2005.Q4 | artonview 44 Summer 2005

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Transformations • helen frankenthaler

Th e WAT E R F RO N T

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Helen Frankenthaler Tales of Genji VI 1998 colour woodcut and stencil Purchased with the assistance of the Orde Poynton Fund 2002 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

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26 November 2005 – 5 February 2006

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artonview Publisher National Gallery of Australia nga.gov.au Editor  Eve Sullivan Designer  Sarah Robinson

Designed and produced  in Australia by the  National Gallery of Australia Printed in Australia by  Pirion Printers, Canberra issn

Director’s foreword

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Director’s vision

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Transformations: the language of craft

22 Against the grain: the woodcuts of Helen Frankenthaler

Photography  Eleni Kypridis Barry Le Lievre Brenton McGeachie  Steve Nebauer John Tassie

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1323-4552

Published quarterly:  Issue no. 44, Summer 2005 © National Gallery of Australia Print Post Approved  pp255003/00078

28 Discovering Constable: rediscovering nature 31 New acquisitions 42 The magic of slow time: contemporary works on display Â

in the Australian galleries 46 Travelling exhibitions: Darwin Art-port 50 Imagining Papua New Guinea 52 The National Gallery of Australia Photography Fund 54 Behind the scenes: installing St Petersburg 1900

All rights reserved. Reproduction without permission is strictly prohibited. The opinions expressed in artonview are not necessarily those of the editor or publisher.

56 Membership news

Submissions and correspondence  should be addressed to:  The editor, artonview  National Gallery of Australia  GPO Box 1150  Canberra ACT 2601  artonview.editor@nga.gov.au

62 Faces in view

58 The art of caring

Advertising  (02) 6240 6587  facsimile (02) 6240 6427 artonview.advertising@nga.gov.au RRP: $8.60 includes GST Free to members of the  National Gallery of Australia For further information on National Gallery of Australia Membership contact:  Coordinator, Membership  GPO Box 1150  Canberra ACT 2601  (02) 6240 6504 membership@nga.gov.au

Correction Apologies to the artist Bert Flugelman: Caryatid Minotaur 2004–05, exhibited courtesy of the artist in the 2005 National Sculpture Prize, was incorrectly captioned ‘Private collection, Perth’ in the spring 2005 edition of artonview. This caption was a reference to the original maquette submitted for preselection to the prize. (Ed.)

front cover: Dale Chihuly Polished ivory seaform set with charcoal lip wraps 2000 blown glass © Chihuly, Inc. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra back cover: Edward Eberle Tin feathers metal wings 2001 porcelain with painted terra sigillata decoration National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

direc tor’s foreword

Ron Radford in front of a Kota School temple hanging from Rajasthan, one of the recent acquisitions currently on display in the Asian Art galleries.

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I commenced my term as Director of the National Gallery of Australia determined to hold off making any definitive statements about my vision for the National Gallery of Australia until I had a sufficient overview of the collections and issues to do with the building, staffing and the management structure across the Gallery’s broad field of operations. Eight months on, after much consultation with Gallery staff and Council, I have come up with a brief centred upon a mandate for the future development of the national collection and its presentation to the public in an enhanced Gallery building that I hope is clear and comprehensive. As discussed in the first part of the Vision for the National Gallery of Australia published here, art museums must come to terms with so many competing objectives to do with building the collection, and serving a broad range of audience needs both now and in the future to perform the representative role of a ‘national gallery’. There are no big surprises here, but it is all the same aspirational and conservative in the best sense, highlighting the high and also I believe realistic expectations of what can be achieved.

Even apart from the broader fundraising objectives and ongoing development of plans for the building, in consultation with stakeholders, including the Minister, the Department, Gallery Council and Foundation, and the architects, there is already a clear approach to privileging core areas of the collection that is well underway and evident to visitors from the works on display now. You need only walk into the Asian Art galleries to see old and new acquisitions recently unveiled to see for yourself our strengths in this area, along with the new acquisitions and donations on view in the Australian Art galleries, including those works recently donated by Alcoa Australia, under the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts program.

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This season of exhibitions features in particular the most substantial survey yet of works from our Decorative Arts and Design Collection in Transformations: the language of craft, with many international and Australian practitioners working in a diverse range of media represented in this exhibition who were here for the opening and to attend the conference and forums.

I also attended the launch in Sydney of the Decorative Arts and Design Collection Development Fund generously hosted by Ashley Dawson-Damer. My special thanks go to Raphy Star, David Thomas and Meredith Hinchliffe for their support of the purchase of works for the collection.

Meredith also volunteered many days to assist Senior Curator, Robert Bell, with research for this extensive project. The sponsorship of Qantas Freight, through the particular support of Ben Andrew, and Kingsley Mundey of International Art Services, assisted the Gallery to cover the transport costs of bringing so many fragile and delicate objects to Australia. Thank you also to Channel Seven for their support with advertising.

Another highlight of this season’s exhibitions is Against the grain: the woodcuts of Helen Frankenthaler, featuring the marvellous collection of woodcuts – and some of the original woodblocks – produced in an extraordinary collaboration with master printer Ken Tyler, joining other works from the Gallery’s renowned Kenneth Tyler Collection, supported so generously by Tyler himself. Tyler’s visit at the end of November was a highlight for those able to attend his master class and demonstration class in Canberra, and other associated events.

Another treasure that must wait till next issue to be featured is the cycle of fifty-one prints, Der Krieg (War),

by Otto Dix which will open in the Project Gallery later this month to further draw on the riches in our collection of International Prints, Drawings and Illustrated Books.

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Imagining Papua New Guinea, the small exhibition of works on paper currently showing in the Children’s Gallery, displays many works from a collection recently acquired by the Gallery from Ulli and Georgina Beier, further confirming our focus on art of this region and, in particular, neighbouring Oceania.

Opening in late February is the exhibition Crescent moon: Islamic art & civilization in Southeast Asia, sponsored by Santos Limited, currently showing at the Art Gallery of South Australia, the outcome of a successful joint curatorial collaboration, which features many important works from the national collection. So, too, Constable: impressions of land, sea and sky, opening in March, has been organised by the National Gallery of Australia and will tour to the Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa. In its presentation here, the exhibition will draw significant links with the development of Australian landscape painting in an extended display.

Canberra has never been so abundant and green, following the generous rains, as a reminder of a previous era when our aspirations were indeed more European.

I would like to take this opportunity to extend to all our members, donors and sponsors our very best wishes for the festive season.

Donations William Anderson Roslynne Bracher Meredith Hinchliffe Michael Joel AM Simon R McGill Kathleen Montgomery Dame Elisabeth Murdoch AC DBE Gene Sherman and Brian Sherman AM Gifts Bill Beresford Imron Cotan K David G Edwards Estate of Dr George Martin J Berger Estate of Mrs Ruth Komon Maureen and Bernard Laing Robyn Maxwell Daphne Morgan Mike Parr Jon Plapp and Richard McMillan Raphy Star Grants Gordon Darling Foundation Thomas Foundation Principal Sponsors Santos Ltd Supporting Sponsors Qantas Freight Seven Network

Ron Radford, Director

Sponsors Casella Wines Hyatt Hotel International Art Services Malaysia Airlines Saville Park Suites The Brassey Canberra Voodoo Hosiery artonview

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Vision for the National Gallery of Australia: part one

This vision statement was presented by Ron Radford, Director of the National Gallery of Australia, to the National Gallery of Australia Council in draft version in June and August 2005.

Publicly launched at the Gallery’s birthday on 12 October, it presents the Director’s vision for  the national collection, and a concept for an improved National Gallery of Australia building.

The core functions of an art museum are ‘to preserve, research and interpret works of art, and their accompanying information, for the public benefit’. A great art museum, therefore, is one that collects and conserves works of great aesthetic excellence, researches them with rigorous scholarship, and then uses the results of its research to interpret works of art for the museum’s various audiences. Â A great art museum should be a powerhouse from which visitors and other users can always receive a charge of psychic energy.

A ‘national gallery’, especially one in the national capital of a federation like Australia, Canada or the United States, has extremely various audiences – not only the local residents but also the nation’s entire citizenship. They are often nonattenders of museums in, say, home cities like Melbourne or Brisbane, Toronto or Vancouver, Boston or Chicago but are tempted to attend while on a visit to their national capitals in Canberra, Ottawa and Washington.

Further, there are politically sensitive audiences, and the local embassies, which note the presence or absence of honour given to the art of their own part of the world.

Our vision should comprise, first and foremost, the presentation of works of the highest artistic excellence.

Our inexperienced nationwide visitors are less willing than frequent gallery-goers to enjoy academic points of art-historical or cultural significance; the broad audiences respond less to cultural analysis than to aesthetic force. Â We should also accommodate some of the international politico-cultural expectations peculiar to Canberra audiences.

There are, as well, two flagship roles. One is to be the leading research and interpretation centre for Australian  art – and in the not-too-distant future to create a formal 4

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Centre for Australian Art that will be both a research institute and a public-education centre. The other is to set professional standards for, and provide professionaldevelopment assistance to, Australia’s smaller art museums.

A nation should first treasure its own culture, and then that of its close neighbours, as well as participate in the world’s internationalised contemporary culture. In its national art museums, a mature nation should strongly reflect a confident appreciation of its own art and a sympathetic interest in that of its neighbours. Our Australian culture, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, has always been a highly visual one. The National Gallery of Australia’s collections, exhibitions, publications and building must therefore proudly echo our national and international cultural and strategic aspirations.

For a nation formed over only two centuries, but with an ancient Indigenous past, Australia’s new National Gallery should not try to emulate the national museums of the European Old World, formed from princely and aristocratic collections, or those formed by the robber barons in the United States. Nor should we repeat the British colonial collections formed from the mid-nineteenth century onwards in Australia’s six colonial capitals.

I believe we should be even more unlike all other national galleries than we are at present. Our geography, our recent past and Indigenous past give the National Gallery of Australia its future direction.

The collections The collections are the core of the National Gallery of Australia – they must remain the kernel of the building and the central focus of the institution. No blockbuster exhibition can ever be as large, as valuable, as wide-

ranging and as consistently high in quality as the collection displays. The three-billion-dollar collections of the National Gallery of Australia are owned by all Australians for the enjoyment of all Australians and international visitors. Those audiences expect to find the collections well maintained and imaginatively used.

The collections have many strengths. They include the sole strong twentieth-century European and American collection to be found not only in Australia but also in the Asia-Pacific region – a collection that covers all media. Besides painting and sculpture it embraces modern European and American decorative arts and design. The holdings of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and American prints and photographs are among the very largest and most important in the world.

The Asian collections also have considerable strength and they represent most Asian cultures, with an emphasis on India and South-East Asia. The Indonesian textile collection and the Indian trade-cloth collection are the largest and finest in the world.

There is a small but high-quality collection of the art  of our closest Pacific neighbours – the regions of Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia which include Maori art from New Zealand and the art of New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Fiji, Samoa, Hawaii and other Pacific islands. Apart from major paintings by the great Colin McCahon, and various works on paper, New Zealand’s pakeha (settler) art is not yet well represented.

Australia’s own visual culture looks extremely impressive in a strong and representative collection from all periods and all regions and cultures. We have by far the largest Indigenous Australian art collection of any art museum. Â The collection of Australian art from the l940s onwards is unrivalled. Our collections are strong in all media. The Australian print collection is the Gallery’s only nearencyclopaedic collection. The twentieth-century Australian drawing collection is unrivalled, and the Australian decorative-arts collection, which includes folk arts, is also very strong.

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Ron Radford in front of Guan Wei’s Dow Island 2002 in the Australian Art galleries following the launch to the press of his Vision for the National Gallery of Australia Photographer: Chris Lane /Fairfaxphotos

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No state gallery needs to aspire in this way to such a large and comprehensive collection of Australian art as the National Gallery of Australia. Our attention to all regions means that visitors from, say, Queensland, Western Australia, the Northern Territory or Tasmania, are already pleasantly surprised by the excellence of their own art in the context of the whole of Australian art. The collection can effectively give the Australian people a sense of ownership of, and contribution to, a great tradition of art-making.

The regional comprehensiveness is a base on which future audience-building can occur, both in bringing audiences to the national capital, and then bringing them on from the Australian War Memorial and Parliament House to the National Gallery of Australia.

In conclusion, Australian art, Asia-Pacific art, and modern art worldwide are the strengths on which we should build.

Collection focus A central focus of the national collection should be the Australian collection. The Asia-Pacific region should also be a major focus. It can mirror the strategic importance of our geographic neighbours and our special allies. Canberra, the capital of Australia, is a twentieth-century city created

by Australians for Australians. Canberra does not have the British colonial history of the state capital cities. The six state art galleries were all founded during the British colonial period, and began with British collections that remain for them a strength. This is also the case for some of the large Australian regional galleries formed in the nineteenth century such as those at Ballarat, Bendigo, Warrnambool, Geelong and Launceston.

The National Gallery of Australia’s collections were formed largely in the last quarter of the twentieth century; the building opened in Canberra in 1982, in the secondlast decade of that century. Its collections rightly reflect recent Australian history and, situated in the national political capital, should also be highly relevant to Australia’s contemporary strategic engagements.

Australia and our region It is crucial therefore that the National Gallery of Australia be strongly focused on Australian art, including Australian Indigenous art, from all states and territories. The Gallery represents all periods of Australian art, from the lateeighteenth to the twenty-first century, supremely well.

The collections should also embrace the art of our nearest neighbours – New Zealand, Papua New Guinea, the Pacific Islands, Indonesia, other South-East Asian countries and India.

China, Japan, Korea, the Himalayan countries, the Middle East and Central Asia should be represented but they are further to the periphery. It is unnecessary, and too late, to duplicate Melbourne and Sydney’s more comprehensive Chinese collections, and Adelaide, Sydney 6

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and Melbourne’s significant Japanese collections. In this way, while emphasising our immediate region, we will not be competing in the main collecting areas of the state galleries. Indeed our collections should, where possible, complement theirs.

To complement, not compete with, the state collections is particularly important as the buying power of the combined Australian art museums is now more limited than formerly in comparison with the wealthier museums of Europe and America. It is desirable that Australia’s limited combined acquisition resources be used carefully and strategically. The National Gallery of Australia should always be seen to be doing the right thing nationally in this way.

No state gallery concentrates on art, past and present, of the Pacific region. Those in Melbourne and Sydney are more committed to North Asian art than South-East Asian art. Brisbane concentrates on contemporary Asia-Pacific art.

Only Adelaide has a sizeable Middle Eastern Islamic collection. The National Gallery of Australia already holds a few Middle Eastern and Mughal Islamic objects and is well positioned to further develop a small, high-quality collection of work from this artistically rich culture, hitherto neglected

by Australia’s collecting institutions. Such a collection is also relevant to our holdings of South-East Asian Islamic art.

European and American twentieth century art As noted, the National Gallery of Australia holds the only major collection of European and North American twentiethcentury art in our part of the world. For a national gallery starting late in the twentieth century, it made sense to focus on this area. In Canberra, mid-to-late-nineteenth-century European art has been collected as a precursor to the twentieth century, an area not especially well represented by the state galleries. (Before the then conservative state galleries realised the importance of many of the major twentieth-century artists, it was already too late to afford a full range of major works in this area.) Indeed, earlytwentieth-century Modernism and late-nineteenth-century European art have been the most expensive kinds of art for over sixty years, and still remain so.

The early-twentieth-century International collection, otherwise representative, only lacks paintings by Kandinsky (the first abstract painter), Mondrian, Braque, Klee and Beckmann. It also lacks a major Picasso. Our fine American collection of the second half of the twentieth century only lacks works by the major artists Barnett Newman and Cy Twombly. Considering how large and important the existing collection is, these gaps are few but significant, and it will require enormous financial resources to fill them. Australia badly needs major paintings by Kandinsky, Mondrian and Barnett Newman. The National Gallery of Australia is the only art museum in Australia that could conceivably afford works by such significant artists in the future, and its collection is the only one that provides a very strong context for their display.

It is interesting to note that when the National Gallery of Australia began, from the early 1970s, to buy American art with enthusiasm, America led the world in cutting-edge art, as had been the case since the mid 1940s.

It is essential that the Gallery continues buying good contemporary art worldwide, and not only from the AsiaPacific region. America can also be seen as part of the Pacific Rim and, as it happens, America’s emergence in the l940s as an art power coincides with Australia’s powerful and continuing defence and economic alliance with the United States. The Gallery’s well-developed American collection, and its continuing worldwide attention to contemporary art, can be regarded as politically strategic.

In filling major gaps in the International, Asian, Pacific, and Australian collections, it is important that the Gallery buys works of the highest quality, which can always be on display. To this end we should acquire fewer objects of better quality. Buying objects for study storage should not be an option. If a costly work cannot be considered for permanent display, then its acquisition should be questioned.

New Acquisition Policy and Ten Year Acquisition Strategy The Gallery is in the process of adapting the previous Acquisitions Policy (1994). The new policy will be an important public document. Concurrently, the Gallery should also develop a confidential Ten Year Acquisition Strategy. The latter, an innovative, competitive and strategic document (or series of documents for each curatorial area), will outline in detail the serious gaps in the collections, and even highlight known works, in private collections, which the Gallery needs. The weaknesses of the collections should be fully documented, particularly the limitations of the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Australian collection, the lack of depth in the Indian and South-East Asian sculpture and painting collection, the currently limited contemporary Asia-Pacific collection and the twentieth- and twenty-first century International design collection. Once approved, this Ten Year Acquisition Strategy should be strictly adhered to.

Dormant collections The Gallery’s collections, put together recently, over just three decades, cannot be expected to geographically cover most areas of world art in historical depth, as do many longestablished national museums overseas. In order to focus the acquisition resources (and limited display space), we need to concentrate on what is central to Australia’s national collection, and do this exceptionally well. The collection areas we concentrate on should look highly credible not only to the rest of Australia but also to the rest of the world.

Therefore, we should not direct further acquisition resources to the small but excellent African, Mesoamerican, Incan and North American Indigenous collections, or to the tiny and imbalanced European Old Master collection. The four dormant collections contain many fine works and will be held in trust for Australia; the African and North

American Indigenous holdings are the only such high-quality public collections in Australia. These collections can be added to by the occasional gift. They could be displayed in small groups – there are hallway possibilities for showcase display – and they may be displayed occasionally in various contexts in the temporary exhibitions galleries; for example, Indigenous objects that came from the collection of the surrealist artist Max Ernst deserve to receive a focused study within the context of Surrealism. In the case of the art of Africa and the Americas, we could consider the possibility that some works be lent from time to time to other Australian institutions perhaps for three-year periods.

In the more attention-getting area of European Old Masters, Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney have relatively substantial collections. Melbourne and Adelaide in particular have been collecting Old Master pictures since the end of the nineteenth century. The National Gallery of Australia has fewer than twenty European Old Master paintings and sculptures, an Australia public collection fifth in size after Brisbane’s. Although there are some fine individual works in the National Gallery of Australia’s collection of European Old Masters, it is not cohesive and looks out of place in a contemporary building with such strong contemporary collections. Twenty works can never represent 500 years of European painting and sculpture. Even though Old Master paintings are usually much less costly than nineteenth- and twentieth-century Modern Masters, it would now require impossibly huge resources to equal Melbourne, Adelaide or even Sydney’s longstanding Old Master collections. We could consider lending our European Old Masters to the three Australian state galleries that have long made a commitment to collecting in this area. Even Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney’s collections are small compared with European and American collections of the same material – yet supplemented with our works they have a better chance to show a fuller history of European art for Australian audiences. The National Gallery of Australia would be regarded as generous and truly national by lending works for long-term display to the state galleries, always to be labelled as on loan from the National Gallery of Australia. Long-term loans of Old Master paintings and sculptures could be rotated between Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney. Any works they don’t want to borrow could be offered to other state galleries. We could borrow them back occasionally for exhibitions in context. a Part two of the 2005 Director’s Vision for the National Gallery of Australia will be published in the autumn issue of artonview and is available online at nga.gov.au/Vision Quotations are from the 1966 Lindsay Report from a ‘National Art Gallery Committee of Inquiry’, our founding document commissioned by Prime Minister Menzies. The Lindsay Report placed its greatest emphasis on modern art worldwide, on the whole of Australian art, and on ‘works of art representing the high cultural achievement of Australia’s neighbours in southern and eastern Asia and the Pacific Islands’. Similarly the 1994 Acquisitions Policy: National Gallery of Australia, the most carefullyconsidered such document developed and published by the National Gallery Council, also emphasised Australasian (i.e. Pacific) art. The present vision statement is therefore partly a reaffirmation of past Council policies that have not yet been fully implemented.

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exhibition galleries

Transformations: the language of craft 11 November 2005 – 29 January 2006

YO AKIYAMA KEIKO AMENOMORI-SCHMEISSER GIAMPAOLO BABETTO GORDON BALDWIN GILES BETTISON JULIE BLYFIELD MICHAELBRENNAND-WOOD ALISON BRITTON HARLAN BUTT TANIJA & GRAHAM CARR CLAUDI CASANOVAS JOHN CEDERQUIST SCOTT CHASELING DALE CHIHULY SHARON CHURCH DEB COCKS PATRICK COLLINS LIA COOK MARILYN DA SILVA EDMUND DE WAAL GEORG DOBLER PIPPIN DRYSDALE EDWARD EBERLE BERN EMMERICHS MERRAN ESSON ARLINE FISCH DONALD FORTESCUE ROBERT FOSTER DAVID FREDA WARWICK FREEMAN TETSUO FUJIMOTO SUEHARU FUKAMI KEVIN GORDON PATRICK HALL BETH HATTON YASUO HAYASHI BRIAN HIRST AGNETA HOBIN SERGEI ISUPOV RITZI JACOBI HERMANN JÜNGER JUN KANEKO TSUKASA KOFUSHIWAKI DANIEL KRUGER SARA LINDSAY NEL LINSSEN JESSICA LOUGHLIN HELMUT LUECKENHAUSEN BODIL MANZ IVAN MAREŠ ROBERT MARSDEN KARL MILLARD KLAUS MOJE MASCHA MOJE RON NAGLE KIMPEI NAKAMURA JIRI NEKOVÁR ALBERT PALEY GWYN HANSSEN PIGOTT PETER PRASIL WENDY RAMSHAW KIRSTIE REA DAVID REGAN KRISTINA RISKA CHRISTOPHER ROBERTSON GERD ROTHMANN MICHAEL ROWE BILL SAMUELS ADRIAN SAXE HELEN SHIRK ROBERT SMIT MARTIN SMITH BETTINA SPECKNER IVANA ŠRÁMKOVÁ KEN THAIDAY SNR CATHERINE TRUMAN GRANT VAUGHAN TONE VIGELAND IRENE VONCK TONI WARBURTON DAVID WATKINS ALICE WHISH SUSAN WRAIGHT GULUMBU YUNUPINGU TOOTS ZYNSKY

Marilyn da Silva Rock, paper, scissors teapot 2003 sterling silver and enamel paint Lent by Marilyn da Silva Photographer: M Lee Fatherree

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For the past 130 years, the philosophies, virtues and processes of craft have occupied art, craft and design theorists, writers and practitioners alike. The promotion and celebration of craft fostered design and the decorative arts as an alternative to what was seen by many critics and design reformers in the late-nineteenth century as debased industrial manufacture. Dialogue was promoted through the Arts and Crafts movement in the United Kingdom and the United States, and its subtext in the various expressions of national romanticism in northern and eastern Europe: in Kunsthandwerk in Germany, in skønvirke in Denmark, in the nuances between bijutsukogei and mingei in Japan, and in the widely disseminated ideas behind vackrare vardagsvara (more beautiful things for everyday use) in Sweden. Such discussions helped to focus attention on craft as a way of thinking across the spectrum of art and design, moving the word itself from an adjective to a noun, and the practice from its traditional anonymity to its more interrogative, interpretive potential as a celebration of individual expression.

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Seeking to locate craft practice in the broader discourse of contemporary arts, craft writers and practitioners have engaged with its theories and language to open new avenues of critical inquiry and debate. Investigating the relationship between theory and practice has given many artists working in craft media new ways to understand their work and to articulate it to a wider audience. Learning to experience and understand the tacit language of the crafted object as it presents itself to our senses, and interacts with our preconceptions and experiences of the world of things, can be intensely pleasurable and persuasive.

This strategy of persuasion defined the concept of Transformations. The exhibition is a celebration of the recent work of eighty-five Australian and international artists working in the area of studio craft who are forging new expressions within the fields of glass, ceramics, textiles, wood, metalwork, and (through a variety of materials) in furniture, jewellery and sculpture. The work of international artists most prominent and influential in

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Toots Zynsky Pennellata 2005 glass filet de verre Lent by Toots Zynsky Photographer: Toots Zynsky Georg Dobler Brooch 2000 silver and amethyst National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Photographer: John Carlono Patrick Hall Bone china 2005 plywood, aluminium, glass and ceramic National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Photographer: Peter Whyte

these fields is seldom seen in Australia; this exhibition offers visitors a chance to encounter their unique and compelling objects that challenge our perceptions of design and function, and the meaning of materials.

Such works reveal the creativity, skill and imagination of the contemporary craft practitioner in the negotiation and articulation of materials, structure, and production technologies; the passionate expression of the languages of abstraction, narrative, design and ornamentation; and the skills that transform materials from the everyday to the extraordinary. The work of these international artists is shown with that of Australian artists engaged in similar themes and concerns.

The modern concept of individual studio craft practice took root in Australia at the beginning of the twentieth century. Initially it reflected and built upon the ideals and philosophies of the Arts and Crafts movement before acquiring meaning as a strand of modernism. The studio craft resurgence from the early 1960s reflected broader conceptual and technical explorations in all media by craft artists in North America, Europe and Japan. International work initially started to gain currency in Australia through publications and exhibitions, then as a result of visits and workshops, and later from the experiences of Australians who had begun working in studios and with artists overseas.

While there is still a lingering perception that studio craft is something of a new movement in the context of contemporary art in Australia, its strong development over the past forty years has resulted in a vibrant and diverse range of practices. These have positioned Australian artists to become active and influential participants in international dialogues about directions and developments in craft and design.

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Beginning in the early 1970s craft organisations and government funding agencies, such as the Australia Council Crafts Board and later the Visual Arts/Craft Board, offered networking and financial assistance for visits to Australia by overseas artists, often in the form of workshops, residencies and lecture tours coinciding with the inclusion of their work in survey exhibitions.

A number of the artists in Transformations undertook such engagements and have had a significant influence on craft practice in Australia as a result of their visits.

This exhibition of recent work creates a bridge to their earlier work that has remained in Australia in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, and state and regional art museums. Such artists include Giampaolo Babetto, Michael Brennand-Wood, Alison Britton, Dale Chihuly, Edmund de Waal, Arline Fisch, Warwick Freeman, Yasuo Hayashi, Ritzi Jacobi, Hermann J端nger, Jun Kaneko, Albert Paley, Wendy Ramshaw, Gerd Rothmann, Michael Rowe, Helen Shirk and David Watkins. Many artists built enduring networks with the Australian artists who hosted them or who worked with them during their visits, facilitating subsequent opportunities overseas.

Over the past forty years, the expansion of tertiary training in craft-based artforms has involved practitioners in the wider concerns of contemporary art, and has brought new expectations for the role of craft skills in interpreting and articulating them. It has done so through the focused work of individuals who have developed their practice with the knowledge that their work is valued as an alternative to a plethora of lookalike manufactured products.

Gerd Rothmann Ten fingers at the neck necklace 2004 gold National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

In choosing to work within the constructs and disciplines of craft-based practices, artists and designers align themselves not only with the rich narrative of human history, but also with the language of invention and technological exploration. Over time, social and industrial revolutions have turned on the development and use of specific materials. Responding to necessity and fuelling desire across cultural and economic barriers, designers and makers have interpreted the possibilities of new ideologies, materials and manufacturing technologies.

Great centres for processing, manufacturing, design and distribution sprung up around craft practices and have attracted designers, artists and craft specialists for centuries, connecting industrial towns and local craft traditions with metropolitan ideologies concerned with design and fashion. Many of the artists in this exhibition have gravitated to such places to connect with and learn from those great traditions, and to integrate something of that spirit in their practices.

Increasingly, however – in a world connected less by geographic destination than by technology, ideology and invention – artists and designers, theorists, technologists and commentators work in fluid dialogues across cultures. Their work draws from many of the currents that activate society: the semiology of craft; global subcultures and counter-cultures; the place of craft skills in the construction and nurturing of kinships and family;

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retrospection, fantasy, satire, desire and subversion; the ethics and consequences of the production, processing and disposal of materials; the recycling of materials of all kinds; and the allure of new materials and imaging technologies. All are connected through the sheer pleasure of creating and working with materials that are sensual, intimate and visually engaging.

It is a paradox that while we have become a society with an ability to quickly assimilate new technology and find value in a plethora of new types of functional and decorative objects, we are doing so with a diminishing understanding of the history and development of design and the decorative arts. We rely increasingly on advertising and celebrity endorsement as a substitute for the understanding and discrimination that comes from direct experience. For many, such experience of significant unique craft works is rare, resulting in a limited comprehension of the rich cultural, formal and material values that such objects represent. While such values can be interpreted in the context of the visual arts, they may also be understood by considering them in the framework of the performing arts. The understanding of dance and music suggests ways of interacting with crafted objects and the unseen ‘performer’ behind them. We can consider and enjoy these objects by engaging with the shared concepts of spatial organisation, time, rhythm, body control, and the confidence and skill in the use of

tools and instruments. By engaging with the nuances and performance of materials, the framework of tradition and the theatrics of presentation, object makers can heighten our experience of their work.

Transformations encourages visitors to encounter the eloquence of crafted objects as mediators of space and experience, and to consider the place of craft skills, traditions and values in an increasingly dematerialised, yet regimented, culture of consumption. The works in this exhibition are drawn together in the themes of Narrative, Materiality and Structure, creating settings in which unique crafted objects give form to innovations in the use of materials and technologies, offer commentaries on nature and the urban environment, express personal narratives, and reflect regional identity.

An examination of the works in each section of the exhibition reveals connections across a diversity of work practices, approaches to materials and personal backgrounds. The disposition of the works in the exhibition

offers a complex set of relationships where the meaning of one can be inflected by our experience of others.

Objects accrue meaning in the landscape of our own imagination, despite the juxtapositions and relationships suggested by their placement in a particular exhibition.

These objects trigger associations that draw us into a potentially haptic, intuitive relationship with them.

Narrative, the exhibition’s first section, explores translation, transience and memory as points of departure for a variety of visually complex objects. They employ metaphor and realism to explore cultural resonances, mythology and our relationship with the natural world.

Works in the second section of the exhibition, Materiality, are defined by an expression of their material qualities, shown in objects where the sensuous, physical properties of materials are explored. Through their orchestration of process, artists bring a poetic physicality to the transformation of raw materials such as clay, metal, wood, glass and fibre. The third section, Structure, brings artonview

David Regan Eagle 2004 porcelain Lent by David Regan, courtesy Frank Lloyd Gallery, Santa Monica and Garth Clark Gallery, New York Photographer: Chris Autio

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Alice Whish Milky Way constellation 2004 powder-coated, laser-cut mild steel National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

together works that are defined by a concern with the organisation of elements, through rhythm, reductiveness, balance and the nature of time. Other objects in this section can be understood through their relationships to space and light, or through the nuances of groupings,

Grant Vaughan Ovoid form 2005 Australian white beech (Gmelina leichhardtii) and lacquer Purchased 2005 with funds from the Meredith Hinchliffe Fund National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

placement, and variations of forms, colour and texture.

With its continuous evolution and traditions of functionality, ornamentation and ceremony, craft has always reflected human experience. Through the skill and ingenuity of its practitioners, craft manifests in objects that help us navigate our way through our lives, offering us new ways to imagine being in the world. Our perception of the world is continually being reshaped through the exposure to fragmented visual information and discontinuous episodes, many stressful and destructive, yet others transcendent and inspirational. In a world increasingly dominated by commercial design and branding, and global industrial manufacture – where location and means of production are determined by economic rationalism rather than tradition – the practices of craft exist as signs of achievement and personal narratives that can re-locate us in time, place and experience. a

Sueharu Fukami Scene II 2004 porcelain with celadon glaze on mikiage stone, and copper-plated stainless-steel stand Purchased 2005 with funds from Raphy Star National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Photographer: Takashi Hatakeyama

Robert Bell Senior Curator, Decorative Arts and Design This article is an extract from the exhibition catalogue Transformations: the language of craft, published in 2005 by the National Gallery of Australia

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Transformations: narrative, materiality, structure

Michael Brennand-Wood Died pretty – flag of convenience 2005 embroidered flowers, acrylic, toy soldiers, wire, paint tubes, fabric and resin on wood panel Lent by Michael BrennandWood Photographer: Stephen Brayne Sergei Isupov To be object of attentions 2004 painted and glazed porcelain Lent by Sergei Isupov, courtesy Ferrin Gallery, Lenox, MA Photographer: Katherine Wetzel

The three themes of Narrative, Materiality and Structure create a logical framework through which to view Transformations: the language of craft.

With eighty-five artists represented in the exhibition, this framework helps to make the connections between the artists, the materials used, and the works themselves.

By exhibiting the work of Australian artists alongside the work of international artists, we can investigate the language used by artists living in environments different to our own. Their spoken language is different, but is the language of their art also different?

The artists included in the first section, Narrative, deal with myriad themes. Michael Brennand-Wood is an artist from the United Kingdom, embroidering by hand and by sewing machine. Using fabric in fine art is unusual, and is indicative of the way Brennand-Wood sets challenges for himself. He says ‘the things that are most difficult are the things that sustain you’ and is happy breaking new ground. His concepts recur over and over in his work as

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he re-investigates and reworks them. Brennand-Wood works intensively and for several years has been studying pattern in textiles, while creating his own highly patterned works.

Historically, as people moved around the world, the patterns in the fabric of their clothes were transferred to others. They were copied and reworked, absorbed into the ever-growing populations, and through historical clothing we can follow migration paths.

Working in this context, Brennand-Wood draws on a vast range of interests including historical lace, maps, music, flowers and scientific experiments to create his own patterned work. Building an intense and dense three-dimensional picture, he addresses other issues.

We know this artist is concerned with global issues through the titles of his work: Died pretty – flag of convenience points to this. It is brought home to us when we see toy soldiers scattered among the embroidered flowers, reminding us that war is not a pretty sight, no matter how it might be disguised.

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The marriage of pattern and form can tell us a great deal.

As Soetsu Yanagi said in The unknown craftsman: a Japanese insight into beauty, ‘to divine the significance of pattern is the same as to understand beauty itself …

The relationship between beauty in the crafts and pattern is particularly profound’.

Artists have represented the human figure in threedimensional form in clay for thousands of years. The figure itself and its surface ornamentation may convey aspects of the human condition or the figure might, as in Sergei Isupov’s case, be a tabula rasa.

Russian-born and now living in the United States of America, Isupov is exhibiting two works: To be object of attentions and Firebird. To be object of attentions is a porcelain sculpture of a human head with two small horns. For this artist the material is almost irrelevant and, as his dealer Leslie Ferrin says, ‘his work is 3-D sculpture with 2-D painting’. However, he would not achieve the same impact on a flat surface. The nose of the sculpture gives body to the pleated skirt on the female figure stretched across its face. The legs of the anthropomorphic figure holding her right arm dissolve into cracks on the side of the sculpture’s forehead, creating visual tension between the form and its painted surface.

Viewers will read their own meanings into this painted surface. Perhaps the female is not being tortured, as one might initially assume, and while she does not look happy, she appears to be resigned rather than in distress. Isupov distils his own feelings and observations into his imagery – and we can only speculate what he may have been thinking about when creating this work.

In his fine enamelled jewellery David Freda, also from the United States, portrays his feelings for creatures, many of which make us uneasy. His fascination with wildlife of all sizes since he was a small boy has taken Freda into a world of natural history. He wants his viewers to see the world as he does, a world that parallels our own of ‘mating, hatching, feeding, and fighting’. As an artist he uses the vast colour palette of enamels as others might use precious and semi-precious stones.

Stag beetles, grubs and raspberries, a necklace in silver, gold and enamels, shows the life cycle of the stag beetle. Raspberries are the beetles’ favourite food and they are linked with pupae to form the chain on which the beetle hangs. Unlike many other enamellists Freda works sculpturally, using colour to replicate nature and enhance his creations. He has developed specialist metalsmithing techniques to create realistic necklaces artonview

David Freda Stag beetles, grubs and raspberries necklace 2001 fine and sterling silver, 24- and 18-carat yellow gold, and glass enamels Lent by David Freda Photographer: Barry Blau Nel Linssen Necklace round 2001 reinforced paper and elastic thread Lent by Nel Linssen Photographer: Peter Bliek

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Tanija and Graham Carr Untitled bowl form 2001 leather National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Yasuo Hayashi Memory of the house ’05-1 2005 glazed stoneware Lent by Yasuo Hayashi Photographer: Yasuo Hayashi Keiko AmenomoriSchmeisser Ripples 1999 paint and dye on linen, shibori technique National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

and brooches of orchids, hatching snake eggs and fish.

Through his acute observation we learn about the beauty of nature and perhaps question why we squirm at the bugs and reptiles he portrays.

In 1947, when Japanese ceramicist Yasuo Hayashi was nineteen years old, he was one of a group of potters who formed Shiko-kai, an avant-garde group promoting a new ceramic art movement in Japan. His work is not vesselbased, and this was almost unique in Japan at the time.

Since those early days, he explored new ways of creating a dialogue with his audience, using reality and graphic illusion, and has always intended that we should be fully involved with his work.

Through the use of shade and light, defined by lines on the surface, flat surfaces appear to curve towards the viewer and to have volume. While his ceramics have become more three-dimensional, as seen in Memory of the house ‘05-1, he continues to use graphic techniques of line and colour to create perspective. Hayashi incorporated several viewpoints into earlier works, taking the exterior into the interior of the work, creating imaginary spaces through visual illusions.

In Memory of the house ‘05-1 he conveys the volume of the house on the surface of the work, which has a distinct front and back. Three or four lines indicate several different spaces or rooms and he takes us through them.

Blocks of colour – blue, red, black and white oblique stripes – and texture further delineate the rooms.

Hayashi recalls the home of his childhood, returning to the security of his family, and he continues to invite us to join him and at the same time to explore our own memories of childhood homes.

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Artists explore the different qualities of their chosen materials and create a dialogue between the materials and the viewer in the second section of the exhibition, Materiality.

Nel Linssen, who lives and works in the Netherlands, creates sensuous jewellery using folded paper. She takes an intuitive approach to her bracelets and necklaces made from paper. It is, however, an approach based on years of research, and haptic knowledge of her material, and of the way it must be cut, folded, drilled and fitted together.

The relationship between the wearer and Linssen’s necklaces is closer than in jewellery made from most other materials. As the wearer moves, the viewer sees the nuances of change in colour and texture. While the wearer is aware of the sensuous nature and movement of the jewellery, the viewer is drawn to the constant changes wrought by the slightest movement of the body.

Light and shade play on the surfaces of the thick coils that wrap around the wearer’s neck or arms, conveying a sense of solidity and weight. In this way, Linssen’s work is evocative of traditional jewellery made from precious metals and stones, belying the light paper from which it is constructed.

Leather is not commonly considered a sculptural material: it so much a part of our lives through functional uses, that we take it for granted. Australian artists Tanija and Graham Carr use leather, carving its thick surface as though it were timber or stone. Theirs is a truly collaborative partnership. Both trained as architects.

They draw on this training and discuss each piece, from the first idea of form and concept to the last line of decorative surface. This mode of practice is unusual,

even among those who make objects, such as those that are included in Transformations.

There is a timeless quality about the Carrs’ Untitled bowl form, which has a strong sculptural presence. It is carved to give a richly textured surface. The patterning is intricate, ordered and repetitive. The repetition brings rhythm and order to the ornamentation of the form.

Protruding lugs give it the appearance of having been made of wood joined together with rivets, as if to serve a functional or ritual purpose.

Artists included in the third section of the exhibition, Structure, are concerned with the arrangement and organisation of elements in their work. Keiko AmenomoriSchmeisser is a Japanese–Australian artist working primarily in textiles and specialising in shibori. She has lived and worked in Germany, Japan and Australia and her work is influenced by each of these places. Her first design lessons were a consequence of being taught at eleven years old the pictographs and culture of Japanese calligraphy. She learned the importance of the white space on the page and the need for balance and tension between the black and white within a given space.

Shibori is the Japanese term given to both the process and the product of fabric that is tied, knotted and otherwise manipulated to create a resist pattern when dyed. The structure of Amenomori-Schmeisser’s work is created by folding and stitching. Through stitching she shapes the fabric, changing the direction of the stitches, using different thicknesses of thread and different stitching to achieve the amount of colour and texture she requires. Surface paint adds to the structure of Ripples and gives the cloth rigidity that allows three-dimensional forming to create tension and movement. Her work is influenced by memories, observations, experiences and travel to many parts of the world. Coincidentally, she has said that ‘transformation’ is a key concept for her work.

Viewers will find that the language of craft transcends the spoken word. This exhibition brings together artists who deal with similar issues, no matter where they live.

The vocabulary is both aesthetic and technical. New technologies have opened further avenues for exploration by individual craft artists, as well as opportunities for more intense communication between artists living in different countries.

Transformations: the language of craft will make a contribution to the exchange between artists around the world. Just as importantly, viewers will increase their knowledge and understanding of craft in the twenty-first century. a Meredith Hinchliffe Meredith Hinchliffe is an arts advocate and writer living and working in Canberra.

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orde poynton galler y

Against the grain: the woodcuts of Helen Frankenthaler 26 November 2005 – 5 February 2006

There are no rules, that is one thing I say about every medium, every picture ... that is how art is born, that is how breakthroughs happen. Go against the rules or ignore the rules, that is what invention is about. Helen Frankenthaler

In 1950, at the age of twenty-two, Helen Frankenthaler met the art critic Clement Greenberg and began mixing with the New York School of artists. Two things immediately set her apart from her contemporaries – her gender and her age. Frankenthaler was one of a handful of female artists who successfully contributed to the artistic territory dominated by such giants as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. Much younger than these artists, Frankenthaler emerged as one of the first in what has come to be known as the ‘second generation’ of Abstract Expressionist painters. Frankenthaler accompanied Greenberg to many exhibition openings, visited the studios of other artists and frequented the (now legendary) Cedar Street Bar and the Artists’ Club. She was adept at analysing, discussing and deconstructing the robust action painting produced around her and actively participated in the artistic dialogue of the 1950s. Yet, she knew she was alone in her quest to develop an individual style. Frankenthaler began her search for a departure point – a method of markmaking that was uniquely hers. She found it in 1952 with a large-scale oil painting entitled Mountains and sea.

Mountains and sea was created after Frankenthaler returned to her New York studio from a trip to Nova Scotia, where she had painted numerous watercolours of the rocky seascape. She spread her canvas on the floor, a technique adopted from Jackson Pollock, but it was what she did next that made that crucial, radical departure from his work. Frankenthaler, in the habit of working quickly and using watercolour washes, applied paint diluted with turpentine directly onto the unprimed canvas. The artist has recalled that she felt ‘the landscapes were in my arms as I did it’. Working instinctively, she allowed the diluted mix to soak into the canvas and using subtle washes she 22 national gallery of australia

filled it with large, lyrical gestures – a style that has since become her signature. The technique, described by the artist as ‘soak-stain’, was a fusion of image and ground that resulted in the ultimate flat surface. This experimental method was a radical digression from what had come before and was the breakthrough that propelled Helen Frankenthaler into the spotlight of the New York art scene.

Frankenthaler was well-equipped for this sudden attention. Born in New York in 1928, the youngest of three daughters to wealthy Jewish parents, she was educated at the prestigious Dalton School, New York, and Bennington College, Vermont. She studied at Dalton under the Mexican muralist Rufino Tamayo and at Bennington under the American Cubist Paul Feeley. It was Feeley who directed Frankenthaler in the development of her early Cubist-derived style and, more importantly, gave her an understanding of pictorial composition and space. Feeley taught Frankenthaler to stand in front of a work of art and dissect it: ‘We would really sift through every inch of what it was that worked; or if it didn’t, why. And cover up either half of it or a millimetre of it and wonder what was effective in it … in terms of paint, the subject matter, the size, the drawing.’ Early encouragement to become involved in the arts, in combination with Frankenthaler’s meticulous training, led to the development of her unwavering determination to become an artist.

Determination is an essential characteristic of the artist whose work evolves from experimentation. It is Frankenthaler’s intrinsic sense of exactly what is required to balance line, form and colour within a given pictorial space that permits her to unleash a spontaneous, yet controlled gesture: ‘you have to know how to use the accident, how to recognise it, how to control it, and ways to eliminate it

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so that the whole surface looks felt and born all at once.’

Frankenthaler recognised early in her career that to grow as an artist and to develop aesthetically it was crucial that she continually challenge herself and work outside of her comfort zone. Painting was Frankenthaler’s primary artistic passion, but an obsession to push her creative limits led her to turn her attention to print media.

Frankenthaler created her first prints in 1961 with Tatyana Grosman at Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) in West Islip, Long Island. It was in this intimate lithographic workshop, where artists were treated as personal guests and for whom Grosman would go to any lengths to facilitate artistic needs, that Frankenthaler began to experiment with print media. There was a long period of print education and technical trial and error for Frankenthaler: ‘Whether it be graphics, sculpture, tapestry, ceramics – whatever the medium – there is the difficulty, challenge, fascination and often productive clumsiness of learning a new method: the wonderful puzzles and problems of translating with new materials … [a] translation of my image in a new vocabulary.’ While Frankenthaler also created her first woodcuts at ULAE it was not until 1976, when she commenced collaboration with master printer Kenneth Tyler, that she began a sustained investigation of the woodcut medium.

Kenneth Tyler was exactly the master printer Frankenthaler required to transpose her bold gestural experiments into the realm of the technological. The artist’s first woodcut with Tyler was Essence mulberry, produced in 1977. The inception of this stunning, eightcolour woodcut was inspired by two factors. The first was an exhibition of fifteenth-century woodcuts that Frankenthaler had seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she was particularly struck by the colour of the prints and determined to discover all she could about the ancient medium. The second was when the artist, working with Tyler at his Bedford workshop, noticed a mulberry tree growing outside the studio. She commented upon the vibrant colour of the berries and Tyler squashed some of them into juice. Frankenthaler dipped a paintbrush into the juice and proceeded to paint onto a piece of Japanese calligraphic paper. The resulting mulberry colour against the delicate paper was the starting point for the development of the print.

With Essence mulberry both the artist and the master printer recognised the start of an extraordinary collaboration. Frankenthaler has confessed that even today she will look at Essence mulberry and say to Ken, ‘How did we do it? How did we get it?’, believing that, ‘It is one thing for the artist to have a certain magic and produce a certain magic but for the technicians and the press and Ken to get it’ was something truly special. She admits that she ‘wanted things that I couldn’t at times articulate … but between our exchange we got this music’.

Essence mulberry is seen today as a watershed, the first 24 national gallery of australia

opening page: Helen Frankenthaler Tales of Genji IV 1998 colour woodcut and stencil on light rose handmade TGL paper Purchased with the assistance of the Orde Poynton Fund 2002 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra © Helen Frankenthaler / Tyler Graphics Ltd opposite page: Helen Frankenthaler Essence mulberry 1977 colour woodcut printed on buff handmade Maniai gampi paper Gift of Kenneth Tyler 2002 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra © Helen Frankenthaler / Tyler Graphics Ltd Helen Frankenthaler Tales of Genji VI 1998 colour woodcut printed on light sienna handmade TGL paper Purchased with the assistance of the Orde Poynton Fund 2002 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra © Helen Frankenthaler / Tyler Graphics Ltd

of Frankenthaler’s woodcuts to employ the traditionally graphic medium in the production of an image of abstract and inspired beauty.

The woodcut, a notoriously difficult and rigid medium, could not be further from the artistic realm of a gestural, spontaneous painter. As a painter, Frankenthaler’s creative process is driven by the development of a dialogue with the work itself, ‘a fighting, loving dialogue with this piece of material. You force something on it and it gives you an answer back … until you know that this is right’. Kenneth Tyler has recalled that with the Tales of Genji, a series of six woodcut prints that Frankenthaler began in 1995, ‘it was apparent from the beginning that what was needed was a new approach and technique for making what Helen strove for: a woodcut with painterly resonance’. With this

in mind, Tyler suggested to Frankenthaler that she could communicate to the workshop of printers and, more importantly, remain true to her unique style by painting her ideas for the printed works onto pieces of wood.

Supplied with wood, paint and brushes, Frankenthaler worked alone in the artist’s studio at Tyler Graphics painting the maquettes for the Tales of Genji. From the painted studies, tracings were made and woodblocks were carved by the ukiyo-e trained Japanese carver, Yasuyuki Shibata. The watery nature of Frankenthaler’s paintings created an immediate problem for printing. In order to create the lush transparent washes of colour, the printers had to work quickly with wet sheets of paper that, under the pressure of the printing press, would force the inks to bleed and blend into one another. Tyler recollects that, artonview

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Helen Frankenthaler Madame Butterfly 2000 colour woodcut printed on three sheets of handmade TGL paper Purchased with the assistance of the Orde Poynton Fund 2002 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra © Helen Frankenthaler / Tyler Graphics Ltd 2000

‘None of us knew what we were doing … and half the time we didn’t know what we were saying. The technique had absolutely no history. We were making it up as we went along’. Through trial and error and laborious proofing sessions, the workshop overcame these technical difficulties.

Despite the leap into the creative unknown, the six resulting Tales of Genji woodcuts are truly seductive prints. It is with awe that one looks at these works and realises that the project took the artist and the workshop a mammoth three years to complete. It is the Tales of Genji woodcuts that form the pinnacle in experimental print collaboration between Frankenthaler and Tyler Graphics, and the series that forced the development of new printmaking techniques that were perfected two years later in Frankenthaler’s final woodcut with Tyler Graphics, the triptych Madame Butterfly.

Frankenthaler has stated that: ‘A really good picture looks as if it’s happened at once. It’s an immediate image … one really beautiful wrist motion that is synchronised with your head and heart, and you have it, and therefore it looks as if it were born in a minute.’ With Madame Butterfly, Frankenthaler has triumphed in her attempt to encapsulate a ‘born in a minute’ feeling with a print so painterly in its delicate washes of colour and transient floating forms that it resembles a watercolour. Madame Butterfly is a virtuoso display of 102 colours, printed from forty-six woodblocks, in a work spanning three panels of paper and measuring over two metres in length.

Once again, the artist communicated her ideas to the technicians of the print workshop by painting on three pieces of specially selected wood. The paper was skilfully handmade by Tyler Graphics to resemble both the texture and look of the wood grain. The woodblocks used to print the image were carved by Frankenthaler and Yasuyuki Shibata with Frankenthaler marking the wood using her ‘guzzying’ technique, a technique that involves scratching the wood with items including sandpaper and dental tools. Frankenthaler was determined to ensure that her wrist, and thus her unique sensibility, be evident in every aspect of the print’s creation, just as it is in her paintings.

The resulting work is one of exceptional beauty. With Madame Butterfly we see Frankenthaler’s impulsive soakstain technique realised in the most graphic of print media.

The ‘spontaneous print’ that Frankenthaler has pursued throughout her print career has finally been achieved.

Against the grain: the woodcuts of Helen Frankenthaler reveals the experimental nature of an artist who, by deliberately casting the rules aside, has maintained her innovative edge for over five decades. a Jaklyn Babington Assistant Curator International Prints, Drawings and Illustrated Books Further information on the Kenneth Tyler Collection is at nga.gov.au/InternationalPrints/Tyler artonview

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for thcoming exhibition

Discovering Constable: rediscovering nature Anna Gray, Assistant Director, Australian Art, explains why the Gallery is working on a major new exhibition of the work of John Constable for 2006.

John Constable Cloud study 1822 oil on paper © The Frick Collection, New York

You want to know why we’re doing a Constable show?

Constable lived around 200 years ago – the time of Jane Austen, William Wordsworth and mad bad Byron. He died just before Queen Victoria came to the throne. My great-great-grandfather George Bonamy was still living in England then. Indeed, Constable was born twelve years before Captain Arthur Phillip and the First Fleet arrived in Sydney Cove; but during Constable’s lifetime settlements were established in Hobart, Brisbane, Perth, Melbourne and Adelaide.

You might think Constable’s art belongs to another place, another time, just like that of Austen and all those others. But we – or at least some of us – love to read Austen, see Emma Thomson’s movie version of Sense and sensibility or watch the BBC version of Pride and prejudice with Colin Firth as Mr Darcy (or the recent film version). We enjoy looking at a people living in a time when things seemed a lot simpler – but also many of Austen’s people seem just like us and people we know, and their predicaments are similar to those we experience. (Bridget Jones’s diary makes just this point.)

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If you think Constable’s art belongs to the past, then I encourage you to come to our exhibition, and look and look again. Because I believe if you take the time to absorb yourself in his art you’ll be transported into a place of great joy – you’ll discover a world full of air and light and atmosphere. You’ll feel the wind in your hair, and sense the delights of being in touch with nature. And you’ll look at clouds like you’ve never seen them before.

I remember the Tate’s Constable exhibition of 1991, when I was amazed at the energy of his paint surfaces.

Then I saw the British Council show in Paris in 2003 – the one that Lucian Freud selected and my co-curator John Gage worked on. French artists such as Géricault and Delacroix were inspired by Constable back in the 1820s. The English-born French art critic PG Hamerton wrote in 1866 that Constable ‘did not see lines, but spaces, and in the spaces’ he saw ‘an immense variety of differently coloured sparkles and spots’. He added, ‘all the best modern French landscape is due to the hints he gave’. The French saw the importance of Constable’s work back then, and the French

appreciated him in 2003. The Grand Palais exhibition was a huge success. People loved the big canvases and the way Constable had painted the full-scale studies for them with so much energy, but they adored the small impressions painted en plein air. These were still as fresh as the day they were painted.

The Paris exhibition inspired us to think about bringing Constable to Australia. It was about ten years since the Gallery presented the magnificent Turner exhibition curated

by Michael Lloyd; and there had not been a Constable exhibition in Australia for thirty years. It was time to show his work again. So we asked Constable expert John Gage – who had worked on the Paris exhibition – to join us in preparing a Constable show for Australia, and the Gallery’s exhibition manager and designer Adam Worrall and I began to discuss the scope of the exhibition with John.

We agreed we would focus on Constable as an artist, a maker of pictures, and select works which emphasised this. We would select one of his six large paintings of the Stour Valley and show this in depth – show two versions of

the one work, and other works related to it. The obvious example was A boat passing a lock 1826; it was the painting Constable selected to give to the Royal Academy as his Diploma picture when he was elected Royal Academician in 1829 – and there was another version of it in the National Gallery of Victoria. We would look at a number of his plein air sketches which were so full of life and contributed to the freshness of his work. We would have a focus on his innovative cloud studies. We would also look at some of the copies he made of Claude and Ruisdael and others – as well as some of the works which Constable painted under the inspiration of these artists, such as the magnificent Vale of Dedham 1827–28 from the National Gallery of Scotland, a work that Constable considered to be one of his best. We would also look at the mezzotints and how David Lucas translated Constable’s paintings into mezzotint. At this time we also discussed how a number of Australian artists had been influenced by Constable and how we should have a small accompanying exhibition showing a group of works

by Australian artists which reflected this influence.

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John Constable Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Grounds 1822–23 oil on canvas Victoria & Albert Museum, London

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John Constable The Vale of Dedham 1827–28 oil on canvas © The National Gallery of Scotland

By pure chance John and I were going to be in London at the same time and we would be able to spend a week together visiting galleries, talking to colleagues about our exhibition and possible loans. We began with the Tate, where John particularly urged the cause of a small painting, Branch Hill Pond, Hampstead Heath, with boy sitting on a bank c. 1825, because it had a similar sky to that which Constable painted in the two horizontal versions of A boat passing a lock. At the Victoria & Albert Museum we argued the case for a large group of works including their magnificent Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Grounds 1822–23, with the cathedral enclosed within a sylvan vista, and Old Sarum 1834, one of Constable’s rare large exhibition watercolours. John had taught at Cambridge  for some years, and knew the Fitzwilliam and its staff well. We wanted to borrow their masterly drawing for A boat passing a lock, and examples from their mezzotint collection – some with annotations by Constable which showed his process of working with his printmaker, Lucas.

At the Royal Academy we asked for A boat passing a lock – his large six-foot Diploma picture, which would be the keynote of our exhibition – as well as one of Constable’s small gems, his spectacular sketch Rainstorm over the sea 1824–28. Our colleagues in the various British institutions could not have been more helpful, and after a week of talks we began to think that the exhibition was a real possibility.

Back in Australia we refined the list of works which we would request for loan. I began to prepare for my next Constable adventure – a trip to the United States for a month at the Yale Center for British Art on a Fellowship. It was wonderful to meet up again with former Art Gallery of South Australia curator Angus Trumble, who is now Curator of Paintings and Sculpture there. What was particularly

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valuable about working with their collection was being able to look at a broad range of Constable’s work in one place – from small intimate plein air sketches to large sixfoot paintings. They have country house portraits such as Malvern Hall: the entrance front c. 1820 and images of rural harmony like Ploughing scene in Suffolk (A summerland) 1825; and they have a large group of drawings which includes Landscape with trees and deer, after Claude 1825.

Among the many works I looked at, and fell in love with, I think my favourite was Stormy sea, Brighton, 20 July 1828 – a work Constable painted just four months before his wife died from pulmonary tuberculosis on 28 November. It is a small sketch, but huge in its emotion. It is full of energy and vigour, with thickly and quickly applied paint capturing the stormy weather Constable experienced at Brighton, and his own personal turmoil.

While in the United States I visited colleagues at the Philadelphia Museum of Fine Art to talk with them about our exhibition. Their paintings include a small early sketch, View towards the rectory, East Bergholt, 30 September 1810, with the red morning sun glowing over and through the fields at East Bergholt. This painting was included in an exhibition of the work of the Barbizon painters a few years ago – to reflect how these artists had admired and been inspired by Constable, and to show how innovative his work was.

On my one day in New York en route back to Australia, I visited the Frick Collection where the curatorial staff kindly arranged to show me their two magical cloud studies. Constable’s sky studies are wonderfully observed, recording the time of day, date, wind direction and weather conditions under which they were painted. After viewing these works I went into some of the public rooms there and sat looking at their Constables and thought about what lay behind the magic of his work. Various scholars express a range of views – but for me the answer that afternoon was that Constable managed to capture the air, in a way that no one else has done. People talk about the way in which he captured atmosphere, the dew, the dampness. I think he went even further to convey the air and the breeze.

He doesn’t just paint light – although he does magically capture light in the sky, on the ground, glistening on water, and in the trees – he goes further and paints the light and the air in between the leaves, behind the trees. Constable animates the landscape and makes you feel it is alive, and in doing so makes you feel alive.

Constable may have lived some time ago in another country, and the world may have changed in many ways – but the clouds still float on high, daffodils still flutter in the breeze, and our hearts can still delight at what we see. a Constable: impressions of land, sea and sky opens  3 March 2006 in Canberra. Organised by the National Gallery of Australia in partnership with the Museum  of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Further information at nga.gov.au/Constable

new acquisition Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Ar t

John Mawurndjul Mardayin John Mawurndjul is Australia’s foremost bark painter and also widely acknowledged as one of the country’s leading contemporary artists, which was confirmed when he was awarded the prestigious Clemenger Contemporary Art Prize at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2003.

Mawurndjul’s people are the Kuninjku in western Arnhem Land, Northern Territory. A member of the Kurulk clan, Dhuwa/Duwa moiety, Balang subsection, Mawurndjul has been living and working in his traditional country at Milmilngkan, an outstation near the larger settlement of Maningrida since the early 1990s.

Mawurndjul’s early paintings were highly figurative with representations of Ngalyod, the Rainbow Serpent, Yawkyawk spirits, animals and ancestral beings, but also including many more schematic visual references to the culturally sacred Mardayin ceremonial design. Mardayin designs were originally painted on young initiates bodies to indicate their connections to their ancestral homelands, mapping their country in physical form. As Mawurndjul’s recent bark paintings and larrikitj [hollow funeral poles] have become more refined in their intricate detailing, the Mardayin designs have come to dominate his oeuvre. Still embedded within these increasingly abstracted Mardayin forms and gracile lines are sacred stories of law.

The mesmerising visual effect of the thin and delicate rarrk, uniformly maintained across the whole length of the bark, is hypnotic and suggests the incredible ancestral power inherent in Mawurndjul’s art. It reiterates the power of the ancestral beings who inhabit western Arnhem Land, demonstrated by Mawurndjul’s masterful and dynamic arrangement of rarrk [cross-hatching] within prismatic grids.

Far from settling into a simple signature style his painting has consistently evolved, showing an immense degree of innovation. Mawurndjul considers himself to be an international artist, and wants to see his work exhibited alongside his peers in major public institutions. a Brenda L Croft Senior Curator, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art John Mawurndjul Kuninjku people, Kurulk clan, Dhuwa/Duwa moiety, Balang subsection Mardayin 2004 natural pigments on eucalyptus bark National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

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new acquisition A sian Ar t

The child-saint Sambandar When he was three years old Sambandar sat hungry and crying outside a temple dedicated to the Hindu god Shiva while his father took a ritual bath. Looking down and feeling compassion for the child, Shiva’s consort Uma [Parvati] offered him a bowl of milk from her breast.

On returning, Sambandar’s father was surprised to see milk dripping from his contented son’s chin, and a golden bowl beside him. When questioned, Sambandar simply pointed to an image of Uma and Shiva on the outside of the temple and began singing their praises.

From that moment Sambandar was devoted to worship.

One of sixty-three Shaivite saints, he spent his life wandering Tamil Nadu in southern India singing and dancing in honour of Shiva and Uma. He is credited with composing thousands of hymns, many of which are still sung.

Sambandar, who lived in the seventh century, was only eighteen years old when he died and is almost always depicted as a child. In this sculpture, he is shown dancing on a lotus base with his right hand raised towards the source of the heavenly milk.

Images of the child saint are found in most Tamil temples devoted to Shiva. Portrayed here laden with jewellery and with his hair elaborately styled, Sambandar can also be represented as a simply adorned standing child, an example of which was acquired by the Gallery in 1989. Both Sambandar figures are from the Chola period (9th–13th century) and were cast in bronze using the lost wax technique.

From the tenth century, deities were obliged to participate in public life in much the same way as human royalty and bronze sculptures, such as this dancing Sambandar, were periodically paraded through the streets dressed in rich cloth and draped with floral garlands.

Melanie Eastburn Curator, Asian Art

Chola dynasty (9th–13th century) Tamil Nadu, India The child-saint Sambandar 12th century bronze National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

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new acquisition A sian Ar t

Goddess Pratyangira Pratyangira is a fierce Hindu goddess with the head and mane of a lion and the voluptuous body of a woman. She protects her followers from evil forces and is worshipped in the pursuit of magical powers rather than as an act of devout spirituality. The goddess has the ability to grant her devotees victory, can eliminate illness, and is considered a protector of armies. She can also bestow the power of flight, as well as the capacity to change size, read and control minds and create rain. When enraged, however, she can inflict hardship, destitution, disease and even death.

Represented here with four arms, Pratyangira has her right foot raised and appears to wear a garland of skulls. She beats the rhythm for her dance on the small drum in her upper right hand while her lower right hand holds a trident, its prongs unusually pointing towards the ground. The trident and drum are attributes associated with the god Shiva and with manifestations of the great Hindu goddesses, in particular the ferocious goddess Kali. Pratyangira’s downward-pointing trident suggests a tantric or mystical origin for the sculpture. In keeping with this cosmic aspect, the missing lower left hand of the sculpture would probably have held a severed head or a bowl made from a skull, into which could be poured blood or other libations.

Carved from a single block of stone, this sculpture of Pratyangira was made in the twelfth century in Tamil Nadu, southern India. Images of the goddess, who flings the stars into chaos when she shakes her mane, are extremely rare and the Gallery is delighted to welcome this impressive sculpture of Pratyangira into the collection.

Chola dynasty (9th–13th century) Tamil Nadu, India Goddess Pratyangira 12th century stone National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Melanie Eastburn Curator, Asian Art

Chola dynasty (9th–13th century) Tamil Nadu, India Goddess Pratyangira 12th century stone National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

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new acquisition International Painting and Sculpture

Larry Poons Mover

Larry Poons Mover 1972 synthetic polymer on canvas Gift of Jon Plapp and Richard McMillan 2005Â National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

In the late 1960s Poons began to pour paint thickly onto canvases on the floor, a complete departure from his earlier precise, analytical, Op Art works. By accident, he discovered that he could more easily achieve the effect of layering and banding that he desired by tacking his canvases to the wall and throwing paint at them, allowing paint and gravity to work together to create what has been described as a cascade motif, which can be seen in Mover 1972. Mover represents a new phase in Poons’ oeuvre, one that was pursued for a further two decades.

Paintings of this period show Poons coming to grips with tactility and painterliness, leaving behind his characteristic restraint and optical illusion, and paving the way for his later explorations of texture.

Mover is painted on unprimed canvas, a flat wash background soaked with a brilliant diagonal splash of orange that forms the basis for the central motif. The work

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has a sense of spontaneity derived from the original splash of paint, yet this apparent impulsive freedom of execution  is the result of painstaking layering and overpainting. In the juxtaposition between impulsiveness and attention to detail, Mover hovers on the cusp of Poons’ transition from studied illusion to the seeming abandonment of deliberation that later characterised his work.

Postwar American painting has a major presence in the Gallery’s collection and Mover builds on that strength, broadening our understanding of the evolution of American art. Poons was a contemporary and friend of a number of artists such as Robert Indiana, James Rosenquist, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, and Jules Olitski, all of whom are represented in the collection. a Bronwyn Campbell Assistant Curator International Painting and Sculpture

new acquisition International Prints, Drawings and Illustrated Book s

Bernard Villemot Orangina

Bernard Villemot began his professional career as a student at Paul Colin’s graphic design school in Paris and from the 1930s onwards established a reputation as a premier poster designer. Villemot produced some of the most iconic commercial images in the period following the second World War for clients that included the French mineral water Perrier, the shoe manufacturer Bally and, of course, Orangina. He went on to win many major graphic design awards throughout his working life, including the prestigious Martini Prize Gold Medal award, and continued to make posters right up until his death in 1989.

Villemot came out of a generation of French graphic designers all of whom were influenced by the great Parisian poster designer Leonetto Cappiello (1875–1942).

Cappiello is generally recognised as the father of modern advertising. His revolutionary insight into the art of advertising was built around the psychological phenomenon of image association. We can see this insight playing a central role in many of Villemot’s

designs, including Orangina 1983. In an ironic, witty way it also refers to the development of modern painting, in particular the School of Paris, by directly drawing on Matisse’s famous painting La dance 1909–10.

Orangina 1983 is one of many designs Villemot produced for this manufacturer. Made from crushed oranges, Orangina was first presented to the world at the Marseille Fair of 1936 by a Spanish chemist named Dr Trigo. Initially marketed in Algeria under the name of Naranjina, the commercial rights to the product were bought by Léon Beton who re-named it Orangina. The drink and its characteristic squat little bottle soon became famous throughout France. Villemot produced his first design for the product in 1952 in an alliance that would last up until his death in 1989. Orangina 1983 is one of Villemot’s most famous works. a

Bernard Villemot Orangina 1983 lithograph The Poynton Bequest National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Mark Henshaw and Gwen Horsfield (Intern) International Prints, Drawings and Illustrated Books

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new acquisition International Photography

Shu-Min Lin Glass ceiling

Shu-Min Lin Glass ceiling 1997–2001 12 holograms installation Purchased with the assistance of the Gene and Brian Sherman Contemporary Asian Art Fund 2005 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

By creating images of depth on a plate of glass, I can explore a world between the real and unreal, giving a dream-like quality to my work. Shu-Min Lin Shu-Min Lin began working with holograms in Taiwan in the early 1980s. Glass ceiling is a work which evolved slowly over a number of years, and was the work shown in the Taiwanese Pavilion at the 2001 Venice Biennale. It is one of his most well-known and popular works.

Due to the three-dimensional nature of the holographic medium, the work gives the impression that people are trapped under the floor looking up. Attempting to see the people beneath their feet, viewers often obscure with their shadows that which they are trying to see. Hence the work explores ideas around the difficulty of really knowing oneself – and others. Where do we place ourselves and our importance in relation to others? The title suggests we might

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connsider a shift in perception, for the work is a ‘ceiling’ only from the point of view of the figures in the work.

The illusory nature of self and reality is central here as it is in all of Shu-Min Lin’s works which are underpinned by a Buddhist philosophy. The world is in three layers: by always looking up (striving for goals in the future) or down (living lost in memories of the past) we lose track of what is around us (the present). The title refers on one level to the corporate notion of being stopped from career advancement beyond a certain position due to prejudice; but the spiritual, humanist aspect is as important, for we are all trapped in samsara, a cycle of rebirth and suffering – trapped as Shu-Min Lin has stated in the ‘compartmentalized, frantic and desperate spaces we inhabit’. a Anne O’Hehir Assistant Curator, Photography

new acquisition Australian Photography

Robert McFarlane Dawn service, Anzac Day, Thirroul, NSW

Photojournalist Robert McFarlane is best known as the doyen of film and theatre stills photography in Australia and as a photography critic and writer. Over the past year he has been reviewing his documentary archive and Dawn service is from a group of works recently acquired by the Gallery from the 1960s–70s. Looking through the images in McFarlane’s archive it was noticeable how he returned again and again to Anzac Day marches and subjects that evoked an ‘older’ simpler Australia.

McFarlane has commented that his literate and musical parents had a strong sense of family and extended community which translates in his own work to an empathy with their generation. Yet McFarlane has also sensitively documented the subcultures of the younger generation and his own contemporaries, amongst a

broader platform of social issues such as a focus on Indigenous leaders and communities.

Dawn service was a self-elected assignment of special significance for McFarlane for while he had photographed many Anzac Days marches he had never made it to a Dawn service. He was, however, intrigued by the association with Thirroul on the south coast and British writer DH Lawrence who spent time in Australia in a cottage in the seaside hamlet in 1922.

Perhaps it was McFarlane’s own love of words and writing that made him stay up all night so he wouldn’t miss the gathering of local veterans on 25th April 1978. a

Robert McFarlane Dawn service, Anzac Day, Thirroul, NSW 1978 gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Gael Newton Senior Curator, Photography

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new acquisition International Decorative Ar t s

Harlan Butt Earth beneath our feet: horizon #1

Harlan Butt has for a long time used the form of the enamelled vessel for his work. In doing so he draws directly from his experiences in Japan, where he studied traditional metalworking and enamelling and their relationships to the cultural traditions of Zen Buddhism and the tea ceremony. Earth beneath our feet: horizon #1 references the traditions of the Japanese koro incense burner, in which forms of the natural world and the simple objects of everyday life are elevated to become vehicles for contemplation.

This work is inspired by the flora, fauna and wild terrain of Colorado, where Butt spends part of each year.

Through it he describes a landscape in which the viewer is an active participant, rather than a passive spectator.

He expands the metaphor of the garden to explore the beauty and wildness of the natural world, encouraging intimacy and involvement. Also evoked in this work are the traditions of Japanese ikebana, with its concept of visible imperfection in remembrance of the harmony of living things. The snake on the vessel’s lid is unobtrusive, seeming to sense our presence as much as we recoil from its appearance. a Robert Bell Senior Curator, Decorative Arts and Design

Harlan Butt Earth beneath our feet: horizon #1 2003 silver, enamel, copper and paint National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

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new acquisition Australian Decorative Ar t s

Bern Emmerichs Who are you?

The quizzical looks exchanged by the two central figures in Bern Emmerichs’ ceramic work Who are you? provide a humorous insight into the complex history of relations between Indigenous Australians and Europeans. Both the title and the semi-naive depiction of the figures inject an immediacy into historical events, the apparently light-hearted treatment of which belies the serious repercussions that are still being felt today.

This imagery captures the early days of contact, before curiosity turned into mistrust and violence. Emmerichs depicts the coming together of two very different worlds by representing these divergent cultures as a collection of artefacts: the man-made environment populated by grand residences crowned by flags of ownership on one side; the didgeridoo, boomerang, spear and sacred places marked by natural landmarks (Uluru) on the other.

The central figures also characterise these differences: the wide eyes and questioning face of the Aboriginal is juxtaposed with the sharp, pale features of the European.

The latter’s bright blue eyes are firmly, though almost secretly angled towards his neighbour, who in turn stares into the distance, perhaps trying to discern the future.

It is telling that neither figure looks directly at the other, leaving each of them to covertly wonder, imagine, and speculate rather than approach each other openly.

The form is reminiscent of a large meat platter, commonly exported to Australia from Britain during the mid-nineteenth century in the early days of the colony.

Along the rim a different kind of history is evoked by combining animated action figures that recall ancient Greek vases alongside figures that resemble those from medieval English tapestries. It is this multiplicity of references, rendered in Emmerichs’ characteristically vibrant palette, that have produced an engaging work which depicts serious themes with a lightness of touch. a

Bern Emmerichs Who are you? 2003 earthenware with underglaze painted decoration National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

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new acquisition Australian Painting and Sculpture

John Barker Mother’s sorrow

John Barker Mother’s sorrow c. 1920 oil on canvas National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

This powerful narrative work by John Barker draws the viewer into the world of loss, grief and hardship experienced by millions during and in the years following the First World War. The symbolism in this painting underlines the pain and anguish experienced in a mother’s loss. The woman slumps at a table, her head resting on one arm and her face hidden in the crook of her elbow in a pose of intense grief. Her other arm extends across the table to touch the corner of a framed photograph of a young soldier and in front of her lies an open letter.

On the wall behind are two images: one of Christ on the Cross, the other is of a baby.

The emotional intensity is heightened by the simplicity of the setting and the dark tones of the wall, contrasted by the stark white of the woman’s blouse and the table cloth. The shallow space, formed by the dark wall and the cropped table, places the viewer within the room as

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a witness to this private moment, creating an uncomfortable sense of intrusion. At the same time the viewer is excluded by the mother’s arm shielding her face from view.

John Barker was a mature artist and a council member of the British Watercolour Society when he emigrated to Western Australia in 1924. He exhibited regularly with the West Australian Society of Arts from 1924 until shortly before his death in 1943. He also became a member of the British Institute of Arts and was a founding member of the Perth Society of Artists. Although undated, it is possible that Barker painted Mother’s sorrow in England before emigrating as the subject matter bears a similarity to other works of art produced between 1915 and 1925 which dealt with the outpouring of grief and loss. a Juliet Flook Administration Assistant, Australian Art

new acquisition Australian Print s and Drawings

ST Gill Native dignity Acquired in August 2005 Native dignity c. 1860 is a lithograph drawn by the English-born artist ST Gill. Gill arrived in Australia with his family in 1839 when he was twenty-one years of age. From childhood Gill showed creative aptitude and a desire to be a professional artist.

While working in London at the Hubbard Profile Gallery Gill was influenced by fashionable caricature artists such as Thomas Rowlandson and James Gillray. He applied these conventions to colonial life.

Gill’s works are famous for their accuracy in depicting the atmosphere and resonance of colonial Australia. While most popularly known as the quintessential artist of the Victorian gold fields, he was also one of Adelaide’s first photographers and documented the people, industry and landscape in the southern Australian colonies in the mediums of watercolour and print. Most notably he depicted the industrious and sometimes struggling city of Adelaide. He also took part in and documented expeditions to find the inland sea and the birth of the South Australian mining industry.

Gill produced satirical works that commented on the social politics of the time, of which the large caricature Native dignity is an example. The work might seem to be a parody of Indigenous culture, but it has been interpreted as satirising the pretensions of the bourgeois colonist. In this vein the work may also be analysed as a metaphor for the colonisation of Australia. The Indigenous couple, dressed in the bare bones of European fashion, signify England’s vain struggle to occupy and claim the land.

The white man in the background walks stiffly upright, eyeing the Indigenous couple with raised eyebrows and a sideways stare, perhaps representing English distaste for the Australian colonies. His veiled female partner, her mind bent to some other task or thought, does not even afford them a glance. a

ST Gill Native dignity 1860 lithograph National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Deborah Hill Gordon Darling Graduate Intern Australian Prints and Drawings

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collec tion focus

The magic of slow time: contemporary works on display in the Australian galleries

Savanhdary Vongpoothorn Incantation 2005 synthetic polymer paint on perforated canvas National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Courtesy Martin Browne Fine Art Brent Harris Plato’s cave: painting no. 4 2005 oil on linen National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

In our busy twenty-first century lives, it is not surprising that the idea of slowing things down is deeply appealing.

In the search for greater meaning in our lives, art has the capacity to slow us down in our tracks if we are open to its enchantments. If we contemplate a number of new contemporary acquisitions currently on display in the Australian galleries we will come to discover a sense of space and time – and indeed enchantment – that is not only experiential for the viewer but imbedded in the works themselves.

Take, for example, Savanhdary Vongpoothorn’s major recent work Incantation 2005 painted on perforated canvas. In this work, delicate red threads of paint weave and loop around hundreds of perforations and across veils and bands of luminous green and yellow. The piercings,

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methodically applied over the surface, are as important as the marks themselves: they create a sense of air, of transparency and lightness, in tandem with the fluidity of the inscriptions. The cumulative effect of the rhythmic patterns is akin to a chant – at once meditative and mesmerising.

The idea of chanting and repetition is integral to Vongpoothorn’s Incantation, which is not hurried in its physical making or in its conception. As an artist who was born in Laos in 1971, migrating with her parents to Australia at the age of eight, Vongpoothorn has a rich cultural heritage to draw upon. The artist points out that for her home is not about nostalgia for a geographical place but instead about her connection with family in Australia. In Incantation the emphasis on repetition and

Jan Riske Yellow melt out 1988 oil on canvas National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Gift of David K Edwards 2005Â

rhythm is closely related to the incantations or khaathaa that her father (an ordained monk) transcribed for her  on loose-leaf sheets. The idea of chants or spells –  warding off harm, comforting and blessing – resonated for the artist with her own experiences growing up.

It appealed further because of the way the idea of incantations resides ambiguously between the secular  and the sacred. Vongpoothorn has also been inspired by her father’s playing of the Khaen, the Lao version of the pan pipe. As she writes in the catalogue for her 2005 exhibition at Martin Browne Fine Art: In Incantation 2005, the scribbly writing appears haphazard  and random, but the process is actually very controlled.  The receding horizontal bands running across the canvas are intended to appear musical, with sound ascending and

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descending, and periodically rising to a crescendo, much like the monks’ chanting. The bands are also reminiscent of the pulsing sound of the Khaen, especially the gentle repetitive chanting melody of Champasak, in the south, where I was born.

For Jan Riske, who was born in Holland in 1932 and immigrated to Australia in 1951, ideas about space, time and energy are integral to his approach to painting. As an artist who has travelled widely, Riske has maintained links with his country of origin. In 1962 he returned to live in Holland for a few years, setting up a studio with sculptor Jan de Baat and painter Hans Nahuijs, forming a group known as the ‘Barokke abstractionists’. Works undertaken more than two decades later such as Yellow melt out 1988 and Prussian pink 1989 (both generously gifted to the Gallery by Dr David Edwards) reveal a personal way

of working: sumptuous in their richly textured, layered surfaces; rigorous in their meticulous construction; open to interpretation. For Riske, the works have evolved in part through his contemplation of the energy underlying all things and his feeling for precision within the apparent randomness of the world. As he notes on his website: We are living in a technically complex world … I realise that basically I am a particle painter. I see everything as particles; everything’s atomic anyway … When you look at the painting you feel that energy: every particle is in just the right place. The composition has to be completely exact … Every particle I put down is done just once, nothing is repeated.

When my brush dips into the paint, the colour has to be graded, so therefore I have to start from a fixed point of departure … My paintings not only refer to energy but also to different layers of perception.

While Riske believes that the Impressionists revealed new ways of perceiving the world through fragmented light and colour, and while his works recall the precision of Pointillism and the abstract rigour of the De Stijl group, he is less concerned with ‘isms’ than with finding ways of working that correspond with his own experiences of the world. In a sense, his perception is guided as much by nature as by the particles and units of the ‘computer age’.

As we take the time to contemplate the works we may think of flickering pixilated screens or abstract patterns made by formations of flocks of birds seen from a distance swirling from dark to light. Alternatively, we may consider the archaeological layers of the paintings that could almost be relief sculptures, or we may delight in the artist’s sensitivity to colour in Yellow melt out, with its subtle unfolding gradations, and Prussian pink which shifts from deep tonalities to shimmering luminosity.

In contrast to the richly textured surfaces of Riske’s works, Brent Harris’s Plato’s cave: painting no. 4 2005 has a seamlessness that looks as smooth as a pebble washed time and again by the tides. Yet both artists work in ways that are contemplative and attuned to the need for unhurried time. Both have evolved a highly personal, philosophical approach. For while Harris’s earlier work has been informed by Colin McCahon and American abstract artists such as Barnett Newman, he has gradually developed distinctive ways of working that have come through personal experience.

Born in New Zealand in 1956, Harris came to Australia in 1981. painting no. 4 is part of a series titled Plato’s cave, begun while the artist was undertaking a residency in Singapore with the Tyler Print Institute. As he said: ‘Several works I was working on contained images that suggest shadows … When I was back in Melbourne thinking about a new series of paintings, the thought of shadows

resurfaced.’ This led him back to a series of drawings that he had undertaken of the model drawn from life. Another springboard was the text Allegory of the cave from Plato’s Republic, although the artist points out that the images in the series are not intended to illustrate the title. Instead, the text and imagery evoked ideas about the nature of perception and the way that a shadow or silhouette can stand in for the figure but carries only limited information about its source.

Plato’s cave: painting no. 4 is an immensely subtle, thought-provoking work in which the shadow of a male figure, rendered in a pale almost translucent blue, rises up and appears to be on the verge of walking out of the picture frame. The ground on which this shadow-man is located is among the most numinous of any of the artist’s works – a cloud-like mass against a dark velvety black that adds to the floating, dream-like feel of the whole.

Against the precision of the outlines is a contradictory spill: forms moving out, trailing down, casting a shimmer.

The distortion of the figure is deliberate, recalling the ambiguous nature of cast shadows, allowing the viewer to project their own imaginings onto the work. The figure emerged two years after Harris painted the background.

As he wrote in notes accompanying his 2005 exhibition at Tolarno Galleries: So after nearly a two-year wait this massive figure now appeared set for this canvas … The large hip appears to me to be of an older body, I like this. He is moving into the space … at this point I added the wedge at the bottom. I felt the figure needed anchoring, to accentuate the movement and … balance … moving into the void.

These intriguing works by Brent Harris, Jan Riske and Savanhdary Vongpoothorn represent striking recent acquisitions currently on display. They have been created with care and consideration and in turn require and reward time from the viewer to observe and contemplate.

By taking time out to slow down with these works, it is possible to enter into the subtle layers of perception and evocative associations that each of the artists have offered us in their distinctive ways. We may, for example, recall the rhythmic chanting of Buddhist monks in Vongpoothorn’s Incantation; the vibrating interactions between the microcosm and the macrocosm in Riske’s precise, densely layered paintings; the interplay between substance and shadow in the enchanting ambiguities of Harris’s Plato’s cave: painting no. 4. Â Take the time and enjoy. a Deborah Hart Senior Curator, Australian Painting and Sculpture

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travelling exhibitions

Darwin Art-port From Darwin they go, to Adelaide, to Sydney, everywhere, even America. They travel all over the world these bark paintings from Arnhem Land. Brian Nyinawanga, artist Djon Mundine, independent Aboriginal curator, writer and former art advisor in central Arnhem Land during the 1980s and 1990s, writes about the place of Aboriginal art in Darwin on the occasion of the return of one of its most notable art exports in the exhibition No ordinary place: the art of David Malangi, currently showing at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory.

In November this year the first major retrospective exhibition of Aboriginal artist David Malangi opened in Darwin, the capital of the Northern Territory. Its presence is surely a sign of the beauty, depth, diversity, and resilience of Aboriginal culture’s many forms that are engrained in Darwin’s history. There is an irony possibly lost on colonial bureaucrats in the naming of this northern outpost after the author of ‘the survival of the fittest’, Charles Darwin, on the land of one of the oldest surviving races in the world. Darwin the town, built on the land owned by the Larrakia people, a place where cultures have met, clashed, recoiled, intermingled and blended within a vibrant Aboriginal subculture, is marked by the crossings of this black–white divide. Darwin has always been a port for many exotic things – pearls, fish, buffalo hides, crocodile skins, beef, and minerals of all kinds – but who would have thought it would become an export site for Aboriginal culture, ideas, and intellectual and spiritual property?

central’ for Aboriginal people from right across the top of the Northern Territory. Here they experienced the best and worst of both cultures. Many had been moved there or just outside the town during the war; so many that in 1949, in order to slow down this migration and return stranded Yolngu, patrol officer Syd Kyle-Little arranged voluntary boat return for people of the Liverpool River area. Here he set up a ‘trading post’ to entice them to remain. A stream of others, mainly young men, made the sojourn of searching and discovery. Travelling with few or no possessions and no clear aims, they survived by various means including government rations and itinerant work – a struggle between personal dignity and just plain survival. Darwin was the place where the regional ‘stolen generation’ were sent and where Aboriginal lepers were quarantined. For visitors, it was a place for court, for hospital, to die, to escape, for drink, for church, for school, for meetings, for football, for exhibition, for adventure, and a place to live.

I met Jack Mirritji [dec.] and some other men at Gumugumuk on

One day I got hurt off a horse and went to Darwin to hospital.

Cape Stewart and I went with them to Darwin by foot for the

I got a job at Qantas then the airport in Darwin. Me and Wally

second time … In Darwin I stayed with my friends at Bagot like

[dec.] and Brian [Nyinawanga] and Jacky [a Kunwinjku man]

Ray Munyal [dec.]. I worked with Ray at Qantas under a Balanda

– we bin working there – a lot of people [from] Milingimbi,

called Frank Astiville (?). Yeah, we living together at Bagot

Maningrida. Some worked at the Air Force getting training,

compound then we shifting from Bagot to Berimah where there

some at Qantas. I was living near the airport, near Bagot

was a compound. Bulany Gaykamangu [dec.], artist

[Aboriginal Reserve]. Jimmy Moduk, artist

While still young and single, Malangi came and lived here in the 1950s. Although numbers of Aboriginal people, who are now called Arnhem Land Yolngu, spent time here before the Second World War it was during the war period and into the 1950s that Darwin became ‘downtown 46 national gallery of australia

When cultures collide, traditions can be swept away, languages lost and laws challenged; but they can also be clung to with a tenacity that is just short of miraculous. For Yolngu it was a curious life here; by day mixing with white Australians and living in their world and by night carrying

on a complex ceremonial life involving large numbers of performers practically in the heart of, and unnoticed by, the relatively modern city. Some Yolngu were politically aware. A number of strikes were staged by Aboriginal people in 1951 including one instance when they refused to dance for tourists on a visiting cruise ship. These actions were blamed by the authorities at the time on communist influences, and the ring leaders were banished to remote desert communities.

After Gatji I went back to Milingimbi and then to Darwin where I went to another Gunapipi at Bagot and another at Berimah and another at Ten Mile [outside of Darwin].

Bulany Gaykamangu [dec.], artist

Darwin has always been a rich cultural centre despite its reputation as the last port of call in ‘white western civilisation’. One of the first major Aboriginal art appearances in the Australian art world were the drawings on paper by Aboriginal inmates of Fanny Bay Gaol in the 1888 Dawn of art exhibition in Melbourne’s Centennial International Exhibition. Ian Fairweather, Russell Drysdale, and many white Australian artists had

visited Darwin for inspiration previous to and following the Second World War but another unacknowledged cultural practice persisted: that of the original people. It was the setting of Xavier Herbert’s 1939 Aboriginal novel, Capricornia. Herbert himself was officially ‘Chief Protector of Aborigines’ in Darwin in the 1930s. The Australian film classic Jedda, the story of an Aboriginal girl brought up by a white Australian couple, was shot in the Northern Territory in the mid-1950s. The first Australian film to star Aboriginal actors (Rosilie Ngarla Kunoth-Monks and Robert Tudawali [dec.]) and the first colour film by an Australian director, Charles Chauvel, premiered in Darwin in 1955 to a segregated audience before becoming the first Australian film to be shown at the Cannes Film Festival the same year.

Djon Mundine with David Malangi preparing a hollow log 1988 Photo: ©Jon Lewis

The first time I went to Darwin to an exhibition was to Berrimah with Bob Cross [a building advisor], with Mick Magani [dec.]. There wasn’t a prison there then but an Aboriginal camp or reserve. George M, artist

Allegedly, Albert Namatjira had seen the sea for the first time when he visited Darwin in 1950. He came artonview

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Trevor Nichols had an exhibition in Darwin in 1981 and there was a memorial solo show for Declan Apuatimi, the Tiwi artist, in 1987 at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT). In 1987, Ramingining artists Charlie Djurritjini and later Bulany Gaykamangu [dec.] had solo exhibitions at commercial galleries in Darwin.

The first time George [Milpurrurru], Mokuy [dead artist] and Charlie Djota, we went to Sydney. I went to Sydney, to New York; I don’t remember any [particular] painting. They’re Balanda [the other – homogeneous white Australian art].

David Malangi

Dr HC Coombs with Malangi after making a presentation to him during a tour of the Northern Territory in August 1967 Photo: Reserve Bank of Australia

to unsuccessfully apply for a cattle licence not for an art exhibition, though he sold several paintings to the bureaucrats he dealt with. Aboriginal artists could paint the land but not yet own it even when prepared to pay it seems. In the meeting of cultures one can enhance or flavour the other but a synergist facilitates the mix.

For many non-Aboriginal people, Aboriginal art is that synergist. Aboriginal art wasn’t widely understood or appreciated until after Namatjira’s death in the late 1950s.

Malangi himself didn’t begin to paint until he returned to Arnhem Land around then. Although Aboriginal art was sold at various tourist outlets in Darwin and in southern cities, it was the success of Malangi’s generation that would facilitate the reclassification of Aboriginal art as a ‘fine art’ through the 1960s and 1970s.

Art is work that takes time, tools and training and in a sense it was his return home to marry and receive ‘bush training’ and the receptive mission life that led him to become a painter. Malangi was made famous by the reproduction of his painting on Australia’s first dollar note in 1966. His paintings would then appear in group exhibitions from Paris, New York, Tehran to Tokyo within the decade. When he won first prize for bark painting at the 1969 Royal Darwin Show, most of the art from Arnhem Land was already bypassing Darwin to be sold and exhibited in the south and overseas. The Darwin museum and art gallery wouldn’t come into being itself until the following year, nor the Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award until 1984. It was still unusual for Aboriginal artists to have a solo exhibition.

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In 1979, David’s paintings with those of Johnny Bonguwuy [dec.] and George M [dec.] became the first Aboriginal art included in a Biennale of Sydney. In 1983 his Glyde River painting set appeared in the 1983 Australian Perspecta exhibition at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. He regularly entered the Darwin National Aboriginal Art Award and won minor prizes through the 1980s and 1990s but it was in New York (1988), Japan (1992), and Paris (1995) where his major work would go. He did complete a set of modest mural paintings for the new Darwin GPO with Fiona Foley and Paddy Dhathangu in 1990, however while a huge industry for Aboriginal art has existed and grown over the last thirty years most of it bypassed Darwin. And although single artists shows began appearing from the 1980s onward in southern cities, until now a very limited number of Aboriginal artists have been honoured by their own focused museum show.

It’s good with me, my mother’s land. This place Yathalamarra is my mother’s land. It brought me into the world with my mother’s dreaming. This land, it’s dreaming and the people.

David Malangi

Darwin must now rival Alice Springs in terms of art galleries and the volume of Aboriginal art sales with auxiliary developments such as the encouragement of Indigenous printmaking through Northern Editions based at Charles Darwin University. In 1991, his mother’s Dreaming collection of objects and paintings commissioned by Mobil Oil were a prominent part of the Aboriginal gallery of MAGNT. The arrival of Malangi’s present show is a more complete, welcome return for northern audiences to see a significant body of the work of this great artist, as recognition also of the place of Aboriginal culture in Darwin. a No ordinary place: the art of David Malangi is on exhibition at the Museum & Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin, until 8 January 2006. Further information at nga.gov.au/Malangi

travelling exhibitions summer 20 05 – 0 6

No ordinary place: the art of David Malangi

David Malangi Daymirringu Luku (foot) 1994 (detail) Private collection, Canberra © David Malangi Licensed

by VISCOPY, Australia

Supported by Principal Sponsor Newmont Australia Ltd, a proud partner of Reconciliation Australia.

Also supported by the Indigenous Arts Strategy, Northern Territory Government, the Seven Network and Visions of Australia, an Australian Government Program supporting touring exhibitions by providing funding assistance for the development and touring of cultural material across Australia. The project has been developed in association with Bula’bula Arts, Ramingining.

National Sculpture Prize and exhibition 2005 A partnership with Macquarie Bank

Fred Fisher Tilt 2005 (detail) MDF, synthetic polymer paint

A celebration of the art and life of David Malangi Daymirringu, whose mortuary rites story bark painting appeared on the Australian one dollar note in 1966, this exhibition shows the extensive repertoire of this brilliant and innovative master painter to promote a broader perception and enjoyment of his work. nga.gov.au/Malangi

Macquarie Bank, 1 Martin Place, Sydney NSW, 16 January – 10 February 2006 Dell Gallery @ Queensland College of Art, Brisbane QLD 16 February – 16 April 1006

Museum & Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin NT 12 November 2005 – 8 January 2006

The Elaine and Jim Wolfensohn Gift Travelling Exhibitions The 1888 Melbourne Cup and three suitcase kits thematically present a selection of art and design objects for the enjoyment of children and adults in regional, remote and metropolitan centres that may be borrowed free-of-charge. nga.gov.au/Wolfensohn

Place made: Australian Print Workshop 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.

Tim Maguire Hollyhocks 1991 (detail) National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Australian Print Workshop Archive 2, purchased with the assistance of the Gordon Darling Australasian Print Fund 2002

This exhibition is a snapshot of the involvement of Australian artists in the production of prints at the Australian Print Workshop between 1981 and 2002. Reflecting a broad range of stylistic, technical and political concerns, the prints are selected from an archive of 3,500 works acquired by the National Gallery of Australia in 2002 through the assistance of the Gordon Darling Australasian Print Fund. nga.gov.au/Placemade Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, Bathurst NSW 2 December 2005 – 15 January 2006 Albury Regional Art Gallery, Albury NSW 27 January – 26 March 2006

Red case: myths and rituals Yellow case: form, space and design Cairns Regional Gallery, Cairns QLD 10 October – 16 December 2005 Early Childhood Workshop, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 10–11 January 2006 Seated Ganesha Sri Lanka 9th–10th century (detail) from Red case: myths and rituals National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Cairns Regional Gallery, Cairns QLD 10 October – 16 December 2005

Proudly sponsored by MARSH

Grace Cossington Smith The lacquer room 1935–36 (detail) oil on paperboard on plywood Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney © AGNSW Photo: Christopher Snee for AGNSW

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney NSW 3 November 2005 – 15 January 2006 Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane QLD 18 February – 1 May 2006

Goulburn Regional Art Gallery, Goulburn NSW 1 February – 26 March 2006 Blue case: technology

Grace Cossington Smith: a retrospective exhibition One of Australia’s most important postimpressionists, Grace Cossington Smith (1892–1984) was a brilliant colourist and played a vital role in the development of modernism in Australia. This exhibition explores the rich intersection of public and private life, drawing upon a diversity of themes and variations including intimate portraits, iconic Harbour Bridges, landscapes and flower paintings, religious and war images, ballet performances and the vibrant shimmering interiors of her home Cossington. nga.gov.au/CossingtonSmith

The National Sculpture Prize is a partnership between the National Gallery of Australia and Macquarie Bank to support and promote Australian sculpture and to recognise outstanding works. It is one of the most generous prizes for contemporary art in Australia, with a nonacquisitive prize of $50,000 awarded to the winning artist. The travelling component of the exhibition will feature a selection of the finalists’ works.

Early Childhood Workshop, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 10–11 January 2006 Bundaberg Arts Centre, Bundaberg QLD 1 February – 26 March 2006 The 1888 Melbourne Cup

The 1888 Melbourne Cup (detail) The Elaine and Jim Wolfensohn Gift National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Tweed River Regional Art Gallery, Murwillumbah NSW 5 October – 18 December 2005 Exhibition venues and dates are subject to change. Please contact the Gallery before your visit. For more information please contact (02) 6240 6556 or email: travex@nga.gov.au.

The National Gallery of Australia Travelling Exhibitions Program is generously supported

by Australian airExpress. artonview

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children’s galler y

Imagining Papua New Guinea 8 October 2005 – 12 March 2006

John Man Not titled [Insect] 1975 colour screenprint Ulli and Georgina Beier Collection, purchased 2005 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Imagining Papua New Guinea is a vibrant exhibition of thirty-five prints and drawings in celebration of thirty years of independence for one of Australia’s nearest neighbours.

The National Gallery of Australia has had a long association with Papua New Guinea, collecting a variety of traditional works of art from the region since the 1970s. The prints and drawings currently on display in the Children’s Gallery were produced from the 1960s through to the 1970s, just prior to and after independence. The group of artists who created these works were based at what later became the Creative Arts Centre in Port Moresby.

50 national gallery of australia

Advocates of the arts in Papua New Guinea, Ulli and Georgina Beier, were instrumental in promoting contemporary art practices in non-traditional mediums from the late 1960s. Their backyard was an impromptu studio for the artists, a space within which they could experiment with new mediums such as drawing and printmaking. The exhibition displays many works from Ulli and Georgina Beier’s collection, acquired by the Gallery earlier this year.

The exhibition illustrates themes repeatedly explored by several Papua New Guinean artists. In his whimsical screenprints, John Mann depicts creatures, both real and fantastical; a theme also at work in the exquisitely patterned drawings and prints of Timothy Akis and Martin Morububuna. This delight in pattern, texture and colour is embodied in many of the works featured in this exhibition.

Almost half of the works in the exhibition were made

by Mathias Kauage who works in a variety of mediums, including printmaking, drawing, textiles and metalwork.

His screenprints and drawings with felt-tipped pen in the exhibition illustrate the theme of social and technological change in Papua New Guinea. In particular his colourful images of cars, helicopters and motorbikes, show a people new to this way of life. Among the most

Mathias Kauage Independence celebration I 1975 colour screenprint Ulli and Georgina Beier Collection, purchased 2005 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

compelling are Kauage’s screenprints of people in planes and cars. a Deborah Hill Gordon Darling Graduate Intern Australian Prints and Drawings

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The National Galler y of Australia Foundation

The National Gallery of Australia Photography Fund

Dr Peter Farrell AM and Fiona Tudor with Council Chairman Harold Mitchell AO at the Gallery in September 2001.

Farrell Family Foundation donation acquisitions are on display on the wall behind Anton Bruehl Porgy and Bess 1942 Gasparcol silver-dye bleach photograph Purchased 2000 National Gallery of Australia Photography Fund: Farrell Family Foundation Donation

By 1999, the era of the ‘collectable’ photograph had arrived, resulting in record prices of $100,000 or even one million dollars for a photograph. Despite years of great support from the Philip Morris Arts Grant, Kodak Australasia, and Nikon, it was clear that the Gallery needed to call on a wider range of corporate and private benefactors. To this end, the National Gallery of Australia Photography Fund was established with a donation of $250,000 from photography collector Dr Peter Farrell, the Australian founder and CEO of ResMed, with its headquarters in San Diego, California. The launch event was held in Paddington in August 1999 at the photography gallery of Sandra Byron who had effected the introduction to Dr Farrell – one of her clients.

Founding donations were received from Bryce and Benita Courtenay, Maria Cutufia, Ian Dodd, Dr Ruth Edwards, Michael Harris, Tim Hixson, Ann Lewis AM, Robert McFarlane, Matthew May, Kim Yow, Marg Thorne and Michael Stephenson.

Dr Farrell served as a National Gallery of Australia council member from 2001–04 and provided further support for the David Moore retrospective in 2003 as well as other Gallery programs and painting acquisitions. He recently described his approach to collecting as ‘pretty eclectic, really … I’m a collector of what I like and I like photography in particular’. And how he got started was: I was living in Japan and got introduced to woodblocks and silkscreens in 1984 and, over a period of a year, bought several good examples of each. When I returned to

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Sydney in 1985 I caught up with Peter Elliston [a landscape photographer, whose work is represented in the Gallery’s collection] … and told him I wanted to get some good wall hangings; he introduced me to photography and I was hooked. I bought quite a few from Peter and then ended up with the largest private collection of his work. But I have amassed a reasonable collection from Karsh, Penn, Leonard, Doisneau, Adams, Cunningham, Weston, Sugimoto, Brandt, Cartier-Bresson, Struth, Horst, Dora Maar, Brecht to Uelsmann and so on. And I have a McFarlane with another to come and, of course, Moores, Dupains (Max and Rex), Levers, Mili and so on as well as some California photographers, like Robert Turner and Watanabe.

The first targets for Farrell Family Foundation funds were three mid-nineteenth-century photographs – ‘mammoth’ plates from negatives over 17 x 19 inches –

by American landscape photographer Carleton Watkins, French architectural photographer Edouard-Dennis Baldus and British travel photographer Francis Frith. At the other end of the scale we also acquired a number of exquisite mid-nineteenth-century daguerreotype and ambrotype portraits.

Farrell funds were used to acquire several advertising photographs and a modernist form study by Anton Bruehl, an pioneer in advertising and colour photography working

in New York in the 1930s and 40s. Bruehl was born in Australia and much admired by Max Dupain, his Australian contemporary. A further purchase of a rare set of New Guinea views made by Dupain in 1944 was also supported by the Farrell Family Foundation funds. The portfolio had been acquired by an American serviceman, based at the time in Australia, who had married an Australian girl. Last year their daughter, Jill Quasha who is a photography dealer in New York, donated a rare early 1850s view of Jerusalem to the Gallery’s Photography Collection, highlighting how family connections often lead to unexpected donations.

Several years ago, while on a visit to Canberra from his home in San Francisco, Anton Bruehl Jr asked ‘to speak to the curator’. He is currently preparing to make a major donation of his father’s work to the Gallery.

Other professional and personal friendships also lead to donation. Recently, David Knaus, a photography collector based in Palm Springs, California, made major donations of prints by the Hong Kong-born photographer Lewis Morley, and Mark Ruwedel, a contemporary American landscape photographer, as well as an exquisite landscape of the Mirror Lake in the Yosemite Valley from the 1880s by Isiah Taber. Knaus is on the photography council of the Getty Museum in Santa Monica and regularly visits curators at the major art museums in Europe and America. His collection consists of over 1,000 works from all eras and, when asked how he started, he told me:

I began collecting photography about twenty-five years ago primarily on the inspiration of Bob Doherty, formerly head of George Eastman House who introduced me to the work of Milton Rogovin; and Keith Davis who was the newly arrived curator at Hallmark in Kansas City where I was also living at the time.

His interest in Australian photography began when he was living in Australia, from 1996 to 2001, at which time we developed a friendship through meeting at openings in Sydney and his visits to the Gallery and friends in Canberra.

Contemporary art is of course an exciting and quite demanding area of collecting. One large colour work

by American artist James Casebere was acquired with Farrell family funds in 2005. It will be on view in a display of photomedia from the permanent collection in the International Art galleries from mid December to 22 January 2006. Also planned for display in 2006 is one of the first major new media works from an Asian artist, Glass ceiling by Taiwanese artist Shu-Min Lin, which was recently acquired with support from the Gene and Brian Sherman Contemporary Asian Art Fund. a

Guests at the 18 June 2005 dinner for Lewis Morley’s 80th birthday at the National Gallery of Australia, mimicking Lewis Morley’s famous photograph of Christine Keeler astride a modernist chair.

The function was sponsored

by Nikon and David Knaus of Palm Springs and Dr and Mrs John V Knaus of Illinois. Photographer: John Swainston, Managing Director, Maxwell Optical Industries Pty Ltd (Nikon)

Gael Newton Senior Curator, Photography For further information on the National Gallery of Australia Photography Fund and information on the American Government tax incentive scheme for gifts through the American Friends of the National Gallery of Australia (AFANG) please contact Lyn Conybeare, Head of Development, on (02) 6240 6410. artonview

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conser vation

Behind the scenes: installing St Petersburg 1900

Costumes on display at the Art Gallery of Western Australia from a design by Alexander Golovin for the romantic drama Masquerade

Part of a conservator’s job at the National Gallery of Australia is to help small regional museums and the public with advice on conservation and appropriate methods of displaying works of art. It is not often that we get called to help a major institution such as the Art Gallery of Western Australia, but our assistance was requested to prepare textiles from the collection of the State Russian Museum, St Petersburg, and the St Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music for display in the exhibition St Petersburg 1900.

The National Gallery of Australia’s textile conservation department has built up a significant field of expertise in the conservation, preparation and installation of Russian theatre costumes in the exhibitions Studio to stage, From Russia with love and, most recently, Working for Diaghilev in Groningen, the Netherlands. The Gallery is the custodian of one of the largest and most magnificant Ballet Russes collections in the world.

Due to AGWA having no textile conservators of their own and a current national shortage of textile conservators in Australia, I was asked to head the team to condition check and prepare for display fourteen costumes and seven textile items for the exhibition. This was not going to be an easy task as the costumes were known to be in fragile condition and were arriving without

54 national gallery of australia

any display forms. The complete manufacture of the mannequins was out of the question, as there were only two-and-a-half weeks to unpack and install the show, so AGWA borrowed similar-shaped mannequins from the Gallery. The approximate size and style of each costume was worked out from photographs and drawings that provided basic measurements, and suitable mannequins were packed in boxes and shipped over ahead of the exhibition’s arrival in Perth.

The costumes from the State Museum of Theatre and Music arrived wrapped in tissue and packed in cardboard trays. The museum has a very large collection, very little funding and very few textile conservators to look after these culturally valuable artworks so the couriers were happy for any conservation work to be done to stabilise them for display. Along with the theatre costumes are beautiful examples of traditional peasant costumes and headdresses, scarves and other apparel reflecting more affluent lifestyles. These belong to the State Russian Museum, St Petersburg.

One costume that required conservation was for the character Boris Gudonov from the opera by Mussorgsky performed at the Marinsky Theatre in 1911. A series of photographs in the exhibition show Fyodor Chaliapin, the famous Russian bass, wearing this coat to promote

the opera. The luxurious costume is a coat of a heavy black silk/cotton satin and gold thread brocade, lined with bright red satin. The cuffs and the upright collar are decorated with paste jewels and pearls and metallic thread embroidery. The brocade was very fragile and had been mended with various adhesive and crude sewing techniques across the front and arms. These may have been original theatre repairs or possible attempts to save the very important costume over the years. Unfortunately, it arrived with several large tears or splits in the brocade due to the brittleness and fragility of the silk fibres and was not able to go up on display until these had been stabilised. Permission was given to repair them, but only using sewing techniques. This was successful but presented a challenge as most were in difficult areas to access and there was the added complication of the lining which could be caught in the stitching repair.

Working closely with these costumes brought to light their histories through the evidence of inscriptions, darning mends and patches. Many fascinating stories were told by the staff of the St Petersburg State Museum of Theatre and Music, including one about the cloak for Aurora in Sleeping beauty which had formerly belonged to the royal family. The magnificent plush red silk velvet, heavily embroidered with gold thread and foil, was the

skirt train of one of the Grand Duchesses’ robes worn for state occasions and was later given to the theatre.

The human aspect of these costumes is further evident in the different body shapes which are quite unlike the performers of today, demonstrated through the examples of the children (much smaller) and the large-chested, corsetted opera singers. Fitting mannequins to these costumes became quite an anatomy lesson as they were altered to best support any weak seams or heavy draping of jewel-encrusted fabrics.

Two magnificent costumes from a design by Alexander Golovin for the romantic drama Masquerade epitomise the hard life on the stage. They are a complex mix of delicate silks, silk velvets and cotton fabric which have in-ground dirt along the trains and hems, and repairs where one imagines strenuous gestures or hurried costume changes have caused splits and tears along seams as they moved across the stage. Incredibly, this performance is said to have opened with gunfire going off in the streets on the night the Russian Revolution began. a

Conservation treatment being carried out on costume for Boris Gudonov Costume from the drama Masquerade being unpacked from travelling tray Costume for Boris Gudonov from a design by Alexander Golovin for the opera Boris Gudonov performed at the Marinsky Theatre in 1911

Micheline Ford Senior Textile Conservator St Petersburg 1900 is on exhibition at the Art Gallery of Western Australia until 23 October 2005.

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membership

The Membership team host a lunch to celebrate the Melbourne Cup in the Members’ Lounge.

We have a wonderful program of summer events and exhibitions in this season’s calendar. I hope you enjoy the new format of the calendar, with more information and easy-to-reference pages sorted by event category to make it easier to participate in the broad range of the Gallery’s programs. We have included a number of member’s exclusive exhibition previews, and remember you receive discounted entry to all the National Gallery of Australia’s pay events.

We are busy preparing for next year to bring you an even better program of exhibitions and events, beginning in March with the opening of Constable: impressions of land, sea and sky. Look out for more information on our Christmas blockbuster of Egyptian antiquities from the Louvre Museum. Next year will definitely be a year when you will surely get value out of your membership.

If you have not had a chance to visit the Members’ Lounge recently, you won’t have met our new caterers, Trippas White, who are providing a superb dining experience for our members and their guests.

Thankyou to all those members who completed the membership survey – we have had an overwhelming response, and the message in relation to artonview magazine is clear – you love it. We are currently evaluating the thousands of responses and will give you the results soon.

With Christmas upon us, this is a great time to offer a National Gallery of Australia gift membership. In addition to all the regular benefits, new members also receive a free ticket to be used at any pay exhibition in the next twelve months.

Adam Worrall Assistant Director Access Services

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membership As a member of the National Gallery of Australia you will enjoy the following benefits: • Free subscription to the Gallery’s quarterly magazine artonview and the Calendar of events • Discounted admission to ticketed exhibitions • Advance notice, preferential bookings and discounts for other programs including children’s events • Discounts of 10% in the Gallery Shop the Gallery Cafe and the Sculpture Garden Restaurant • Exclusive use of the Members’ Lounge.

Refreshments are available for members and a maximum of three guests • Reciprocal membership benefits at nominated Australian galleries Further information at nga.gov.au.

Freecall 1800 020068, phone 02 6240 6528 or email membership@nga.gov.au

B A R T O N • Canberra’s Premier Boutique Heritage Hotel (est 1927) • 4 Star Property • Located within the Parliamentary Triangle • Close to All Major Attractions • Bar & Licensed Restaurant • Foxtel (Heritage Rooms only) • 24 Hour reception

National Gallery $149.00 Member Rate per night Twin share / double

delicious food professional service memorable events

Includes a full buffet breakfast, Morning newspaper, free parking & complimentary tickets To Old Parliament House

The National Gallery is a short Walk away.

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: info@brassey.net.au http: //www.brassey.net.au CANBERRAN OWNED AND OPERATED

trippas white catering new to the national gallery of australia

special access programs

the art of caring

Voluntary guides Catherine Sykes, Penny Moyes and Kerin Cox discuss Manta Ray 2003 by James Angus with their groups of visitors at the National Sculpture Prize private viewing for carers Margaret Enfield, voluntary guide (centre), and visitors to the exhibition enjoy Moth 2003 by Richard Goodwin

On Saturday 7 October 2005 the National Gallery of Australia opened its doors early for a private viewing and tour of the National Sculpture Prize and exhibition for carers. This was the fifth special event for carers since the private viewing of the exhibition French paintings from the Musée Fabre, Montpellier in December 2003. Over the past two years, literally hundreds of carers have enjoyed Saturday guided tours of major exhibitions such as The Edwardians: secrets and desires, Vivienne Westwood: 34 years of fashion, Grace Cossington Smith: a retrospective exhibition and the National Sculpture Prize and exhibition.

Since 2004 a carers’ art appreciation group has also met each month to explore the Gallery collection and temporary exhibitions, guided by enthusiastic voluntary guides, on-call educators and curatorial staff. Lively discussions are often continued over a coffee in the Gallery’s brasserie.

So why is this initiative so important? There are over 43,000 carers in the ACT taking responsibility for a family member or friend who has a disability, is frail or has a physical or mental illness. Very often these are forgotten and isolated members of our community. Working in

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partnership with Carers ACT, who provide respite care and transport for many carers, the Gallery has been able to provide ‘time out’ for carers and stimulate an understanding and pleasure of the visual arts. Jan Agnew, a counsellor with Carers ACT, feels that an important and affirming aspect of this partnership is that ‘it shows a major institution in the ACT has a carers’ focus, and is thinking about us’.

From John Glover and the colonial picturesque, Surface beauty: photographic reflections on glass and china to Bill Viola: the Passions, every visit has been diverse, engaging and interactive. Particularly memorable was a drawing tour in the Sculpture Garden with artist/educator Tess Horwitz, which was as hilarious as it was challenging.

The feedback from carers themselves – their enormous appreciation for the warmth and encouragement of the voluntary guides and staff, and gratitude to the Gallery for its continued support in making these events free – highlights the value of access to the Gallery. a Annette Tapp On-call Educator Special Access Programs

EVERYONE HAS AN OPINION ABOUT ART, EVEN US. PARTICULARLY WHEN IT’S A COPYRIGHT DISPUTE. Reward your senses with Musica Viva’s inspirational performances.

Corrs Chambers Westgarth is one of Australia's leading law firms.

We act for a wide range of corporate, commercial and government clients. From construction to international law, trade practices to intellectual property, our clients turn to us for quality legal advice that reflects business insight and creates commercial results.

Our 2006 season includes the legendary Borodin Quartet; music from the golden age of the Spanish Renaissance by the Harp Consort; violin mastery from Julian Rachlin; even Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata performed by British piano virtuoso, Paul Lewis. Andreas Scholl, who possesses ‘a vocal perfection near supernatural’ also makes his much anticipated return to Australia.

These and more great artists are yours to experience from Musica Viva in 2006.†

For your FREE CD* and subscription brochure call 1800 688 482 or visit www.musicaviva.com.au

For more information please contact Tom Brennan, Partner Tel: 02 6276 5500 Canberra House 40 Marcus Clarke Street Canberra ACT 2600

†Not all artists perform in all capital cities *CD subject to availability

MAKING BUSINESS SENSE Media Partner

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4HE ART OF RELAXATION

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FORREST INN & APPARTMENTS • Overnight accommodation • Full buffet breakfast • Walking distance to Manuka Shopping Village • $65 per person twin share • Telephone 1800 676 372 • Email reservations@forrestinn.com.au Exibitions to vist while in Canberra: At the National Library of Australia - National Treasures from Australia’s Great Libraries (3rd December 2005 to 12 February 2006) At the National Gallery of Australia - Transformations: The Language of Craft (11th November 2005 to 29th January 2006) Against the Grain: Helen Frankenthaler woodcuts (26th November 2005 - 5th February 2006)

Michael Leunig’s Street Football, Collection of the State Library of Victoria

Ned Kelly’s helmet, Collection of the State Library of Victoria

Henry Lawson’s pen, Collection of the National Library of Australia

30 NATIONAL CIRCUIT FORREST ACT 2603 PHONE: 02 6295 3433 - FAX: 02 6295 2119 - www.forrestinn.com.au

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faces in view 1 & 2 Voluntary guides host an event for rural visitors 3 & 4 Chunky Move residency and sessions 5 Guy Warren, Deborah Hart and Joy Warren at the opening of Moist 6 Bill Viola: An evening with John Bell 7 Lee Liberman, Ian Donaldson and Grazia Gunn at the opening of Moist 8 Wayne Osborn, John Pizzey and Jeffrey Smart at the Alcoa Gift media launch 9 Anne McDonald,

ngashop the art of shopping

Barry McDonald, ex de Medici, Lucky Oceans and George Macintosh at the opening of Moist 10 David Handley, John Pizzey, Wayne Osborn, Janine Murphy and Meg McDonald at the Alcoa Gift media launch 11 Richard Birrinbirrin

Indigenous arts and craft * books and catalogues * calendars

performing a singing ceremony at the Art Gallery of South Australia opening of

and diaries * prints and posters * gifts * jewellery * fine art cards

No ordinary place: the art of David Malangi 12 Paul Dowd, Managing Director, Newmont Australia Limited and Richard Birrinbirrin at the Art Gallery of South

* accessories * desirable objects * toys

Australia opening of No ordinary place: the art of David Malangi 13 Artists from Warlukurlangu Art Centre at Yuendumu visiting the National Gallery of Australia after spending a week in Canberra having eye surgery for cataracts. The visit was sponsored by the Canberra Medical Society. (Back left to right) Brenda Croft, Gloria Morales (Napaljarri), Micheline Ford (Front left to right), Rosie Nangala

Gallery Shop open 7 days 10am–5pm Phone 02 6240 6420 ngashop.com.au

Fleming, Judy Nampijinpa Granites, Marlette Napurrurla Ross, Judy Napangardi Watson, Liddy Napanangka Walker

Blown Glass Decoration Elizabeth Kelly Limited edition of 150 Exclusive to the Gallery Shop $29.95

Castlemaine Art Gallery

Koori Art Designs Avoca

Ballarat Fine Art Gallery

Bendigo Fine Art Gallery

Ballarat Fine Art Gallery

Convent Gallery Daylesford Castlemaine Art Gallery

Castlemaine Art Gallery

Bendigo Fine Art Gallery

You’ll find works by artists such as Arthur

your attention in this cultural hub. As will

Streeton, Clifton Pugh, Norman Lindsay ,

the grand Victorian architecture, and the

William Dobell, Fred Williams and Jeffrey

myriad of bric-a-brac stores, restaurants and

Smart housed in the galleries of Victoria’s

wineries that this region has to offer . For a

Goldfields. The work of contemporary and

free Victoria’s Goldfields brochure phone

indigenous Australian artists will also vie for 64 national gallery of australia

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This is an exceptional opportunity to acquire one of Canberra’s finest apartments. Luxury two and three bedroom apartments and penthouses are now available.

WE I N V I T E YO U TO V I S I T T H E WAT E RF R O N T M A R K E T I N G S U I T E & D I S P L AY A PA RT M E N T , O P E N 7 DAY S F R O M 1 P M - 5 P M . M U N D A R I N G D R I V E , K I N G S T O N F O R E S H O R E . A LT E R N AT I V E LY ,

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Helen Frankenthaler Tales of Genji VI 1998 colour woodcut and stencil Purchased with the assistance of the Orde Poynton Fund 2002 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

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26 November 2005 – 5 February 2006

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Transformations • helen frankenthaler