sculpture gallery # robert rauschenberg # ocean to outback

Transcription

artonview
artonview
I S S UE
N o . 5 1
ISSUE No.51 SPRING 2007
s p r i n g
2 0 0 7
N AT I O N A L G A L L E RY O F A U S T R A L I A
Richard Bell Australian art it’s an Aboriginal thing 2006 synthetic polymer paint on canvas Acquired 2006 TarraWarra Museum of Art collection courtesy the artist and Bellas Milani Gallery
13 October 2007 – 10 February 2008
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
CELEBRATING¬¬YEARS
A National Gallery of Australia Travelling Exhibition
The National Gallery of Australia is an Australian Government agency
nga.gov.au/NIAT07
Sculpture Gallery • ROBERT Rauschenberg • Ocean to Outback
OC E A N to OUTBACK
Australian landscape painting 1850 –1950
The National Gallery of Australia’s 25th Anniversary Travelling Exhibition
1 September 2007 – 27 January 2008
Proudly supported by the National Gallery of Australia Council Exhibition Fund
Russell Drysdale Emus in a landscape 1950 (detail) oil on canvas National Gallery of Australia, Canberra © Estate of Russell Drysdale
nga.gov.au/Rauschenberg
This exhibition is supported by the
Embassy of the United States of America
Robert Rauschenberg Publicon – Station I from the Publicons series enamel on wood, collaged laminated silk and cotton, gold leafed paddle, light bulb, perspex, enamel on polished aluminium
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1979 © Robert Rauschenberg Licensed by VAGA and VISCOPY, Australia, 2007
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content s
2
Director’s foreword
Publisher
National Gallery of Australia
nga.gov.au
6
Development office
Editor
Jeanie Watson
8
A new gallery for sculpture: wood, stone, metal, glass
Designer
MA@D Communication
14 Pacific arts in the Gallery
Photography
Eleni Kypridis
Barry Le Lievre
Brenton McGeachie
Steve Nebauer
John Tassie
20 The ‘big guns’ of Culture Warriors
Designed and produced
in Australia by the
Printed in Australia by
Pirion Printers, Canberra
artonview issn 1323-4552
Published quarterly:
Issue no. 51, Spring 2007
© National Gallery of Australia
Print Post Approved
pp255003/00078
All rights reserved. Reproduction without
permission is strictly prohibited. The opinions
expressed in artonview are not necessarily
those of the editor or publisher.
26 Robert Rauschenberg 1967–1978
34Black robe, white mist: art of the Japanese Buddhist nun Rengetsu
40 Ocean to Outback: Australian landscape painting 1850–1950
48 Collection focus: Ricketts photography collection
54 New acquisitions
66 Drawn in
68 Faces in view
70 Travelling exhibitions
Submissions and correspondence
should be addressed to:
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GPO Box 1150
Canberra ACT 2601
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front cover: Giorgio de Chirico La Mort d’un esprit [Death of a spirit] 1916 oil on canvas 36.0 x 33.0 cm
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased with the assistance of Harold and Bevelly Mitchell,
Rupert and Annabel Myer and the NGA Foundation © Giorgio de Chirico Licensed by VISCOPY, Australia, 2007
direc tor’s foreword
Director Ron Radford
with Senator the
Hon. George Brandis SC,
Minister for the Arts and Sport,
who opened the successful
George W Lambert exhibition
(closes 16 September 2007)
2
Activity around the Gallery this year has been
building up towards the twenty-fifth anniversary on
12, 13 and 14 October. It will culminate in a gala weekend
of celebrations, including the launch of the National
Indigenous Art Triennial and an open day welcoming
people to help recognise a quarter of a century of art and
inspiration. The Gallery’s twenty-fifth anniversary year is a
celebration of our magnificent past and more recent
acquisitions, our excellent exhibitions and programs, the
recent refurbishment and radical refocusing of our
collection displays and, of course, the commencement of
our building redevelopment. Stage one has recently begun.
I am pleased to announce four very significant new
acquisitions in celebration of our twenty-fifth anniversary.
La Mort d’un esprit [Death of a spirit] 1916 is an early
work by Giorgio de Chirico, an important Metaphysical
artist who had a profound effect on Surrealism. This is the
Gallery’s first early European modernist painting acquired
in fifteen years. We have been searching for a work of this
kind for some time and it is especially valuable for us to
find one produced in Europe at a crucial period during the
First World War. It is one of only two de Chirico works held
in the country and the only early one. We acknowledge
the financial assistance of Harold and Bevelly Mitchell
and Rupert and Annabel Myer along with the Gallery’s
national gallery of australia
Foundation for this major acquisition. It is featured on the
cover of this issue of artonview.
The second important acquisition, mentioned briefly
in the last issue of the magazine, is Max Ernst’s Habakuk
1934/1970. The giant black creature presides over the
National Australia Bank Sculpture Gallery, its four-and-ahalf-metre form appearing to change as you approach it.
The knife-thin head, the eyes on stalks and the flowerpotlike body seem to rotate in a cylinder. The Gallery holds
Ernst’s private collection of Indigenous art, which was so
influential on Surrealism. Habakuk is a significant example
of his work as a Surrealist artist and by far his largest work.
The National Australia Bank generously helped us purchase
the sculpture for the collection.
The third major acquisition is from India and is the
Gallery’s earliest image of the Buddha. The superb and
imposing early Indian sculpture is a cornerstone for the
Gallery’s ability to introduce visitors to the development of
Buddhist art in India and beyond. The bold red sandstone
seated Buddha from the second century Kushan centre of
Mathura sits marvellously – physically and art historically –
between the aniconic symbolism of our rare Amaravati
marble panel depicting the life of the Buddha and the
recently purchased large Gandharan Head of a bodhisattva
with its strong Hellenic influence. We are enormously
grateful for the generous assistance of Council member
Roslyn Packer in this purchase.
The fourth important acquisition is Clifford Possum
Tjapaltjarri’s Warlugulong 1977, a seminal work by this
pioneer of Papunya Tula painting of Central Australia.
Although the Gallery holds the largest Aboriginal art
collection, we have lacked a significant work by Clifford
Possum. Warlugulong will be on permanent display in our
main Central Desert room of the new Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander wing. A more detailed essay about this work
will appear in the next issue of artonview along with the
announcement of other significant twenty-fifth anniversary
acquisitions.
The new Pacific Arts Gallery is now open to the public
and features a number of spectacular works collected in
the late 1960s and early 1970s alongside some recent
acquisitions. Highlights include an imposing carved house
post figure from the Sawos people, near the Sepik River,
New Guinea, purchased in 1969. Conservation has recently
removed a layer of dirt to reveal an orange, yellow and
black painted face design. All too often the names of the
spirits associated with traditional art from the Pacific were
neglected. However, this is a very rare instance when
a work can be re-associated with its identity. We have
been fortunate to learn more about this particular piece
through an original photograph held at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art which has the personal name of the figure
written on the reverse: ‘Mogulapan’. Another particularly
noteworthy work in the Pacific Arts Gallery is the figure of
a man wearing a distinctly western hat yet also wearing
Indigenous adornments. This figure, a recent acquisition
from the Anthony Forge collection, is the only known
portrait of an Australian undertaken by a New Guinean
artist during the early twentieth century. Also featured is
a refined and masterful stone pestle that exhibits a rare
clarity of form for a daily utensil from any culture in the
world. It comes from a little known prehistoric culture
in New Guinea and is very likely to be 3500 years old,
produced during the same era as the Gallery’s iconic
Ambum stone which is also on display. Both stoneworks
from New Guinea are the most ancient works in the
Gallery’s large collection.
The inaugural National Indigenous Art Triennial opens
in October with the title Culture Warriors. This innovative
exhibition, very generously sponsored by BHP Billiton, will
be a permanent event in the Australian and international
art calendar. Works selected for the Triennial have been
created within the past three years and provide a highly
considered snapshot of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
contemporary art practice. The exhibition features the
work of thirty-one artists and encompasses a wide range
of media including painting on canvas and bark, sculpture,
textiles, weaving, new media, photo-media, printmaking,
and installation work.
Spring sees the opening of Robert Rauschenberg, our
latest temporary exhibition in the Orde Poynton Gallery.
Robert Rauschenberg entered the New York art world in
1950 at a time when Abstract Expressionism was at its
peak. Working outside the restrictions imposed by media,
style and convention, he adopted a unique experimental
methodology that paved the way for a number of
subsequent movements, including Pop Art. His invention of
‘combines’ and unique photo-collage and image transfer
practices made him one of the most influential figures of
the postwar period. This exhibition is supported by the
Embassy of the United States of America.
Another new exhibition is Black robe, white mist: art
of the Japanese Buddhist nun Rengetsu. The tragic life of
Rengetsu (1791–1875), whose name translates as Lotus
Moon, inspired extraordinary creativity. One of a very few
successful professional female artists of nineteenth-century
Japan, Rengetsu was primarily a poet and calligrapher
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Rupert Myer AM, Chairman
of the National Gallery of
Australia Council,
Steven Münchenberg,
National Australia Bank,
and Director Ron Radford
contemplate the new
acquisition, Max Ernst’s
Habakuk, purchased with
the assistance of the
National Australia Bank
spring 2007
3
but also excelled in pottery and scroll painting. Largely
drawn from international private collections, Black robe,
white mist shows contemplative works of paper and clay
inscribed with Rengetsu’s elegant poetry and understated
calligraphy. Her work reflects the beauty of the imperfect
and unconventional. This is the first time a major museum
exhibition on her work has been staged outside Japan.
The major travelling exhibition for the Gallery’s twentyfifth anniversary year, Ocean to Outback: Australian
landscapes 1850–1950, has been curated by me specifically
for the smaller galleries around Australia. Concentrating
on the dynamic century of Australian landscape painting
from the colonial 1850s and gold rush era to the
period immediately following the Second World War,
the exhibition features many of the Gallery’s treasured
Australian landscapes alongside some fine but lesser
known works from the national collection which have
been especially cleaned and appropriately reframed for the
exhibition. Ocean to Outback is truly national, travelling
to and including images of every state and territory –
from urban and suburban landscapes to outback and
coastal views. The exhibition, sponsored by RM Williams,
is accompanied by a substantial and very accessible fully
illustrated catalogue.
Internationally, as part of the Gallery’s anniversary
celebrations, an exhibition of Australian art will be
displayed at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh,
USA, in October. The show, Andy and Oz: parallel visions,
curated by Tom Sokolowski, Director of the Andy Warhol
Museum and Deborah Hart, Senior Curator, Australian
Painting and Sculpture (after 1920), coincides with a
festival of Australian culture, and focuses on the work of
Australian artists whose art has affinities with renowned
American artist Andy Warhol.
The Australian artists cross several generations and
include works from the 1970s through to the present day.
Artists such as Martin Sharp, Richard Larter, Tracey Moffatt,
Juan Davila, Fiona Hall, Christian Thompson and Tim
Horn will be featured. The works in the exhibition will be
drawn predominantly from the Gallery’s collection. Some
parallels between these artists’ works and Andy Warhol’s
art are immediately apparent, while others are totally
unexpected and surprising. This exciting event will provide
a greater awareness of significant Australian art and artists
internationally. We are grateful to Ann Lewis AM, Henry
Gillespie and Penelope Seidler for their generous support
of the exhibition.
4
Finally, I am pleased to announce the release of Printed
images by Australian artists 1885–1955 by Roger Butler,
the second volume in our series of publications on the
history of printing in Australia. It is as splendid as the first
volume, Printed images in colonial Australia 1801–1901.
The third volume, which deals with contemporary
printmaking, will be released later this year.
The celebrations for our twenty-fifth year won’t stop in
October! Keep an eye out for more twenty-fifth anniversary
events and major acquisitions throughout the year.
Ron Radford
credit lines
The following donations have been received
as part of the National Gallery of Australia’s
Twenty-fifth Anniversary Gift Program.
Donations
Aranday Foundation
Myer Foundation
Rotary Belconnen
Sheila Bignell
Roslynne Bracher
John Calvert-Jones AM and Janet Calvert-Jones
Patrick Corrigan AM
David Craddock
The Curran Family Foundation
Ferris Family Foundation
Jane Flecknoe
Henry Gillespie
June P Gordon
Rolf Harris AM OBE MBE
Maree Heffernan
His Excellency Major General Michael Jeffery AC
CVO MC
Lou Klepac
Ann Lewis AM
Robert and Susie Maple-Brown
Harold Mitchell AO and Bevelly Mitchell
Charles Nodrum
Roslyn Packer AO
Jennifer Prescott and John Prescott AC
Maxine Rochester
Penelope Seidler
Morna E Vellacott
The National Gallery of Australia Foundation
would like to thank the family, friends and
colleagues of Philippa Winn (NGA Educator
1996–2005) who have contributed to the
Philippa Winn Memorial Acquisition.
Gifts and Bequests
From the collection of Sir Francis Aglen
(1869–1932). Given in memory of his
daughter and their mother, Mrs Marion
Hutton, by Peronelle Windeyer, Margaret
Hutton, Jeremy Hutton and John Hutton
Gift of Allan Behm and Rhyan Bloor
Gift of Sue and Ian Bernadt
Gift of Christopher and Philip Constable in
memory of their mother Esther Constable
Gift of Antony de Jong, grandson of the artist
on behalf of The Duldig Studio
Gift of the artist, Ruth Faerber
Gift of Sara Kelly
Gift of Mrs Ineke Kolder-Wicks
Gift of Corbett Lyon and Yeuji Lyon Collection of
Australian Contemporary Art, Melbourne
Gift of Colonel NH Marshall, in memory of Prue
Marshall
Gift of the artist, Tracey Moffatt
The Poynton Bequest
Gift of Kenneth Tyler and Marabeth Cohen-Tyler
in memory of Harry Seidler
Gift of Dr Beverley Wood
Masterpieces for the Nation Fund 2007
In memory of Pixie Parsons (nee Roper)
David Adams
Ross Adamson
Robert Albert AO
Peter and Gillian Alderson
Robert C Allmark
Bill Anderson
Susan Armitage
Stuart Babbage
Belinda Barrett
Peter Boxall AO and Karen Chester
Dr Berenice-Eve Calf
Diana Colman in memory of her husband James
Austin Colman
Joan Daley OAM
Winifred Davson MBE
Maxwell Dickens
Rosemary Dunn
Tony Eastaway
Peter Eddington and Joy Williams
Brian Fitzpatrick
Dr R and Mrs A Fleming
Bill Galloway in memory of Ann Maria Paget
Neilma Gantner
Pauline M Griffin
Aileen Hall
Bill Hamilton
Cheryl Hannah
Natasha Hardy
Karina Harris and Neil Hobbs
John Harrison
Ann Healey in memory of her husband
David Healey
Elizabeth Heard
Shirley Hemmings
Janet D Hine
Rev Theodora Hobbs
Joanne Glory Hooper
Rev Bill Huff-Johnston and Rosemary
Huff-Johnston
Elspeth Humphries
Dr Anthea Hyslop
Fr WGA Jack
Chris Johnson and Ann Parkinson
Pamela V Kenny
Dr Peter Kenny
King O’Malley’s
Sir Richard Kingsland AO CBE DFC
Robyn Lance
Paul and Beryl Legge Wilkinson
Judith MacIntyre
Jennifer J Manton
Simon McGill
Diana McRobbie in memory of her sister-in-law,
Andrea Gibson McRobbie
Joyce McRobbie in memory of her
daughter-in-law, Andrea Gibson McRobbie
Eveline Milne
Joananne Mulholland and David Rivers
W Newbigin
Susan S Rogers
Roslyn Russell, Museum Services
Heather G Shakespeare
George and Irene Skilton
EJ Smith
Wendy Smith
Barry Smith-Roberts
Ann Somers
Prof. Ken and Maggie Taylor
H Neil Truscott AM
Chris van Reesch Snr
Diana Walder OAM
Joy Warren OAM, Director, Solander Gallery
The Hon. E Gough Whitlam AC QC
Y Wildash
Muriel Wilkinson
Tessa and Simon Wooldridge
We would also like to thank the numerous
anonymous donors who have donated to the
Masterpieces for the Nation Fund 2007.
Grants
Australia Council for the Arts through the
Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art
Board, Visual Arts Board and Community
Partnerships & Market Development
(International) Board
Australia–Japan Foundation
Australian Government through Visions of
Australia
Japan Foundation (Tokyo)
Arts NT through the Northern Territory
Government’s Department of Natural
Resources, Environment and the Arts
Queensland Government (Australia), through
the Queensland Indigenous Arts Marketing
and Export Agency (QIAMEA) Arts
Partnership Program of Department of
Premier and Cabinet
Sponsorship
NAB
BHP Billiton
ActewAGL
Qantas
Hindmarsh
R.M.Williams, The Bush Outfitter
Yalumba
O’Leary Walker Wines
Lambert Vineyards
Casella Wines
Forrest Inn and Apartments
Gordon Darling Foundation
Saville Park Suites
WIN Television
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spring 2007
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development of fice
The National Gallery of Australia acknowledges and thanks the government and corporate
supporters involved in our major twenty-fifth anniversary exhibitions, acquisitions and
education and public programs.
Culture Warriors: National Indigenous Art Triennial
The inaugural National Indigenous Art Triennial features a
range of contemporary Australian Indigenous art practice
and pays tribute to a key group of dedicated and important
artists – in particular those whose respective careers span
the four decades since the 1967 Referendum (Aboriginals).
In recognition of the national significance of the exhibition,
the following organisations have provided their support,
along with that of principal sponsor BHP Billiton.
Visions of Australia
Visions of Australia is an Australian Government program
supporting touring exhibitions by providing funding
assistance for the development and touring of Australian
cultural material across Australia. The National Gallery
of Australia is very proud of its longstanding relationship
with Visions of Australia which has seen fifteen travelling
exhibitions visit 110 venues throughout regional, remote
and metropolitan Australia over a period of twelve years.
Culture Warriors: National Indigenous Art Triennial has
been granted funds under Round 4 of the Contemporary
Touring Initiative through Visions of Australia, an Australian
Government program, and the Visual Arts and Craft
Strategy, an initiative of the Australian Government and
state and territory governments.
Australia Council for the Arts
The Australia Council for the Arts, through its Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander Art Board, Visual Arts Board
and Community Partnerships and Market Development
(International) Board, has generously provided
funding support.
Arts NT
Arts NT, through the Northern Territory Government’s
Department of Natural Resources, Environment and the
Arts, has provided support to artists and writers with
cultural links to the Northern Territory to travel to Canberra
for the opening of the exhibition and to participate in
associated education and public programs.
Queensland Indigenous Art Marketing Export Agency
The exhibition has been generously supported by
the Queensland Government (Australia), through the
Queensland Indigenous Arts Marketing and Export Agency
6
(QIAMEA) Arts Partnership Program of Department of
Premier and Cabinet. The exhibition and the accompanying
catalogue include ten Indigenous artists and five writers
with cultural links to Queensland.
Ocean to Outback: Australian landscape painting
1850–1950
This bold and generous twenty-fifth anniversary initiative
aims to ensure that people across Australia have access
to the treasures of the national collection. The exhibition
will travel to Tamworth, Hobart, Mount Gambier, Ballarat,
Perth, Cairns, Alice Springs, Newcastle and Canberra.
R.M.Williams, The Bush Outfitter
We welcome R.M.Williams, The Bush Outfitter as a valued
sponsor of the Gallery’s twenty-fifth anniversary travelling
exhibition, Ocean to Outback: Australian landscape
painting 1850–1950. This is a historic partnership between
two iconic Australian organisations that will see fifty-eight
important landscape paintings travel 18,500 km over a
nineteen-month period to every state and territory in
the country. It is a project that goes to the heart of the
Gallery’s mandate of being truly national and the generous
support of R.M.Williams (celebrating their seventy-fifth
anniversary) has ensured that people in regional, remote
and metropolitan Australia will have access to the treasures
of their national collection.
Visions of Australia
In Round 28, Visions of Australia also granted funds to tour
Ocean to Outback.
The National Gallery of Australia Council
Exhibitions Fund
The fund has generously sponsored the national tour of
Ocean to Outback.
Black robe, white mist: art of the Japanese Buddhist
nun Rengetsu
Australia–Japan Foundation and Japan Foundation
(Tokyo)
The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade through the
Australia–Japan Foundation and the Japan Foundation
(Tokyo) through its Japan Foundation Exhibitions Abroad
Support Program have both generously contributed funds
to the exhibition and publication, Black robe, white mist:
art of the Japanese Buddhist nun Rengetsu. Their support
ensures that the work of this important nineteenth-century
Japanese artist will reach a new and broader Australian
audience.
Andy and Oz: Parallel Visions
This exhibition is a collaborative project between the
Philippa Winn Memorial Acquisition
Friends, family and colleagues of Philippa Winn, National
Gallery Educator (1996–2005), have been very generous
in their donation of funds to acquire a work of art for
the national collection. Philippa was greatly admired and
respected as an educator and for her ability to present
and develop creative education and public programs at
the Gallery.
(left to right)
The Hon. Mark Vaile MP,
Deputy Prime Minister,
Leader of the Nationals and
Minister for Transport and
Regional Services; Rupert
Myer AM (Chairman of NGA
Council) and Ken Cowley AO,
Chairman of R.M.Williams,
The Bush Outfitter at the
media launch of Ocean
to Outback: Australian
landscape painting 1850–
1950, the National Gallery of
Australia’s 25th Anniversary
Travelling Exhibition
Corporate Members Program
National Gallery of Australia and The Andy Warhol
Museum in Pittsburgh, USA, that will be the National
We are grateful to and thank the following for their
Gallery’s twenty-fifth anniversary international exhibition.
continued corporate support: Casella Wines Pty Limited,
The work of four generations of Australian artists who
The Brassey of Canberra, The Forrest Inn and Apartments
have been inspired by the famous artist, Andy Warhol, will
and Saville Park Suites. We formally welcome Lambert
be brought together and exhibited at The Andy Warhol
Wines, Yalumba Wines, O’Leary Walker Wines, and JQ Pty
Museum as part of the Australia Festival in Pittsburgh this
Limited to the Corporate Members program and thank
October. We are grateful to Qantas, which has generously
them for their generous support of the National Gallery’s
provided sponsorship to this exhibition, with support from
Twenty-fifth Anniversary Program and the Decorative Arts
Ann Lewis AM, Penelope Seidler and Henry Gillespie.
and Design Fund respectively.
Robert Rauschenberg 1967–1978
Twenty-fifth Anniversary Gift Program and
We welcome the generous support of the Embassy of
Masterpieces for the Nation Fund 2007
the United States of America towards the exhibition,
Our thanks go to all the donors who have generously
Robert Rauschenberg 1967–1978, which draws together
donated to both the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Gift Program
works from the Gallery’s rich collection of prints and
and the Masterpieces for the Nation Fund for 2007.
multiples and features the artist’s innovative printmaking
For further information please contact the NGA
processes from the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s.
Foundation Office on (02) 6240 6454.
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spring 2007
7
national australia bank sculpture galler y
A new gallery for sculpture: wood, stone, metal, glass
Constantin Brancusi
L’Oiseau dans l’espace [Bird
in space] 1931–36 white
marble, limestone ‘collar’,
sandstone base overall 318.1
x 42.5 (diameter) cm and
L’Oiseau dans l’espace [Bird
in space] c.1931–36 black
marble, white marble ‘collar’,
sandstone base overall
328.4 x 51.4 (diameter) cm
Purchased 1973
8
On the evening of 22 May 2007 the National Gallery
of Australia opened its new sculpture gallery, generously
sponsored by the National Australia Bank. A range of works
by American, European, Australian and Indigenous artists
are on show. When the Gallery opened in October 1982,
this impressive space originally showed sculpture from the
modern collection. It again features masterpieces including
Brancusi’s two Birds in space placed in a calm reflecting
pool. The architects have created a beautiful and generous
space, where light falls softly onto the works of art. Every
season and every time of day is marked by changing light,
which alters our perceptions of the sculptures.
Made from traditional materials, often in unconventional
ways, the works on show are created by carving and casting,
assembled from found objects or even manufactured by
industrial processes. Donald Judd’s untitled brass boxes
of 1974, for example, replicate the exact geometry and
uniformity of modern factory products. Their shiny,
regulated march across the floor reflects and refracts their
surroundings, which include the feet of visitors and the
beautiful smoky grey tiles of the renewed slate flooring.
Rocks and mirror square II 1971 unites a clean, crisp
construction of factory-made mirrored glass with rough,
hard rocks picked up in the countryside by the artist.
Robert Smithson’s installation – which like Judd’s is placed
directly onto the floor – hugs the ground, striving to merge
into it and levitate at the same time. In his Suspended
stone wallpiece 1976, Ken Unsworth uses river stones,
made round through erosion over time, each tied up with
thin wire. The rocks form a semicircle above the floor,
which seems to defy the laws of physics. Stone becomes
lighter than air.
The most common manifestation of wood on show in
the gallery is not carved, but roughly hewn or found objects,
painted rather than raw or varnished. Louise Bourgeois
made her sculpture originally between 1941 and 1948,
and covered it with red and black paint. She talked of its
genesis: as children, she and her brother hid under a table
and watched their parents’ legs as they walked to and fro.
The work’s meaning changed in 1979 when Bourgeois repainted it salmon pink and renamed it C.O.Y.O.T.E. after the
prostitutes’ rights campaign ‘Call off your old tired ethics’.
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spring 2007
9
(left to right)
Jannis Kounellis Untitled
1990 (detail) three steel
panels, clothes and beams
each 200.0 x 181.0 x 25.0 cm
Purchased 1992; Louise
Bourgeois C.O.Y.O.T.E.
1941–48 painted wood
137.4 x 214.5 x 28.9 cm
Purchased 1981; Robert
Klippel No. 757 painted
wood construction
1988–89 painted wood
253.0 x 171.0 x 146.0 cm
Purchased 1989; Donald
Judd Untitled 1974 brass
each 101.6 x 101.6 x 101.6 cm
Purchased 1975;
Anselm Kiefer La Vie
secrète des plantes [The
secret life of plants] 2002
lead, oil, chalk, pigment
195.0 x 300.0 (diameter) cm
Purchased 2003;
Robert Smithson Rocks and
mirror square II 1971 basalt
rocks and mirrors
36.0 x 220.0 x 220.0 cm
Purchased 1977; Anselm
Kiefer Abendland [Twilight
of the West] 1989 lead
sheet, synthetic polymer
paint, ash, plaster, cement,
earth, varnish on canvas and
wood 400.0 x 380.0 x 12.0 cm
Purchased 1989
Both Robert Klippel and Rosalie Gascoigne
collected and re-used wooden objects. Klippel plays
with architectonic elements in No. 757 Painted wood
construction 1988–89 to create a new reality, based on
manufactured things but now useful only as art. The
weatherbeaten panels of Gascoigne’s Plenty 1986 are
made of recycled box slats. The installation shines on a
dull grey concrete wall, its golden hues and title perhaps
implying fields of wheat or blond grass stretching out
before our eyes.
The earliest work on display is Elie Nadelman’s Horse
c. 1911–15, which seems to gallop into the gallery. The
animal’s sturdy body, carved from white plaster, balances
on its absurdly delicate thoroughbred legs. The modernist
sculptor’s impulse to pure form is taken to its ultimate
abstract end in Brancusi’s black marble and white marble
Birds in space of 1931–36. They embody the idea of flight,
an upward striving which separates the earthbound from
the free. Purchased from the sculptor by the Maharajah of
Indore, the works were originally meant to be installed in a
pavilion designed by Brancusi. Their current placement on
simple geometric sandstone bases in a silent pool is based
on a similar idea of contemplation and reflection.
10 national gallery of australia
Combining stone and metal is unusual, because of
possible contradictions between the methods of carving
or casting employed by the sculptor. Anthony Caro’s
Duccio variations no. 7 2000 is a promised gift from Ken
Tyler and Maribeth Cohen through the American Friends
of the Australian National Gallery. When Caro was invited
to respond to a painting in the collection of the National
Gallery, London, he made seven works in different
materials. Each was based on Duccio’s Annunciation 1311,
but responds to the painter’s depiction of architecture
rather than the traditional subject. Here Caro assembles a
new altarpiece with pieces of golden sandstone and found
metal objects, painted gunmetal grey-blue.
Max Ernst’s giant bronze Habakuk is a major new
acquisition, purchased with the help of the National
Australia Bank. It is a curious figure, conjuring up thoughts
of birds, or reptiles, even partly machine or human. Ernst
was a major Surrealist sculptor: this is a large version of
an original work which he made in plaster in 1934, and
reworked later that decade. A small edition in this size was
authorised by the artist in 1970. His alter-ego was a birdman called Loplop. Habakuk’s body was created from casts
of flowerpots, stacked on top of and inside one another.
Ernst then added a head, consisting of a giant tilted bill and
eyes. At the foot of the figure is a third eye, and the plinth
also bears a negative impression of another. Together these
stand for inward and outward vision, forming a veiled
reference to the biblical prophet Habakuk, for whom the
sculpture is named.
An untitled triptych by Jannis Kounellis from 1990
combines hard-grade steel panels with I-beams used in
building construction and pieces of men’s clothing. It
serves as a contemporary crucifixion, implying Christ’s
absent body, as well as the Trinity, by a man’s coat, jacket
and trousers. The three parts also refer to conventional
medieval and Renaissance iconography, the painted
altarpiece with two wings around a central panel. The
clothes provoke a more recent memory, that of the great
post-war artist Joseph Beuys, whose use of men’s jackets,
as well as felt and fat, haunts contemporary art.
References to the natural world include a new sculpture
by Glen Farmer Illortaminni, Jongijongini [Egret] 2005–06.
Bronze is an unusual choice of material for a Tiwi artist,
but the bird’s essentialised form, as with Brancusi’s birds
and Nadelman’s horse, is conveyed by combining intense
observation with artistic simplification. Maria Fernanda
Cardoso uses the remains of real starfish in her installation
Woven water: submarine landscape II 2003, where delicate,
porous white skeletons float above the viewer, suspended
on almost-invisible wires. Bronwyn Oliver weaves a similarly
fragile web in Clasp 2006 and Garland 2006, but her
medium is metal. Originally taken from the earth, the wire
is forged and remade into forms analogous to nature’s.
The only artist with two objects in the Sculpture
Gallery is Anselm Kiefer, a German who now lives in
France. Kiefer’s artistic practice centres on encounters
with his country’s history and universal moral choices. His
magisterial Twilight of the West 1990 combines embossed
lead sheeting with oil paint and plaster below, depicting
railway tracks leading into a desolate landscape. References
include the soft, poisonous and alchemical metal lead, the
impression of a manhole cover representing the sun, the
Nazis’ use of trains to transport people to death camps,
while the German title ‘Abendland’ implies the sun setting
on civilisation.
In his massive book The secret life of plants 2002,
Kiefer obscures the possibility of anyone reading this
tome inscribed with oil paint, chalk and pigments.
The sculpture has a secret life of its own. As Shaun Lakin
artonview
(left to right)
Klippel No. 757 painted
wood construction 1988–89;
Kounellis Untitled 1990;
Max Ernst Habakuk 1934/70,
cast 1995–98 bronze
449.9 x 162.9 x 162.9 cm
Purchased with the assistance
of the National Australia
Bank; Ken Unsworth
Suspended stone wallpiece
1976 river stones, steel wire
215.0 x 140.0 x 104.5 cm
Purchased 1976; Anthony
Caro Duccio variations no.7
2000 sandstone and steel
189.5 x 198.0 x 103.0 cm
On loan from Kenneth Tyler
and Marabeth Cohen-Tyler
spring 2007
11
(opposite, left to right)
Kiefer La Vie secrète des plantes
[The secret life of plants] 2002;
Smithson Rocks and mirror square II
1971; Kiefer Abendland [Twilight of
the West] 1989
(left to right)
Brancusi Birds in space 1931–36;
Cy Twombly Untitled 1987–2004
bronze, no. 4 from an edition of six
368.3 x 88.9 x 34.3 cm Purchased
2006 with the generous assistance
of Roslyn Packer and members of the
NGA Foundation: John Kaldor and
Naomi Milgrom, Julie Kantor, Andrew
Rogers; Kounellis Untitled 1990
(detail); Bourgeois C.O.Y.O.T.E.
1941–48
has remarked, it is named after a 1973 book by Peter
Tompkins and Christopher Bird which investigates the
physical, emotional and spiritual relations between plants,
humans and the universe.
Another contemporary artist who cogitates on
questions of culture and history is the American Cy
Twombly, who has lived and worked in Italy for the last
fifty-five years. As well as paintings and drawings, Twombly
makes sculptures. They are often assembled from industrial
metal, plastic or wooden objects, then painted white and
occasionally cast in bronze in small editions. Untitled 2005,
one of an edition of six, has a unique patina, or surface
treatment, of mottled pale grey-green.
The patina has something of the quality of lichen
covering gravestones in a shady cemetery, which is
appropriate as it serves as a kind of memorial to a friend of
the artist. Inscribed on the base are the words ‘In memory
of Dominique Bozo’, who was head of the Pompidou
Centre until his premature death in 1993. But ‘Victory’
is also written high on the work. It has a sail form, and a
rectangular base, and stands the same height as a classical
Greek sculpture in the Louvre, the Victory of Samothrace.
She was the goddess of victory. The equivocal nature
of death and memory is recalled when we consider that
Admiral Nelson won the Battle of Trafalgar from his
flagship – and was fatally wounded on board – the Victory.
Returning sculpture to the grand, meditative space of
the lower level, now known as the National Australia Bank
Sculpture Gallery, hopefully restores the original intention
of the National Gallery’s founders to showcase sculpture
as a central part of the collection, and to display it as a
powerful and extraordinary medium of modern art. a
Christine Dixon
Senior Curator, International Painting and Sculpture
artonview
spring 2007
13
pacific ar t s galler y
Pacific arts in the Gallery
Raharuhi Rukupo
Aotearoa [New Zealand],
North Island, Manutuke,
Rongowhakaata people
Figure from a house post
[poutokomanawa]
c. 1825–1840 (detail)
wood, natural pigments
79.7 x 26.5 x 20.2 cm
National Gallery of Australia,
Canberra Purchased 1981
The National Gallery has a long history in bringing the
arts of the non-Western world to its visitors – from Indian
miniature paintings to faïence figures from Ancient Egypt.
However, until recently, the Pacific Arts collection remained
perhaps the least known of the world’s many spheres of
art to our visitors. With the opening of the new Pacific
Arts Gallery in July, some of the finest Pacific artworks in
Australia, dating from around 3500 years ago to the midtwentieth century, are now on display. The origins of the
collection stem from 1968 when the first item – a wood
sculpture of a Papua New Guinean woman wearing a rain
cape – was purchased from a Sydney art dealer by acting
chairperson for the Commonwealth Advisory Board,
Sir William Dargie.
In broad geographic terms, the Pacific Arts collection
encompasses around one-third of the world’s surface and
is divided into three main areas: Polynesia, Micronesia and
Melanesia. Within each of these areas exist many unique
cultures, some sustained by less than 100 people and each
with their own artistic forms of expression. Melanesia is
by far the most diverse area of the collection, with works
from New Caledonia, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands and
the great landmass of Papua New Guinea where more than
800 languages are spoken. Given the diversity of Papua
New Guinea’s Indigenous cultures, its proximity to Australia
and the long and entwined history we share, it is not
surprising that a greater portion of the collection is from
Papua New Guinea.
The next area of the Pacific Arts collection comes
from Polynesia (meaning many islands), a vast triangular
region of the Pacific with the three outermost points being
New Zealand, Hawaii and remote Easter Island. Within
the Polynesian triangle are the islands that fascinated
eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European society
with notions of noble savages and idyllic paradises – Tahiti,
the Cook Islands, the Austral Islands and the Marquesas
Islands. The Gallery holds only a small collection from these
islands yet each work is more than 150 years old. Notable
among them is the very fine Poutokomanawa house
post figure carved by the great carver-priest and warrior
Raharuhi Rukupo in the early 1840s.
The qualities of the collection’s sometimes sublime,
sometimes aggressively confronting works can be
appreciated through their sculptural value alone. However,
they are all the more impressive after reflecting upon how
unsaid ideas and concepts. The colours used in arts from
each work was created. Connections to the environment
the Pacific were sourced from a variety of natural resources
played a great part in sourcing raw materials for sculpture.
– plants, pounded shells, ochre and soot obtained by
For example, the tree trunk used for the impressive
burning fruits such as candlenut all contributed to the
Kanganaman village house post at the entrance to the
artists’ palette. An exception is the Lower Sepik Spirit mask
Pacific Arts Gallery would have been selected because the
which is highlighted with Reckitt’s laundry bluing dye. This
spirit that lived in the tree made itself ‘known’ to the artist.
interesting adaptation shows that artists were not afraid
Once the tree was chosen, the artist simply worked on the
to incorporate exotic materials. (Indeed the use of Western
natural shape of the wood to reveal the spirit’s true form.
materials may have been considered a way to imbue a work
with extra magical capabilities.) What seems to be a limited
The tools used by some artists are remarkable in
themselves – sharply ground edged stones (which in
range of natural resources did not dim the imagination of
themselves took considerable time to produce) acted as
the artist – the individuality, uniqueness and latent power
the cutting blades of adzes for hewing out the mass and
of each artwork can still be felt in works that have endured
volume of an object. Smaller pieces of worked shell and
many years of exposure to the tropical elements.
bone, even the sharp teeth from small mammals, were
employed to complete the finer details of a figure, mask or
Pacific artists and their communities. A prestigious object
sculpture. To achieve a pleasingly smooth surface required
such as a delicate Marquesan fan, Tahi, was made by
laborious rubbing with the tough edge of a boar tusk or
specialists known as tuhuna who focused on refining
the rough skin of rays, sharks and certain plant leaves with
the singular aspect of fan making in order to elevate the
abrasive properties.
production to an artform difficult for others to replicate.
Fans were made only on Tahuata Island and were exported
For Pacific art, colour can be equally as important
Lower Sepik people
Papua New Guinea, Lower
Sepik River area
Spirit mask c. 1885–1920
wood, pigment, laundry
dye 89.0 x 24.0 x 28.0 cm
Te Fenua ‘Enata people
French Polynesia, Marquesas
Islands, Tahuata Island
Fan [tahi’i] 1800–1850
wood, pandanus, coconut
fibre National Gallery
of Australia, Canberra
Purchased 1972
Specialisation in certain media was common for many
as form, and the application of colour was often a ritual
great distances across the Marquesas group. The finely
event in itself. Particular colours are known to be powerful
braided continuous cordage of the Hawaiian necklace,
visual communicators for different island cultures. Colour,
Lei niho palaoa, was once the preserve of artists who
when used within an important event or ceremony for
worked only with human hair – one of the most important
many communities, symbolically communicates otherwise
materials in Hawaii. Hair was highly regarded as being
artonview
spring 2007
17
charged with mana, a spiritual power, as it grows
that do not immediately conform to the Western eye.
directly from the head, which was considered the seat
In particular, the works from Melanesia hold great physical
of the human spirit. As with the Marquesan fan, this
complexity, an example of which is the spirit figure
necklace was a collaborative work and likely to have been
Maunwial whose vestigial limbs, bulbous head and intense
commissioned by a wealthy member of the community. An
colours are a synthesis of the concrete and the abstract.
artist skilled in working marine ivory would have produced
the refined central hook-shaped pendant. These pendants
have long been considered stylised fishhooks. They are also
said to represent ‘the tongue of god’ in a protruding and
aggressive manner. The pendant is fashioned from a whale
tooth, indicating a connection to Kanaloa, the god of the
sea, who provides a bounty of fish and seafood and whose
Maunwial and several other works have been displayed
floating free of the wall, in much the same manner as they
once were displayed in spirit houses suspended from the
rafters by cords of fibre.
Recognition of Pacific arts has been a slow process due
to the blossoming of anthropology in the late nineteenth
waters surround all the Hawaiian Islands. These kinds of
and early twentieth century when the arts of Indigenous
connections between art and life in the Pacific were and
peoples were exhibited solely in museums and primarily as
are inseparable.
documents to one aspect of human history. Appreciation,
however, did grow through the esteem shown by
Many of the works in the Pacific Arts Gallery
were created to give younger generations a better
individuals in the Expressionist, Dadaist and Surrealist art
understanding of what it meant to be a member of
collectives, including Pablo Picasso, Max Pechstein, André
a community. Initiation on the Sepik River was often
Breton and Paul Éluard, whose passion was guided by an
part of the process of becoming an adult member of
aesthetic approach of pure contemplation and intuitive
the community. The initiate would undergo a period of
interpretation rather than any deeper understanding of
hardship and stressful rituals that culminated in a short-
the cultures of the Pacific. This appreciation blossomed
lived confrontation with a powerful spirit in the Haus
tambaran (a place where spirits dwell). Pacific artists
conceived works with the greatest possible visual force for
the Haus tambaran in order to create a menacing reverence
which viewers would clearly remember and cautiously
regard all their lives, even if their glimpse was only fleeting.
Artists depicted otherworldly beings, ancestors or spirits
during the mid-twentieth century, as seen in the history of
the exquisite To-reri uno double figure from Lake Sentani
that has been internationally acknowledged as one of
the finest known works from the Pacific. For more than
a decade, when works from the Pacific were making the
slow transition from artefact to art, it stood in the gallery of
in forms that held a physical presence that conveyed the
Parisian art dealer Pierre Loeb, overlooked and unsold. The
ancestors’ will and underlined their mastery over the
beauty inherent in the sculpture did not change, but the
environment in which the community lived. For some
comprehension and susceptibility of the viewer did.
cultures, this environment was shaped by the deeds of
distant primordial ancestors and was demonstrated by
Pacific Arts collection in the late 1960s to today, this same
connections to natural features – lakes, mountains and
transitory process means visitors to the gallery will see the
coastlines. Animals such as crocodiles, hornbill birds,
masks and sculptures as more than curiosities or specimens
sago beetles, sea eagles, bonito fish and sharks were also
of ‘the other’. They are objects of potent visual force
incorporated into ancestral mythologies. These connections
that stand equally next to art from any period, culture or
were stressed to the young so they would never forget
their association with the local environment.
Visitors to the Pacific Arts Gallery may be unsettled by
the convulsive nature and compositions of some sculptures
Hawaiian people
United States of America,
Hawaiian Islands
Necklace [lei niho palaoa]
1820–1860 marine ivory,
human hair, plant fibre
Canberrra Purchased 1970
In the intervening years from the building of our
individual artist across the world.
a
Crispin Howarth
Assistant Curator, Pacific Arts
artonview
spring 2007
19
exhibitions galleries
The ‘big guns’ of Culture Warriors
Jean Baptiste Apuatimi
Tiwi people Yirrikapayi 2007
natural earth pigments on
canvas 160.0 x 200.0 cm
Canberra
Philip Gudthaykudthay
Liyagalawumirr people
Wagilag Sisters 2007
natural earth pigments
and Liquitex Matte Binder
on Belgian linen
172.0 x 120.0 cm
Canberra
Through their art and culture, the artists in Culture
Warriors ensures that their work is seen and celebrated
Warriors: National Indigenous Art Triennial tell the stories
during their lifetime.
of their communities in an incredible diversity of ‘voices’ –
humble, venerated, spiritual, customary, poignant, satirical,
‘the big guns’, is a Tiwi elder whose traditional name is
political, innovative and overt. Among the thirty-one artists
Pulukatu (female buffalo) and dance Jarrangini (buffalo).
featured in the Triennial, a core group of dedicated and
Apuatimi began working as an artist alongside her
significant artists deserve singular focus. Jean Baptiste
husband, acclaimed Tiwi elder and artist, Declan Apuatimi
Apuatimi, Philip Gudthaykudthay, John Mawurndjul, Lofty
(1930–1985). Earlier this year, Jean talked with Angela Hill,
Jean Baptiste Apuatimi, the only female artist in
Bardayal Nadjamerrek and Arthur Koo’ekka Pambegan
Art Centre Co-ordinator at Tiwi Designs, about her art
Jr are fêted through major installations of their work in
and culture:
the exhibition, and through essay contributions in the
My name is Jean Baptiste Apuatimi. I am a painter.
accompanying exhibition publication. Colloquially referred
My husband Declan Karrilikiya Apuatimi taught me
to as ‘the big guns’, their respective careers span the four
how to paint. I love my painting, I love doing it ...
decades since the 1967 Referendum (Aboriginals). Culture
Now I am doing that. Painting makes me alive.1
Apuatimi learnt by assisting her husband with his art-making
John Mawurndjul is a member of the Kurulk clan of
and had her first solo exhibition in 1991. She has created
Kuninjku-speaking people of Western Arnhem Land. He is
a striking series of large canvases especially for Culture
without doubt the most renowned Kuninjku artist working
Warriors, which include figurative representations of tutini
today, with an international reputation and lauded as a
and pukumani objects, and body painting. A tiny figure, she
‘maestro’ by former French president Jacques Chirac at
nonetheless has a powerful presence, accompanied by a
the opening of the Australian Indigenous Art Commission
wicked sense of humour, declaring herself ‘a famous artist
for the newest Parisian museum, Musée du quai Branly,
now’, through her inclusion in Culture Warriors.
Philip Gudthaykudthay, one of the last conversant
in June 2006.
Liyagalawumirri speakers, was born c. 1925 and is a
My work and my rarrk (cross-hatching) have
senior custodian of the Wagilag creation narrative.
changed a lot since I started painting a long time
Gudthaykudthay’s totem is Burruwara, the native cat,
ago [late 1970s]. That was with my brother [Jimmy
which has seen him endowed with the nickname of
Njiminjuma] and together, we have changed the
‘Pussycat’. In 1983 Gudthaykudthay was the first Central
rarrk and started to paint in a new style. We are
Arnhem Land artist to have a solo show at a contemporary
new people … Now, I concentrate on painting
gallery, Garry Anderson Gallery in Sydney, making him
important places, my land, my djang [sacred places].
possibly the first Aboriginal artist in Australia to hold a
I paint the power of that land … I keep thinking, I
solo exhibition in a contemporary artspace.
keep finding new ways, new styles for my paintings.
I just can’t stop thinking about my paintings.
Although consistent in his artistic output, since being
awarded an artist fellowship from the Aboriginal and
Torres Strait Islander Art Board in 2006, his creative well-
Mawurndjul’s representations of Mardayin and sites
spring has been replenished, and he has produced a
associated with his traditional country of Milmilngkan –
magnificent series of badurru (hollow logs) for Culture
on bark and hollow logs – have become increasingly
Warriors in his characteristically elegant and spare miny’tji
refined in his expert use of rarrk. Inspired by great classical
(clan body design) and rarrk (cross-hatching), quite
Kuninjku artists such as Peter Marralwanga (Mawurndjul’s
distinct from the larrakitj and lorrkon from Yirrkala and
wife, Kay, is Marralwanga’s daughter and an artist in her
Maningrida, respectively.
own right) along with Yirawala and his elder brother Jimmy
I’m botj [boss] here. Ramingining … Me, number
Njiminjuma, Mawurndjul’s artistic and cultural mastery
one painter … Right up from painting, Milingimbi,
was acknowledged when he was awarded the Clemenger
Ngangalala, Ramingining, Maningrida, now come
Contemporary Art Award in 2003, and honoured in the
here, Ramingining. Stop here. Number one painter
solo exhibition Rärrk: John Mawurndjul journey through
here. Bark, finish ‘im up here; canvas, finish ‘im up
time in Northern Australia at the Museum Tinguely, Basel,
here. Hollow log. All painting here. Me, number one.
in 2005.
artonview
John Mawurndjul Kuninjku
(Eastern Kunwinjku) people
Billabong at Milmilngkan
2006 natural earth pigment
on bark 200.0 x 47.0 cm
Canberra
Arthur Koo’ekka
Pambegan Jnr
Wik Mungkan/Winchanam
peoples Face painting 2006
natural earth pigments
and hibiscus charcoal with
synthetic polymer binder
on canvas 56.0 x 168.0 cm
Canberra
spring 2007
23
Lofty Bardayal Nadjamerrek is rightly acknowledged
renown) who was among the first of the Wik-speaking
as one of the most learned elders of the Arnhem Land
people to live at Aurukun, a mission established by the
escarpment known as ‘Stone Country’, and is the last of
Moravians at Archer River in 1904.
the painters of the magnificent rock art galleries of the
I’d just say … I WON’T STOP DOING IT. This belong
region; his final work, a simple, dynamic kangaroo and
to all of us. We share it together … we share our
hunter in white ochre, was created in 2005. From the
culture and you sharing your culture. The culture,
Kundedjnjenghm people, Mok clan, Nadjamerrek was born
what you see in the carvings, in the body painting,
c. 1926 at Kukkulumurr, Western Arnhem Land, and, as his
what you see in the canvas, they more important,
name suggests, his elevated, graceful physique was often
because this is the way we are, not going to lose it.
seen traversing the length and breadth of Arnhem Land in
his early adult years.
Pambegan Jnr is known for his wonderful sculptural
installations of ancestral stories, Bonefish Story Place and
Now residing at his outstation at Kabulwarnamyo,
Bardayal paints sparingly, passing on his traditions to his
Flying Fox Story Place. The distinctive art of Aurukun –
grandsons, who sit quietly watching him as he paints.
trademark body-paint design worn by performers in a set
Although his hand is now somewhat unsteady, his great
of horizontal stripes, alternating red, white and black2 –
skill as an ‘old-style’ rock art painter is evident in the
has also enjoyed a gradual move into the art market in the
stunning barks and works on paper which have been
past twenty-five years, with younger artists encouraged
secured for Culture Warriors. Bardayal may scrape back
by elders such as Pambegan Jnr. He is equally renowned
some of the ochre pigments on the bark canvases or
for his skill and acumen as a ceremonial dancer and leader.
paper sheets when dissatisfied with a particular line, but
Culture Warriors presents the first works on canvas by
the stature of his figures – creation beings and totemic
Pambegan Jnr alongside his installations.
animals – remains unchallenged. Whereas Mawurndjul
continually works on refining his sublime rarrk, filling the
inspirational artists and cultural activists, whose work and
entire surface of his canvas, Bardayal’s painting reflects
lives inspired the title of the inaugural National Indigenous
a fidelity to his cultural traditions, with the figurative
elements reigning supreme.
Arthur Koo’ekka Pambegan Jnr is one of the most
respected Winchanam ceremonial elders in Aurukun,
a community based on the western side of Cape York
Peninsula in far north Queensland. Pambegan Jnr comes
from a family of great standing in the community, learning
his cultural traditions through his father, Arthur Koo’ekka
Pambegan Snr (also an artist and cultural activist of great
Lofty Bardayal
Nadjamerrek
Kundedjnjenghm people
Ngalyod I 2005 natural
earth pigments on bark
45.0 x 134.0 cm on loan
from Joseph Fekete and
Annie Bartlett
It has been a great honour to work with such
Art Triennial.
a
Brenda L Croft
Senior Curator, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art
Curator, Culture Warriors: National Indigenous Art Triennial
notes
1 From an essay with Angela Hill, ‘Jean Baptiste recorded this
introduction in Tiwi at Nguiu, Bathurst Island, on 3 February 2007
which was transcribed and translated by Margaret Renee Kerinauia’.
2 Peter Sutton, essay for the exhibition catalogue accompanying
Culture Warriors.
artonview
spring 2007
25
orde poynton galler y
Robert Rauschenberg 1967–1978
Beauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look.
John Cage, avant-garde composer, 19611
Artist Robert Rauschenberg
in 1953 Photo by Allan Grant,
Life Magazine © Time
Warner Inc/Robert
Rauschenberg/VAGA, New
York/DACS, London
Booster 1967
from the Booster and
seven studies series 1967
colour lithograph, screenprint
183.0 x 89.0 cm
Robert Rauschenberg has had an extensive impact
on late twentieth-century visual culture. His work has
been of central influence in many of the significant
developments of post-war American art and has provided
countless blueprints for artistic innovation by younger
generations. Rauschenberg’s radical approach to his artistic
practice was always sensational, with the artist producing
works so experimental that they eluded definition and
categorisation. The National Gallery of Australia holds
an important collection of Rauschenberg’s works. These
works exemplify the artist’s striking transition in subject
matter and material during the late 1960s and throughout
the 1970s – a shift from the imagery of American
popular culture to a focus on the handmade and unique
combinations of natural and found materials. Many of the
works exhibited in Robert Rauschenberg 1967–1978 reveal
the artist’s overarching aim to ‘drag ordinary materials
into the art world for a direct confrontation’.2 It has been
Rauschenberg’s perpetual mix of art with life that has
ensured that his work appears as innovative today as it
was forty years ago.
The legendary Bauhaus figure, Josef Albers, was
the head of fine art at Black Mountain College, North
Carolina, when Rauschenberg enrolled in 1948. Under
the supervision of the strict disciplinarian, Rauschenberg
learnt about the essential qualities, or unique spirit, within
all kinds of materials. Rauschenberg said of their studentteacher relationship, that Albers was ‘a beautiful teacher
and an impossible person. He didn’t teach you how to
“do art”. The focus was on the development of your own
personal sense of looking. Years later … I’m still learning
from what he taught me. What he taught me had to do
with the whole visual world’.3
Storyline I
from the Reels (B+C)
series 1968
colour lithograph
54.6 x 43.3 cm
Storyline III
from the Reels (B+C)
series 1968
colour lithograph
54.6 x 44.6 cm
It was also at Black Mountain College that Rauschenberg
Despite his ‘prankster’ reputation, Rauschenberg
came into contact with several other key art world figures
was highly self-disciplined and determined to challenge
who had a vital and long-lasting impact upon his thinking
himself. In 1951, Rauschenberg completed a series of white
and artistic pursuits. The artists Ben Shahn, Robert
paintings, which were in contrast, followed by a series of
Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, Jack Tworkov, Franz Kline
black paintings. By limiting himself to a monochromatic
and Aaron Sisskind were all teaching at Black Mountain.
palette, Rauschenberg performed an artistic exorcism,
However, the most significant influence on the young
rendering the restrictions imposed by media, style and
artist was the celebrated avant-garde composer John
convention obsolete so that there were no psychological
Cage. Rauschenberg and Cage developed a relationship of
reciprocal inspiration – a connection that provided both the
artist and the composer with the daring that was required in
the creation of their most innovative works.
In contrast to the environment of Black Mountain
College, the New York avant-garde art scene in 1949
was dominated by Abstract Expressionism. The artistic
giants Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock had
established themselves as the most innovative of the
Abstract Expressionists. Discussions focused on the inner
emotional state of the individual artist as expressed in
highly charged painted gestures. The more free-thinking
Rauschenberg, however, worked outside these confines,
boundaries to what he could do from that point onwards.
Only after such self-imposed regulation was Rauschenberg
prepared for what he was to attempt next. In a radical
transgression of artistic conventions, Rauschenberg
began to fuse vertical, wall-mounted painterly works with
horizontal, floor-based sculptural elements, usually in the
form of found objects. His fusion of the two-dimensional
picture plane and the three-dimensional object is now of
legendary status. It was the invention of a new ‘species’ of
art, which Rauschenberg termed ‘Combines’.
Rauschenberg developed his own unique style by
combining gestural mark-making with its antithesis –
adopting a methodology that sought to reunite art with
mechanically reproduced imagery. It was this remarkable
everyday life, an ideology that was in complete opposition
clash of visual elements in Rauschenberg’s art that provided
to the central tenets of Abstract Expressionism. Early in his
a major aesthetic fracture – a departure from the heroic
career, Rauschenberg created controversy within the New
painterly gestures of Abstract Expressionism and a move
York art scene with a series of ‘artistic pranks’, including
towards the adoption of popular culture as subject matter.
his infamous erasure of a Willem de Kooning drawing. This
This radical schism, however, would not have occurred had
rebellious act of destroying an established artist’s work
it not been for Jasper Johns, with whom Rauschenberg
gained him instant notoriety and secured Rauschenberg
had a long and intense partnership, beginning in 1954.
the position of New York’s enfant terrible.
Rauschenberg and Johns lived above one another in the
same building, visiting each other every day and setting
artistic challenges for each other. Rauschenberg has said
Horsefeathers thirteen, is a striking example of the artist’s
of his partnership with Johns that, ‘He and I were each
innate talent in constructing compositions of detailed
other’s first critics … Jasper and I literally traded ideas.
sophistication. Mass media action images, such as running
He would say, “I’ve got a terrific idea for you” and then I
races, horse-riding and rowing, are mixed with more
would have to find one for him’. The Rauschenberg–Johns
generalised subjects that blend the natural environment
relationship was one of the great creative relationships of
with the manufactured environment. Each image is
the twentieth century. It propelled them both in radically
poised on the precarious dynamic moment and, in this
new directions and contributed to the development of the
way, Rauschenberg succeeds in investing his works with a
Pop Art movement.
simultaneous sense of movement and suspense. There is no
4
Rauschenberg’s series of dense collage works,
Rauschenberg’s modus operandi has always been
hierarchy of images – the path of visual exploration for each
collage – the combination of disparate elements within a
composition is of our own choosing, despite the occasional
single composition. He has been a cultural archaeologist –
(and humorous) directional arrow. The Horsefeathers
a master of collecting, editing and assembling the imagery
thirteen series is a visual experiment in the ‘random order’
of society, the environment, life and time. He insists that
of experience.5 By presenting us with a series of signs
there is no personal narrative embedded within his work,
that encourage multiple complex readings, the artist has
but rather that his imagery is arranged through a series of
attempted a collaboration with the specific memories,
rapidly made associations based upon intuition.
associations and thought processes of the individual viewer.
artonview
Albino cactus (scale) 1977
from the scale series
1977–81
ink transfer on silk,
synthetic polymer paint
on composition board,
mirrorised synthetic
polymer film, electric light,
wood, rubber tyre
88.7 x 442.1 x 122.0 cm
spring 2007
29
Publicon – Station IV
from the Publicons series
1978 enamel on wood
construction, collaged
laminated silk and
cotton, bicycle wheel,
fluorescent light fixture,
perspex, enamel on
polished aluminium
open 154.8 x 146.2 x 29.0 cm
While the images and objects selected for inclusion
combination of two-dimensional photographic imagery
within the artist’s compositions may not be personally
and three-dimensional found objects can be considered a
symbolic, they do reveal much about the American social
late ‘Combine’ work.
events and political issues of the cultural period in which
they were created. The garishly coloured Reels (B + C)
into Rauschenberg’s artistic expression, but it cannot be
series appropriate the film stills from the 1967 Bonnie and
completely detached from its life spirit. The Duchampian
Clyde movie, starring Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty,
displacement of the found object from life, and its
and expose Rauschenberg’s fascination with celebrity and
subsequent transference to art, creates something akin to a
the entertainment industry. In a similar fashion, the photo-
split personality; that is, all found objects bring with them a
collage work Signs operates as a succinct visual summary
history and/or pre-function which the artist allows to seep
of the cultural and political events of the 1960s, depicting
into the composition. Thus, in a collaborative encounter
the tragic musician Janis Joplin, the assassination of
with his material, Rauschenberg becomes a choreographer
John F Kennedy, America’s race riots and the Vietnam War.
of the historical meaning and value of the found object.
Rauschenberg has always been an artist-activist, skilled
in employing art to raise individual awareness of social,
backdrop of Albino cactus (scale) have been printed via a
environmental and political issues.
solvent-transfer process – a technique that Rauschenberg
began to experiment with in 1959. However, the look of
Rauschenberg’s work from the 1950s and 1960s can
A ‘found’ tyre in Albino cactus (scale) is incorporated
The images collaged along the material panel
also be seen as a presentation of the street culture of the
Albino cactus (scale) also recalls Rauschenberg’s many
urban environment. During this period, Rauschenberg lived
screenprinted paintings, first explored by the artist in 1962.
in New York and regularly walked the streets in order to
(It was at the same time that Andy Warhol also adopted
collect the ‘surprises’ that the city had left for him. Many
the screenprinting technique and the two artists traded
of these found objects were incorporated into his artwork,
ideas about the method.) The solvent transfer process and
the most famous of which is a stuffed goat (Monogram
screenprinting technique liberated Rauschenberg’s work.
1953–59). The Gallery’s Albino cactus (scale) with its
With both forms of printmaking, the artist discovered ways
in which he could quickly and repetitively transfer his found
imagery to the canvas of his paintings and Combines.
Rauschenberg believed that the printmaking technique
of lithography was old-fashioned and is notorious for
having stated that ‘the second half of the twentieth
century is no time to start writing on rocks’. Ironically,
it is Rauschenberg who became a significant figure in
the resurrection of American printmaking that occurred
during the 1960s. He has subsequently worked with many
leading print workshops to create more than 800 published
editions. Printmaking is a technique that was perfectly
suited to his methodology of layering found images and
one which gave him total control over the size and scale of
each component image. It was through printmaking that
Rauschenberg was able to once again blur the distinctions
between media and perfectly unite his obsessive use of the
photographic image with painterly techniques.
One of the most successful of Rauschenberg’s
collaborations has been with the Gemini GEL print
workshop – a printmaking partnership that has permanently
changed the terrain of American printmaking. The artist’s
highly experimental approach to print processes comes to
the fore in the colour lithograph and screenprint Booster,
created in 1967. For Booster, Rauschenberg decided to
use a life-sized X-ray portrait of himself combined with
an astrological chart, magazine images of athletes, the
image of a chair and the images of two power drills.
Printer Kenneth Tyler was a masterful facilitator for
Rauschenberg’s ambitious project and the collaboration
radically altered the aesthetic possibilities of planographic
printmaking. Rauschenberg and Tyler pushed beyond what
had previously been done by combining lithography and
screenprinting in a new type of ‘hybrid’ print. The rules
governing the size of lithographic printmaking were also
ignored, and at the time of its creation Booster stood
as the largest and most technically sophisticated print
ever produced. Today, Booster remains one of the most
significant prints of the twentieth century, a watershed that
catapulted printmaking into a new era of experimentation.
Rauschenberg’s collaborations with printmakers and
print workshops have often not resembled traditional
prints at all. In his typical mix of techniques and processes,
the artist has radically re-interpreted the traditional notion
of what constitutes a print. Seizing upon the notion of
multiplicity, inherent in the printed form, Rauschenberg
has frequently applied it to sculpture to create multiple
sculptural works that are editioned, just as a traditional
print can be editioned. His three-dimensional Publicon
artonview
Cardbird III
from the Cardbird series
1971 photo-lithograph,
screenprint, corrugated
cardboard, tape
98.0 x 90.6 cm
spring 2007
31
station multiples are seven physical expressions of the clash
Donald Judd. By selecting the most mundane of materials,
of art and religion and a reference to Christ’s fourteen
Rauschenberg once again succeeds in a glamorous
stations of the cross. Early in his life Rauschenberg was very
makeover of the most ordinary of objects. This is an
involved in the Church and wanted to become a preacher.
exploration of a new order of materials, a radical scrambling
His decision was reversed, however, when he was told
of the material hierarchy of modernism.
that the Church would not tolerate dancing (an activity
that Rauschenberg was particularly good at). Just like this
focus required him to travel to several countries where he
clash of religion and culture in life, the Publicon stations
entered into significant collaborations with local artists
represent a similar clash of visual elements in art. They are
austere containers that unfold to display intricately
collaged, bright fabrics and electrical components. Akin to
the individual steps that make up a choreographed dance,
the works are adjustable through various configurations.
As box-like containers, the Publicon stations also reveal
the influence of Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell.
Rauschenberg closely studied the works of the two masters
and repetitively referenced them in his own work.
A fundamental shift in subject and material occurred
in Rauschenberg’s work from the 1960s to the 1970s.
In the 1960s he relied heavily upon American visual
During the 1970s, Rauschenberg’s new international
and craftspeople. The first was in 1973 with the medieval
paper mill Richard de Bas in Ambert, France. Once again,
Rauschenberg imposed a disciplined stripping back of his
art materials – this time it was not to do with colour but
with the notion of the handmade. In particular, the artist
wanted to engage with handmade paper as one of the
most ancient of artistic traditions. The resulting series,
Pages and fuses, is a group of paper pulp works where
the Pages are formed from natural pulp and shaped into
paper pieces that incorporate twine or scraps of fabric. In
contrast, the Fuses are vivid pulp pieces dyed with bright
pigments. It was precisely this innovative experiment with
paper pulp that sparked a renewed interest in handmade
culture whereas in the 1970s Rauschenberg embraced
paper, which inspired major paper works by artists such as
an international perspective. The works from the 1970s
Ellsworth Kelly, David Hockney and Helen Frankenthaler.
also reflect the artist’s incessant experimentation with
new materials. Where the 1960s were dominated by
in the creation of theatre costumes and stage sets. In 1974,
repetitive mass media imagery, the 1970s reveal a focus
however, his interest in the inherent properties of natural
on natural fibres, a simplification of the artist’s materials to
materials led him to experiment with the combination
incorporate fabric, cardboard and other natural elements
of fabric and printmaking. The Hoarfrost editions series,
such as mud, rope and handmade paper. The catalyst for
created at Gemini GEL, is named after the thin layer
this dramatic change in both subject matter and material
of ice that forms on cold surfaces and was inspired by
can be explained by a change in Rauschenberg’s physical
Rauschenberg’s observation of printmakers using ‘large
environment – his decision to move from New York City
sheets of gauze … to wipe stones and presses … and hung
to Captiva Island, Florida, had a profound effect on the
about the room to dry … how they float in the air, veiling
appearance of his work.
machinery, prints tacked to walls, furniture’.7 The imagery
With no city to offer up its detritus, the artist turned
to the things that surrounded him in his new environment
and the move had yielded numerous cardboard boxes.
Rauschenberg has suggested that his choice of cardboard
as a new material was the result of ‘a desire … to work
in a material of waste and softness. Something yielding
with its only message a collection of lines imprinted like a
friendly joke. A silent discussion of their history exposed
by their new shapes’.6 The Cardbird series of 1971 is a
tongue-in-cheek visual joke, a printed mimic of cardboard
constructions. The labour intensive process involved in the
creation of the series remains invisible to the viewer – the
Throughout his career, Rauschenberg worked with fabric
of the Hoarfrost editions was drawn from the Sunday
Los Angeles Times and printed onto layers of silk, muslin
and cheesecloth. The artist has exploited the transparent
layering of material in order to suspend the image within
the work itself, enabling the viewer to both look at and
look through the work – to see both the positive space and
the negative space in conjunction with the environment
behind the work. Everyday objects, such as paper bags, are
in sophisticated contrast with the ghostly imprinted imagery
and the delicate fabric folds and layers.
Rauschenberg’s quest for continued international
involvement took him to Ahmadabad, India, to work in
a paper mill that had been established as an ashram for
artist created a prototype cardboard construction which
untouchables. Rauschenberg was immediately struck by
was then photographed and the image transferred to a
the contrast between the rich paper mill owners and the
lithographic press and printed before a final lamination
absolute poverty of the mill workers. The artist’s specific
onto cardboard backing. The extreme complexity of
environment once again provided him with materials
construction belies the banality of the series and, in this
and in 1975 he set about making the Bones and unions
way, Rauschenberg references both Pop’s Brillo boxes by
series. For the Bones, the collaborative team wove strips of
Andy Warhol and Minimalist boxes, such as those by
bamboo with handmade paper embedded with segments
of brightly coloured Indian saris. In the creation of the
clippings, paper, fabric and mud to electric lightbulbs and
Unions, Rauschenberg sought to incorporate the mud
old tyres. In this way, Rauschenberg has imbued his art
that was used by the villagers to build their homes. He
with the visual ‘poetry of infinite possibilities’.8
achieved this by concocting a rag-mud mixture consisting
of paper pulp, fenugreek powder, ground tamarind
seed, chalk powder, gum powder and copper sulphate
mixed with water, all of which was then kiln fired. For
Rauschenberg, the striking contrast between the sensuous
colour of the saris against the aromatic and earthy
aesthetic of the rag-mud encapsulated the manifest social
and cultural contrasts of India.
In all of his artistic pursuits, Rauschenberg has been
an enthusiast for collaboration, working with numerous
artists, composers, papermakers and printmakers. His joy in
creating works of art within a reciprocal exchange has also
extended to his materials. By looking beyond the apparent
ordinariness of everyday experience, Rauschenberg
celebrates the life spirit of all things, realising the unique
qualities of everything from individual colours, mass media
a
Jaklyn Babington
Curator, International Prints and Drawings
This exhibition is supported by the Embassy of the
United States of America
Preview
from the Hoarfrost editions
series 1974
lithograph and screenprint
transferred to a collage
of paper bags, silk chiffon,
silk taffeta
175.3 x 204.5 cm
notes
1 John Cage, ‘On Robert Rauschenberg, artist, and his work’ (first
published in Metro, Milan, 1961); republished in Silence, 4th edition,
The M.I.T Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England,
1970, p. 98.
2 Walter Hopps, ‘Introduction: Rauschenberg’s art of fusion’ in Walter
Hopps and Susan Davidson, Robert Rauschenberg: a retrospective, The
Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, 1997, p. 29.
3 Calvin Tomkins, Off the wall: the art world of our time, Doubleday &
co., New York, 1980, p. 32.
4 Tomkins, p. 118.
5 Robert Rauschenberg, ‘Random order’, Location, New York, Volume 1
Spring 1963, pp. 27–31.
6 Robert Rauschenberg, ‘Note: Cardbirds’ in Rauschenberg: Cardbirds,
promotional brochure, Gemini G.E.L, Los Angeles, 1971, n.p.
7 Ruth Fine, ‘Writing on rocks, rubbing on silk, layering on paper’
in Walter Hopps and Susan Davidson, Robert Rauschenberg: a
retrospective, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York,
1997, p. 384.
8 Cage, p.103.
artonview
spring 2007
33
projec t galler y
Black robe, white mist: art of the Japanese Buddhist nun
Rengetsu
Rengetsu’s memorial stone
at Saihoji, near Jinkoin.
The calligraphy was designed
by Tomioka Tessai
Black robe, white mist celebrates the life and work of
Otagaki Rengetsu or Lotus Moon (1791–1875). Featuring
delicate ceramics, calligraphy and scroll painting, it is the
first exhibition outside Japan to focus solely on the work of
Rengetsu, who lived an exceptional life at a time of great
social and political upheaval. Black robe, white mist brings
together many objects never before exhibited, the majority
of which are in private collections.
Born the illegitimate daughter of a courtesan and a
high-ranking samurai in a Kyoto pleasure district, Rengetsu
died a Buddhist nun renowned as a poet, calligrapher,
potter and painter. She was included in Heian jinbutsu
shi, a list of prominent people in Kyoto, in 1838, 1852
and 1867, and even today she is one of the characters in
Kyoto’s annual Jidai Matsuri or Festival of the Ages, which
includes a parade of historical figures.
Despite her fame, relatively little is known with
certainty about Rengetsu and much that is believed about
her owes more to fantasy and romantic conceptions of
her character and astonishing beauty than to reality. She
endured personal tragedy from early in her life and it was
these experiences that led to her remarkably productive
artistic career.
Originally called Nobu, Rengetsu was adopted as
a baby by Otagaki Hanzaemon Teruhisa, a lay priest at
Chion’in, the major Pure Land Buddhist temple in Kyoto,
and his wife Nawa. Teruhisa and Nawa had five sons
only one of whom, Katahisa, was still alive at the time
of Rengetsu’s adoption. When she was eight or nine,
Rengetsu went to live at Kameoka Castle where, as a ladyin-waiting, she received training in poetry, calligraphy,
dance, needlework and martial arts. During the time
Rengetsu was at Kameoka, Nawa and Katahisa both died.
At the age of sixteen or seventeen Rengetsu returned
to Kyoto and married Oka Tenzo. In keeping with custom,
he was adopted into the Otagaki family and his name
changed accordingly. He became Naoichi Mochihisa.
Rengetsu’s first child, a son, was born soon after the
marriage but lived only twenty days. The couple also had
two daughters but they too died young, one at a few
months and the other as a small child. In a rare occurrence
for the time, Rengetsu eventually divorced the apparently
depraved Mochihisa.
Her second marriage was a happy match but ended
tragically when her husband Ishikawa Jujiro (who became
Hisatoshi upon adoption) died from tuberculosis. The pair
had at least one daughter and possibly two. The night
before his death, Rengetsu marked her intention never to
remarry by cutting off her hair. Aged thirty-three, she soon
became a nun, adopting Lotus Moon as her name. Teruhisa
was ordained at the same time and, with Rengetsu’s
remaining child, or children, they moved to a Chion’in
hermitage. Within a decade Teruhisa and the last of
and that every Kyoto household included at least one
Rengetsu’s children had died. The nun then left the temple
example, be it a tea vessel, sweets dish, sake flask or
to make her own way in the world.
cup, tanzaku poem sheet, or a painting with calligraphy.
In search of a means of support, she considered
Rengetsu’s work was so popular that even within her
teaching the board game gõ, which Teruhisa had taught
lifetime it was imitated and faked, a practice that has
her, or waka poetry, which she had studied at Kameoka.
continued intermittently to the present and which makes
(Waka poems have thirty-one syllables divided into five
lines of five-seven-five-seven-seven syllables.) Although
neither career was a success, Rengetsu’s verse did
contribute to her later work. In her late forties or early
fifties, Rengetsu began making tea ceramics. In describing
her teapots, Rengetsu modestly wrote, ‘they were very
humble and the shapes were unrefined. The poems I
carved on them I wrote when I had a moment free. I never
had much free time.’1
Rengetsu’s combination of pottery, poetry and
it difficult to confidently attribute many Rengetsustyle objects to the artist herself. In many ways this is
unimportant as such things did not concern Rengetsu.
She is believed to have willingly helped others make
their ceramics and paintings more saleable by adding her
calligraphy to them. In one story, a ceramics manufacturer
asked Rengetsu to inscribe copies of her work because
they couldn’t duplicate her calligraphy. She agreed, even
presenting some originals so better copies could be made.
calligraphy, usually using Japanese kana rather than
To keep up with demand for her ceramics, Rengetsu also
Chinese kanji characters, was inspired. These simple,
worked with professional potters, including Isso (dates
often roughly made, objects proved enormously popular.
unknown) and Kuroda Koryo (1822–1895). Known as
Though doubtless an exaggeration, it has been said that
Rengetsu II, Kuroda had Rengetsu’s permission to sign his
Rengetsu made more than 50,000 works in her lifetime
work with her name and continued to do so after her death.
artonview
The Makuzuan hermitage
at Chion’in, Kyoto, where
Rengetsu lived with her
daughter/s and her adoptive
father Teruhisa
(opposite)
Otagaki Rengetsu and
Tomioka Tessai In this
world hanging scroll
[kakemono] c. 1855 ink on
paper 92.0 x 20.0 cm overall
Canberra
Otagaki Rengetsu and
Wada Gozan/Gesshin
The goddess Amaterasu’s
divine light hanging scroll
[kakemono] 1864 (detail)
ink on paper
sheet 33.1 x 56.6 cm
Museum DKM/Stiftung DKM,
Duisburg, Germany
Down to the Kamo river vase
[hanaire] 1850–75
glazed ceramic, incising
29.3 x 3.5 x 3.5 cm
Private collection, Basel
spring 2007
37
With her work sought after and a reputation for beauty
Rengetsu’s poems also appear without illustration on
as well as generous acts of charity, the reclusive Rengetsu
tanzaku poem sheet and scrolls.
often moved several times a year to avoid unwanted
attention. She eventually settled at Jinkoin, a Shingon
had lived and worked in for a decade. She requested that
Buddhist temple outside Kyoto city, and stayed there
Tessai alone be contacted following her death, and it was
until the end of her life. Rengetsu’s time at the temple
her adored friend who designed the calligraphy on her
resulted in thousands of works, especially paintings and
unassuming memorial stone near Jinkoin. In her eighties,
calligraphies. In a poem about calligraphy that evokes
Rengetsu wrote her autobiography in waka and prose in
the feeling of her delicate, but powerful, rounded hand,
a letter to Tessai. It included the poem:
Rengetsu wrote:
Taking up the brush
just for the joy of it,
writing on and on,
leaving behind
long lines of dancing letters.
(translation John Stevens)2
At Jinkoin, Rengetsu often collaborated with Wada
Gozan/Gesshin (Moon Mind), who became a priest at
the temple after the death of his wife. She also created
In 1875 Rengetsu died in the temple tearoom she
The day begins
I’m busy with my crafts
and I have nothing to worry about.
(translation Lee Johnson) 4
a
Melanie Eastburn
Curator, Asian Art
artists, including the painters Mori Kansai (1814–1894)
Further information at nga.gov.au/Rengetsu
and Tomioka Tessai (1835–1924). Rengetsu and the much
notes
1 Lee Johnson, ‘The life and art of Otagaki Rengetsu’, Master of Arts
thesis, University of Kansas, 1988, appendix 2.
2 John Stevens, Lotus Moon: the poetry of the Buddhist nun Rengetsu,
Buffalo: White Pine Press, 2005, p. 98.
3 Patricia Fister, ‘Waka poet-painters in Kyoto’, in Japanese women
artists: 1600–1900, Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas,
New York: Lawrence, Harper & Row Publishers Inc., 1988, p.153
4 A translation of Rengetsu’s autobiography appears in Johnson, 1988,
appendix 2.
painting of eggplants by Tessai and calligraphy by Rengetsu
reads: ‘In this world there are certain forms which bring
[welcome] thoughts to mind. The eggplant serves as a
symbol of happiness’ (translation Patricia Fister).3
Fluttering merrily sake flask
[tokkuri] 1870 glazed
stoneware, incising
15.0 x 8.0 x 8.0 cm
Museum DKM/Stiftung DKM,
Duisburg, Germany
I pray to Buddha
The exhibition catalogue is available from the National
Gallery of Australia Shop on 02 6240 6420
son. A scroll painting in the Gallery’s collection featuring a
(opposite)
Let us consider ageing,
teapot [kyusu] c. 1850
ceramic, incising
11.1 x 17.0 cm
Canberra
the day ends
collaborative works, gassaku, with a number of other
younger Tessai were very close and she thought of him as a
Set of five sencha tea cups
1873 glazed stoneware
height: 4.5 cm each
Private collection, Brussels
artonview
spring 2007
39
travelling exhibition
Ocean to Outback: Australian landscape painting 1850–1950
4 August 2007 – 3 May 2009
… it is continually exciting, these curious and strange rhythms which one discovers in a vast
landscape, the juxtaposition of figures, of objects, all these things are exciting. Add to that
again the peculiarity of the particular land in which we live here, and you get a quality of
strangeness that you do not find, I think, anywhere else. Russell Drysdale, 19601
From the white heat of our beaches to the red heart of
127 of the 220 convicts on board died.2 Survivors’ accounts
central Australia, Ocean to Outback: Australian landscape
said the ship’s crew fired their weapons at convicts who, in
painting 1850–1950 conveys the great beauty and diversity
a state of panic, attempted to break from their confines as
of the Australian continent. Curated by the National Gallery’s
the vessel went down.
Director Ron Radford, this major travelling exhibition is
a celebration of the Gallery’s twenty-fifth anniversary. It
broken George the Third dwarfed by the expanse. Waves
features treasured Australian landscape paintings from the
crash over the decks of the ship while a few figures in the
national collection and will travel to venues throughout each
foreground attempt to salvage cargo and supplies. This is
Australian state and territory until 2009.
Encompassing colonial through to modernist works, the
exhibition spans the great century of Australian landscape
art. From 1850 to 1950 landscape was the most painted
and celebrated theme in Australian art. As well as images
which convey the geographical extremes of the continent,
Ocean to Outback includes works that reflect significant
Knut Bull
The wreck of the
‘George the Third’ 1850
oil on canvas
84.5 x 123.0 cm
Canberra Purchased with
funds from the Nerissa
Johnson Bequest 2001
Eugene von Guérard
Schnapper Point from
‘Beleura’ 1870 oil on canvas
66.1 x 104.2 cm
Canberra From the James
Fairfax collection, gift of
Bridgestar Pty Ltd 1995
events that transformed the social fabric of Australia –
droughts and bushfires, the gold rushes, the Depression,
and times of war.
The exhibition begins with a dramatic shipwreck scene
The painting is dominated by a huge sky, with the
a seascape that evokes trepidation and anxiety. The small
figures contribute to the feeling of human vulnerability
when challenged by the extremities of nature.
Australia’s finest late colonial landscape artist from
the period, Eugene von Guérard (1811–1901), painted
images of Australia from the perspective of an observer,
explorer and a resident. Von Guérard received numerous
commissions for ‘homestead portraits’. These commissions
were generally paintings of properties owned by graziers
who were keen to display the results of their hard
off Tasmania’s east coast painted by convict artist Knut Bull
labours on the land. Schnapper Point from ‘Beleura’ 1870
(1811–1889). The wreck of the ‘George the Third’ 1850
was painted for James Butchart who owned Beleura
depicts the aftermath of the shipwreck in 1835 of the
homestead, built in 1863. Schnapper Point is located near
convict transport ship. Following a four-month voyage from
Mornington Peninsula on Melbourne’s Port Phillip Bay
London and bound for Hobart, the 35-metre ship entered
(approximately forty kilometres from Melbourne). Von
D’Entrecasteaux Channel on the evening of 12 April 1835.
Guérard depicts the sweeping views from the property
Less than 200 kilometres from its destination, the ship
across the bay – an area that had become a popular
struck submerged rock and in the catastrophe that followed
holiday destination for Melbourne residents.
Thomas Baines
Gouty stem tree,
Adansonia Gregorii,
58 feet circumference, near
a creek south-east of Stokes
Range, Victoria River 1868
oil on canvas 45.2 x 66.5 cm
Exploration of the Australian continent by Europeans
Melbourne continued to expand. Rail soon connected
was a risky and arduous pursuit. The professional
townships located close to the Blue Mountains and
explorer–artist Thomas Baines (1820–1875) was one of
Dandenong Ranges to Sydney and Melbourne. Tom Roberts
a group of eighteen people who formed the 1855 North
(1856–1931) and Arthur Streeton (1867–1943) used the
Australian Expedition party. The purpose of this expedition
was to determine the existence of natural resources for
settlement in far north-west Australia. Under the command
of Augustus Charles Gregory the expedition lasted from
rail to travel to the outskirts of Melbourne where they
established artists’ camps on the fringe of suburbia, first at
Box Hill and later at Eaglemont.
August 1855 to November 1856, with the group reaching
the mouth of the Victoria River on the upper north-west
accompanied by Frederick McCubbin (1855–1917) and
coast of the Northern Territory on 15 September 1855.
Louis Abrahams (1852–1903). The artists set up camp on
land owned by a local farmer, David Houston.3 In A Sunday
Baines’s official role in the party was as artist and
Tom Roberts first visited Box Hill to paint in 1882,
storekeeper – he made hundreds of sketches, recorded
afternoon c. 1886 Roberts depicts an intimate picnic.
weather conditions and kept a detailed journal of daily
Framed by spindly gums and bathed in dappled light, a
life. Painted in London some thirteen years after the
young couple relax in the bush, the woman reading to her
expedition, Gouty stem tree, Adansonia Gregorii, 58
feet circumference, near a creek south-east of Stokes
Range, Victoria River 1868 depicts the party campsite
and an enormous water-yielding baobab tree. The artist
companion from a newspaper. At the time, a belief in the
health benefits of country air was becoming popular with
city dwellers, who sought recreational activities in the bush
has painted himself in the lower right-hand side, sitting
or by the ocean. Roberts’s observant eye depicts small
underneath a makeshift shelter sketching the tree.
details in this scene such as the trail of smoke from the
man’s pipe, the dark wine bottle on the crisp white cloth
While artists such as Thomas Baines recorded the far
reaches of Australia, the major settlements of Sydney and
and the light falling softly on the leaves of the eucalypts.
Arthur Streeton’s The selector’s hut (Whelan on the
log) 1890 is an image that conveys the ‘pioneering spirit’
which underpinned the Australian nationalist attitude
of the late nineteenth century. Streeton depicted iconic
elements of the land – the ‘blue and gold’ of sky and
earth, golden grass and shimmering light, a slender
silhouetted gum tree, and a bush pioneer. He shows a
man at rest from the toil of clearing the land and making
his home. The man depicted is Jack Whelan, the caretaker
of the Eaglemont estate where Streeton had been given
permission to set up ‘camp’ in an old house in the summer
of 1888. Early the next year he was joined by Charles
Conder (1868–1909) and Tom Roberts. The camp provided
the perfect working environment – a reasonably isolated
bush location close to the city of Melbourne.
Works by Australian Impressionists such as Roberts,
Streeton and Conder showcase the national collection’s
great holdings from this period. Alongside these are scenes
of modern, misty Melbourne as captured by Clarice Beckett
(1887–1935). Beckett’s lyrical and evocative landscapes
remained largely unknown to Australian audiences during her
lifetime. She was a dedicated artist who, despite dismissive
reviews and few sales, continued to paint and exhibit regularly.
Beckett always painted outdoors, usually in the early
morning or evening, around the bays and streets of
her family home in the Melbourne beachside suburb of
Beaumaris. She sought to convey the beauty of her local
environment, be it through the afterglow of a bright
sunset, the shimmering heat of a tarred road or
headlights shining through misty rain. She excelled at
depicting particular effects of nature, such as haze,
rain, mist and smoke. Beaumaris seascape c. 1925 is a
meditative image of a still sea, a tree-lined cliff and distant
coastline. Beckett has paid close attention to the subtle
effects of light and shade reflected in the water. The soft
lilac and pink hues of the sea, coastline and sky dissolve
into bands of colour. The subject is so tonally reduced it
appears to be almost abstracted.
Work by another female artist of the period, Elise
Blumann (1897–1990), depicts a ferocious storm scene
on Perth’s Swan River. Blumann painted the Swan and the
native melaleuca trees of the region many times. Escaping
the Nazi regime that devastated much of Europe, Germanborn Blumann came to Perth with her husband and two
children in 1938. Educated at the Berlin Academy of Arts
and the Royal Art School Berlin, Blumann was familiar
artonview
Tom Roberts
A Sunday afternoon c. 1886
Arthur Streeton
The selector’s hut
(Whelan on the log) 1890
spring 2007
43
with the modern art of Europe. In Australia her modernist
painting was unconventional, and she was regarded as a
valued member of Perth’s artistic community.
In Storm on the Swan 1946 Blumann uses broad
sweeping gestures – strong horizontal and diagonal
brushwork – to capture the power of a storm. Wind and
rain beat against the limbs of the trees which appear
to almost float in space. This dynamic and sensitive
composition displays Blumann’s modern approach to her
art and her desire to capture the ‘essential spirit’ of nature.4
Areas of the painting’s surface are blank, while others are
scratched with the end of her brush to indicate sharp, fast
rain. This is a vigorous, physical and quickly executed work,
a powerful response to the speed in which a storm can
approach and pass.
Modernist experiments of colour theory by Roland
Wakelin (1887–1971) and Roy de Maistre (1894–1968) are
included in the exhibition. In de Maistre’s rarely exhibited
Forest landscape c. 1920 he has adapted the subject of a
felled tree to create a painting concerned with modernist
principles of form, rhythm, symmetry and colour.
Historically, the subject of the felled tree in the Australian
bush has reflected artistic interests in rural industry, the
natural grandeur of forests and, in some instances, an
awareness of conservation issues related to loss and
destruction. For de Maistre, tree trunks have been reduced
to angular planes of colour and the composition is united
by vivid greens that portray the forest floor and foliage.
De Maistre has explored a range of colour tones, using subtle
shifts in greens, reds and browns throughout the painting.
Forest landscape belongs to a period when de Maistre
was interested in the broken colour approach of Cézanne
and the relationship between colour and music. He had
studied violin and viola at the Sydney Conservatorium,
and art at the Royal Art Society of New South Wales and
Julian Ashton Art School. Working with musician Adrian
Verbrugghen he developed a colour music scale where
the spectrum of colours related to notes of the major and
minor musical scales. The colour music theory was further
underscored by de Maistre’s interest in the psychological
effects of colour and its relationship to the expression of
emotional states. Quoting the English poet-performer and
colour theorist Beatrice Irwin, de Maistre wrote that colour
‘brings the conscious realisation of the deepest underlying
principles of nature … it constitutes the very song of life
and is, as it were, the spiritual speech of every living thing’.5
A number of paintings in Ocean to Outback reveal how
artists used the landscape as inspiration during difficult
times of drought, depression or war. Works by Russell
Drysdale (1912–1981) and Sidney Nolan (1917–1992)
explore the drama and expressive possibilities inherent
in the land. In 1944 Drysdale was commissioned by the
Sydney Morning Herald to accompany journalist Keith
Newman to western New South Wales to document
artonview
Elise Blumann
Storm on the Swan 1946
oil on paper mounted on
cardboard on composition
board 57.0 x 67.0 cm
Roy de Maistre
Forest landscape c.1920
oil on cardboard
35.4 x 40.6 cm
(opposite)
Clarice Beckett
Beaumaris seascape c.1925
oil on cardboard
50.0 x 49.0 cm
spring 2007
45
Russell Drysdale
Emus in a landscape
1950 oil on canvas
101.6 x 127.0 cm
the effects of the drought. This experience significantly
changed the way he viewed the Australian landscape.
The photographs and sketches he made on the trip
informed much of his work in the following years.
In Emus in a landscape 1950 Drysdale explores the
strange and surreal qualities of the Australian outback.
The native birds move quietly through the landscape,
passing a precariously arranged structure of wood and
corrugated iron. This sculptured mass of refuse represents
the remains of a previous settlement. It could be an
abandoned dwelling or a wrecked ship on a dried inland
sea. Drysdale creates a sliding space between reality and
imagination, fact and myth, and captures the vast space
and timelessness of the outback.
Between 1947 and 1950 Sidney Nolan spent months
travelling through remote areas of Australia. Using money
he had made from a successful exhibition of Queensland
outback paintings held at the David Jones Gallery in Sydney
in March 1949, Nolan, accompanied by his wife Cynthia
and stepdaughter Jinx, travelled through Central Australia,
the Northern Territory, Western Australia and South
Australia. This trip, from June to September 1949, inspired
a body of work and a series of paintings that depict inland
Australia from an aerial perspective.
Inland Australia 1950 is an extraordinary aerial image of
the ‘heart’ of the continent, possibly of the Durack Range.
With the composition board lying flat on a table Nolan has
pushed the paint around the surface of the work. In some
areas the paint has been wiped back, exposing the white
undercoat of the composition board. The undulating shapes
and intense colour of the red earth evoke an ‘otherworldly’
sensation – a feeling of the land’s inherent grandeur,
timelessness and mystery. Nolan described the work as ‘a
composite impression of the country from the air’. Painted
in his Sydney studio, he used photographs taken from the
aeroplane as a visual aid. Inland Australia is an example of
Nolan’s technique of fusing elements from existing locations
with a landscape remembered from experience.
1850–1950 includes images of the furthest points of
distance and geography across Australia. Created by some
of our greatest landscape artists, these paintings reveal the
compelling beauty, extreme conditions and qualities of the
Australian environment that have made landscape painting
a vital force in Australian culture. a
Tamworth Regional Gallery, Tamworth NSW,
4 August – 22 September 2007
Beatrice Gralton
Associate Curator, Australian Painting and Sculpture
Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, Ballarat Vic.,
2 February – 30 March 2008
The exhibition catalogue is available from the National
Gallery of Australia Shop on 02 6240 6420
Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, Perth WA,
13 April – 1 June 2008
Further information at nga.gov.au/OceantoOutback
Cairns Regional Gallery, Cairns QLD,
21 June – 27 July 2008
notes
1 Russell Drysdale, interview by Hazel de Berg, 1960, Canberra:
National Library of Australia, [deB 27].
2 Michael Roe, An Imperial disaster: the wreck of George the Third,
Hobart: Blubber Head Press, 2006, p. 12.
3 Leigh Astbury, ‘Memory and desire: Box Hill 1855–88’, in Terence
Lane (ed.), Australian impressionism, Melbourne: National Gallery
of Victoria, 2007, p. 51.
4 John Scott & Richard Woldendorp, Landscapes of Western Australia,
Claremont, Western Australia: Aeolian Press, 1986, p. 17.
5 Roy de Maistre, extract from lecture on ‘Colour in relation to painting’,
in Colour in art, exhibition catalogue, The Art Salon, Penzance
Chambers, Sydney, 1919.
Sidney Nolan
Inland Australia 1950
oil and enamel paint on
composition board
91.5 x 121.0 cm
Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart
Tas., 5 October – 25 November 2007
Riddoch Art Gallery, Mt Gambier SA,
8 December 2007 – 20 January 2008
Araluen Arts Centre, Alice Springs NT,
9 August – 19 October 2008
Newcastle Region Art Gallery, Newcastle NSW,
8 November 2008 – 18 January 2009
Canberra Museum and Gallery, Canberra ACT,
31 January – 3 May 2009
artonview
spring 2007
47
collec tion focus
Ricketts photography collection
Samuel Bourne
Wanga Valley, view 1860s
albumen silver photograph
29.0 x 24.0 cm
Canberra
Since 1973 the Gallery’s photography collection has
daguerreotype was superseded by the alternative process
grown to include about 15,000 Australian and international
of photographs on paper from a negative on glass. The
works, with the latter category chiefly being by twentieth-
process appealed to the legions of mostly British men
century European and American photographers. An
stationed in India as part of the East India Company and
energetic program of acquiring South and Southeast Asian
other colonial ventures. It was a diversion and a way of
photographs began in 2006 after Director Ron Radford
conveying what India was like to families, friends and
initiated a more central role for art of the Asia–Pacific
investors. Photography also became for Indians a means
region. In February 2007 the Gallery acquired more than
of presenting themselves to the foreigners. Government
200 nineteenth-century photographs from India along with
a small group of works from Burma (Myanmar) and Ceylon
(Sri Lanka). These came from a collection assembled over
thirty years in London by Howard and Jane Ricketts whose
holdings and research have formed the basis of a number
of pioneering survey shows of Indian photography. Chiefly
dating from the 1850s to the 1880s, the photographs
from the Ricketts collection acquired by the Gallery include
individual photographs on paper and those in albums and
illustrated books by the best-known British photographers
who collectively made some of the earliest images in India,
bodies also soon adopted pioneering survey projects using
photography to encompass and manage the huge physical
and cultural diversity of India.
Among the earliest works in the Ricketts collection are
twenty-six views from 1858 of significant sites in the First
War of Independence (also known as the Indian ‘Mutiny’).
These were taken by Italian-born British professional
photographer Felice Beato, who, having previously
photographed in the Crimea and the Middle East, was
the most experienced photographer to work in India. His
Burma and Ceylon.
images are the only known photographs of many of the
historic buildings in the conflict that were later demolished.
India was one of the first countries outside Europe
and America to take up photography. By January 1840
Beato went on to China in 1860 where he made pictures
a daguerreotype apparatus was for sale in Calcutta
of the Boxer rebellion (of which an album is also held by
(Kolkata). Despite the difficulties of photochemistry in
the Gallery) and then established a studio in Japan. Beato
a tropical climate, a number of daguerreotype studios
went to Burma in 1885 to document the Third Burma War.
existed in India. Surviving daguerreotypes from anywhere
He remained there developing studios which specialised in
in Asia, however, are scarce. From the mid-1850s the
photographs of ‘Burmese beauties’ and ‘native types’.
artonview
spring 2007
49
Colin Murray
Reversing station on the
S.I.P. at Khandalla on the
Bhue Ghats albumen silver
photograph 18.8 x 30.4 cm
Canberra
Charles T Scowen
Sinhalese girl 1870s
28.0 x 22.0 cm
Canberra
Large-scale albumen prints are the exemplary
achievements of the nineteenth century; costly and
technically demanding, only the best resourced
photographers could undertake such mammoth prints.
Those who did included military officers who had learned
photography in India and came to be assigned on official
monuments surveys or took on projects out of personal
interest and ambition. In the Ricketts collection this type
of survey work is represented by eleven large prints from
1855 to 1857 by Captain Thomas Biggs (1822–1905) of
the Bombay Artillery and Dr William Pigou (1818–1858)
of the Bombay Medical Service, which come from
Architecture in Dharwar and Mysore, a three-volume
photographically illustrated book by Anglo-Indian scholar
Colonel Meadows Taylor published in London in 1866.
Working from 1855 to 1857 Biggs and Pigou were the first
designated ‘architectural photographers’ of sites in western
India. Dr John Murray (1809–1898) of the Bengal Medical
Establishment specialised in Mughal architecture of Agra,
Fatehpur Sikri and Delhi and mastered the difficult process
of mammoth plate paper negatives. The Gallery holds two
of his dense but mezzotint-like prints, including one from
his 1858 portfolio Agra and its vicinity.
Bombay photographers William Johnson and William
Henderson were among the earliest to make ethnographic
studies in India in 1857. Johnson’s The oriental races and
tribes, residents and visitors of Bombay (issued in two
volumes in London from 1863 to 1866) was the first
photographically illustrated ethnographical publication
on India.
Consumption of photography was by no means
limited to foreigners’ interests; royalty and upper echelon
administrators in India and elsewhere in Asia were keen
to present images of themselves as presents in exchange
for the many photographs sent to them by the crowned
heads and statesmen of Europe. A small group of portraits
of maharajas by unknown photographers in the Ricketts
collection reveal the splendour of the royal courts.
The largest individual holding and aesthetically the
‘jewel in the crown’ of the Ricketts collection is the group
artonview
spring 2007
51
of sixty-four large prints by landscape photographer
photographer was Lala Deen Dayal (1844–1905), a civil
Samuel Bourne, an experienced landscape and portrait
engineer who became skilled as an amateur photographer
photographer in England active in societies and salons who
by the 1870s while working for Sir Henry Daly, the Agent
moved to India in 1862 and worked there until 1870 and
to the Governor General for Central India. Deen Dayal
returned in the 1880s. He was in partnership with Charles
set up on his own studio in 1885, becoming the most
Shepherd and later Colin Murray at various times. Bourne
prominent and acclaimed photographer of Princely India
made a series on the sites of the ‘Mutiny’ in 1864 but his
until his death in 1905.
renown comes from the distinctive elegant abstract design
of his landscape and wilderness views taken on extensive
Asia–Pacific region has revealed that while some
journeys to Simla, Kashmir and Himalayas in the 1860s,
photographers and eras are widely celebrated, others such
which won him medals in Britain.
as Charles Scowen in Ceylon and Beato in Burma are not
because their works are later than the colonial era of high
Photography in India was impossible without local
labourers. Bourne, for example, had some thirty porters
and assistants on his Himalayan journeys. Indians were
widely employed as assistants to foreign photographers
but increasingly became photographers in their own
right. In the 1870s a photographer at the Madras School
of Industrial Art was employed by James Breeks to take
photographs for his book An account of the primitive
tribes and monuments of the Nilagiris, published in 1873.
Current scholarly consensus is that the photographer was
a local, C Lyahsawmy. The first high profile Indian-born
Unknown photographer
Maharana’s elephant,
Udaipur 1880s–90s
19.2 x 24.4 cm National
Gallery of Australia, Canberra
(opposite)
Charles Shepherd
Khyber Pass 1860s
19.9 x 29.1 cm
Canberra
Research into the spread of photography in the
adventures or ‘first’ views. The Gallery aims to bring to
Felice Beato The Mosque
Picket on the ridge, Delhi
1858 albumen silver
photograph 25.5 x 30.4 cm
Canberra
greater prominence many of these lesser-known bodies
of work by pioneer photographers in the Asia–Pacific in
the National Photography Festival exhibition from July
until October 2008. The Gallery’s survey exhibition will
showcase many works from the Ricketts collection and will
be the first such survey of photographic art in the region.
a
Gael Newton
Senior Curator, Photography
artonview
spring 2007
53
new acquisition International Painting and Sculpture
Max Ernst Habakuk
Max Ernst Habakuk
1934/1970 bronze
449.9 x 162.9 x 162.9 cm
no. six of a planned edition
of ten, cast 1995–1998
the assistance of the
National Australia Bank
Max Ernst was a towering figure in the revolutionary
to curse his enemies. These include the Chaldeans, and
artistic and literary movement of Surrealism, a sculptor,
interestingly, the makers of idols, that is, sculptors:
painter, graphic artist and inventor of frottage. His
What profiteth the graven image that the maker
monumental bronze Habakuk is a memorable and
thereof hath graven it; the molten image, and a
outstanding statement of modern art. A dark, looming,
teacher of lies, that the maker of his work trusteth
bird-like column, Habakuk is engaging and eccentric, yet at
therein, to make dumb idols?
the same time its huge size and shiny black patina make it
seem severe, even ominous. The sculpture is a large version
of the original plaster executed by Ernst in 1934 and
he had no money to cast them in bronze. According to
reworked later in the 1930s.
Werner Spies in Max Ernst: sculptures, maisons, paysages,
Habakuk’s body was created from casts of flowerpots,
When Ernst first worked with plaster maquettes,
‘Ernst agreed, in 1970, that a monumental version of
stacked on top of and inside one another. Ernst then added
Habakuk should be carried out, expressing above all the
a head, consisting of a giant tilted bill and eyes, and a
still-remaining Dada refusal to accept formal purism, which
circular plinth. At the foot of the figure is a third eye, and
he had denigrated in Cologne [fifty years earlier] ...’ One
the plinth also bears a negative impression of one of the
cast of the larger version was made in 1970 for Düsseldorf,
eyes. These were cast from a desert stone found by Roland
and is now installed in the Grabbeplatz. The Gallery’s
Penrose, the English Surrealist collector, painter and poet,
cast is numbered ‘6’, part of the planned edition of ten
who gave it to Ernst in 1929. He called it Rose de sable, œil
authorised and plaster signed by Ernst in 1970, and cast
de sphinx [Rose of sand, eye of the sphinx].
by Susse Fondeur, Paris. Only four were realised. The large
plaster has been destroyed, so no more can be made.
Together, the eye and the impression on the plinth
represent inward and outward vision, and form a veiled
reference to the biblical prophet Habakuk, after whom
the sculpture is named. In his study, Max Ernst: sculpture,
Jürgen Pech draws a parallel between Ernst’s perceived
connection ‘between the soothsayer and visionary of the
Bible and the visionary, transcendental aspects of his own
work.’ The Book of Habakuk is one of the last, and shortest,
books of the Old Testament. It is a song, a conversation
between the prophet and God, in which Habakuk asks God
Its totemic form places Habakuk within the context of
Ernst’s own enthusiastic and discerning collecting of art
from Africa, the Pacific and the Americas. These sculptures
reflect his personal taste, acquired as they caught his eye
and resonated with him aesthetically. Ninety-six works from
his collection are held in the National Gallery of Australia.
Christine Dixon and Bronwyn Campbell
International Painting and Sculpture
new acquisition International Painting and Sculpture
Giorgio de Chirico Death of a spirit
Giorgio de Chirico
La Mort d’un esprit
[Death of a spirit] 1916
the assistance of Harold and
Bevelly Mitchell, Rupert and
Annabel Myer and the
NGA Foundation
Giorgio de Chirico is an important figure in twentieth-
Death of a spirit features two French biscuits frontally
century art, renowned for his invention of Metaphysical
placed onto orange geometric receding planes, flanked
painting (pittura metafisica), which preceded Dada and
by a black disc and surrounded by yellow, red and green
Surrealism from about 1911 into the 1930s. The artist’s
forms. The elements crowd uneasily into an ambiguous
imaginative symbolic language – especially human figures
space, which reads as an interior, opening onto an
meshed with machines, often placed in incongruous
unsettling urban landscape. The tense composition and
settings such as classical or mechanical landscapes – is
bright, constrained palette animate this small and vigorous
seminal to modern art.
painting. Its content and style embody an extraordinary
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that examines
moment in modern painting when Cubism, Dada and
the nature of reality. For de Chirico, true reality was hidden
Abstraction collided in de Chirico’s new Metaphysics.
behind appearances. He invented a language of images
which represented human presence by placing everyday
Surrealist artists such as Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst, as
objects such as statues, mannequins, set-squares and
Gale notes in the Grove Dictionary of art:
biscuits within a compressed and fictional space. The poet
The style of Metaphysical painting strongly influenced
On his arrival in Paris in 1922, Ernst’s painting
Guillaume Apollinaire named the style ‘metaphysical’
in 1913. According to the art historian Matthew Gale,
reflected the admiration of his poet friends for de
de Chirico thought that reality was ‘visible only to the
Chirico … the painters who became Surrealists after
“clearsighted” at enigmatic moments’.
Ernst almost all passed through a period of stylistic
debt to de Chirico, notably Salvador Dalí and Alberto
De Chirico studied art in Munich from 1905, moving to
Paris in 1911. There he met such Cubist and Fauvist artists
Giacometti (the leading creators of the Surrealist
as Picasso, Derain, Braque and Brancusi, and avant-garde
Object), René Magritte [and others].
writers such as Apollinaire. His first solo exhibition, largely
unsuccessful, was held in Rome in 1919. Viewers found his
paintings disturbing, especially the unusual treatment of
space: claustrophobic interiors, unusual angles and cut-off
planes, with deadpan representations of classical statues or
tailor’s dummies lending an eerie quasi-human presence.
In 1914 de Chirico enlisted in the Italian army and was
sent to Ferrara. There he met Carrà and Papini, soon to be
his colleagues in Metaphysical painting, and mixed with
Futurist and Dada artists. By 1916 de Chirico concentrated on
small, stifling still-life compositions, often featuring biscuits,
set-squares, planks, maps, military insignia and flags.
De Chirico was also important to the Australian
painters James Cant and James Gleeson. Indeed, Cant
almost certainly saw Death of a spirit in London. It was
shown there twice while he lived there, first in 1937 at the
Zwemmer Gallery in the exhibition Chirico–Picasso, and
again at the London Gallery in Giorgio de Chirico 1911–
1917, in October–November 1938. Some of the costumes
de Chirico designed for Diaghilev’s production of Le Bal in
1929 are held in the Gallery’s collection.
Christine Dixon
Senior Curator, International Painting and Sculpture
new acquisition A sian Ar t
Kushan Buddha
Kushan dynasty
Mathura, India
Seated Buddha 1st–2nd
century red sandstone
129.5 x 101.6 x 30.5 cm
Purchased with the
generous assistance of
Roslyn Packer 2007
This superb Indian sculpture has recently been added
anthropomorphic form, was established. This is a fine
to the permanent display of art from South Asia. The
early example of this key development in Asian art.
unusually large seated Buddha is not only a spectacular
Characteristic of the evolving, quintessentially Indian
example of early Indian sculpture, but also a key image
style of sculpture from Mathura, the torso of the Buddha
in understanding the development of Buddhist art
is robust and powerful, with a plump, gently smiling
throughout Asia. The sculpture has survived, largely intact,
face and wide-open eyes. He is shown with several of
from the second century of the Current Era.
the thirty-two marks (lakshanas) of a great man – the
During the first to third centuries a large part of
broad ‘chest of a lion’, the urna or tuft of hair between
northern and western India and Pakistan was ruled
the eyebrows (which in this case would once have been
by the powerful Kushan dynasty that originated in
embellished with a precious jewel), circles or wheels on
central Asia. The two great Kushan political centres – at
the soles of his feet, webbed fingers, folds of flesh at the
Gandhara and Mathura – each developed its own style of
neck, elongated earlobes and a topknot of hair. The last
monumental Buddhist art. Importantly, both were noted
of these is the ushnisha, or cranial protuberance, that
for their anthropomorphic depictions of the Buddha who
signifies Buddha’s spiritual advancement. In contrast to
had hitherto been represented by symbols such as his
the Gandharan images of Buddha and bodhisattvas clad
footprints, the empty throne, the bodhi tree and the wheel
in elaborate royal robes, Mathuran Buddhas are depicted
of law. These are the central focus of the Gallery’s fine
in almost diaphanous garments that cling to the body and
large marble Amaravati frieze from a stupa from eastern
accentuate the human form.
India, dated to roughly the same period.
his legs crossed, the upturned soles of his feet carved with
Mathura was a prosperous city and an ancient religious
and political capital that predated the rise of the Kushan
dynasty. It was also a centre for stone carving to serve
the temple complexes. A bold and distinctively Indian
style of figurative sculpture developed at Mathura, in
contrast to the strongly Hellenic but rather delicate
figures of neighbouring Gandhara, which are superbly
represented in the Gallery’s collection by a large grey-schist
standing bodhisattva and the recently acquired head of
a bodhisattva. In contrast, this sculpture is formed from
the striking mottled-red Sikri sandstone typical of the
Mathuran region of northern India.
Buddhism flourished in India at this time and it was
during the Kushan dynasty that the representation
of the Buddha, with his characteristic features
of a cranial protuberance and extended earlobes
dressed in the monastic robe that would become the
enduring iconography for the depiction of Buddha in
The Buddha is seated in the meditation posture with
two auspicious symbols in shallow relief – a discus (cakra)
and a triratna. The cakra represents the wheel of Buddhist
teachings, with the ‘turning of the wheel’ signifying the
transmission of Buddhist teachings. Each of the Buddha’s
toes is carved with a small swastika, another recurring
symbol of Buddhism. The figure holds one hand, now
missing, aloft in what would have been the fear-dispelling
gesture (abhaya mudra), while his other hand is placed
squarely on his left knee.
Installed in a niche in the new Indian Gallery, the
Seated Buddha provides visitors with new insights into
the history of Asian art. We are grateful to Ros Packer,
Chair of the Acquisitions Committee of the Gallery’s
governing Council, for her timely donation that secured
this masterpiece for the national collection.
Robyn Maxwell
Senior Curator, Asian Art
new acquisition Photography
Robyn Stacey Gorilla skull
Robyn Stacey
Gorilla skull 2005
Type C colour photograph
100.0 x 162.0 cm
Canberra
Robyn Stacey belongs to a generation of photomedia
grounded in popular culture with a slightly sixties Pop look,
artists who came to prominence in the 1980s. These
but presented a modern world made somewhat anxious
artists were unconcerned with, even suspicious of, the
and edgy. By contrast her work since the 1990s has made
claims to truth by various styles of personal documentary
use of science and the deathly quiet of a number of natural
photography dominant in art museums in the 1970s. They
history museum collections in which she worked during
spurned reportage photography and embraced visual
several residencies.
culture as a source rather than the ‘real’ world. The artists
of this movement (later called Postmodernism) happily
series which draws on collections at the Macleay Museum,
appropriated images from the past as well as popular
Sydney, and recalls the tradition of the Dutch genre of
culture, including the look of ‘old master’ paintings or
nature morte paintings in which the still-life objects provide
fifties and sixties magazines and television.
a moral lesson on the vanity of world. The reference to the
From her earliest series in the mid 1980s, Robyn Stacey
has created seductive and vibrantly coloured tableaux
involving great technical expertise in synthesising multiple
sources and motifs which has been greatly facilitated by
the emergence of digital manipulation. Her earliest efforts
are hand-coloured black-and-white prints; later works
involve complex overlays. Stacey’s series works, such as Kiss
kiss bang bang 1985 and All the sounds of fear 1990, were
Gorilla skull 2005 comes from Stacey’s Beau monde
gorilla (a threatened species symbolising humankind) and
coral (a threatened wonder of Australia’s northern coast)
alongside dead specimens under the microscope and an
ominously placed geological hammer, combine to create
an anxiety often found in her early works. Stacey’s art
entertains and yet reminds us of dangers to the planet.
Gael Newton
Senior Curator, Photography
new acquisition Australian Painting and Sculpture
Howard Taylor Rainbow and supernumerary
Howard Taylor was an incessant observer of nature,
concerned with recording perceived phenomena in nature.
In 1976, largely influenced by his admiration of Constable,
Taylor painted a group of paintings in a small format in
which he focused on clouds and the skies. One of these is
Rainbow and supernumerary 1976. He based the works
on drawings in his sketchbook, where he made day–to-day
observations, including details of weather, sunlight and
shadow. Rainbows were a particular source of fascination.
In Rainbow and supernumerary Taylor demonstrated his
commitment to looking, his fascination with the natural
world and his sensitivity to recording the transient
effects of light.
Taylor was born in Hamilton, Victoria, on 29 August
1918 and moved to Perth with his family in 1932. He
served with the air force during the Second World War
until his capture in 1940. In 1949 Taylor returned to
Western Australia and settled in the Darling Ranges on the
outskirts of Perth, where he became fascinated with the
bush landscape and forest forms which became central to
his work. In 1967 he moved to Northcliffe in the heart of
the tall-timber karri and jarrah forests of the south-west
of Western Australia where he produced some of his most
powerful, impeccably crafted evocations of nature. He died
on 19 July 2001.
As Daniel Thomas has remarked, ‘Howard Taylor was
an Australian and his brilliant gifts and stunning vision was
totally focused on the depiction of his beloved Australian
bush. His vision, however, went far beyond the focus of
any painter before him, in that none of them, irrespective
of their unquestioned brilliance, ever interrogated and
captured the complexity of structure, the ephemeral quality
of its light and colour, or the rich and subtle patina of its
living forms, as he did’.
Howard Taylor
Rainbow and supernumerary
1976 oil on composition
board 21.7 x 30.5 cm
Canberra Gift of Sue and
Ian Bernadt 2007
Anne Gray
Head of Australian Art
artonview
spring 2007
61
new acquisition Australian Print s and Drawings
Roy Kennedy I’m never alone
Roy Kennedy
Wiradjuri people
I’m never alone 2005
etching, printed in black ink
from one plate
platemark 25.0 x 33.0 cm
Canberra
Wiradjuri artist Roy Kennedy was born in the early 1930s
people lived on the mission during the Depression. Of
in Griffith in central New South Wales. Kennedy spent
I’m never alone he writes ‘all my lovely memories of my
his childhood on a government-run mission located on
mission are always there. Some are sad times and some are
the banks of the Murrumbidgee River, downstream from
good memories’. His family had been moved from nearby
Narrandera and Hay. As a young man he worked on farms in
stations to the mission many years before and the concept
the district and later moved to Sydney. In 1995 he enrolled
of relocation is a constant theme in his art. Of Mission boy
at the Eora Centre for Aboriginal Studies at the Sydney
dreams Kennedy recalls ‘from far back as I can remember
Institute of Technology where he pursued his interest in
I’ve always wondered when we would have our own home
printmaking. He was student and artist of the year at Eora in
and years on I’m still wondering’.
1999, and won a NAIDOC Week award that same year.
Kennedy’s etchings provide a graphic documentation
of his memories of the Aboriginal mission environment.
Through his sure placement of key elements – the church,
the police station, his own mission hut and recreation
areas – a vivid and very personal picture emerges of how
The mission on which Kennedy spent his youth was
closed in 1941. His graphic etchings provide us with a
historically acute and sensitive picture of mission life
during this period.
Mary-Lou Nugent
Curatorial Assistant, Australia Prints and Drawings
new acquisition Australian Print s and Drawings
William Nicholas Lady and child
A ready market for portraiture arose with the spread of
settlement and the rise of prosperity in colonial Australia.
From the 1820s to the 1850s there were more professional
portraitists working in both watercolour and oil in the
colony than landscape artists.
Watercolourist, etcher and lithographer William
Nicholas (1807–1854) found acclaim after just ten years in
Australia, with the Sydney Morning Herald of 27 July 1847
reporting: ‘His fame is now established in Sydney as the
best portrait painter in watercolours in the colony, and the
consequence is that there are more heads offered to him
for decapitation than he is able to take off.’
Nicholas’s sensitively rendered untitled watercolour
reflects the much sought-after English portrait style of
the period. An exquisitely painted portrait, the faces in
particular are superb examples of the stippling technique
for which Nicholas was renowned. Further research may
well reveal the identity of this fashionable, well-to-do
young mother and her child, dressed in finely embroidered
christening robe and bonnet.
Even in the distant colonies, the quiet, demure aspects
of women’s dress of the Victorian period dictated fashion.
Watered silks in pastel tones were the height of fashion
in the 1840s, and the woman’s gown of celestial blue
typically has a high bodice with a low-waisted, V-shaped
front panel trimmed with a white lace collar. The influence
of medievalism is evident in the angular lines of the bodice
with its reference to the Gothic arch. Showy, full sleeves
slowly lost favour in the Victorian period and the dress has
stylish, closely fitting sleeves with pleating at the elbow. By
contrast, the skirt is full, to emphasise the narrow sculpted
waistline. The hairstyle is also typical of contemporary
fashion: centrally parted, held by combs, ringlets forward
of the ears, and a plaited knot at the back. The gold
brooch on her bodice, painted in a blend of ground gold
leaf and gum arabic, is a delicate final touch.
William Nicholas
not titled [Lady and child]
c. 1847
watercolour, pencil and
ground gold leaf and gum
arabic on cardboard
image 22.4 x 17.6 cm
Canberra
Anne McDonald
Curator, Australian Prints and Drawings
artonview
spring 2007
63
new acquisition Decorative Ar t s and Design
Toots Zynsky Pennellata
Toots Zynsky Pennellata
2005 glass filet de verre
27.0 x 59.5 x 31.0 cm
Canberra
The ethereal quality of Toots Zynsky’s 2005 work,
known as Urban Glass), where she developed technical
Pennellata, is characteristic of the extraordinary glass
processes for the production of the fine glass threads, or
vessels that have placed her among the leading
‘canes’, used as a key element in the design of her glass
practitioners of contemporary studio glass. Its layered
works. Zynsky describes the technique of constructing
colours are animated by reflected and refracted light,
open vessel forms works entirely composed of these fused
each linear element inflecting the visual quality of the
and thermo-formed glass elements as ‘filet de verre’.
next as the viewer’s gaze moves from its outer to its inner
From 1983 to 1999, she worked from a studio base in
surfaces. Their shaded, drawing-like quality is the result
Amsterdam, The Netherlands, immersing herself in the
of a complex and demanding process of construction by
traditions of European glass, drawing inspiration and
which two layers of glass threads, in about sixty colours,
technical knowledge from Venetian glass in particular.
are assembled flat before being fused and formed into a
An interest in music also took her to West Africa, where
circular sheet of glass. This sheet is then mould-slumped
she participated in a recording project of West Ghanaian
in the kiln before final manipulation into the undulating,
organic form that characterises all of Zynsky’s work.
Mary Ann (Toots) Zynsky was born in Boston,
Massachusetts, in 1951, and gained a Bachelor of Fine Arts
from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1973. After
moving to New York in 1980, she founded and developed
the second New York Experimental Glass Workshop (now
traditional music, an experience that exposed her to the
vibrant colours and patterns of the region’s traditional art
and design, influences that were interpreted in the complex
colour orchestrations of her later work.
Robert Bell
Senior Curator, Decorative Arts and Design
new acquisition Decorative Ar t s and Design
Marion Mahony Griffin Window panel
Marion Mahony Griffin was born in the United States of
and delineated by his staff in Chicago from 1907 to 1912.
America in 1871 and died there in 1961. She graduated
While ‘leaded glass’ is used as a generic descriptor for
in Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of
such window panels, the glass elements of the work are
Technology in 1894, and became one of the world’s first
fixed together with zinc, allowing a more precise fit of the
registered women architects. In 1895, she joined the
complex geometrical elements of Wright’s designs. Such
Chicago practice of architect Frank Lloyd Wright where,
work was usually carried out to Wright’s specifications by
in addition to working as an architect, she became
the Linden Glass Company in Chicago. The design of this
Wright’s key delineator and developed his designs for
panel has been attributed to Marion Mahony Griffin and
architectural glass and other decorative arts and interior
it is a work closely associated with her and Walter Burley
design projects. A professional relationship with another of
Griffin during a critical time in their partnership with Frank
Wright’s staff, the architect Walter Burley Griffin became
Lloyd Wright. As it was a valued part of their personal
personal with their marriage in 1911. When Walter Burley
possessions in Australia, it is highly probable that the
Griffin won the competition for the design of Canberra,
with an entry prepared jointly with Marion, she joined him
in Australia, living and working in Canberra, Melbourne,
and Castlecrag in Sydney from 1914 to 1937.
This coloured and iridised glass window panel, with a
geometric border design around a clear glass centre panel,
is similar to designs for window panels designed by Wright
Marion Mahony Griffin,
in association with
Walter Burley Griffin
and Frank Lloyd Wright
Window panel c. 1910
glass, zinc cames, wood
frame 45.0 x 45.0 x 4.5 cm
Canberra
Griffins intended to use the panel in one of their projects
in Australia, or to use it as a model for further works and
a demonstration of their design approach to architectural
decoration.
Robert Bell
Senior Curator, Decorative Arts and Design
artonview
spring 2007
65
children’s galler y
Drawn in
14 July – 25 November 2007
Mike Brown Half lady
on chair 1975 pen on
paper sheet 26.0 x 26.0 cm
Canberra
Sidney Nolan
Bushranger head with
red and yellow mask
1947 charcoal, enamel
31.4 x 25.2 cm
Canberra
A dot becomes a line and then a form; each drawing
in his drawing MN at Papunya 1987. This drawing uses
unfolds from a single mark. It is the finished drawing that
tone rather than line to hint at a figure in the landscape.
shows how this simple beginning can be transformed.
Johnson’s airy technique suggests the heat of central
More than any other medium, drawing is accessible
Australia, and the Indigenous artist working in the open is
to everyone. Sketching a map, doodling while on the
shown as part of the country, rather than separate from his
telephone, even writing can be considered drawing.
surroundings.
Design, animation, architecture, mathematics and the
sciences all use drawing. Individual observations are
and looking in. Drawing can also link directly to memory
interpreted through drawing by both the maker and
and imagination. The charcoal drawings of Sidney Nolan’s
their audience. It is a means to record experience,
rugged band of bushrangers, including Bushranger head
whether literally or imaginatively. Children draw, and so
with red and yellow mask 1947, display an uncertainty
did Leonardo da Vinci and Albert Einstein. For all three,
and vulnerability through their smudged and broken lines.
drawing is a means for experimentation and exploration.
In these drawings Nolan is not only examining these men
Drawn in, an exhibition for children, highlights figure
as individuals with thoughts and feelings, he is also using
Drawing examines the act of looking – looking out
drawing by many Australian artists. The drawings selected
them to think about the bushranger as an expression of
include portraits, self-portraits, figures in landscapes and
Australian identity.
imaginary forms. Even within this relatively narrow range of
subjects, the materials and techniques used by each artist
show the diversity of drawing.
Children will be able to see that drawing is not one
thing. It can be about replicating the world around them, it
can be about the creative power of mark making and it can
be about the process itself, how each mark predetermines
the ones that follow. Some drawings focus on line, some
on tone, some use colour and some incorporate all of
these elements. The vertical black pen lines used by
Richard Larter in his drawing, Untitled, portrait of a woman
with a scarf 1975, are confident and bold. This work
demonstrates Larter’s unique use of line, for the balance
he creates between his marks and the page forms the
portrait. Another artist in the exhibition who plays with the
arrangement of positive and negative space is Tim Johnson
Drawing is a wonderful activity used with skill and
humour by a range of Australian artists in this exhibition.
Drawing can be neat or messy, cool or hot and it can
be about concrete and abstract ideas. Drawn in invites
children and their parents to participate in various drawing
activities in the exhibition space. An easel and mirror allow
visitors to observe and draw themselves, tables provide
materials for drawing in response to music, free drawing
with pencil and paper and the mechanical etch-a-sketch
which makes a continuous line as two dials are rotated.
The exhibition will give children and their parents the
confidence to see that when it comes to drawing, there is
no right way to do it.
Adriane Boag
Educator, Youth and Community Programs
1
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faces in view
16
1 Anna Gray, curator, and Daniel Thomas AM at the opening of the exhibition, George W
Lambert retrospective: heroes and icons 2 Sir Richard Kingsland AO CBE DFC and Lady
Kathleen Kingsland at the opening of the exhibition, George W Lambert retrospective:
heroes and icons 3 John Mackay, ActewAGL, and Colette Mackay at the opening of the
exhibition, George W Lambert retrospective: heroes and icons 4 Brian and Lesley Oakes at
17 exhibition, George W Lambert retrospective: heroes and icons
the Members’ opening of the
5 Geoffrey King OAM and Rae King at the Members’ opening of the exhibition, George W
Lambert retrospective: heroes and icons 6,7,8 Children participating in a shell workshop
with Marilyn Russell (pictured) and Esme Timbery during NAIDOC Week 9 Children at the
National Australia Bank Sculpture Gallery open day 10 Performance by Emma Bossard
and Jane Ryan in response to Brancusi’s Birds in space; part of the National Australia Bank
Sculpture Gallery open day 11 Family attending the tour of the Aboriginal memorial during
NAIDOC Week 12 Jean Baptiste Apuatimi, Angela Hill, Philip Gudthaykudthay, Peter
Mingululu, Belinda Scott, Arthur Pambegan Jr, Luke Kawangka, Daniel Boyd and Brenda L
Croft at the announcement of the National Indigenous Art Triennial 13 Rupert Myer AM at
the announcement of the National Indigenous Art Triennial 14 Arthur Pambegan Jr at the
announcement of the National Indigenous Art Triennial 15 Peter Mingululu and Belinda Scott
at the announcement of the National Indigenous Art Triennial 16 His Excellency Mr Robert
McCallum Jr, United States Ambassador to Australia and Mrs Mary McCallum with Director
Ron Radford AM 17 Jean Baptiste Apuatimi performing at the announcement of the National
Indigenous Art Triennial
artonview
17
spring 2007
69
travelling exhibitions spring 20 07
An artist abroad: the prints of
James McNeill Whistler
James McNeill Whistler was a key figure in
the European art world of the 19th century.
Influenced by the French Realists, the Dutch,
Venetian and Japanese masters, Whistler’s
prints are sublime visions of people and the
places they inhabit. nga.gov.au/Whistler
James McNeill Whistler
Portrait of Whistler 1859
(detail) etching and drypoint
Canberra
Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery, Launceston
Tas., 1 September – 4 November 2007
Stage fright: the art of theatre
Grace Crowley Abstract painting
1947 (detail) oil on cardboard
Canberra
Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide SA,
27 July – 28 October 2007
In partnership with Australian Theatre for
Young People
Supported by Visions of Australia, an Australian
Government Program supporting touring exhibitions
by providing funding assistance for the development
and touring of cultural material across Australia
Loundon Sainthill Costume
design for the ugly sister from
Cinderella 1958 (detail)
gouache, pencil and watercolour
on paper National Gallery of Australia,
Canberra
Stage fright: the art of theatre raises the curtain
on the world of theatre and dance through works
of art, interactives and a program of workshops
conducted by educators from the National
Gallery and Australian Theatre for Young People.
Worlds from mythology, fairytales and fantasy
characters intended for the ballet, opera and
stage are shown in exquisitely rendered finished
drawings alongside others that have been quickly
executed capturing the essence of an idea, posture,
movement or character. nga.gov.au/StageFright
1850–1950
The National Gallery of Australia’s 25th
Anniversary Travelling Exhibition
Russell Drysdale Emus in a
landscape 1950 (detail)
oil on canvas
Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery, Booragul NSW,
14 September – 28 October 2007
Michael Riley: sights unseen
Michael riley untitled from the
series cloud [cow] 2000
(detail) printed 2005
chromogenic pigment
photograph National Gallery
of Australia, Canberra Courtesy
of the Michael Riley Foundation
and Viscopy, Australia
Mathias Kauage
Independence Celebration I
1975 (detail) stencil National
Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Colin McCahon Crucifixion: the
apple branch 1950 (detail)
oil on canvas
Canberra Purchased with funds
from the Sir Otto and Lady
Margaret Frankel Bequest 2004.
Imagining Papua New Guinea: screenprints
from the national collection
This exhibition of screenprints from the national
collection celebrates Papua New Guinea’s
independence and surveys its rich history
of printmaking. Artists whose works are in
the exhibition include Timothy Akis, Mathias
Kauage, David Lasisi, John Man and Martin
Morububuna. nga.gov.au/Imagining
To mark the Gallery’s 25th anniversary, this exhibition
of treasured works from the National Collection has
been curated by Director Ron Radford for a national
tour. Every Australian state and territory is represented
through the works of iconic artists such as Clarice
Beckett, Arthur Boyd, Grace Cossington Smith, Russell
Drysdale, Hans Heysen, Max Meldrum, Sidney Nolan,
Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and Eugene von Guérard.
nga.gov.au/OceantoOutback
Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart Tas.,
5 October – 25 November 2007
Sri Lanka Seated Ganesha
9th–10th century (detail) from
Red case: myths and rituals
Canberra
The Elaine & Jim Wolfensohn Gift Travelling
Exhibitions
Three suitcases of works of art: Red case: myths and
rituals includes works that reflect the spiritual beliefs
of different cultures; Yellow case: form, space, design
reflects a range of art making processes; and Blue
case: technology. These suitcases thematically present
a selection of art and design objects that may be
borrowed free-of-charge for the enjoyment of children
and adults in regional, remote and metropolitan centres.
For further details and bookings telephone
02 6240 6432 or email [email protected].
nga.gov.au/Wolfensohn
Red case: myths and rituals and Yellow case: form,
space and design
Caloundra Regional Art Gallery, Caloundra Qld,
16 July – 21 September 2007
Blue case: technology
Manning Regional Art Gallery, Taree NSW,
Noosa Regional Gallery, Noosa Qld,
9 November – 5 December 2007
Colin McCahon
A focus exhibition showcasing the Gallery’s
holdings of one of the Australasian region’s most
renowned and respected artists – Colin McCahon
(1919–1987). The exhibition includes paintings and
works on paper spanning the period from the 1950s
to early 1980s. It is significant that the exhibition’s
tour of Australia and New Zealand coincides with the
30th anniversary of the New Zealand government
gifting to Australia in 1978 the iconic work Victory
over death 2 1970. nga.gov.au/McCahon
Proudly sponsored by R.M.Williams, The Bush Outfitter and
the National Gallery of Australia Council Exhibitions Fund
Tamworth Regional Gallery, Tamworth NSW,
3 August – 22 September 2007
Michael Riley (1960–2004) was one of the most
important contemporary Indigenous visual artists
of the past two decades. His contribution to the
contemporary Indigenous and broader Australian
visual arts industry was substantial and his film
and video work challenged non-Indigenous
perceptions of Indigenous experience, particularly
among the most disenfranchised communities in
the eastern region of Australia. nga.gov.au/Riley
Museum of Brisbane, Brisbane Qld,
27 July – 18 November 2007
Grace Crowley: being modern
One of the leading figures in the development of
modernism in Australia, Grace Crowley’s life and art
intersected with some of the major movements of 20th
century art. This will be the first exhibition of Grace
Crowley’s work since 1975 and will include important
works from public and private collections. Spanning the
1920s through to the 1960s, the exhibition will trace her
remarkable artistic journey from painter of atmospheric
Australian landscapes to her extraordinary late abstracts.
nga.gov.au/Crowley
The 1888 Melbourne Cup
Hawkesbury Regional Gallery, Windsor NSW,
Karl Lawrence Millard
Lizard grinder 2000
(detail) brass, bronze, copper,
sterling silver, money metal,
Peugeot mechanism, stainless
steel screws National Gallery of
Australia, Canberra
Exhibition venues and dates are subject to change.
Please contact the gallery or venue before
your visit. For more information please phone
+61 2 6240 6556 or email [email protected]
Dell Gallery@QCA, Brisbane Qld,
19 September – 28 October 2007
The National Gallery of Australia Travelling
Exhibitions Program is generously
supported by Australian airExpress.
a new star
is born
Vibrant. Dynamic. Inspiring. Unique. It’s what
made the National Gallery of Australia one
of the world’s great art institutions and it’s
why we’re shaping a new direction with the
National Australia Bank Sculpture Gallery.
Create a new direction for yourself and enjoy
the new star of the Sculpture Gallery.
NAB is proud to partner with the National
Gallery of Australia to bring you the National
Australia Bank Sculpture Gallery.
Max Ernst, Habakuk, -, bronze. Purchased with the assistance of National Australia Bank
 Collection: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. ©Max Ernst. Licensed by VISCOPY, Australia, .
03Art on view ad.indd 1
28/6/07 10:51:49 AM
The art of relaxation
at SAVILLE.
With Saville Park Suites Canberra’s convenient location in the heart of the city, the
National Gallery, shopping and many of Canberra’s attractions are all just a short
stroll away.
View one of the many exhibitions on display at the National Gallery and enjoy
apartment facilities or relax and be pampered by traditional hotel services at Saville.
Gallery Packages start from
$189* per night
Includes overnight accomodation and breakfast for two. Special car parking rate
of $5.00 per day and 25% discount off food when dining in Zipp Restaurant in
conjunction with this package.
*Subject to availability and conditions apply.Valid to 14 September 2007.
For more information or to make a booking call
savillehotelgroup.com
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To purchase O’Leary Walker wines visit
www.discountwines.com/nga.htm
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Open Garden
&
Gallery
Southern Highlands
28th October - 4th November, 2007
10am - 4pm
Blue Pond by John Kirton
An exciting collection by:
John Kirton
Margie Mullins
Nadine Harvey
Libby Hobbs
Margaret Shepherd
Jenny Stewart
Cindy Pryma
Jean Griffin
Patrice Cooke
Melinda Haylock
Martial Cosyn
Vanessa Forbes
The Burrows
Tugalong Road
Canyonleigh NSW 2577
Take the Illwarra Hwy exit from
the Hume Highway and follow the
signs to Canyonleigh.
Entry to garden $5.00 - supporting
NSW Rural Fire Service.
This exquisite ten acre garden, often likened
to the garden of French impressionist Claude
Monet in Giverny, France and which HighLife
Magazine described as a “Highlands’ Garden
Oasis with a Touch of Monet”, will be open
to the public for the first time this year.
The Burrows is a roaming garden transformed
from bare paddocks at Canyonleigh. Situated
on the south-western edge of the Southern
Highlands, half way between Sydney and
Canberra, The Burrows has been part of the
Australian Open Garden scheme and has
been featured in a number of magazines.
Also open will be The Kirton Gallery, a private
art gallery housed in a restored hay shed
adjacent to the garden.
THE LEADING AUSTRALIAN OWNED ART AUCTIONEERS AND VALUERS
Final Entries Invited
Major Fine Art Auction
SYDNEY 5+6 December 2007
Entries close 24 October 2007
For confidential appraisals by our art specialists, please contact:
Melbourne 03 9822 1911 Sydney 02 8344 5404
www.deutschermenzies.com
www.lawsonmenzies.com.au
Robert Klippel NO. 251 1985-86 1970,
87.0 cm height.
C • A • N•B •E •R•R•A
B A R T O N
celebrating 25 years
LAMBERT, George
The red shawl
(Olave Cunninghame Graham) 1913
oil on canvas
96.70 (H) x 76.00 (W) cm
Gallery of New South Art Wales,
Sydney, purchased in 1934
Sydney photograph: Jenni Carter
The Brassey of Canberra Celebrating our 80th birthday
National Gallery of
Australia Package
175.00
$
per night.
Based on Twin share/double and includes full buffet breakfast for 2 people,
admission to the National Gallery including George Lambert Exhibition and entry
for 2 at Old Parliament House.
$30.00 extra person per night. Valid until 16th September 2007.
The Brassey of Canberra
Belmore Gardens and Macquarie Street,
Barton ACT 2600
Telephone: 02 6273 3766
Facsimile: 02 6273 2791
Toll Free Telephone: 1800 659 191
Email: [email protected]
http: //www.brassey.net.au
Canberran Owned and Operated
artonview
spring 2007
75
Richard BELL (1953)
Kamilaroi/Kooma/Jiman/Gurang Gurang peoples
Australian Art It’s an Aboriginal thing, 2006 (detail)
synthetic polymer paint on canvas
Collection: TarraWarra Museum of Art, Victoria
Courtesy the artist and Bellas Milani Gallery
INDIGENOUS HERITAGE
MANY STORIES, MANY FORMS
The deep wealth of Indigenous art, music and dance enriches all Australians. BHP Billiton
values our Indigenous heritage, traditional and contemporary.
Through our offices and operations across Australia, many of which are located within rural
and remote areas, we have long-standing relationships with Indigenous communities.
We have a long history of supporting Indigenous cross-cultural programs in Australia and
we continue to look for ways that we can help contribute to the communities in which we
operate or have a presence, so that we can leave a lasting, positive legacy within our
communities. BHP Billiton are immensely proud to be associated with the National
Gallery of Australia and their landmark event, the inaugural National Indigenous Art
Triennial, CULTURE WARRIORS.
May the Indigenous stories in all their forms be seen and heard forever.
bhpbilliton.com
OC E A N to OUTBACK
Australian landscape painting 1850 –1950
The National Gallery of Australia’s 25th Anniversary Travelling Exhibition
Proudly supported by the National Gallery of Australia Council Exhibition Fund
Russell Drysdale Emus in a landscape 1950 (detail) oil on canvas National Gallery of Australia, Canberra © Estate of Russell Drysdale
nga.gov.au/Rauschenberg
This exhibition is supported by the
Robert Rauschenberg Publicon – Station I from the Publicons series enamel on wood, collaged laminated silk and cotton, gold leafed paddle, light bulb, perspex, enamel on polished aluminium
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1979 © Robert Rauschenberg Licensed by VAGA and VISCOPY, Australia, 2007
artonview
artonview
I S S UE
N o . 5 1
ISSUE No.51 SPRING 2007
s p r i n g
2 0 0 7
N AT I O N A L G A L L E RY O F A U S T R A L I A
Richard Bell Australian art it’s an Aboriginal thing 2006 synthetic polymer paint on canvas Acquired 2006 TarraWarra Museum of Art collection courtesy the artist and Bellas Milani Gallery
A National Gallery of Australia Travelling Exhibition
nga.gov.au/NIAT07
Sculpture Gallery • ROBERT Rauschenberg • Ocean to Outback

sculpture gallery # robert rauschenberg # ocean to outback

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