Artonview 106 - Winter 2021

Jeffrey Smart: the centenary From Adelaide to Arezzo and the art in between

Gordon Darling and the American Friends of the National Gallery Sarah Lucas • Jonathan Jones • Touring special: Spowers & Syme

Contents

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Director’s Word

Editor’s Letter | Contributors

Jeffrey Smart Under the Tuscan sun

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Jeffrey & Me

By Bruce Beresford

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A Life in Pictures Celebrating the centenary of Jeffrey Smart

On the cover Jeffrey Smart in his studio in Arezzo, Italy, 2011. © Rob Palmer. Image courtesy the artist. Photo by Rob Palmer. (below) Jeffrey Smart, The Construction Fence, 1978, oil and synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 88.5 x 228.4 cm, TarraWarra Museum of Art collection, Gift of Eva Besen AO and Marc Besen AC, 2001.

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Studio Spotlight Jonathan Jones

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Sarah Lucas Slipping through the veil

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Justene Williams Spellbound

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The American connection The cultural ties of the AFNGA

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The Darling factor Remembering Gordon Darling AC CMG

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Vale Marabeth Cohen-Tyler

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Touring Special: Spowers & Syme Prints, pigments & poison National Gallery Art Cases Touring Exhibitions Team

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Summer Scholarships

My Collection David Paul

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Partnerships Sara McKerihan

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What’s On

Director’s Choice Huma Bhabha’s Waiting for another game

Blue poles A new perspective

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(from left) Sid and Fiona Myer Curator of Ceramics and Design Rebecca Edwards, Director Nick Mitzevich and Henry Dalrymple Head of Australian Art Deborah Hart are pictured with Jeffrey Smart’s Labyrinth (left) and Waiting for the train (right).

Director’s Word

Gooroo Burri, We are halfway through 2021 and what an extraordinary first half of the year it has been. As we prepare to pack up Botticelli to Van Gogh: Masterpieces from the National Gallery, London, we can reflect on what a thrill it has been to see so many visitors enjoying these iconic works.

The energy in the Gallery has been invigorating and seeing the joy on the faces of visitors in the exhibition reminded me of the power of art in real life.

From 500 years of European art history, we will next celebrate an iconic Australian artist: Jeffrey Smart, who would have turned 100 in July. Smart had a unique voice in Australian art and made an impact on generations of artists and art lovers. The National Gallery will mark the centenary of his birth with a fresh review in October, featuring more than 100 paintings spanning seven decades and the three locations that played such pivotal roles in his inspiration: his home town of Adelaide; Sydney, where he established his career; and his adopted country of Italy, where he lived from 1964 until his death in 2013.

What I love about Smart is he was both a traditional and a radical at the same time. He studied and scrutinised art history, but he was also very cognisant of what was happening in the present. You can see this in his paintings, where academic tradition is very much a part of his technical process but also there’s a great tension with abstraction and the evolution of contemporary art. Many of his contemporaries were making large colour field paintings and while Smart didn’t ignore it, he did it his own way. At times his paintings are tableaux and tell stories; at others they’re great explorations of colour, form and abstraction.

We have a series of works by Smart in the national collection that span his career, including Wallaroo from 1951, inspired by the eponymous South Australian copper-mining town, and Labyrinth, his final painting, created at his home studio in Arezzo in 2011 (and which is poignantly captured on our cover).

Journalist Michael Maher, the New York-based President of the American Friends of the National Gallery of Australia (AFNGA), spent time with Smart in Tuscany in 2005 for the ABC’s Foreign Correspondent program. It is a fascinating conversation that we are sharing in this issue (on page 6) and you can also watch the video on our website.

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The AFNGA is an important international arm of the Gallery and Michael also writes about its inception and connections to New York on page 28. One of the founders of the AFNGA was former National Gallery Council Chair Gordon Darling AC CMG, who was born the same year as Jeffrey Smart and who left a lasting legacy at the Gallery.

To celebrate his centenary and the upcoming book Printed, Emeritus Curator Roger Butler AM interviews Gordon’s wife, Marilyn Darling AC, about their passion for philanthropy and the genesis of the Gordon Darling Foundation.

After a difficult 18 months due to COVID-19 restricting travel, this quarter we have reignited our Touring program and have been thrilled to re-engage with our regional audiences through Patricia Piccinini’s Skywhales: Every Heart Sings touring event, which is making its way around the country thanks to the generosity of the Naomi Milgrom Foundation, and the upcoming exhibition of trailblazing modernist artists Ethel Spowers and Eveline Syme, who brought the art of modern colour linocut to Australia. These three women are included in the Gallery’s ongoing Know My Name initiative. Part Two of the exhibition Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now also opens next month. Another Know My Name exhibition is Sarah Lucas, part of our new Project Series. Lucas’ witty works explore gender, sex and death and we recently acquired her sculpture TITTIPUSSIDAD for the national collection. It will be on display when her exhibition opens in August.

When you next visit the Gallery you will notice several changes to our displays on levels 1 and 2, most obviously that Jackson Pollock’s Blue poles has moved to a new space on the lower ground floor as part of a temporary display of collection highlights. These are among many exciting changes happening at the National Gallery to improve the building, the exhibitions and your experience.

Nick Mitzevich I acknowledge and pay respect to the Traditional Custodians of the Canberra region, the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples and their Elders past and present.

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Editor’s Letter

Contributors

Michael Maher New York-based Michael Maher is a former ABC foreign correspondent, filmmaker, author, producer and current President of the American Friends of the National Gallery of Australia. In 2005 he interviewed artist Jeffrey Smart for a documentary: “He was 84 but still possessed of an intoxicating exuberance,” Maher recalls. Read the interview on page 6.

While we were preparing this issue, there was a lot of change happening around the Gallery: change in exhibitions, a change in season, a change in perspective.

Perspective changes everything – I recently walked out of a lift and was transported straight to Arizona thanks to David Hockney’s A bigger Grand Canyon, which was on temporary display. The colours are intoxicating and the perspective – up close and far away – is completely mesmerising. Standing in front of those 60 panels I was taken away from that particular cold, rainy day to the heat of the colourful canyon full of life on the other side of the world. I love how art can transport you to another place or another feeling. It can lift you up, it can make you cry, it can make you laugh.

Rob Palmer Rob won the National Photographic Portrait Prize 2020 for his image of chef Josh Niland with a mahi-mahi.

But his shoot with Jeffrey Smart in 2011 was a career highlight he describes as “fantastic”. The shoot, which graces the cover and feature on page 6, was to be Jeffrey’s last. Read about Rob’s time with the artist on page 11.

Sarah Lucas is an artist whose irreverent works can make you smile. As she tells Peter Johnson on page 20: “When humour happens, things get good. Less depressing.

It’s a kind of magic.” Lucas’s new exhibition opens next month, and her sculpture Deep cream Maradona is currently on display on the lower ground floor as part of the new collection highlights display.

Bruce Beresford Before Bruce Beresford became an Oscar-nominated director known for the films Driving Miss Daisy, Breaker Morant and Ladies in Black, he was a student at The King’s School in Sydney’s Parramatta, where Jeffrey Smart was art master. It was a friendship that lasted a lifetime. Bruce pays tribute to his artistic mentor on page 12.

Talk about perspective: the cavernous room is extraordinary and showcases works large and small along the themes of ‘Emotional Body’, including Huma Bhabha’s monumental sculpture Waiting for another game, a new acquisition and personal favourite of the Director, who writes about it on page 62. Next door is themed ‘Towards Abstraction’, and alongside Claude Monet’s Nymphéas [Waterlilies] and Mark Rothko’s 1957 #20 you’ll see Jackson Pollock’s Blue poles has moved to a new home. Senior Conservator David Wise will continue the Blue poles conservation project, which began in lockdown last year. David talks about his progress over the past 12 months and the continued public interest in one of the Gallery’s most iconic works on page 40.

Blue poles keeps company with Rosalie Gascoigne’s Fool’s gold and Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s stunning Seeds of abundance. The yellows in Emily’s beautiful painting hint at the change in season and are a reminder of autumn, which has just passed. According to Emily’s story, in awelye (women’s ceremonial activity), Anmatyerre people mark the power of the red soil, the many seeds that await rain and the resultant growth across the landscape.

As it is now rainy season with winter upon us, it’s the perfect time to get lost in the Gallery and see things from a different perspective.

SKYWHALES ON TOUR

Roger Butler AM For 39 years, Roger was the Senior Curator, Australian Prints, Drawings and Illustrated Books at the National Gallery, before retiring last year. During his tenure, the now Emeritus Curator worked closely with Gordon Darling AC CMG and Marilyn Darling AC to establish the Gordon Darling Fund. To celebrate the centenary of Gordon’s birth, Roger talks with Marilyn on page 34.

Winter 106 The National Gallery of Australia acknowledges the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples, the Traditional Custodians of the land on which the Gallery stands, and recognises their continuous connection to culture, community and Country.

Artonview may contain names and images of deceased Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Editor Sophie Tedmanson

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Patricia Piccinini, Skywhalepapa, 2020, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, commissioned with the assistance of The Balnaves Foundation 2019, purchased 2020 © Patricia Piccinini

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Jeffrey Smart in his studio in Arezzo, Italy, 2011, while painting his last work, Labyrinth.

Image © Rob Palmer.

Under the Tuscan sun

In 2005, journalist MICHAEL MAHER travelled to Italy to interview JEFFREY SMART at his 18th-century farmhouse, Posticcia Nuova, in Arezzo in the Tuscan countryside. What transpired was one of the last interviews with the celebrated Australian artist, traversing his move to Italy in 1968, his connection to Australia and his artistic inspiration.

In celebration of the centenary of Jeffrey Smart’s birth and the upcoming exhibition at the National Gallery, here is an edited transcript of their conversation, which was broadcast for the ABC’s Foreign Correspondent expat series Another Sun, accompanied by the last photoshoot with the artist, in 2011.

Photographs by ROB PALMER. 6

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Getting to know Jeffrey Smart during the course of making a documentary on him was a professional and personal treat.

‘Bayreuth’, home of the German festival which celebrates the hosts’ beloved Wagner.

He was 84 when we were filming but still possessed of an intoxicating exuberance for painting, for music, for literature, for travel and, of course, for wine, food and conversation.

I was guilty on both counts but was quickly forgiven and spent many captivating hours filming Smart at the easel in his studio, sketching from his car on a Tuscan back road and playing piano in the great room of his farmhouse.

Dining with Jeffrey and his partner, Ermes De Zan, in the loggia at Posticcia Nuova was the equivalent of what the Round Table at New York’s Algonquin Hotel must have been like in the 1920s.

The rapier-like banter was relentless, the guests might include Germaine Greer, Bruce Beresford or Barry Humphries and no quarter was given to those who weren’t familiar with a particular line from a T.S. Eliot poem or mispronounced

Some artists find being filmed an intrusion. Not so Jeffrey Smart. Here was an artist approaching the end of a remarkable life and it was clear he had a generous desire to share the story of his creative journey with us all.

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JEFFREY SMART (JS) I looked at about 30 farmhouses and then found this one.

At the time, I only had enough money for the deposit, but then I had a show in London and the money from the exhibition just paid for it. So when I moved in here, I literally had no money at all for food, really. It was a pretty thin existence to start with.

Why do we change to lands warmed by another sun? Well, I don’t know.

Why did Henry James leave America and go and work in England? Why did Picasso leave Spain and go and work in France? Why did Shakespeare go down from Stratford and move to London? Hemingway moved to Europe for a long time. I think a lot of artists moved a great deal. I think I left because I wanted to see the old masters in situ.

I couldn’t go on feeding on reproductions.

I wanted to see the pictures.

I don’t agree with the word ‘expatriate’.

I think it’s a horrible word. Edna Everage calls an expatriate a traitor. That’s the equivalent in her dictionary, traitor.

Nothing of the sort. Absolute nonsense.

We should be able to live where we want to live. I much prefer living here in Tuscany than living in Australia.

Mind you, my case is a little different.

Because I came from Adelaide, which was no laughing matter, I tell you. It was not funny.

Jeffrey and Michael drive to an industriallooking area of Arezzo, where the artist explains what inspires him from the local landscape.

I just adore it here. I liked everything Italian. I like the offhand way of them.

I like the language, and I love spaghetti, and I love the Italian painting and I like the Italian way of life.

JS

I like the more geometric sort of forms.

I’m no good with misty lakes and gum trees dissolving into hazy smoke and all that. It doesn’t get me. This is light industry. This is a happy hunting ground for me down here, and then I’ve got another one on the outskirts of Arezzo. So I’m well placed, really, for subject matter.

What are you looking for in particular?

MICHAEL MAHER (MM)

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Nothing this morning. I don’t look for anything. It’s a bit like fishing. If you try too hard, you don’t see anything. It’s quite good there [he points to the gated entrance of a factory]. That entrance and the curved thing.

MM It’s

And the boom gates with the red markings on them.

I’m an Australian who lives in Italy, but I never feel anything but Australian.

How could I? Of course not.

JS

MM

JS Yeah.

MM JS

I’m helping you to see.

MM JS

The numbers over there in the circles.

What am I meant to be seeing?

I don’t know. The new world.

MM A

lot of people have said, and you’ve heard it said many times about your work, that it is apocalyptic. That there’s something alienating.

JS Oh,

I don’t see that. Apocalyptic?

Threatening.

MM

The dark skies . . .

JS Oh,

the dark sky, a big storm coming, bad times around the corner. Oh, I don’t see that. I just do black skies because . . .

Gauguin said, “Good pictures are usually dark.” You’ll find it very hard to find bright blue skies in the great artists.

Have a look.

Back at the farmhouse, Michael and Jeffrey are joined by the artist’s partner, Ermes De Zan, and their pugs.

JS:

not an issue here?

No, it doesn’t exist.

MM After

40 years in Italy, do you regard yourself as an Italian?

JS No, I’m not an Italian. I’m an Australian.

MM You’ve

been away for a long time.

Yes, but I intend to remain here and be buried here, I suppose. It depends where I am when I die. I don’t know that one.

JS

— Jeffrey Smart was born in Adelaide on 26 July 1921 and passed away in Arezzo on 20 June 2013, aged 91. � The exhibition Jeffrey Smart opens on October 1. Exclusive Members preview tickets available from Monday 12 July, visit: nga.gov.au ichael Maher is the New York-based M President of the American Friends of the National Gallery of Australia (AFNGA).

To learn more about the AFNGA, turn to page 28. This is an edited transcript of Another Sun. To watch the video, go to: nga.gov.au

Jeffrey Smart is supported by Major Patrons the Margaret Olley Art Trust, Philip Bacon AM, and Exhibition Patrons Penelope Seidler AM, Wayne Kratzmann, and Colin and Barbara Hindmarsh.

You’ve lived here for a number of decades with your partner, Ermes De Zan.

MM

JS

Yes.

You’ve described these years as the happiest in your life.

MM

“I like the more geometric sort of forms. I’m no good with misty lakes and gum trees dissolving into hazy smoke and all that. It doesn’t get me. [Arezzo] is light industry.

This is a happy hunting ground for me down here . . . So I’m well placed, really, for subject matter.”

The best, yes. I had a stroke of luck there, meeting Ermes. That was great . . . Mind you, I’d had a bad run before that. I’ve got a very bad track record with friends in the past . . . Nothing lasting more than about eight or nine years.

JS

What about being accepted here in Italy as a gay man and a gay couple?

This is a very conservative nation.

MM

But that doesn’t exist here. There’s no gay people here at all. They don’t exist. They’re not recognised and that there are none. It’s quite an easy way out of it, isn’t it?

JS

(right) Scenes from Jeffrey Smart’s studio in Arezzo, Italy, in 2011. © Rob Palmer.

Images courtesy of the artist.

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Still life ROB PALMER travelled to Italy in 2011 to photograph JEFFREY SMART at his home studio. It was to be the last ever photoshoot with the artist, who passed away in 2013.

Tell us about the photoshoot. How did it come about?

In 2011 The Weekend Australian magazine commissioned me to photograph Jeffrey as part of a centrepiece story they were doing for the newspaper. So my wife, Sophia, who works as a photo producer, and I stopped in Italy to photograph him on our way to our wedding in Morocco in 2011.

You studied Jeffrey’s work at school. What influence has his art had on you?

Jeffrey was a painter acclaimed for seeing beauty in everyday scenes. I started out pursuing painting in art school but eventually followed a career in photography. Seeing beauty in everyday scenes has been a pursuit I’ve always strived for.

As a commercial photographer you’re often placed in average surroundings and required to produce something unique.

Have I always produced images of any worth when faced with these difficult situations? Probably not. But the work of critically acclaimed artists like Jeffrey certainly have inspired me to search for results of interest.

What was it like to photograph him at that time just before he passed away, and capturing him working on his last painting (Labyrinth, which is in the national collection)?

The importance of that moment only rang true a few years later when Jeffrey’s partner, Ermes [De Zan], called me to let me know what had happened. In the moment I was so pleased to have spent some time with a prolific painter whom I had studied in my youth, but only once he had passed away did I realise just how special that moment was. I literally photographed one of the last moments Jeffrey ever put a brush to canvas.

What was he like, both as a subject and in person?

As a person he was gruff; he said what he wanted without any worry for what others may feel. He didn’t try to impress anyone but, if you won his respect, the conversation became easy and enjoyable. By the end of our two days we didn’t want to leave.

Can you share any anecdotes from your time with him?

I still remember Jeffrey commenting a few times with “Oh, that’s so provincial.” It was one of his favourite things to say to put someone in their place. The last thing Jeffrey said to me was “See you at the footy.”

You have had a varied career, from surfing photography to last year winning the National Photographic Portrait Prize – congratulations! Where does this shoot sit in your career?

It was honestly one of the highlights of my career. This seems like a predictable thing to say, but flying to Italy to photograph a childhood idol was fantastic. One of the main images I shot of Jeffrey still sits in my portfolio today.

Details of Jeffrey Smart’s studio in Arezzo, Italy, 2011. (opposite) Jeffrey Smart’s last painting, Labyrinth, in progress in Arezzo in 2011. The work is now in the national collection. © Rob Palmer.

Images courtesy of the artist.

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Oscar-nominated filmmaker BRUCE BERESFORD remembers his lifelong mentor JEFFREY SMART and their friendship, which began at a Sydney high school.

Jeffrey & Me

I was 15 years old when I first met Jeffrey Smart. It was 1955 and he was the art master at The King’s School in Parramatta (New South Wales). I was a gormless pupil. Some years later, Jeffrey told me I was the only student he ever met who clearly contradicted his belief that “anyone can be taught to draw”.

A few years later – around 1958 – I was working as a camera assistant in the newsreel department of the ABC. Being young and strong it was my job to load and unload the mountain of heavy equipment we seemed to need for the simplest assignment. Equipment that today, in our digital age, is either scrapped or in a museum.

Bruce Beresford with Jeffrey Smart at the artist’s home in Arezzo in 2010. Photo courtesy of Bruce Beresford.

With the chief cameraman, a chainsmoking, charmless old cynic, I went to cover an art show in a gallery somewhere near Circular Quay.

To my surprise the paintings on display were all by Jeffrey Smart, who amazed me by remembering my name: “Beresford . . . the boy who likes films.”

I had assumed, with no foundation whatever, that Jeffrey was teaching at my school because he wasn’t a success as an artist, in the same way that people teach screenwriting and film directing because they were dismal failures when they attempted to actually write and/or direct.

My first look at the paintings on display was a revelation. Not only could Jeffrey Smart draw, but he created such compelling images. He saw beauty in the everyday – modern buildings, highways, road signs, airports. I realised he was reacting to his world just as the Heidelberg school had painted the world of their era or the Impressionists had painted the France of their daily lives.

I never much cared for interpretations I read of Jeffrey’s paintings that stated the few human figures included were lonely, alienated, symbols of an unappealing era. First, it seemed to me that Jeffrey saw beauty in the era, which many did not, and the figures were included to give scale to the compositions. Why, I thought, would someone on the balcony of a tower block necessarily be lonely or unhappy?

He’s probably just admiring the view for a few minutes before going back inside for a G&T, or into the arms of a lover.

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Dissolve now to 1963. I had graduated from Sydney University, having spent four years struggling through an arts course while spending far too much time making films and giving inept performances in minor roles with the drama society.

Film production in Australia was minimal, so I decided I should move to London. A very elderly lady, vaguely related to my mother, generously bought me a ticket for a berth in the grim hold of an Italian ship, the Castel Felice.

During the six-week voyage I spent quite a lot of time chasing attractive young girls around the decks. Curiously, most of them found me eminently resistible.

Fortunately, quite early in the voyage I discovered Jeffrey Smart in the breakfast room. He was quite pleased, I think, to encounter a passenger who was such an enthusiast for his paintings. We talked endlessly through the entire voyage.

Most of the talking was done by the erudite Jeffrey, who, along with chunks of gossip about Australian artists, fascinated me with his passions – the works of Cézanne, Matisse, Léger (with whom he had studied in Paris), Lucian Freud and many of the great Italians, particularly Piero della Francesca. The genius of Piero never ceased to fascinate him; Jeffrey was obsessed with his compositional skill, use of perspective, placement of figures, delicate use of colour.

His interests stretched far beyond painters. He was widely read, with an incredible memory. He seemed to have total recall of the most arcane plot twists of the immense novels of Anthony Trollope. Even more impressive was his ability to recite all of Eliot’s Four quartets from memory.

Over the years – from 1962 until Jeffrey’s death in 2013, and as my film career flickered into life – my wife and I visited Jeffrey many times at his house near Arezzo, in Tuscany. He was always cheerful and courteous, but nothing could distract him from painting in his studio (a converted chicken house?) from 9am to 6pm every day. On one occasion I called him from the Arezzo railway station to tell him I’d arrived and would he pick me up? The answer was an instant “No. I’m working. Get a taxi.”

On my visits, he didn’t mind if I sat in the studio as he worked. His concentration was formidable. His paintings were detailed, not just a couple of scribbles in the style of Cy Twombly. Most took months to complete. Classical music was played at top volume from an FM station. “Why don’t they play more Delius?” Jeffrey yelled at me. “Bruce, can you get in touch with them and ask why?” (Despite strenuous efforts on my part I have never been able to share his passion for Wagner. The lugubrious plots defeated me, while his admiration was the musical equivalent of his adoration of Piero della Francesca. A visit to Bayreuth was the high point of nearly every year.)

The day’s painting over, a sociable Jeffrey Smart emerged. Visitors often arrived for dinner on the patio. The conversation was usually laced with salacious gossip, much of it about the foibles of famous artists. I remember a startling revelation regarding the length of Sibelius’s virile member.

Before bed there could be a movie.

Jeffrey’s taste tended towards works of the ’30s and ’40s. He was fascinated by the films the director Josef von Sternberg made with his lover Marlene Dietrich at the height of her beauty and charisma. He admired Sternberg’s stunning pictorial sense and ignored his lack of skill with plot or characterisation.

But Dietrich he adored even in the absurd Morocco. He could imitate the great Marlene singing the classic ballad “Go ’way from my window”, not omitting her inability to pronounce the letter ‘r’.

On my last visit to Arezzo, a few months before he died, I noticed a large print of a painting by Piero della Francesca on the wall opposite his bed. Jeffrey, frail and failing, was propped up with cushions, ambitiously reading a huge biography of Catherine the Great.

I am lucky, I know, that my career as a film and opera director has taken me all over the world and into contact with many remarkable people. Jeffrey Smart is undoubtedly one of the most remarkable, certainly one of the kindest, wittiest and most gifted. His paintings give me the same thrill today as they did at that exhibition in 1958.

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Jeffrey Smart, Corrugated Gioconda, 1976, oil on canvas, 84.7 x 120.5cm, purchased 1976.

Jeffrey Smart’s potent images of empty streets populated by solitary figures have become emblematic of 20th- and 21stcentury urban experience – particularly in this pandemic era.

The acclaimed Australian artist sought inspiration and beauty from the world around him, looking to the sites and objects of urban and industrial modernity such as water towers, apartment blocks, factories, modes of transport, railway sidings, highways and signage – all of which he rendered with a sense of theatre and an intimate understanding of geometry and composition. Now, 100 years since Smart’s birth, the National Gallery will hold a major exhibition to celebrate his centenary.

While broadly chronological, beginning with Smart’s artistic foundations in Adelaide, the exhibition is fundamentally thematic and delves into a rich array of ideas emerging from his work: the theatre of life and the uncanny, surveillance, the act of watching and being watched, geometry and composition, pattern making and architectural constructs, the road and directional motifs, art about art, as well as portraiture and friendships. The show will also reveal insights into Smart’s working methods and incorporate archival material to present the trajectory of his life from Adelaide to Sydney and to Italy, where he lived from 1964 until his death in 2013. Although he spent all these decades outside of Australia, Smart never liked to think of himself as an expatriate. Instead, he felt a deep connection with his country of birth and very much at home in his adopted country, resisting the idea of neat categorisations in terms of geographical boundaries or narrative.

Although Smart’s works suggest narratives, he was averse to telling stories about his art, preferring instead to emphasise the importance of geometry and composition. In 1969, he famously stated, “my only concern is putting the right shapes in the right colours in the right places. My main concern always is the geometry, the structure of the painting.” Given the persistence of enigmatic, figurative imagery in his art, this statement seems misleading. It remains, however, a stance he repeated often and certainly, an interest in compositional design and form in their most abstract sense runs parallel and in constant tension with the figurative aspect of his work.

From a curatorial point of view, we have sought to explore the confluence between these two seemingly opposed ideas in both the exhibition and the publication.

A life in pictures 14

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Theatre of the real and the uncanny In relation to figuration and subject matter, Smart’s art is more akin to poetry than prose. Indeed, poetry, especially

by T.S. Eliot but also many others, was profoundly important to him. His painting The wasteland II, for example, drew directly from Eliot’s highly influential poem of the same name.

His painting presents an abandoned bank building set within a desert landscape strewn with incongruous objects as though props on a stage. For Smart, the poem was a revelation and he had a profound and lifelong passion for Eliot’s writings, sharing an interest in bringing together aspects of daily life with the metaphysical.

A new exhibition celebrates the centenary of Jeffrey Smart, his legacy and the ideas that emerge from his work, write DEBORAH HART and REBECCA EDWARDS.

Smart’s Self-portrait, Procida, presents a theatre for imagining.

It reveals his awareness of the work of Giorgio de Chirico, who combined architectural and largely deserted spaces to create unsettling landscapes of mind. Smart did not paint

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many self-portraits and those he did were telling. In tandem with the strength of his compositions – focusing intently on the construction of his pictures – it was the crystallisation of specific imagery and a pervasive, often haunting stillness that characterises his best works. This small self-portrait invokes another key foundation stone of his work: meditations on the nature of time. It was inspired by a memory of the island of Procida off the coast of Naples, where he and his close friend Jacqueline Hick stayed for a short while prior to their return to Australia in 1951. In this, as in other works, Smart often sets the theatrical stage to create arenas in which human experience cannot be defined through easy platitudes or singular readings.

Instead, the subjects of his art are suggestive realms in which characters and signposts within the paintings are jumping-off points for the viewer, who becomes an active player, bringing themself to the experience. This is part of the brilliance of some of Smart’s best works in which image and structure are distilled as tautly as a haiku, inviting the viewer into a dream.

Dreamlike sensibilities are seen in On the roof, Taylor Square (pictured right). Here, the sunbathing woman feels physically very present while the tilt of her head and closed eyes suggest she is in her own dream world. In its palette and in her pose there are echoes of the sleeping figures in Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection fresco, albeit in a determinedly contemporary, secular setting. The striking presence of the naked figure, covered only by black drapery, is amplified by the palette of the yellow and pink architecture behind the rooftop, set against an uncharacteristically blue sky. Smart painted male figures in a similar direct pose, for instance in The listeners, undertaken in Rome. The man who turns his head towards the satellite appears to be listening intently. He lies in long grasses that rustle in the wind while the satellite picks up its own signals. New technologies of satellite and radio dishes and towers were integral to dramatic changes in communications in the 20th century, creating a global interconnectedness.

Abstracting from the real The significance of compositional design was something Smart first learnt from Dorrit Black, who had spent time in London studying at the Grosvenor School and then in Paris with André Lhote and Albert Gleizes. When she arrived back in Adelaide after a stint in Sydney, where she had established the Modern Art Centre (1931–33), she made a considerable impact on the artistic milieu. Smart always acknowledged Black’s importance to him in the formative stages of his artistic life, opening up new ways of thinking about art, especially in relation to ‘making a picture’ – and the processes involved in constructing a composition. Black shared details of the golden mean, a mathematical ratio that defined the relationship between formal elements and provided a framework upon which artists could develop aesthetically pleasing, balanced compositions in which objects were placed at points most appealing to the eye. Through the golden mean, Smart was introduced to and presented with a practical way of conceiving the composition in terms of basic, abstract geometry and the mathematical structure can subsequently be seen in the compositions of many of the works he produced during his lifetime. Returning to On the roof, Taylor Square, for example, the composition is underpinned by a simple yet effective

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arrangement of golden rectangles that form the backdrop to the sunbathing woman, the black clothing draped between her legs, wryly positioned at the focal point dictated by the ratio.

As well as his understanding of the underpinning structure of the composition, in later years Smart began to play with the outwardly formal traits broadly associated with developments in pure abstraction – the bright, flat colour, sharp-edged geometric shapes and optical patterns seen in colour field and hard-edge painting of the 1960s onwards. This manifests particularly in his imagery of the road. Asphalt, road markings, billboards, signage and the bulky carriages of trucks with their graphic, two-dimensional surfaces offered Smart a subject existing in the external world that was already reduced to an abstract visual language resembling the bold, flattened geometries of pure abstraction. In Bus terminus, road markings strike up the composition in broad arcs, stripes and grids of crisp yellow and white. Although the tone of the road darkens slightly as it moves towards to the viewer, the lighting across the composition is predominantly even and smooth, and the overall effect is one of flatness and two-dimensionality.

Large, formal blocks of colour are seen in Truck and trailer approaching a city (pictured right), in which Smart overlapped the carriages of two trucks, one yellow and one red, and pushed them into the foreground to create two large fields that divided the composition in half. Later works such as Portrait of Clive James (1991–92) play with optical geometric patterns of a corrugated fence, pressed against the foreground in a singular graphic plane that dominates the composition.

Ultimately, however, it is impossible to avoid the references to reality in Smart’s compositions. His paintings are populated with portraits of friends, lovers and public figures, layered with references to literature, art and other artists, and underpinned by personal jokes and references that mean the viewer can never solely interpret his work as a formal, compositional exercise – despite his assertions otherwise. The yellow fence in Portrait of Clive James fills most of the composition like a hard-edge painting, yet James’s head remains visible at its top and the painting never becomes a complete abstraction. Figuration and form inevitably jostle with each other, a tension encouraged by the artist that is both puzzling and enigmatic but, more importantly, in the end, central to their ongoing allure.

novels including The time machine (1895). Although his work was derived from an image of a maze, Smart chose to title it Labyrinth. While a maze presents a challenge and is often used in science to study spatial awareness, a labyrinth has spiritual connotations. Perhaps, in the end, geometry has become the subject, embodying both a sure sense of construction and a sense of the metaphysical, opening up endless possibilities for imagining. ­— Deborah Hart is the Henry Dalrymple Head of Australian Art and Rebecca Edwards is the Sid and Fiona Myer Curator of Ceramics and Design.

(above) Jeffrey Smart, On the roof, Taylor Square, 1961, oil on canvas, 71.6 x 61.1cm purchased 1969; (below) Jeffrey Smart, Truck and trailer approaching a city, 1973, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 75 x 150.4 cm, Art Gallery of New South Wales, purchased under the terms of the Florence Turner Blake Bequest 1980 © Estate of Jeffrey Smart.

In his last major painting, Labyrinth (which is featured on the cover being painted by the artist), Smart brings together many of the philosophical, literary and aesthetic threads that had run through his work since his early paintings undertaken in Adelaide in the 1940s. Labyrinth was inspired by a verdant hedged maze the artist saw on a book cover, transforming this image into a stone configuration that appears to extend into infinity. Here, the motif combines his ongoing interest in geometry and the philosophy of aeronautical engineer J.W. Dunne, who believed in predestination and the relevance of dreams. He also proposed that our experience of time as linear is an illusion and that past, present and future were continuous in a higher dimension of reality. In the centre of the labyrinth is a portrait of H.G. Wells, who was friends with Dunne and best remembered for his science-fiction

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Studio Spotlight

Opposite Artist Jonathan Jones.

We visit an artist in their studio and discover how space influences their inspiration and creative process.

This month: JONATHAN JONES (Wiradjuri/Kamilaroi peoples)

The artist working on walamwunga.galang (grindstones) at Henderson’s Marble & Granite in Tottenham, Victoria. Photos

by Christian Capurro.

My school reports were full of straight Ds in every subject apart from visual art. So I’m not able to do much else.

Thankfully my grades weren’t such a problem as my extended family and friends have always been really supportive. One of the many things Aboriginal people can be proud of is the fact that in our community being an artist isn’t considered strange. It’s only as I’ve gotten older that I’ve realised the mainstream community doesn’t really value artists, or the arts, in the same way.

I worked at the Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative with Michael Riley that I felt I had someone to model my work on. Michael’s work finds the contradictions and beauty within the lived experiences of Aboriginal people from the southeast region. Michael, along with other key New South Wales artists including Aunty Elaine Russell and H.J. Wedge, really inspired me to not just curate but to continue my practice.

So being an artist, for me, has always been a group effort.

learning from and working with for many years. Uncle Stan is responsible for the revival of our Wiradjuri language, and has always been an inspiration to me.

The sentences included in the work were recorded with him over a cup of tea at his kitchen table in Narrandera [in southern New South Wales]. Statements such as “Nindi-nhi bagaray-bang Ngurambang maying-galang-girri-gu (We want healthy country for future generations)” embed the project in a cultural space and provide us with hope.

My Aunty Chris was the first person to really get me on the right track.

Aunt helped me finish TAFE and then apply to university. At [UNSW Art & Design] I was interested in both photography and sculpture, but most importantly I got to study under Uncle Peter McKenzie from La Perouse [in Sydney], who photographed the NSW Koori Knockout [rugby league carnival] and lectured about Bauhaus design.

Uncle Peter’s work is held in the National Gallery collection. He really supported me through the challenges of university.

He also curated my work into my first exhibition, at the Ivan Dougherty Gallery [in Paddington, Sydney] in 1997.

Similarly this work, walam-wunga. galang (grindstones), has been inspired and created by a number of people.

People like Uncle Bruce Pascoe and Bill Gammage, who have been leading the conversation about how Australia is understood. Their groundbreaking work has shown that our native grasses were carefully cultivated to not only be the most dominant species pre-1788 but that our ancestors have been harvesting and grinding the seeds of these grasses to make bread and sustain our societies for at least 32,000 years. In the process, the works of Uncle Bruce and Bill have completely shifted the very foundations Australia has built its narrative upon.

Art and cultural practices have always been the platform on which Aboriginal people share our ideas. Cultural events connected our communities and transferred knowledge. Even from the early days of colonisation, nonAboriginal people were generously invited to be part of these experiences.

For me, art is a continuation of this important process. These stories and how we tell them is what makes a nation.

Although I had completed three years of art school and had shown my work in a number of exhibitions, it wasn’t until

walam-wunga.galang (grindstones) is made in collaboration with Dr Uncle Stan Grant Snr AM, who I’ve been

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— In conversation with Aidan Hartshorn, Wesfarmers Assistant Curator � Jonathan Jones’s walam-wunga.galang (grindstones) is part of the Project Series and will be on display in the Gallery in August. The work will then go on tour in November as part of the Ever Present: First People’s Art of Australia major touring exhibition, supported by Wesfarmers.

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Slipping through the veil

Contemporary artist SARAH LUCAS, whose wickedly witty sculptures use ordinary objects to explore gender, sex and death, reflects on time, her hardscrabble beginnings and the potency of feminism in art. By PETER JOHNSON, Curator, Projects.

PETER JOHNSON (PJ) COVID-19

has had significant impacts on all our lives – particularly in the UK. How are you?

And how has it has affected your creative practice?

SARAH LUCAS (SL) I think what I’ve enjoyed about it most, especially in the first lockdown when the world outside the window really went quiet, is the sense that nothing needs to be done in any great hurry. It reminded me of life some decades ago when time seemed to stretch and yawn.

You could go days or a week when the phone didn’t ring. There was time to get a bit bored and then start something, read a book or get into action making something – and really spend the time with it. Or not, as the case may be. One didn’t have the feeling then of being watched or expected to account for every moment of the day or even the obligation to be useful.

When I come to think of it, that is the kind of time that I hanker after and do my best to preserve. The feeling that time is my own. Initially, when everything stopped, I realised how far from that, in my own habitual thinking to myself, I’ve become in recent years. And I think this has happened to everybody.

How did you get started? What drew you to art as a way of making sense of, and being in, the world?

PJ

Well, I’ve always been making things, not for art’s sake, exactly.

I think it must have started with mud pies. Just keeping myself company.

It’s still that to some extent.

SL

I left school when I was 16, dying to get out, then had a good couple of years playing records and talking with friends and travelling a bit. Then it struck me to wonder what I was going to do with my life. What I’d been up to had run out of steam. I realised it needed input of some kind – something to talk about, something to do. Someone I met at work suggested art college might suit me. I spent a couple of years doing all the evening classes I could get my hands on and getting a portfolio together. Then I applied.

You studied at [prestigious London art college] Goldsmiths, surrounded by many contemporaries who would go on to have remarkable careers. Tell us about that experience – was there a sense that something special was happening?

PJ Portrait of Sarah Lucas by Julian Simmons (Framlingham, Suffolk, UK, February 2020), image courtesy of Sadie Coles HQ, London, © Sarah Lucas, photograph: Julian Simmons.

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I fancied the college in the first place mainly for not having to choose between disciplines, but I rapidly gravitated towards sculpture once I was there.

There was a big conceptual side, too, and lots of part-time and visiting artists – many of them close in age to the students.

So one began to feel a part of something going on in the world, it came into focus.

SL

Colleges now seem to be under enormous pressure to prove they’re ticking all the right boxes. That’s a shame. There needs to be a truly free art school type of place where people can grow into being themselves. For me, that’s what art is, finding a way to do what you like and making that valid. Validate yourself.

That should be point A. One has to ask: Am I convinced by this? What’s it saying back to me? That’s difficult, too. If it was easy, everybody would do it. Of course, it might and often does look easy when it’s done.

And a lot of people think: I could have done that. But they didn’t. It’s taking a mental leap and finding your own feet that’s important. It’s less about fulfilling existing criteria and more about what might be possible and what you dream it could be.

I didn’t have a sense back then of an impending career – let alone one as an actual contemporary artist. In the first place I didn’t know there was such a thing.

I was totally up for doing things, though.

You use everyday materials – stockings, cigarettes, foodstuffs – in your work. What about these materials draws you to them?

Why are these materials important to your exploration of gender, sex and death?

PJ

In the first place they were just handy.

And cheap. And full of connotations.

At college I’d been grappling with a lot of more abstract materials. I’d buy a huge amount of blue plastic, for instance, and see what I could do with that.

And that seemed meaningful at college.

When the college context was over, less so. I found myself in a room at home with a pile of something or other that was taking up all the available space and thinking, Who cares about this stuff?

Do I? So I started again using readily available, ordinary stuff that didn’t take up so much space and seemed to be already imbued with some sort of content. Worldly content. Whether that be tabloid newspapers or nylon tights or my own image or fruit and veg . . . These

SL

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things seemed to me to be currency and language that had to do with real life, everybody’s real life: I’m in the world and what’s it all about? That sort of thing.

PJ The

bunnies in your upcoming show at the National Gallery have a very different disposition to your earlier bunnies. Where the sculptures in Bunny Gets Snookered [Lucas’s 1997 installation at Sadie Coles HQ in London] are entirely abject – limp, sexually available yet filled with ennui – the newer bunnies have a greater sense of individual character, even dignity.

How have the bunnies changed in the years you’ve been making them?

Well, the times have changed a lot since then. In those days London was quite abject, and my life was too in many ways. Living in rundown areas and having studios in half derelict warehouses. Drinking in the roughest pub and having to get everywhere by foot or on a bike at all hours of the day and night . . . Also, I used floppier wire in those days. Things evolve in all kinds of ways, materially and in one’s own thinking, out in the world.

SL

At college and even before that at evening classes, I aspired to making something beautiful as my high ideal. On leaving college – and I can’t leave disillusion out of the equation – I started to make things with, I felt, a much more gritty reality.

And certainly I was living in a gritty reality. I also wanted to be hardcore and a radical, I expect, like most young people. These days I often feel inclined to cheer things up. Lift the spirits.

My own, first and foremost. Although I’d like to think I keep some sort of edge.

The bronzes, in particular, also start to mix masculine and feminine elements.

DICK ‘EAD sports a very proud and prominent penis. What draws you to androgyny? How do the bunnies feel about mixing with the masculine?

PJ

Masculinity was made for bunnies. It’s a bunny plaything. Or is it the other way around? I was always a bit of a tomboy.

It makes sense really to want to do a lot of the things that are traditionally the preserve of men and boys – because that’s most things. I didn’t give it too much thought. Post-college, reading a bit of Freud, penis and absence-of-penis stuff, it made me laugh, but I also realised there

SL

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is something to it. Through that lens, art making seems a decidedly macho activity – in the sense that it is manifestation; what’s present rather than what’s absent.

That got me wondering about what it is to be a women artist, how to mobilise it. Then I read Andrea Dworkin and she really turned my head (spun my nut).

She aided my dawning realisation that it’s all a construction and could therefore be constructed quite differently. If we wanted it. So I found myself playing with these kinds of ideas and they seemed to have some potency, in the art world, at least.

Opposite Sarah Lucas, Eating a Banana, 1990, black and white photograph, image courtesy of Sadie Coles HQ, London, © the artist.

This page Sarah Lucas, SUGAR, 2020, tights, wire, wool, bulldog clips, shoes, acrylic paint, metal chair, image courtesy of Sadie Coles HQ, London, © the artist, photograph: Robert Glowacki.

The exhibition features monumental reproductions of images from the contact sheet of your work Eating a Banana.

What draws you to using your own image? What brings you back to this work after such a long time?

PJ

SL Eating a Banana was

the first ‘selfportrait’ I made. It came about quite casually, as a lot of things do. I was sharing a studio with Gary Hume, who was my boyfriend at the time, and I asked him to take some pictures of me eating this banana – it was just the one banana. A very off-the-cuff idea.

Looking at the contact sheets, one in particular jumped out at me, so I had a print made and put it in an exhibition.

Somehow it seemed to help the other work I was making. It helped to put myself in the picture and lent the other sculptural works a bit of my personality and angle. It seemed to become iconic very quickly, among my coterie, at least.

It’s very convincing when something like that happens. You start to believe in some magic about the image itself, like it has to be that image and no other would do, sort of thing. Many years later, rummaging through drawers looking for something or other, I came across the contacts. I thought: Actually, they’re all really good. And I liked seeing my younger self. Later still, when I had an idea to make a black and white room as part of an exhibition, I had the idea to use them as a wallpaper. Often when I’m hanging an exhibition I realise it would benefit from the addition of something or other and have to act on that quite fast, whether that’s getting images printed up or making some ad hoc sculpture, or just introducing some furniture. I’m thinking on my feet a lot.

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PJ So

much of your work pushes back against a sense of propriety. Through its crassness – or some might say honesty – it rejects authority and repressive regimes, especially those based on class.

What draws you to this subject matter and way of making?

SL

A kind of desperation. Exasperation.

PJ On a

similar note, humour is central to so much of your work, whether that be through the use of visual puns or pushing back against our expectations.

What do you find useful about humour as an artistic strategy?

It’s not a strategy in the sense of being a plan, something I set out with.

It happens. When humour happens, things get good. Less depressing.

It’s a kind of magic. Suddenly things make sense. Contradictory things.

Hard-to-reconcile things. The same as jokes, really. Or Freudian slips.

They are a revelation of where the gaps are, the chinks in the armour of our seamless reality. Making something concrete at that point is like slipping through the veil.

SL

There’s something very raw and mythic about the newest bunnies – both the soft

PJ

This page (from top) Sarah Lucas, TITTIPUSSIDAD, 2018, bronze, concrete and cast iron, image courtesy of Sadie Coles HQ, London, © the artist, photograph: Steve Russell Studios, purchased 2021; Sarah Lucas, WINTER SONG, 2020, tights, wire, wool, spring clamps, shoes, acrylic paint, wooden chair, image courtesy of Sadie Coles HQ, London, © the artist, photograph: Robert Glowacki.

sculptures and the bronzes. They almost recall the Venus of Willendorf with their unapologetic embodiment of gendered forms. How has the relationship of the bunnies to the representation of women changed over the years you have been making them?

SL A

lot has changed with the century.

In the ’70s and ’80s I grew up in the feminist movement, which tended to be made up largely of hippie-ish and also butch lesbian types (I was living in squats and short-life housing co-ops at the time), women who were against the definition of females as sex objects. Sexy attire and lots of makeup was the province of women in the glamour and sex industries and women out to ‘snare’ a man. As it turned out, these days women in powerful positions in government and running companies tend to be very glamorous.

They may wear a well-cut power suit but they’re still likely to be tottering about on six-inch stiletto heels in full makeup and hair. It’s beginning to seem like any serious political challenge to the likes of Trump is going to have to be a huge bullet-breasted, mega-high-heel-wearing, big-painted-lips sort of super-heroine cartoon character.

You’ve been making bunnies for 30 years. What draws you back to them time and again? How do you feel about repetition – or, more accurately, iteration – in your work?

PJ

I’ve tended to be wary of repetition.

It struck me years ago in college days that many successful artists seem to only make versions of the same thing they made a name for themselves with in the first place. I thought: Crikey, that looks boring, like having a job in a factory or something. So I set about being eclectic about materials and methods. A period of making cigarette works, for instance, or plaster casting. Then a bit of messing about with tights. Building up a repertoire, I suppose. Often long gaps when I don’t use certain materials at all. So going back to something is usually very fresh – something else is ready to happen.

SL

And finally, when do you know a work is finished?

PJ

SL When I know its character. When it becomes my friend. When I don’t want to tamper with it anymore. When I wouldn’t want it to be some other way.

� Project 1: Sarah Lucas, opens 7 August. nga.gov.au

“When humour happens, things get good.

Less depressing. It’s a kind of magic.

Suddenly things make sense.”

Opposite Sarah Lucas, PEEPING THOMASINA, 2020, tights, wire, wool, shoes, acrylic paint, vinyl and metal chair, image courtesy of Sadie Coles HQ, London, © the artist, photograph: Robert Glowacki.

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Spellbound Brisbane-based contemporary artist JUSTENE WILLIAMS speaks with YVETTE DAL POZZO, Assistant Curator, Australian Art, about her installation Given that/You put a spell on mine/Uterus, which features in Part Two of Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now.

YVETTE DAL POZZO (YDP) Tell us about the genesis of the idea for this work?

JUSTENE WILLIAMS (JW) The work was made in 2014 when I received a commission through Artspace. It was made as a part of an exhibition called The Curtain Breathed Deeply. In preparation I made collages which included artworks by [Fernand] Léger which depict women reclining and pipe organs. In creating the installation, the pipe organs became lights and the hierarchical tower became like an altar piece or a female form.

I made the video works first. They were speaking to a broader investigation throughout The Curtain Breathed Deeply using holes as a mechanism to peep through, to look through to death, to peer beyond thresholds or to look at interior holes in bodies – all sorts of orifices!

At the time I made this I was mourning the loss of my father, so the work is contending with death. However, at the same time there was a joyousness and discovery of my body through meeting my now partner, so it also encompassed the joy of sex and life. So these two opposite experiences inspired the work.

YDP Why

is it important to you to utilise readymade materials in your work?

Because I feel for the objects somehow.

My father owned a wrecking yard, so I grew up around objects that were left or discarded but had been given another life. As a child I’d sit in decommissioned cars with my sister. Sometimes you could turn the ignition and move the JW

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steering wheel and it would start to work.

I imagined the life of the objects and dreamt about where they could go. I like the idea of visual artists giving objects another life. As an artist you imbue energy into objects through intention, ideas and making. I feel second-hand objects have an existing vibration, energy or history that’s lying dormant.

YDP What is it about the ute that you are interested in reinvigorating in this work?

JW It was my ute, [but] was originally my father’s car. The Ford Ute in the work also acts as a point of transition. At the time, I was making videos about psychopomps [Santa was a Psychopomp], spirits whose role was to take souls to the afterlife.

What I love is that the work can operate on these different levels – there is no one set meaning and people can take what they want from it. The Ute, for me, when I was growing up around cars in western Sydney, was a symbol of the macho male.

The Ute was a way of taking that symbol of machismo and making it mine by building up the female form on top of it. Playing with it, like in the title making ‘Ute’ part of ‘Uterus’. I was trying to reclaim those symbols of masculine identity.

YDP As an artist and a university lecturer you have an active relationship with art history. How does this shape your work?

JW I suppose it saved me, in some ways, when I had a crisis of faith in making work a while back. I looked back to art history to rekindle a love of art. I was

(right) The artist Justene Williams; (below) Justene Williams, Given That/You put a spell on mine/ Uterus, 2014, Ford Falcon utility vehicle, steel, wood, paint, 12 fluorescent lights, freezer, barbeque, 5-channel HD video installation, installation view from Monash University Museum of Art. Photo: Zan Wimberley. All images are courtesy the artist and Sarah Cottier Gallery, Sydney.

drawn to peripheral figures. For instance, when I looked at [Marcel] Duchamp and his circle, that’s when I started to find artists like [Elsa Hildegard] Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven, whose life and work had been sidelined. These figures were sometimes women and, for me, that was interesting. This idea of being overlooked then manifested in a different way in my photographic practice.

YDP The work is an altar to female sexual expression and desire and the pinnacle of this is a video of a nude vagina (mons pubis) viewed through a peephole. Why did you present the female body this way?

JW Because it was my body, I suppose, I really didn’t want to show my whole self or the nude as we are used to. I wanted it to be about looking very directly; when you cut the circle like that and you look through, you have a very specific lens.

Looking back on it, it’s very specifically about the woman’s sex. I also wanted it to be animated and moving. At the time, I was starting to become sexually active again and I was also starting to think about reproducing for the first time.

There’s nothing more female, but a lot of the time it doesn’t get shown [in art] – everyone always shows the tits. It was also a Duchampian reference [to the work Étant donnés] but in his work the woman was lying there flaccid, not doing anything. Mine was active. � Know My Name Part Two opens 12 June.

For more, visit: knowmyname.nga.gov.au

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MICHAEL MAHER, an Australian New Yorker and President of the American Friends of the National Gallery of Australia, explains its mission of mutual cultural enrichment.

The American connection

Jackson Pollock’s Blue poles was extracted from Ben Heller’s apartment on New York’s Central Park West in 1974 ahead of its journey to Canberra after being purchased by the National Gallery.

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(right) The National Gallery’s Ned Kelly series was loaned to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a Sidney Nolan exhibition in 1994.

Sidney Nolan, Ned Kelly, 1946, enamel paint on composition board, 91.3 x 122.2cm, gift of Sunday Reed, 1977; (below) Robert Motherwell, Elegy to the Spanish Republic, 1958, synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 175.3 x 248.9cm, purchased with the assistance of American Friends of the National Gallery of Australia Inc., New York, NY, made possible with the generous support of The Dedalus Foundation and the Foundation of the National Gallery of Australia 1994, © Dedalus Foundation, Inc. VAGA/Copyright Agency.

“Today, new threads are being sewn into the richly embroidered fabric of cultural ties between America and Australia. And the visual arts are at the very centre of those bonds”

In the embroidery of New York’s cultural life there are threads which irrevocably link the city to the National Gallery of Australia. After all, it was in New York that Jackson Pollock’s Blue poles was lowered with ropes and pulleys from the window of an apartment high above Central Park West in 1974 to begin its long journey to Canberra.

Around the same time as the inspired Pollock acquisition, the master American printmaker Ken Tyler, his friend and art critic Robert Hughes and the Australian surrealist James Gleeson gathered at the Algonquin Hotel before moving to an Italian restaurant on 53rd Street to arrange for the National Gallery to become the custodian of Tyler’s remarkable body of work.

One of the finest collections of postwar American art outside of the US was taking shape on the streets and in the parlours of Manhattan. Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker magazine once joked that it was an undertaking akin to the British making off with Greece’s treasured Elgin Marbles.

Australian art was coming to New York as well.

As early as the mid-1950s the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) had acquired works by Sidney Nolan and Albert Tucker. In the midst of the racial strife and political tumult of 1968, Brett Whiteley was encamped in the penthouse of the Hotel Chelsea, working obsessively on his 18-panel opus The American dream. Years later, when I checked into the storied hotel, a Whiteley picture still hung above the front desk (given as part-payment for the artist’s 30

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rent). In the 1980s an exhibition of Aboriginal art at the Asia Society on Park Avenue broke attendance records and ushered in New York’s ongoing embrace of Australian First Nations artists. Then, photographs and films by Brisbane-born Tracey Moffatt began to assert themselves in the sinews of New York’s cultural anatomy, as did the much-celebrated novels of Shirley Hazzard and Peter Carey. Carey’s Booker Prize-winning, quintessentially Australian True history of the Kelly gang was not written beneath a blazing Antipodean sun, but rather at his desk in Greenwich Village. In fact, the author told me he was moved to write the novel after viewing an exhibition of Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly series, on loan from the National Gallery collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art up on 5th Avenue.

This is all to say that when the Melbourne businessman and arts patron Gordon Darling AC CMG struck upon the idea of founding the American Friends of the National Gallery of Australia (AFNGA) nearly 40 years ago, New York was the obvious place to start. It was, as the Americans say, a ‘triple threat’: the capital of the art world, the capital of the financial world and the capital of the philanthropic world. Delving into his extensive rolodex, Mr Darling recalled that he “approached a small number of prominent Americans in New York who had links and friendships with Australians . . . [and] sought their help to enrich our national collection of art”.

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He also saw the not-for-profit AFNGA as a vehicle to strengthen cultural bonds between the two countries.

Over the years the American Friends became one of the largest private donors of art to the National Gallery, garnering support from some of New York’s leading financiers and philanthropists. The Sydneyborn, ex-Olympian and cello-playing banker James Wolfensohn, who led the campaign to restore Carnegie Hall, was a generous benefactor, as was the chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank, David Rockefeller, and the venture capitalist Benno C Schmidt Snr. Together – in the early 1960s – Rockefeller and Schmidt bought a 5000-hectare farm in Esperance, Western Australia, and on his frequent trips there Schmidt began to assemble a fine collection of paintings. Among the works he purchased was one of the most iconic images in Australian art, Russell Drysdale’s The drover’s wife.

In 1987, through the auspices of the American Friends, Benno Schmidt donated a significant part of his collection to the National Gallery. At the time, the gift was valued at nearly US$1.5 million (AU$2 million) and was one of the most substantial ever made to any Australian gallery. So it was that The drover’s wife, a work the writer Frank Moorehouse has described as “Australia’s Mona Lisa”, came to be where it should rightfully be: in our national collection.

through AFNGA’s portals as well. And perhaps the most unstinting patron of the American Friends and the National Gallery has been the man who attended the aforementioned lunch on 53rd Street back in the early 1970s. The master printmaker Ken Tyler collaborated with a good number of the most acclaimed American artists of the 20th century and redefined the medium of printmaking. The National Gallery’s purchase in 1973 of his private collection of printers’ proofs is an integral part of the Gallery’s creation story. The Kenneth Tyler Collection – which now encompasses 77 artists – has grown into the most comprehensive body of postwar American art outside that country’s borders and continues to be generously supported by Tyler and his late wife, Marabeth.

Today, new threads are being sewn into the richly embroidered fabric of cultural ties between America and Australia. And just as it was in the past, when the National Gallery’s inaugural director, James Mollison, was astutely acquiring masterpieces from the abstract expressionist canon, the visual arts are at the very centre of those bonds. Almost four decades after its founding, the American Friends is still on hand to help ensure the National Gallery of Australia and its collection are embraced by art lovers and patrons throughout the United States. � For more information on the American Friends of the National Gallery of Australia, go to: afnga.org

In 1994, the American Friends also helped to buy one of the key works of the National Gallery’s abstract expressionist collection, Robert Motherwell’s Elegy to the Spanish Republic. The work was secured in no small part due to the efforts of the AFNGA trustee and New York-based Australian artist Judith Cotton. Works by Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, Philip Guston, Frank Stella and numerous others came

Russell Drysdale, The drover’s wife, c.1945, 70.2 x 79.6cm, Gift of American Friends of the National Gallery of Australia, Inc., New York, NY, USA, made possible with the generous support of Mr and Mrs Benno Schmidt of New York and Esperance, Western Australia, 1987, © Estate of Russell Drysdale.

Opposite National Gallery Founding Director James Mollison with Sidney Nolan’s Death of Sergeant Kennedy at Stringybark Creek, image courtesy of The Canberra Times.

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The Darling factor

To celebrate the centenary of Gordon Darling AC CMG, ROGER BUTLER AM talks to MARILYN DARLING AC about the former National Gallery Council Chair’s connection to artists, his passion for philanthropy and the genesis of the Gordon Darling Fund.

Gordon Darling AC with Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II at the opening of the National Gallery in 1982.

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Marilyn, what influenced you and Gordon to begin collecting?

ROGER BUTLER (RB)

MARILYN DARLING (MD) Gordon was a dedicated collector since he was about 30, so collecting was nothing new to him.

He had two unmarried aunts in Adelaide who were great collectors and probably got him on the collecting track. Gordon used to stay with them as a young man and they would walk him around the house and show him the things they’d recently bought. They also used to go up to the Adelaide Hills and visit Hans Heysen when he couldn’t sell paintings to anyone, and they would buy a few.

When we met, Gordon had been collecting paintings and works on paper for 30 to 40 years and he had already given a lot of them away, mostly to regional galleries.

So he was well down the track of collecting paintings. He certainly loved to buy art, either for himself or for an institution.

When you look through our archives and all of the paperwork that went through, it’s really an extraordinary amount.

We travelled a lot together in Southeast Asia and started collecting Southeast Asian objects. So I suppose that was really the genesis of our joint collecting.

We bought paintings, but really the bulk of it, when I think of it, was Southeast Asian objects.

Opposite (above) Albert Namatjira (Western Arrarnta people), Mount Giles, MacDonnell Ranges, Central Australia, 1945–1958, painting in watercolour over faint underdrawing in black pencil, image 29.3 x 38.3cm, gift of Marilyn Darling AC in memory of Gordon Darling AC CMG 2016.

Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, © Namatjira Legacy Trust/Copyright Agency; (below) Jiawei Shen’s L. Gordon Darling AC CMG, 2006, oil on canvas (frame: 180.5cm x 164.5cm, support: 168.8cm x 153.0cm), National Portrait Gallery, purchased with the assistance of the Mundango Charitable Trust and Claudia Hyles 2006, © Jiawei Shen.

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RB Gordon was the inaugural Chair of the National Gallery – a huge responsibility and challenge. I remember him telling me many times that the first thing he did was take an around-the-world trip to visit all sorts of other galleries, to get an idea about the whole procedures of galleries and their policies, and their administration and governance. It must have been an extraordinary thing to take up. Did he often talk about it?

Well, it was sort of like a lump of gold dropping; he was just totally thrilled and incredibly surprised when he was offered it. Because, until then, he’d been in the business world; umpteen years on the BHP board, chairman of Rheem, among other roles. So when he was offered the National Gallery he was thrilled beyond words.

He applied very good business principles to the Gallery as it began. [Founding Director] James Mollison used to remark that Gordon always said, “The bottom line had to be black, and not reddish.”

MD

RB You already mentioned that Gordon had given works for a long time to regional galleries and others. What was it about giving? What led to that?

Why did he feel it was so important?

What did he get out of it himself?

MD Both his aunts gave a great deal of their

very considerable estate to philanthropic causes. Because he admired their collecting and then the way they disposed of their assets, I think that, probably, just guessing, would have been what put philanthropy in his mind.

And I think the rest of it was he travelled widely in the US and he would see there what philanthropy was doing, because it was well ahead of Australia, of course.

So I think it was probably seeing the US example, because there wasn’t really a big example to follow here.

Once he started he got enormous enjoyment out of it. And the old phrase ‘You get more out of it than you put in’ is really true. He loved the network and the satisfaction. He really, really enjoyed his philanthropy.

RB When you were collecting works for your own collection, did he often think, We’re acquiring these now, but sometime in the future they will go to a particular place?

Well, that was the [Albert] Namatjiras.

The Namatjiras were always a collection.

But once he got a few, he was already thinking, This is going to be for the National Gallery. Which is why he often consulted you before adding yet another.

And that really was collecting it but, of course, collecting to give it.

MD

And when he gave the first tranche he was miserable when they went, and he immediately started buying more and accelerating the pace. And then, Ron [Radford, Director 2004–14] badgered him and he gave another batch and he was even more miserable. And I said to him, “Look, restock, but, for goodness sake, don’t give any more away in your lifetime. When you die, I’ll give the rest of them away and you enjoy them in the meanwhile.” Because, as you said, it’s easier to give money than art – taking art off your wall really hurt.

But he was buying it to give to the National Gallery, definitely.

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RB So would you say he was buying things he loved, that appealed to him for some reason, and for the enjoyment of living with them?

MD

Yes, that’s right.

RB Can you offer

some insight into the motivation to establish the Gordon Darling [Australia Pacific] Print Fund at the National Gallery?

The Fund was established in 1988.

I know the reason he wanted to have a print fund – to enhance the print collection – was because he had the belief that of some of the artists he really admired most had begun by drawing and making works on paper. And he felt that when they started painting it led to them being better and more proficient artists.

MD

Now, that’s probably a very old-hat idea, particularly with art schools, but I know he just thought drawing and making prints was the precursor.

I think in art schools now it’s almost going back to that idea. There must have been something about Namatjira that really appealed to him? You mentioned that when they went off the wall he was bereft of them?

RB

That’s right. He felt personally linked to the works. In his final months, when he was going in and out of hospital so often, he went to a very perfect aged-care facility and he sort of used it as a B&B. He had a lovely small suite and he took a certain number of paintings with him.

And he said, “I’m taking paintings only where I knew the artist and the artist was a friend.” And he took a Namatjira (Mount Giles, MacDonnell Ranges, Central Australia, pictured page 36), and I said, “How does that fit?” And he said, “Well, I feel he was.” And so he certainly had a Namatjira in his room. He also took two Paul Joneses, a Fred Williams and a Jeffrey Smart.

MD

RB That’s a wonderful idea, thinking of him as a friend like that.

Well, he knew him. He felt ... I think he said he felt he knew him; that was probably more accurate.

MD

RB I certainly remember the visit we did

to Central Australia, when we went to the opening of the Namatjira show and went out to Hermannsburg. That was a wonderful, wonderful visit.

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MD

Vale Marabeth Cohen-Tyler

Yes. A very memorable day.

Marilyn, can you remember the first work of art that made you feel, or think, differently?

RB

1962 – 2021

Well, bearing in mind that before Gordon and I teamed up the arts played a smaller role in my life. I was a virologist, which makes the COVID-19 pandemic very interesting as I read about it.

MD

I think the turning point for me, and it was a pretty exotic turning point, was when Gordon and I were going, twice a year, to the United States, with James Mollison, for the American Friends of the National Gallery, and James would take me around the galleries. So it was a pretty fabulous teach-in, but he would patiently walk me around and tell me about the art, tell me about the artist.

And that, for me, was the moment that you really realised that looking at art could make you feel fantastic.

So I was very lucky. I’d like to think . . .

I don’t know how many people James steered around like that, but he did to me. But we were travelling together, twice a year, for quite a long period, and we had a great deal of fun. And that was one of the things he did; he said, “I’ll show you a bit about art,” and he did.

And do you have any strong memories of the ones that really stood out as you were wandering around? Or was it just so many that it was just more of a general appreciation?

RB

It was a long time ago now. I do remember MoMA and all of Monet’s Waterlilies. I tend to remember more the gifts we were getting for the Gallery and how the gift happened, than what I was looking at with James. And of course James, a lot of the time, was scurrying around all of the artists’ studios; he really covered some ground when he was in the States – he was just always on the move.

MD

RB Is there a particular work in the national collection that inspires or has inspired you?

MD One

that really does something for me is Brancusi’s Bird in space. I just love that piece and it was especially magnificent when it was downstairs in the big Sculpture Gallery.

Printed: images by Australian artists 1942–2020 by Roger Butler AM is available from the Art Store. The third volume in the Printed series is supported by Marilyn Darling AC and the late Gordon Darling AC CMG through the Gordon Darling Foundation and John Hindmarsh AM and Rosanna Hindmarsh OAM. Printed: images by Australian artists 1942–2020 will be launched on Wednesday 16 June, 2021 at 5.30pm.

Join author Roger Butler AM for the launch of the third volume in the Printed series, followed by a complimentary drink and an opportunity to purchase a copy of the new publication. Free, limited places available.

To book, go to: nga.gov.au

National Gallery benefactor Marabeth Cohen-Tyler’s contribution to printmaking and the documentation of visual arts was profound, writes David Greenhalgh.

“Each day at Tyler Graphics was filled with the wildly unexpected. Even if I drew a precise outline of what I hoped to accomplish in the morning, it was dramatically altered by midday” ­— Marabeth Cohen-Tyler Marabeth Cohen-Tyler’s keen eye for composition and detail demonstrated a natural talent for photography, which led to the development of her role capturing artists – such as David Hockney, Roy Lichtenstein and Joan Mitchell – who worked at Tyler Graphics Limited print studio in New York State. As a result, the majority of the 60,000 photographs in the Kenneth Tyler Collection archive, which is held by the National Gallery of Australia, are by Marabeth.

Marabeth was married to printmaker Kenneth Tyler AO for more tham 30 years. Their relationship began in the late 1980s and was both personal and professional: Ken would grow to know her as the love of his life and their relationship was enriched by the excitement of the activities in workshop.

The National Gallery’s Distinguished Adjunct Curator, Jane Kinsman, reflects that Marabeth had “defined for herself this role as the documenter of workshop activity. She had a great sense of what’s important in history . . . She then became the archival recorder of the workshop.

Ken always had understood the importance of documentation, whether it was print documentation or film. So she became integral to the visual recording of history.”

studio and began to flourish in a diverse range of roles such as curation, essay writing and preparations for the first Tyler Graphics Catalogue Raisonné. However, her decision to begin photographically documenting workshop activities had a resounding impact and led to the creation of the Kenneth Tyler Collection archive. This visual resource underscores our understanding of the prints produced

by Kenneth Tyler’s workshop.

Marabeth played a central role in the many successes of Tyler Graphics and the collection of some of the most significant works on paper from the late 20th century, through the acquisition and gift to the National Gallery as part of the Kenneth Tyler Collection.

Marabeth Cohen-Tyler, alongside Kenneth Tyler AO, has been an outstanding benefactor to the National Gallery. Her contribution to an important part of printmaking and visual art history will continue to make a profound impact. She is remembered for her warmth, positive energy and generous spirit.

Marabeth joined the team at Tyler Graphics Ltd in 1985, during the production of David Hockney’s Moving Focus series. She first worked in papermaking and collage as well as documenting the progress of print editions and writing for the Tyler Graphics newsletter. Marabeth became vital to almost all operations in the print

—D avid Greenhalgh is the Curatorial Assistant, Kenneth E Tyler Collection, International Prints, Drawings and Illustrated Books

Ken Tyler AO and Marabeth Cohen-Tyler with Frank Stella’s Juam. Photo by Steven Sloman.

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Gallery staff move Blue poles to the lower ground floor past the Lamps of the Tiffany Studios, on loan from a private collector.

Jackson Pollock’s Blue poles has moved to the lower ground floor, the first time it has changed location since 2017. So what does that mean for the conservation project? Senior Conservator DAVID WISE has been treating Blue poles since the Gallery temporarily closed during the COVID-19 lockdown last year. Here, he reflects on working on one of the most iconic paintings in the national collection, public interaction and what happens next.

Blue poles: a new perspective SOPHIE TEDMANSON (ST) What

has the past 12 months been like working on Blue poles, both while the Gallery was closed and when we reopened to the public?

DAVID WISE (DW) It

has been interesting, and good to continue the project. People are interested in what we are doing.

ST Will the new space affect the conservation project?

DW The space is much more intimate in some ways, so it’s a benefit to the public as they’ll be closer to the painting.

ST What are

the main questions people

have asked?

DW There’s a similar range of questions: why are we doing this? What are we doing exactly? People share their memories.

A lot of people remember the first time they saw Blue poles or when it was acquired and travelled around the country [Blue poles was acquired in 1973 and went on

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a national tour in 1974, before the National Gallery opened in 1982]. It was a big cultural event. That has been one of the pleasures of this project, talking to people and hearing their reactions, especially the younger generations for whom this work has a different meaning entirely because they’re taught about it in school, so it’s like studying a living piece of history.

ST Talk us

through what you’ve done over the past 12 months and anything interesting you’ve come across.

DW As we’ve done this treatment, we’ve

discovered more about what has happened over time and before the painting came to the Gallery. We can see evidence of several earlier treatments before Blue poles came to Australia, what differences these have made to the surface, in turn, the effects of this previous treatment on what we’re able to do. Essentially, the painting is still surviving incredibly well considering it turns 70 next year.

This has also been a unique opportunity to deal with modern materials and the transition period in the 1950s when artists were moving away from oil-based paints to more modern paints. We can’t apply what we know now about modern paints to this painting because there have been 70 years of development in paint technology since it was created.

The treatment we’ve been carrying out has been defined by those materials.

There have been some challenges that we didn’t anticipate which defined the direction we’re taking. It is a slow process. We had to step back and think, OK, where are we going to take this?

What’s possible, given what’s going on with the surface and what’s going on with the way the materials are interacting here?

Visually there are aspects that are much cleaner now, although that might not be so obvious to people coming to see it.

Another aspect that has evolved was when I approached the treatment, I thought I would work across the surface in a grid, but it hasn’t been like that at all. I have instead worked with areas of colour and developed a different strategy as I progressed. For me, this has been a really fascinating study.

ST Can you summarise the treatment you have done over the past 12 months?

DW We looked at it with infrared and ultraviolet lights, then we took smaller cross-sections of paint and looked at the layers. We did pigment analysis to see what pigments there are, what the colours are, how stable they are.

And then we’ve also done analysis on the paint binder itself, to get an idea of whether the paints are similar across the surface or there are differences in composition. And then we’ve done cleaning treatment on top of that, which has been informed by that analysis.

ST You’ve found objects such as a staple, a piece of glass and cardboard in the canvas, and also a fingerprint. Have you discovered anything else?

DW The

public always ask that too!

People want to see the glass and the staples. And there are always questions about a footprint. I have not found a footprint in there. I’m not saying it’s not there, just, for the life of me, I can’t see it.

ST Maybe that’s your challenge for the next 12 months! So what is the end goal?

DW We want to pursue the cleaning to its logical conclusion, wherever that ends.

I can’t predict when we’re going to stop because as we deal with things we’re finding things react differently. In general it’s very stable so the cleaning is really what I’m looking at as the scope of the treatment.

ST You’ve been looking at Blue poles intimately for 12 months now. How do you feel about the painting now?

DW I’m still enjoying it. It’s fun even though it’s a slow process. Sometimes I’ll spend a whole day on just a centimetre and at think, This whole painting is going to take a long time. But then I’ll come back and do a whole section quite quickly. It’s just the nature of the paint changes in the work.

I’ve looked at lots of Pollocks in other collections, but what I’d like to do now, after looking at this one so intimately, is go back and look at all those others when we are allowed to travel again, and really look at them and think with the knowledge I’ve gained from working so closely on Blue poles.

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Touring Special

Opposite Eveline Syme, Sydney tram line, 1936, linocut, printed image 24.4 x 18cm, purchased 1979.

Below Eveline Syme, Skating, 1929, linocut, printed image 12.2 x 15.3cm, purchased 1979.

The creative alliance of ETHEL SPOWERS and EVELINE SYME, highlighted by a new exhibition at the Gallery, brought the linocut to Australia while sparking a new acceptance of modernist art forms. By SARINA NOORDHUIS-FAIRFAX.

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Post-World War I was a time of great change for women, with the tireless efforts of the suffrage movement and feminism generating new opportunities for education and independent careers without the expectation of marriage. It was during this interwar period that Ethel Spowers and Eveline Syme emerged as trailblazing modernist artists in Melbourne. The daughters of rival newspaper magnates, they formed an unlikely but dynamic friendship based on shared artistic ambitions.

Privileged and philanthropic, both women moved easily between the circles of Toorak society and established art groups in Melbourne and Sydney.

As their artistic paths increasingly overlapped, Spowers and Syme travelled widely and studied with progressive teachers in Paris and London. During the 1920s and ’30s, they were among many Australian artists who explored relief printmaking after reading books and articles on Japanese-style woodcuts. After acquiring Claude Flight’s handbook on colour linocuts in 1928, Spowers and Syme arranged to study with him in London at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art. Flight taught them that art should say something vital about the changing urban world with its increased speed and mechanisation as if accelerating towards the future.

He encouraged a pivotal shift in Spowers’s aesthetic from nursery-themed, illustrative prints and drawings to a deftly balanced synthesis of colour, pattern and movement. Spowers applied these technical approaches to childhood themes while Syme would focus on landscapes and figure studies following subsequent studies with painter André Lhote in Paris.

During the early 1930s, the art world in Australia was still deeply conservative, despite the stream of artists returning from abroad bearing news of art movements that explored the geometric and symbolic; subjective and emotional. Small progressive galleries around Collins Street began to exhibit artists working with ideas around colour and form. The Melbourne art world was steadily, finally changing but the backlash from critics and arts educators was intense and vitriolic.

In April, 1930, Melbourne art critic Harold Herbert questioned the “so-called modern art shown here and in Sydney”, accusing the local artists of a “tendency to paint the grotesque and the ugly in a more or less unskilled manner, in order ‘to be different’”.

“Centuries of study and development are discarded, but is the result better, or even new?” Herbert wrote. “It is, perhaps, easy to be guilty of intolerance, but it seems a far better thing at the moment for Australians to be accused of stodginess than to attempt to impress an over-tired world with an art which is but second-hand, and so often the product of ill-equipped extremists.”

Fresh from her direct experience of European art, Ethel Spowers responded politely but firmly: “The idea of ‘being different’ does not appeal to the serious worker – he works in one particular way because he must,” she wrote. “While he is still young he is probably amused by some new idea, then interested in it, and finally sets to work to see how far his individuality can carry it.”

“As a nation, we Australians are too apt to be sure that black is black and white is white, without considering the other man’s possibly equally intelligent point of view,” she wrote.

“This ‘Modern Art’ is accepted and appreciated in all the capitals of Europe. Surely all Western people cannot be wrong, and we in this country, so far away from the centre of everything, the only people in the world who are right.

I should like to ask all lovers of art to be tolerant to new ideas, and not to condemn without understanding.”

Ethel Spowers, The bamboo blind, 1926, linocut, printed image 15.4 x 15cm, purchased 1976.

Two days after this public skirmish, Eveline Syme arrived back in Melbourne after her studies in Paris. The lifelong friends joined with like-minded artists in Melbourne and Sydney to forge new paths in the changing modern world. Syme shared Lhote’s cubist-influenced teachings on abstraction and geometry with Spowers and their friend the influential artist/teacher/critic George Bell. In turn, he later incorporated these ideas into the syllabus of the Bourke Street school he established with Arnold Shore.

Meanwhile, Spowers and Syme kept pushing the modern print into the heart of the city. From late September, 1930, they exhibited their London prints with the Arts and Crafts Society of Victoria at the Melbourne Town Hall, during which Syme gave a demonstration of the linocut technique.

That December, they were involved with organising the first exhibition of linocuts in Australia at Everyman’s Lending Library. Held in the heart of avant-garde Melbourne, the exhibition brought together the recent works of both Spowers and Syme alongside examples by Flight’s other Australian students Dorrit Black and Nutter Buzacott, in addition to prints by Eric Thake, James Flett, Fred Ward, and textiles designer Michael O’Connell.

Although initially unconvinced, by 1932 artist-critics including Arthur Streeton and Blamire Young had accepted the colour linocut as a serious artform. The confident prints of Syme and Spowers rippled with energy generated through contrast of lines and patterns, curves and angles. In 1932 Spowers and Syme co-founded the Contemporary Art Group with Bell, which forms part of the bigger story of Modernism in Melbourne through the Contemporary Art Society and the breakaway group of artistic rebels at Heide.

Drawing on the National Gallery’s collection of prints and drawings by both artists, Spowers & Syme celebrates the full extent of their pivotal contribution to Australian art. ­— Sarina Noordhuis-Fairfax is Curator, Australian Prints and Drawings � Spowers & Syme opens on 14 August at the Canberra Museum + Gallery. The national tour of Spowers & Syme has been made possible by Major Patron David Thomas AM, is supported by Visions of Australia, and is a Know My Name project. For more information, visit: knowmyname.nga.gov.au

“I should like to ask all lovers of art to be tolerant to new ideas, and not to condemn without understanding” ETHEL SPOWERS

Spowers perceptively compared the changing times with the development of the Italian Renaissance from the beauty and realism of ancient Greek and Roman art; followed by Europe’s discovery of the arts of Asia, Africa and the Pacific region that would introduce a move towards the symbolic.

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Touring Special The vibrant works by ETHEL SPOWERS and EVELINE SYME, printed on smooth Japanese gampi papers from 1927 to 1950, demanded special consideration during conservation preparation for the Spowers & Syme exhibition. ANDREA WISE, Senior Conservator, Paper, explains the process and details the green pigment with the toxic backstory.

The conservator engages with art at both a macro and micro level and sees the artist’s hand at work in ways often unimaginable to the visitor. The detective work involved in identifying materials and techniques, separating deliberate effect from accidental damage or deterioration often provides new and exciting insights into the images on the Gallery walls.

The typical palette in Spowers & Syme works features carbon black, yellow and brown ochres, ultramarine, cobalt and cerulean blues, emerald green and two organic lake pigments – alizarin crimson and a distinctive lilac. Lake pigments are made by attaching a dye to a base material such as alumina, making a dyestuff into a workable particulate pigment. This process can also extend more expensive dyestuffs, making them cheaper to use. Bound with oil to create printer’s inks, this limited palette was then overprinted to achieve a wider range of colours.

From top The Print Conservation team - Andrea Wise, James Ward and Fiona Kemp working on prints included in the Spowers & Syme Touring Exhibition in the paper conservation lab; using low magnification to examine the surface of the work; using a paper corner to lift the lightweight, transparent Japanese gampi paper support during examination; viewing a pigment sample at x500 magnification.

Emerald green commonly recurs throughout the works.

A highly toxic vivid green, invented in the 19th century, it was still commercially available until the early 1960s.

Many historical pigments are toxic, based on arsenic, mercury and lead.

Today we are increasingly aware of health and safety issues related to works of art, but this was not always the case.

Emerald green belongs to a group of copper acetoarsenate pigments that were extensively used for many household goods including furniture and wallpapers. A similar pigment, Scheele’s green, was used on the wallpaper in Napoleon’s apartments on St Helena and has been suggested as the cause of his death. Large amounts of arsenic (100 times that of a living person) were found on Napoleon’s hair and scalp after he died.

While poisoning theories still abound, it has been confirmed through other medical cases from the period that arsenic dust and fumes would be circulated in damp Victorian rooms sealed tight against the drafts that were thought to promote ill health.

Registration marks, indicative of the making process, are visible in the margins and old mounting hinges are evident on the top edge. It was noted that the same range of pigments was reused during specific periods of production. A sample group of these works therefore provided the focus for analysis.

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One of the analytical techniques used was polarised light microscopy (PLM), whereby less than a pinhead of sample is taken and dispersed and mounted on a micro-slide.

Viewed at upwards of x500 magnification, a digital image from the microscope can be seen on a screen, and a kaleidoscope of crystalline shapes and refracted light and colour captured.

From the examination of particle morphology, and with the assistance of an experienced eye, comparative samples and reference literature, an identifiable set of visual characteristics emerges for each pigment. Emerald green has an intense colour and large floret-like particles arranged around a central point.

Analysis has also allowed potentially light sensitive pigments to be identified, meaning mitigating strategies can be used to ensure the preservation of works during their regional tour.

— Andrea Wise is Senior Conservator, Paper

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Touring Special

One of the National Gallery Art Cases including new works: (on top of case, left to right) Sonja and Elisa Jane Carmichael Dabiyil wagari (water carrying) vessels 2020, Jimmy John Thaiday Kebi nam 2018, (in front of case, left to right) Penny Evans Burnt banksia 2020, Karla Dickens Block and tackle 2020, James Tylor Kaurna wirri katha 2020, Angela Valamanesh From Miscellaneous items G 2006/2020.

Case in point From Geraldton to Gundaroo and Kangaroo Island to Bathurst Island, the National Gallery Art Cases have been enjoyed by almost a million people since 1990. Now, they’ve had a makeover, writes CAMILLA GREVILLE, JOHANNA McMAHON and PETER JOHNSON.

Over the past three decades, the National Gallery toured suitcases filled with works of art to libraries, galleries, schools and community centres across Australia. Uniquely, all the works of art contained within the brightly coloured cases can be held and touched by participants. Far from the confines of white gallery walls and high plinths, this rare hands-on experience provides audiences with a new perspective on art.

Over the years, tour venues have creatively incorporated the Cases into their programming on- and offsite, using them for object-based learning, storytelling and artmaking.

“We took the case to rural schools in the Wheatbelt.

The children and teachers were so appreciative. Most of these children have never been to a gallery, let alone had the chance to get up close and personal to such exquisitely made objects.

This was a wonderful initiative and I was delighted to be able to offer rural youth the chance to interact with fine art objects from the National Gallery. Personally, it was a pleasure to be part of this touring program and I’m sure it has challenged some of the students’ perception of art and got their creative juices flowing.” – Community Arts Network, Perth WA The program began with a donation by Jim and Elaine Wolfensohn in 1988. Sir James David Wolfensohn KBE AO, the Australian-born president of the World Bank, and his wife, Elaine, had given the money with the intention for the National

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Gallery to acquire works of art that “evoke in children a response of pleasure and encourage visual and expressive skills as a direct result of firsthand experience with objects”.

Two years later, two Cases and the 1888 Melbourne Cup began a tour – then known as the Elaine and Jim Wolfensohn Gift – and in 2004 they were joined by a third Case.

After three decades, the program has been refurbished and expanded thanks to the support of the Neilson Foundation.

From July 2021, five Art Cases will tour Australia and the renewed Cases include additional artworks, new themes and revised supporting material. With the aim of inspiring creativity, inclusivity, engagement and learning, the expanded Art Cases program will allow for greater audiences to access art within their own communities.

The new suite of Art Cases is grouped into five broad themes – ‘Bodies’; ‘Land and Country’; ‘Form and Education’; ‘Earth’; and ‘Past, Present, Future’ – bringing works of art into generative conversations with one another and providing pathways of interpretation for audiences. The themes developed out of the existing works and informed the acquisition of new works as we continue to draw out new stories and connections between objects that span centuries.

The ‘Bodies’ Art Case brings together works that explore the lived experience of biology, of flesh and blood and the ways in which our bodies influence memory, space and form.

‘Land and Country’ includes Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists dealing with their profound connection to Country and the diverse practices undertaken by First Nations people to care for our vital ecosystems. Encompassing objects with functional uses, including light sources and a pepper grinder, ‘Form and Function’ explores the line between art and design. In a time of ecological catastrophe, ‘Earth’ brings together artists who reflect on the importance of the natural world and our place within it, while ‘Past, Present, Future’ explores the complex and interwoven histories that inform this place and imagines what could come to pass.

The refreshed Art Cases feature works of art that respond to these themes by some of Australia’s leading contemporary artists. For example, Karla Dickens’s Block and tackle explores the impacts of ongoing colonisation on the bodily experience of First Nations people, while Angela Valamanesh’s biological forms encourage us to consider our relationship with the natural world. � The National Gallery Art Cases tour, supported by the Neilson Foundation, begins in July 2021. For more information, visit: nga.gov.au/exhibitions/touring

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Touring Special

The Touring Exhibitions Team

The National Gallery Touring Exhibitions team might be small, but its reach is enormous: in excess of 11.5 million visitors have seen 10,000 works from the national collection at more than 1600 venues in the past three decades. By SANDRA O’MALLEY.

Taking National Gallery exhibitions to the far reaches of the country – and everywhere in between, sometimes even overseas – the Touring Exhibitions team is instrumental in helping the Gallery fulfil its remit to be a truly national institution - on site, online and on tour.

Led by Touring Exhibitions Manager Mary-Lou Nugent, the group that takes exhibitions on tour comprises Camilla Greville, Kathleen Worboys, Metal Manufactures Regional Initiatives Officer Clare Armitage and Indigenous Curatorial and Touring Officer Emily McDaniel, who is assisting with the touring exibition Body Language and the National Indigenous Art Triennial.

The team is currently taking Skywhales: Every Heart Sings, Terminus and Ned Kelly on the road and is in the middle of relaunching the National Gallery Art Cases, which share art with communities both remote and urban across the nation, including schools, aged care homes, libraries and prisons.

The National Gallery Touring Exhibitions Team pictured in the Sculpture Garden: (from left) Camilla Greville, Kathleen Worboys, Metal Manufactures Regional Initiatives Officer Clare Armitage and Manager Mary-Lou Nugent.

According to Kathleen, helping people around Australia access the national collection is a great motivator for the team: “That’s important to us. It is the gallery’s mission statement – on site, online, on tour – to get the collection out to the people,” she says. “One of my favourite parts of the job is getting to meet such a range of people and having the opportunity to learn from them as well.”

Fresh from the start of the two-year national tour of Skywhales: Every Heart Sings in Albury in April, Mary-Lou says launching Patricia Piccinini’s hot-air balloon sculpture was unlike anything the team had done before. Mary-Lou, who has been on the Touring team for almost 14 years, about half of them as Manager, says the successful launch of the skywhales outside Canberra was one of the most exciting and challenging experiences of her time in the role.

“Everything that makes it a little more complicated than other exhibitions – the fact that it’s a balloon and an aircraft – happens on tour, but it is also a major public event,” she says.

The Touring team essentially acts as a microcosm of the Gallery when on the road, undertaking everything from installation to condition checking to negotiating exhibition contracts.

Sometimes a curator or conservator will also travel to a venue, but other times it can be a one-person job. Before the tour begins, the team works closely with the Curatorial, Conservation and Registration departments to ensure venues are suitable for the exhibition and to prepare the exhibition for tour.

All have come from an exhibition or art handling background – a critical skill in this context.

“Our relationship with the regional venues is one of the most important elements of our job – it underpins the success of the tour and contributes to ebsuring the care of the collection,” Mary-Lou says.

“It is always a very collegiate experience.

You have this wonderful creative period when you are installing a show together, working with this new team.”

Camilla adds: “Our regional colleagues are all very accomplished and they’re so grateful for the opportunity to host these exhibitions.”

According to Kathleen, regional institutions are thrilled to be able to share the national collection with their locales. “People are so excited to have the collection in their community, as well as the projects and programs around it.”

National Gallery Touring Exhibitions supported by Metal Manufactures and the Naomi Milgrom Foundation.

National Gallery on tour since 1990 11.6+

million visitors

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1666 venues

10,000

works from the national collection

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external loans

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After a year in which the world changed, the annual Summer Scholarship – delayed and adapted to include a digital component due to COVID – proved just the tonic for a group of students assembled from around the country.

MOSMAN ART GALLERY

For many of the students, art became a conduit for wider transformative experience that provided a boost to confidence and deep engagement with creativity and potential.

“The program has really boosted my confidence and I am even more excited and determined to continue on the path of art,” said Lawrence from Tasmania.

An original group of 16, two from each state and territory, were selected to travel to Canberra in January 2020, before commencing their year 12 studies. Due to last year’s travel restrictions, the program was adapted to include an extended collaboration initially by email, then a digital program last December. Participants finally arriving at the National Gallery for a week onsite in April, now aged between 17 to 20 and studying at university or working through a gap year.

The online program included a workshop with artist Kate Blackmore that reinforced one student’s decision to study sculpture and moving image in Tasmania. The group also learnt weaving techniques with First Nations artist and National Gallery educator Krystal Hurst, creating a link to the Tjanpi Desert Weavers’ Kungkarangkalpa (Seven Sisters) installation.

Summer Scholarship This annual program is always a powerful experience, but for the 13 young people who travelled to Canberra in April 2021 it was a particularly significant journey, writes ADRIANE BOAG.

Summer Scholars with National Gallery staff. (left to right, standing) Ira Gold, Arewhy Abiyie, Tivien Andrews-Homerang, Matthew Hattrick, Tahlia Jard, Abbey Clerke, Emma Neill, Sean Cowen, Annika Romeyn, National Gallery Lead Artist Educator; (sitting) Blake Griffiths, National Gallery J T Reid Outreach Coordinator, Mackenzie Johnson, Lawrence Ellis, River DeFranceschi, Juan Arellano Rivas, Adriane Boag, National Gallery Programs Convenor, Nadia Hernández, Joanne Leong.

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When the students arrived in Canberra for the week-long program onsite in April, they were greeted with a welcome to Country in the Gallery’s Sculpture Garden by Dr Aunty Matilda House, which established a theme of belonging for the week.

A highlight of the program was a workshop with artist Nadia Hernández, who led a series of activities to create an installation of text-based banners. The text was distilled from discussion and became a collective poem hung ceiling to floor, each proclaiming a word or phrase such as “IDENTITY”, “UNSHACKLED”, and “KEEPING THE PASSION ALIVE”. The final works were installed in the Tim Fairfax Learning Studio.

Tim Fairfax AC and his wife, Gina Fairfax, travelled to Canberra to visit the summer scholars and shared ideas with the group during a workshop exploring ways to talk about art. The scholars also met and discussed the arts with National Gallery Director Nick Mitzevich over afternoon tea in the Boardroom.

UPACARA

CEREMONIAL ART FROM SOUTHEAST ASIA

from the collection of Dr John Yu AC

19 June - 24 August 2021

Creative inspiration, friendship, support and acceptance were characteristics of the program, with many revealing how affirming and positive the week was on their mental health.

The scholarship program also showcased the behind-thescenes workings of the national institution. The 2021 Summer Scholarship program was developed by Lead Artist Educator Annika Romeyn, J.T. Reid Outreach Coordinator Blake Griffiths and Program Convenor Adriane Boag.

The support of Tim Fairfax AC has ensured the longevity of the National Summer Art Scholarship program. Applications for the January 2022 program open in July; go to: nga.gov.au

Figure of Men Brayut, Bali /Java, Indonesia, Bronze 15th century, 40 x 23 x 23 cm. Photo by Tim Connolly

1 Art Gallery Way MOSMAN NSW 2088 53 Winter 2021 www.mosmanartgallery.org.au

My Collection

We visit the private collection of a National Gallery donor.

This month: DAVID PAUL in conversation with MARYANNE VOYAZIS, Head of Development and Executive Director, National Gallery of Australia Foundation.

MARYANNE VOYAZIS (MV)

What inspires you about

living with art?

DAVID PAUL (DP) There

is no wall space in my house, it is completely full. In my office, I have a mix from photos to symbolic pieces, such as a piece by Jarinyanu David Downs (Wangkajunga/Walmajarri peoples).

It was a donation by David’s family to the team I work with, because of the support we provided for their son. There are several of his works of art in the national collection.

I also have a painting called Water by Sarrita King (Gurindji peoples), from Daly River, which I bought in Darwin. Another is Meeting place by Jeffrey Pirup, that was a gift from colleagues at my previous work place. It sits right above my computer, and reminds me of why we are here.

MV You did not set out to be a collector; works have come into your life and mark a time and tell a story.

Is that correct?

DP Most of my working life has been in the Aboriginal health space. Along that journey things have been shared with me that allowed me to start to gain an appreciation. I am not an art critic. These pieces all have stories that belong to the artists, their families and their Country.

I buy pieces because they are part of the local story and I am hopeful, at some stage, some pieces will go back to the families of the creators of the works.

MV The support of somebody like you is meaningful, because you give to things you believe in. Tell us more about your interest in supporting First Nations art and artists?

DP When I first heard about the previous Triennial, Defying Empire, I knew nothing about it but I liked the idea of presenting the work of contemporary First Nations artists around the theme ‘Defying Empire’ in the 50th year since the 1967 Referendum so I decided to support it. When I saw the exhibition I had an ‘Oh wow’ moment. The art is so powerful.

It reminds you that as colonialists, we have only been here for a very short period.

The works remind me of the privilege of sharing this space with First Nations people, to respect their histories and cultures, and also to understand how far we are from meaningful recognition of that generosity and knowledge.

dominated by oppression, and Aboriginal peoples.

That the National Gallery would recognise that and put together such an important exhibition that demonstrates the power of change, and the power of voice, was important to me. As for this next Triennial, I wanted to contribute to make it a smoother run and give solidity at a time of financial hardship for cultural institutions.

MV Is there a work in the national collection you are especially fond of?

There are a few: The Aboriginal Memorial by the Ramingining artists is significant, Landstory by Danie Mellor (Mamu/Ngadjon peoples), and the [Albert] Namatjira collection, which is breathtaking.

DP

MV Are there works in your personal collection you could not live without?

DP A piece by Katherine Marshall Nakamarra (Pintupi peoples), called My mother’s country captures some of the Seven Sisters’ story. It is an incredibly vibrant piece that I wake up to every morning. I collected several of early landscapes

by Shane Pickett (Ballardong peoples), another artist from Western Australia, who isn’t with us anymore.

I knew him when I worked in the Aboriginal medical service. One of his relatives is a graduate of ours, so while Shane’s works help me remember him, they help me to think to the future, about his relative who is going to be a contributor to improving health for Aboriginal peoples. Maybe someday the works will end up in her hands.

I enjoy these works, but I see it as a temporary custodianship. I don’t have kids, so I have a responsibility to think about what to do with the works in my possession and determine what is appropriate for pieces of culture [that] have their own history. They belong to the people who created them.

You can join David in supporting the 4th National Indigenous Art Triennial: Ceremony with a tax-deductible donation. Your gift will elevate artists’ voices in Canberra, on tour to regional Australia and online to the world.

Help us make big things happen: nga.gov.au/giving

MV What motivates you to support the National Indigenous Art Triennial?

DP I supported Defying Empire for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, the symbolic nature of 50 years since the 1967 Referendum. Defying Empire was a wonderful collection of works but also a symbol of national recognition and a point of change in the relationship between this colonial society, that is racist and

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Gallery donor David Paul in his office in Perth, surrounded by works by Jeffrey Pirup and Sarita King. Photo by Tony McDonough.

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Donors

The National Gallery acknowledges the support of all donors and recognises here the donations made between January and March 2021.

Partnerships

Supporters in Focus The National Gallery would like to acknowledge the ongoing commitment of two long-term supporters: Meredith Hinchliffe and Maureen Chan.

A Gallery volunteer from 1987 to 2019, Meredith has been a donor to the National Gallery Foundation since 2004. The Meredith Hinchliffe Fund was established to enable the acquisition of contemporary works of Decorative Arts & Design, and most recently Meredith’s support brought 33 contemporary Indonesian textiles into the national collection.

She is also a regular donor to Annual Appeals and is a supporter of the upcoming 4th National Indigenous Art Triennial: Ceremony.

Maureen Chan has supported the National Gallery of Australia since it opened. Originally, Maureen was part of a group of dedicated volunteers who serviced the National Gallery’s fledgling Members Lounge.

As more and more Members signed up to join the Gallery, Maureen remained a committed volunteer, assisting the staff in the Membership office to look after our Member community. Maureen has contributed to the National Gallery as a donor since 2009 and is a regular supporter of Annual Appeals.

Most recently, Maureen supported the National Gallery’s Conservation Fund.

We thank Meredith, Maureen and all our supporters for helping us to develop the national collection and present exhibitions and programs for the benefit of all Australians.

4th National Indigenous Art Triennial: Ceremony Cynthia Anderson The Sargeson family Janet Crane Mary Curtis and Richard Mann Cherie Flanagan Meredith Hinchliffe Christine McCormack and Jacqueline McCormack Robert Meller and Helena Clark Patrick Moody Joananne Mulholland and David Rivers Janet Munro David Paul Peter Rossiter and Linda Rossiter Rebecca Scott Ray Wilson OAM

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Australian Art Gordon Darling Foundation eX de Medici Linda Jackson AO Jenny Kee AO Patricia Piccinini Penelope Seidler AM Australian Artists Documentary Fund Marc Besen AC and Eva Besen AO Vivienne Sharpe

Strategic Partners

Indigenous Art Partner

Presenting Partner

Contemporary Art Partner

Touring Partners

Conservation Maureen Chan Donations to support the National Gallery Janet Lapworth and Ross Lapworth Svetlana Manns and Peter Manns Ingrid Mitchell Michael Robertson Wayne Smithson and Felicity Smithson Amanda Goldrick Yen Lucas and Richard Lucas Jennifer Nelson and Peter Burgess Andrew Phelan AM and Monica Phelan Dr Marian Simpson

Major Partners

Supporting Partners

Jeffrey Smart Hindmarsh Pty Ltd Colin Hindmarsh and Barbara Hindmarsh Margaret Olley Art Trust Gala Dinner Fund 2021 Ray Wilson OAM Ken Tyler Print Fund Ken Tyler AO and Marabeth Cohen-Tyler

Media Partners

Know My Name Belinda Jackson Dr Helen Jessup Michael Pennisi Dr Sally Pitkin AO Isharna Walsh Ching Ching Yeoh Rotary Fund for Australian Prints and Drawings Rotary Club of Belconnen

Promotional Partners

Corporate Members

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Partnerships

As an Australian woman who spent the past two decades at the top on Wall Street, SARA McKERIHAN has firsthand experience of the need for gender equity. Here, the the Citi Australia & New Zealand vice-chair of markets & securities services and member of the American Friends of the National Gallery of Australia talks art, gender and Know My Name with SAMANTHA JONES, Head of Partnerships.

SAMANTHA JONES (SJ)

Tell us about your connection to the National Gallery of Australia.

This demonstrates there is a way to go and being transparent about this problem is a crucial first step to fixing it.

I’m passionate about the arts. And even though I’ve lived in New York, Hong Kong and London for a number of years, I’ve maintained my connection to the Australian scene through my membership of the American Friends of the National Gallery of Australia. I think we’re very fortunate to have a gallery that attracts such a high calibre of artists from around the world. I read about Nick Mitzevich’s appointment with great excitement, and Know My Name is a really wonderful initiative that I’m privileged to be part of.

Additionally, Citi is committed to hiring equal gender representation at the graduate level and on a global basis have done this well. Citi is also a Leadership Council member of 100 Women in Finance (100WF) and I am on the global board. 100WF has three pillars: education, networking and philanthropy, and has worked tirelessly to help empower women in the finance industry. This year is their 20th anniversary.

SARA MCKERIHAN (SM)

The National Gallery is delighted to welcome Citi as a Major Partner of Know My Name. What resonated with Citi about this initiative?

SJ

SM Citi

Citi’s Sara McKerihan pictured at home in Sydney with her personal collection, including her favourite Margaret Olley painting, View of Palm Beach, which hangs above the fireplace.

Photo by Renee Nowytarger.

is honoured to support this groundbreaking program for the National Gallery. Know My Name celebrates the contribution of women artists by showcasing their unique perspective on our country’s politics, ideas and culture.

This reflects Citi’s own ambition to promote diversity and work towards a future of gender equity, and we are excited to share this experience with our clients throughout the year.

Diversity is hugely important at Citi, not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it makes business sense. If you provide a positive, welcoming work environment, people will be much more productive.

SJ You have had an incredible international career including spending the past two decades on Wall Street. What are some of the key differences for women in banking today compared with the beginning of your career?

SM One of

the key differences I have noticed in banking is that when I first went onto the trading floor we were told we had to act like men to get acceptance. We had to dress in dull colours, have short, sharp hair, we had to be tough and ‘aggressive’ in meetings, we had to learn to play golf and we could never admit to needing time off for children or caring responsibilities. Today it’s the reverse and it’s acknowledged that real diversity means accepting and celebrating people for who they are. This manifests itself in very simple ways, for example I can thrive and no one blinks at my love of wearing pink, my long hair and the fact I don’t play golf!

SJ What is Citi doing in the gender equity space that is helping to make a difference to represent diversity in the finance sector?

And what are your hopes for the future?

SM Citi

is very committed to gender equity. Our new CEO, Jane Fraser, is the first female CEO of a major global bank and she has committed to removing the gender pay gap.

SJ Are there any lessons the arts sector could learn from the finance sector about improving representation for women?

SM If you apply the quick dinner-party quiz of asking people to name three artists, it soon becomes obvious they are all men. The female artists in Australia, including my very talented grandmother, have never had the respect they deserve.

From this perspective, women in finance and in the arts can both struggle from a representation perspective.

Ultimately, I think we can both learn from each other. I have met some outstanding female artists and curators, and I hope they get the recognition they deserve. Citi sponsoring an exhibition like Know My Name not only helps female artists get recognition, but it has also delighted many of our female clients in finance. I’m looking forward to pandemic-related restrictions being eased so we can truly celebrate Know My Name, the successes of so many female artists and, at the same time, the success of women in finance positions.

SJ What is your favourite work in the exhibition Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now and why does it resonate with you?

There are so many fabulous options. My first choice would be Margaret Olley’s Portrait in the mirror. I absolutely love her work. I actually bought my first Olley when I was living in London and shipped it straight back to Australia. It has pride of place above my fireplace (pictured left).

SM

An honorary mention also to both Grace Cossington Smith and Emily Kame Kngwarreye, who are huge favourites of mine in very different ways, and Margaret Preston’s Self portrait is also very impressive. I also liked Mirka Mora’s Untitled – it is just a fabulous mix of colour and life, and Esme Timbery’s Shellworked slippers was . . . wow! � Citi Australia is a Major Partner of the Know My Name initiative.

Part Two of the exhibition Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now opens next month.

Citi was the first major US financial institution to publicly release the results of a pay equity review comparing compensation of women with men, including disclosing our unadjusted or ‘raw’ pay gap. While an adjusted review, which compares employees in the same role, finds that women are paid on average more than 99% of what men are paid, the unadjusted review finds that the median pay for women globally is better than 74% of the median for men.

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What’s On What to see, do and experience at the National Gallery during winter.

Botticelli to Van Gogh Champagne Breakfast Wed 9 June, 8am $70 Members, $80 guests SOLD OUT

Join author Roger Butler AM for the launch of the third volume in the Printed series, followed by a complimentary drink and an opportunity to buy a copy of the publication.

All bookings: nga.gov.au/calendar

July NAIDOC: Heal Country, heal our nation Thurs 8 July, 12.45–1.30pm James Fairfax Theatre and online Members Lounge Complimentary tea and coffee have returned to the Members Lounge.

Members are welcome to bring up to two guests. Due to COVID-19 precautions, we ask that members and their guests limit their stay in the Lounge to 30 minutes.

Become a Member Support the National Gallery and become a Member today. New Members enjoy a free ticket to a major exhibition, as well as access to pre-sale tickets, exclusive events, and discounts at the Gallery Art Store & Café.

Memberships from $60 Join online nga.gov.au/members Call (02) 6240 6528

Tours 1 June – 31 August, 11.30am and 2.30pm Free Join a Guide for an insightful 60-minute tour of the Gallery’s collection and special exhibitions, conducted daily at 11.30am and 2.30pm. Check the What’s On calendar online for further details.

Art Chats 1 June – 31 August (as above), 10–11.30am & 2-3.30pm Botticelli to Van Gogh & 11am– 12pm Know My Name Know My Name & Botticelli to Van Gogh exhibitions, Level 1 Free

nga.gov.au/calendar

(top) The Members Lounge is now serving complimentary tea, coffee and refreshments; (left) Anne Wallace, She Is, 2001, oil on canvas, 164.0 h x 197.0 w cm, purchased 2002, © Anne Wallace.

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‘Heal Country, heal our nation’ is the theme for 2021 NAIDOC (National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee) Week. Wherever you are across Australia, join a livestream panel discussion featuring First Nations artists and cultural workers highlighting art and artistic practices that heal Country.

nga.gov.au/calendar

Choose your own art adventure and find Guides in the exhibitions to talk with about the art and artists. Check the What’s On calendar online for specific exhibition times morning and afternoon.

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Art for Carers Tues 15 June, 20 July, 17 August 10.30–11.30am Free, bookings required Art for Carers meets on the third Tuesday of each month. Join with carers from across the region to spend a social hour engaging with art through tours and art making activities. nga.gov.au/whatson/programs/access/carers Sensory Sunday Sun 6 June, 4 July, 8 August, 8.30am–10am Free, bookings required

conlog.eventsair.com/amaga2021

Enjoy an exclusive curatorial introduction to Part Two of Know My Name: Australian Women Artists: 1900 to Now, including drinks and canapés. Then join our guides on an after-hours tour of the exhibition.

Book launch: Printed: images by Australian artists 1942-2020 Weds 16 June, 5.30pm Free, limited places available

June

The National Gallery welcomes museum and gallery professionals from small, regional and remote communities across Australia for thought-provoking sessions, workshops and tours hosted by the Australian Museums and Galleries Association (AMaGA), the national association and peak advocacy body for museums and galleries in Australia.

Know My Name: Australian Women Artists 1900 to Now – Part Two Exclusive Viewing Fri 16 July, 6pm $70 Members, $80 guests

Join Dr Deborah Hart, Henry Dalrymple Head Curator, Australian Art in the James Fairfax Theatre for an exclusive look at the upcoming summer exhibition Jeffrey Smart.

Light afternoon refreshments included.

Access Highlights

Australian Museums and Galleries Association (AMaGA) Conference Regional Remote and Community Museum Day Mon 7 June, 9am – 5.30pm James Fairfax Theatre

Enjoy a special breakfast celebration and a private guided tour of Botticelli to Van Gogh: Masterpieces from the National Gallery, London.

Exhibiton Insights: Jeffrey Smart Thurs 12 August, 2.30pm $50 Members, $60 guests

Public Program Highlights

August Know My Name Part Two Art Weekend Fri 6, Sat 7, Sun 8 August, various times Free, bookings required Celebrate part two of the exhibition Know My Name: Australia Women Artists 1900 to Now with a weekend of performances, art chats, access tours, film screenings at the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, and artmaking activities for the whole family. knowmyname.nga.gov.au

Sensory Sunday welcomes teens and young people with social anxiety and people on the autism spectrum and their families to the Gallery. Sensory Sunday creates a supportive environment in which to spend quiet time, wander at your own pace and engage in art making activities before the Gallery opens to the public. nga.gov.au/whatson/programs/access/ autism Art with Friends: Art & Dementia Fri 4 and 18 June, 2 and 16 July, 6 and 20 August, 10.30am–12noon Free, bookings required Art with Friends promotes wellbeing and quality of life for people living with dementia and their care partners. Along with discussionbased tours (first Friday of the month) the Gallery offers art-making workshops (third Friday of the month) with Gallery educators facilitating conversations and hands-on art making in a social and intellectually stimulating environment. The Art & Dementia program is supported by the Landsdowne Foundation. nga.gov.au/whatson/programs/access/ dementia

(top) Betty Muffler (Pitjantjatjara people), Ngangkari Ngura (Healing Country), 2020, synthetic polymer paint on linen, 198.0 h x 167.0 w cm, gift of Vogue Australia, 2020; (below) Artist Vivienne Binns (second from left) showing her work Tower of Babel with Know My Name curators (clockwise, from left) Yvette Dal Pozzo, Elspeth Pitt and Dr Deborah Hart, Henry Dalrymple Head of Australian Art.

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Director’s Choice: Waiting for another game A personal highlight from the national collection.

By NICK MITZEVICH.

A new display of highlights from the national collection is now on the lower ground level with the themes of ‘Towards Abstraction’ and ‘Emotional Body’.

I enjoyed working on this display in collaboration with colleagues Senior Curator Lucina Ward, Senior Curator of Asian Art Carol Cains and Curator Pacific Arts Crispin Howarth on works from the collection, and particularly loved working with the scale of the room showcasing the Emotional Body display.

We teased out the Emotional Body theme by looking at how artists, cultures and people from different geographical locations have used the figurative form to convey emotion – divine, religious, spiritual, desire and political emotions.

The room vibrates with thousands of years of art making and I hope gives the viewer a sense of what the human condition is, and of how devotion and the power of spirituality, the power of love or the power of desire is completely embedded in art making.

Installation view of ‘Emotional Body’ in the Collection Highlights display on the lower ground floor.

Opposite Installation view of Huma Bhabha, Waiting for another game, 2018, New York, cork, polystyrene, wood, acrylic, oil stick, 299.7 x 61 x 91.4cm, purchased 2021.

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A standout is the new acquisition, Huma Bhabha’s sculpture Waiting for another game. This monumental, hulking mass is built from cork and styrofoam. Like a character from an alien encounter film, this four-faced visitor from another planet seems scarred by battle, at once creative and destructive.

Bhabha’s work draws on historic events, war, colonialism, art traditions and pop-culture references: “I’m from a broken place, living in a breaking world . . . I guess it feels natural to be relaxed among ruins.”

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A little luxury for all.

Little National Hotel Sydney is now open.

Perfectly located above Wynyard Station and centred between Barangaroo, Bridge Street and Martin Place. With 230 rooms, Technogym wellness centre, sprawling library and exclusive rooftop lounge and bar, Little National Hotel Sydney lets you live a little.

26 Clarence Street Sydney NSW littlenationalhotel.com.au A DOMA Hotel.

Hilma af Klint The Secret Paintings

Archibald, Wynne & Sulman Prizes 2021 & Archie 100

Presenting partner

OF THE ARCHIBALD PRIZE Tempe Manning Self-portrait 1939 (detail). Private collection © Estate of Tempe Manning

Hilma af Klint Group IX/UW, The dove, no 2 1915 oil on canvas, 155.5 × 115.5 cm. Courtesy of the Hilma af Klint Foundation HaK174 Photo: The Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden.

100 YEARS

5 Jun – 26 Sep 2021

Discover the visionary artist disrupting art history.

Exclusive to Sydney.

12 Jun – 19 Sep 2021

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STAY, ENJOY ART AND INDULGE IN THE NATION’S CAPITAL

The only thing you can control is what you do next.

Enjoy Marie Hagerty’s exhibition at the Nancy Sever Gallery (23 June to 25 July 2021), 131 City Walk, with a complimentary glass of champagne and tour with Nancy. nancysevergallery.com.au

Indulge in a cocktail inspired by the art of Botticelli, Van Gogh or Yayoi Kusama at King O’Malley’s, one of Canberra’s most iconic pubs in the city, home to good food, drinks and live music located at 131 City Walk. kingomalleys.com.au

Marie Hagerty, Knave II, 2019. Oil and acrylic on canvas.157 x 137 cm

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Stay at Forrest Hotel and Apartments and receive 10% off your accommodation.

Book your accommodation and timed tickets using the link below and see the Botticelli to Van Gogh exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia. forresthotel.com/special-offers

CELEBRATE AUSTRALIAN WOMEN ARTISTS PART TWO OPENS 12 JUNE

FREE ENTRY ONLY IN CANBERRA