2006.Q2 | artonview 46 Winter 2006

artonview 14 July – 16 October 2006

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

imants tillers • michael riley • James Rosenquist

SPECIAL MEMBERS’ VIEWING

9 – 30 August Wednesdays 6pm This annual lecture series showcases the latest work of renowned Australian architects.

9 August Andrew Andersons from Peddle, Thorpe and Walker, Sydney 16 August Luigi Rosselli, Sydney 23 August Tim Jackson from Jackson Clements Burrows, Melbourne 30 August Shaun Lockyer from Arkhefield, Brisbane $60 Series; $50 members/RAIA/concession $20 Single; $15 members/RAIA/concession Presented in association with the ACT Chapter RAIA Sponsored by BCA Solutions Bookings essential James O Fairfax Theatre National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Mr Ron Radford AM, Director National Gallery of Australia requests the pleasure of your company at a Members Viewing of

Saturday 15 July 2006 6pm The evening will commence with an introduction to the exhibitions in the James O Fairfax Theatre by

Followed by a viewing of the exhibitions Members /guests $40 Light refreshments Limited tickets – bookings essential RSVP 5 July 2006 (acceptances only) Phone 02 6240 6528

Imants Tillers The hyperborean and the speluncar 1986 oilstick, oil and synthetic polymer paint on 130 canvasboards Cruthers collection, Perth Michael Riley Untitled, from the series Cloud [feather] taken 2000 printed 2005 pigment prints, ultrachrome chromogenic inks on Ilford Gallery Pearl photographic paper Purchased 2005 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Reproduced courtesy of the Michael Riley Foundation and VISCOPY, Australia

Photo: John Gollings Richmond House, Jackson Clements Burrows

Dr Deborah Hart, Senior Curator, Australian Paintings and Sculpture and Brenda L Croft, Senior Curator, Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art

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artonview Publisher National Gallery of Australia nga.gov.au Editor Alistair McGhie Designer Sarah Robinson

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Interview with Rupert Myer, Chairman of the National Gallery of Australia Council

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Imants Tillers: one world many visions

16 Michael Riley: sights unseen

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

Director’s foreword

14 Imants Tillers discusses Terra incognita & Terra negata

Photography Eleni Kypridis Barry Le Lievre Brenton McGeachie Steve Nebauer

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1323-4552

Published quarterly: Issue no. 46, Winter 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.

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

21 Michael Riley Kristina 1986 24 Rosenquist: Welcome to the water planet 32 Right here right now: Recent Aboriginal and Torres Strait

Islander acquisitions 38 New acquisitions 46 The Anton Bruehl Gift 50 Come rain or shine 52 Indian art: New acquisitions, directions and display 56 Conservation: The Mermaid’s Tale 58 Faces in view 60 Collection study room

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: Michael Riley Darrell (detail) 1989 gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Reproduced courtesy of the Michael Riley Foundation and VISCOPY, Australia back cover: Imants Tillers installing Terra incognita 2005 at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 2005

direc tor’s foreword

Ron Radford with internationally renowned American artist James Turrell

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From my office window, Lake Burley Griffin is looking more like Constable’s Stormy sea, Brighton 20 July 1828 which puts me in no doubt that three frosty yet clear-skied months of winter lie ahead of us and that there are only two weeks left to see Constable: Impressions of land, sea and sky here in Canberra before it heads across the pond to the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in – dare I say it – windy Wellington.

Often, once exhibitions are up and have been on display for a while, connections between them become more apparent than may have been anticipated at their inception or planning. The concurrent displays over the past months of Crescent Moon: Islamic art and civilisation in Southeast Asia and Constable: Impressions of land, sea and sky – although from historically and culturally disparate sources – had indisputable connections. Constable showed not only the work of the master of the English landscape tradition, but also reminded us of many Australian landscapes and his influence on so many Australian artists from the 19th century to today, as demonstrated by the accompanying exhibition Constable and Australia. In Crescent Moon we witnessed the influence not of a single artist but of Islam in Southeast Asia from the 14th through to the 19th century and its effect on the development of the cultural history of our region and our nearest neighbours. Both exhibitions have been extremely popular, well exceeding targets. I’d like to express my thanks to the Gallery’s Voluntary Guides for their preparation and hard work and for being available to show the many thousands of visitors through these highly popular exhibitions over the past three months.

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Following on from the success of Crescent Moon and Constable, for the winter season at the Gallery we present three significant single-artist shows: Imants Tillers: One world many visions; Michael Riley: Sights unseen; and the paper works by American artist James Rosenquist, Welcome to the water planet. Again, it is felicitous to present the work of Riley and Tillers concurrently as these two Australian artists have made such significant contributions to the landscape and dialogue of art in this country. Michael Riley (1960–2004) through photography, film and video has challenged our perceptions of Indigenous Australia, and Imants Tillers in his continuing, numbered canvasboard panel works investigates the themes of identity and displacement, origins and originality, and language and landscape. I commend these two highly interesting exhibitions of contemporary Australian art to you.

On display in the Orde Poynton Gallery is the monumental paper work series Welcome to the water planet and two related works by James Rosenquist produced with printer publisher Ken Tyler from September 1988 to December 1989. When you see this exhibition I’m sure Rosenquist’s journey from billboard painter in the 50s to key figure in America’s Pop Art movement in the 60s will be apparent in the scale and subject of the works. Massive, impressive and a further demonstration of the depth of the National Gallery’s premier American print collection.

Our other current collection-based exhibition in the Project Gallery, Right here right now, displays for the first time more than 80 new acquisitions to the Gallery’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Collection purchased over the past two years. These largely contemporary works, including canvas paintings, bark painting, fibre works, prints, drawings, and sculpture covering themes ranging from the ancestral and ancient to politics and contemporary Australian society, fully demonstrate the great diversity and vitality of Indigenous Australian art and culture.

The lower level Asian Galleries will be closed over the winter months for re-slating and de-cladding in order to restore this very large space to its original function as a sculpture gallery featuring the iconic Brancusi Birds in Space.

By the end of August, we will have opened our new Indian and South Asian Gallery on the entrance level. This special Indian Gallery will be the first of its kind in Australia. By the end of September we will also have opened a larger Southeast Asian Gallery adjoining the Indian Gallery.

We are acquiring many major works for these new Asian displays, which will be revealed at the opening. The new

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complex and integrated displays in these Asian Galleries on the principal level of the Gallery will be a significant step towards our stated aim of helping to place the art of our region centre stage in the National Gallery of Australia.

Major new Australian acquisitions, both 19th and 20th century, will also be revealed this winter. For instance, we take great pleasure in presenting Sydney Long’s Flamingoes c. 1906 as the Masterpieces for the Nation acquisition.

This is a strikingly decorative oil painting by the leading proponent of the art nouveau movement in Australia at the turn of the 19th century. Further information on both Long’s work and the appeal is enclosed in this edition of artonview. Masterpieces for the Nation is the National Gallery of Australia Foundation’s annual appeal to raise funds to acquire a major work that will become part of our permanent display. Over the past two years this appeal has been extraordinarily successful and has enabled the Gallery to acquire two significant Australian paintings: WC Piguenit’s Near Liverpool, New South Wales (purchased with funds raised from the 2005 appeal) and William Robinson’s Creation landscape – fountains of the earth (purchased with funds raised from the 2004 appeal). Please consider being a part of this exciting initiative to assist in building the National Collection for the enjoyment of future generations.

I hope you had a chance to participate in the Gallery’s autumn events such as the James Turrell lecture, the Constable symposium, the Crescent Moon cultural day, Sculpture Garden Sunday, or the innovative Forecast: art and fashion collaboration between CIT fashion designers, the Quantum Leap Youth Choreographic Ensemble, video artists, Next Hair hairdressers and makeup artists from the Canberra Makeup Academy. The winter calendar of events provides more outstanding opportunities for you to engage with artists, curators and educators, through special events developed in conjunction with our exhibitions and around the National Collection.

There is much that is new and exciting to see and hear at the National Gallery of Australia this winter.

Donations Belinda Barrett Sheila Bignell Peter Farrell AM Andrew Gwinnett Robyn Jenkins Judith Roach Rotary Belconnen John Schaeffer AO Gene Sherman Kerry Stokes AO Bruce and Daphne Topfer Foundations Gordon Darling Foundation Wolfensohn Foundation Gifts Aranday Foundation Josephine Bayliss Anton Bruehl Jr Ann Burge Carolyn Cameron Michael Chaney AO Janet Dawson and Michael Boddy Eleanor Hart Bridget McDonnell Gallery Lila McGrath Ron Radford AM William Robinson Kenneth Tyler and Marabeth Tyler Sanong Wattanaurangkul Grants Australia Council for the Arts Australia-Malaysia Institute Australia Indonesia Institute Visions of Australia Sponsors Casella Wines Hyatt Hotel

Ron Radford Director

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Interview with Rupert Myer, Chairman of the National Gallery of Australia Council Alistair McGhie In 2001 the government asked you to chair an independent inquiry into the visual arts in Australia.

What was a concern that arose for you regarding the role of the visual arts or artists in our society?

The Inquiry considered many issues about the circumstances of artists and the institutional context in which they work.

The status of the artist in Australia is still a very relevant consideration as visual artists don’t enjoy the same visibility as other artists. By and large, it’s a solitary profession and there is no equivalent to an audience’s applause at the end of the creation of a piece of work. Interaction with an audience has a very different character to it than the interaction that performing artists have with their audience.

There are financial risks that have to be taken by performing arts companies that relate to the magnitude of the task and the need to bring collaborative efforts together into performances. There is a very different funding model for a visual artist’s practice and the financial risks that are undertaken are on an individual level. Prior to the Inquiry, many in the sector had sought an examination of the circumstances in which artists were finding themselves and, more broadly, the institutions around the country that supported their practice.

The model of support for contemporary arts practice through government funding, as undertaken by the three levels of government in Australia, is widely accepted internationally. That model is often under-recognised and we don’t often see it portrayed as a necessary part of a creative society. The arts are given limited media coverage and are regularly presented as an elitist activity, with the term elitist having implied derogatory connotations. Yet we have the common experience here of rushing off at weekends to pay a lot of money to watch elite sports men and women whose elite status is celebrated. The difference is that elite sports men and women now pull in six and seven figure salaries whereas elite artists don’t.

So the media play a role in this?

Many people can imagine what it might be like to be a sportsperson. I don’t think it’s easy for people to imagine what it must be like to be an artist. While exposure to and involvement in the arts by Australians at a young age is perhaps more limited compared to sport, the media contribute to this by not attempting to explore the ‘artistic life’ with the same urgency of inquiry as they choose to explore the ‘sporting life’. Many artists wouldn’t be prepared to share with a wider audience what it is that they do and how they do it, nor to share with audiences the lives that they lead. So it’s not surprising in a way that we remain unexposed to creative lives. There is a mystery associated 4

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with creative processes and certainly creative individuals.

We need to count ourselves fortunate that we are able to see the end product and enjoy that. We are more likely to recognise an artist by their work than if they walked past us in the street but I’m sure that there are many that would like some more personal recognition than they get.

If artists did receive more exposure would we then be able to relate better to the final product?

One observation that I’d make from a personal collector’s perspective is that it certainly adds enormously to the experience of collecting to know something about the person and to have met and discussed the work with the artist. Discourse is a really important part of collecting and the opportunity for the artist, having produced the work, to then participate in some discussion about what it is and the ideas and to also be part of feedback and response actually is really valuable for the audience and the arts community.

What’s your view on the best balance between popular exhibitions aimed at generating attendance and more speculative shows?

The Gallery has a responsibility to have a decent balance of exhibitions, some of which are going to be more speculative and less popular and others that are going to generate large audiences that enjoy coming to galleries for those sorts of exhibitions, and indeed look forward to them. On the more speculative ones I think that is actually one of the assertive roles that this institution can take. The Director’s recent Vision Statement envisages the Gallery as an assertive, relevant, national cultural institution that might pursue a curatorial idea or a view about an individual or a group of artists whose work may not be so well known. And, yes, we should try and get sponsorship for that and, yes, we should try to be financially responsible about putting them on, but we should be able to balance an overall exhibition program that allows us to do that and at the same time have extremely popular shows. Interestingly some exhibitions that you’d expect might not be popular become popular, and in that sense it’s sometimes hard to know what drives audience numbers. There are often surprises about what will draw people to the Gallery.

How do you know the Gallery’s Council is doing a good job?

One of the measures is a collaborative collegial working environment – but not so collegial that if someone wants to say something discordant that they feel uncomfortable in doing so. Another is the way in which the Council manages two very important relationships: one with the Director

who has a critical role to play in the success of the Gallery; and the other with the Commonwealth Government.

The government appoints the Council so part of the role is representing the institution back to the government particularly in matters of recurrent funding, building programs and other policy issues. We spend quite a lot of time at the meetings reviewing the operational reports and the broader strategy issues, the financial circumstances of the institution, the process of the Acquisition Committee and adding to the Gallery’s collection. We also work on reviewing exhibition schedules, the role of development, sponsorship and benefaction. Many of these have long term horizons and outcomes may not be known for many years.

At the end of your time as Chairman what would you like to have achieved?

I’d like to have the institution really celebrate its 25th anniversary because it will have many achievements of which it can be proud. It’s unusual to think that it’s not yet 25 years old. It is the only Australian gallery of its type created in the last century. It is worthy of celebration. I’d like also to think that we’ll be completing or have opened the new Indigenous Galleries with the new entrance and have completed the reconfiguration of the gallery spaces with the new presentation of Australian art. I’d also like to think that any visitor to the Gallery as a matter of course will visit the Sculpture Garden and that it becomes an integral and integrated part of the experience. We are a national institution derived from an Act of Parliament so we have

a responsibility to service the national capital well, but the idea of a national gallery extends beyond the national capital. It is both a place and an idea. The ‘place’ aspect is obvious: it’s everything that happens here, it’s the building and the collections, the programs and the staff. In fact, you can’t make a comment on this institution without talking about the outstanding staff. The ‘idea’ aspect is sometimes less obvious. I’d really like to think that it will become a more assertive national cultural institution where what actually happens at the National Gallery really matters in a broader cultural sense. In order to achieve this, it means lending works from the collection, including the touring of important parts of the permanent collection, like some of the Old Masters. We recognise any such works will be missed by those who live in Canberra, but what we’re doing is creating an opportunity for those works to be seen in the context of other collections. That is something that adds enormously to the appreciation of those objects within the broader context of all of the collections around the nation.

The Gallery has had a long association with a number of very generous benefactors in the past and we should be continuing to find ways to honour that benefaction and create an environment where further acts of benefaction will occur. One of the obvious areas is in the continued development of the collection through strategic acquisitions. The NGA’s own acquisition funds require additional benefaction so that we can continue to acquire the major works necessary as envisaged in the Director’s recent Vision Statement. a artonview

Director, Ron Radford and Chairman, Rupert Myer in front of a set of late 19th-century ornamented doors before the official opening of Crescent Moon: Islamic art and civilisation in Southeast Asia

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exhibitions galleries

Imants Tillers: one world many visions 14 July – 16 October 2006

Imants Tillers and Jennifer Slatyer installing Terra incognita 2005 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 2005 photograph: Patrice Riboust Diaspora 1992 oilstick, gouache and synthetic polymer paint on 228 canvasboards Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa Izkliede 1994 oilstick, gouache and synthetic polymer paint on 292 canvasboards Gene and Brian Sherman Collection, Sydney Courtesy of Sherman Galleries Paradiso 1994 oilstick, gouache and synthetic polymer paint on 299 canvasboards The Chartwell Collection, Hamilton, New Zealand Farewell to reason 1996 oilstick, gouache and synthetic polymer paint on 292 canvasboards National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

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Introduction: one and many Imants Tillers is one of Australia’s most acclaimed contemporary artists, who established a national and international reputation in the early 1980s. This survey exhibition will provide the opportunity to trace the high points of Tillers’ artistic development over more than two decades. The exhibition includes paintings shown in the Venice Biennale in 1986 when Tillers was selected to represent Australia along with other key works from the 1980s, through to the remarkable Diaspora series of the 1990s, to evocative works such as the Nature speaks series 1998–2006 and a major new work Terra incognita 2005.

The works have been carefully selected to convey Tillers’ personal approach in his particular artistic processes and his ongoing interest in issues of identity and displacement. The presence and absence of self is at the heart of Tillers’ work. It is bound up with concerns about origins and originality that are implicit in his quotation of images from reproductions of artworks and other sources and the re-working of them. While issues of authorship may be challenging, an Imants Tillers work is easily recognisable. The personal aspects of his approach reside in his distinctive canvasboard system and in the specificity of his choices – be they visual, intellectual or intuitive. The personal aspects appear in correspondences he discovers between the sources and his own experience; in unexpected juxtapositions to form new realities; in the sensuous, layered surfaces and subtleties of tone and luminous colour; in the transformations and presence of the art.

Tillers has written that the life of an artist is essentially a solitary one. Yet the world he inhabits in the work itself is connected with a rich repository of ideas and imagery. The idea of one and many, of the unit and the multiple, of an interconnecting web-like whole, relates to the remarkable system that Tillers

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has developed for his art. Since 1981 this has involved working on small amateur painters’ canvasboards that come together in grid-like structures to form a work.

A single work can contain anywhere from three to 300 panels. This method has provided a way for Tillers to work in relatively small studios and still create large paintings, even though he has often not been able to view an entire work until it is exhibited in a larger gallery space. After coming up with the initial idea and creating a working ‘map’ as a guide, the making of a painting is quite intimate; the artist sitting at his studio desk to work on individual panels which subsequently get placed on the floor as one layer after another is left to dry. The process of work evolving from table to floor is performative, mirroring the subsequent installation of the work on the wall as one panel is applied after the next. After being shown on the wall (held on by Velcro tabs), the canvasboards come apart again, stacked in beacon-like formations that have a sculptural presence.

In some instances the stacks have become works in their own right, like his recent installation Art is an action 2006 in the exhibition.

The hyperborean and the speluncar 1986 oilstick, oil and synthetic polymer paint on 130 canvasboards Cruthers collection, Perth

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Conversations across time Tillers’ painting The hyperborean and the speluncar 1986, with its visual and poetic resonances of the sea, the wind and the cave, was the perfect work to show at the Venice Biennale. Hyperborean refers to Greek mythology and the people who lived in a land beyond Boreas, the north wind; speluncar refers to one who explores caves. The dominant sources are de Chirico’s The mysterious animal 1975 and a painting by the 19th-century British artist, Frederick Leighton, Greek girls picking up pebbles by the sea 1871.

In his work Tillers establishes a meeting place for artists of different time-frames and stylistic approaches who adopted a similar approach to his own. In both instances these artists borrowed from classical Greek sources and adapted them to their own ends.

Tillers has in turn edited the Leighton image for his own ends, extracting a single figure from the group of women, while still locating her on a beach. In keeping with the sensuality of the original, the woman is like a figure on a classical Greek vase: poised in her tender gesture of collecting, invested with a sense of drama in the folds

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of the drapery that wrap around her body and billow above her head. In the more direct quotation of the de Chirico image, classical references to houses, temples and acropolises are treated in the manner of the 16th-century artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo inhabiting the horse’s head that has become the mysterious, symbolic bearer of the past.

In the spectrum of Tillers’ work de Chirico has been a continuing source of fascination. Since the 1970s he has been drawn to de Chirico’s interest in the metaphysical and apparently coincidental occurrences across time and place. A quite personal connection with this artist is found in Tillers’ work Inherited absolute 1992, based on de Chirico’s The painter’s family 1926. The work incorporates a reference to a drawing by his first-born daughter Isidore as a child. In the re-making of the work Tillers retraced the formation of the letters of a child learning to write – learning, tentatively, how each letter is shaped – observing his offspring’s early interest in numbers and repetition. Isidore Tillers recalls that as a child she often spent time with her father in his studio, like her younger

sister Saskia later on, she often had a go at making her own canvasboard works. In Tillers’ adaptation of de Chirico’s intimate family group, the added lines across the surface suggest the passing of time. There is also a shared connection with the processes of making art (in references to the painter’s materials) and with architecture – in the figures that do not inhabit the buildings but are inhabited by them. In Tillers’ correspondence with de Chirico there is always a shared fascination with serendipity and with the idea of the past being alive in the present.

The Diaspora works Although born in Australia, Tillers’ experience growing up as a child of Latvian refugees who migrated from a Displaced Persons camp in Germany in 1949, left him with a sense of fragmentation and an awareness of psychic exile. The feeling of his own ‘in-betweenness’ – belonging partly to two cultures and not fully to either – has informed his art and life. When he was growing up in Sydney Tillers attended Latvian school on weekends

in addition to his normal schooling during the week. As much as he may have felt some ambivalence as he moved from his parental home into the wider world, at times wanting to free himself from the shadows of a past he could only imagine, as a child of refugees he had a sense of responsibility to his parents’ memories.

Tillers described his Diaspora series of the 1990s as introducing ‘a new paradigm’ in his work. The four major paintings in the series collectively represent an epic statement relating to diasporas – to the dislocation of peoples from their original homelands (including within their own lands due to colonisation) and the coming together of disparate cultures that is so much part of the stories and legacies of communities in the 20th and 21st centuries. Seen collectively the Diaspora works are, to quote Pierre Restany, like a vast ‘epigraphic fresco’ enfolding many visions.1 Taking into account the broad sweep of the series from the first painting Diaspora 1992, through Izkliede 1994 (Latvian for diaspora), to Paradiso 1994 (an anagram for diaspora), to Farewell to reason artonview

Inherited absolute 1992 oilstick, gouache and synthetic polymer paint on 115 canvasboards Orange Regional Gallery, Gift of the Friends of the Orange Regional Gallery

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1996, the most striking change in Tillers’ art appears in the way that he includes many small paintings nesting within each large work. Another distinctive element of these paintings is that they include more text references than previous works, locating language as a potent source of identity: suppressed, fractured, regained and reworked as poetry, political activism, performance art, ritual and lament.

Tillers’ monumental painting Diaspora 1992 came about in part as a response to dramatic political events. After growing up with the view that the fate of Latvians was to be perpetually subsumed by a colonising culture or to go into exile in Siberia, the newfound freedom of the Baltic States that occurred with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 seemed to Tillers to be remarkable, a sudden turnaround.

The first small painting that he included in Diaspora was a reference to The Madonna Oriflamma 1926 by Nicholas Roerich, a Russian artist inspired by Tibetan mysticism, theosophy and Russian icons. He was also the originator of the Roerich Peace Pact, signed by President Roosevelt and other world leaders in 1935, that sought the preservation of cultural institutions around the world in times of war. The flag held by the Madonna in the painting is The Banner of Peace, the symbol of the Pact. In contrast, the trauma of shared memory is alluded to in the section containing four pale heads on long flexible necks probing space like radars,

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inspired by Georg Baselitz’s Oberon 1963–64 and reinscribed with the word RIGA; the red and white reflecting the colours of the Latvian flag. This segment refers in part to the suppression of the Latvian language under Soviet annexation and the loss of a public voice.

The title of the fourth work in the Diaspora series Farewell to reason (p.7) 1996 comes from a book by Paul Feyerabend. The anchoring power of the work is the dignified presence of the Aboriginal man locating the centre of the work in Australia and suggesting the displacement of indigenous peoples. The work also incorporates multiple voices and visions from other places (New Zealand, France, Latvia, South America and Germany, to mention a few). There are numerous symbols relating to mortality and ritual across different cultures including the cross in Colin McCahon’s The five wounds of Christ no.3 1977–78 and another symmetrically placed cross on the vibrant green chasuble (a vestment worn at mass) originally designed by Matisse for the chapel at Vence. The word ‘Nezinams’ refers to a tombstone for unknown Latvian soldiers set amongst several other funerary images.

On the one hand patterns of rupture are present in large and intimate signs of remembrance. On the other hand the cycles of nature are metaphors for regeneration: in allusions to rocks and clouds in McCahon, in the spiky

yellow flowering details on the Matisse vestment, in the unexpected inclusion of four superimposed panels of leaf imagery based on photocopies of actual leaves that Tillers made and repainted, and in a cut-out shape of a flowering iris that is one of the first references to the German Romantic artist Philipp Otto Runge. In the epic picture of Farewell to reason the Runge image is a modest inclusion.

Yet his interest in this artist who found new ways of reconceptualising landscape through nature symbolism would flow in wave upon wave through the next phase of Tillers’ art: in works such as the Nature speaks series 1998–2006.

Nature speaks: when locality prevails By 1998 the groundwork was set for a dynamic interweaving of two aspects of Tillers’ approach to painting: the web of interconnections between all things and an increasing recognition of the significance of place. The shift in subject matter towards locality was inseparable from the move Tillers made with his family to Cooma in late 1996 where he became inspired by the varied local environment: the garden at their family home Blairgowrie; the expansive terrain of the surrounding Monaro region; and the proximity to the Snowy Mountains.

Correspondences with landscape make their presence felt in a non-literal way – as evocations of nature through text

references including place names and excerpts of poetry and sensuous layered visual elements.

Drawing upon a poetic analogy of symbolist poets and artists, the title Nature speaks suggests that nature has its own voice or language. In particular Tillers was referring to the Latvian poet Ilze Kalnãre who wrote: ‘The rock speaks, the mountain speaks, every ear of corn speaks, every tree and field, in a language so intimate and familiar.’2 The Nature speaks series comprises over one hundred sixteen-panel works that contain multiple variations as well as certain constants. As Tillers noted: ‘At first glance the series appears to proceed like an algorithm because of the repetition of certain elements within each work – like the word “horizon”; the Mallarméan mantra “A throw of the dice will never abolish chance”; the Tau cross of Colin McCahon’s “load-bearing structures”; and the ubiquitous cherubim of Philipp Otto Runge from his unfinished Gesamtkunstwerk “The Times of Day”.’3 In the Nature speaks series some works allude to Tillers’ ongoing connection with a German Romantic tradition as in Nature speaks (Kosciusko) and Nature speaks: D. Both include a figure that closely resembles Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above a misty sea c.1818. If Tillers allows the cool romantic light of the Snowy Mountains to envelop the dream-like atmosphere of Nature speaks

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Diaspora 1992 oilstick, gouache and synthetic polymer paint on 228 canvasboards Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington

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Nature speaks: AU 2002 synthetic polymer paint, gouache on 16 canvasboards, Private collection, Melbourne Nature speaks: D 2000 synthetic polymer paint, gouache on 16 canvasboards, Private collection

Nature speaks: AT 2002 synthetic polymer paint, gouache on 16 canvasboards, Canberra Museum and Gallery Nature speaks (Kosciusko) 1999 synthetic polymer paint, gouache on 16 canvasboards, Private collection, Melbourne

Imants Tillers and Michael Jagamara Nelson Nature speaks: AD 2002 synthetic polymer paint, gouache on 16 canvasboards, Private collection, Brisbane Nature speaks: AQ 2001 synthetic polymer paint, gouache on 16 canvasboards, Australian National University, Canberra

(Kosciusko), in Nature speaks: D he also reminds us that painting is an illusion. The abstracted dot-screen over the landscape suggests different ways of seeing and thinking about art, evoking constellations piercing the night sky. In other works in the series there is an almost Dada sense of absurdity, as in Nature speaks: AU where the silhouette of a man on a bicycle perched on a weather vane over the horizon suggests the variability and strangeness of existence as we try to navigate through the labyrinth of memory and contemporary experience.

In a series that reflects upon the significance of landscape Tillers felt that he could not overlook the power of much contemporary Aboriginal art. While Nature speaks: VI recalls the paintings of Emily Kam Ngwarray, works such as Nature speaks: AD are the result of collaborations with Michael Jagamara Nelson. In these works space is seen from above. In contrast to repeated references to the horizon, the alternative inscription appears in a number of works: ‘There is no horizon’, conveying an alternative way of conceptualising place.

In Nature speaks: AT, Tillers locates us in the landscape through glowing yellow tones and through place names such as The ‘Jenny’ Brothers, Cooroo, Kybeyan and on to Myalla, Nimmitabel and Gaerloch in the region around Tillers’ home. With the additional inscription of ‘out)back’ in this work we are reminded of a journey that he made into the interior of Australia in 2000 (also recalled in Nature speaks: BK 2004). The experience was an enlivening one for him, coming at a time when his deepening feeling for

place was resonating in his art. As he wrote, ‘it was an exhilarating and panoramic experience that changed my perception of our vast and beautiful continent’.4 Throughout the Nature speaks series, the mantra from Mallarmé’s late daring poem Un coup de dés, ‘A THROW OF THE DICE WILL NEVER ABOLISH CHANCE’, inscribed in blue around the edges of the works is a continual reminder of the importance of chance correspondences that run through all of his works. The exhibition Imants Tillers: one world many visions reveals that it is possible to engage with multiple correspondences and transformations on a journey through different stages and aspects of the artist’s works from 1984 to the present. It opens up intriguing possibilities for our engagement with a distinctive and intriguing approach to art-making in Tillers’ canvasboard system: in stacks on the ground; in an intimate installation of the boards on music stands titled Telepathic music 1994, in the fluctuating rhythms of the Nature speaks series and in some of the largest and most accomplished paintings undertaken in Australia. a

Telepathic music 1994 synthetic polymer paint, gouache 9 double-sided canvasboards 9 K brand music stands, randomly grouped Collection of the artist

Deborah Hart Senior Curator, Australian Painting and Sculpture notes 1 Pierre Restany in Diaspora in context: connections in a fragmented world, Pori Art Museum, Finland, 1995, p. 73 2 Imants Tillers, ‘When locality prevails’, Heat 8, new series, ed. Ivor Indyk, Giramondo Publishing Company, Artarmon NSW, p. 115 3 Imants Tillers, ‘When locality prevails’, Heat 8, new series, p. 114 4 Imants Tillers quoted in Ashley Crawford, ‘Centre grounds Tillers’, The Age, sighted in the following website on 5 December 2005: www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/12/05

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Imants Tillers discusses Terra incognita & Terra negata Terra incognita 2005 synthetic polymer paint and gouache on 288 canvasboards Collection of the artist

As Heiner Bastian has pointed out, Mallarmé wanted to write poetry similar in concept to the composition of a painting: ‘Painting – not the thing, but the effect it creates. Verse should not be composed of words, but of intentions, and should destroy all words for the sake of sensation.’ Thus the meaning of a poem can only be evoked by an inner reflection of the words themselves.

In my own works, particularly over the last decade, words, phrases and sentences (some of which come from Mallarmé) float not on the white space of a page but in and amongst the colours, the forms and the imagery of a painting. As in Mallarmé, they are not there to be decoded, to arrive at a precise meaning predetermined by the author or the artist but rather to generate allusions and sensations in the reader/viewer.

During the 1980s I was very fortunate to be making frequent visits to New York and on several notable occasions I found myself standing in front of one of Jasper Johns’ masterpieces: Map 1961 in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. What appealed to me particularly was how the structure of the boundaries and names of the 52 states of the United States (together sometimes with adjoining bits of Canada and Mexico) allowed Johns a new kind of freedom with his gestural brushstrokes. Here, by virtue of some novel constraints, the Abstract Expressionism of de Kooning was given a new twist, a new life and a new relevance. It is perhaps not surprising, given my postmodern bent at the time, that this work gave me the idea of doing my own series of Johns’ ‘maps’ (both the paintings and the prints), a repainting and reconfiguring of his work from an Antipodean viewpoint. I only completed two

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works: Prophecy 1989 and Mystic America 1989 which I exhibited in my fourth and last solo exhibition at the Bess Cutler Gallery in New York in 1989. (Bess was disappointed that neither work contained the name of her birthplace: Saskatchewan.)

Subsequently I experimented with the map of Australia but found its contour too distinctive and its subdivisions too few and too plain. It was only with the discovery of David Horton’s Map of Aboriginal Australia at the beginning of the new millennium that I found a way to go forward on this front – for here was not only an alternative map to the familiar, boring one I had grown up with at school but the 460 subdivisions demonstrated the rich diversity of the language/tribal/nation groups of the Indigenous people of Australia – a fact which had been largely invisible or unknown to most white Australians and the rest of the world. Here also, was the palpable lie to the misguided colonial idea of terra nullius – the so-called empty, unoccupied continent of 1788. While the regional divisions on Horton’s map were panoramic, diverse and fascinating (the Northwest, Southwest, Desert, Spencer, Kimberley, North Arnhem, Fitzmaurice, Gulf, West Cape, Torres Strait, East Cape, Rainforest, Northeast, Eyre, Riverine, Southeast and Tasmania to name them all), it was the individual names themselves that most attracted me. I recognised words like Ngarigo, Arrernte, Luritja, Badjala, Wiradjuri, Adnyamathanha as a kind of eloquent readymade poetry that I would like to include in my future paintings.

After about three years’ work on this project, I have completed two major paintings, both composed of 288 canvasboard panels and measuring 120” x 336” each:

Terra incognita in March 2005 and Terra negata in November 2005. Terra incognita is of a golden hue and described by my friend, the semiotician Anne Hénault, as being ‘syntactical’ while Terra negata is of a red bronze hue and described as being ‘paradigmatic’. In Terra incognita I have isolated just the Aboriginal names themselves (without their defining boundaries) from Horton’s map and distributed them spatially across the painting so that they correspond approximately to their actual geographical locations within the continent of Australia. In Terra negata the same names are arranged in the form of an alphabetical list from A to Y, beginning with the name Alyawarre and ending with Yiman. The background image in both works – the tangled network or web of lines derives from a famous painting by the Aboriginal artist Emily Kam Ngwarray who appeared on the art scene like a cloudburst in the early 1990s. Her Big yam dreaming 1995 in the National Gallery of Victoria in

Melbourne is a work to rival Blue Poles or indeed the best of American Abstract Expressionism be it Pollock or de Kooning. Furthermore, her painting is a kind of psychic and yet geographical mapping of the land and in this has a strange and unexpected affinity with the Jasper Johns Map 1961 that once had me spellbound in New York.

Thus both Terra incognita (shown for the first time in this exhibition) and Terra negata (selected for the Sydney Biennale in 2006) are for me a kind of homage to Indigenous Australia, a lament for the tragedies of all the lost tribes, languages and cultures of Australia but also, simultaneously, a kind of honour roll for the spectacular resurgence of their culture. This has been revealed to the wider world largely through art and especially through the medium of painting – an amazing phenomenon to which all Australians have borne witness over the last 30 years. a

Terra negata 2005 (details) synthetic polymer paint and gouache on 288 canvasboards Collection of the artist Emily Kam Ngwarray Big yam dreaming 1995 synthetic polymer paint on canvas National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Presented through the Art Foundation of Victoria by Janet and Donald Holt and family, Governors, 1995

Imants Tillers

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exhibitions galleries

Michael Riley: sights unseen 14 July – 16 October 2006

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Wiradjuri/Kamilaroi artist Michael Riley (1960– 2004) was one of the most important Indigenous visual artists of the past two decades. His film and video work challenged our perceptions of Indigenous experience, particularly the experience of disenfranchised communities in rural and remote eastern Australia, which he brought to the forefront of international contemporary art. Riley’s work gained increasing critical acclaim in the early 21st century, highlighted by his selection for the 2003 Istanbul Biennial. Riley has been selected as one of eight artists who will be represented in the significant Australian Indigenous Art Commission at the new Musée du quai Branly, due to open in Paris in June 2006.

Riley’s work draws on both European and North American traditions – as well as his Indigenous heritage in Australia. He studied film-making and photography and was concerned by the contradictions imposed by European beliefs on the Indigenous people in Australia.

His early photographs are imbued with an aesthetic

beauty, and his subjects possess a sense of dignity and grace. The black-and-white portraits, with their sensitive styling and ambient lighting, are the very opposite of the gritty, socio-political documentary style that emanated from the Black Power and Indigenous self-determination movements of the 1970s and ‘80s, often taken by nonIndigenous photographers.

These sensitive informed portraits of families and communities are the antithesis of the bleak photojournalist studies of contemporary Aboriginal life in towns and cities favoured by the media. There is an obvious warmth between subject and photographer. It is evident that the photographer knew his subjects well and shared their experiences. Throughout all Riley’s work is a sense of exploration, of using the media of film and photography to represent the diverse aspects of contemporary Aboriginal life accurately and to get away from the stereotype of the drunk in the streets or marching in protests, and not being involved in everyday life.

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All Michael Riley images reproduced courtesy of the Michael Riley Foundation and VISCOPY, Australia Untitled from the series cloud [cow] 2000 (detail) printed 2005 chromogenic pigment photograph National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2005 Untitled from the series flyblown [galah] 1998 Epsom ultrachrome ink on Ilford Gallerie Gloss photographic paper National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2005 Untitled from the series flyblown [gold cross] 1998 Epsom ultrachrome ink on Ilford Gallerie Gloss photographic paper National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2005

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Michael Riley was born in Dubbo, western New South Wales, and spent his early childhood on Talbragar Aboriginal Reserve outside Dubbo, moving to Sydney in 1976. He was represented in the first Indigenous photographic exhibition, the NADOC ‘86 Exhibition of Aboriginal and Islander Photographers, held at the Aboriginal Artists Gallery in Sydney in September 1986.

In 1987, with nine other Sydney-based Indigenous artists, he founded Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative, a seminal force in the contemporary Indigenous visual arts movement throughout the 1990s. A number of his films and photo-media work won major national and international awards. Riley’s work is also represented in various major public and private collections throughout Australia, and his early black-and-white photography is highly sought after by collectors.

His first conceptual body of work was the languidly beautiful series of 15 gelatin silver images comprising Sacrifice 1993. It is in this series that the symbol of the cross – that most potent of Christian icons – first appeared, looming large against a turbulent sky. Riley returned to the subject of Christianity in later work, such 18 national gallery of australia

as the series flyblown, 1998 and the video Empire, 1997.

Riley’s images reflect what he has described as the ‘sacrifices Aboriginal people made to be Christian’.

They resonate with loss – experienced not only by the individual, but also by entire Indigenous communities – loss of culture and land in an enforced or sometimes embraced exchange for Christianity. Biblical elements abound in Sacrifice: the cross laid on the chest and standing out sharp against the sky in an unseen cemetery; the shimmering skin of the fish is in stark contrast to the parched earth; the oozing liquid in the dark palms of the black Christ-like figure evoking his struggle on the cross; and the granules of sugar, flour and coffee echoing the rations meted out to Aboriginal people on missions and hinting at the struggles present-day communities face with the onslaught of drugs.

In early 1998 Riley was diagnosed with renal failure and this debilitating illness impacted on his professional and personal life. Riley’s last and most significant body of work, cloud, 2001, shifted from terra firma to other worldly locations, including the paranormal. A dream-like quality is evoked in the seductive, digitally manipulated

images of the Magritte-like bovine seraph from the Mission as it floats in mid-air against a background of clouds; the flight of the boomerang (or barrgan/balgarrn in Wiradjuri), which is echoed in the wings of the angel, its back turned to the viewer, face averted; and again in the splayed wings of the blackbird, the eaglehawk or crow, and in the crucifix-like span of the native Galang-galang, or locusts’ wings. There is irony and wit in this image.

Michael Riley: sights unseen reveals the prolific talents of a quiet observer. Riley’s video, film and photomedia works continue to have a profound effect on contemporary representation and comprehension of Indigenous Australia. The exhibition draws together a comprehensive body of work, chronicling a period of intense cultural development and achievement. a

Untitled from the series Sacrifice [single fish, cracked earth] 1993 gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased with the assistance of the KODAK (Australasia) PTY LTD Fund 1993 Untitled from the series cloud [angel with full wings], taken 2000, printed 2005 pigmented prints, ultrachrome chromogenic inks on Ilford Gallery Pearl photographic paper National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2005

Brenda L Croft Senior Curator, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art

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Michael Riley Darrell 1989 gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Michael Riley Kristina 1986 In September 1986 Michael Riley’s moody Hollywoodstyle glamour portrait of Kristina (Nehm), a Sydneybased Black Australian woman, was used on the invitation card for the opening of the NADOC ‘86 Exhibition of Aboriginal and Islander Photographers at the Aboriginal Artists Gallery in Clarence Street, Sydney.

The exhibition was part of NADOC ’86, the annual National Aboriginal Day of Commemoration programs – now known as NAIDOC Week (National Aboriginal and Islander Day Observance Committee). The 1986 NADOC photographic exhibition included some 60 works by Riley and nine other Indigenous photographers: Mervyn Bishop, Brenda L. Croft, Tony Davis, Ellen José, Darren Kemp, Tracey Moffatt, Chris Robinson, Terry Shewring and Ros Sultan. The style and form varied from artist to artist across portraiture, landscape, protest marches and press photographs, including images by Bishop, the eldest of the group and then the only long-established professional who had made a famous 1975 Aboriginal land rights recognition image with then Prime Minister Gough Whitlam pouring soil in to the hands of Gurindji

traditional owner Vincent Lingiari, at Daguragu in the Northern Territory. The prints were mostly black and white and the content addressed a wide range of issues and notions of Aboriginality. Riley and Tracey Moffatt presented staged portraits that turned upside down the stereotypes that inhibit the lives and futures of Indigenous people. For them identity involved issues of dress and undress and reduction would be dependent on inserting the unfamiliar dark face and body in the familiar white scenario. Both Moffatt and Riley worked outside what they saw as constraints of ‘straight’ photography preferring to stage their images and evoke earlier types of stereotyped photographic images of Aboriginal people. Both would also later work in film.

Photographs taken at the opening by Sydney photographer William Yang show there were indeed plenty of beautiful and chic Black women and men present. It was in fact an historic event; the first exhibition ever held of contemporary art exclusively by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander photographers. It was an art opening like any other but that note of style artonview

Kristina 1986 gelatin silver photograph printed 2001 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2005 Image exhibited at the NADOC ‘86 Exhibition of Aboriginal and Islander Photographers, Aboriginal Artists Gallery, Sydney 1986

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and confidence in that inviting image set the tone of the show and the future role of Indigenous photographers in Australian and international art. Riley, Moffatt, Bishop, Croft and José in particular developed high profile national and international careers over the next decade.

The NADOC ’86 show was preceded by Koori Art ’84, the pioneering show of Indigenous urban-based artists which had included several photographers including Riley and Shewring.

Of the photographers in the 1986 Aboriginal Artists Gallery show the photographer and nascent film-maker Tracey Moffatt, attracted the most media attention. She showed a complex but coolly classic black and white portraits of dancers from the Islander Dance company called the Some Lads series and a now iconic colour portrait of dancer/actor David Gulpilil sprawled on a car bonnet at Bondi Beach with tinnie in hand, ghetto blaster at his side and traditional white painted body markings. Regarding this image the artist made a rare categorical statement to the media: ‘Why shouldn’t Aboriginal people go to the beach like anyone else’.

The point was lost on some. Moffatt was to receive quite a bit of flak for allegedly representing an Aboriginal person as a drinker of alcohol in a public setting.

One of Riley’s first major works was prominent in the NADOC ’86 exhibition. This was the dark-toned head and shoulders portrait of young woman wearing a luminous white shell or bone necklace which was marked by an elegiac beauty and other-worldliness which would become the artist’s signature. It recalled, and at the same time overwrote, the well-known 19thcentury photographs of Tasmanian Aboriginal woman Truganinni wearing the maireener shell necklace unique to the Islander’s craft. After Truganinni’s death her shell necklace and bracelet were acquired by the Royal Exeter Museum in England and repatriated to Hobart in 1997, along with another maireener shell necklace held in the South Australian Museum. Riley would have been aware of the issues of violation of Trugannini’s body and repatriation of her remains from museums. The image also recalled a 19th-century image by German-born photographer JW Lindt of a beautiful Grafton Aboriginal woman wearing a white bone necklace which was widely reproduced. Lindt made his name and fortune in the 1870s with sales of staged tableaux photographs taken in his Grafton studio of local Aboriginal people in ‘authentic’ ethnographic settings.

Riley’s images of Kristina (with and without sunglasses) in the 1986 exhibition were selected from a number taken throughout the mid to late 1980s. The exhibition notice image shows Kristina in a languid pose leaning on her crossed arms. It seems ‘retro’, recalling 1930s images of Black American Blues singers hanging over the piano player. The sunglasses she wears

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accentuate the hung-over, I-cant-stand-the-light look of that genre. Anthony (Ace) Bourke, then Director of the Aboriginal Artists Gallery, and co-curator of the show with Moffatt, recalls the picture ‘was very political, black girls weren’t meant to be seriously chic’. Looking again at the image, we can’t see her eyes and despite her small frown imparting a note of anxiety, Kristina oozes confidence and spirit, no victim here, she flaunts her sunglasses as a fashionable, not functional artefact. Yet no Australian fashion magazine then would have hired a Black model despite the profile of Black singers and models overseas.

The NADOC ’86 show marked the beginning of a public profile within the art world for contemporary Indigenous photographers. The National Gallery acquired a 2001 print of Kristina 1986 and another portrait from slightly later, Darrell 1989 in 2005, the latter is very enigmatic with the young man’s soft-lit face, eyes lowered and closed, in a Zen-like meditation. At this time Riley had become a professional artist, he had taken classes at the Tin Sheds in photography and was working as Assistant to teacher Bruce Hart at Sydney College of the Arts. In the 1993 Riley would make his Sacrifice series of overtly symbolic tableaux ramping up the spiritual and multilayered readings of his work.

An earlier generation of Australian non-Indigenous photographers in the seventies had imagined themselves taking up a ‘new’ medium. For this first generation of highly directed Indigenous artist-photographers to begin meant inevitably that first there would be some backtracking. The medium had a history as an accomplice to injustice which needed rewriting. Other Indigenous photographers shows followed in the next five years aided by the establishment of other dedicated venues such as Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative in 1987. New Indigenous photo-based artists and curators appeared. Issues of dress and undress, which are central to how the native is seen (and not seen), remained topical for many. a Gael Newton Senior Curator, Australian and International Photography

Kristina (no glasses) 1984 gelatin silver photograph National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2005 Vintage print exhibited Koori Art ‘84, Artspace, Sydney

orde poynton galler y

Rosenquist: Welcome to the water planet 10 June – 12 September 2006

‘All I have to be is brilliant’ James Rosenquist represented by VAGA and VISCOPY, Australia Sky hole 1989 33 colour pressed paper pulp with lithographic collage on white, handmade, handcoloured, TGL paper and white, mould-made Rives BFK paper published by Tyler Graphics Ltd Purchased with the assistance of the Orde Poynton Fund 2002

The American artist James Rosenquist was pleased he was now exhibiting with the prestigious New York Gallery, Acquavella. ‘All I have to be now is brilliant’, he recently mused in conversation. In his career the elusive ‘need to be brilliant’ is something the artist has constantly searched for. Sometimes it seemed he was successful, sometimes he wasn’t, and he could never quite work out why, other than it sold.1 Rosenquist has an unusual modus operandi to achieve his goal, art historian Judith Goldman calls it a ‘taste for a convoluted idea’.2 He likes to draw together visual elements or notions that fascinate or intrigue, which he then places together to form a complex composition.

With this process, whether the artist is brilliant or not can only be judged on completion.

In the mid 1980s, when Rosenquist agreed to work at the print studio at Tyler Graphics Ltd at Mount Kisco, in New York State, he was required ‘to be brilliant’. The artist had been invited by Ken Tyler, printer and publisher, to explore the idea of making some paper pulp works. These came to form the series Welcome to the water planet and the works House of fire and Time dust which were produced in 1988 and 1989. Rosenquist had been a longtime admirer of Tyler and his working methods. ‘Ken liked to get his hands dirty’; he was ‘voracious’ in the studio in his enthusiasm for new ideas about printmaking, new techniques, new materials.

Tyler’s approach was in stark contrast to Rosenquist’s early experience in printmaking, when he made his first lithographs in 1965 and 1966 with publisher Tatanya Grosman at Universal Limited Art Editions, West Islip, New York. He found the atmosphere of the studio ‘old fashioned’ with more traditional technical methods used, leisurely lunches and no sense of urgency.

As a young man Rosenquist had long desired to become an artist. Born in provincial Grand Forks in

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North Dakota in 1933, he studied at the University of Minnesota, supporting himself by painting Phillips 66 Gasoline signs as he travelled to the border of the State of Iowa. Rosenquist then graduated to painting billboards, including the billboards advertising Davy Crockett, ‘King of the Wild Frontier’, the film first released in 1954. He painted two versions of this up and down the highways leading to Minneapolis. The following year he left the Midwest for New York to pursue an artistic career, winning a scholarship to attend the Art Students League in New York. There he continued painting billboards to support himself. His work now graced the skyline of New York’s Times Square and Brooklyn and Rosenquist gained a certain notoriety when he was featured in an article published on 6 June 1960 and dubbed, ‘Broadway’s biggest artist’. In this article, not noted for its understatement, the overly enthusiastic UPI journalist commented further that while ‘bigness isn’t always greatness, his creations nonetheless dwarf the most grandiose artistic accomplishments of Rivera and Michelangelo’.3 By the 1960s, the experience of painting on a large scale influenced his own art. Rosenquist began working on huge canvases and incorporating figures from the mass media. Because of their very size, the individual forms became abstracted when viewed close-up. The effect that scale changed figures from realistic images to abstract ones was something Rosenquist delighted in.

Rosenquist’s growing popularity as an artist had him regularly showing at Pop Art’s mecca, the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. The Castelli stable of artists included Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol. All were in some way associated with Pop Art. This was a movement which evolved in the late 1950s, which embraced ideas, subjects and techniques of

Time dust 1992 82 colour pressed paper pulp, lithograph, screenprint, relief, etching, stamping and collage printed from one copper plate, 59 aluminium plates, four magnesium plates and 12 screens on seven sheets of white, handmade, handcoloured, TGL paper; white, mould-made Rives BFK paper; black/gold marble Dri-Print metalized foil published by Tyler Graphics Ltd Purchased with the assistance of the Orde Poynton Fund 2002

popular culture. Pop saw the adoption of forms, colours and methods of mass culture drawn from advertising, television, film, music, comics, pulp novels and magazines.

Rosenquist was one of the central artists who drew inspiration from such sources. However, unlike other Pop artists, Rosenquist’s art method of the convoluted idea made his imagery not immediately clear. It was an art of fragments juxtaposed in often apparently bizarre, but at the time oddly pleasing, sequences.

Rosenquist’s association with Ken Tyler goes back many years to the time when he was keen to be further involved in printmaking to reach a wider audience through using new media. The artist and printer had planned to work at Gemini GEL in Los Angeles decades earlier.

However, as fate would have it, Rosenquist had a car accident in 1971 in which the artist, his wife and child were seriously injured and so nothing came of their first attempt to work together in the early 1970s. In 1974 they met in Bedford New York when Tyler had moved to the east coast of the USA, but again nothing eventuated.4 The 1970s were a testing time for Rosenquist, both personally and as an artist, and he said of these years that they were ‘not a very good time in my art work at all’.5 As Rosenquist’s career advanced both as a painter and maker of prints, his progress in each medium was decidedly uneven. In fact, the artist had become disillusioned with printmaking. He found painting more immediate, on a

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larger scale, and a more inventive way of making art. In contrast, he came to consider that prints were too small, too rigid in technique and lacked spontaneity. When, in 1987, Tyler wrote to Rosenquist inviting him to work at his new purpose-built workshop at Mount Kisco in upstate New York, he needed to be convinced the experience would be worthwhile – that making paper works and lithography with Tyler would be different from his earlier experiences. In response, Tyler promised Rosenquist that he would provide handmade paper as big as the artist could imagine and then sent him sketches of his premises and equipment. By the next year, Rosenquist had agreed to work at Tyler’s studio.

The new premises at Mount Kisco were established to further Tyler’s desire to provide the utmost assistance for artists who worked with him on print projects. In discussion it became apparent that the intention was that Rosenquist and the printer would develop a project – perhaps to make some paper pulp works. Tyler had a long held an interest in handmade papers. He had worked on collaboration in 1973– 74 with Robert Rauschenberg at the Richard de Bas paper mill in France, where the artist made 12 paper works. Tyler then continued with paper pulp projects in the 1970s with artists Elsworth Kelly, Keith Noland and later, in 1979, David Hockney. Hockney produced spectacular paper pulp works, notably in his Paper Pools series, which brought paper works to new heights in terms of scale, colour and textures.

When he arrived, Rosenquist had an idea, a convoluted one, which he hoped would develop as an image – slow heating popcorn taking its time – and tying this notion together with his growing concern about the state of planet earth – the only water planet known in existence in the universe at this time. Arriving at the workshop, Rosenquist had the same need ‘to be brilliant’. He mulled over such disparate thoughts. Telling Ken of his initial idea, Tyler joked, ‘Well, that was one idea, where are the rest of your ideas?’. As an artist Rosenquist liked to work with fluid concepts initially for what became the Water planet project, which would then take shape during his time at the Tyler studio: ‘So then we’re getting into this print called The bird of paradise approaches the hot water planet. He says, “What’s the next idea?” So I brought them the next idea. He says, “Oh great! That’s fabulous. Where’s the next one?” I said, “I don’t have any idea yet”.’6 In fact, Rosenquist wished to remain as spontaneous as he could, untrammelled by long-held or preconceived ideas. ‘I wanted them to come right out of the air’.7 To work in this manner required a print workshop which could be innovative and on the spot. Rosenquist was pleased to be working with Tyler on such a momentous project because he considered him ‘probably the best printing technician in the world’. Unlike other printers who, when faced with a difficult task put to them by the artist, would shake their heads and say sorry they couldn’t deal with the

new ideas, ‘with Ken – he’d look at you, walk away and the next day he would have devised something to make the new idea work. Nothing would stop him … he would go to any length … He would never say no.’ For the project Tyler devised a huge deckle box to make hand-made papers some 150 x 305 cm, and a giant printing press for lithography and etching (305 x 610 cm).

Over the months as the pair worked together a series of large-scale paper pulp works evolved, using huge sheets of handmade paper made on the TGL premises. The project was inspired by the exotic vegetation of Florida where his studio was in Aripeka on the Gulf of Mexico and reflected Rosenquist’s disquiet with what was happening to the earth. All this combined to project Rosenquist’s concern, ‘We all live on the water planet’, the artist discussed at an interview, ‘John Glenn [the first American astronaut to orbit the earth] said when he went into space he turned around and looked at Earth, and he wondered why so many people were spending so much money on blowing it up, and they actually lived on it. It seems very bizarre’.8 Rosenquist’s series of paper works were intended to act both as a celebration and a warning to what might happen to the water planet.

Rosenquist included imagery which evoked the colourful and sensual riches of the earth and brilliant flora from Florida, set within a wondrous star-lit universe.

This he combined with the contrasting ideas about the

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previous page: Space dust 1989 20 colour pressed paper pulp with lithographic collage on white, handmade, handcoloured, TGL paper and white, mould-made Rives BFK paper published by Tyler Graphics Ltd Purchased with the assistance of the Orde Poynton Fund 2002 James Ronsenquist working with Ken Tyler on Skull Snap, state I at Tyler Graphics Ltd, 1989 The bird of paradise approaches the hot water planet 1989 33 colour pressed paper pulp with lithographic collage on two sheets of white, handmade, handcoloured, TGL paper and white, mould-made Rives BFK paper published by Tyler Graphics Ltd Purchased with the assistance of the Orde Poynton Fund 2002

mistreatment and destruction of the earth represented by detritus, pots and pans, rocket ships, fighter planes or missiles of destruction with the addition of torpedos in the form of ruby red lipsticks or jet engines as acid green pencils. ‘The water planet is earth. A visitor from another universe comes by, and we say, “hey, welcome to this mess! It’s hell, it’s burning up, but come on in!”’9 The first idea Rosenquist came to form was The bird of paradise approaches the hot water planet. From his early days as a billboard artist it was Rosenquist’s habit to work from a small drawing, often a collage of various images, and upscale the composition and develop this to be a gargantuan size. Deconstructing the image into its component parts, artist and printer decided to make the curved lines of cross-hatching, so characteristic of Rosenquist’s work in general at this time, and it would then be printed in colour lithography. These lithographic elements would then form a collage which would be laid for a brilliantly coloured paper pulp sheet. The separate colours were made by filling different moulds with paper pulp placed on top of the large sheets of handmade paper which were cut out in metal according to Rosenquist’s design.

At the initial stages of the project the method of using metal moulds, or ‘cookie cutters’, was clumsy, timeconsuming, and the paper pulp lacked consistency – it was just ‘so awful’, Rosenquist remembered. The paper pulp was messy and not easy to control. Rosenquist was also frustrated by the lack of spontaneity in the whole procedure. He was loosing momentum. To counteract these problems, Tyler worked on the consistency of the pulp and the shapes of the moulds, but still there were problems

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in translating Rosenquist’s designs into paper form. The artist developed a group of templates which took a great deal of time to make, based on his drawings and cut for each form he wanted. Tyler drew on his own technical expertise and the constant desire for experimentation and innovation to solve problems in the workshop. For the large areas of graded colour, impossible to achieve using mould shapes, Tyler proposed to use a spray gun, used for applying stucco to walls in houses which could spray the gradations of brilliant and unusual colour across the pulp on which the lithographic elements were collaged. The technique was a success and the results were glorious with a look of apparent spontaneity and effortlessness, which belied the hours of preparation and a technique born of experimentation.

Rosenquist was delighted with his paper pulp works.

‘The wonderful thing about paper pulp is the colour. If you take a magnifying glass, you’ll see a little fuzz rising like smoke off the surface of this handmade paper – like doing giant watercolours and letting this watercolour seep together at the perfect moment … ’10 a Jane Kinsman Senior Curator, International Prints, Drawings and Illustrated Books notes 1 James Rosenquist in conversation with Jane Kinsman, 9 March 2006.

All quotes with text refer to this interview unless otherwise indicated.

2 Judith Goldman, ‘Whenever you’re ready, let me know’, in James Rosenquist: Welcome to the water planet and house of fire 1988– 1989, Mount Kisco, United States: Tyler Graphics Ltd, 1989, p. 13. For further reading see Constance W. Glenn, Complete Graphic Works 1962–1992, New York: Rizzoli, 1993, cat. nos. 214–23, Time dust, illustrated, pp. 160–68.

3 United Press International, 6 June 1960, quoted in Judith Goldman, James Rosenquist, New York: Viking Penguin, 1985, p. 25.

4 Ken Tyler in correspondence with Jane Kinsman, 18 April 2006.

5 James Rosenquist referring to the years 1971 to 1977, quoted in Constance W. Glenn, Time dust: James Rosenquist, Complete Graphics: 1962–1992, New York: Rizzoli, 1993, p.51.

6 James Rosenquist in Welcome to the water planet (Documentary film)

(New York: Seven Hills Production, 1989) 7 James Rosenquist (Documentary film) 1989 8 James Rosenquist (Documentary film) 1989 9 James Rosenquist quoted in Walter Hopps and Sarah Bancroft, James

Rosenquist: A retrospective, New York: Guggenheim, c. 2003, pp.

126–27.

10 James Rosenquist (Documentary film) 1989

projec t galler y

Right here right now Recent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander acquisitions 13 May – 13 August 2006

13 May – 13 August 2006

Unknown Maker Rainforest people Jawun basket [bicornual] 1900s lawyer cane National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2005 Julie Dowling Badimaya/Yamatji people Laid in his tomb oil on canvas National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2005

Right here right now: Recent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander acquisitions presents a selection of works from across the breadth and depth of Indigenous visual art and culture in Australia over the past two centuries, acquired during the last two years, which have not yet been on public display. Media include bark painting, fibre-work and textiles, print-making, drawing, painting and sculpture, with themes ranging from the ancestral and ancient in Indigenous and European time, to the cutting edge of political society in Australia today.

Works are by leading contemporary artists such as bark painter and lorrkon (hollow log) maker, Kuninjku artist John Mawurndjul, whose work has been selected for the prestigious Australian Indigenous Art Commission (AIAC) at the new Musée du quai Branly in Paris; a series of oils on canvas with a specifically Indigenous perspective on Christianity by Julie Dowling (Yamatji/Badimaya people), the edgy satire of Waanyi/Waanjiminjin artist Gordon Hookey; to memento mori in the work of Kuku/ Erub artist Clinton Nain, in a stunning series of panels

by Ungkum artist Rosella Namok and a recent canvas by renowned Waanyi artist Judy Watson, whose work is also represented in the AIAC. A group of paintings by emerging Kudjla/Gangalu artist Daniel Boyd, visually pun on the concepts of terra nullius, buccaneering and stolen wealth, drawing

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inspiration from 18th-century portraiture filtered through the artist’s 21st-century perspective.

These works are shown alongside a stunning body of canvases by established and emerging Papunya Tula artists; paintings by emerging artist Ngoia Pollard Napaltjarri from Utopia in central Australia; Bidyadanga and Parnggurr communities in north-east Western Australia, and Peppimenarti in the Northern Territory; and superb lorrkon and larrikitj [hollow logs] by rising artists from Maningrida and Yirrkala, Timothy Wulanjbirr and Naminapu Maymuru-White, respectively, whose work has gained increasing notice in the past year. Tiwi artists Jean Baptist Apuatimi and Timothy Cook present their distinctive vision rendered in ochre.

Works on paper by foremost Torres Strait Islander print-maker, Dennis Nona (Kala Lagaw Ya people), are highlighted by the innovative approach to working with a diversity of media on paper by senior Arnhem Land artist Paddy Fordham Wainburranga (Rembarrnga people).

A whimsical approach is evident in the objects of south-eastern artist Lola Ryan, and Blackstone, Western Australian artist Kantjupayi Benson (Ngaanyatjarra people), whose individual approaches to their work encompass intimate and recent history. Other objects and textile works include two rare late 19th-century bicornual baskets from Far North Queensland, a magnificent burial basket by renowned Ngarrindjeri weaver, Yvonne Koolmatrie, textiles by local and regional artists, and a series of vibrant weavings by Maningrida artists.

Such contemporary works complement recent acquisitions of historical works, which include a stunning 19th-century Torres Strait Islander mask by an unknown maker; a wonderful carving of the wife of Gurrmirringu, the ancestral hunter by David Malangi Daymirringu; a series of spectacular painted boards created in the early 1970s by Wadeye (Port Keats) artists; and paintings by renowned Warmun artists, the late George Mung Mung and his contemporary, Hector Jandany, elder statesman in the community today. a Brenda L Croft Senior Curator, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art

Daniel Boyd Kudjla/Gangalu people Captain no beard oil on canvas National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2006

Dennis Nona Kala Lagaw Ya people Awai Yithuyil (Badu Island Story) relief National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2005

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Unknown Maker Torres Strait Islander people Mask wood, shell, resin, human hair, fibre string, white pigment National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2006 Doreen Reid Nakamarra Pintupi people, Nakamarra subsection Untitled synthetic polymer paint on canvas National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2005 Š Doreen Reid Nakamarra and Papunya Tula Artists

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new acquisition Australian Painting and Sculpture

Shane Cotton Three-quarter view

Shane Cotton Three-quarter view 2005 acrylic on canvas purchased 2005

In recent years Shane Cotton has emerged as one of Aotearoa New Zealand’s most significant contemporary painters. Working within postmodern and post-colonial frameworks, Cotton combines appropriated imagery from Maori and pakeha (non-indigenous New Zealanders) sources to create hybrid, poetic paintings, which investigate the shared experience of the country’s two cultures.

Three-quarter view is dominated by the moko (facial tattoo) of 19th-century British flax trader, Barnet Burns. The striking physical transformation of the Englishman resulted from his extraordinary decision to live amongst the Maori from the 1830s. Cotton used a 19th-century etching of Burns as his source, yet his painting process transforms the original. Removing all signs of Burns’ Englishness, the artist has reproduced only his moko in two-tone blues. Hovering around the disembodied face are targets, sparrows and a goldfinch. The avian motif has particular importance in Maori cosmology and the goldfinch symbolises the passion of Christ in western religious art. The captivating combination alludes to the complex relationship between Christianity, colonialism, and contemporary culture.

Three-quarter view is the final painting in a series of three works based on historic etchings and photographs.

Each work presents a portrait painted from a different angle: a frontal view, a profile view, and a three-quarter view. The first painting depicts the carved self-portrait of 19th-century Maori chief, Hongi Hika. Hika displayed great interest in European culture and travelled to England in 1820. The interrelation between the narratives of Hika and Burns is of particular interest to Cotton: ‘it reflects ideas associated with gain and loss, which encircle racial and cultural exchange.

Between the spaces of the frontal and profile view, is the three-quarter view; a space of difference: a space of change’

(‘Trans-former’, Keynote address, AAANZ conference, Power Institute, 2005). In this way, Three-quarter view creates a ‘liminal’ space in which colonial narratives are blurred and new cultural possibilities are engendered. Cotton’s art questions the notion of indivisible cultural identity, looking instead to the indeterminate space between Maori and pakeha perspectives.

Olivia Sophia Intern, Australian Painting and Sculpture, from the Australian National University

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new acquisition Australian Print s, Drawings and Illustrated Book s

John Lewin Studies of a remora fish

In the early decades of the colony watercolour was one of the few media for recording Australia’s natural history and landscape. One of the most successful artists of this period was John Lewin, the first professional artist to reside in Australia as a free settler, who arrived in the fledgling colony in January 1800. Trained by his ornithologist father in England, Lewin was skilled in the art of natural history painting. He rarely had the luxury of painting subjects of his choice, but readily accepted commissions from those interested in the natural oddities of flora and fauna or those who wanted ‘portraits’ of their houses as proof of their success in this strange new land. The National Gallery holds several watercolours by Lewin and his Government House Parramatta. December 1806 is the earliest watercolour painted in Australia in the collection. Lewin was fortunate to come under the successive patronage of governors Hunter, King, Bligh and Macquarie, and accompanied field expeditions, documenting many natural

history subjects, including the first known depiction of a koala following an 1801 expedition to the Hunter River.

The most recent addition of Lewin’s work to the collection is his Studies of a remora fish c. 1807. This watercolour shows two studies of a remora fish – one is a full-length view from above and the other is the underside of the head. The fish is painted in a monotone grey watercolour in delicate detail, with particular attention given to the head and mouth and underside of the head.

There is no background to distract from this faithfully rendered natural history study. The work is inscribed across the top of the sheet “16 inches in length & 5 in Girth – Black on the Back with a Black Stripe on the side” and “Under side of the Head” above the view of the fish’s head. This work was originally in the collection of Governor William Bligh and was held by the family until recent times.

John Lewin Studies of a remora fish c. 1807 watercolour on paper

Anne McDonald Curator, Australian Prints and Drawings

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new acquisition International Photography

Shinzo Fukuhara Beautiful West Lake: the light with its harmony

Shinzo Fukuhara photogravure plate from Beautiful West Lake: the light with its harmony Tokyo: Nihon Sashin-kai [Japan Photographic Society] 1931

Shinzo Fukuhara was the most prominent and influential amateur art photographer in Japan between the world wars and the driving force behind various camera societies, exhibitions and publications. He was very western in business having completed his education in America as well as having spent time in Paris in 1913 where he mixed with avant-garde artists and pursued his own art photography.

Recalled to Japan at the advent of the First World War, Fukuhara took over direction of the old family pharmacy business, and during the 1920s created the international cosmetics corporation Shiseido. His personal art, however, was very romantic and his first photobook – published in Japan in 1922 – was of soft-focus impressionistic studies from his pre-war sojourn in Paris.

In 1930 Fukuhara travelled to China and photographed the long-established tourist destination of the West Lake at Hangzhou. The sub-title came from his influential 1923

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essay ‘The Light with its harmony’ in which Fukuhara promoted a manifesto for photographic art reflecting national character (Japaneseness) based on the abstract qualities of light merged with the aesthetics of traditional arts and culture. Fukuhara’s various photobooks were very other-worldly, usually about places by water with literary associations. His last published book The Sunny Hawaii (1935) embraced a more modernist clarity of light and form.

Fukuhara’s advocacy of an international style of Pictorialist art photography while seeking to define a national character parallels the activities of Harold Cazneaux and his Australian contemporaries in founding the Sydney Camera Circle in 1916 to promote an Australian school of sunshine photography expressing the national character.

Gael Newton Senior Curator, Australian and International Photography

new acquisition International Print s, Drawings and Illustrated Book s

The Chapman Brothers Disasters of war

Since 1990, Jake and Dinos Chapman have successfully worked as a sculptural team who employ shock tactics to make statements about, amongst other things, the warmongering of the capitalist West. When the Chapman Brothers decided to produce a series of prints in 1999 the result was a portfolio of 83 exquisitely executed etchings that takes both its name, and its inspiration, from Francisco Goya’s famous cycle of prints Los desastres de la guerra [The disasters of war], 1810–20.

In a highly skilled but idiosyncratic application of aquatint, drypoint and hard and soft-ground etching, The Disasters of war seems to herald a return to the timehonoured techniques and perfection of process found in traditional etchings. However, this intimate aesthetic contrasts profoundly with the relentless repetition of swastikas, mutilated bodies, scenes of torture and devilish figures that the Chapmans present as subject matter.

Their view of the world is that it is one that has gone completely mad, a dystopia of human depravity and moral

deterioration. Re-translating Goya’s war imagery and recontextualising their own sculptural works, the Chapman Brothers have created nightmarish image upon nightmarish image, the culmination of which is a powerful statement about human evil in the 21st century. If you feel sick, you’re supposed to. If you want to look away, but can’t, the Chapmans have succeeded again.

In many of the etchings, the postmodernist combination of infantile humour and profound horror allows the artists to simultaneously seduce and revolt their audience. Not an easy task when you consider, as the Chapmans do, that the audience is made up of desensitised spectators. The Chapmans’ tactic is to position their audience as voyeurs, only to disgust them with the depravity of the world in which they live. As a result, the Disasters of war portfolio affects the viewer with the full force of a visual slap across the face.

Offensive? Distressing? Yes. And that’s the point.

Jake and Dinos Chapman plate 14 from the Disasters of war portfolio 1999 etching, drypoint and aquatint The Orde Poynton Bequest, 2005

Jaklyn Babington Assistant Curator, International Prints, Drawings and Illustrated Books artonview

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new acquisition A sian Ar t

Last rites: funerary bird from Vietnam

possibly Jarai people, Vietnam Funerary bird early 20th century teak

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While the great architectural complexes of Angkor Wat and Borobodur have ensured that the Hindu-Buddhist sculpture of Southeast Asia is well known, the art created for rituals related to the earlier but enduring animist beliefs of the region is often overlooked. This is especially the case for the sculpture of Vietnam which has always been eclipsed in western art collections by the arts of neighbouring Cambodia.

This striking stylised image of a bird, probably representing a peacock, was made for a burial site of one of the ethnic minorities, primarily dry rice cultivators, who inhabit the forested highland areas of central and northern Vietnam. Left to disintegrate after the graves are ritually abandoned, few such sculptures have survived. This fine example has been in a private collection in France since it was collected in the early 20th century. As a result, unlike most Jarai funerary sculpture, which is often badly eroded and grey in colour from being exposed to the elements, the surface of the bird is polished and well preserved.

For the animist Jarai, a year or so following a death, an elaborate ceremony is performed when a large houselike tomb structure of wood and basketry is constructed.

The grave site in the village of the dead is surrounded by sculptures of birds, animals and, more commonly, human figures, sometimes with overt genitalia and depicted in sexual acts. Two fretwork wooden panels from the top of such a tomb-house, in the Gallery’s collection of ancestral art once belonging to the Surrealist artist Max Ernst, depict birds and human figures in erotic poses. This starkly angular bird is perched on a pair of oxen horns or tusks, the tips of which are now missing. A small cavity on the top of its head indicates a missing crest.

Unlike many Southeast Asian cultures, figurative sculpture is only created by the Jarai for these secondary funerary rites.

Also unusual for a region where pilgrimages to the grave sites of ancestors are considered vital to the wellbeing of the spirit of the deceased and the living descendants, the Jarai neglect the village of the dead with its tombs and surrounding sculptures after the ceremony of closure. Both the dead and the living move on, the community returning to the village of the living and its everyday activities, while the spirit of the dead moves westward, perhaps to return in the future as dew at the birth of a child to the family of the deceased.

Ron Radford Director

new acquisition Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Ar t

19th-century Torres Strait Island mask The maker of this extremely rare and highly significant cultural object is unknown, but it is immediately recognisable as being from the Torres Strait Islands, and as having been created during the 19th century, if not earlier. The majority of Torres Strait Islander masks were used and worn during sacred ceremonies, initiations, sorcery and other customary rituals. This particular mask may have come from the north-western part of the Torres Strait, possibly Saibai Island, or been traded from a nearby coastal village in Papua New Guinea.

Nineteenth-century Torres Strait Islander objects are rarely found in either private or public collections in Australia due to the destruction of cultural material that occurred as a result of the arrival of Christian missionaries in the late 1800s. Torres Strait Islanders faced significant historical, cultural and social change when Reverend Samuel MacFarlane of the London Missionary Society brought Christianity to the Torres Strait on 1 July 1871.

This is referred to by the Islanders as ‘Coming of the Light’ and is celebrated annually on 1 July by all Torres Strait Islander communities throughout the Torres Strait and mainland Australia.

Examples of 19th-century Torres Strait Islander masks are held in the collections of the Cambridge University of Archaeology and Anthropology, UK (Haddon Collection); the Metropolitan Museum, New York, USA; the de Young Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, USA; Horniman Museum, London, UK; the Pitt-Rivers Museum, Oxford, UK; and the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington, NZ. This acquisition emphasises the importance of building upon Torres Strait Islander representation within the National Collection. The work is on display in Right here right now: Recent Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander acquisitions, Project Gallery, National Gallery of Australia 13 May – 13 August 2006.

Brenda L Croft Senior Curator, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Simona Barkus Trainee Curator, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art

Unknown Maker Torres Strait Islander Mask – 19th century Torres Strait Islander 19th century wood, shell, resin, human hair, fibre string, white pigment purchased 2006

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new acquisition International Decorative Ar t s and Design

Sergei Isupov To be object of attentions Combining engaging and surreal subject matter with consummate craftsmanship, Sergei Isupov’s painted figural ceramics alarm us at first glance, as we realise that they are revealing only one of several contradictory faces to the viewer. In the theatre of his imagination, heads sprout secondary figures, horns and hybrid animal limbs while faces and bodies become screens for a flotilla of painted figures that seem to have escaped from the world of Hieronymous Bosch. Isupov’s subjects exude calm repose, making the theatre of anguished humanity painted on them even more poignant as bizarre figures play out themes of birth, love, sex, jealousy, anxiety and death.

Each porcelain work is hand-built and painted with stained porcelain slip and glazes before being fired, a time-consuming and exacting process that Isupov tackles with equal measures of playfulness and discipline. Born in Stavropole, Russia in 1963 and trained in classical painting and ceramics in Kiev, Ukraine, and Tallin, Estonia, before taking residency in the United States of America in 1993, Isupov has personal experience of two very different cultures. His graphic visualisation of that duality is encapsulated in To be object of attentions, with its two faces looking in opposite directions, apparently unaware of each other but linked by figures that seem to have materialised from a shared imagination.

Sergei Isupov’s ceramics were first seen in Australia in the National Gallery of Australia’s 2005 exhibition, Transformations: the language of craft, during which he spoke on his work at the Gallery before undertaking a studio residency at the JamFactory Contemporary Craft and Design Centre in Adelaide. This work, one of the mostdiscussed in the exhibition, was acquired in 2005, adding a new dimension to the Gallery’s collection of contemporary ceramics.

Sergei Isupov To be object of attentions 2004 painted and glazed porcelain Purchased 2005 Photograph: Katherine Wetzel, courtesy Ferrin Gallery

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Robert Bell Senior Curator, Decorative Arts and Design

travelling exhibitions winter 20 0 6

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 and their concerns stylistically, technically and politically produced at the Australian Print Workshop between 1981 and 2002. The works are selected from an archive of 3,500 works acquired by National Gallery of Australia in 2002 through the assistance of the Gordon Darling Australasian Print Fund. nga.gov.au/Placemade

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

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

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

MOIST: Australian watercolours Moist is a rare glimpse into the National Gallery of Australia’s extraordinary collection of Australian watercolours. While the title refers to the liquid nature of watercolour, the word ‘moist’ elicits images of an atmospheric, physical or emotional state of being. The watercolours in Moist will demonstrate how Australian artists have created visual representations of such states, from the highly figurative to the purely abstract and intensely emotional. While each has its own story there are also common threads that draw them together. nga.gov.au/Moist

Red case: Myths and Rituals and Yellow case: Form, Space and Design Australian Embassy in Washington, Washington DC, USA, 10 April – 25 June 2006 David Wallace Stockman and horse 1997 recycled materials including wire, fabric, plastic, buttons National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

An artist abroad: the prints of James McNeill Whistler James McNeill Whistler was a key figure in the European art world of the 19th century.

Influenced by the French Realists, the Dutch, Venetian and Japanese masters Whistler’s prints are sublime visions of people and the places they inhabit. nga.gov.au/Whistler James McNeill Whistler Portrait of Whistler 1859 (detail) etching and drypoint National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

University Art Museum, University of Queensland, St Lucia QLD, 6 August – 1 October 2006

Coffs Harbour City Gallery, 10 July – 24 September 2006 Blue case: Technology Australian Embassy in Washington, Washington DC, USA, 10 April – 25 June 2006 Barossa Regional Gallery, Barossa SA, 3 July – 30 July 2006 Caloundra Regional Art Gallery, Caloundra QLD, 7 August – 17 September 2006

Perc Tucker Regional Art Gallery, Townsville QLD, 26 May – 9 July 2006 Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery, Mornington Vic., 25 July – 24 September 2006

The Elaine & Jim Wolfensohn Gift Travelling Exhibitions: The 1888 Melbourne Cup and three suitcases of works of art: Red case: Myths and Rituals includes works which reflect the spiritual beliefs of different cultures; Yellow case: Form, Space, Design reflects a range of art making processes; and Blue case: Technology. The suitcases 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

Karl Lawrence Millard Lizard grinder 2000 (detail) brass, bronze, copper, sterling silver, money metal, Peugeot mechanism, stainless steel screws National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

The 1888 Melbourne Cup Australian Embassy in Washington, Washington DC, USA, 10 April – 25 June 2006 Exhibition venues and dates are subject to change. Please contact the gallery or venue before your visit. For more information please contact (612)6240 6556 or email: travex@nga.gov.au.

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

The National Gallery of Australia Travelling Exhibitions Program is generously supported by Australian airExpress.

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new acquisition

The Anton Bruehl Gift

Gallery of Australia. The Anton Bruehl Gift is the highest in value ever to have been presented to the photography collection. Now in the art store at the Gallery, Anton Bruehl’s work keeps company with that of his Australian contemporary Max Dupain, as well as a gem-like collection of mid 20th-century American advertising photography.

While in Australia in 2001, Anton Bruehl Jr visited

the National Gallery of Australia after hearing of the Gallery’s purchase of a selection of iconic Bruehl prints, in part with funds from Dr Peter Farrell. We viewed the Gallery’s collection of American advertising photography and maintained contact through the following years. In 2004 I visited the Bruehls in San Francisco where, sitting all works Gift of Anton Bruehl Jr, 2006, through the American Friends of the National Gallery of Australia Anton Bruehl Lexington Avenue New York studio logo Martin Bruehl Portrait of Anton Bruehl in the studio, New York 1937 as published in a Condé Nast magazine article on ‘Cinema Arts’ in 1937 Anton Bruehl Swimsuit advertisement 1950s dye transfer colour photograph

From the late 1920s in New York, Anton Bruehl

on their couch, I first heard that Anton Jr wanted his

(1900–1982) was the doyen of advertising photography.

collection to come to Australia. The Bruehl Gift of 112

He is best known today as a pioneer of brilliant colour

photographs including some 20 original colour images

photography produced under exclusive contract to the

covers Bruehl’s career from the 1920s through to the

Condé Nast magazine group. Bruehl also specialised

figure studies of the 1950s. Although he has travelled to

in theatre studies, often recreating sets and scenes

Australia a number of times on business, Anton Bruehl

from musicals in his studio for absolute quality

Jr has no strong connections with Australia; his singular

control. He was equally acclaimed internationally in art

gesture is in recognition of his father’s birthplace, simply

photography salons and in 1933 published an award-

saying ‘it felt right’.

winning book of photographs of Mexico in a classic

straight documentary style.

teenager after his older brother Martin gave him a box

camera. He developed his skills in Melbourne where

Despite his German name, Anton Bruehl was not

Anton Bruehl first took up photography as a

one of the many European photographers drawn or

he trained as an electrical engineer and worked for an

driven to America in the 1930s; instead he was from

American engineering firm with colleagues who were

the dry regions of South Australia, born in Hawker in

also interested in camera art. Bruehl immigrated to New

1900. His German-born father was a well-respected

York in 1919 to work for Western Electric. Some years

and technically inventive medical doctor, a skill passed

after his arrival in New York, Bruehl was inspired to make

on, as Anton was a meticulous technician and skilled

photography his vocation after studying and teaching at

craftsman.

Clarence White’s School of Photography in New York.

In February this year, businessman and San Francisco

Bruehl was in partnership briefly with Ralph Steiner,

art collector Anton Bruehl Jr presented his personal

who worked with Bruehl on launching a hugely popular

collection of his father’s work to the National Gallery of

series of photographic tableaux advertisements for

Australia through the American Friends of the National

Weber and Heilbroner fabrics in the pages of the New

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Yorker in 1927–30. In these images cut-out paper figures of three men in suits were seen carrying on through various travels and adventures throughout which their clothing triumphed. The ‘Fabric Group’ ads won Bruehl the Art Directors Club Medal for 1928. Bruehl opened his second, larger studio on Lexington Avenue in 1927 and persuaded his brother Martin, a structural engineer in Australia, to immigrate to New York. The brothers then brought their parents to live in America.

The Bruehl studio began to supply images regularly

for the Condé Nast publications – Vogue, Vanity Fair and House and Garden. At Nast’s instigation and despite the cutbacks in most magazines during the Depression, Bruehl worked with photo-technician Fernand Bourges on developing very high quality colour photographs. The first of 195 Bruehl–Bourges process colour photographs appeared in the May 1932 issue of Vogue. The cost of production was enormous but so were the meticulous and inventive tableaux Bruehl designed for each job.

Bruehl became an American citizen in 1940 when he

married journalist Sara Barnes. They had three children, Steven, David and Tony (the donor of the Bruehl Gift).

The Bruehl studio remained in operation until 1966.

Anton retired to Florida in the 1970s and died in San Francisco in 1982. The Bruehl family never returned to Australia, but, interestingly, Anton named the beloved sailboat he built, the Yarra. The National Gallery is undertaking a major retrospective and publication on Bruehl’s career.

a

Gael Newton Senior Curator, Photography

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Anton Bruehl Christmas pageant advertisement 1950s dye transfer colour photograph Anton Bruehl ‘Four Roses’ Whiskey advertisement c. 1950 dye transfer colour photograph Anton Bruehl Unidentified man in workshop c. 1925 gelatin silver photograph

development of fice

Crescent Moon: Islamic art and civilisation in Southeast Asia The Gallery has been delighted with the partnership formed with Santos – the major sponsor of Crescent Moon: Islamic art and civilisation in Southeast Asia. The Managing Director, John Ellice-Flint spoke at the opening and demonstrated a keen interest in and a support for Southeast Asian Art. The Gallery would also like to take this opportunity to thank the Gordon Darling Foundation for providing a grant towards the curator’s research for the catalogue.

Without this generous contribution, the production of this exquisite catalogue would not have been possible. The Myer Foundation also provided a grant for the educational resource that has been received with much enthusiasm from teachers and students and public program events.

I hope you were able to attend the Crescent Moon Cultural Day on 13 May. This unique and exciting occasion was kindly supported by the Myer Foundation, AustraliaMalaysia Institute and the Australia-Indonesia Institute.

Constable: Impressions of land, sea and sky We would also like to thank Booz Allen Hamilton who supported the exhibition through a contra arrangement and have been providing consulting services to the Gallery.

Once again, we thank our committed and long-term supporters: Qantas Freight and Channel Seven for assisting with transport and promotion of the exhibition.

The National Gallery of Australia Foundation The Gallery relies heavily on the financial support of individuals to assist in acquiring works of art for the National Collection. Most donations to assist collection development are channelled through the National Gallery of Australia Foundation. Other fundraising initiatives include the ongoing Treasure a Textile program, supporting the conservation of the Gallery’s renowned

collection of Southeast Asian textiles and the annual Masterpieces for the Nation Appeal. For more information on the Foundation please contact the Development Office on (02) 6240 6454.

Ron Radford and John Ellice-Flint at the opening of Crescent Moon: Islamic Art and Civilisation in Southeast Asia

Sculpture Garden Sunday The Rotary Club of Belconnen has been a continuing supporter of the Gallery. We would like to thank them for the Children’s Easels that were purchased for use on the Sculpture Garden Sunday on 5th March 2006, they will also be used at other children’s events held by the Gallery.

Masterpieces for the Nation Appeal This year an oil painting by Sydney Long, Flamingoes c. 1906, has been selected for our Masterpieces for the Nation Appeal 2006. Enclosed with this edition of artonview is information about the work and the Appeal.

This is your opportunity to make a donation and share the excitement of knowing this exceptional work will bring pleasure to many future generations. All donors will be invited to an event, hosted by the Director, to celebrate this acquisition. Please forward your donation (on the enclosed form) to Silvana Colucciello in the Development Office or telephone her on (02) 6240 6454 with payment details.

Farewell to Lyn Conybeare Lyn Conybeare, Head of Development and Sponsorship (and previous author of this column), worked at the Gallery for 14 years and had devoted the last five years to expanding the Sponsorship and Development programs at the Gallery. Lyn has moved to Sydney and her ideas, energy and dedication will be greatly missed by all staff, donors and sponsors of the Gallery.

Annalisa Millar Coordinator, Development and Sponsorship

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children’s galler y

Come rain or shine Until 16 July 2006

Mitec culture, Mexico Tlaloc the Rain God 1200–1300 Veracruz / Mexico ceramic, earthenware, pigment National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

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Curating an exhibition for children is always a challenge.

Firstly curators, educators and exhibition designers get together to consider what it might be like to be a child visiting this large grey cement building in search of something friendly, small, interactive and fun. Secondly we take a concept, often related to an exhibition at the Gallery or a theme that we hope will appeal to a young audience. Then, using works of art from the collection, we design an interactive environment that takes the experiences of children as the starting point: the under fives love three-dimensional objects that remind them of their fantasies and engender wonder or intrigue, whereas older children might prefer two-dimensional or more conceptually challenging works.

The theme of Come rain or shine is the weather and is linked to the major exhibition, Constable: Impressions of land, sea and sky. Many of John Constable’s paintings have skies full of cumulous storm clouds, grey sheets of rain coming or going, or rainbows, sunshine and shade.

Through the process of examining how artists represent weather conditions using paint, video and sculpture, young children are prompted to become more aware of the world around them, to imagine what clothes they should wear for protection and comfort and to create their own artistic works at home or at school.

To select the works for the show, we trawled through hundreds of contact sheets of black-and-white photographs of works in the National Collection, works that are often seldom if ever on display. We selected works of art that have a connection with weather and that would appeal to children. For Come rain or shine we found dramatic 19th-century paintings of ships foundering on rocky shores; a huge video of a skilful skateboarder dancing on his board against a stormy sky; a massive snowscape; two ‘hot’ paintings, one dusty and one green; a small naïve painting of a monsoonal storm; and the amazing 800-year-old rain god, Tlaloc, from Mexico whose snake-ridden head forms a neat connection with

the Rainbow Serpent from Arnhem Land, installed next to him. Tlaloc sits at the entrance to the exhibition, arms folded, teeth bared. A push of a button enables children to hear his story accompanied by the sounds of thunder, rain and wind.

Works of art are displayed with questions on accompanying labels that encourage a Gallery mini visitor to explore the way artists create the sense of weather in their paintings. For example, the monsoonal storm in the small painting The channel country no. 3, by James Fardoulys is graphically represented by cyclonic clouds and windswept trees and the heat of Russell Drysdale’s Emus in a Landscape is almost palpable.

Although the exhibits have been carefully chosen to connect with three- to seven-year-olds, the interactive

components also enrich the experience for children of any age. Pressing buttons that change coloured light on the Constable landscape print demonstrates how an artist can use colour to enhance the mood of a landscape, a magnet board demonstrates how artists create an illusion of space in their landscapes and flip boards encourage children to think further about how we must wear the right clothes or we will get sunburnt, wet or cold.

We enjoy the task of transforming the Children’s Gallery into a magical experience for these special visitors. And, of course, we hope that they will have fun, remember the magic and bring their own children to the Gallery in the future. a

James Fardoulys The channel country no. 3 1965 oil on canvas on plywood National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Jenny Manning Acting Manager, Education

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collec tion focus

Indian art: new acquisitions, directions and display

Eastern Rajasthan, India Lotus ceiling 11th – 12th century stone National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Kota school, Rajasthan, India Temple hanging (pichhavai) Krishna’s fluting summons the entranced gopis c.1840 opaque watercolour, gold and silver on cotton National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

The opening of a new Indian Gallery off the entrance foyer in August provides a perfect opportunity to reveal recent additions to the National Collection. It also refocusses attention on works of art from South Asia acquired over 30 years of collecting Asian art. One of the most spectacular of the recent additions is a series of massive wooden brackets which act as a major architectural feature drawing visitors into the newly refurbished spaces and creating a series of niches within which to display small miniature paintings, illuminated manuscript folios and small textiles. The angles of the intricately carved late 15th–16th century teak brackets echo the structure of the Gallery building, while the combination of Hindu and Mughal and Persian inspired ornamentation is a subtle introduction to the works displayed within. In fact a number of sculptures, such as the white marble Jain arch which surrounds the seated jina provide elaborate depictions of very similar architectural structures and ornamentation. Both the brackets themselves and their recurrence in many sculptures attest to the centrality of

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temple and palace architecture for South Asian artists.

A stone ceiling panel in the form of a lotus further demonstrates the way in which key decorative elements are shared by the major religions of India: even the eight grotesque kirtimukha faces of glory, with bulging eyes, small pointed horns, and distinct fangs are found in the temple architecture of Jainism, Buddhism and Hinduism.

Forming an introduction to the antiquity of certain key images in South Asian art is an image of the nagaraja serpent king, depicted in anthropomorphic form sheltering beneath the seven hoods of a cobra-like snake. A rare instance of a three-dimensional stone sculpture in the Gallery’s collection, the intermeshed coils of the serpent are sinuously depicted down the back of the red sandstone image. While derived from early nature worship, the naga serpent is a recurring image in Indian art, sheltering the meditating Buddha or buoying up the reclining Vishnu.

A smooth oval egg shaped rock – a self born lingam – is also testament to the continuity of primal sexual imagery, restated in terms of the worship of the great god Shiva.

Inside the entrance to the new gallery, Buddhist and Jain art predominates. Among the earliest surviving sculptures from the Indian subcontinent are those from the great Buddhist stupas, and the marble frieze from the vicinity of the Amaravati stupa in central east India shows the adoration of the empty throne, an iconic image of the earthly Buddha dating from the 3rd century ad. Another early image is an imposing standing figure of a richly apparelled bodhisattva from Gandharan Pakistan revealing a very different early Buddhist style. Dating from around 300 ad, the powerful influence of the forays of Alexander the Great into this region of South Asia is evident in the strong Hellenistic features of the saviour, his drapery and stance. Also in white marble, the tall figure is a superb example of the syncretism of Greek and local iconography.

Other Gandharan objects already in the collection include a fine stupa gable depicting a scene from one of the Jataka tales of the previous lives of the Buddha.

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While the Gallery’s collection of Jain objects is small, two sculptures of serene enlightened conquerors or liberators (jina) provide a fine introduction to the intricacy of Jain temple art: the serene white marble seated image of a simply robed jina and the stark standing ‘sky-clad’ figure, completely unadorned in the abandonment pose, represent the two main orders of Jainism. In contrast the Gallery’s internationally renowned Indian textile holdings includes a number of Jain works, the most famous of which shows a series of female courtiers in sumptuous costume. The hand-drawn 5 metre long cloth, dated 1500, echoes on a large scale the imagery of illuminated Jain manuscripts of medieval west India. Textiles in various techniques – double ikat, mordant painting, and pigment printing – are displayed throughout the new Gallery.

Also prominent are large pigment paintings which have been a recent collection development. The pichhvai hangings are created for rituals celebrating the Hindu deity Krishna. They contain some of the most charming images in Indian art – the popular blue god Krishna (an avatar of Vishnu) surrounded by adoring milkmaids and their herds of cows. Other subjects for the very 54 national gallery of australia

large Indian paintings are scenes of royal progress, such as the Maharana’s hunt, vibrant maps of popular pilgrimage centres and tantric cosmological diagrams. The dimensions of the Gallery building are ideally suited to the display of such large paintings.

The collection of Hindu sculpture has also grown over the past year with the addition of a number of important works from the southern Indian 9th–13th century Chola period. Arguably the pinnacle of Indian bronze sculpture, the recent acquisitions of a fine large image of the child saint Sambandar and a delicate rendition of the fierce deity Kali seated beneath the large trident of the god Shiva add significantly to the Gallery’s existing collection of Chola bronzes which includes the popular dancing Shiva Nataraj. However, the Chola also were famed for their stone images, and the recent addition to the collection of the voluptuous lion-headed goddesss Pratyangira demonstrates the superb skills of early Tamil Nadu artisans.

The Gallery’s collection of Hindu art has been enriched by the addition of these images of the Great Goddess, one of the most revered deities who takes a wide variety of forms, both benign and threatening. The centrality of

female deities, alone or paired with male gods as consorts and shaktis, has been surprisingly under-represented in the Gallery’s collection. The Chola sculptures join works in paper, textile and stone featuring Durga, the demon slaying goddess. In another recent purchase, Lakshmi, the Goddess of Abundance is shown in a lithe sensual embrace with her consort Vishnu.

Another aspect of the art of the Indian sub-continent which has been a target of recent acquisitions is Islamic art.

The Gallery has good holdings of richly decorated textiles displaying Mughal designs, ornamentation which is also present in Islamic architecture and other arts. An intricate openwork pierced stone screen from the 17th century reign of great Mughal emperor-architect Shah Jahan – remembered best for his architectural masterpiece, the Taj Mahal – demonstrates the shared imagery: the design of floral buds within a diagonal grid, subtly set within a mihrab arch is found on numerous early Indian textiles in the collection, examples of which will be displayed in this section of the Indian Gallery. The jali screen is presented so that visitors can appreciate the quality of the stone carving on both front and back surfaces.

In the new entrance-level Indian Gallery recent acquisitions join old favourites. In juxtaposing works of different media – stone, wood, paper, metal and cloth – visitors are introduced the spectacular art of South Asia through fine examples of key images from the major strands of Indian culture and religion. In this process existing holdings in the collection are enhanced by conversations with new works located close by, such as the huge 12th-century Pala dynasty stone stele depicting a majestic Vishnu flanked by two diminutive images of his consorts Lakshmi and Sarasvati, now shown beside the newly acquired panel showing Vishnu and Lakshmi in a dynamic embrace of more earthly proportions. The addition of recently acquired works also encourages a deeper appreciation of the range of cultural, religious and stylistic representation and imagery in the art of the Indian sub-continent. Along with the physical move to a more central and accessible location off the main foyer, it is hoped that the displays in the new Indian Gallery will more successfully engage, excite and inform visitors about the arts of Asia. a

Gandhara region, Pakistan Standing bodisattva 300ad stone National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Vijayanagara period, Tamil Nadu, India Door guardian (dvarapala) 15th century stone National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Shah Jahan period, Mughal empire, India Open-worked pierced screen (jali) 1628-1658 red sandstone National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Robyn Maxwell Senior Curator, Asian Art artonview

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conser vation

The Mermaid’s Tale

Dr H Maulana Pangkuningrat, Sultan Sepuh of Cirebon, Indonesia with the Skirt cloth at the opening of Crescent Moon: Islamic art and civilisation in Southeast Asia Cirebon, Indonesia Skirt cloth 19th century commercial cotton fabric, natural dyes; hand-drawn batik Conserved with the assistance of the Maxwell family in memory of Anthony Forge 2005

Situated on the north coast of west Java, the royal palace Kraton Kasepuhan in Cirebon is one of the oldest surviving royal centres in Indonesia. The art of the sultanate incorporates an exciting range of regional and international motifs. The distinctive Cirebon designs draw on ancient indigenous symbols, Hindu Javanese narratives, and a strong Chinese influence in compositions of layered rocks and clouds. Fanciful landscapes are often depicted in carving, stone, metalwork, textiles, and painted on the sheaths of ceremonial keris daggers.

Such scenes are thought to have been inspired by the 18th-century royal retreat Sunyaragi in Cirebon, although they also appear on intricately carved panels in the royal palace collection dating from as early as the 16th century.

This rocky landscape, however, is most often depicted on cotton batiks of the Cirebon region. The fragrant garden designs (taman sari or taman arum) comprise horizontal bands of rocky mountains, filled with a mixture of real and mythical creatures. Shrines for pilgrims and grottos for meditation can often be found among the mountain peaks and forest groves.

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Worn by men and women of the royal court, this rare 19th-century skirt cloth displays the distinctive blues, purples and pinks of Cirebon natural dyes. Close inspection reveals elephants, spotted kijang deer, snakes and serpents, rabbits, monkeys, other quadrupeds – possibly the kancil mouse-deer or babi rusa wild boar – various types of birds and, in between, fish and crustaceans swim in pools among the lotuses. The most prominent figure in the design is the shrimp mermaid archer, Dewi Urang Ayu, daughter of a great sea god and the wife of the Mahabharata hero Bima. The appearance of shrimps on local batik may be an allusion to the name of the port city, Cirebon, which translates as Shrimp River.

In Java different batik-making regions developed distinctive styles and dye combinations. This textile is typical of the area around Cirebon, which was renowned for the quality of its hand-drawn wax batik. During much of the 20th century, however, Cirebon batik production was in decline and it was only in the 1960s and 70s that the region’s distinctive batik styles, especially the fragrant garden designs, were revived.

When the Gallery purchased this extraordinary textile in 1989 it was stained and had many holes as well as extensive splits and 28 cobbled repairs throughout the work. While small sections of the textile’s unusual design have been published, its display was hampered by its poor physical condition. In 2003 it was possible to display only a section of the cloth in the Gallery’s exhibition Sari to Sarong: 500 years of Indian and Indonesian textile exchange.

Seven different types of stitch repairs, in a range of threads and executed with varying sewing ability, were identified on the batik. Close examination of these repairs allowed us to formulate a textile repair history, piecing together its use by different owners. The repairs, although holding the textile together, caused additional problems of creasing and distortion and were removed as part of its treatment. The initial conservation of the work focussed primarily on cleaning and realignment, and was followed by extensive structural repair of splits and holes. The entire top third of the cloth was found to be completely detached from the rest of the textile.

Early on, spot treatment of isolated stains was undertaken and then all original repairs were carefully removed, releasing the areas of puckering. The textile was then placed on a suction table and, section by section, flushed with cleaning solution. While this washing method removed the overall discolouration from the fibres, it also enabled the creases to be carefully relaxed and flattened, allowing the distorted areas of the design to be realigned.

Then it was possible to join the sections of the textile and to fill in areas of loss by fixing patches of cotton fabric to the back of the textile using a fully reversible adhesive heat set method.

The spectacular textile, fondly known by the conservation department at the Gallery as the mermaid batik, was a centrepiece of the recent exhibition, Crescent Moon: Islamic art and civilisation in Southeast Asia, shown at the Art Gallery of South Australia, in Adelaide and the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. a

Before treatment long horizontal tears and loss in top right-hand corner Before treatment (detail) old stitch repairs, tears and in-ground grime After treatment (detail) textile cleaned and new adhesive fabric repair

Charis Tyrrel Textile Conservator Robyn Maxwell Senior Curator, Asian Art artonview

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faces in view 1 Barbara Poliness, Maria Gravias and Leanne Burrows from the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts at the opening of Crescent Moon: Islamic art and civilisation in Southeast Asia Impressions of land, sea and sky

2 Senators Bob Brown and Christine Milne with guests at the opening of Constable:

3 AGSA Curator of Asian Art and Crescent Moon curator James Bennett with Richard and Mary Owens at the

Crescent Moon Members night

4 Constable co-curators Anna Gray, NGA Assistant Director, Australian Art and British art scholar John Gage at

the media launch of Constable

5 NGA Senoir Curator, Photography Gael Newton and Assistant Director, Access Services Adam Worrall with artists

Paula Dawson and David Sequeira at the opening of Constable

6 Gallery Council Members Lee Liberman, Roslynne Bracher and Roslyn Packer at

the opening of Crescent Moon

7 NGA Director Ron Radford, Prime Minister of New Zealand Helen Clark and Senior Curator, Aboriginal and Torres

Strait Islander Art Brenda Croft

8 AGNSW Head Curator of Asian Art Jackie Menzies with QAG Head of Asian, Pacific and International Art Suhanya

Raffel at the opening of Crescent Moon opening of Crescent Moon 12 Forecast: Art and Fashion

9 Former Ambassador of the Republic of Korea HE Mr Cho Sang-hoon and Mrs Cho with guests at the

10 Anna Gray presenting Helen Clark with a Constable exhibition catalogue 13 Forecast: Art and Fashion

Chairman Tony Berg and Carol Berg

11 Sculpture Garden Sunday

14 Gallery Council Member Ashley Dawson-Damer with former Gallery Foundation

15 Sculpture Garden Sunday

Bremner at the farewell dinner for Tony Berg

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16 NGA Voluntary Guide Rosanna Hindmarsh, Jennifer Prescott and Maureen

access ser vices

The Collection Study Room Voluntary Guides, Els Sondaal and Phoebe Jacobi, and Collection Study Room Officer, Joanne TuckLee, view an illustrated book

by Gilbert and George in the Collection Study Room Voluntary Guides, Sylvia Shanahan, Setsuko Kennedy and Jan Smith, view a collection of works by Gilbert and George in the Collection Study Room

As set out in the Director’s Vision Statement for the Gallery, ‘the collections have long outgrown the building and lack of display space is overwhelmingly the Gallery’s greatest problem’. Meeting public demand for access to a collection of over 110,000 works in a building originally designed to house only a thousand leads to an increasing reliance on resources such as travelling exhibitions, the internet and storage study facilities.

With over ninety per cent of the National Collection now in storage, the Collection Study Room (CSR) remains one of the Gallery’s most popular research facilities since its establishment in 1984. It is a free service for anyone wishing to view works of art not on display or on loan.

The number of collection study rooms in Australia and overseas is increasing and involve staff from curatorial, conservation, art storage, education, public programs and visitors’ services departments. Many institutions provide specialist services. For example, they might concentrate on works on paper or limit access to tertiary students or qualified researchers. However, the nature of a collection that belongs to the nation justifies an attempt to process as many collection access requests as possible.

The Gallery’s study room adjoins the on-site storage facilities and is utilised by staff, researchers, curators from other galleries, student groups, art and craft societies and members of the public. The most frequent request for the CSR is The Rajah quilt, an iconic work produced by convict women on board The Rajah, during its journey towards Hobart Town in 1841. The quilt, which has captured the imagination of visitors since its acquisition in 1989, is too light-sensitive for regular exhibition and

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has only been accessible through CSR request. At 325.0 x 337.2 cm in size, it is too large for the study room tables and remains folded in its box during viewings. The Gallery’s textile conservation staff, having spent several years researching the techniques and fabrics used in the quilt, recently advised that it will only be brought out once a year for public requests due to its fragility and the resources involved in transporting and displaying it.

‘Unfolded: the Rajah Quilt on view’ is a CSR initiative, whereby the quilt will be unfolded and displayed for viewing between 11am and 12pm daily, 7–13 August 2006 (additional talks will be advertised in the events calendar).

Public talks are regularly held in the CSR, allowing visitors to learn about the collection, particularly those works of art, such as illustrated books, that are difficult to view in their entirety when on display. Visitors are encouraged to refer to the Gallery’s online catalogue and publications (many of which are also available online) to select the works that they wish to view, and will be referred to the appropriate curator if specialist expertise is required. Some works of art will be too large, fragile or light-sensitive to be available for private viewings, but it is always worth asking. To closely inspect the detail of a watercolour that is not under glass, or a rare book of botanical prints in its original box, is all part of the Collection Study Room experience. a Joanne Tuck-Lee Collection Study Room Officer For Collection Study Room bookings, phone (02) 6240 6524 or email csr@nga.gov.au. The catalogue is available online at nga.gov.au/CollectionSearch

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John Constable: Impressions of Land, Sea and Sky National Gallery of Australia until 12th June 2006

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SPECIAL MEMBERS’ VIEWING

9 – 30 August Wednesdays 6pm This annual lecture series showcases the latest work of renowned Australian architects.

9 August Andrew Andersons from Peddle, Thorpe and Walker, Sydney 16 August Luigi Rosselli, Sydney 23 August Tim Jackson from Jackson Clements Burrows, Melbourne 30 August Shaun Lockyer from Arkhefield, Brisbane $60 Series; $50 members/RAIA/concession $20 Single; $15 members/RAIA/concession Presented in association with the ACT Chapter RAIA Sponsored by BCA Solutions Bookings essential James O Fairfax Theatre National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

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Saturday 15 July 2006 6pm The evening will commence with an introduction to the exhibitions in the James O Fairfax Theatre by

Followed by a viewing of the exhibitions Members /guests $40 Light refreshments Limited tickets – bookings essential RSVP 5 July 2006 (acceptances only) Phone 02 6240 6528

Imants Tillers The hyperborean and the speluncar 1986 oilstick, oil and synthetic polymer paint on 130 canvasboards Cruthers collection, Perth Michael Riley Untitled, from the series Cloud [feather] taken 2000 printed 2005 pigment prints, ultrachrome chromogenic inks on Ilford Gallery Pearl photographic paper Purchased 2005 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Reproduced courtesy of the Michael Riley Foundation and VISCOPY, Australia

Photo: John Gollings Richmond House, Jackson Clements Burrows

Dr Deborah Hart, Senior Curator, Australian Paintings and Sculpture and Brenda L Croft, Senior Curator, Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art

artonview 14 July – 16 October 2006

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

imants tillers • michael riley • James Rosenquist