore’s Hill Arches in the National Gallery Sculpture Garden and became mesmerised by the sight of thousands of spores of pollen sparkling through shafts of sunlight, dancing on the giant bronze work of art. It reminded me of something Lindy Lee said when we visited her studio near Byron Bay for this issue’s cover story. During a fascinating conversation about her life and art (read more on page 6), Lindy described the moment she realised she wanted to be an artist: “I was about three years old, lying on my tummy in the old Queenslander house that my parents lived in. I was trying to draw, and you know how the light slides through windows and you can see the dust motes floating and sparkling in the air? It was pure magic… particularly wondrous.

And I just felt, ‘If only one day I could draw that.’ Now, curiously, it’s come full circle because I am making those works now that sparkle with light.”

You may have noticed a series of scar trees by Ngambri/ Ngunnawal Traditional Custodian Paul Girrawah House that have already begun to pop up around the Sculpture Garden for the 4th National Indigenous Art Triennial: Ceremony, which opens this month. They will form a permanent installation, representing his relationship to his matrilineal Country on the shore of Lake Burley Griffin.

Spot the difference: 1982 vs 2022

© National Galley of Australia 2022 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.

Views expressed by writers are not necessarily those of the National Gallery of Australia.

ISSN 1323-4552 ISSN 2208-6218 (Online) Printed by Adams Print, on FSC certified paper using vegetable-based inks, FSC-C110099

Photographs by: Sam Cooper, Kieran Murray, Grazia Gunn by Jacqueline Mitelman, Collection of the National Portrait Gallery, purchased with funds provided by Wayne Williams 2015 © Jacqueline Mitelman

Editor’s Letter

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LINDY LEE has been commissioned to create Ouroboros to celebrate the National Gallery's 40th anniversary.

The professional high comes in a year of personal loss for the leading Australian contemporary artist, writes SOPHIE TEDMANSON. Photographs by SAM COOPER.

Reaching for the stars

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Lindy Lee is sitting on top of a sand dune at Tallow Beach near Byron Bay. She is barefoot in the lotus position, basking in the moonlight that glistens on the ocean behind, just like one of her luminescent sculptures. A sense of serenity surrounds the artist.

Cane toads, bats and bush turkeys rustle the bushes around us.

But the artist is seemingly undistracted by the nocturnal noise.

“I love being near the water,” she says later. “It is meditative for me.”

We meet at the end of 2021, a bittersweet year of career highs and deep personal lows for Lindy Lee. In September it was announced that she had been commissioned to create Ouroboros, the largest and most ambitious commission in the National Gallery’s history. Just a few weeks earlier, in June, her husband of 28 years, the photographer Rob Scott-Mitchell, passed away after a brief illness.

When we visit Lindy’s studio in the lush Byron hinterland, we find her juggling various projects and visiting friends, still grappling with her grief. The corrugated iron studio is nestled below her house, down a winding road. When we visit it is bustling with energy: Lindy’s assistants, Demian Burman, Zoe Wesolowski-Fisher and Angelika Stepanova, are variously working on maquettes, taking calls in the house, collecting produce from the veggie garden; and her four beloved Scottish terriers (Mae Mae, Ziva, Mungo and Kevin) roam freely, following her around the grounds, occasionally barking at a bush turkey.

It is a smaller studio than one might expect for one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists, but it is very Lindy Lee. Outside, one of her large, egg-shaped Life of stars sculptures takes up the entire deck while it is being patterned. Lindy darts in and out, delegating and juggling myriad things – prepping a work of flung bronze on the floor for an upcoming commission, fielding calls about ingredients to pick up for the soup she is making us all for lunch and posing for photos. All the while, Lindy smiles. She has a dazzling smile that lingers longer than most people’s, fading eventually to a peaceful concentration as she returns her focus to the work in front of her. Watching Lindy at work is a meditation in itself; she moves in silent, fluid motion. She hovers the flung bronze an inch above the canvas, then suddenly changes her mind, swinging around and setting it down to the left. Like placing pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

On one wall is a list of upcoming projects and timelines; tables are strewn with papers bearing geometric measurements; we are surrounded by new works and detritus from previous projects possibly waiting to be repurposed into a future work (sustainability is very important to Lindy).

Lindy’s practice spans more than four decades. She has exhibited widely around the world including in Australia, Canada, China, Hong Kong, Japan and the US. In recent years, she has collaborated with the UAP Foundry in Brisbane to create significant works that enhance public spaces all over the globe: at the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide; on Sanya Bay, Hainan Island, China; at the Province Midtown Cultural Centre in Zhengzhou, China; and at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Sydney.

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Her early flung-ink works derived from an ancient Buddhist practice whereby, according to Lee, you meditate for a short time to still the mind, before taking up a flask of ink and tossing it onto the floor. Lindy has practised Taoism and Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism for decades and it infuses all she does. “That mark that happens is understood to be the entire working of the universe in that moment,” she says. “Everything that has come together, the air temperature, the this, the that, in order to make this mark. So that type of calligraphy is understood as being the calligraphy of the universe.”

Visiting a foundry with her friend, student and fellow artist Nell, Lee watched staff pour cauldrons of molten bronze into a mould and noticed some dripped onto the floor. She recalls, “I couldn’t care less about what they were making, but those drips were completely mesmerising.”

Lee collected the “rubbish” drips, polished them and created beautiful pieces that became her flung-bronze works, which include placeless, nameless, traceless, which was exhibited in Part One of the National Gallery’s Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now exhibition last year. “It’s a notion of the absolute coming together, of everything in the universe at that moment,” she says. “I’m fascinated by that. … We are these bits of flung stuff that have come together to create what we are.

So the flung bronze or the flung ink is a metaphor for existence.”

Lindy then met with the team at UAP, who showed her how to create this type of work in a safe environment, and a decade-long working relationship was born. Moving into public sculpture was “inevitable”, she says, “the biggest step that I’ve made over the last 20 years.

“I trained as a painter and I never thought I would ever work three-dimensionally,” she continues, “so working in these big public spaces is immensely satisfying because you’re actually changing civic space and how people interact in these. You’re providing opportunities for pause and reflection, and also a sense of inclusivity of something bigger that’s actually very positive.

“I hope the works I make are mesmerising. I love the way they work – especially the stainless steel work, like outside the MCA or the Art Gallery of South Australia, and the Ouroboros at the National Gallery. During the day, these mirror-polished surfaces of stainless steel absorb and capture the images of the world.

So you get fragments of scudding clouds or birds or passersby or traffic. I love this idea that it’s receiving the imagery of the world during the day, and at night, because the lights are on and it’s dark, it sort of pulses this energy back into the world.

So… this kind of cyclical thing, which kind of gave rise to the Ouroboros, by the way.”

Ouroboros is Lindy’s most significant work to date. Based on the ancient image of a snake eating its own tail, the idea for Ouroboros emerged from Lindy’s preoccupation with infinity and eternity. “I started to think about the figure-eight,” she says, “and trying to make this sculpture out of the figure-eight wasn’t working. I was just playing around with ideas. And then, all of a sudden, I thought of the ouroboros, which essentially is this circle of infinity, the snake swallowing its own tail.

It’s about this eternal return, the cyclical nature of life, of birth and death and renewal, looping back to this moment here, now.”

This page Scenes from Lindy Lee’s studio in northern New South Wales.

Page 6 Lindy Lee, holding a maquette of Ouroboros, in her studio.

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Lindy Lee creating a flung bronze work.

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This page (Left) Lindy Lee in her studio; (below) Lindy Lee and her family in Brisbane in 1957, left to right: mother Lily Lee Kam Lan, Lindy, sister Joyce Lee-Horn (nee Lee) and father Phillip Lee Kam Chee. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Page 15 Lindy Lee, Ouroboros, 2024, (artist interpretation), courtesy the artist, UAP and Sullivan+Strumpf, © Lindy Lee.

Lindy’s Ouroboros will be sited at the entrance to the National Gallery and will stand about four metres high and weigh approximately 13 tonnes. It will be the artist’s first fully immersive sculpture; visitors will be able to enter the ‘mouth’ of the sculpture and walk into the curved interior to experience darkness punctuated by light beams emanating from the hundreds of perforations in its surface.

“I really wanted no internal structure, so that people could actually go into the belly of the beast,” Lindy says. “This is also the first opportunity I’ve had to make a truly immersive work, so that you can feel, you can experience a sense of being intrinsic to the work.”

The commission makes Lindy one of Australia’s highest-paid artists and comes amid the Know My Name initiative, the National Gallery’s ongoing commitment to support and exhibit Australian women artists. To receive such a commission in her late sixties, when the artist is heading, in her own words, “towards the winter of my life”, is “incredibly humbling” for her, particularly given that when she was a young female Asian emerging artist in Brisbane in the 1970s, she had no female role models. “I think it’s a really amazing and important thing that a woman of colour who is an Australian has been selected to make this major commission, not before time, because I think the spirit of place in Australia is actually about its diversity,” Lindy says. “Our culture is made up in the ways in which different cultures are rubbed up against each other to urge new forms. I think that’s a really important statement about inclusivity, which is what the Ouroboros is about.”

Lindy was born in Brisbane in 1954, under the White Australia policy, the archaic law aimed at limiting non-white immigration to Australia. The policy was eradicated in 1973 but was the backdrop to Lindy’s formative years and had a detrimental effect on her, and has, in turn, informed the themes that run through her artistic practice. “The trajectory of my work has come from the sense of deep unbelonging, deep dissatisfaction, terrible depression that I might say was almost suicidal. I will say that, actually, now I am in my sixties. ‘White Australia’ had a legacy that was awful,” Lindy says.

“However, through just the process of my work... this sense of not belonging kind of has expanded, somehow. It’s not about identity anymore. … My practice starts out from a very constricted idea of not belonging, travels through questions of identity and then, finally, with meditation, really, it becomes something different. It grows and it becomes more expansive.

“So, a lot of my work has come out of this sense of isolation and alienation and this sense of not really belonging, but really wanting to belong to this country.”

Lindy first realised she wanted to be an artist as a three-year -old. Lying on the floor of her Queenslander family home trying to draw, she was entranced by airborne dust particles floating through shafts of light. “I remember it was pure magic… particularly wondrous,” she says. “And I thought, ‘Oh, if only one day I could draw that.’

“I think that was that moment where I just knew there was something about art and its capacity to capture something

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and to communicate something more broadly than just speaking,” Lindy continues. “And then, curiously, it’s come full circle. I am making those works now that are sparkled with dust and light.”

It was a trip to the Uffizi museum in Florence, Italy, at the age of 25 that changed Lindy’s perspective on art. Among the galleries of Renaissance paintings she discovered Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes. “It was this incredibly violent and powerful painting of a woman chopping off this guy’s head. And, most remarkably, when I looked at the label, it had been done by a woman. And in that moment, I thought, ‘You know what? Maybe I can do this.’ So this is, again, the importance of role models,” she says. “That changed my life because it gave me the courage to step up to myself. And I guess I haven’t looked back since then.”

Lindy has been a mentor to artists including Nell – who was her student at Sydney College of the Arts in 1993 and to whom she also introduced Buddhism. She is also a mother figure of sorts to her assistants, cooking lunch for them and our crew – chicken-and-sweetcorn soup and salad made with produce from the veggie garden.

After lunch, we are sitting in Lindy’s favourite spot, a private sanctuary in the verdant grounds between her house and the studio. A statue of Buddha is the site of the scattered ashes of her former pets. It is also where she plans to spread Scott -Mitchell’s ashes. I bring up Birth and death, the work about the terminal illness of her 22-year-old nephew, Ben, which she has described as a creation to help her family heal.

Does she still find art therapeutic? Will creating Ouroboros help with her grief, which this year must be particularly raw?

“I have this smile when people say, ‘Oh, art is therapy’,” she responds, practising the smile, yet this time there is a shadow behind it. “Art is many things, but one of its functions is to allow us to bear witness to the deepest pains of our lives.

And if we don’t do that, we are going to trip around this planet and just be destructive. So art has a capacity to allow us to sink in and see the deepest pain we have... and just by seeing it we can have great compassion, just to be able to hold that.

And if you can hold that for yourself, you’ll actually learn how to hold it for others.”

She stops and for a moment her smile fades and her eyes tear up. It is the first time all day that Lindy has looked vulnerable.

Suddenly, Kevin starts barking incessantly at a bush turkey and the noise of the world comes back into focus.

This part of the garden is where Lindy comes to meditate each day. Here and at her local pool, where she swims every morning.

Being in the water is also where Lindy gets ideas for her work.

“Meditation is so important to me, and particularly swimming meditation,” she says. “One of the most succinct descriptions of meditation is just being head, heart and body together.

For instance, in swimming, I do an hour and a bit of just long laps; lap after lap. And this is boring as hell for the first half hour. But eventually it becomes this state where you allow this thought to come up and then another thought comes up and something happens. You let it go and you just allow that magic to come together and somehow in that swim, a solution will happen or a pathway will be clear.

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“My best ideas come from swimming,” Lindy continues.

“In fact, my team now understand, Lindy doesn’t get to work until 11am because Lindy is busy swimming! And they’ve seen the results. Before a swim, Lindy can get stuck, you know, like, ‘Oh, what’s the idea for this?’ After a swim it just comes together.” Art, Buddhism, swimming, meditation: these are all symbolic threads that run through Lindy’s life. They are intertwined, just like the Ouroboros.

Commissioned to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the National Gallery, Ouroboros is due for completion in 2024 and, in a stroke of serendipity, it brings full circle Lindy’s association with the Gallery. “I’ve always had a very soft spot for the NGA, because in 1984 [Founding Director] James Mollison was travelling around Australia and buying up young artists through an emerging artists fund he created, and when I had my first solo show he came and bought my work. I mean, how cool is that?” Lindy says. “And then Betty Churcher, who was my art history lecturer [at Brisbane’s Kelvin Grove Teachers’ College], becomes the first woman Director [1990-1997].

“In some ways I feel as if, unknowingly, the NGA has kind of nurtured me and helped me on my path. And now there’s an even bigger connection and that’ll be this massive sculpture, which will be a beacon for the NGA, I hope. If you think about Ouroboros and going back to the beginning when my first work was acquired, I’ve had 40 years with the National Gallery.” Lindy’s face lights up with that sparkling grin.

“Speaking of snakes eating their own tails, this whole journey with the National Gallery, for me, has been an ouroboros.” ● Lindy Lee: Ouroboros has been commissioned in celebration of the National Gallery’s upcoming 40th anniversary and is due to be completed in early 2024. It will be located in the Sculpture Garden at the entrance to the Gallery. To find out more, go to: knowmyname.nga.gov.au/events/lindylee-ouroboros ● To support the National Gallery Sculpture Garden Fund, go to: nga.gov.au/join-support/support-us

“This work is going to belong to the family of the Life of stars. The Ouroboros is the snake swallowing its own tail, the symbol of eternal return, cycles of birth and death and renewal. It will become a beacon, it will pulse with light and energy. I’m reaching for the stars.”

LINDY LEE

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Jeffrey Smart – the sitters

1 David Malouf, novelist:

2 Clive James, critic and broadcaster

“There’s always a kind of playfulness about the way Jeff sees you when he’s painting a portrait… Sitting for Jeff was remarkable because he liked to talk while he was working… and some of the stories were quite outrageous. So it was great fun, and we would just be in the studio alone and he worked for quite long hours and very painstakingly, both when he was doing the sketches and also when he was painting.”

“When he started painting me, I thought it was going to be a big portrait of me because he did a very meticulous head study and he kept up a running commentary while he was painting me, mainly about my physical deficiencies – apparently my ears are asymmetrical and my eyes are unusually small. There was quite a lot of that. The results were staggering; it’s a wonderful head study, I’ve still got it.

And I thought, ‘Well, the painting will be a big version of that.’ And then when I got to Sydney the following year the painting, undoubtedly it was big, it was huge, it’s like a tennis court, but me, the picture of me is a very, very tiny thing.

A little dot! I got used to that fairly quickly.”

Jeffrey Smart writing to David Malouf about the portrait in a letter dated 13 September, 1980: “Dear David, it’s midnight & I’ve come down to the studio to look again at your portrait. It is just floating on to the canvas.

Apart from being a portrait, it is, I feel sure, the best picture I have ever painted.

Perhaps it would be better not to have you pose again. Ermes [de Zan] says it looks more like you than any of the drawings… I’ll glaze it later… to give you that wonderful golden look you have.”

Jeffrey Smart on how small he painted Clive James: “He thinks, jokingly, of course, that it was a serious effort to put him down, but how could you ever put Clive down, ever?”

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3 Margaret Olley, artist “I am glad Jeffrey put me in the Louvre, for I am much more at home in the Louvre than on one of [his] freeways.”

Friends of JEFFREY SMART made cameos in several of his paintings – sometimes anonymously, sometimes as a portrait.

To celebrate his centenary exhibition, we hear from Smart’s famous sitters.

Jeffrey Smart on Margaret Olley in the Louvre Museum: “I was going to have figures in blue jeans, but then I thought it would be better to have a static figure, then I thought it might as well be a portrait, and then I thought of Margaret … but I don’t believe in the idea of the artist being psychologically penetrating. Whoever gave artists the perception to know the innate, secret things of a person’s heart?”

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All works by Jeffrey Smart: 1. Portrait of David Malouf, 1980, State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, Purchased 1983 2. Portrait of Clive James, 1991–92, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Purchased with funds provided by the Art Gallery Society of New South Wales 1992; 3. Margaret Olley in the Louvre Museum, 1994–95, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Bequest of Ian Whalland 1997 © The Estate of Jeffrey Smart.

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4 Ermes de Zan, Jeffrey Smart's partner

6–8 Self-Portrait

“The early portrait Jeffrey painted of me [North Sydney] was constructed.

He had done the sketches in Sydney.

He got me into the studio when we got back to Posticcia [Nuova, Italy].

He’d worked out the painting and in a sense he just needed a figure in that position. For Study for ‘Portrait of David Malouf’ [Ermes posed for this version], I was really just like a mannequin.

The last one, The Two-up Game (Portrait of Ermes), is the only time he really painted me as a portrait. I think he’d got the composition going and he wanted the figure staring out into the audience.

So then he said, ‘I’ll put you in.’ In the war, they would have two-up games.

I think he liked the idea of a composition of figures in that background, against the containers, against the trucks. I love it.”

“I always thought that painting was such a small thing, and it was all we could do to paint a picture. How does that compare to Beethovens’ 9th symphony?

T.S. Eliot wrote: ‘Words move, music moves, but that which is only living can only die. Words after speech, reach into the silence …, as a Chinese jar still, moves perpetually in its stillness.’

And I thought, ‘There we have it, he’s saying what art can do’. I’m convinced that Eliot must have known a lot about painting. If a good painting comes off it has a stillness, it has a perfection, and that’s as great as anything I think that a musician or a poet can do.”

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● Jeffrey Smart runs until 15 May. The National Gallery gratefully acknowledges all corporate partners and donors that have supported this exhibition.

5 Germaine Greer, author and feminist “The world which Jeffrey Smart has created out of familiar elements belongs to us. We can understand its extremely complex language. It is not a world meant to be savoured by strollers or applauded by passengers in hansom cabs; it is constructed on our own speed and scale, we read its arcane symbols effortlessly and just as stiffly translate them into sensation.”

JEFFREY SMART, in The Age in 1999

Jeffrey Smart on Portrait of Germaine Greer (which began when Smart saw a section of a wall at a football ground in Melbourne):

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“There were doors of two different colours and a lovely bit of graffiti, a spray-canned letter ‘R’. I thought, ‘That’s going to be useful one day, and made a sketch.

It evolved into a portrait of Germaine sitting on a chair in front of that wall.

I put her in a long skirt because I wanted more colour in the composition.

My frequent house guest, our brilliant filmmaker Bruce Beresford … says people think the ‘R’ next to Germaine stands for ‘ratbag’ – but it isn’t true. Germaine used to be a Tuscany neighbour, but she sold up and rarely comes to Italy nowadays, sadly. Ermes [de Zan] had lunch with her in England this year; they went to the Chelsea Flower Show together.”

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“I try to avoid having a person sitting in a chair and staring at you – it’s such a boring composition.”

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All works by Jeffrey Smart: 4. The two-up game (Portrait of Ermes), 2006, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healesville, Purchased 2006; 5. Portrait of Germaine Greer, 1984, Private collection; 6. Self portrait, Procida, 1950-51, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, Purchased 2016; 7. Self-portrait, 1940, Collection of Jenny and Rob Ferguson; 8. Selfportrait, 1993, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Purchased 2003 © The Estate of Jeffrey Smart.

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Mabel Juli: the moon and the stars

Ever Present: First Peoples Art of Australia surveys historical and contemporary art by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists from across Australia with works drawn from the collections of the National Gallery and Wesfarmers Collection of Australian Art. To celebrate the exhibition at the Art Gallery of Western Australia and its tour to Singapore, we highlight senior Gija artist MABEL JULI and her story of forbidden love.

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“I like to do painting all the time. Mabel is my name. Ngagenybe yinginybe-ngirri gardiya name – Mabel, and blackfella name Wirringgoon. Wirringgoon is the Gija name of that little bird, the cockatiel. My mother named me after that bird.

My mum bring me here [to Warmun Art Centre] to look for job, went to do painting. Aunty Queenie [McKenzie] told me about painting. She asked me, ‘What if you do a little bit of painting, you might get something out of them?’ And they give me one little board and I would paint that little board.

I’m doing my Country. That’s where I do all my paintings.

I don’t paint another Country, I paint my own Country.

Darrajayin at Baliny – Springvale, that’s all. I like to go back there to my Country [Springvale Station]. When I’m thinking what I’m doing, I’m doing my own Country. I am working all day now, working, painting, painting – they would tell me, ‘You’re an artist now.’ And that’s right, that’s good, good for me, it’s nice.”

– Mabel Juli, Gija people Senior Gija artist Mabel Juli (birth name Wirringgoon) was encouraged to paint the Ngarranggarni (Ancestral stories) of her Darrajayin homeland by both Queenie McKenzie and Rover Thomas. Her distinct style draws ultimately on the East Kimberley aesthetic tradition of utilising natural earth pigments mixed with binder and ochre-coloured acrylic paint applied as part of a bold and contrasting minimalist colour -block patterning. This patterning and iconography is both ancient and contemporary, and came to the attention of the art sector during the late 1970s and early 1980s.

This imagery, which is associated with important Dreaming narratives and initially painted on ceremonial boards, was used and activated by senior ritual participants.

Paddy Tjamitiji and Rover Thomas were the initiators and key proponents of this practice.

Juli was born circa 1933 at a location known as Five Mile, near Moola Boola cattle station south of Warmun (Turkey Creek), Western Australia. Like many Aboriginal people of this period, she and her family grew up on and worked on several cattle stations in this region. Unfortunately, due to the introduction of equal wages legislation to the pastoral industry around the late 1960s-early 1970s, many Aboriginal people were forced off these stations and settled in nearby towns. By the 1980s, Juli was living in Warmun and through the encouragement of others began to paint Ngarranggarni and significant historical events.

Juli paints the Ngarranggarni her parents taught her when they took her to their ancestral lands – Karnkiny, Glingennayn, Marranji and Jiyirinny. These locations and the activities of the Ancestors associated with these locations are featured in her work. As a senior law and culture Elder, she has inherited cultural responsibilities and obligations to care for her Country.

Included within this is the supervision of and participation in the re-enactment of ceremonies and the communication via a visual language of the traditional iconography associated with the Dreaming to the next generation.

Juli says her iconic moon-and-star works – including Wardal and Garnkeny from the Wesfarmers Collection of Australian

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Art and Garnkiny from the National Gallery collection – tell a story of forbidden love.

“Garnkiny ngelmang rurt ngarri nginji. Wardel tal kerlurr ngarrkalen laarne pertij nginyi tanyi garnkiny. Wiji ke ngarri ngurramangpe ngewa tampurru-kal. Gangpelkpe nginini.

Kerlewirring tek nginini Nginini pirri nangkap parrrun na nginini pirri ngayimuwana murlinte ngenpenke. Purapurap ngeliyante wanemay pirri melakawum tam. Wurrji ngarri perrani yilak. Taam merrkernpem purakarr ngeliyante Nangkapwa perrayin kili namuwana ngininji. Merrkern taam nginji purap ngitji. Taam merrkernpem.”

“Well, this the Dream by Wardel and Garnkiny [star and moon].

That’s what my mother and dad told me about that Dream.

The moon sits in the east. The star sits on top of the hills, the moon came and climbed that hill.

“That moon loved his mother-in-law, but they told him he couldn’t love her and to go away. He left with shame and climbed up the hill and he was looking from on top [of the hill]. He told all the people that they were going to die.

He said that he would be the only one living. He cursed those people that he would be the only one coming back alive.

He told them while they were sitting down, ‘You are all going to die and I will... be alive, coming out. Every three days I will rise from the dead.’ They all died, and he was the only one that stayed alive. He came back as the moon, for three days every month. The site of this Dreaming is a place called Yariny Country in Darrajayin [Springvale Station], which lies south of Warmun. This is Juli’s traditional Country.” ● Ever Present: First Peoples Art of Australia is a National Gallery Touring Exhibition supported by Wesfarmers Arts. The exhibition is on at AGWA until April 18, 2022, before moving to the National Gallery Singapore in May 2022

This page (Above) Mabel Juli, Gija people, Garnkiny Ngarranggarni, 2013, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/ Canberra, Purchased 2019 © Mabel Juli/Copyright Agency, 2022; (below) Mabel Juli, Gija people, Wardal and Garnkeny, 2011, The Wesfarmers Collection of Australian Art, Whadjuk Boodja Country/Perth © Mabel Juli/Copyright Agency, 2022.

Page 21 Portrait of Mabel Juli, Gija people, photo and © Eddie Jim/Fairfax.

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Family matters

For more than four decades, Warrang/Sydney-based artist Cressida Campbell has sought inspiration from her house and local surroundings to transform commonplace experiences into single-edition prints and painted woodblocks. Her works combine keen observation with a delicacy of line and capture the overlooked beauty of the everyday. Working in her backyard studio, Campbell brings her intuitive understanding of colour and composition to delicately detailed arrangements of garden flowers, stacked dishes and compost scraps through to burnt bushland, rusty shipping containers and coastal panoramas. Her world is rendered with a strong sense of design and pattern, explored through the meticulous nature of her idiosyncratic technique.

Campbell grew up on Sydney’s north shore, the youngest of four children born to journalists Ross and Ruth Campbell.

During the 1950s, 60s and 70s, the suburban adventures of the Campbell family were recounted in a regular newspaper column written by her father, who shared humorous stories about his children using the pseudonyms Theodora (Sally), Lancelot (Patrick), Little Nell (Laura) and Baby Pip (Cressida).

For actress Nell Campbell, her father’s epithet became her stage name, first immortalised in her role as Columbia in the cult 1975 film The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and later as owner of the New York nightclub Nell’s. The two Campbell sisters recently caught up to talk all things art and life.

CRESSIDA CAMPBELL: Well, here we are – my wonderful sister, Nell Campbell, and myself in my living room. We’ve got together to talk to each other about our childhood and all sorts of aspects of our lives. But it’s mostly because I have been given this incredible opportunity of having a big survey exhibition at the National Gallery. Now, do you remember when I was born?

NELL CAMPBELL: I shall never forget it. One of the greatest times.

I was seven, our brother, Patrick, was 10 and Sally was 13. We were so excited about you being born. We weren’t allowed to visit you in the hospital because children weren’t allowed in at that stage.

Mum would wave from the window and then you came home and we absolutely adored you. We used to fight over who could hold you, who could give you all the love and attention.

CRESSIDA: I remember Mum said I came out with this enormous

shock of bright red hair.

NELL: And you had the softest skin imaginable, which is why you got the nickname ‘Butter’. So, why did you first like drawing?

CRESSIDA: I think I’ve always loved detail and Mum said I once said to her, “All I’m good for is drawing.” I think, like anything you are interested in doing and get some vaguely good results [with], that you like doing it. And I love drawing plants and animals and all sorts of things. So it just came naturally.

Ahead of a major new survey exhibition to celebrate the National Gallery’s 40th anniversary, Australian artist CRESSIDA CAMPBELL – who attended the opening in 1982 – is interviewed by her actress sister, NELL CAMPBELL, about art, life and her recent brush with death.

Photographs by SAM COOPER.

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NELL: It’s your favourite thing to do, it seems, like, if I say, “Oh,

I had the greatest day, I just lay down and read and had a swim and da, da, da,” you would go, “I had the greatest day, I painted all day long.” Now, you started collecting things very young.

What was your first collection?

CRESSIDA: I

started with stamps. I wasn’t interested in the valuable ones, the ones with just a head on it. They’re quite boring. But often the ones that came from places like Poland and Hungary and America had all these fabulous pictures

on them. I would spend hours rearranging the stamps in the album like a salon hang. And that’s exactly what I’ve got in this house and it’s what I’m doing in my pictures now in the interiors. The next collection was shells. When we went to Pearl Beach [on New South Wales’s Central Coast] as a child, we stayed in a very interesting old house at a friend of Mum and Dad’s who was a crime [writer].

NELL: Lester Cotton.

CRESSIDA: In those days, I’m talking, like, 1967, we went down to the rock pools in Pearl Beach and, unbeknown to me, Mum bought a few shells from the shell shop [at The Rocks] and she’d go ahead and wedge one of these shells in a rock pool. And they usually came from miles away, like New Guinea or Mauritius.

And she would say to me, “I’ve got a funny feeling that I saw just a glint of something in that pool.” And you’d put your finger into a sea anemone and then wedge out an [empty] cone shell from New Guinea that is [usually] totally poisonous. And we’d go back and look [it up in] the shell book and I’d say to Mum, “Why do you think a shell from New Guinea would be in Pearl Beach?” and she’d say, “Oh, darling, I think it was that storm we had last week.” So that was the beginning of the shell collection. As you can see, I’m an eclectic collector. I now like Japanese ukiyo-e prints and quite a bit of Indigenous art and Asian ceramics that I put in my work, and I’ve got fabrics by Sally, our other sister, who is a textile designer.

NELL: I’m wearing her outfit right now.

CRESSIDA: Every cupboard in the house is full of Sally Campbell

textiles.

NELL: Did you like being a teenager?

CRESSIDA: I loved primary school and I absolutely loathed being a teenager… but I got in with the wrong crowd and was a complete idiot. I left school and went on to the [Australian International Independent School] and Paul Delprat, the painter who runs the Julian Ashton School, was my teacher and he was terribly nice.

I left when I was 16 and went to art school.

NELL: How long did you last in art school?

CRESSIDA: Well, it was the first year of Sydney College of the Arts…

I went to that school because it was meant to be brilliant and exciting. I only stayed for three days because they weren’t into drawing. But then I went to the East Sydney Tech, which is now the National Art School, because they were more interested in drawing and painting. It was a two-year course run by Roy Fluke.

I was thrilled to be there, but the problem was in that period – it was ’76 – everyone wanted people to paint like Cézanne and have a very big brush. And I don’t even know if Cézanne used a big brush, for that matter, but they wanted us to have these huge brushes and it was all very gestural. And to this day I still use sable brushes that are absolutely minute. So it just was completely the opposite and so that didn’t go with me. So then I did printmaking in the second year.

NELL: So that’s where you got into woodblocks, right?

CRESSIDA: Yes. I was studying etching and drypoints. And around about that time the Art Gallery of New South Wales had a big Margaret Preston show. It was a total eye-opener… and I was really taken by her woodblocks. I’d already experimented with

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had, it affected his health. He was incredibly helpful to me and had a really good eye. After Peter died in 2011, I spent about five years going quietly mad.

NELL: No kidding.

CRESSIDA: But

I did have lots of wonderful friends, and you and Sally and Patrick. And I used to go and get cards made of my work. And I was doing a whole lot of work with the cards at the studio of Warren Macris. He’s a photographer and probably Australia’s top photography and contemporary art printer. I met him and we got on absolutely brilliantly.

This page A scene from Cressida's studio.

Opposite Cressida Campbell at work in her home studio.

Page 24 Cressida and her sister Nell Campbell at the artist’s home on Sydney's north shore.

NELL: Because you met through your work.

CRESSIDA: We’ve been together five years.

NELL: And he’s just been the greatest.

CRESSIDA: He’s wonderful and he’s got a great eye, and like the way Mum used to help me edit the pictures, Warren’s very good at that too.

NELL: Now, you were great friends with Margaret Olley – what did she teach you?

CRESSIDA: Well, where do you begin with Margaret? She was an extremely eccentric and wonderful woman. She didn’t drive and I often took her to exhibition openings. And one time I forgot to invite her and I said to her later, “Sorry Margaret, I didn’t think you’d be interested.” There was dead silence on the telephone and she just said, “Cressy, never presume anything.” So that was one thing she taught me.

NELL: It’s a very

the Japanese traditional ukiyo-e technique. But I like the combination of painting and printing, whereas if you’re using the Japanese technique they scrub the block with ink, they don’t paint the block like I do. Anyway, the printmaking teacher, Leonard Matkevich, suggested I carve a block and just paint it with watercolour. So I did it very simply and then we put it through an etching press and that is sort of where it started.

NELL: So the only difference since that time is that you handprint?

CRESSIDA: I use to paint the block quite heavily with watercolour

paint. And Leonard and I would put it on the etching press, spray it with water, roll it through. And the first print would be very heavy, strong colour. And then we’d just keep doing it.

By the sixth print the print would be incredibly pale, more like watercolour. So there’d be six in an edition. And when I did the work at home when I left the Tech, I did small editions, but I had to repaint the entire block up in between each print and it was terribly boring, as you can imagine.

NELL: Of course,

that’s like being in a play – doing the same lines

every time.

CRESSIDA: And

in the end I started exhibiting the painted block and making one print. In more recent years, I actually spend a lot of time retouching and handpainting the print as well because there’s often quite a lot of it that needs work. So it’s just developed slowly.

NELL: So how long would you spend on one picture?

CRESSIDA: It depends, but I’d say at least three months, but if

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it’s big it takes longer. It’s maddening because I would love to do more. But it’s a combination of painting and printing that gets the results, and drawing. If I just painted, I have painted directly onto paper and they’re not quite as good.

NELL: Different effect.

CRESSIDA: I’ve found my language, if you know what I mean?

And unfortunately I’m sticking with it.

NELL: Now, one thing I meant to mention with your divine Asian pottery and paintings, you went to Japan to study Japanese woodcut printmaking.

CRESSIDA: Yes,

in 1985, after art school. It was fascinating but I realised it wasn’t for me. Because even though I love really good old ukiyo-e prints – I mean Utamaro and Hokusai, Harunobu and Eisen and other artists – it’s not a combination of painting and printing like the way I work. It’s a totally different method.

NELL: Tell us about when you met Peter Crayford, whom you married, and how that changed your life.

CRESSIDA: Peter Crayford was

a film critic. He taught me lots of things – he was an incredible chef, which I’m not, and he was a brilliant man intellectually. The main problem for him was that he nearly died at the age of 21 from Hodgkin’s lymphoma and it sort of dictated our life. Years later he said there were three people in our marriage and one of them was cancer. He ran a film festival in Adelaide and then ran the Australian Film Institute, and then the cancer came back. And then we met and fell in love.

It was always a worry and also because of all the radiation he’d

good piece of advice.

CRESSIDA: It is. It’s just that it’s hard to keep it. But she was incredibly supportive about my work and we had similar aesthetics as far as museums and she was insatiably curious about art and had some very difficult times in her life. She was a sort of magical person in a funny kind of way. In the end she was a great friend. And at times she would give me the odd bit of advice about work. And she adored Peter. It was a great friendship that lasted a long time.

NELL: Now, our darling mother, Ruth: did she contribute to your work in any way?

CRESSIDA: An enormous amount. From when I was a little girl she’d be encouraging. Later she helped edit, because when I finish painting a woodblock and make the print, sometimes I decide the composition isn’t that great with the woodblock and I just saw up the block. We would often have a lot of fun editing the blocks. I can do it myself, but she was a great person to…

NELL: To

play off, yeah.

CRESSIDA: Also, years earlier when I was doing quite a bit of work around the harbour and bush, she used to come and she made the most fantastic chicken sandwiches and we’d sit and she’d be my bodyguard, because you just don’t get bothered as much if there’s someone with you. We had lots of great times.

NELL: You have an exhibition coming up at the National Gallery to celebrate its 40th anniversary. How do you feel about that honour?

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CRESSIDA: It’s really amazing. The collection in that Gallery is awe-inspiring, especially for such a young gallery. It’s just an incredible compliment.

NELL: When did you

first go to the National Gallery?

CRESSIDA: Amazingly,

I went to the opening in 1982. Martin Sharp got tickets and asked me if I’d like to go. It was incredibly exciting. It’s such a sculptural building in itself. At the opening I found all sorts of things I loved – there were Rodin drawings, Durer prints, Ingres drawings, Piranesi etchings...

NELL: They

bought a picture of yours in 1987 – which picture

was that?

CRESSIDA: Yes,

funnily enough that was a picture called Through the windscreen. Peter had a Volkswagen that he drove from Adelaide to Sydney. It was actually a rather horrible sort of mustard but I made it red. A lot of the harbour pictures I did were around Greenwich where we grew up, because the Shell company had lots of very graphic, giant gas cylinders and there were lots of ships that came in and out, and it was fabulous bush combined with industrial stuff. You could park at the end of Vista Street and I just drew the windscreen and then looking through that was the harbour and the tanks. It was a pretty simple composition, but it was punchy. One of the Australian artists I’ve always really admired is John Brack – he and probably Margaret Preston have been the most inspirational to me. Our work isn’t at all the same, but Brack did a great picture of some people in a car and I got inspired by that. He also had a very good graphic sense with his still lifes, and saw beauty in often slightly grotesque things.

I wouldn’t say I see it in grotesque things, but I’ll see it in things like a grater and ordinary, everyday things.

NELL: Well, you always

NELL: It is. But there’s no doubt about it, it was a life-and-death situation. And it was life-changing.

and gardens. And I would like to do some portrait drawings, but they take so long I never do them.

CRESSIDA: Yeah,

NELL: You’ve

it was. I just wish it had changed me a bit more.

NELL: Oh, don’t be ridiculous. I was so glad that you’re back to your absolute normal self.

CRESSIDA: I wish NELL: Are you

it had cured me of a few bad habits.

someone who ponders death very much?

CRESSIDA: I’m not maudlin about it. I might say we both wanted to talk about our wonderful brother, Patrick, who was a brilliant scientist. He died two and a half years ago from lymphoma.

He was a solar energy researcher and more than 60% of the worlds’ solar panels rely on technology he developed in his PhD, but he was the sort of person that never boasted about anything.

And I think also because of Peter, I was very aware. We’ve just all got to be grateful for what we’ve got.

NELL: We

had our darling brother, Patrick, and we’ve also got Sally, our fabulous sister. Tell us about her.

CRESSIDA: Well, she’s absolutely charming and wonderful. She used to design in the film industry and now is running a textile business with her husband… and I’ve been using a lot of the images of the textiles in my work.

NELL: What subjects have appealed to you, and do you find that over the years the same subjects have come back into your work?

CRESSIDA: In

the beginning it was landscape a lot, bush and nature. I want to do a whole series on lichen. I love plants

been doing round pictures – what inspired that?

CRESSIDA: I got interested in them when the art shop was selling the odd round board. I’ve never really liked round pictures, but I am finding these really interesting. They’re very good with non-organic shapes. Like if you’re doing an interior with straight windows and lines that cut the circle, it’s quite interesting.

NELL: Absolutely.

And another great tip you gave me once is that the eye likes to have a rest.

CRESSIDA: Yes.

That’s why I’ve got 4000 images in the house.

I’ve lived out of Australia for half my life and now I’m back, and have been for some time. Do you like having me around more, Cress? Speak frankly.

NELL:

CRESSIDA: Of course I do. I love having you around… and we speak pretty much every day on the phone. What can I say? You’re an incredible person and wonderful and I love you madly.

NELL: Thank you, darling. The feeling is highly mutual. Dah-dah.

That’s it, treasures. Now, bloody well put on an exhibition.

Show us your stuff.

— Introduction by Sarina Noordhuis-Fairfax, Curator, Australian Prints and Drawings ● Cressida Campbell opens at the National Gallery on September 24. For more information, go to: nga.gov.au /exhibitions/cressida-campbell

said you love an obstructed view.

CRESSIDA: Japanese artists are absolute masters of this seeing a view through something rather than wham in the middle of your face. I love the way the Japanese appreciate the design of small household objects, like in Hokusai’s sketchbook.

I love tiles on a roof, a grasshopper, endless little fungi, just a fascination in looking at the…

NELL: the

minutiae of life…

CRESSIDA: ...

that most people may not take the time to look at.

NELL: Recently you were very ill and, in fact, almost died.

Do you want to discuss that?

CRESSIDA: Yes. I mean it’s part of life but, as you know, because you know how ill I was because you and Warren and Sally came and visited me every day, it was incredible.

NELL: Tell us what was exactly wrong with you.

Cressida Campbell works from the national collection.

This page Francis Street, East Sydney, 2000, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/ Canberra, Purchased 2000 © Cressida Campbell.

Opposite Through the windscreen, 1986, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/ Canberra, Purchased 1987 © Cressida Campbell.

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CRESSIDA: It was a freakish situation. I had an abscess in the brain, and at first it was misdiagnosed as a mild stroke. And then, three days in, I had a massive seizure and they realised it was either a brain tumor or an infection. And thank God it turned out to be an infection, but I had to have two brain operations and the first one didn’t work. And the right side of my body became paralysed, including my painting hand.

The neurologists all said I made a miraculous recovery.

It’s over a year now, but it’s almost unbelievable to think about it, isn’t it?

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Warwu Mrs N. Yunupiŋu The family of MRS N. YUNUPIŊU pay tribute to the innovative Yolŋu artist, a generous and unpretentious woman whose work touched and inspired many from her Yirrkala community and across the world.

Djulpan (Seven Sisters) Djulpan (Seven Sisters) and Ganyu Djulpan – two works

by Mrs N. Yunupiŋu that recently entered the national collection – depict the important Seven Sisters story relating to the Pleiades constellation. Both works feature Mrs N.’s recognisably individual designs and share information about when and where this important constellation can be seen from her Country. “[Seven sisters] went out in their canoe called Djulpan. During September onwards, they go hunting and always come back with different types of food, turtles, fish, freshwater snakes, yams and berries. They can be seen in the sky of a night, seven stars that come out together. The stars come in season when the food and berries come out, the stars will travel through the sky during that month until the season is over, and they don’t come out until the next season. My father told me about these seven sisters in a canoe, and the three brothers who came behind them, following them [Orion’s Belt]. They travel west.

That’s what my father told me.”

My sister overcomes dangerous things. She is a winner.

By Eunice Djerrkŋu Marika, as told to Merrkiyawuy Ganambarr-Stubbs One of Mrs N.’s childhood names, her nickname, is Gargark, used mostly by brothers and sisters in the family because she would just wander off on her own. If she wanted to do this or that, then there was no stopping [her], she would just do it. Whether it was to go collect honey, then nothing would stop her. She would find it and eat it all by herself. Her other name is Barkuma… it’s from the animal like a possum [northern quoll]. We would call out for her but she would never answer back. She would look or check out every tree for honey very carefully. Sometimes we had to sit and wait for her to come back, only when she’s good and ready.

And when she did return it was with something she had hunted and gathered like yams, ganguri, and lots of them too. And she would share whatever she got to everyone that was there waiting… her heart was really beautiful then.

She is kind and gives to everyone – maypal, ganguri, etc., djinydjalma, yunuŋaḻi, namura, dhän’pala [bush foods] – just gives them out to sisters, us sisters, and to our children.

Her idea of getting herself lost in her surrounding is because she is getting something like food/seafood, honey, slowly with no rush. That buffalo incident [the artist was gored by a water buffalo as a young woman] happened because she was too busy looking down and not around her. She was too busy looking for other things.

When Mrs N. was young my older sisters used to tell me that she was what they called yalŋgi, or floppy, and our mothers would bathe her with butjiriŋaniŋ, yawulurrŋaniŋ [medicinal herbs] or even covered her in a ground sauna and then would massage, pull and stretch parts of her body. Sometimes she was covered all the way up to her chest and the rest, especially her legs, was in the warm sand. Then she started walking a bit better.

Mrs N. is a very humble woman. Calm, her mind is djambatj – everything is collected carefully in a calm way. We rush; Mrs N. never rushes. And she will stay there until her bag or container is full. No never, never rushes – never; unlike us, the other sisters. That is what she is, that is her way of thinking, that is her rom (law).

Nyapanyapa Yunupiŋu, Gumatj people, Djulpan (Seven Sisters), 2020, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, Purchased 2021 © Nyapanyapa Yunupiŋu courtesy Buku-Larrnggay Mulka.

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Nyapanyapa Yunupiŋu, Gumatj people, Ganyu Djulpan, 2019, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, Purchased 2021 © Nyapanyapa Yunupiŋu courtesy Buku-Larrnggay Mulka.

The little things...

By Will Stubbs, Coordinator, Buku-Larrŋgay Mulka Centre

in a ground oven with granite chips and termite mound covered over with paperbark and sand, butchered according to Law.

I was sitting under a casuarina tree at Saliwuy Bay [Northern Territory] with young Indigenous curator Glenn IsegerPilkington waxing lyrical about Mrs N. Yunupiŋu and her art.

It was 2011 and Glenn was curating her and Gunybi Ganambarr in the Western Australian Indigenous Art Awards of that year. He had come up to meet the artists and was trying to get an understanding of Mrs N. and her art.

Mountains of dhän’pala (fist-sized clams) appear by the sackful. A fire warden turns these and tends with a deft stick, hardly breaking her conversation. Gossip and unspoken digs at absent miscreants. Sly smiles and loud guffaws at the gaps in the words as we download the things that shouldn’t be said about the people whose lives we share too intimately in a communal system. Scare the kids out of the water with an imaginary crocodile in rhythm with the beast.

It was one of those groundhog days at Yirrkala. Get in the ‘Troopy’, drive around town five times to pick up and deposit items and people that may or may not be going hunting that day. Have a bumpy run through the strobing stringybark forest before suddenly emerging at a crescent of clear blue sea framed in dead-white sand.

Pile out and everyone heads their own way once a fire has been lit, a camp raked and set, and the mats laid down. Men with spears wade into the mangroves, women with welding hammers and buckets attack the maypal (shellfish). What is in season is on. The tide is king. Kids are frolicking and making imaginary worlds. A big pannikin holds the tea and morsels come back regularly to be expertly cooked on coals.

Damper gets rolled out and then tucked in under the hot sand from where the fire has been shifted. Lashed with condensed milk and washed down with black tea. Crunchy orange heads of hermit crabs. Smoked mangrove oysters cut from one long aerial root open on the fire, 50 at a time. Giant trevally baked

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The smell of smoke and sound of snores as the afternoon progresses.

And like the misfit outsider I will always be, I am accepted.

But I still try to earn that acceptance, which I never can.

So I grab my spear and Glenn and I head off into the mangroves to do our bit. Glenn probably realises that he has backed the wrong horse here but, as always, is open-minded and generous enough to follow.

Cut to two and a half hours later and we stagger back.

Chafed, sunburnt, dehydrated, sunstruck and with a grand total of two measly mud crabs. We have thrown and missed at hundreds of targets, real and imagined, with no success.

We are greeted with the usual warmth and a cup of tea, with oysters and damper. Drop the crabs by the fire and slump on the mat. Next to us is Mrs N. and I see that she has a cut-down two-litre Coke bottle full of baby mud crabs, and it hits me.

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This page Nyapanyapa Yunupiŋu, Collecting wild apples, 2008, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, Purchased 2008.

Opposite Nyapanyapa Yunupiŋu, Sydney Harbour Bridge, 2008, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/ Canberra, Purchased 2010 © Nyapanyapa Yunupiŋu, courtesy Buku-Larrnggay Mulka.

apparent plan, or anxiety about the outcome, which results in works that appeal to such a wide range of humans when the subject matter is either insignificant or non-existent? Well, just maybe because they are experiencing time differently to us.

And could it be that this is what these paintings are expressing?

The Yolŋu and Mrs N.’s father famously resisted the theft of their land in the Yirrkala Bark Petitions and the Gove Land Rights Case. They were unsuccessful. So, for 45 years, 24 hours a day, the top five metres of their Country has been scraped off and sent overseas to be turned from bauxite into aluminium.

The cost of the bauxite ore (less than $100 per metric tonne) in the process of making aluminium is completely insignificant in comparison to the cost of power to smelt it. Old engineers thus wryly describe aluminium as ‘congealed electricity’.

In a sense, an ugly but weirdly accurate way to see a work from Mrs N. is as congealed humility. Or congealed patience.

Or even congealed timelessness.

Falling where they land in cross-hatch patterns. A random fractal complexity. A carpet of mindless patterned occurrences that somehow soothes our instinctive need to be in the presence of such organic designs. A collection of little things.

Could a human be so much a part of that rhythm of things that she could channel it into art that approximated the same genius?

Is that what satisfies us about being with Mrs N.’s art when it is so devoid of important meaning or statement? Only a fool would ask. And the exercise of trying to explain Mrs N. beyond feeling the art itself is the opposite of what her art is about.

Probably time to lie back under that tree and drift off to join the other snorers lined up along the mat. Until next time. ● Both essays are edited texts from the moment eternal: Nyapanyapa Yunupiŋu catalogue from the eponymous 2020 exhibition at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, reprinted with permission and © 2020 Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory

Returning to our seat under the mawurraki, the gaywaŋi.

The djomula’. The casuarina tree. Whistling tree, the she-oak, Casuarina cunninghamiana. A tree that sits within the poetry of the songspirals of the Yirritja moiety in that tense of the past/present/future.

It is dropping its leaves. Or rather, needles. Look down.

They are long thin marks on the white sand. About the size of one of Mrs N.’s brushstrokes made from ground ochre with a brush made from the straight hair of some young girl.

Look at the way the needles fall down upon one another.

“That’s it!” I cried. We have just walked for miles in search of an imagined bounty. We were thinking of what we could or would catch. And we were literally walking over these self-same crabs, which were running around within metres of where we had started. We couldn’t see them.

Meanwhile Mrs N. had barely strayed from her base and had effortlessly harvested the equivalent protein. Because of one thing. She could see what was there. The things that others couldn’t. The things that were invisible to those blinded by hoped-for things or wished-for things or planned-for things.

She could see the little things.

Mrs N. is in tune with the little things. The real. The actual.

She sees clearly the insignificant. She dwells in a world of insignificance. She sustains herself from it. She is herself ‘insignificant’.

As a Yolŋu artist who paints birrka’mirri, or anything paintings, rather than declaiming Yolŋu Law through sacred design.

As a tiny old woman who is basically deaf. As the little one with a quiet and gentle personality in a family of superhuman, loud overachievers. As the childless 13th wife of elder statesman Djiriny, who had 14 wives but only 11 children. As a Yolŋu woman who doesn’t speak English in a world where all resources have slowly accreted to those who do, and who insist that all negotiations take place in that language.

Mrs N.’s sisters are among the brightest, strongest, loudest, biggest and best people I have ever met. Two of her brothers – Galarrwuy and the late singer M. Yunupiŋu – of course,

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have been named Australians of the Year. She is never the one to step forward. In this family of leaders, she has always followed.

Her ascendancy in the art world is a seeming contradiction to all of this. It is a conundrum that an essay like this is meant to solve. The explanation is begged.

In the years of being a bystander to that phenomenon, I really haven’t cracked the code. Except, perhaps, in that moment of insight down by the beach. As trite as it sounds, that endlessly recurring day is the physical truth of the Yolŋu appreciation of time.

Albert Einstein wrote: “The distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

He understands that “each moment fully exists without reference to past and future”.

As does Mrs N. Each stroke of her brush has no idea what camebefore it and no concept of what may come next. Among physicists this understanding of time is known as eternalism.

It is also known as B-series, block universe or static time.

But for Yolŋu it is just time. A tense in which the past, present and future contemporaneously occur.

Mrs N. is not English. To try to wrangle with who she is and where these paintings emerge from, we cannot approach from where we are sitting. We are going to have to get up and shift our view. Move left, right, up or down. Look behind us, put our head on its side, get up a ladder, squint.

How can someone paint so many lines so patiently without any

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Hollywood actor, comedian and musician STEVE MARTIN is a passionate collector of Australian First Nations art and recently joined the board of the American Friends of the National Gallery of Australia (AFNGA). Part of his collection features in the exhibition 50 Years of Australian Aboriginal Art at the Australian Consul-General’s residence in New York alongside works from the collection of American venture capitalist JOHN WILKERSON. To celebrate the exhibition and the Gallery’s upcoming Triennial: Ceremony, they sit down with AFNGA Chair CAROLYN FLETCHER AM in New York and discuss their passion for collecting First Nations art. Photographs by KIERAN MURRAY. CAROLYN FLETCHER: The National Gallery has the largest collection of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art in the world, which began before the Gallery was opened in 1982. At the Australian Consulate-General in New York we recently launched the special exhibition 50 Years of Australian Aboriginal Art, featuring works from the collections of Steve Martin and his wife, Anne Stringfield, and John and Barbara Wilkerson. This unique exhibition brings together the early works of groundbreaking Papunya Tula artists in 1971 with paintings by some of the leading contemporary Aboriginal artists who followed them.

The exhibition celebrates the significant period in one of the most extraordinary art movements in the 20th century.

John and Barbara have a significant collection of Papunya Tula works, while Steve and Anne collect large canvases by contemporary Aboriginal artists. When I saw these two collections, I realised that there was an opportunity to present a show that would be a unique way to celebrate this significant moment in Australia’s artistic and social history. And with the Gallery’s 4th National Indigenous Art Triennial: Ceremony opening in the same year the Gallery celebrates its 40th anniversary, I thought it would be a great way for the American Friends to celebrate and support the Triennial and the Gallery’s pre-eminent collection of First Nations art.

I was just in Australia before the pandemic.

Marty Short [the actor and comedian] and I were there, and Anne, my wife. We went to every city, including Perth, and went to all the museums. It was great. Saw the [Janet] Holmes à Court Collection in Perth – just staggering.

STEVE MARTIN:

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CAROLYN: You are two of America’s most respected, dedicated collectors of Australian First Nations art, and we’ve brought your two collections together to form this exhibition. I’d love to know how you started your collections. John – when did you first experience a piece of Aboriginal art and what attracted you to it?

Actor Steve Martin with a work from his private collection - Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Anmatyerre people, Untitled, 1990 - on display during the exhibition 50 Years of Australian Aboriginal Art at the Australian Consulate in New York.

JOHN WILKERSON: I remember reading one of Robert Hughes’s books and he said that Australia’s most significant contribution to art was the Aboriginal art movement. About 25 years ago we visited Australia when my son did a junior year abroad in Sydney.

My wife, Barbara, and I went to a regional museum in Darwin and another government building that was packed with

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beautiful pieces, including a car door that had been painted.

That really grabbed me. Everything took off from there.

CAROLYN:

Steve, what drew you to it?

STEVE: Well, I had a first experience that was legitimate. And then a second experience, which was illegitimate. The first experience was in 2015 when I opened The New York Times arts page and there was a show at Salon 94 gallery [in New York] of Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri’s art. There was a big photo of him and he looked like a god. He was standing next to these pictures that were essentially vibrating. And I said, “What’s this?” It was a warm, sunny Saturday. I got on my bicycle and I went down, and I still didn’t know much, but my wife and I bought one and we hung it in our house. But I didn’t really connect that there was a movement. I just thought, ‘I like this artist and I like the story.’

A couple of years later somebody posted on Twitter a painting

by Anna Petyarre. I was so taken with it. So I started searching and went down these dark internet holes. And I bought a few dubious pictures, but I ordered history books and found it really fascinating. One thing I liked is that it was a finite period, you could actually see the beginnings, see the development, see the roots, understand the narrative, try to understand the Dreaming. And then I read newspaper articles on the Pintupi Nine, which I thought was a fantastic story. And one thing I loved was the headline of the paper said, “We find the lost tribe.” And Warlimpirrnga said, “We weren’t lost.”

I love the story. Then I kept investigating articles, books… and I read an article by scholar Ross Bowden, who had written a piece on Aboriginal art. I called him and he put me in contact with [Melbourne dealer] D’Lan Davidson, who thankfully set me straight with the importance of not breaking the provenance line. So that was really interesting and helped set me on the path to get better, legitimate paintings. I also came across Fred Myers, an anthropologist who lived with the Pintupi the late 1970s and now lives in New York. I met him and he was extremely generous and very smart. His books are great.

CAROLYN: John, how did you build your collection? Did you come across galleries or advisors?

When we went to the museum in Darwin – we were fortunate as they were featuring the early Papunya Tula boards, and that piqued my interest. So I started studying, as Steve did, and learning the same lessons. In that trip, we probably bought about 12 paintings. We made a few mistakes but learnt so much.

JOHN:

We were fortunate to meet Irene Sutton, who runs Sutton Gallery in Melbourne, and we developed really a close bond with her. She was our eyes and ears and sleuth on the ground.

And she did the provenance work on every piece. And she introduced us to D’Lan. I have a lot of faith in him.

That’s so fortunate; being Americans on the other side of the world trying to build worthwhile collections, to be able to find a dealer that you can trust and work with is critical to building the collections that you both have.

Can you tell us about your favourite painting in this exhibition?

CAROLYN:

STEVE: I don’t really have a favorite. Do you, John? You must, because you have these masterpieces. I have the Wilkerson

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Collection book [catalogue from a previous exhibition of John’s collection in New York 2009]. I thought, ‘Well, the Pintupi boards are done, there’s no competing in that world.’ But I actually just really loved these later pictures, because they slot into the contemporary art world. And that’s what I found appealing, these rival international paintings, abstract paintings and their narrative, which is bizarre.

You don’t think of abstract paintings as being narrative.

It’s not just, “Oh, it represents the soul.” It tells a real story.

With John’s Papunya boards it’s very clear that they are telling a story. We don’t necessarily know what it is until someone explains, but they’re full of symbols and the iconography of their culture, of their Dreamings.

Can you explain how you feel that your paintings resonate?

CAROLYN:

When Steve was talking, the first thought that came to my mind is, ‘This exhibition is like bookends.’ And if we were to start today, my wife and I would probably collect women’s contemporary paintings [like Steve’s].

JOHN:

CAROLYN:

Why is that, John?

They’re just beautiful. We decided not to expand, but it hasn’t spoilt my taste for it.

JOHN:

STEVE: I feel the same way about early pictures. Couldn’t really get started, but I love it.

CAROLYN: For this exhibition, because we are limited by space, I decided to get bookend collections, to help people understand the extraordinary movement that has been in Australia.

We are standing in front of two paintings that make that point very clearly: over there is the Papunya board from John Wilkerson’s collection, painted in 1976 by Willy Tjungurrayi.

And then opposite, on the other side of the room, we have this painting by Willy Tjungurrayi from 2015 from Steve’s collection. It’s the same artist, and that’s the distance he’s travelled, which is quite extraordinary.

When I think of the distance in Western art, it took 150 years to foreshorten an arm. The dramatic difference as this progressed. I also think another great story is the progress of the women painters, because it was all men at first and restricted to men, and then slowly they became overwhelming, to the point where they dominated.

STEVE:

CAROLYN: It wasn’t until after I had made the selection from Steve’s collection for the exhibition that I realised that five out of the nine were by women, and women really have risen to the fore through the more modern, abstract era.

JOHN: There are 12 paintings from our collection here and there are no women artists.

CAROLYN:

That’s correct.

No women. It might be interesting... We’re looking at the early board from ’71 [Stars, Rain, and Lightning at Night

by Kingsley Tjungurrayi]… To the best of our knowledge, this is the earliest Papunya board known, and they have records of, and this is listed as an allotment number one, painting number three. And we don’t know where one and two are. But this is how it started.

JOHN:

This page (Above) Makinti Napanangka, Pintupi people, Kungka Kutjarra, 2001, from the collection of Steve Martin; (right) Kingsley Tjungurrayi, Pintupi people, Stars, Rain, and Lightning at Night, 1971, from the John Wilkerson collection © the artists.

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STEVE: I almost feel it’s a little disrespectful to try to learn it too much or think you know it, because you can’t.

(Left to right) AFNGA chair Carolyn Fletcher with Steve Martin and John Wilkerson with Kaapa Mbitjana Tjampitjinpa, Anmatyerre/Warlpiri/ Arrernte peoples, Ngalyilpi (A Small Snake), 1972, from the Wilkerson collection, on display during the exhibition 50 Years of Australian Aboriginal Art at the Australian Consulate in New York.

CAROLYN: Well, these paintings are John’s. Clearly they do mean a great deal to the artists and do tell a story. We may not be able to understand it. It’s clear that that’s what’s going on.

Steve, these are your paintings.

STEVE: Well, I don’t know the story exactly of this one, but if you think of them as aerial views… This is quite refined.

If you look at the Makinti, it’s more detailed about the rock holes, the journeys, the places, the hills, where they slept, where they went. And it wasn't about this picture, but it was a description that Makinti gave of a different painting, and she was describing it and she said, “We journeyed here.”

Or the women went here, then they’re looking for yams and then they’re doing something else. And then they slept at this rock overnight and froze to death.

So there’s a lot of narrative going on, that we can either halfknow or not know. But the shimmer of this landscape is...

When you’re in Australia, you feel that shimmer, flying over it, not going in. And it’s pretty sophisticated, how she figured out to get that shimmer with these lines, and almost like the lines are dotted, yet they give the appearance of a whole line.

I love in the books, in the histories, you can actually find out what painting was in the trunk of a car that went to Alice Springs. I love that documentation.

STEVE:

Well, that’s very important, because there has been quite a bit of unfortunate exploitation in Aboriginal art. When you’re seriously collecting, you need to know the provenance.

CAROLYN:

STEVE: Another

thing I find interesting is it’s the reverse of modern contemporary artworks motivated by young people.

Aboriginal art is motivated by older people. One of the greatest artists didn’t start until she was 80: Emily Kame Kngwarreye.

Yes. And now she’s probably one of the greatest Australian artists.

CAROLYN:

JOHN:

I think Steve has one of the greatest Emily paintings.

STEVE:

It’s a nice one.

I was at a dinner last night with Ai Weiwei for his new memoir. The fellow that was on table with me was very proud that two years ago he bought an Emily.

JOHN:

STEVE:

Really?

And he showed me a picture, and it was a beautiful one.

I told him: “You should see the one that Steve got.”

JOHN:

CAROLYN: Well, he’s welcome to come and have a look! One of the things that’s interesting is that a lot of the abstract contemporary art is painted by middle-aged artists who are in their forties by the time they are really hitting their stride. Whereas with the Pintupi boards they were, as you say, older artists using their traditional iconography. And they painted sitting on the floor.

STEVE: That’s another thing I found interesting – because they’re painted on the floor, there’s no ‘up’. They’re moving around the picture, painting it. So it’s all over, going this way, that way.

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JOHN: You’ve just STEVE:

solved my hanging issue.

Yeah, if it doesn’t fit, I just turn it lengthways.

CAROLYN: John, are there any paintings here that you particularly love apart from Number 1?

Very much like Steve, I actually don’t have a favourite.

I have a couple of artists that I gravitate toward. Uta Uta [Tjangala] is one, but I’ve had this painting here by Clifford Possum [Tjapaltjarri] in the entranceway of my apartment.

JOHN:

STEVE: We just bought a Clifford Possum and lent it to the Kluge-

Ruhe Museum [at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville]…

I was just thumbing through a Texas auction house email and there’s knives and forks, plates. And then there were two Aboriginal pictures, one of which was Clifford Possum. And I wrote D’Lan, I said, “It’s US$17,000. Is this real?” And he said, “We’re already on it.”

CAROLYN: Got

to be quick.

STEVE: I ended up purchasing it for the Neiva [National Endowment for Indigenous Visual Artists] coalition.

Did you think that you learnt very much about Aboriginal culture as you’ve collected?

CAROLYN:

STEVE: Well, you

get informed, but you can’t really learn something so subtle. I’m reading it in books.

I agree. I learnt by doing rather than reading. We went to two remote areas: Kintore and Kiwirrkurra [in Western Australia], and spent a night or two in each of those places.

And I just, I sensed. But I skimmed the surface.

JOHN:

CAROLYN: Well, as you were saying, it is one of the most ancient cultures in the world. You can’t imbibe it and have it in you like they do.

CAROLYN:

You also have a rather nice personal story.

STEVE: Oh, yes. Well, I had been collecting these pictures with my wife and I thought, ‘I've never really seen them all together.’

So we rented a little private gallery space at our storage place.

And we just hung them up in two galleries, invited a few people, it wasn’t for the public. And I was just so knocked out by the way they looked. And coincidentally, Yukultji Napangati, who painted this picture, was in town and having a show at Salon 94. So I said, “Maybe you could come out,” and they did. And she was there with her daughter. And it was so interesting to see her up against the painting. And you could see her almost reliving what she had done. She was very involved with it, because she could read it. And then she and her daughter came to our apartment and we played the banjo. She liked that. And she made my daughter a family member, which is quite an honour.

CAROLYN: Wow.

Yeah. And I got the readout of how it works. So that was a big night.

STEVE:

CAROLYN: Very special. Steve, I think you once said that what you loved about Aboriginal art was the lack of irony.

STEVE: But that’s true. I would say that much contemporary painting – I’m not a critic of it, I like it – but it’s all imbued with irony. Even an interior of a household is ironic in some way, whether it’s been flattened or the coffee pot becomes a very significant thing, and this is utterly sincere. And when I first started collecting it, they were all named the same thing: My Country. And I found it very emotional. To me, it all comes under that umbrella of ‘my Country’, where they live. And they’re so close – they couldn’t be more intimate with the land.

the early boards we have, they recorded the painter singing. So we have cassettes. This reminds me, I need to get that transferred to something, because I don’t know how long

that plastic will last. Also, our paintings are in two groups: those that are acceptable to be seen by everybody and then those that are not. We didn’t have the wisdom and experience to make that decision when we purchased them… so we retained a fellow by the name of Kimber, from Alice Springs, and over about two years he went out to the remote sites where the artists’ families were. And he shared what the families said about the painter and the paintings, and why they as a group felt this could be seen and this one could not be seen. That was pretty amazing.

CAROLYN: When you both see your collections together this way, does it in any way change the way you see your own collection?

STEVE: Definitely for me…It’s almost like it’s not two stories. It’s one story. You can mix and match early and late, and it still works.

I just love that the painting community is getting this recognition.

JOHN:

CAROLYN: Steve,

you have a large collection, some of which is in storage. And I just remember the pleasure you seem to have at the thought that these paintings were going to be hung somewhere where people could see.

STEVE: I think they look great in a room. I just love the way they envelop you. If we look at these two pictures here, George Tjungurrayi, Untitled (2017), and Warlimpirrnga Tjapaltjarri, Untitled (2017), it has this element of the Rothko Chapel, where you’re surrounded by these big moody pictures.

JOHN: Do you have any of the large ones on show in your apartment?

STEVE: Yes. CAROLYN: Steve,

you obviously love collecting, and you’ve also started an endowment fund for Indigenous artists.

STEVE: I’ve

teamed up with D’Lan and another collector, and we feel the contemporary artists are undervalued.

So I said, “Well, how can we support this?” And he’s a dealer.

So we dedicated a portion of profits to a new foundation, Neiva. National Endowment for Indigenous Visual Artists.

Part of the money that the gallery earns would go into this fund that goes back to the community.

It’s a path-breaker. It’s interesting that D’Lan has been an intellectual father of this, certainly, but it’s gained momentum through American funding.

JOHN:

John, you’ve made some contribution to the National Gallery of Australia. How did that come about?

CAROLYN:

A few years ago the National Gallery was offered a wonderful collection of early Board paintings and I was very pleased to join the group that funded this important acquisition.

JOHN:

JOHN: One of

→ Continued on page 79

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On the corner of a New York City street in late Autumn 1953, the artist Suzie Gablik introduced Jasper Johns to Robert Rauschenberg. Both men were aspiring young artists living through a moment of despair: Johns had recently left art school after a bout of illness and had resigned himself to only painting on Sundays over a bottle of wine, while Rauschenberg had endured a series of negative reviews for his exhibition at Stable Gallery, where he only sold a single work. But this chance meeting would change their lives, as they fell in love. It would also change the trajectory of American art in the 20th century.

Rauschenberg and Johns were in a same-sex relationship during a time when it was illegal in the United States. This meant they had to navigate a homophobic society that prohibited the public expression of their sexuality. Their relationship was immensely private. At the time, New York’s artistic culture was focused on Abstract Expressionism, an art movement often framed as heroic and an exposure of the self and subconscious. As young gay artists on the periphery of this movement, they quickly came to realise that the Abstract Expressionists were publicly performing a type of identity, what Rauschenberg referred to as an “exaggerated emotionalism”. Aware of their personal circumstances, Johns and Rauschenberg could not participate in an art movement fixated upon ideas of self-revelation.

Or as Johns would say, “I didn’t want my work to be an exposure of my feelings. Abstract Expressionism was so lively – personal identity and painting were more or less the same.” Instead of participating in this art movement, they colluded: “Jasper and I used to start each day by having to move out from Abstract

Expressionism,” said Rauschenberg. “We were the only people who were not intoxicated with [them].”

The pair moved into adjacent New York studios in September 1955; Rauschenberg encouraged Johns to quit his job and start taking himself seriously as an artist. This was the beginning of their private artistic dialogue, where they would see each other every day for a period of about five years, exchanging ideas, materials and even completing each other’s work. “For a number of years we were each other’s main audience,” said Johns, working “on a daily basis to the exclusion of most other society.”

Together they explored the idea of developing art that was not self-expressive, what Johns would describe as “making a picture which somehow has a public life [but] not making a picture of oneself to have a public life”. Influenced by the work of the Dadaist Marcel Duchamp, their exchanges began to develop a new ‘indifferent’ visual style based on collage, everyday materials and physical processes closely associated with printmaking, such as stamping and stencilling. What they created and discovered together became the crucible for their lifelong practices and soon their work would influence a new generation of artists working in the emerging style of Pop Art. Rauschenberg and Johns would surface from their cloistered creative dialogue in 1958 and began to publicly exhibit their work again. It is no coincidence that their relationship would end a couple of years later, due to the sudden increase in public attention and art criticism they received. “What had been tender and sensitive became gossip” for both artists and according

A chance meeting made a profound impact on the lives – and art – of ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG and JASPER JOHNS, writes DAVID GREENHALGH.

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This page Robert Rauschenberg, Booster from Booster and seven studies, 1967, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, Purchased 1973 © Robert Rauschenberg.

VAGA/Copyright Agency 2022.

Opposite Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns in Johns's Pearl Street studio. Photograph Collection. Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Archives, New York. Photo: Rachel Rosenthal, 1954.

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to Rauschenberg they split over the “embarrassment about being well known”. Their personal split was irreconcilable, but their artistic lives continued to develop parallel to each another.

Both Rauschenberg and Johns became key artists in the American revival of fine-art lithography in the 1960s, where they would push at the boundaries of what was possible in the medium while also surreptitiously encoding small snippets of biography into their prints. Working closely with master printer Kenneth Tyler, Rauschenberg would create what was then the world’s largest hand-pulled lithograph, Booster, a self-portrait that conceals information about his personal life during a time of crisis.

Similarly, Johns would produce experimental ‘prints’ made of embossed lead, such as The Critic Smiles, which poked fun at the published criticism that he and Rauschenberg received in the early ’60s in camouflaged terms that only those close to him would understand.

Ideas from their early creative dialogue would surface throughout their lithographic experiments, such as their conviction that despite our cultural assumptions, “there’s no such thing as ‘better’ material” for making art. This led to Rauschenberg’s provocative Cardbird series in 1971, where fine art lithography processes were used to recreate the worn surfaces of junk cardboard boxes.

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In the same year, Johns would produce a series of lithographs called Fragments – According to What that used precision drawing, ready-made stencils, newspaper clippings and cast shadows to create the work and avoid expressive mark making.

He would even cross out his own signature on the work Hinged Canvas as if to deny his authorship.

The ‘indifferent’ and anti-expressionist styles of Rauschenberg and Johns were born out of the tension between an artwork’s visibility and their need for personal invisibility during their relationship. By making an audience of each other, it allowed them to reconcile this. Later, when Rauschenberg was asked what the most important thing he got from Johns was during this time, he simply answered: “Courage. Persisting upstream.”

— David Greenhalgh is the Assistant Curator, Kenneth E. Tyler Collection, Prints and Drawings ● Rauschenberg & Johns: Significant others, presented with the assistance of the Tyler Charitable Foundation, runs from 11 June to 30 October.

This page (Right) Robert Rauschenberg, , Cardbird box II; from Cardbird series, 1971, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, Purchased 1973 © Robert Rauschenberg. VAGA/Copyright Agency, 2022; (below left) Jasper Johns, The critic smiles, from Lead relief series, 1969, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/ Canberra, Purchased 1973; (below right) Jasper Johns, Bent “U", from Fragments - according to what, 1971, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, Purchased 1973 © Jasper Johns. VAGA/ Copyright Agency, 2022.

Opposite Jasper Johns (left) and Kenneth Tyler at the Gemini GEL print studio, Los Angeles, 1971. Photo by Peter Balwan, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, Gift of Kenneth Tyler 2002 © 2022.

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Two artists, two generations, two perspectives: JUDY WATSON, Waanyi people, and HELEN JOHNSON have forged a dialogue on the roles of women in contemporary and colonial Australia, presented as part of the Balnaves Contemporary Series at the National Gallery.

Here, they discuss the work, which was complicated by lockdowns and location – Judy was in Meanjin/Brisbane and Helen in Naarm/Melbourne – with TINA BAUM, Larrakia, Wardaman and Karajarri Curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art at the National Gallery.

The red thread of history TINA BAUM: This exhibition,

the red thread of history, loose ends, is a dialogue between the two of you through your art. For this exhibition you’ve both, from different perspectives, forged a material and conceptual dialogue about contemporary and colonial Australia. What do you think of your pairing and how do your works relate conceptually?

HELEN JOHNSON:

I remember Judy saying: “It’s a shared history and nobody gets away with it.” That became a kind of touchstone for me. Judy and I have such different subject positions but with the commonality of womanhood. I was thinking about the work that can be done from these perspectives and what happens when they meet... I feel like colonial Australia and contemporary Australia are one and the same thing. This is part of the continuity that runs through this exhibition and is alluded to in the title: The Red Thread of History.

This page Judy Watson, Waanyi people, with six moons, water sky (balangarra, wanami bala), image courtesy of the artist.

Opposite Helen Johnson with Women’s work (1902) 2017, commissioned 2016 with funds from the Future Collective through the QAGOMA Foundation.

Image courtesy of QAGOMA, photograph by: Natasha Harth, QAGOMA.

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JUDY WATSON: There are parallels in the way that we look at history and try to deal with it and work with it as artists, and to bring it into our current perspectives as women and mothers, living in Australia… with the burden of what happened on this continent in terms of colonisation… [there are also parallels in our artistic practice and ways of making meaning through materiality. And there’s a certain tenderness within the work.

It’s a historicising of fact and research, but there’s

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a tender stamp of femininity too, which is very powerful. Subtle, but powerful.

TINA: Did your engagement with each other change

how each of your works developed for this show?

HELEN: It definitely affected my palette. I have a tendency to use quite bombastic colours, which didn’t seem appropriate for this body of work.

I was partly thinking about the colour red and the role that it plays in Judy’s work, and it comes into my work, but the intensity of that colour and its symbolism has stayed with me and influenced my decision-making when I’m mixing paint.

Helen’s work and how it will be in the space has been in the back of my mind… and how the works will spark ideas and conversations. It’s almost like when we are not there, the works will be chatting to each other. It’s a sort of osmosis or poetry that moves between artists, a shared language, in a way, even though we might come from different positions.

JUDY:

Because we both make works that are free-hanging in space, there’s a level on which they function pictorially, but there’s another level on which they function bodily… depending where you are in the room, you get all these different connections and perspectives.

HELEN:

Truth-telling is one of your shared artistic concerns. How have you approached this in your works for this show?

TINA:

I put a great deal of thought into navigating what’s appropriate for me to reference in my work as a non-Indigenous person. I feel firmly that it’s not for me to tell Indigenous stories. And that becomes a complex thing to navigate when you’re addressing colonialism in your work… Where’s the line between respect and erasure if you’re not including Indigenous content?

HELEN:

When the National Gallery first approached me about this commission… one of the first things I said was that the work should be understood as one voice in a conversation… it would be most appropriately displayed alongside Indigenous voices, rather than just being this white woman kind of grandstanding about colonial processes. It needs to be collaborative.

I was interested in using maps of countries in our area and how women – my matrilineal Aboriginal heritage – sit within that. Helen and I also discussed colonial Australian politician Henry Parkes and how his quote at the 1890 Federal Conference about the “crimson thread of kinship” relates to the anthropologist Ernst Wreschner, who said ochre is at the beginning of every human civilisation around the world. As well as Henry Parkes and the crimson thread I want it to be clear that ochre is the ‘red thread’ to me. Blood and ochre, not just blue blood (crimson thread)…

JUDY:

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I hadn’t realised that Parkes is a suburb in Canberra, so [using the quote felt appropriate.

I sort of had Parkes in the back of my mind… and while making my work for this show] I started pulling out this imagery of young white women that was used as a symbol for newly federated Australia. In around 1900 there were a lot of cartoons accompanying articles about what shape federation would take, and newly federated Australia was always represented as a young white woman with Parkes as a sort of patriarch showing the way. When you read the first sessions of Parliament you can see that the whole thing was about white supremacy. It still is.

It’s the foundation.

HELEN:

This page (Right) Judy Watson, Waanyi people, joyce with queensland tenure map, 2021 work in progress. Image courtesy of the artist; (below) Helen Johnson’s work in progress; Works featured in The red thread of history, loose ends have been commissioned with the assistance of The Balnaves Foundation.

JUDY: It is, for sure… There’s been a lot of play in this exhibition with perceptions of cultural integrity and …with assumptions about what makes this country great. It’ll be interesting to see the conversations that erupt or are exchanged because of the works.

I don’t see art as a didactic project. It’s a way to start conversations. Difficult ideas are easier to put in the too-hard basket, but if there’s an aesthetic experience that it’s bound up in, people can find their way into it in a different way and start thinking about it in a different way.

HELEN:

TINA: Your

works for this exhibition speak to the experience of colonisation in Australia. Can you elaborate on the subjects embedded in the works?

HELEN: I’ve been working with quite a lot of archival material… these images [cartoons] of the young women of federated Australia. And going back into the Hansard record of the first sitting of the first parliament of federated Australia and… taking fragments from them and bringing them into the paintings... researching the people who spoke these often shocking words and finding their images and bringing them back to life [-sized] scale as people.

I’ve also been trying to focus on the connections between these colonial documents and… contemporary society. They’re parts of the same thread.

The mortar in colonial buildings around Sydney and other places – that’s a product of Aboriginal middens… the DNA of Aboriginal people… their saliva [from eating]… the oysters, is what is gluing history and colonisation together... It’s not just one white history you’re looking at when… seeing so-called old buildings in Australia.

JUDY:

TINA: Judy, you’ve always said that your work has been inspired by your matrilineal line and other family members. What else besides family inspires you?

→ Continued on page 79

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Love machine

“They react as we react. My machines are not washing machines or cars. They have a human quality and they must change. They get nervous and must stop sometimes.

If a machine stops, it doesn’t mean it’s broken. It’s just tired.

The tragic or melancholic aspect of machines is very important to me. I don’t want them to run forever. It’s part of their life that they must stop and faint.”

A visit to REBECCA HORN's studio and foundation in Germany, combined with exhibitions in Metz and Basel, offered a rare opportunity to survey the German artist’s practice and view the National Gallery’s new acquisition Les amants [The lovers], writes LUCINA WARD.

Artist Rebecca Horn, photo by Gunter Lepkowski, Berlin, Germany © Rebecca Horn - VG Bild-Kunst.

Rebecca Horn, Les amants [The lovers], 1991, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, Purchased 2020, © Rebecca Horn.

“The lovers prepare themselves, they bathe in pink champagne and black ink and embrace each other inside the painting machine. In a weightless state of love, in a crazed dance, they perform their painting.”

— Rebecca Horn Rebecca Horn’s studio and foundation in Bad König, Germany, is the site of a textile factory owned by her grandfather, nestled in the trees and hills of a picturesque resort town in the Odenwald ranges, about 60 kilometres south of Frankfurt.

The artist’s base since 1989, the Moontower Foundation operates as ‘a village with a museum,’ an archive, a space for concerts and studios for artists in residence.

The complex comprises a workshop, preparation areas and an overview of Horn’s art housed within light-filled, whitewashed interiors: in one of the larger, warehouse-type spaces, Kiss of the Rhinoceros performs a magnificent ritual, while her smaller sculptures, objects and drawings – sometimes in dialogue with the work of artists she has hosted – are accommodated in attic-like rooms

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with views to the surrounding landscape.

It is, altogether, a wonderful insight into the artist’s life and work.

suggesting prosthetics and augmented reality – to the machines and complex installations often incorporating sound.

Horn came to prominence in the 1980s for her use of performance, installation, sculpture and film in highly sophisticated and intertwined ways. Human-machine hybridity, alchemical transformation and animistic sensibility are key themes, and she draws on a rich history of European literature, Surrealism and popular culture. Some of Horn’s machines were made for use in her films, others were created as independent objects.

Rebecca Horn: Theatre of Metamorphoses highlighted the role of film in the artist’s practice and her use of animal, often surrealist, themes in mechanical forms.

Works by several ‘spiritual peers’ – Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and Méret Oppenheim – suggest the range of Horn’s influences.

Highlights included the dramatic and threatening Peacock machine, the exquisite butterfly-flitting Lover’s bed (from the film Buster’s bedroom) and the constantly buzzing Bee’s planetary map. Within the uppermost space in the building designed by Shigeru Ban Architects – its wooden, fibreglass and Teflon hexagon roof reminiscent of classic cane hats from China – the Dancing Snake Rope performed and snapped under the canopy, seemingly caged and ensuring visitors came to no harm.

When I visited in 2019, key works usually displayed at the Moontower Foundation were on loan to Rebecca Horn: Theatre of Metamorphoses at the Centre Pompidou -Metz in France and Rebecca Horn: Body Fantasies at the Museum Tinguely in Basel, Switzerland. These two distinct but complementary exhibitions explored Horn’s work over five decades, from her earliest body sculptures in 1968 – objects and instruments attached to her own or others’ bodies that explore contact between humans and their surrounds, with limb extensions or structures

Jean Tinguely, the artist’s works were in their element. Here, the focus was on transformation, with early performative works and later kinetic sculpture emphasising Horn’s key motifs and themes. Pencils, funnels, paint and other brushes – as well as feathers, butterflies, shoes, mirrors, musical instruments and typewriters – recur throughout the oeuvre. The liquid of earlier painting machines is directed onto stretchers, books, shoes or an egg.

In previous incarnations The lovers painted in a corner space and, on occasions, expanded to the floor; in Basel it extended over a long wall. In an adjacent gallery the installation El Rio de La Luna pumps mercury (or ‘liquid moonlight’) in ways which recall the veins of the human body, its passion and pain, as well as the larger systems of an urban space. In Fluchtkoffer a fluttering suitcase with paint-splashed interior periodically attempted escape via a pole spanning the double-height space. Both exhibitions demonstrate Horn as one of the most important artists of the second half of the 20th century, whose combination of technology and

human concerns, comedy and pain, menace and pleasure results in works that are startling, intriguing and often exquisitely beautiful.

The National Gallery has long sought a major work by Horn and several were under consideration for acquisition.

Ultimately, The lovers won out. Fuelled by a combination of ink and champagne, The lovers perform for one minute before pausing for three. When the correct mixture is achieved a long, wall-mounted motorised arm sweeps the wall, spraying and dripping across its surface. The painting complete, The lovers rest until next time. Horn’s machines confound notions of what technology can do but are, ultimately, without function. Despite and because of their precision engineering these objects tire, shudder or even, at times, seem to refuse to participate. All of them develop a distinct sense of personality: these are machines with souls. ● Rebecca Horn, The lovers will feature in the new collection display Worldwide, opening in late 2022

At Rebecca Horn: Body Fantasies in Basel, alongside machines and other extraordinary objects by Swiss sculptor

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As the National Gallery turns 40, we look back at architect Col Madigan’s geometric inspiration for the brutalist building, which opened in 1982 and is the inspiration behind this year’s Enlighten work by artist DANIEL CROOKS. Words by COL MADIGAN, photos by MAX DUPAIN.

B RU TA L

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B E AU T Y

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“The power of architecture, like art, has an ability to transform our feelings and thoughts. Architecture is inspirational in its physicality, it enhances our ability to live, work and experience the world.

The National Gallery building is a sculpture that we inhabit with so many purposes: we use it as a vault to store the collection, we use it as an office to do our work, we use it as a meeting place to bring people in. Over the next two years we plan to return many important elements of the building to the original intent of architect Col Madigan.

The building is robust and, in its own way, beautiful and poetic, and as we celebrate our 40th anniversary I look forward to celebrating our architecture and Mr Madigan’s original vision of a powerful structure that incorporates functional design and environmental integration.”

NICK MITZEVICH, Director, National Gallery

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The Gallery has a complex structure – though the genesis of this complexity is a simple triangle. It was the intention of the architectural concept to implant into the grammar of the design a sense of freedom so that the building could be submitted to change and variety but would always express its true purpose.

It became, in a sense, like a Gothic building in that elements could be added or subtracted without damaging the overall principles.

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The simple numerical structure of the equilateral triangle extended into the third dimension produces tetrahedral and octahedral crystals and this geometric evolvement generates a harmony within the building.

The building is a special kind of space and there are only certain kinds of symmetries which this space can support.

The octahedron is a most exquisite crystal, the natural shape of the diamond crystal; its symmetry is imposed on it by the nature of the space we live in, expressing the crucial law of nature. So a crystal, like a pattern, must have a shape that can extend or repeat itself in all directions indefinitely (image 8). The faces of a crystal can only have certain shapes.

They could not have anything but the symmetries in the pattern.

The design of the Gallery building has a peculiar inquisitiveness that combines the adventure of its planned communication with this geometric logic where the numbers dovetail and say this is a part of, a key to, the structure of the building.

The equilateral triangle is the nucleus of this structural code, dictating the dimensions and character of the building and producing a desirable unity in all areas of the Gallery.

This is realised primarily in the triagrid concrete space frame ceiling/floor systems serving the small galleries and extends to the steel space frames spanning the great gallery spaces.

The basic three-dimensional law and the inherent flexibility this system contains ensures a potential to express the manifold, complex and interconnected needs of structure, services, aesthetics and the essential neutrality for the display of art within the gallery spaces.

Within this grid the mechanical and lighting services are integrated to serve the ceilings and floors.

The detail forming the landscape of this building is full of exact adaptions – each element is governed and controlled by the geometry to fit the environment like one cog wheel into another.

The realisation becomes more subtle and penetrating as the elements combine in complex and intimate ways. Architecture as a force brings our attention to visual continuities or absolutes through principles that run or recur from one civilisation to another. We can link back to history and traditions in subtle ways and this, in turn, gives to the observer a feeling of comfort.

The total ethos of the Australian National Gallery does this.

A flexible geometric law to discipline this idea was found to be a tessellation of regular triangles and hexagons, what may be called a trihex – and this is the geometry on which the design concept is based.

The building expresses itself in a mute geometric language. There is a harmony, an ordering of elements in the Gallery building. A unity in the variety of its spaces.

— Col Madigan’s Architect’s Statement was first published in the National Gallery publication: Australian National Gallery, Canberra.

The agreement between the building and its geometry is so cogent it organises the shapes, scale and dimensions of all elements within it to express this harmony.

Knowledge makes prodigious journeys.

Pythagoras proved that the world of sound is governed by exact numbers. He went on to prove that the same thing is true of the world of vision.

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Pages 52-59 Historic images of the National Gallery taken by Max Dupain prior to opening in 1982.

National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, Papers of the Australian National Gallery Building Archive, National Gallery of Australia Research Library’s Archive Collection, MS 91, [box 8, folder 1] © Max Dupain/ Copyright Agency, 2022

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Daniel Crooks Col Madigan’s geometry partly inspired Structured light,the new work of Naarm/Melbourne-based artist DANIEL CROOKS, which will light up the façade of the Gallery during the Enlighten Festival this month.

“I’m a geometry nerd from way back. As a kid I was obsessed with equilateral triangles and making pyramid structures and platonic solids. It was all deeply fascinating to me.

When I came to the National Gallery to do a site visit during Joan Ross’s Enlighten work last March [2021], I wandered around and under the footbridge found the plaque unveiled by [then-Prime Minister] Gough Whitlam commemorating the start of construction of the building in 1973.

Just above that is another plaque marking the master set out point. It sits on an octahedron, a literal piece of the structural DNA of the building.

It’s an intriguing yet forgotten object with a beautifully graphic line drawing that reminded me of the Pioneer Plaques that were sent into space by NASA in 1972, around the same time Col Madigan was finishing the design of the National Gallery. The Pioneer Plaques featured pictorial messages in case the probe was discovered by aliens. I was always fascinated by the idea that they had this universal language and utopian ideas that were meant to speak for all mankind.

Artist Daniel Crooks at the National Gallery and researching the architecture of the building. Photographs: Karlee Holland.

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I then delved into the Madigan archive in the National Gallery Research Library and it became apparent how obsessed the architect was with an almost sacred geometry. He talks about the unifying structure and the natural harmony.

I’m quite ambivalent about it, but at the same time I see it as a very academic way of looking at a universal language and I do put some weight [in] the philosophy of mathematics and the idea of mathematical objects being actually real.

I was inspired by Madigan’s geometry and hand drawings and the very analogue nature of them. Architecture has become so digitalised, but back then it was very real; there’s even correction fluid on his drawings.

At that time I was also building my own drawing machine and writing a lot of code to do the drawing, so it felt right to focus on geometry and the line drawings themselves.

Brutalism is really having a moment now and I love the brutalist sensibility about honesty [of] materials; and particularly with large scale outdoor projection... subtlety is not rewarded.

So for my work I’m using a lot of Madigan’s drawings and it is going to be super-minimal yet super-extreme by embracing the brutalist nature of the building.” ● Daniel Crooks's work, Structured light, is the final installment of the Balnaves Contemporary Series and will be on display on the façade of the National Gallery as part of the 2022 Enlighten Festival from 4 to 14 March

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From his early appreciation of First Nations artists to his open-minded pursuit of excellence for the national collection, the National Gallery’s Founding Director, James Mollison, was a defining figure in Australian art, writes Dr GRAZIA GUNN.

As Founding Director of the Australian National Gallery, as it was called then, in the final decades of the 20th century, James Mollison set out to establish a national gallery that lived up to that name; appropriate to the times, appropriate to the region. He wanted the institution to showcase art of every kind within its galleries and garden: sculptures, paintings, drawings, prints, artists’ books, monoprints, photographs, modern design, textiles, costume and fashion, theatre designs.

Some of Mollison’s early acquisitions were works

by First Nations artists at a time when few galleries represented their art.

The idea of an Australian national art collection was first discussed in 1903 between Prime Minister Alfred Deakin and the artist Tom Roberts. It took decades, and the leadership of several prime ministers, for the idea to materialise due to the First and Second World Wars and the Depression years in between.

It wasn’t until the 1960s when Prime Minister Robert Menzies resurrected the plan and in 1965 set up the National Art Gallery Committee of Inquiry to report on the proposal that was eventually approved and tabled in Parliament in November 1967 by Prime Minister Harold Holt.

40 Years of Collecting

Mollison, then-director of the Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, was recruited to Canberra in 1968 to serve in an informal curatorial role and other loosely defined duties in the Prime Minister’s department. From this time onwards, Mollison’s art connoisseurship and ambition led to a broadening and shaping of the character of the collection. This period also marked the planning of a prestigious building to house the collected art. Mollison was not involved in the initial stages of the planning – James Johnson Sweeney, a former director of the Guggenheim in New York and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston in Texas, was the consultant advising the National Capital Development Commission, who were responsible for the building of the Gallery.

This page Kasimir Malevich, Stroyuschiysya dom [House under construction], 191516, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, Purchased 1974.

Opposite (Above) Sonia Delaunay, Dubonnet, 1914, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/ Canberra, Purchased 1985 © L&M Services B.V. The Hague; (below) Eva Hesse, Contingent, 1969, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/ Canberra, Purchased 1973 © The Estate of Eva Hesse, Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.

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In 1972 Prime Minister Gough Whitlam had declared that the new Gallery in Canberra would “fully represent not only the best Australian art, but the art of other civilisations in our region and throughout the world”. Mollison, like the Prime Minister, saw the history of art as related to the history of culture and civilisation, but also as having fundamental aesthetic principles. The Director conceptualised the Australian National Gallery as a museum offering an educative experience and not as a treasure palace, solely for pleasure. This is not surprising when you consider he was an art teacher; education through art was one of the many factors that shaped the national collection.

For the grand opening of the National Gallery in 1982, Mollison placed each art object in historical relationship through juxtapositions to form a complex

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work or his reaction to it, yet he had an astonishing capacity to unravel a passage of applied paint on canvas as it turned into the magic of art.

Painting 1954-58 were acquired the same year, but they represent distinctly different aspects of Modernism in America.

This is evident in another of the many letters to his parents. He writes with passion about one of the galleries at the National Gallery, London, “which contained perhaps the cream of the 17th-century Italian crop,” and off to one side were two other rooms of… Sienese pictures. “I knew something about these… because one of the first books I bought was by John Pope-Hennessy on Sienese paintings,” he writes.

Now in London in front of the originals, Mollison felt the mysterious aspect of these works, with their luxuriant golden backgrounds, and the immense emotional power this kind of art had over him.

Blue poles made a grand entry into Australia, but, of all the major paintings entering the collection in the 1970s, its acquisition was the most controversial historically, politically, financially and socially.

The painting was made famous by this initial critical response, yet this is but one of many works in the national collection that, although less controversial, are equally significant masterworks in the long history of Modernism.

But what was Mollison’s response to Blue poles?

Was he astonished by its primal energy? What did he think of the drips and violent splashes of paint covering the entire surface? Did he think that this iconoclastic rejection of established painting conventions was creating a new art language?

Did he personally like it? Mollison does not say.

James Mollison, with his dedication to and love of art, built a varied permanent collection of timeless character for the National Gallery that is his most lasting achievement.

As Director, Mollison was aware that personal taste is secondary to objective professionalism, and that Blue poles is part of the history of Modernism and must be included in the Gallery’s collection regardless. Blue poles and Reinhardt’s whole. In the sculpture gallery, he suspended from the ceiling in a row Eva Hesse’s Contingent a sculpture comprising eight units of cheesecloth, latex and fibreglass, delicate and translucent.

By contrast, lined up on the floor next to Contingent were Donald Judd’s opulent huge brass boxes, Untitled (1974), and nearby was Constantin Brancusi’s L'Oiseau dans l’espace [Bird in space] sculpture reaching for the sky.

Mollison did not differentiate between the work created by women artists and that of men; if the art was of high aesthetic quality it would be unreservedly welcomed into the collection.

In his uncompromising search for excellence, he acquired some rare works by Natalia Goncharova, Alexandra Exter, Sonia Delaunay, Lee Krasner, Louise Bourgeois, Agnes Martin and many others.

The Director championed modern art, yet he was also conservative in his acceptance of the latest innovations. He was very aware that Europe’s modern masters were not readily available for acquisition so late in the 20th century, yet with determination he sought out and acquired major works of European modern art. He brought into the Gallery’s collection work by Kasimir Malevich, the constructivist and suprematist artist who changed the course of the history of modern art. Another major artist, Cézanne, whose work led to Cubism, entered

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the national collection, as did Matisse’s sensuous rendering of Europa’s abduction by Zeus, L’Enlèvement d’Europe [The abduction of Europa].

Many other works crucial to the history of Modernism in Europe were carefully chosen to be part of the collection.

Mollison also turned his attention to the wave of Modernism post-World War Two in America.

In contrast to the mainstream art of Abstract Expressionism, in 1973 Mollison acquired a black painting by Ad Reinhardt, Painting 1954-1958, that recalled Malevich’s geometric compositions, in particular his suprematist painting Black Square. Reinhardt had an interest in mysticism and this would probably have led him to the British physician and mystical philosopher Robert Fludd, who was the first to paint a black square as a picture of infinity. Also acquired in 1973 was Jackson Pollock’s Blue poles, a painting Mollison had seen at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in June 1958, when he was in Europe on a study tour of galleries, museums and art collections.

Mollison’s first encounter with Blue poles was not momentous. Writing home to his parents he mentioned the painting, but only to criticise its placement on a wall outside the main gallery where this monographic exhibition had been installed. He makes no further comment on the

This page National Gallery Founding Director James Mollison (left) with then-Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in front of Jackson Pollock’s Blue poles at the Gallery in 1986. Photo

by David Porter/Fairfax Media.

Opposite Lee Krasner, Cool white, 1959, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, Purchased 1978 © Lee Krasner. ARS/ Copyright Agency, 2022.

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“I’m not one for saying what art should or should not be, but I do believe art can function to expand one’s consciousness, to act as a catalyst, perhaps, to exceed the boundaries of language and how it defines and limits our understanding of the world in which we live.”

— Gordon Bennett, 1996

Storylines: 1982 – 2022

Detail of Gordon Bennett, Notes to Basquiat (The Death of Irony), 2002, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, Purchased 2020 © The Estate of Gordon Bennett. John Citizen Arts Pty Ltd / Copyright Agency, 2022.

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When the National Gallery opened in 1982, Australian art was displayed on level 2 until it was moved several years ago.

After recent refurbishments it has now returned with a new display, Australian Art: Storylines. Drawn from the National Gallery’s collection, Storylines brings together works by First Nations and non-Indigenous artists from across Australia, including work by artists from Asia and the Pacific. It weaves together multiple stories, different cultural traditions and a range of art historical perspectives.

Storylines includes historical and contemporary works of art to show how the past and present are interconnected.

An aspect of the display celebrates Australia’s artistic heroes and the communities and networks that have supported their work. Some works of art tell the story of connections with other places and of the ways that those exchanges have influenced art in this country.

The display considers how artists have made sense of our experience of place and Country – the spaces in which we live and the landscapes that sustain life and culture.

It also reflects on the ways art helps us to remember our histories and Ancestors, and how art itself has become part of telling our diverse and interwoven stories.

Here, we celebrate the past and present with images from now and then.

Fun fact: by coincidence, Grace Crowley’s Painting (1951) – pictured in both images at right: far left in 2022, and centre corner in 1982 – has been hung in almost exactly the same location 40 years later.

Pages 68-71 Installation views of level 2 at the National Gallery in 1982 (in black and white) and approximately the same locations in 2022 (in colour) where Australian Art: Storylines is currently on display.

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Kiki Smith

In 2019 the National Gallery acquired a group of works on paper

by New York artist Kiki Smith as part of the Orde Poynton Bequest.

Here she describes the works.

“These were made during a time when I was making a story of a woman’s life in drawings. The series became a very large piece in stained glass called Pilgrim that consists of about 24 panels. The story is about a person representing St. Francis talking to the animals and gleaning information from the animals. Also at that time I was making a loose series of work titled Visionary Sugar exploring sight as something physically activethat moves out of the body through the world. These other images relate to these drawings. They were all drawings of people intersecting with the spirit world, and one is just a drawing of solitude. Most of my works on paper start out as drawings then are printed on mylar and turned into photolitho and then collaged. Often they become other things later.”

— Kiki Smith

Kiki Smith emerged as an artist in New York in the early 1980s. Over the course of four decades she has established an international reputation for her hand crafted work in the medium of print, drawing and sculpture. From the 1990s she has created acclaimed bodies of work that have increasingly referenced folkloric and Early Christian European narratives – exploring the communion between humans and animals, and the intersection between the lived experiences of women and the spirit world. Specific to the drawings in the national collection, which feature an androgynous figure reaching out to a snake and nest of birds, is the story of “St. Francis talking to the animals and gleaning information from the animals”.

— Sally Foster, Senior Curator, Prints and Drawings

This page (Above) Kiki Smith, Lounging legs, 2005, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, The Poynton Bequest 2019; (right) Kiki Smith, What happened between the thoughts, 2007, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, The Poynton Bequest 2019 © the artist.

Opposite (Above) portrait of Kiki Smith © Chelsea Culpepper; (below) Kiki Smith, Mirage, 2007, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/ Canberra, The Poynton Bequest 2019 © the artist.

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The Bequest Circle Whether it is sums of money or works of art, donations from the Bequest Circle are leaving a lasting legacy at the National Gallery, writes ELIZABETH FORTESCUE.

Chris Kirby and Ray Leggott have always enjoyed the National Gallery’s gardens, so about four years ago they decided to join the National Gallery Bequest Circle and leave a percentage of their estate to benefit the gallery’s sculpture program.

The couple usually live in Braidwood, NSW, but are temporarily based in Seattle, USA, where Mr Kirby works for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Mr Leggott is an artist.

“We’ve always been very cognisant of how art can be this powerful influence on people,” Mr Kirby says.

While the Gallery is grateful for all its surprise bequests, many benefits accrue when intending benefactors notify the Gallery of their estate plans.

They are then welcomed into the Gallery’s Bequest Circle, established in 2008 to deepen the Gallery’s relationship with its future benefactors.

The Bequest Circle now boasts 59 members, who bond over their mutual interests, and a convivial, clublike atmosphere prevails at the annual lunch.

Members enjoy other benefits including invitations to the Gallery’s exhibition openings and other events. Bequests and other donations are becoming ever more vital in light of rising art prices and the need for the Gallery to raise its own funds to enable the visionary projects that make the national collection more accessible and relevant to all Australians.

The Gallery’s biggest single bequest donor, Dr John Orde Poynton, died in 2001 before the Bequest Circle was established. A British-born bibliophile, Dr Poynton donated generously during his lifetime and left the National Gallery a surprise $13 million in his will.

The Poynton Bequest provides annual funding, in perpetuity, for the Gallery to acquire international prints, drawings and illustrated books.

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official Alan Boxer. Mr Boxer was a Bequest Circle member who hung works of art in his kitchen after he ran out of room elsewhere.

When Mr Boxer died in 2014, the National Gallery received 19 works by artists including Arthur Boyd, Sidney Nolan, John Olsen and John Perceval from Mr Boxer’s collection.

One of the Gallery’s most recent surprise bequests was from Henry Dalrymple, which funded two staff positions including that of Dr Deborah Hart, now the Henry Dalrymple Head Curator, Australian Art. Mr Dalrymple, a specialist in marine engineering and shipbuilding, was generous to the Gallery during his lifetime but was not in the Bequest Circle. He died in 2017.

When Sydney philanthropist Barbara Jean Humphreys passed away in 2018, she left the Gallery a seven-figure financial gift. It was a major bequest from someone the Gallery didn’t know personally but who had been a member. Maryanne Voyazis, Head of Development and Executive Director of the National Gallery’s Foundation, said staff would have liked to thank Ms Humphreys in person and forge a connection during her lifetime. “All we can do is be incredibly grateful, acknowledge her in perpetuity on our donor boards and put that money to very good use to support the best interests of the Gallery,” Ms Voyazis says.

Others own works of art they wish to give to the Gallery, in which case there can be a negotiation about which works will be suitable for the national collection and which might be better directed to another institution with a different curatorial focus.

Collectively, the gift to the Gallery from the Bequest Circle amounts to millions of dollars, Ms Voyazis says. But there is no minimum gift, and the Bequest Circle is open to all. “While larger amounts are transformational, smaller amounts absolutely contribute meaningfully to the life of the Gallery,” Ms Voyazis says.

Former National Gallery Bequests Manager Liz Wilson joined the Bequest Circle after deciding to leave the National Gallery a painting by Grace Cossington Smith. The painting was hung in the Gallery’s Cossington Smith retrospective exhibition in 2004-05.

“Seeing the painting in the Gallery and seeing people walking up to it gave me such a thrill,” Ms Wilson says. “That was the moment I thought, ‘It should be in the Gallery.’” Ms Wilson believes bequests are just as important for the donor as for the Gallery. “They’re giving their last gift, really,” she says.

“It’s the culmination of their life, and thinking of the National Gallery as part of that is such an honour.” ● For more information about how you can support the National Gallery, go to: nga.gov.au/join-support

The role of Barbara Jean Humphreys Assistant Director, First Nations Engagement, held by Bruce Johnson McLean, now honours her act of philanthropy. “Through Barbara Jean's generosity we've been able to take the ambition and vision that the Director has for the Gallery and to realise it, such as through Bruce's appointment,” Ms Voyazis says.

Among the 4000 objects so far enabled by the Poynton Bequest are 18th-century Japanese ukiyo-e woodcut prints, artists’ books and works on paper by Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith and William Kentridge.

Ms Voyazis says the Bequest Circle continues to grow and “gives us the opportunity for our own planning, but, more importantly, to develop relationships with people to understand their connection to this place, their particular passions and how we best honour their legacy.”

Another of the Gallery’s most significant gifts was from former Federal Treasury

Some donors leave the Gallery a specified sum of money or a portion of their estate.

Opposite (Above) National Gallery Bequest Circle members Chris Kirby (left) and Ray Leggott in the National Gallery Sculpture Garden; (below) Colin McCahon, Muriwai. Necessary protection, 1972, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra, Jane Flecknoe Bequest 2013 © Colin McCahon Research and Publication Trust.

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Partnerships

UNESCO City of Film Award at the recent Sydney Film Festival – studied art history for her HSC and wrote a thesis on the perspective of female artists and the way male artists represent women in artwork, so she has a deep connection to the film’s content.

A new film goes behind the scenes at the National Gallery to celebrate Australian women artists, writes SOPHIE TEDMANSON.

“There were so many stories that we fell in love with and so many we unfortunately had to cut [because of time],” she says. “But we wanted to make sure each artists’ story was representative of a particular female experience.

Whether that was because of the way the critics had attacked their work, or because of opportunities that they’d missed out on, or because of how forgotten their work was, or because of the marginalisation of their particular cultural experience.

Plus women who represented certain breakthroughs, whether that was the first Archibald win or the highest price of art that has been achieved.”

Production took place over several evenings in the National Gallery late last year, led by a predominantly female crew including the director, writer, cinematographer and producers.

“It’s very meta because you’ve got female filmmakers making art about women who are artists making art about women… it’s an all-women team and so we had so much fun,” Holden says.

The Exhibitionists

It is after hours inside the National Gallery and four women attending a cocktail party challenge one another to get locked inside the cultural institution overnight. What starts as a tipsy dare ends in an attempt to rewrite history as the accidental tourists spend the night at the Gallery.

The Exhibitionists bookends an 18-month-long partnership between the National Gallery and the ABC for the Gallery’s Know My Name initiative. Other productions that were supported through the partnership include the documentaries Step Into Paradise, about the relationship between the artists and designers Jenny Kee and Linda Jackson, and Bronwyn Oliver: The Shadows Within, about the Australian sculptor

– both of which premiered on the ABC and iview in 2021 – and the Fierce Girls podcast series, which featured a run of Know My Name artists.

Kalita Corrigan, ABC Arts commissioning editor, says the partnership was an exciting opportunity to demonstrate ABC's vital commitment to celebrating women’s contribution to our national cultural heritage: "Know My Name is a visual arts initiative by the National Gallery, but the ABC represents all art forms, so when we took up the baton we broadened the conversation to include musicians, composers, authors and all creators."

The National Gallery has a longstanding connection to supporting films about art, but recently delved into film production through the Australian Artists Film Fund.

Created in 2019 and funded by National Gallery donors, the Film Fund supports the commissioning and promotion of feature films about leading Australian artists that aim to broaden the exposure of art and artists across the country.

The Film Fund has so far helped to produce Catherine Hunter’s documentary Quilty: Painting the Shadows, which was also supported by the ABC and focuses on the evolution of Ben Quilty’s major 12-panel painting Myall Creek Rorschach, about the Myall Creek massacre of 1838 on Gamilaraay Country in Northern NSW. The painting has since entered the national collection. ● All films mentioned here are available to stream on ABC iview and nga.gov.au ● To support the National Gallery Australian Artists Film Fund, go to: nga.gov.au/join-support

“Where’s the female take?” queries one of the quartet after they discover the walls are dominated by male artists. They decide to put on an exhibition themselves and rehang – quelle horreur!

– one wall with works by Australian women.

This page The Exhibitionists stars Bessie Holland, Bridie Carter, Mandy McElhinney, Bridie Carter and Veronica Milsom, pictured in front of Diena Georgetti, SUPERSTUDIO, 2015-2017, National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra.

Photo by Jamila Toderas.

Opposite The docu-comedy was filmed by a predominantly all-female team after hours at the National Gallery.

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This escapade is purely fiction, a scene from the recently produced docu-comedy The Exhibitionists starring Mandy McElhinney, Bridie Carter, Bessie Holland and Veronica Milsom, which aired on the ABC on International Women’s Day (March 8). Produced by Northern Pictures for ABC Television, it is part of a partnership between the National Gallery and the national broadcaster for the Gallery’s Know My Name initiative, which celebrates the work of Australian women artists and aims to enhance understanding of their contribution to our cultural life.

Producer Karina Holden, head of factual at Northern Pictures, describes The Exhibitionists as “a hybrid film”, where drama is interwoven with documentary footage and interviews with artists including Janet Dawson, Nora Heysen, Emily Kame Kngwarreye (Anmatyerre people), Vivienne Binns, Karla Dickens (Wiradjuri people), Dorrit Black and Julie Rrap, as well as National Gallery curators and art historians.

Ms Holden – who was named winner of the 2021 Sydney

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Separately from that I have been involved with several corporate and non profit boards and seen how challenging it is for underrepresented groups to be selected for positions in cultural institutions. Somehow high potential minority candidates are involved as subject matter experts and are not invited to help design policy. There are signs of progress but it is slow.

So my wife and I are funding a program to select and train Australian First Nations individuals who are considered to have the potential to sit at the policy table as museum directors globally. This program will be in place in the near future.

CAROLYN: You’ve both excited a lot of people’s interest in Australian Aboriginal art in America. Do you see yourselves as an ambassador of sorts?

STEVE: To

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consider myself an ambassador would be arrogant, because this art works on its own. It doesn’t need an ambassador.

I was talking to a collector friend who has a major thing for de Kooning. And someone asked him once, they said, “What do you feel the meaning of the de Kooning and the blah,” and it was one of those complicated questions. And he said, “I’m just a fan.” And that’s the way I feel.

● The 4th National Indigenous Art Triennial: Ceremony opens at the National Gallery in Canberra on 26 March. For more information, go to: nga.gov.au/exhibitions/national-indigenous -art-triennial-ceremony ● For more information on the American Friends of the National Gallery of Australia, go to: afnga.org

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→ Continued from page 48

[I’m inspired by the] history of both sides of my family, also Country. I was reading about a place [by] a non-Aboriginal local historian who… put out this myth that Aboriginal people just gave their land away. There is so much to refute; there’s always going to be something to counter. And the way I do it is through art.

JUDY:

TINA: Cultural Partners

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The National Gallery gratefully acknowledges our Learning and Digital Patron Tim Fairfax AC, and all Patrons of our Exhibition Program.

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Helen, what inspires or influences your work?

HELEN: I don’t necessarily think art can save the world, but I think

it can prompt people to see things differently or encounter things from a different perspective. For many years I’ve been making works that think about the space between broader constructs of national identity and the ways that histories get cobbled together and solidified to suit that project. And how those things sit in relation to people’s lived experiences and how people navigate that sometimes contradictory space.

Over the years I’ve found painting a more and more useful space to push those ideas around in … I guess this also resonates with German painting movements of the 1980s and 1990s – [Martin] Kippenberger, Albert Oehlen, Charline von Heyl – who were grappling with German identity after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

And when the reckoning about World War II was starting to become a public debate and those artists embraced humour and insinuation and the sense of the messiness or impossibility that painting can hold.

It felt like those approaches could have an application here…

When I went to art school in the late 1990s, you were… told that you couldn’t paint figuratively [so]… ‘If they’re telling me I can’t do that thing, that’s probably a reason to do it.’

JUDY: … That’s [what they said] in the late 1970s, early 1980s... mostly male art teachers telling me that. Uncle Sam Watson from… Meanjin/Brisbane [said]: “The gatekeepers need to open their gates.” Because artists – and not just visual artists, but performers, musicians… are the bards and the seers, and they need to be let through because they’re going to carry our stories for us… I hope that future generations have the strength and support from previous generations of artists and cultural practitioners to know that that’s the way – to take those stories and beat down those doors.

— This is an edited transcript from a video conversation. ● Judy Watson and Helen Johnson: the red thread of history, loose ends are the combined fourth and fifth instalments of the Balnaves Contemporary Series, on until June 5. For more information, go to: nga.gov.au/exhibitions/judy-watson-helen-johnson

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In 1991, Superman flew to Canberra from Metropolis to get some intel about the son of his arch-nemesis, Lex Luthor, from an ASIO spy.

Spoiler alert: it turns out Lex had cloned himself and was posing as his own estranged son who had been brought up by foster parents in the Australian Outback! Here, we speak to the comic’s original artist, BOB MCLEOD, about how the National Gallery was featured in the iconic DC Super Hero storyline.

NGA The National Gallery featured in Superman Action Comics #672 issue in a storyline about Lex Luthor’s clone’s Australian background. Why was the National Gallery included in this particular storyline?.

BOB MCLEOD We just needed a location in Australia that would be authentic to the country, rather than just someplace that could be anywhere. The writer, Roger Stern, chose the National Gallery as a good visual place to do the scenes we needed. It could as easily have been some other prominent place.

NGA Your

drawings of the Gallery and details such as the bridge and entrance are very specific. How did you know what the Gallery looked like – have you ever visited Canberra or the National Gallery, or was it done via photographs?

BOB Unfortunately,

I’ve never been to Australia, though I would like to visit it someday. I just drew from photos. I don’t remember if Roger supplied reference or if I went to the library, but either he or the editor may have given me some photos to work from.

NGA Why

did you choose the bridge in particular for the illustration?

NGA Was

Australia included in any other comics that you drew?

BOB Yes,

I remember having to draw the Sydney Opera House, but I just can’t remember which comic it might have been.

NGA You have had an incredible career as a comic artist, what was it that attracted you to this particular art form?

BOB I decided when I was about five years old that I wanted to be a cartoonist of some kind. I enjoyed copying cartoons in the newspaper. I’ve always been fascinated by what you can do with black lines on white paper. But I had originally intended to try to be an animator for Disney, or do my own newspaper comic strip, or draw for Mad magazine. I read Superman and Archie comics, and the Harvey line of comics, but I wasn’t really a fan of the superhero comics and more ‘realistic’ comics. I just wanted to do humorous cartoons. By the time Marvel was creating Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four in the ’60s, I was only reading Mad magazine.

I never thought about drawing comic books until I met a co-worker in the grocery store I was working in as a teenager. He was a big comic book fan and when he found out I could draw he said, “You have to draw for Marvel!”

So I decided to try to start my career there, intending to move on to other things after a while. But after working so hard to master the brush and pen nibs and studying so hard to learn how to draw ‘realistic’ comics, my career took off and I stayed with it. I feel very fortunate to have worked on all of the comics I have. It’s been a great career.

BOB I’m afraid I don’t remember. It may have been in the script to have them meet there, or I may have just picked that spot because I had a good photo of it.

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NGA Were there any other arts institutions featured in Superman over the years?

BOB Yes,

there may have been several.

I drew the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. in Action Comics #663 for a story where Superman was time-travelling. During his decades of adventures I would think he probably visited some others.

This page The National Gallery featured in a Superman storyline in 1991. All Superman images from: “Action Comics” #672 © DC Comics.

Opposite Original drawings courtesy of Bob McLeod.

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JEFFREY SMART

Only in Kamberri/Canberra National Gallery Book now

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11.12.21– 15.5.22

MAJOR PARTNERS Jeffrey Smart, The plastic tube, 1980, private collection,courtesy Gallery Sally Dan-Cuthbert © The Estate of Jeffrey Smart