2006.Q1 | artonview 45 Autumn 2006

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ISSUE No.45 autumn 2006

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N AT I O N A L G A L L E R Y O F A U S T R A L I A

constable • crescent moon • otto dix

WAR The Prints of Otto Dix

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 24 February – 28 May 2006 Principal sponsor

Supported by

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 17 December 2005 – 30 April 2006 Organised by the National Gallery of Australia in partnership with the Art Gallery of South Australia Yogyakarta, Central Java, Indonesia Serat Dewi Ruci 1886 European paper, ink, pigment, gold leaf Presented by the Friends of the Gallery Library in memory of Tina Wentcher, 1982 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Otto Dix Sturmtruppe geht unter Gas vor [Stormtroops advancing under a gas attack] plate 12 from the portfolio Der Krieg [War] 1924 etching, aquatint National Gallery of Australia, Canberra © Otto Dix, Licensed by VISCOPY, Australia

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

Director’s foreword

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Director’s vision

10 Constable: impressions of land, sea and sky

Designer Sarah Robinson

16 Constable: the ecstasy of stormy elements

Photography Eleni Kypridis Barry Le Lievre Brenton McGeachie Steve Nebauer John Tassie Designed and produced in Australia by the National Gallery of Australia Printed in Australia by Pirion Printers, Canberra

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Published quarterly: Issue no. 45, Autumn 2006 © National Gallery of Australia Print Post Approved pp255003/00078 All rights reserved. Reproduction without permission is strictly prohibited. The opinions expressed in artonview are not necessarily those of the editor or publisher.

21 Australia and Constable 22 Crescent moon: Islamic art and civilisation in Southeast Asia 32 War: the prints of Otto Dix 38 New acquisitions 50 Collection focus: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art 54 Conservation: restoring the glow to Afterglow 56 Kenneth Tyler at the National Gallery of Australia 58 Tribute: Jimmy Wululu 60 Faces in view

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 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

front cover: John Constable Harwich Lighthouse c. 1820 (detail) oil on canvas Tate, London, gift of Maria Louisa Constable, Isabel Constable and Lionel Bicknell Constable in 1888

direc tor’s foreword

Ron Radford with Harold Mitchell AO, outgoing chairman of the National Gallery of Australia Council

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This is a very exciting time at the Gallery with the opening of two major and contrasting exhibitions, Crescent moon: Islamic art and civilisation in Southeast Asia and Constable: impressions of land, sea and sky.

As the first major international exhibition to focus on the Islamic art of Southeast Asia, Crescent moon introduces Australian audiences to the beauty and complexity of Islamic culture within our region, to reveal the unique developments in the arts of Islamic Indonesia, Malaysia, but also the Muslim communities of the Philippines, Thailand, Burma and Cambodia. Splendid objects in silk, gold, lacquer, porcelain and stone illustrate the transformation of indigenous motifs and techniques into new art forms to express the message of the Prophet Mohammed.

Crescent moon brings together 180 valuable loans from museums, palace treasuries and private collections of Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei, displayed alongside objects from Australian institutions, in particular, textiles from the National Gallery of Australia’s spectacular collection of Southeast Asian textiles, and Islamic ceramics from the Art Gallery of South Australia.

I would especially like to acknowledge all the lenders, the curator of Asian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia, James Bennett, Principal Sponsor Santos, and the particular enthusiasm of John Ellice-Flint, CEO and Managing Director, along with the extraordinary generosity of the Gordon Darling Foundation in providing funding to produce the splendid catalogue, and the support for special education projects by The Myer Foundation’s Beyond Australia and the Sidney Myer Fund.

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Constable: impressions of land, sea and sky curated by the Gallery’s Head of Australian Art, Anna Gray, continues the Gallery’s commitment to analysing the historical legacy of European and, in particular, British art, with a major focus on this important landscape artist.

Over 100 works have been selectively drawn together from distinguished museums and private collections in Great Britain, the United States and Australia, including the British Museum, the Royal Academy of Arts, Tate Britain, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, and the Frick Collection, New York. Qantas Freight and The Seven Network have once again generously supported the Gallery by transporting the works and providing television promotion for this exhibition.

The exhibition showcases the extraordinary range of Constable’s work, from his exuberant outdoor sketches to masterpieces such as Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Grounds 1822–23 and The Vale of Dedham 1827–28. The exhibition is presented thematically to show key phases of Constable’s approach to the landscape, such as his wellknown cloud and sea studies, and what may well be his favourite subject, the lock – including his Royal Academy Diploma work, A boat passing a lock 1826.

A special display titled Australia and Constable has been included within the exhibition to explore Constable’s influence on Australian art through the much-loved Australian landscape paintings of John Glover, Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and Hans Heysen, leading up to the work of contemporary practitioners, such as Howard Taylor, Philip Wolfhagen and Lesley Duxbury.

If you have not already done so, please also take this opportunity to see the remarkable portfolio of prints by Otto Dix, Der Krieg [War] 1924. Modelled on Francisco Goya’s famous Los desastres de la guerra [The disasters of war], and acquired recently by the Department of International Prints and Drawings. The complete cycle of fifty prints is now on view in the Project Gallery. As curator Mark Henshaw states in his essay in this issue, it is ‘one of the most powerful indictments of war ever conceived’ by an artist.

I would also like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the retirement of Harold Mitchell as chairman of the National Gallery of Australia Council.

During his term as both a member (1998–2001) and chairman (2001–05) of the council Harold gave a great

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deal of his time, passion and enthusiasm, and made a significant impact on the National Gallery of Australia’s direction. We were privileged to have Harold’s strong leadership. What the general public have not known to this point is that Harold is one of our most generous benefactors. And although Harold oversees the largest media-sales organisation in the country, he still found time to fly to Canberra to officiate at every exhibition opening, affirming wholeheartedly, ‘As I always like to say, “this is a great gallery, in a great city, in a great country”’. In every sense Harold maintained a supportive, hands-on role as chairman, and was always at the end of the telephone line for advice to both Brian Kennedy and myself.

He is succeeded in the role of chairman by Rupert Myer, whose appointment was announced on 18 December 2005 by the Minister for the Arts and Sport, Senator the Hon. Rod Kemp.

Rupert has been a National Gallery of Australia Council Member since 2003 and is director of the National Gallery of Australia Foundation. In January 2005 Mr Myer was made a Member of the Order of Australia for service to the arts, for support to museums and galleries and to the community through a range of philanthropic and service organisations.

I had the personal privilege of working with Rupert, when he spearheaded the Commonwealth Government’s Inquiry into the Contemporary Visual Arts and Craft Sector 2001–02, an initiative that achieved a much-needed boost in funding to the contemporary visual arts sector, during my own term as chair of the Visual Arts/Craft Board of the Australia Council (1997–2001). I know that Rupert is wellregarded by the visual arts community, and has significant experience on museum boards and foundations.

I hope that many of you will agree, this is an exciting time for the Gallery.

Donations Ross Adamson Philip Bacon AM Anthony Berg AM and family Graham Bradley Antony G Breuer Joan Daley OAM Lady Nancy Fairfax OBE Di Gregson Andrew Gwinnett Catherine Rossi Harris PSM John Hindmarsh Reverend Theodora Hobbs Peter Jopling QC Harold Mitchell AO Cameron O’Reilly Angus Paltridge Jennifer Prescott Alan D Rose AO and Helen E Rose Penelope Evatt-Seidler Raphy Star Caroline Turner Anonymous Gifts Rosemary Dobson Bolton Louise Dauth eX de Medici John Eager Helen W Drutt English Thea Exley Peter Fay William Hamilton Russell Harper Pauline Hunter Terrance Lane David Rose John F Turner Robert H Turner Rosalind Turner Zuses Grants The Myer Foundation Sidney Myer Fund Principal Sponsor Santos Ltd Supporting Sponsors Qantas Freight Seven Network

Ron Radford Director

Sponsors Casella Wines Saville Park Suites, Canberra SMS Management & Technology

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Vision for the National Gallery of Australia: part two Part two of the vision statement presented by Ron Radford, Director of the National Gallery of Australia, on the Gallery’s birthday, 12 October 2005

The building and the collection displays The National Gallery of Australia’s building was conceived in the late 1960s. Plans, by the architectural firm Edwards, Madigan, Torzillo & Briggs, were finished at the beginning of the seventies, before the collections were formed. It took nearly a decade to build. Opened by HM Queen Elizabeth II in 1982, it is an important architectural example of seventies concrete architecture in the Brutalist style. Costing $82 million, it was an extremely expensive building for its time. The building has architectural distinction and is part of Canberra’s heritage. However, as an art museum it has always been criticised by the museum profession and the public alike, particularly as its interior is unsympathetic to most works of art. The building has been an ongoing challenge to former and current directors and curators of the Gallery. There were conceptual problems in the earliest brief.

Since the National Gallery had neither collections nor staff when the building was first designed, it could not be designed around a known or probable collection.

Moreover, it was conceived to show 1,000 works, but the collections have grown to well over 100,000 works. The collections have long outgrown the building and lack of display space is overwhelmingly the Gallery’s greatest problem. There are many other limitations to the building. Ceilings are far too high in the main entrancelevel display galleries and too low on the upstairs display floor. The concrete-aggregate wall surface visually interferes with the viewing of most paintings. The public entrance is confusing; visitors don’t know where to enter the building. Confusing interior circulation remains an ongoing complaint. The facilities for openings, other events, and catering are limited. There has never been any special provision for the display of Indigenous Australian art, now a major component of the collection.

Many of these problems will be addressed in Stage One of the building alterations currently being planned, in which process Andrew Andersons, of PTW Architects, and I are working with Col Madigan.

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Building additions: Stage One. New entrance and Indigenous Australian galleries In Stage One, a new more visible and accessible groundlevel entrance is being planned for the south of the building, facing the current ground-surface car park. The new entrance area will have escalators to and from the galleries on the main level; a lift will also provide access to the underground car park. The entrance area will have a new cloakroom and a new enlarged bookshop. An adjacent ground-level space will be created for openings and events, and will open onto a newly created Australian garden. It will be a space that can be commercially hired out when not required for Gallery functions and, if necessary, can be divided into three separate spaces.

At the new ground-level entrance there will be a specifically created area for the 1988 Aboriginal Memorial, one of the most important works in the collection.

Appropriately, this impressive sculptural installation, a major work of art, will be the first that visitors see as they enter the Gallery. It will be displayed in a way that relates to the outside landscaping.

Immediately above the new entrance and its facilities there will be specially created galleries for Indigenous Australian art that will connect to the existing galleries on the main level. Each of these new galleries will be designed to accommodate the needs of specific types of Indigenous Australian art, with areas for small early dot paintings, large galleries for larger dot paintings, spaces for bark paintings, and for Hermannsburg watercolours, Indigenous textiles, prints, ceramics and sculpture. The main Indigenous art galleries will be sky-lit, apart from those areas intended for the display of light-sensitive works such as textiles, baskets and watercolours. These will be the first galleries in Australia designed around the specific needs of displaying different aspects of Indigenous Australian art.

The famous Ned Kelly series by Sidney Nolan, arguably the Gallery’s most popular Australian work, will be brought downstairs to the main level and given a special room at a location currently occupied by a lobby area and

the Gallery Shop. The Kelly paintings will be among the first works seen on the principal display floor. Existing shop and cloakroom spaces will be converted to small spaces for the decorative arts and on the opposite side of the hallway from the Kelly paintings, a space is reserved for displaying works from the photography collection.

The overwhelming problem with the current building – apart from the lack of a noticeable entrance to the Gallery, and the fact that the collection has long outgrown the building – is that Australian Art is relegated to secondary status. Australian art is confined to the low-ceilinged ‘attic’ upstairs. The area is too small to show either the full richness of our culture or even our existing extensive collection. The inaccessibility, in the present building, of Australia’s own visual culture – and its placement in an unattractive corridor-like space – could be seen as the ultimate cultural cringe. Some visitors never find the present upstairs galleries containing Australian art. The National Gallery of Australia should display Australian visual culture much more accessibly, attractively and expansively.

Stage One of the building program will do this for Indigenous Australian art. Stage Two will similarly redisplay the rest of Australian and Australasian art.

Building additions: Stage Two. Australian Art (non-Indigenous) In Stage Two of the building program, completely new galleries for Australian art should be created in a new wing built to encircle the present temporary-exhibitions galleries. Australian art should be brought downstairs from the ‘attic’ to occupy this large area of its own on the main level, the ‘piano nobile’ floor. These new Australian galleries will be illuminated from above with sunlight, the same light by which most of the works were created.

The future Stage Two galleries for Australian art should connect to the new galleries for Indigenous Australian art that are part of Stage One. Indigenous art, appropriately, will be encountered first. Chronologicallyarranged galleries will proceed from the colonial period onwards. Preceding colonial art there should be an

introductory gallery showing eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-century European art in the Pacific. All the galleries should be designed to accommodate the specific scale and diverse forms of Australian art. For example, spacious galleries with high ceilings are required for large Edwardian figure paintings and Federation landscapes; smaller, lower-ceiling galleries would suit modernist pictures of the 1920s and 1930s; while larger galleries are again necessary for neoclassical figure paintings and sculptures of the same period and smaller galleries for Australian modernism of the 1940s. Large high spaces will be designed to accomodate the diverse forms of contemporary Australian art.

Adjacent to the main chronologically arranged day-lit galleries will be small side galleries, with lower ceilings and without natural light, for light-sensitive works on paper – watercolours, drawings, prints and photographs – and also for textiles. Such galleries are especially important for the periods of Australian art when works on paper (e.g. artonview

A provisional concept design for the front entrance for Stage One of the proposed additions to the National Gallery of Australia building

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early colonial watercolours) are artistically stronger and more numerous than oil paintings. The National Gallery of Australia has the finest and largest collection of Australian works of art on paper. These adjacently arranged exhibition spaces will also feature Australian design and decorative arts.

The Australian galleries should be planned to incorporate exceptional works in the collection such as Napier Waller’s large mural design I’ll put a girdle round about the earth (which currently cannot be displayed) and John Olsen’s major painting Sydney sun installed as it was intended – as a ceiling.

Furthermore, the Gallery’s proposed new wing for Australian art will hopefully attract major private collections. With new spaces the National Gallery of Australia can offer donors naming rights to certain galleries. There exist private collections that could significantly help complete aspects of the national collection of Australian art.

Galleries in the future Australian art wing also provide an opportunity for offering naming rights to prospective donors of cash to Australian art.

Displaying Asian art: Stage One Asian Art, too, should be brought to the piano nobile floor, up from the lower-level Gallery 9 to main-level Galleries 11 and 12 (and in Stage Two also add Gallery 8, the current Orde Poynton Gallery). We should focus on sympathetic displays of mixed media (sculptures, paintings and textiles) beginning with Indian Hindu, Jain and Buddhist art. The redisplay of the Indian art collection will be completed in August 2006 and Indian Islamic art will link with Southeast Asian Islamic art. Southeast Asian Ancestral and Animist art, and other arts of Southeast Asia, will also link into the Indian display.

Each major Asian sculpture will have its own custommade pedestal of concrete in keeping with the concrete architecture of the Gallery building. Chinese and Japanese art, Middle Eastern Islamic art and other Central Asian arts will remain where they are in the lower-level Gallery 10, connected by the two ramps to the rest of Asian art on the main level above.

Displaying Pacific arts: Stage Two A special large gallery should be created in Stage Two for traditional art of the Pacific Islands, including the Maori art of New Zealand, the traditional Melanesian art of New Guinea, New Caledonia, Vanuatu and the Solomon Islands, and the Polynesian art of Samoa, Fiji, Tonga, Hawaii, etc. The works will be shown as art and not anthropology. This display should be connected to a large gallery devoted to contemporary art of Asia and the Pacific.

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These galleries for the Pacific arts should be strategically placed towards the end of the future Australian wing, in proximity to contemporary Australian art, reflecting their geography in relation to Australia. This great attention to the Pacific past and present has never been attempted before in any art museum in Australia – or indeed elsewhere. It is a major new initiative and must be seen as very significant for our region.

In summing up, for art-political reasons and ease of access, the art of all the major cultures should have a significant presence on the same accessible main-level floor: the piano nobile. And Stage Two should also be designed in a way that allows much better circulation than the present building.

Sculpture Gallery: Stage One Gallery 9, where the main Asian display is currently located, will return to being a sculpture gallery. When the building opened in 1982 most visitors and museum professionals agreed this was the one gallery that really worked. Indeed it was strikingly successful, centred upon the exquisite Brancusi Birds in space which will return to the sculpture gallery. Sculptures representing all cultures could be displayed in this beautiful gallery.

Open study storage: Stage Two Beneath the main-level galleries for the future display of Australian art, open study-storage galleries should be created for Australian art. Study storage is where very dense and unaesthetically arranged displays are accessible to the general public, either all the time or on selected days each week. Study storage is becoming common in America – for example the American Decorative Arts display at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art – and exists for Old Master paintings at the National Gallery, London, yet it has never been incorporated successfully into an art museum in Australia. It would help relieve the Gallery’s acute storage problem and make the Australian collections (other than light-sensitive textiles and works on paper) completely accessible to the public.

The Research Library and the Collection-Study Rooms: Stage Two The National Gallery of Australia Research Library is the most important art library in Australia. The ground-level space beneath the future galleries for Australian Art should be used not only for open study-storage but also to create an expanded library with easier access from outside for visiting researchers and scholars. Adjacent to the library should be collection-study rooms and storage for our huge collection of Australian works on paper, which is stored in solander boxes. Adjacent to this area could be a similar study arrangement for textiles, especially the major Southeast Asian textile collection.

The much enlarged Australian displays and, on the ground level below them, the Open Study Storage, the Collection-Study Rooms and the Research Library together will form a unique and important Centre for Australian Art. Such a centre should eventually establish formal links with Canberra’s Australian National University.

Office space: Stage Two The present library space could be easily converted into the much needed expansion and consolidation of office space.

Works on paper and textile displays: upstairs galleries. Stage Two The National Gallery of Australia holds more works on paper than any other art museum in Australia. This includes the largest collections of International and Australian photographs, twentieth-century American prints, nineteenth- and twentieth-century European prints, Australian prints and drawings and illustrated books. The Gallery also holds Australia’s largest collection of Asian textiles. The upstairs galleries, currently used to display Australian art, may not be suitable, with their smaller spaces, lower ceilings and lack of natural daylight, for displaying Australian paintings and sculptures but they are ideal for a series of galleries in which to install changing displays of photographs, European prints and American prints. The series could also accommodate a special gallery for Indian and, particularly, Indonesian textiles. A new Orde Poynton Gallery (or several Orde Poynton Galleries) could be created for works on paper. A small gallery for late-nineteenth-, twentieth- and twenty-first-century design could also be established on this upper level.

Galleries such as these will be significant and unique in Australia, particularly for visitors who enjoy intense study of such material.

International contemporary art: Stage Two The one high-ceilinged space on the upstairs level, Gallery 7, currently used for contemporary Australian art, could be used for the most recent international art, and include Australian contemporary art.

Redisplays of current International galleries: Stage One In the current International display, the walls have been clad with white-painted plasterboard in a desire to make the building more sympathetic for the works of art, covering the concrete-aggregate walls that were so particularly unsympathetic for paintings. While the works of art are now better-displayed, the interior look of the building has changed from what was described as a ‘concrete bunker’ to something worse, an insubstantial white ‘cardboard box’. The internal architectural integrity of the building has been compromised.

A solution must be found not only to honour the integrity of the original building interior but also, at the same time, to be sympathetic to the works of art. Naturally textured and carefully coloured wall cladding and temporary partition walls are required to complement the concrete structure. The Gallery curators and designers are currently working with me on a solution.

Furthermore, newly planned International and Asian Art collection displays in the current building will attempt to integrate, where possible, prints, drawings, textiles and decorative arts into the displays of paintings and sculptures.

This has always been done, with varying degrees of success, in the awkward upstairs Australian galleries.

Importantly, highlights of Australian art should be included in the International displays. Australian art must be seen in an international context as well as in a comprehensive national display. In the past this has been done occasionally, but must be done more consistently, particularly where Australian artists can be favourably compared with their international peers. (In the current upstairs Australian display, wall colours have already been very recently changed and a new display of nineteenthand early-twentieth-century art, including many very recent acquisitions, has just been completed.)

More radical changes to the newly integrated International displays will be finished within the next twelve months after the Aboriginal Memorial is temporarily moved from its present location in Gallery 1 to Gallery 9, the past and future Sculpture Gallery, before being permanently relocated to the new ground-level entrance area of the Stage One extensions.

Relighting The collection-display spaces also need to be completely relit. There are too many gloomy areas. The lighting system is antiquated; lighting fixtures have become unsightly and inconsistent. The lighting is not only inadequate and inflexible but the systems are highly unattractive. We need to engage experienced international lighting experts who can undertake this major expensive, but necessary, task.

Exhibitions Temporary exhibitions keep the public and the media vitally interested in the National Gallery of Australia. Special exhibitions provide in-depth access to artists, periods or themes and they provide audiences with new insights not readily available in the permanent collections. They also provide a focus for associated public programs. The Gallery’s exhibition program should complement the collections. On the one hand exhibitions should parallel the strengths of the Gallery’s collections and, on the other, bring in the kinds of art absent from the collections.

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In Stage Two of the building alterations we plan to increase the temporary-exhibitions area so that a new space for our smaller collection-based exhibition projects could be adjacent to the main exhibition space. The present Project Gallery is, unfortunately, the furthest space from the entrance to the building.

The Gallery should stage at least one fine blockbuster exhibition every year to bring in large numbers of visitors and generate income to maintain the exhibition program. There should be an attempt to make various middle-sized shows largely pay for themselves. And we should also undertake more esoteric shows, which may not necessarily be popular with audiences, and therefore need to be highly subsidised, but which stretch one’s knowledge, imagination and understanding.

In the exhibition program over a period of years there should be balance between traditional and contemporary art, and between European, Asian, Pacific and Australian art. The program should also include exhibitions containing different media, not just painting but sculpture, photographic media, prints, drawings and the decorative arts. The National Gallery of Australia has a particular role in developing and displaying imaginative exhibitions of Australian artists, movements or periods that may have been neglected. We could also help smaller art museums by becoming a partner in presenting shows of their nationally significant local artists.

A great many publicly-funded exhibition spaces for contemporary art are to be found throughout the nation and also in Canberra. Even so the National Gallery of Australia should include contemporary projects in its program. Such projects help develop audiences that might never find their way to their local contemporary art spaces, and they can contextualise difficult new art for inexperienced audiences. But this should never be a main thrust of the program; the National Gallery of Australia should not compete with or threaten the role of Australia’s contemporary art spaces and museums of contemporary art.

Unfortunately, organising exhibitions (especially blockbusters) has effectively become three times more costly in the past six years or so. We should therefore look at doing no more than three or four shows per year in the major temporary-exhibitions galleries, and avoid the practice of removing the permanent collection to accommodate temporary exhibitions. We will continue to produce high-quality low-cost exhibitions from our rich collections for the Project Gallery, the Orde Poynton Gallery and the Children’s Gallery.

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It should go without saying that the National Gallery of Australia must also continue its excellent program of touring exhibitions around Australia and – after the success of the Out & About program – by continuing to release small focus displays drawn from the national collection. The ongoing travelling-exhibitions program is an important way to share the collections with the nation.

Children’s Gallery: Stage Two A new and larger Children’s Gallery should be established in the Stage Two construction. The present Children’s Gallery is very popular but far too small for school groups. This future gallery should be placed adjacent to the other temporary-exhibitions galleries.

Publishing the collections Art museums should publish or perish. Since the National Gallery of Australia is located in Canberra, a city with a population of about 350,000 (and only the sixth-largest city in Australia), publishing allows the Gallery to extend its audiences both nationally and internationally. The curators, and others, must be encouraged and given every opportunity to research the collections and related material, and publish the results.

A great national gallery must contain in-house scholarship in order to maintain its international credibility. We must of course fulfil the expectation that we should be the world’s principal centre of scholarship in Australian art. At present we are also a world centre for scholarship in Indonesian textiles.

The collection should be published electronically as well as made available through print publications in the form of books and catalogues. The Gallery should aim to make all works in all collections available online through both images and texts. Much has been done already to make them digitally accessible to all Australians and to promote the collections worldwide. The online collections will assist in disseminating information with which to educate and whet a very large public appetite for the treasures we hold in trust for the nation.

At the same time we must continue to publish books on artists, collections and collecting areas of artistic and cultural significance. The scholarship should be of the highest quality, and so should the design and production. a Part one of the 2005 Director’s Vision for the National Gallery of Australia was published in the summer 2005–06 issue of artonview. The full Director’s Vision is also available online at nga.gov.au/Vision.

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Masterpieces for the Nation appeal Looking to the future, we are proud to present the opportunity for Members to participate in acquiring a major work for the collection. This year the Director takes delight in proposing an oil painting by Sydney Long, Flamingoes c. 1906. Sydney Long was the leading proponent of the art nouveau style in Australian painting at the beginning of the twentieth century and this work is a remarkable example of Long’s decorative style.

Flamingoes were a popular motif for Sydney Long as in art nouveau more generally, their sinuous necks and exotic connotations highly appropriate to the flowing lines and sensual nature of the art nouveau style.

Flamingoes will be an important addition to the Gallery’s select collection of turn-of-the-century art nouveau and symbolist painting, complementing works

by Bernard Hall, Rupert Bunny, DH Souter and Bertram Mackennal, as well as Sydney Long’s The spirit of the plains 1914 already in the collection. This is your opportunity to make a donation and share the excitement of knowing this exceptional work will bring pleasure to many future generations. Please forward your donation to Silvana Colucciello in the Development Office or telephone her on 02 6240 6454.

Constable: impressions of land, sea and sky Once again we thank our committed and long-term supporters: Qantas Freight for airfreighting the works to Australia; and Channel Seven for creating and broadcasting the inspiring television advertisement.

Crescent Moon: Islamic art and civilisation in Southeast Asia We welcome and thank Santos as the Principal Sponsor of this special exhibition. As a major Australian oil and gas exploration and production company with expanding interests in the Asia Pacific region, their support represents significant commitment to developing cultural ties with our Southeast Asian neighbours.

The Gordon Darling Foundation’s generous grant towards the curator’s research and the production of the splendid catalogue ensures readers many hours of pleasure and in-depth knowledge about the exceptional works in the exhibition.

We also acknowledge the value of The Myer Foundation’s grant directed to a family day and children’s workshops; the Sidney Myer Fund’s grant for the study day and education resource, with the support of the Australia Indonesia Institute and the Australia Malaysia Institute, enabling the attendance of Indonesian and Malaysian speakers at the special cultural day.

Sydney Long Flamingoes c. 1906 oil on canvas

Conservation equipment donation On behalf of the Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, conservation research colleague Dr Simon Watts kindly donated an Ion Chromatograph. The gift will greatly assist with the research currently being undertaken by Paper Conservators at the Gallery, and will enable the Gallery to monitor air quality in Solander storage boxes, display cases and gallery spaces.

Lyn Conybeare Head of Development

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exhibition galleries

Constable: impressions of land, sea and sky National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 3 March – 12 June 2006 Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington 5 July – 8 October 2006

John Constable A boat passing a lock 1826 oil on canvas Royal Academy of Arts, London, Diploma work, accepted in 1829

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John Constable (1776–1837) is one of the greatest British landscape painters, renowned for his ‘pure and unaffected representation of nature’. Constable: impressions of land, sea and sky showcases the extraordinary range of Constable’s work, from his outdoor sketches to his cabinet pictures to some of his larger exhibition pieces.

It presents the breadth of his approach to image making and shows the brilliance of his depiction of nature: how he captured light in the sky and reflected on the ground, how he showed it glistening on water and sparkling in the trees, how he animated the landscape and created a sense of air that brought nature alive. It especially demonstrates the vitality of his many impressions of specific places and of particular times of day, and how he gave these brief moments a continuing existence. It also indicates the significance of these sketches, how Constable used these impressions in creating his exhibition pictures, in transporting something of their directness and immediacy into his larger work.

The son of Golding Constable, a prosperous corn and coal merchant, mill owner, and barge operator, and his wife Anne (née Watts), Constable was born on 11 June 1776. He grew up at East Bergholt, along the Stour River in Suffolk, England. He spent several years working in his father’s milling business, where he learnt to understand the importance of weather to an agricultural community and to observe atmospheric phenomena with a disciplined

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John Constable View towards the rectory, East Bergholt

30 September 1810 oil on canvas laid on panel John G Johnson collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art, bequeathed in 1917 John Constable Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Grounds 1823 oil on canvas Victoria and Albert Museum, London, gift of John Sheepshanks in 1857 John Constable A cottage in a cornfield c. 1816–17 oil on canvas Amgueddfa Cymru National Museum Wales, Cardiff, purchased with the assistance of the National Art Collections Fund in 1978

eye. At the same time, he privately pursued his ambition to be a painter, working in the fields, painting one view for a certain time each day until the shadows changed. In 1796, the engraver and antiquarian John Thomas (‘Antiquity’) Smith advised Constable not to people his landscapes with imaginary figures as was common at the time, but to include figures actually observed in the landscape. He also suggested that Constable use varying shades of green when depicting vegetation, a feature of Constable’s work which was later admired by the French artist, Eugène Delacroix.

Constable went to London in February 1799, with a small allowance from his father, to study at the Royal Academy Schools. After viewing the works on display at the Royal Academy in 1802, he wrote to his East Bergholt friend John Dunthorne that ‘Nature is the fountain’s head, the source from whence all originality must spring’ and returned to East Bergholt to make ‘laborious studies from nature’ to achieve a ‘pure and unaffected representation of the scenes’.

Between 1808 and 1816, Constable spent most of the summers and early autumns in Suffolk, sketching in the fields and the surrounding countryside, producing works such as View towards the rectory, East Bergholt, 30 September 1810. He also made drawings in small pocket sketchbooks, which provided the source for a number of future paintings. In 1813, he wrote ‘How much real delight I have had with the study of Landscape this summer’. Over the succeeding years he made many sketches in the open air in Suffolk, creating works that are remarkable for their freshness and spontaneity, and for the freedom of their brushwork.

For the most part, Constable painted places with which he felt a deep emotional attachment, or that were associated with his family and friends. He visited the cathedral city of Salisbury for the first time in September 1811 as a guest of the Bishop, Dr John Fisher. He met with the Bishop’s nephew and namesake, John Fisher, later Archdeacon of Berkshire, who became Constable’s closest friend. Constable’s letters to Fisher provide insights into his world and his art and many of his thoughts and feelings.

On his visits to Salisbury over the years Constable painted important images of the cathedral and the surrounding countryside, such as Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop’s Grounds 1823, in which he captured the air and atmosphere of a summer morning, with the silver grey of the cathedral shining through the golden foliage.

On the death of his father on 14 May 1816 Constable received an inheritance of £400 a year, which gave him a degree of financial independence and enabled him to marry Maria Bicknell, whom he had been courting for seven years. During their honeymoon they stayed with John and Mary Fisher at their vicarage in Osmington, near Weymouth, Dorset – with Constable and Fisher spending time sketching the environs of Weymouth Bay and visiting Salisbury. In advance of the visit Fisher had written to Constable: My house commands a singularly beautiful view: & you may study from my very windows … we never see company: & I have brushes paints & canvas in abundance. My wife is quiet & silent & sits & reads without disturbing a soul & Mrs Constable may follow her example. Of an evening we will sit over an autumnal fireside read a sensible book perhaps a Sermon, & after prayers get us to bed at peace with ourselves & all the world.

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John Constable Brighton Beach (A sea beach) 1824 oil on paper laid on canvas Detroit Institute of the Arts, bequeathed by Mr and Mrs Edgar B Whitcomb in 1953

Constable was a great innovator, but he also had a passionate interest in the works of the Old Masters, and in particular the great tradition of landscape painting of Claude Lorraine and Jacob van Ruisdael. He continued to study and copy the work of his predecessors as long as he lived, constantly juxtaposing their interpretations of the natural world against his own experience of it.

For five weeks in 1823, he visited Sir George Beaumont at his home, Coleorton Hall in Leicestershire. Constable wrote to Maria: ‘this is a lovely place indeed … such grounds – such trees – such distances – rock and water – all as it were can be done from the various windows of the house’. He studied intensively his host’s collection and made careful copies of two of Beaumont’s paintings

by Claude, including Landscape with goatherd and goats, after Claude 1823. Although Constable shared Sir George’s love of the Old Masters, they disagreed about some technical matters, and Constable’s biographer CR Leslie recorded their debate about the colours of nature: ‘Sir George recommended the colour of an old Cremona fiddle for the prevailing tone of everything, and this Constable answered by laying an old fiddle on the green lawn before the house’.

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Constable is known for his large exhibition pictures of the landscape and life in the area around the Stour Valley. In A boat passing a lock 1826 he created a landscape full of life, with a strong sky and dramatic light permeating the scene. Constable sold two of his large Stour Valley paintings The haywain 1821 and View on the Stour near Dedham 1822 (Henry E Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino) to the Parisian dealer John Arrowsmith who exhibited them at the Paris Salon in 1824, where Constable was awarded a gold medal. The paintings created a sensation in Paris, and were acclaimed

by French artists.

In the summer of 1824, Constable took his family to Brighton, hoping that the sea air would restore Maria’s health. At first he was critical of Brighton, describing it as ‘Piccadilly … by the sea-side’. But in spite of this unflattering assessment, Constable found a new stimulus there. He painted a number of oil sketches, such as Brighton Beach (A sea beach) 1824, which reflect his enthusiastic response to the moods of the sky and the effects of light on the sea, at times using a small palette knife instead of a brush.

Constable and his family moved permanently to Hampstead in 1827, leasing no. 6 (now no. 40) Well Walk – opposite the chalybeate well, which had helped to make Hampstead into a fashionable spa in the early eighteenth century. ‘This house is to my wife’s heart’s content’, he wrote to Fisher. That year, The Times wrote that Constable ‘is unquestionably the first landscape painter of the day’.

In 1828, however, Maria’s health rapidly declined and she died of pulmonary tuberculosis in Hampstead, on 23 November. For Constable ‘the face of the world [was] totally changed’; he never fully recovered from the loss and dressed in black for the rest of his life. He began to use stormy weather more self-consciously to express his own feelings, as in Stormy sea, Brighton, 20 July 1828, which he painted just four months before Maria died.

He painted it with vigour, applying the paint thickly and quickly to capture the stormy weather and his own personal turmoil.

Constable was finally elected a Royal Academician on 10 February 1829, and Turner visited him to congratulate him. He was required to present a work to the Academy as his Diploma painting, and he selected A boat passing a lock, such was the value he placed on this work.

On 31 March 1837, aged 60, Constable died suddenly at his home in London. As Leslie reported: It was his custom to read in bed; between ten and eleven he had read himself to sleep, and his candle, as usual, was removed by a servant. Soon after this, his eldest son, who

John Constable Stormy sea, Brighton 20 July 1828 oil on paper laid on canvas Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, gift of Mr and Mrs Paul Mellon in 1981

had been at the theatre, returned home, and while preparing for bed in the next room, his father awoke in great pain, and called to him … He took some rhubarb and magnesia, which produced sickness, and he drank copiously of warm water, which occasioned vomiting.

Within half an hour of the first attack of pain he had died.

He was buried alongside his wife in the churchyard of St John’s, Hampstead. a Anne Gray Assistant Director, Australian Art, and co-curator of

Constable: impressions of land, sea and sky

This exhibition has been organised by the National Gallery of Australia in partnership with the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa.

Further information on the exhibition and symposium on Saturday 8 April at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, is available at nga.gov.au/Constable.

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Constable: the ecstasy of stormy elements

John Constable Rainstorm over the sea c. 1824–28 oil on paper laid on canvas Royal Academy of Arts, London, gift of Isabel Constable in 1888

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Constable’s intense study of nature was translated into an unprecedented broad handling of his materials, whether pencil or chalk, watercolour or oil paint. As the French art critic Ernest Chesneau wrote in the 1880s: ‘He is a poet whose nature is roused to ecstasy by stormy elements; although not blind to tranquil beauty, it is life and movement which stir the depths of his soul’. Change, movement and variety were what John Constable chiefly prized. At Brighton, only the breakers and sky could interest a painter: he felt they were ‘lovely indeed and always varying’. The sky was the paradigm of natural change, and Constable threw himself into the study of it more intensely perhaps than any painter before him.

In 1821 and 1822 alone he made around one hundred studies of skies.

The starting point in what must surely be Constable’s most famous letter to his friend John Fisher, of 23 October 1821, constitutes an aesthetic manifesto. The skies in some of his exhibition pictures had been criticised, and Fisher had defended them, so the painter felt he should explain his principles of sky painting. He began by telling his friend that he had been doing a good deal of ‘skying’, since it was the most difficult part of landscape painting, but one of the most important. Quoting the painter and academician Joshua Reynolds who stated that Titian, Salvator Rosa and Claude Lorraine had made their skies ‘sympathise’ with their subjects, Constable went on to say that the sky was ‘the key note, the standard of “scale”, and the chief “organ of sentiment”’, as well

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John Constable A storm off the coast of Brighton 1824 oil on paper laid on card private collection

John Constable Cloud study, Hampstead, trees at right 11 September 1821 oil on paper laid on board Royal Academy of Arts, London, gift of Isabel Constable in 1888

as being ‘the “source of light” in nature – and governs every thing’. He explained that the execution of his skies was often faulty because he was too anxious about them, ‘which alone will destroy that Easy appearance which nature always has – in all her movements’: a particularly telling idea, because Constable seems to be thinking here of the movement of nature as related to the movement of his brush.

These were generalities, but the most important evidence of Constable’s involvement with the sky lies in the many inscriptions he wrote on the reverse of the sketches. The best-known (because it was published by his friend and biographer CR Leslie, who owned the sketch) is on the Melbourne sky study, Clouds 5 September 1822: 5th September 1822, 10 o’clock. Morning looking SouthEast very brisk wind at West, very bright and fresh grey clouds running very fast over a yellow bed about half way in the sky. Very appropriate for the coast at Osmington.

Constable had hoped to join John Fisher at Osmington in April 1822, but could not. This sketch was made later at Hampstead, and the inscription tells us that Constable had no problem thinking that an inland sky could suit a coastal scene, just as he used a Hampstead sky of 1819 not only for an upland Hampstead scene several years

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later, but also for a major Stour Valley subject.

The inscription also puts a premium on movement, and this was even more marked in a number of others, such as that on Cloud study, Hampstead, trees at right 11 September 1821: Hampstead, Sepr.11, 1821. 10 to 11. Morning under the sun – Clouds silvery grey, on warm ground. Sultry. Light wind to the S.W. fine all day – but rain in the night following.

This highly circumstantial description tells us how quickly Constable worked (10 to 11am), how he took notice of the direction of light, the wind, the temperature and humidity, as well as of the later weather situation, and it is the type of inscription that has led some commentators to believe that the painter was a close student of meteorology at this time.

Certainly all these features of the weather were discussed in a book Constable acquired and annotated heavily: Thomas Forster’s Researches about Atmospheric Phaenomena (1815). He often found himself disagreeing with Forster, but he also marked several passages where he found the meteorologist’s account of special interest.

One concerned the formation of cumulus clouds: … in the evening, when the heat is diminished, the air deposits its vapour again in the form of dew, which gravitates to the ground, becoming more dense as it

approaches the earth, because the lower atmosphere is not the coolest; and finally lodges on the surface of the herbage, or on the ground, where it awaits the reascending sun to be again evaporated.

Constable was proud of being able to produce the effect of dew in his paintings: ‘there goes all my dew’ he complained to Leslie when another artist warmed up one of his exhibition paintings with a glaze of asphaltum just before the opening of the 1829 Royal Academy show.

Forster’s account of this cycle of nature must have especially appealed to Constable because it chimed with another account of a water cycle in a work of natural theology by William Paley, recommended to him by Fisher in 1825: From the sea are exhaled those vapours which form the clouds; these clouds descend in showers, which penetrating into the crevices of the hills, supply springs; which springs flow in little streams into the valleys; and these uniting become rivers; which rivers, in turn, feed the ocean. So there is an incessant circulation of the same fluid; and not one drop probably more or less now than there was at the creation.

Constable’s brilliant sketch, Rainstorm over the sea c. 1824–28, could well serve as an illustration to this religious idea.

Forster also dealt with perhaps the most important function of meteorology, weather forecasting, and Constable inscribed several notes in this section of the book, including the word cumulostrati against the line: ’Large clouds, like rocks, forebode great showers’. He is interpreting folk wisdom in modern scientific terms, and this raises the question of the date of his reading of Forster, whose book is first mentioned by Constable in a letter of 1836. My own view is that he became interested in the science of meteorology only after 1830, when he began recording unusual heavenly phenomena, as in London from Hampstead Heath in a storm; with a double rainbow 1831; when he was preparing the often meteorological letterpress for English landscape; when he was having difficulties with the rainbow in David Lucas’s large mezzotint of Salisbury Cathedral from the meadows, which was not published until 1848 as The rainbow; and when was planning (but never delivered) a lecture on the sky for the Hampstead Institute Literary and Scientific Society.

The key to Constable’s intensive involvement with the sky in the early twenties is surely the changeability of the weather, its ‘before’ and ‘after’, and it brings a landscape element into the lively academic debate on the relationship of painting and poetry. History painters within the Royal Academy were anxious to show that

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John Constable Clouds 5 September 1822 oil on paper laid on cardboard National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, acquired through the Felton Bequest in 1938

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John Constable Cloud study 1822 oil on paper The Frick Collection, New York, bequest of Henrietta ES Lockwood in memory of her mother and father, Ellery Sedgwick and Mabel Cabot Sedgwick in 2001 John Constable Harwich Lighthouse c. 1820 oil on canvas Tate, London, gift of Maria Louisa Constable, Isabel Constable and Lionel Bicknell Constable in 1888

their art, like poetry, could represent time as well as space, by selecting the ‘pregnant moment’. Speaking of Raphael in 1801, the Professor of Painting, Henry Fuseli, told the students (Constable possibly among them) that ‘the moment of his choice never suffers the action to stagnate or to expire; it is the moment of transition, the crisis big with the past and pregnant with the future’.

Constable in 1821 was in the thick of his campaign to impress the public with his six-foot canvases, and to raise the status of landscape in the Academy; and it is more than likely that he would want to take a leaf from the history painters’ book.

One of Constable’s most vivid memories as a student at the Royal Academy was being told by Benjamin West – who was correcting one of Constable’s pictures with white chalk – ‘Always remember, Sir, that light and shadow never stand still‘, and that his skies should always aim at brightness. When staying with Sir George Beaumont in 1823 Constable showed a rather abstract concern for the way clouds serve to distribute light and shade in any sky, by copying all twenty schemata of clouds by Alexander Cozens, from his compilation, A New Method of Assisting the Invention in Drawing Original Compositions of Landscape (c. 1785).

Constable’s pencilling gives the clouds more volume and more movement than the originals, whose inscriptions simply prescribe the number of watercolour

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washes (hence depth of tone) to be applied to various parts of the design; there is no hint of an interest in weather. Attention to light and shade, or chiaroscuro, was Constable’s most constant and significant preoccupation as a painter. Whereas, as a painterly device, chiaroscuro has a long history in art, Constable’s interpretation was substantially original, for he regarded it not simply as a function of visual structuring, but as an attribute of nature itself. For the 1833 second edition of English landscape he amplified its title to show that the mezzotints were ‘Principally intended to display the Phenomena of the Chiar’oscuro of Nature’; and in a Prospectus of 1835 he wrote that he hoped: the Landscape Painter shall be aware that the CHIAR’OSCURO really does exist in NATURE (as well as Tone) – and, that it is the medium by which the grand and varied aspects of Landscape are displayed, both in the fields and on canvass …

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John Gage John Gage taught for twenty years in the Department of History of Art, Cambridge University, is a fellow of the British Academy and recently worked on the Paris ‘Constable’ show, 2002–03. He is co-curator of Constable: impressions of land, sea and sky. John Gage, with other leading international scholars, will contribute to the Constable symposium at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, on Saturday 8 April 2006. Further information available at nga.gov.au/Constable.

Australia and Constable National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 3 March – 12 June 2006

The landscape painter has to realise that [the sky] is not something secondary, like a backdrop, but that it is above you, at the sides of you, and all around.

Thus wrote the prominent Australian landscape artist, Hans Heysen, a great admirer of Constable’s work who, like Constable, was aware of the expressive significance of the sky and its ability to dictate the mood of a landscape.

Such is the power of Constable’s art that it has inspired many artists, including Hans Heysen and a range of Australian artists: Conrad Martens, Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton, Howard Taylor, Philip Wolfhagen and Lesley Duxbury, among others. It is for this reason that in Australia we are presenting a second exhibition alongside Constable: impressions of land, sea and sky, called Australia and Constable, which will include examples of the works of some of these Australian artists, and one New Zealand artist, Toss Woollaston.

Among the most recent of the works in the exhibition are those by Lesley Duxbury who has looked to Constable for inspiration in a series of paintings and prints. In her Untitled 2003 series, she painted on paper on canvas because this was a method Constable used, not only with his Hampstead cloud studies but also in other paintings.

Like her contemporary Philip Wolfhagen, she has been interested depicting the movement of clouds as indicators of passing time.

The works in this exhibition show that Constable’s art has continued to inspire artists – and viewers – into the present day. a

Philip Wolfhagen The path of least resistance (to J. Constable) 1989 oil and powder pigment on paper laid on canvas artist’s collection

Anne Gray Assistant Director, Australian Art

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Crescent moon: Islamic art and civilisation in Southeast Asia National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 24 February – 28 May 2006

Malaysia Keris 19th century gold, iron, nickel Department of Museums and Antiquities, Kuala Lumpur Malaysia Breast plate 19th century, gold, gemstone Department of Museums and Antiquities, Kuala Lumpur

Crescent moon: Islamic art and civilisation in Southeast Asia is the first international exhibition to present the spectacular heritage of five hundred years of Islamic art, from the fourteenth to twentieth century, in our region. It is astonishing that the contribution of Islam to Southeast Asian art has been so neglected when the archipelago is the most populous region of Islam on the planet today. Since the publication of Sir Stamford Raffles’s seminal study The History of Java in 1817, European scholars working from the viewpoint of an increasingly secular society have often been ill equipped to understand the subtle dialogue between art and spirituality in the Islamic world of Southeast Asia. In much historical art scholarship,

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derived from a Western orientalist perspective, the mechanist model of the ‘layer cake’ used to describe the sequential relationship of Islam to Hindu and Buddhist traditions in Southeast Asian history has reinforced studies which emphasised the dichotomy between religion (agama) and indigenous customs derived from ancestral tradition (adat). The focus on perceived gulfs between a textural theory of Islam and its local daily practice underlined an implication that Islam in Southeast Asian societies was somehow less authentic than that of the Middle East. This discourse created an intellectual climate where discussion on the role of Islamic art, seen as a foreign overlay on a more real indigenous foundation, often became marginalised.

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Kelantan, Malaysia Qur’an c. 1900 European paper, pigment, gold leaf National History Museum, Kuala Lumpur

Nevertheless the term ‘Islamic art’, invented by nineteenth-century Western scholarship, is also fraught with difficulties and serves more to emphasise ideas of difference rather than define aesthetic goals. Many Muslims would suggest that perhaps the only true Islamic art is the decoration of the Qur’an, and other religious texts, represented in Crescent moon by thirty-five of the finest illuminated manuscripts from Southeast Asia, including one of the earliest surviving Qur’an from the collection of the National Library of Indonesia. The written Qur’an is the revealed message of God and hence the calligrapher is often regarded as the quintessential Muslim artist: any other art may be created by a non-Muslim, but God’s holy word, revealed to the Prophet by the angel Gabriel, should only be written by a pious believer in a state of ritual purity.

Religious inscriptions are found on a wide variety of art objects, including luxurious royal keris. But it was in the decoration of religious manuscripts, rather than the transcription of the Arabic text, that Islamic art achieved

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its most beautiful and elaborate forms through various regional styles such as in Trengganu, Patani and Banten.

In Southeast Asia the decoration of the Qur’an and other sacred texts articulated the believer’s deep reverence for faith. Rulers and religious institutions also sponsored the production of illuminated manuscripts in local regional languages, including Malay and Javanese.

One of the most exquisite works of art in the exhibition is the Javanese manuscript Serat Dewi Ruci, dated 1886 and possibly decorated by the famous Yogyakarta court painter Jayadipura. It depicts the wondrous story of the warrior Werkudara’s search for the elixir of life.

Although Werkudara is more commonly known as Bima, the hero of the Indian Mahabharata epic, and the manuscript is illustrated in the style of wayang kulit conventionally identified with the Hindu epics of the shadow puppet theatre, nevertheless the Serat Dewi Ruci is quintessentially Sufi in its mystical tale of the perilous journey towards the conquest of self.

The Dewi Ruci story was composed in the sixteenth century and another highlight of Crescent moon is a small collection of rare wood carvings that dates from around the transitional era from HinduBuddhism to Islam in Java. The uncertainties of time and the tropical climate of Southeast Asia have not favoured the survival of many art media, including the wood once used widely to decorate mosques and palaces as well as utilitarian objects. These unique works are from Cirebon’s Kraton Kasepuhan palace which was established by the Muslim saint Sunan Gunung Jati and today is the oldest continuously occupied Islamic palace in Southeast Asia.

The exhibition includes two unusual panels, decorated on both sides, which appear to be the only surviving narrative wood sculpture from that period.

Local people describe the scenes as the story of Adam and Hawa (Eve) but they probably depict the Sri Tanjung tale from the Javanese Hindu-Buddhist period and

include a humorous depiction of two servant figures (panakawan), engaged in a startling sexual encounter.

The panels, with their distinctive style similar to the stone reliefs of East Javanese Hindu-Buddhist temples, may even have originated from a late fifteenth-century Majapahit palace context as historical evidence suggests it was once a common practice to recycle architectural ornament for new building construction.

The occurrence of pre-Islamic art motifs, and literary themes, in the context of Islamic civilisation in Southeast Asia is not surprising given the nature of transmission of the new belief into the archipelago and the receptiveness to cross-cultural engagement amongst early Sufi teachers, many of whom were practising craftspeople, in comparison to the stricter doctrinal orthodoxy that followed in the wake of the nineteenth-century Wahhabi reformist movement. A spectacular Cirebon batik Skirt cloth, recently restored for this exhibition, includes the curious depiction

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Yogyakarta, Central Java, Indonesia Serat Dewi Ruci 1886 European paper, ink, pigment, gold leaf Presented by the Friends of the Gallery Library in memory of Tina Wentcher, 1982 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

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of elephants in the form of rocks. Such images are often attributed to orthdox Islamic injunctions against naturalistic representations; nevertheless, the precedent for this image may be found in an episode from the Javanese version of the Mahabharata epic where the exiled Arjuna discovers an enormous stone in the shape of an elephant. This event occurs just as the hero meets the god and goddess of love sporting in an idyllic natural setting and the landscape pattern on many Cirebon batik cloths, like on this example, are often described as representing fantastic pleasure gardens (taman sari). The depiction of rocky landscapes in Cirebon textiles appears to be inspired specifically by the famous Sunyragi Gardens, with its fantastic grottoes, built by the local sultan in the eighteenth century as a retreat for meditation.

One wood carving with a clearly documented religious provenance and dated to the early period of Islam is a lively statue of a lion. This originally adorned the burial vault of the holy man Sunan Sendang located at the famous East Javanese mosque of Sendang Duwur erected about 1561. It is most unusual to find three-dimensional zoomorphic images in a religious context in Islam, and only occurs in Southeast Asia during this Javanese period marking the transition from Hindu-Buddhist belief to Islam. The elegant decorative portrayal of the lion reflects the influence of Chinese aesthetic traditions at a time when many Muslim Chinese communities were being established in the coastal ports of the Southeast Asia archipelago.

These Chinese merchant settlers were key participants in the international commerce in blueand-white high-fired ceramics that became an integral part of the archipelago’s Islamic art history. Porcelain was a major commodity in the legendary ‘spice trade’ stretching from Asia to the Middle East and Europe. The trade ware is a reminder that, while the precise parameters of the term ‘Islamic art’ may at times be difficult to define, there is a very clear and recognisable Islamic sensibility pervading art produced by both Muslims and non-Muslims for the context of Islamic patronage. Included in Crescent moon are Chinese ceramics from the Yuan until Qing Dynasty as well as Vietnamese and European export ware intended for these markets. These ceramics embody a distinctive Islamic sensibility through the use of Arabic inscriptions, decorative motifs based on markedly geometrical designs and a variety of vessel shapes, such as the long-spouted ewer, clearly derived from Middle Eastern and South Asia metal prototypes.

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Mantingan, Central Java, Indonesia One side of two panels depicting figures in the landscape 16th century teak, wood Collection of Kraeton Kasepuhan Museum, Cirebon

Cirebon, north coast Java, Indonesia Skirt cloth (detail) 19th century cotton, natural dyes, hand-drawn batik Conserved with the assistance of the Maxwell Family in memory of Anthony Forge, 2005 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Makam Sunan Sendang, Sendang Duwur, East Java, Indonesia Lion 16th century wood National Museum of Indonesia, Jakarta Jingdezhen, Jiangxi Province, China, found in Maluku, Indonesia Plate late 14th century, Yuan Dynasty 1271–1369 underglaze blue porcelain National Museum of Indonesia, Jakarta

Coromandel coast, India, found in Toraja region, South Sulawesi, Indonesia Ceremonial cloth and sacred heirloom early-to-mid 18th century handspun cotton, natural dyes, mordant painting, batik Gift of Michael and Mary Abbott 1987 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Richly patterned Indian trade cloths, formerly preserved as ancestral heirloom objects in both Islamic and non-Islamic societies of the archipelago and now assembled into one of the greatest collections at the National Gallery of Australia, also formed part of this cultural exchange alongside the ceramics.

The textiles document the international identity of Islamic aesthetics in the pre-modern era and include a spectacular Ceremonial cloth and sacred heirloom whose distinctive quadrature design, a symbolic map of paradise, reflects the influence of Sufi cosmic symbolism. Islamic mystical cosmograms had a significant influence on a variety of Southeast Asian arts, including textiles like batik headcloths. The symmetrical mirrored patterns convey concepts of unity and multiplicity related to the Islamic doctrine of tauhid, although their geometrical balanced appearance is sometimes mistakenly attributed to the influence of mandala designs from earlier Hindu-Buddhist art.

In the preparation of Crescent moon, an awardwinning Indonesian calligrapher and scholar of Southeast Asian Qur’an illumination, Bpk Ali Akbar was invited to suggest three Islamic quotes that encapsulated a Muslim perspective for this exhibition. These quotes are displayed in each of the three galleries that present the rich heritage of the sultanate arts, the international identity of Islam aesthetics in the archipelago and the beauty of the holy word revealed in the Qur’an. It is the second inscription that perhaps most directly speaks to the aspiration of Crescent moon to promote a greater understanding and appreciation in Australia and overseas for the Islamic art of our region: O Mankind…

We made you into nations and tribes, that ye may know one another.

Al Qur’an, Surah 49: 13

James Bennett Curator of Asian Art Art Gallery of South Australia

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Not your typical hard hat.

Santos searches for oil and gas all over the world. But recently, we’ve discovered something quite Southeast different – precious gold, silk, porcelain and even stone from South East Asia, including Indonesia. It’s the

Crescent Moon exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia. In becoming the principal sponsor of Crescent Moon: Islamic Art & Civilisation in Southeast Asia, our aim is to help Australians develop a better understanding of our closest neighbours. And that’s of benefit to everyone.

Banten, Java, Indonesia, Crown, 18th century, gold, precious stones, enamel, metal, 17.0 x 11.5cm (outer crown). National Museum of Indonesia, Jakarta.

projec t galler y

War: the prints of Otto Dix 17 December 2005 – 30 April 2006

all images © Otto Dix, Licensed by VISCOPY, Australia Otto Dix Zerfallender Kampfgraben [Collapsed trenches] plate 9 from the portfolio Der Krieg [War] 1924 etching, aquatint The Poynton Bequest 2003 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Otto Dix (1891–1969) was born in Untermhausen, Thuringia, the son of an ironworker. He initially trained in Gera and at the Dresden School of Arts and Crafts as a painter of wall decorations and later taught himself how to paint on canvas. He volunteered as a machine-gunner during the First World War and in the autumn of 1915 he was sent to the Western Front. He was at the Somme during the major allied offensive of 1916. During the war, he was wounded a number of times, once almost fatally. War profoundly affected Dix, and as an artist he took every opportunity, both during his active service and afterwards, to document his experiences. These experiences would become the subject matter of many of his later paintings and are central to the Der Krieg [War] cycle of prints.

A portfolio of fifty-one etchings, Der Krieg is modelled on Francisco Goya’s equally famous and equally devastating Los desastres de la guerra [The disasters of war]. Los desastres detailed Goya’s own account of the horrors of the Napoleonic invasion and the Spanish War of Independence from 1808 to 1814.

Goya’s cycle of eighty-two etchings, which he worked on for a decade after the Spanish War of Independence, was not published until 1863, long after his death.

Like Los desastres, Der Krieg uses a variety of etching techniques and does so with an equally astonishing facility. Similarly, it exploits the cumulative possibilities of a long sequence of images and mirrors Goya’s unflinching, stark realism. The focus of Der Krieg is, in many respects, quite different from that of Los desastres.

War for Goya was an intimate horror, its initial impact localised, its ultimate effect incremental. As the images which open Dix’s cycle in particular demonstrate, Dix’s war is a modern war – the scale is vast. Not only are

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men killed in an arbitrary, anonymous and indiscriminate way, the landscape itself is torn apart, desecrated and ravaged. Often the landscape appears alien, other-worldly, nightmarish. It appears sometimes as a simple backdrop to human tragedy, but often as a more integral part of the destruction – see for example plate 9, Collapsed trenches.

Collapsed trenches is also typical of a recurrent psychological strategy that underpins much of what Dix does in his portfolio. In this image, we are immediately aware that something terrible has happened, a perception that is reinforced subliminally by the piece of cloth that seems to loom, vulture-like, over the disintegrated trench.

It is only on closer inspection, however, that images of skeletons, disarticulated limbs and the other debris of war slowly reveal themselves – many viewers fail to see, for example, the foot in the extreme lower left foreground on first inspection, and are horrified when they do.

Dix’s work is less about objectively documenting the experience of war in the way that many commissioned war artists do; although it does this as well, it is about recapturing the nightmare-like quality of its psychological impact. The images in this portfolio convey the immediacy of authentic experience. Many of them are based on the diary sketches that Dix made while fighting in the trenches.

GH Hamilton in the Oxford companion to twentieth century art describes Dix’s cycle as ‘perhaps the most powerful as well as the most unpleasant antiwar statements in modern art’, and it has become a commonplace to see it as an admonition against the barbarity of war. And there is no doubt that as a human document it is a powerful cautionary work. At a psychological level, however, its truth goes deeper than this. Dix was both horrified and fascinated by the experience of war.

Otto Dix Mahlzeit in der Sappe (Loretthöhe) [Mealtime in the trenches – The Loretto Hills] plate 13 from the portfolio Der Krieg [War] 1924 etching, aquatint The Poynton Bequest 2003 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Otto Dix Lens wird mit Bomben belegt [Lens being bombed] plate 33 from the portfolio Der Krieg [War] 1924 etching, aquatint The Poynton Bequest 2003 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

In 1963, explaining why he volunteered for the army in the First World War he had this to say: ‘I had to experience how someone beside me suddenly falls over and is dead and the bullet has hit him squarely. I had to experience that quite directly. I wanted it. I’m therefore not a pacifist at all – or am I? Perhaps I was an inquisitive person. I had to see all that myself. I’m such a realist, you know, that I have to see everything with my own eyes in order to confirm that it’s like that. I have to experience all the ghastly, bottomless depths of life for myself.’

We can see what Dix was talking about clearly in plate 13, Mealtime in the trenches. Here, in an image that is as ghastly as it is macabre, a lone soldier gulps down a hasty meal, apparently indifferent to the human skeleton trapped in the frozen landscape beside him.

Dix was not only interested in portraying the impact of war on its combatants, but was also interested in analysing the impact it had on civilian populations. In the brilliantly dynamic composition Lens being bombed (plate 33), the viewer has an overwhelming sense of the terrifying reality of the actual moment the city of Lens in Northern France was bombed. We are drawn into the image by the multiple receding lines of the street, plunging into the distance. In the foreground, the faces of the fleeing civilians are distorted by fear and grief. Their hollow eyes echo the empty, boarded-up windows of the houses they desert. In the background, these figures are

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reduced to dark, fugitive shapes seemingly trapped by the dramatic, vortex-like perspective of the scene. As the bomber swoops down on Lens, one can almost hear the noise and feel the panic it creates. Its shadow ominously divides the two groups of people, while the endless façades of the buildings stretching into the horizon from both right and left create a narrowing tunnel from which the citizens of Lens seem to have no prospect of escape.

Years later, Dix had this to say: ‘As a young man you don’t notice at all that you were, after all, badly affected. For years afterwards, at least ten years, I kept getting these dreams, in which I had to crawl through ruined houses, along passages I could hardly get through.’ This nightmarish, hallucinatory quality pervades all of the Der Krieg images.

As stated above, Der Krieg is modelled on Goya’s Los desastres. Two of the images that most directly echo Goya’s work are plate 22, Night-time encounter with a madman, and the devastating plate 35, The madwoman of St Marie-à-Py. The original German title of plate 22 is Nächtliche Begegnung mit einem Irrsinnigen: in relationship to this work in particular, the word Irrsinnig in German powerfully conveys the sense that all the neural networks that underpin both one’s sense of self and the apparent rational structure of one’s world have been irretrievably torn to shreds.

Equally harrowing is plate 35, The madwoman of St. Marie-à-Py, which depicts a woman crazed with grief proffering her breast to her dead child who lies before her.

One of the most famous etchings from Goya’s war cycle was entitled Yo lo vi [I saw it], and we have the same sense of absolute observed authenticity in Dix’s portfolio, not only in the images mentioned above, but elsewhere – see for example plate 28, Seen on the escarpment of Cléry-sur-Somme, and plate 29, Found while digging a trench – Auberive.

While Dix’s work certainly documents the horrors of war, it is also paradoxically sensuous, conveying an almost perverse delight in the rendering of horrific detail, indicating that, for Dix, there was an addictive quality to the hyper-sensory input of war – something that would be familiar to many a war correspondent today.

The portfolio on display in the exhibition War: the prints of Otto Dix includes plate 51 Soldier raping a nun, which on the advice of Dix’s publisher Karl Nierendorf was suppressed when the portfolio was first published in 1924. Nierendorf believed that this image would be seen as a ‘slap in the face for all those who celebrate our “heroes” [and] … for all those who have a bourgeois conception of a front-line soldier.’ Indeed, it could ‘threaten the whole work with confiscation … People will make this one print into the target of their attacks.’ He had similar reservations about plate 34 Frontline soldiers

in Brussels and plate 36 Visit to Madame Germaine in Méricourt, both of which depict soldiers visiting a brothel.

As a consequence, this image was excluded from the portfolio when it was published. Subsequently, however, collectors of the portfolio who were aware of this fact have sought to re-integrate it into the cycle. In the present instance the image is numbered 59/70 and is from a different edition to the rest of the cycle, which is numbered 58/70, indicating that the original owner sought to complete his portfolio of Der Krieg in this way.

In terms of the general corpus of Dix’s work, Der Krieg occupies a central place amongst the large number of paintings and works on paper devoted to the theme of war. This astonishingly powerful work remains one of the most powerful indictments of war ever conceived, and is universally regarded as one of the great masterpieces of the twentieth century. Its acquisition in 2003 represented a major coup for the Gallery having been on the Department of International Prints desiderata list for years. As a document, the cycle demonstrates that its concerns are as relevant today as they were when it was originally conceived. a

Otto Dix Nächtliche Begegnung mit einem Irrsinnigen [Night-time encounter with a madman] plate 22 from the portfolio Der Krieg [War] 1924 etching, aquatint The Poynton Bequest 2003 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Otto Dix Die Irrsinnige von St. Marieà-Py [The madwoman of St. Marie-à-Py] plate 35 from the portfolio Der Krieg [War] 1924 etching, aquatint The Poynton Bequest 2003 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Otto Dix Soldat und Nonne (Vergewaltigung) [Soldier raping a nun] plate 51 from the portfolio Der Krieg [War] 1924 etching, aquatint The Poynton Bequest 2003 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Mark Henshaw, Curator, Department of International Prints, Drawings and Illustrated Books; and Gwen Horsfield, Department of International Prints, Intern

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new acquisition A sian Ar t

Ancient aniconic images of the Buddha Shakyamuni

India Amaravati region, Andhra Pradesh Scene from the life of the Buddha Shakyamuni 3rd century CE limestone National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

The ruins of the great stupa at Amaravati was only rediscovered near the modern town of Guntur in the eastern state of Andhra Pradesh in the 1840s, during the British colonial period. The stupa was never reconstructed, and the great collections of Amaravati stone sculptures were largely divided between the Madras Provincial Museum in today’s Chennai, and the British Museum in London, with a smaller but growing collection located in a museum at the Amaravati site. While this imposing marble panel is clearly in the Amaravati style, it may have originated from one of the many other stupas known to have once existed in that region. Unlike the contemporaneous sculptures of the better-known Gandhara region in the north-west of the Indian subcontinent, this style was not influenced by the Hellenic traditions brought to Central Asian Buddhist centres by Alexander the Great.

This is the lower register of one of the tall slabs which decorated the exterior of the dome of the stupa.

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Onto such slabs, a series of friezes were carved which told the stories of the life (and previous lives) of the Buddha Shakyamuni. These narrative images served a didactic function for the worshippers who circled the stupas, believed to conceal a relic of the Buddha himself buried within, as part of their pilgrimage. In this scene worshippers – male and female – holding vases of lotuses and (one woman) a fly whisk, flank the empty throne with its round cushions, beneath which the Buddha’s footprints are clearly shown. A part of a trunk or pillar appears above the throne: it may have supported the branches of the bodhi tree under which the Buddha achieved Enlightenment, or it may have been topped by a large disc representing the Wheel of Law, symbol of the Buddha’s First Sermon at the Deer Park at Sarnath near Benares (Varanasi).

Robyn Maxwell Senior Curator, Asian Art

new acquisition A sian Ar t

Ancestral gold

Throughout the Indonesian archipelago, valuable clan treasures and royal heirlooms are created from gold. The precious metal was part of a complex exchange network involving many other parts of Indonesia. In historical times, however, much of the gold in Sumba came to the island in the form of gold coins which were refashioned into elaborate sculptural ornaments, like this double-axe shaped marangga chest ornament. The marangga appears only to be used in the west of Sumba, an eastern island located close to Timor. Similarly-shaped but smaller gold items appear elsewhere in eastern Indonesia. The gold objects were often created in specific regional styles and forms by itinerant smiths from the small nearby islands of Savu and Ndao.

Precious heirloom treasures such as marangga are viewed only on special ceremonial occasions, usually under the supervision of village priests. (Despite the spread of Christianity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a large proportion of the population of Sumba still follows many ancestral religious practices.) Such objects

are an essential part of ritual and communication with the ancestors, and their display and, in some instances, exchange (particularly through marriage), cements social relationships. Less sacred versions of the same objects are worn as jewellery on special occasions and for less powerfully charged rituals. While senior figures rarely wear gold, it is common for their children to be adorned with heirloom jewellery for public rituals. Marangga are worn by girls and boys alike.

Marangga imagery is also found on stone grave monuments and village altars throughout west Sumba.

Through the construction of stone megaliths for the internment of great nobles, and the accompanying sacrifices, the soul is said to be protected on its journey through the Afterlife. Marangga motifs also appear on Sumbanese heirloom textiles worn and displayed at such important rites.

Indonesia West Sumba Breast ornament or pectoral [marangga] 19th century gold National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Robyn Maxwell and Melanie Eastburn Asian Art

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new acquisition Australian Print s, Drawings and Illustrated Book s

John Savage Prince Giolo Prince Giolo, also known as Jeoly, was a native of the island of Meangis in the Philippines. Acquired by the explorer and sailor William Dampier as settlement for a debt, Giolo was taken to England in 1691 and introduced to the English elite, including the reigning monarchs William III and Mary II. This engraving is an advertisement to promote Giolo, the tattooed prince, as a ‘fashionable wonder’, a novelty brought from the ends of the earth to be scrutinised by English society. The engraved text beneath the image gives an account of Giolo’s lineage, admirable physical form, his homelands and a description of his tattoos and their meaning. Little is known of the life of artist John Savage. He flourished in London 1680–1700 and was both an engraver and a publisher.

The Prince towers within the landscape and is an imposing figure placed centrally within the composition.

His pose is noble and elegant; the small loincloth draped gracefully around his waist covers little of his tattooed body. Beneath the layer of tattoos the Prince’s figure is tall and muscular. The Prince was a particular curiosity for the English: on special request, preferred patrons could view Giolo privately to marvel at this exotic individual and his elaborately tattooed skin, a practice claimed to be reserved in his homeland for royalty.

At the Prince’s feet, snakes, scorpions and lizards are repelled by the magical powers vested in his tattoos.

This image of Giolo is an example of the introduction of tattooing to the West. Less than a century after Giolo’s death from smallpox, Captain James Cook introduced the word ‘tatau’, now tattoo, into the English language after observing the Tahitian practice, and the fame of a man called Omai.

John Savage Prince Giolo, Son to the King of Meangis c. 1692 engraving National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

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Deborah Hill Gordon Darling Graduate Intern Australian Prints and Drawings

new acquisition Australian Print s, Drawings and Illustrated Book s

William Hodges Omai Unlike Prince Giolo, Omai’s journey to England from Tahiti in 1774 was voluntary. This portrait of Omai was engraved by James Caldwell in 1777 after a drawing

by William Hodges, several years after the return of the HMAS Resolution and HMAS Adventure to England. It was on Captain James Cook’s second voyage to Tahiti that Cook and Hodges met Omai. Hodges was an artist aboard the HMAS Resolution employed to document the landscape, flora and fauna, but his works from this period are better known for their sublime atmosphere rather than their topographical accuracy. Omai sailed as a crewmember on HMAS Adventure and was placed in the care of Joseph Banks and Dr Solander upon arrival in England.

While the intentions of the English may have been to exhibit Omai as an ‘exotic wonder’, Omai was ambitious and hoped to use the journey to convince those in England to arm him in a war to reclaim his native island from the men of neighbouring Borabora. Hodges illustrates the famous islander dressed in white robes with loose black hair and a dignified pose, as he was popularly portrayed.

Omai’s comfortable glance over his shoulder to engage the viewer gives the work an intimate atmosphere, as if we occupy his personal space. Omai’s tattoos are not visible in this portrait, but they were a significant part of his exotic appeal.

Omai spent two years in England during which time he was the darling of polite society, celebrated in literature, studied for science, and even presented to King George III and Queen Charlotte at Kew. Unlike other men and women taken from the South Pacific to England, Omai did not fall prey to Western disease and was returned to Tahiti on Cook’s third and fateful voyage to the Pacific. Omai carried home with him an array of European trappings including weapons, crockery, animals and clothing.

print after William Hodges engraver James Caldwell Omai 1777 engraving National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Deborah Hill Gordon Darling Graduate Intern Australian Prints and Drawings

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new acquisition International Photography

RA Cunningham’s Australian Aboriginal international touring company

[attributed to] William Robinson, photographer H Negretti & Zambra printers and publishers Members of RA Cunningham’s Australian Aboriginal international touring company, (left to right): Jenny, Toby her son, her husband Toby, Billy, Bob, Jimmy and Sussy (Crystal Palace, London, April 1884) albumen silver carte de visite on Negretti & Zambra yellow mount National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

In 1882 Canadian theatrical agent Robert A Cunningham came to Queensland to secure ‘wild’ Aboriginal people as performers for touring in America and Europe in PT Barnum’s show, ‘Ethnological Congress of Strange and Savage Tribes’. Six of the nine troupe members ‘recruited’ were from separate communities on Palm Island and three from Hinchinbrook Island. They did not all speak the same traditional languages. Only two spoke some English, and these were used to assert Cunningham’s claims that they were not coerced. Their performance in Barnum’s Congress began in 1883 and in the following year two members of the troupe, Tambo and Wangong, had died. Cunningham left Barnum in 1884 and began a long tour across Europe despite the deaths of Bob, Toby senior, Sussy and Jimmy in 1885. Only Jenny, her son Toby and Billy returned to Australia in 1888. Their full and extraordinary story has been told by the Australian writer and anthropologist Roslyn Poignant in her 2004 book Professional savages: captive lives and western spectacle.

Cunningham knew nothing of Aboriginal culture, so the members must have worked together as a group

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to develop a crowd-pleasing repertoire of dances, songs, boomerang throwing and mock fights in stage costumes (as they deeply resented requests to be photographed naked). Cunningham soon realised the value of professional photography, and sales of images became a feature of all the European venues. Relatively few copies of the tour images are known to survive.

Cunningham was undeterred by the death of the majority of his first troupe and returned to recruit a second group in 1892 in preparation for the living ethnological displays planned for the 1893 World’s Colombian Exposition in Chicago. The Gallery has also recently acquired photographs of troupe members from ‘Meston’s Wild Australia’, which performed in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne in 1892–93. This company was established by the Queensland journalist Archibald Meston who had formerly assisted Cunningham.

Gael Newton Senior Curator, Photography

new acquisition Australian Photography

JW Lindt Coontajandra and Sanginguble, Central Australian Aboriginals German-born photographer JW Lindt made his reputation in the 1870s–1880s for his studio tableaux portraits of Aboriginal people made in Grafton in 1872, and continued to market these images until his death in 1926. Coontajandra and Sanginguble, the two sitters in his 1893 portrait, were Workii clan members from the Mount Isa region. They were photographed, possibly in Sydney in late 1892 but more likely in Melbourne in January 1893, as members of ‘The Wild Australia Show’. This event was presented in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne by Archibald Meston, a Queensland journalist who later became the first Protector of Aborigines in Queensland. He hoped to tour the company to the 1893 World’s Colombian Exposition in Chicago whose organisers had called for living ethnographic displays.

Meston’s partner in the venture was Harry Brabazon Purcell, a Brisbane-based stock and station agent who had rounded up the performers for Meston from across North Queensland and Central Australia. Purcell delivered lectures in Melbourne in 1893, showing his considerable ethnographic knowledge of the central Australian language groups. The gouges and gashes shown on Coontajandra’s arm and back, for example, were explained as evidence of a ritual fighting practice – not traditional initiation and scarification. Meston was, however, also a considerable bushman and expert in Aboriginal languages and culture. He was adept at boomerang throwing too.

Throughout his life, Lindt presented himself as a gentleman-ethnographer but was more interested in New Guinea tribes. He never went to Central Australia. The work is one of his last ethnographic works but significantly was marketed as ‘art’. It has the tall thin ‘Japanese scroll’ format typical of a style of exhibition print which Lindt made around 1900. It is modelled on the new Pictorialist photography and in its elegiac humanism anticipates the portraiture of Edward S Curtis in America who began his first Native American Indian portraits in Seattle in 1895.

Gael Newton Senior Curator, Photography JW Lindt Coontajandra and Sanginguble, Central Australian Aboriginals 1893 carbon photograph National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

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new acquisition Australian Painting and Sculpture

Jeffrey Smart Waiting for the train

Jeffrey Smart Waiting for the train c. 1970 synthetic polymer paint on canvas Gift of Alcoa World Alumina Australia 2005 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

I like living in the twentieth century – to me the world has never been more beautiful. I am trying to paint the real world I live in, as beautifully as I can, with my own eye.

More than any other Australian artist, Jeffrey Smart has explored the aesthetics of the modern urban environment. Born in Adelaide in 1921, he has devoted himself to painting images unique to our time: highways and airports, factories and road signs. Smart asks us to look again at such prosaic subjects and to consider the possibility of discovering a new form of beauty in them.

As with the best of Smart’s paintings, the subject of Waiting for the train c. 1970 is enigmatic. It features a small group of men, women and children on a railway platform, evoking a single moment captured and rendered timeless. Smart’s passion for geometric forms and artificial colours is evident in the precise depiction of the man-made elements in the work: the sign, platform, mesh fence, railing and the buildings.

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These are in stark contrast to the painterly and dramatic sky, which is threatening rain. Smart considers such skies to be an important formal element within his paintings: ‘Did you ever notice that Titian’s skies are dark? I need a dark sky for the composition, because pale blue at the top of a frame looks nothing.’

There has been a remarkable consistency in Smart’s paintings since the 1960s, and the artist repeatedly employs a basic repertoire of subjects and compositional devices in his works. This allows him to concentrate on what he considers the most important aspect of his work. He has said: ‘The subject matter is only the hinge that opens the door, the hook on which one hangs the coat. My only concern is putting the right shapes in the right colours in the right places. My main concern always is the geometry, the structure of the painting.’

Elena Taylor Curator, Australian Painting and Sculpture

new acquisition Australian Painting and Sculpture

Fred Williams Landscape

Fred Williams is widely regarded as Australia’s finest landscape painter of the twentieth century. His distinctive works have changed the way in which we perceive the unique topography and vegetation of this country. In his paintings and gouaches of the Australian bush Williams devised his own formal language of mark-making and spatial configuration, combining his interest in contemporary abstraction with his enduring concern to express the essence of place.

Born in Melbourne in 1927, Williams studied at the National Gallery of Victoria School and at the George Bell Art School in Melbourne. In 1951 he left for London where he continued his studies at the Chelsea College of Art and the Central Art School. On his return in 1956, the landscape became his artistic preoccupation and Williams began making frequent painting trips to the countryside around Melbourne, later also travelling further afield to remote parts of Australia.

Landscape 1977 was most likely painted on location at Cavan, a historic property on the Murrumbidgee River near Yass, NSW, during a painting trip in August of that year. It is a characteristic example of Williams’s later works. The composition, divided into horizontal bands, emphasises the essential flatness of the landscape and the vast expanse of the sky above. The predominantly earth colours of the landscape are enlivened by vivid streaks and dabs of crimson and teal green, the highly textured earth contrasting with the smooth and empty sky.

Painted in the same year as his solo exhibition of gouaches ‘Australian Landscape’ at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the generic title Landscape 1977 reflects Williams’s interest at this time in not only describing the particulars of place, but in capturing the essential nature of the Australian landscape.

Fred Williams Landscape 1977 synthetic polymer paint on paper Gift of Alcoa World Alumina Australia 2005 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Elena Taylor Curator, Australian Painting and Sculpture

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new acquisition Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Ar t

Lola Ryan’s Harbour Bridges

Lola Ryan Dharawal/Eora people, La Perouse community A selection of Harbour Bridges 2000 shells, mixed media on cardboard (front, right and back) Donated by Peter Fay 2005 and (far left) proposed acquisition in memory of Dr Joan Kerr (1938–2004) National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Lola Ryan is from the Dharawal/Eora people and lived in the La Perouse Aboriginal community in Sydney until her death in 2003. She was a senior artist who, along with her sister Mavis Longbottom, had been making shell work since the 1930s. This tradition dates back to the late 1880s and was a form of income for the displaced community, which had relocated from Circular Quay in the early 1800s.

The La Perouse women would use discarded cardboard as a foundation for their work and use a fabric base, glitter and sometimes lace in conjunction with small bivalve shells (two halves) and some mollusc shells to cover the forms. The combination of different shell shapes, colours and textures enabled Ryan to create striking patterns in deliberate, repetitive and contrasting designs that reflect the shape of the object. She used the templates and the glue recipe developed by her father – flour and water mixed with powdered oyster shells – because, as she told collector Peter Fay, ‘we didn’t always have araldite’. Mavis Longbottom stated:

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I suppose I’d be 16 when I started making shell work.

I got started because there was money in it and in those Depression years every little counted. I reckon that you have to be a bit artistic to do shell work, if not I don’t think you could make it: to match all your shells and get the colour into it …. The only place you can see my and Lola’s shell work at the moment is in the Powerhouse Museum, which has a display of La Perouse history.

Now and again somebody will come along and ask us to make something like a box or a Sydney Harbour Bridge for Mother’s Day or birthdays … Other than that we don’t go out of our way trying to make a sale.

A selection of Lola Ryan’s Harbour Bridges were featured in the National Gallery of Australia’s travelling exhibition Home sweet home: works from the Peter Fay collection and were donated to the Gallery by Peter Fay in 2005.

Tina Baum Curator, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art

new acquisition International Decorative Ar t s

Hermann Jünger Necklace

Whether adorning the neck or presented as a collection of sculptural objects, the geometrical elegance of Hermann Jünger’s Necklace is strikingly effective. This necklace is one of a number produced by Jünger that were designed to give the wearer the opportunity to reconfigure the work by adding or subtracting some of its elements.

These kits, comprising a gold neck ring and a collection of pendants to thread onto it, fit into a customised wooden box meant for open display when the jewellery is not being worn. The pendants are made of stone and metal, referencing both the man-made and the natural worlds, their geometric shapes taken from Euclidean geometry.

This work bridges the space between abstraction and nature, with the hard, shiny character of the metal pendants contrasting with the softer, imperfect surfaces of the granite and lapis lazuli shapes. The heaviness of the

stone elements is alleviated by the beautifully variegated character of these natural materials, while the play of light on the metal surfaces offsets their severe outlines.

Born in Hanau, Germany, in 1928, Jünger taught goldsmithing at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich from 1972. On his death early in 2005, he left a legacy as an important inspiration and mentor to many contemporary jewellers, among them a number of Australians.

This work is a recent gift to the National Gallery of Australia from the Philadelphia jewellery scholar and collector, Helen W Drutt English, a passionate advocate of the craft and a long-time friend of Hermann Jünger.

Hermann Jünger Necklace 2005 gold, silver, lapis lazuli Gift of Helen W Drutt English, Philadelphia, through the American Friends of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Sarah Edge Curatorial Assistant, Decorative Arts and Design

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new acquisition International Painting and Sculpture

Joseph Beuys Ja, Ja, Ja, Ja, Ja, Nee, Nee, Nee, Nee, Nee

Joseph Beuys Ja, Ja, Ja, Ja, Ja, Nee, Nee, Nee, Nee, Nee [Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, No, No, No, No, No] 1969 felt squares, 32-minute audiotape no. 45 from an edition of 100 Gift of Dr K David G Edwards National Gallery of Australia, Canberra © Joseph Beuys, Licensed

by Bild-Kunst and VISCOPY, Australia

‘If you have all of my multiples, then you have me entirely’, said Joseph Beuys. For the German sculptor, performance artist, teacher, activist and self-styled shaman, multiples are physical vehicles for his ideas. They mark his opposition to panel painting and traditional sculpture as autonomous genres, while allowing distribution of his work to a broader audience. Sometimes Beuys’s multiples are relics from a performance or action, in other cases they are elaborately planned objects derived from earlier works.

Ja, Ja, Ja, Ja, Ja, Nee, Nee, Nee, Nee, Nee comprises a stack of felt squares hollowed at the centre to house an audio cassette. The object is reminiscent of Beuys’s larger sculptures in which stacks of felt are juxtaposed with sheets of copper or iron. They suggest the energy needed to be stored, transmitted or received in order to effect change in society. The artist’s use of felt is usually traced to the wartime story of his aeroplane crash in the Crimea: to heal and warm his body, his Tartar rescuers rubbed him with fat and wrapped him in felt. A combination of matted, compressed animal

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fur – sometimes human hair – with wool, cotton or other fabrics, the insulating properties of felt are remarkable.

When opened, the object recalls a ‘book safe’ where pages are cut out to hide an item, whether firearm, illicit substance or banned text. This prompts questions of the contents: is this tape and the voices recorded on it being protected, concealed or censored? The soundtrack described as ‘granny gossip’, co-narrated by Beuys’s long-time supporters Christian and Johannes Stüttgen, was recorded at the Staatliche Kunstakademie, Düsseldorf, in December 1968. It was published

by Gabriele Mazzotta Editore, Milan.

This work, and another generous gift from the David and Margery Edwards New York Art Collection, Painting version 1–90 1976, join Beuys’s major installation Stripes from the house of the shaman 1962–72 1980 and several other multiples, artist’s books and a film in the collection.

Lucina Ward Curator, International Painting and Sculpture

travelling exhibitions autumn 20 0 6

National Sculpture Prize and exhibition 2005

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, 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.

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

A partnership with Macquarie Bank

Glen Clarke American crater near Hanoi #2 2005 (detail) Vietnamese and US currency, cotton thread, wood National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Dell Gallery @ Queensland College of Art, Brisbane, Qld 18 February – 16 April 1006

Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, Perth, WA 7 April – 4 June 2006 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

Kenneth Macqueen Summer sky c. 1935 (detail) watercolour and pencil on paper Purchased 1965 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra © The Macqueen family

The Elaine & 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

Geelong Gallery, Geelong, Vic. 7 April – 4 June 2006

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

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 draws upon a diversity of themes including intimate portraits, iconic images of Sydney Harbour Bridge, landscapes and flower paintings, religious and war images, ballet and theatre performances and the vibrant, shimmering interiors of her home Cossington. nga.gov.au/CossingtonSmith Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Qld 18 February – 01 May 2006

Moist: Australian watercolours Moist is a rare glimpse into the National Gallery of Australia’s extraordinary collection of Australian watercolours. The title, Moist, refers to the liquid nature of the medium and an implied atmospheric, physical or emotional state of being. The watercolours in Moist demonstrate how Australian artists have created visual representations of such states, presenting works that are highly figurative alongside images of a more abstract emotional intensity. nga.gov.au/Moist Araluen Galleries, Alice Springs Cultural Precinct, Alice Springs, NT 24 March – 7 May 2006

Albury Regional Art Gallery, Albury, NSW 3 February – 26 March 2006

Grace Cossington Smith: a retrospective exhibition

The National Sculpture Prize is a partnership between the National Gallery of Australia and Macquarie Bank to support and promote Australian sculpture. It is one of the most generous prizes for contemporary art in Australia, with a non-acquisitive prize of $50,000 awarded to the winning artist.

The travelling component of the exhibition will feature a selection of the finalists’ work. nga.gov.au/SculpturePrize05

Seated Ganesha Sri Lanka 9th–10th century (detail) from Red case: myths and rituals National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Red case: myths and rituals Yellow case: form, space and design Goulburn Regional Art Gallery, Goulburn, NSW 1 February – 26 March 2006 Australian Embassy, Washington DC 10 April – 25 June 2006 Blue case: technology Bundaberg Arts Centre, Bundaberg, Qld 1 February – 26 March 2006 Australian Embassy, Washington DC 10 April – 25 June 2006 The 1888 Melbourne Cup Australian Embassy, Washington DC 10 April – 25 June 2006

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

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.

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collec tion focus

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art In March 2006 a number of recent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art acquisitions will go on display. Highlights include a diversity of works and media by renowned artists from South Australia, East Kimberley, Far North Queensland, Victoria and the Torres Strait. Permanent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander collection displays draw from nearly 6,000 works and major changeovers are installed every six months, with minor changeovers for works on paper occurring every three months.

Yvonne Koolmatrie Ngarrindjeri people Burial mat 2003 woven sedge grass National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

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Yvonne Koolmatrie is acknowledged as one of the finest weavers in contemporary Indigenous visual art practice. From the Ngarrindjeri nation, and based in her traditional country at Gerard, in the Riverland of South Australia, Koolmatrie has initiated a revival of traditional Ngarrindjeri weaving practices. The Ngarrindjeri people lived along the Murray River, hence the emphasis on traps made for catching food from the river. Although Koolmatrie’s weaving uses customary methods and forms (e.g. baskets, eel and fish traps) Yvonne has pushed her weaving beyond the commonly perceived definitions of ‘craft’ as an ancient practice of utilitarian form. Ancient techniques are now used to create contemporary sculptural forms, intended for exhibition in art galleries and museums, rather than functional objects.

Burial mat 2003 is constructed in the form of a mat, curved around and stitched together in the front.

The bones of the deceased were parcelled together, painted with ochres and wrapped in paperbark, then placed inside the woven burial mat, which was finally placed upright in the fork of a tree.

At only 26 years of age Rosella Namok is a rising young star on the national contemporary art scene and her work is sought by public institutions and private collectors alike.

From the Aangkum people of Lockhart River, Far North Queensland, Namok first gained significant notice for her distinctive large-scale paintings in the 2000 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, Beyond the pale: contemporary Indigenous art, held at the Art Gallery of South Australia for the 2000 Telstra Adelaide Festival of the Arts.

Namok’s technique involves painting with her fingers, a method derived from the sand-drawing style taught to her by her grandmother. This process is important in understanding the relationship between the painting’s very tactile and sensual surface and the painting’s subject matter. Her paintings make symbolic use of ovals and rectangles, and are often about family relationships and her country’s landscape and weather patterns.

The artist’s statement for Old girls ... yarn for us young girls ... about country and family 2004 is: From before time … Kuuku Ya’u … Lockhart River sandbeach people … talk in the sand. Mission came … teachers showed people how to draw … today kids learn

Rosella Namok Ungkum (Aangkum) people Old girls … yarn for us young girls ... about country and family 2004 synthetic polymer paint on canvas National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

to write … but we still talk in the sand. Those old girls … they yarn for us … they remember before time … they were small girls … grandmothers for them talk in the sand for them. When I was small … I remember ‘Queen’ … grandmother for me … remember she yarned to me … drew in the sand for me … about before time. Old girls yarn … specially when they make necklaces or weaving … always yarn about when they were young. One old lady will draw in the sand … they will yarn about grass and Puunya … show you where to walk … go find things.

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George Mung Mung Gija/Kija people, Jambin sub-section Texas Country 1985 natural pigments, binders, pencil, crayon on plywood National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

George Mung Mung (c. 1920 – 1991), a Gija/Kija visual artist, was a great cultural leader, artist and teacher at Warmun community [Turkey Creek], East Kimberley in Western Australia. A respected elder, Mung Mung began painting in the early 1980s. Using ochres and natural gum binders, he painted the inseparable relationship between land and life. Many of his works embody both Gija/Kija and Christian beliefs. In the 1970s he set up the Ngalangangpum bicultural Christian school with his friend, fellow artist and elder, Hector Jandany. Both men taught the stories and songs of their country to the children in the school, using paintings as an educational tool. Mung Mung won the 1990 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award (paintings in introduced media) for Tarrajayan Country.

Texas Country 1985 by Mung Mung is a fascinating painting: a mix of the mid-1980s Warmun school of painting, with his own representation of the dark brown ochre rock formations outlined in white dotting on board.

This painting is similar in style to the watercolour paintings

by Kimberley Wunambal artist Wattie Karruwara (c.

1910 – 1983) that were on display for a major Aboriginal art auction in 2002. This is particularly evident in the portrayal of the crocodile figure. The bird in the top right-hand corner is typically Warmun painting ‘school’.

It is a beautiful example of dual-style painting, in much the same manner as the late Arrernte artist, Wenten Rubuntja (c. 1923 – 2005), painted in both the Western Desert ‘dot’ style and Hermannsburg watercolour style.

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Lee Darroch, from the Yorta Yorta nation, and Vicki Couzens, from the Kirrae/Wurrong nations, have been integral in reviving cultural awareness of Victorian Indigenous material culture, particularly in relation to the customary practices involving possumskin cloaks. Both artists have worked with the Australian Print Workshop, in Melbourne, Victoria, which is where these works on paper were created.

Darroch’s print Possum skin cloak, circa 2000, is based on historical works held in the collection of Museum Victoria and, like Koolmatrie accessing her people’s cultural heritage in South Australia, Darroch and Couzens have accessed historical collections holding their ancestors’ cultural heritage in order to generate greater understanding in the broader community about Indigenous art-making in the southeast region of Australia.

Within Victorian Aboriginal clans possum-skin cloaks were owned by every member of a group: their utilitarian purpose was to keep the wearer warm and for use as a blanket or bedding. Intricate designs and markings incised into the underside of each cloak designated the specific clan designs of the wearer, in much the same manner as ceremonial body painting marks.

Dennis Nona is from the Kal-lagaw-ya/Boigu language group from Badu Island in the Torres Strait and currently lives in Brisbane where he is furthering his artistic studies. Nona is a highly expressive printmaker, drawing on the elaborate carving of his people, which he was taught as a young boy, and his work is held in numerous national and international collections. Inspired by the coastal life of his people and his family Nona has stated:

Dennis Nona Kal-lagaw-ya/Boigu people Sesserae (Badu Island Story) 2004–05 linocut National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Lee J Darroch Yorta Yorta people Possum skin cloak circa 2000 2000 etching on paper Australian Print Workshop Archive 2, purchased with the assistance of the Gordon Darling Australasian Print Fund 2002 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

As a young boy I was taught the traditional craft of wood carving, which, along with my cultural heritage, learnt through story telling and ceremonies, helped me to develop my linocut skills that feature intricate decorative style based on the rich narrative legends of the Torres Strait Islander people. The symbols I use of sea creatures, masks and designs are from our traditional masks, artefacts and my concept-figured designs.

The stunning hand-coloured linocuts Sesserae 2004–05 and Awai Yithuyil 2004 depict customary stories specific to Badu Island which is part of the west-central group of the Torres Strait Islands. Sesserae is the name of a young man of Tulu who went fishing every morning at low tide, and it is also the title of Nona’s solo exhibition, curated by the Dell Gallery, Queensland University, in 2005. The stories for both works are as complex as the images. a Brenda L Croft Senior Curator, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art

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conser vation

Restoring the glow to Afterglow

After treatment Frederick McCubbin Afterglow 1912 oil on canvas National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Frederick McCubbin completed Afterglow in 1912.

A colour illustration of the work published in a monograph by the Lothian Book Company, Melbourne, in 1916 shows a late afternoon scene with a pearlescent sky and the setting sun shining through the trees as bathers bask in its warmth. Ninety years later the painting appeared dramatically different. The colours were muted, muddied and dull, the surface was covered with a thick, treacly varnish that obscured the vigorous brushwork characteristic of the artist’s late works, and the trees on the left-hand side had become a dark, opaque block. More obvious changes included an extensive section of raised repair and poorly matched retouching covering a large proportion of the foliage

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on the left-hand side. This was matched on the reverse with a considerable patch of painted canvas stuck over the original canvas, masking any real evidence of the actual extent of the damage. There were also several smaller poorly executed repairs with retouching over the original paint, plus significant additions by a restorer to mask the changes wrought by the repairs.

Although the painting entered the national collection in 1970, very little conservation work had been carried out since then. What had been done was largely confined to strengthening the weak original tacking margins to restore more tension to the support. Closer investigation indicated that the work had been previously cleaned and that the present varnish layer comprised multiple applications with

retouching and overpainting below, between and on top of the layers. The foreground and the trees on the lefthand side had been given an overall tone, presumably to make the repaired areas less obvious. Testing with the usual range of solvents used to remove varnish layers yielded little success; it was possible to swell the varnish but removal was a slow and patchy process. Experiments with gelled solvent systems were more effective. The process remained slow but the results were dramatic.

Subsequent analysis by FTIR (Fourier Transform Infrared) micro-spectroscopy, carried out at the Conservation Department of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, showed that the varnish was a material more typically associated with sealing floors than enhancing paintings.

On removal of the varnish most of the overpaint also came away. This revealed the colours in a truer light and, even at this stage, the painting bore more resemblance to the 1916 illustration. The areas of fill were carefully

scraped away and it was discovered that the tear, although quite large, had not resulted in complete loss and there were in fact significant amounts of the artist’s original paint layer still intact under the fill. The remnants of foliage uncovered in the process showed that the original tone was lighter, with darkening of the exposed paint caused by a combination of overpainting during the previous restoration and the discoloured varnish. The tear was repaired using a combination of existing old and new threads. The painting was lightly varnished to give an even saturation to the surface and areas of damage were re-integrated with new fills and localised retouching.

The painting now awaits a new frame to match its revived ‘glow’. In the meantime we can once again appreciate McCubbin’s masterly handling of paint in all of its true vibrancy. a

(top left) Before treatment (top right) During varnish removal, right hand side cleaned and part of the fill revealed on left-hand side

David Wise Paintings Conservator

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kenneth t yler collec tion

Kenneth Tyler at the National Gallery of Australia Following is an excerpt from Sasha Grishin’s speech for the dinner to thank Kenneth Tyler after he launched the exhibition Against the grain: the woodcuts of Helen Frankenthaler on 24 November 2005.

(top left, top right and middle right) The Kenneth Tyler masterclass at Megalo Access Arts (middle left) Kenneth Tyler with James Mollison AO at the opening of Against the grain: the woodcuts of Helen Frankenthaler (bottom left) Professor Sasha Grishin AM with Alan and Anne Rubenstein at the opening of Against the grain: the woodcuts of Helen Frankenthaler (bottom right) The opening of Against the grain: the woodcuts of Helen Frankenthaler

Thirty-two years ago Ken Tyler, who was then based in Los Angeles, decided to relocate from the West Coast to New York. He was cash-strapped and was preparing to sell his collection of printer’s proofs – several hundred prints in number. The Australian National Gallery under its founding director, James Mollison, had gained a reputation for bold purchases of major collections of international prints, such as the Felix Man Archive, so with the assistance of a number of people, within several months, on Australia Day 1974, over 600 Tyler prints, proofs and drawings arrived in Canberra. Through an act of chance and serendipity this was the beginnings of a continuous collaboration between Ken Tyler and what is now the National Gallery of Australia, a collaboration which has continued until the present day.

Thanks to this collaboration we now have an internationally significant collection of American and European prints from the 1960s through to the present day, covering some of the biggest names in American art from Albers to Warhol: including Hockney, Kelly, Kitaj, Lichtenstein, Motherwell, Noland, Oldenburg, Rauschenberg, Stella and many, many others. It is a collection of great depth from which the Gallery has managed to stage about a dozen significant exhibitions, possibly the most memorable of which have been Pat Gilmour’s Ken Tyler: printer extraordinary 1985,Jane Kinsman’s Big Americans 2002, and now Jaklyn Babington’s Against the grain: the woodcuts of Helen Frankenthaler 2005. There is certainly scope in the collection for many more such major exhibitions.

Ken Tyler is an unusual artist–printer and a very unusual person. One of his favourite aphorisms comes from the German poet Goethe: ‘In the realm of ideas, everything depends on enthusiasm. In the real world, all rests on perseverance.’ Some of you may remember David Hockney telling us a few years ago, that whatever he

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would ask of Tyler – the answer was always the same – yes it can be done. Whereas in an earlier generation, Fernand Mourlot as a master printer changed our understanding of printmaking, Tyler as an artist collaborator has redefined the art of printmaking for our generation. While a Ken Tyler print has no single stylistic morphology, it does carry the stamp of a new philosophy of printmaking – Tyler prints can be big, technically adventurous, but what is more important, they are visually exciting. Anyone who looks at Helen Frankenthaler’s Madame Butterfly colour woodcut and is not excited by it must have their aesthetic receptors atrophied. For this transformation in printmaking we are profoundly grateful to Ken Tyler.

What I have learnt is that Ken Tyler is also a person who has a great generosity. This is not only in reference to his generosity as a benefactor who for over thirty years has constantly augmented the National Gallery of Australia’s archive of international prints, or his funding of the Tyler Print Fellowship, Tyler Print Internship and the Kenneth Tyler Collection website, but, and dare I say more significantly, it is his generosity of spirit and intellect. So much of our public life is dominated by mean spiritedness and in Tyler we have a person who is totally committed to art and to printmaking, and who in an intelligent and generous manner is promoting both of these. Ken Tyler is a person who has devoted his life to printmaking and who has set himself a life mission to share this accumulated knowledge, to pass on the torch, and to do it here at the National Gallery of Australia. a Professor Sasha Grishin is Head of Art History at the Australian National University, Canberra Further information on the Kenneth Tyler Collection is at nga.gov.au/InternationalPrints/ Tyler. On his visit to Canberra in November 2005, Kenneth Tyler also presented a master class and demonstration class at Megalo Access Arts

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tribute

Jimmy Wululu (1936–2005)

Jimmy Wululu with Bongu (waterhole) sand sculpture at the Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra, 1992 Photo: The Canberra TImes

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Jimmy Wululu was a proud Yirritja man of the Gupapuyngu people. In mourning he is known as Bulany Daygurrgurr, in reference to his skin name and clan group. He was born in 1936 at Mangbirri in central Arnhem Land. The Gupapuyngu homelands are around Djiliwirri country near Gapuwiyak in northeast Arnhem Land but many people, like Wululu, live in central Arnhem Land through family associations, for it is their mother’s or grandmother’s land. Wululu was of the freshwater Gupapuyngu people and his group can be classified according to their natural environment as Gulunbuy – from the waterholes. His subjects in painting and sculpture, the creatures and ancestors who inhabit those waterholes, reflect these associations. While living mostly in the communities of Milingimbi, Ngangalala and Ramingining, Wululu would maintain a strong physical and spiritual connection to significant Gupapuyngu ancestral sites, through attending ceremonies, family events and visits to country.

On Milingimbi Island at the Methodist Mission (est.

1923) Wululu attended school and worked at various jobs there including tending pigs, milking cows, clearing bush for the garden and airport and building mud brick houses.

Those years as a young adult were also spent travelling across the region attending his own and peers’ initiation ceremonies at bush camps on the mainland. After the Second World War Wululu also attended school in Darwin at Bagot Reserve and participated in ceremonies, having ‘foot walked’ there from central Arnhem Land.

Living in a single men’s camp on Milingimbi, Wululu was taught to paint by his brother and father. He is one of the last of the generation of central Arnhem Land painters who hail from the mission era. Like many Yolngu, when the homelands movement gained momentum in the 1970s he moved to the newly established communities of Ngangalala and Ramingining on the mainland. Wululu was one of the key artists working out of Ramingining Arts and Crafts from this time and later, in the 1990s, worked with Bula’bula Arts.

Wululu’s output was impressive. By the 1980s, he was an established and practised painter at the height of his powers. He held a position of cultural authority within his clan and had a significant international profile as an artist. In 1988, Wululu travelled to New York to attend the opening of the major exhibition

Dreamings: the art of Aboriginal Australia at the Asia Society Galleries. Wululu’s work seemed as ‘at home’ in Indigenous and non-Indigenous group exhibitions.

His work was selected for inclusion in numerous exhibitions, including Magiciens de la terre, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1989), l’ete Australien à Montpellier, Montpellier, France (1990); Paintings and sculptures from Ramingining, Drill Hall Gallery, Canberra (1992); Aratjara: art of the first Australians, Düsseldorf, London, Denmark (1993–94); Tyerabarrbowaryaou 2, Havana, Cuba (1994); Stories, Hannover, Germany (1995) and The native born: objects and representations from Ramingining, Arnhem Land, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (1996). As well, Wululu exhibited regularly in commercial galleries, community spaces, biennales and national Aboriginal art awards. He is represented in all major public and private collections in Australia and numerous art collections internationally.

At the National Gallery of Australia Wululu’s work was included in the exhibitions Aboriginal art: the continuing tradition (1989), Flash pictures (1991), as well as in the touring of The Aboriginal Memorial to Switzerland, Germany and Russia. The Gallery holds several bark paintings acquired over some years, which focus on the subject of honey. The champion in this group is the sublime Niwuda, Yirritja native honey 1986. It is in such works that Wululu’s excellence as a painter comes to the fore. He was fastidious in his attention to detail and meticulous application of paint.

Without doubt, Wululu’s contribution of a group of hollow log coffins to The Aboriginal Memorial 1987–88 is his eulogy. His unmistakable stand of thirteen logs depicts the Yirritja ancestors: Burala the darter, Minhala the longnecked tortoise and Wuluwarri the catfish. It was their travels from Gupapuyngu country further east, westward, that link Yirritja land and people across the area. The predominant design on the logs is the fine white hatching which represents the bones of the eel-tailed catfish. The action of Burala, diving into the pool to snatch the young fish, is a metaphor for the transition from life to death.

Wululu will be remembered as a friendly, cheerful, robust, driven, witty man, whose infectious humour combined with a stoic sincerity in all that he did. When Wululu’s uncle David Malangi died in 1999, Wululu assumed responsibility for Yathalamarra, his mother’s country, and

Jimmy Wululu Gupapuyngu people, Yarrita Moiety Niwuda-Yirritja Honey natural eucalyptus on bark National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

moved there with his family for a time. He is now buried there, next to Malangi. In the last few years of his life, Wululu struggled with ill-health and moved back into Ramingining where he was cared for at home by family.

He is survived by a loving extended family including his wives and children who will carry on the traditions of the Gupapuyngu Daygurrgurr through painting. a Susan Jenkins Former Acting Curator Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art This obituary was written with the assistance of Wululu’s family and in consultation with Bula’bula Arts, Ramingining.

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Remembering Philippa Winn In March 2006 Philippa Winn was to celebrate ten years as an educator at the National Gallery of Australia. Unfortunately Philippa didn’t

faces in view 1 Robert Foster, Scott Chaseling, Alice Whish and Donald Fortescue at the opening of Transformations: the language of craft 2 Jukka Pennanen, Touvi Lindholm, Ambassador of

reach this significant career milestone as she died on January 3.

During the past decade Philippa inspired thousands of students

and their teachers who visited the Gallery. Philippa’s passion and enthusiasm for visual art combined with a vibrant and engaging

Finland, Agneta Hobin and Robert Bell at the opening of Transformations: the language of craft

personality contributed to her success in developing innovative

3 Tetsuo Fujimoto, Robert Bell and Tsukasa Kotushiwaki at the opening of Transformations: the

programs for youth and people with disabilities. She developed

language of craft 4 Gretchen Keyworth, Chris Rivkin, Dudley Anderson and Lisa Anderson at

stimulating and enjoyable exhibitions for the Children’s Gallery

the opening of Transformations: the language of craft 5 Raphy Star, Ann Star and Robert Bell at the opening of Transformations: the language of craft 6 Lyn Conybeare, Elizabeth Nosworthy

such as In the box, Big spooks and Dog. Philippa was integral

AO and Roslynne Bracher at the farewell to outgoing NGA Chairman Harold Mitchell 7 Incoming

to the establishment and ongoing success of Gallery programs

NGA Chairman Rupert Myer AM and Charles Curran AO at the farewell to outgoing NGA

such as the Summer Scholarship, SubURBAN, the Registered Unit

Chairman Harold Mitchell 8 Alice Whish with her work at the opening of Transformations: the

program for Senior Secondary and College students and special

language of craft 9 Lia Cook with her work at the opening of Transformations: the language

programs such as those for the University of the Third Age.

of craft 10 Deborah Hart, Philip Bacon AM and Roslyn Packer at the farewell to outgoing NGA Chairman Harold Mitchell 11 Kenneth Tyler and Marabeth Cohen-Tyler with the Tyler

Philippa’s concern for and love of the environment and all living

team at the opening of Against the grain: the woodcuts of Helen Frankenthaler 12 Christina

creatures was well known, as was her love of family, her three dogs,

Costaridis, Amy Crago, Hannah Gregory and Rob Bastian at the opening of Against the grain:

and the farm she shared with her husband John. Philippa’s warmth,

the woodcuts of Helen Frankenthaler 13 Marabeth Cohen-Tyler and Kenneth Tyler with curator

energy and sense of the ridiculous made her a great colleague

Jaklyn Babington at the opening of Against the grain: the woodcuts of Helen Frankenthaler

and friend to us all.

The Education team artonview

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WAR The Prints of Otto Dix

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 24 February – 28 May 2006 Principal sponsor

Supported by

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 17 December 2005 – 30 April 2006 Organised by the National Gallery of Australia in partnership with the Art Gallery of South Australia Yogyakarta, Central Java, Indonesia Serat Dewi Ruci 1886 European paper, ink, pigment, gold leaf Presented by the Friends of the Gallery Library in memory of Tina Wentcher, 1982 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne

Otto Dix Sturmtruppe geht unter Gas vor [Stormtroops advancing under a gas attack] plate 12 from the portfolio Der Krieg [War] 1924 etching, aquatint National Gallery of Australia, Canberra © Otto Dix, Licensed by VISCOPY, Australia

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constable • crescent moon • otto dix