2009.Q2 | artonview 58 Winter 2009

artonview artonview

I S S U E 5 8 

ISSUE 58  WINTER 2009

w i n t e r 2 0 0 9

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

The National Gallery of Australia is an Australian Government Agency

Frederick McCubbin Golden sunlight 1914 (detail) Castlemaine Art Gallery & Historical Museum Gift of Dame Nellie Melba, 1923

REINVENTIONS: SCULPTURE + ASSEMBLAGE • FREDERICK McCUBBIN

The National Gallery of Australia is an Australian Government Agency

published quarterly by National Gallery of Australia GPO Box 1150 Canberra ACT 2601 nga.gov.au ISSN 1323-4552 Print Post Approved pp255003/00078 © National Gallery of Australia 2008 Copyright for reproductions of artworks is held by the artists or their estates. Apart from uses permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part of artonview may be reproduced, transmitted or copied without the prior permission of the National Gallery of Australia.

Enquires about permissions should be made in writing to the Rights and Permissions Officer.

The opinions expressed in artonview are not necessarily those of the editor or publisher.

Issue 58, winter 2009

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7 Foundation 8 Development exhibitions and displays

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Reinventions: sculpture + assemblage Deborah Hart

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McCubbin: Last Impressions 1907–17 Anne Gray

collection focus/conservation

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editor Eric Meredith

In these dreams of colour: a close examination of McCubbin’s paintings in the national collection David Wise

designer Kristin Thomas photography Eleni Kypridis, Barry Le Lievre, Brenton McGeachie, Steve Nebauer, David Pang, John Tassie

Director’s foreword

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Photographing America’s South: Roll, Jordan, roll Anne O’Hehir

rights and permissions Nick Nicholson advertising Erica Seccombe

acquisitions

printed in Australia by Blue Star Print, Melbourne

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The editor, artonview National Gallery of Australia GPO Box 1150 Canberra ACT 2601 artonview.editor@nga.gov.au advertising Tel: (02) 6240 6557 Fax: (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: Membership Coordinator GPO Box 1150 Canberra ACT 2601 Tel: (02) 6240 6504 membership@nga.gov.au

Edgar Degas Woman bathing Jane Kinsman

enquiries

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Choi Jeong Hwa Clear lotus Melanie Eastburn and Robyn Maxwell

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Max Ernst King, queen and bishop Christine Dixon and Krysia Kitch

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Ricardo Idagi GiriGiri Le (Bird of Paradise Man) Tina Baum

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Margaret Benyon Pushing up the daisies Gael Newton

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Debra Dawes Parallel planes Miriam Kelly

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Kiribas people Ririko Crispin Howarth

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Bantor Irene Mague ne hiwir Crispin Howarth

(cover) Edgar Degas Woman bathing (Femme à sa toilette) 1880–85 (detail) monotype over pastel image 27.8 x 38 cm sheet 32.2 x 42.2 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra The Poynton Bequest with the assistance of the National Gallery of Australia Foundation 2009

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Travelling exhibitions

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Faces in view

Director’s foreword The dinner was part of a weekend of events to celebrate the anniversary. I extend my appreciation, on behalf of the Gallery, to everyone who attended.

Degas was undeniably the greatest artist of the pastel medium in the nineteenth century. He often made many studies of a single subject—as evidenced in the exhibition Degas: master of French art in the numerous scenes of the horses and the racecourse, the ballet and opera, cafe culture and, of course, women bathing. Woman bathing has never been shown publicly before because it has always been in private hands. It is similar to the group of pastels exhibited at the eighth and final Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1886, in Degas’s ‘suite of nudes’, which was heavily criticised for the ungainly poses of his subjects. Today, these images still attract some controversy

Ron Radford, Director, National Gallery of Australia, with the book Soft sculpture, published in conjunction with the exhibition.

I know many of you seized the opportunity to see our highly successful exhibition Degas: master of French art during its limited time at the Gallery between 12 December 2008 and 22 March 2009. The exhibition was a unique experience for Australian audiences and attracted a great number of interstate and overseas visitors to Canberra. I was sad to see those masterful works packed away to be returned to the lending institutions—the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the National Gallery, Washington, the British Museum, London, and 40 other places. A compensation was our acquisition of Degas’s brilliant pastel Woman bathing (Femme à sa toilette) 1880–85 (on the cover of this issue) at the auction of the Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé collection in February. We were very lucky to acquire such a high-quality and well-documented work for a reasonable price and at such a famous auction. The acquisition, a major coup for the Gallery, was generously supported by the Orde Poynton Bequest Fund as well as funds raised from the National Gallery of Australia Foundation’s Twentieth Anniversary Gala Dinner in March.

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but they also represent a radically changing period in French art and society during the nineteenth century, a period that has left its mark on history.

After the Degas exhibition, Woman bathing was put on display in our print exhibition Degas’ world: the rage for change and is part of our display of nineteenth-century international art.

The Gallery has acquired Max Ernst’s King, queen and bishop 1929–30 (cast 1974–75), a small but spectacular precursor to his familiar chess imagery of the 1940s and 1950s. The work was acquired from the William Bowmore collection. Ernst’s fascination with chess was shared by many other Surrealist artists, including his wife Dorothea Tanning, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage and Man Ray. The tiny work is a radical counterbalance to the imposing Habukuk 1934 (cast 1970), which we acquired in 2006 (see artonview issue 51).

We have also acquired significant works in other collecting areas, including two works for our Pacific art collection. The first is a rare, nineteenth-century, preChristian necklace made from human teeth, a disarmingly striking object from the Republic of Kiribati, and one of our few works from Micronesia. The second, from a small volcanic island in Vanuatu, is one of the largest and most sculptural Mague grade-figures made in recent decades.

This colossal contemporary figure was created as part of a long tradition of ceremonies in the island’s strict hierarchical social system. From the Torres Strait Islands we acquired Ricardo Idagi’s intricate GiriGiri Le (Bird of Paradise Man) 2008, a stunning mask to complement the Gallery’s collection of contemporary Torres Strait Islander masks and headdresses.

Other recent acquisitions include four early holographic works from British artist Margaret Benyon’s Australian

period (1977–81), as well as one of her more recent largescale works, Pushing up the daisies 1996; and Debra Dawes’s Parallel planes 2007, which is less abstract than it first appears—its subtle changes in tone and angle disrupt what initially seems to be a predetermined optical design.

For the Gallery’s small holdings of contemporary Asian art, we have a fascinating addition, Korean artist Choi Jeong Hwa’s Clear lotus 2009. We thank Gene and Brian Sherman for their financial support and continued dedication in bringing works by contemporary Asian artists with strong international reputations into the national art collection. Clear lotus is currently on view in our Soft sculpture exhibition.

The Gallery is currently celebrating creative developments in three-dimensional art with two exhibitions, Soft sculpture and Reinventions: sculpture + assemblages, and a vibrant program of talks and events about sculpture, assemblage, installation and the various other ways in which artists engage with, create and transform three-dimensional objects and environments.

Indeed, this winter, visitors will experience the creative

output of some of the world’s best contemporary artists working in the area.

Soft sculpture was opened in April by the Minister for Environment, Heritage and the Arts, Peter Garrett, who delivered an engaging and passionate speech. Curated

by Lucina Ward, Curator of International Painting and Sculpture, the exhibition looks at the ways artists use unconventional materials such as plastic, rubber, fur and fabrics to question the changing nature of sculpture. Soft sculpture comprises 55 works by European, American, Asian and Australian artists selected primarily from the national art collection and combined with a small number of loans. It focuses on anti-form works from the 1960s and 1970s through to present-day sculptures. These interesting works inflate, droop and ooze!

Reinventions: sculpture + assemblage opened in the Project Gallery on 16 May. Spanning four decades, from 1965 to 2007, the display draws on the Gallery’s collection of Australian sculpture and assemblage and focuses on artists’ fascination with taking old materials or established ideas and finding fresh, distinctive and poetic ways to

Visitors marvel at the various objects in the exhibition Soft sculture at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 24 April – 12 July 2009.

Go to the Gallery’s extensive Soft sculpture website for more: nga.gov.au/softsculpture

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The Soft sculture exhibition at the Gallery, 24 April – 12 July 2009.

Works from left to right: Richard Van Buren For Najeeb 1972, Giselle Antmann Genetic glimpse 1978, Ewa Pachucka Landscape and bodies 1972.

express them. Reinventions is curated by Deborah Hart, Senior Curator, Australian Painting and Sculpture post 1920, who has written an engaging article about the display for this issue of artonview (page 10).

From 14 August our new exhibition, McCubbin: Last Impressions 1907–17, will redefine one of Australia’s most loved Impressionist painters. The exhibition focuses on the radical changes in Frederick McCubbin’s approach to painting in the final decade of his life. It will introduce our audiences to the mature, more expressive, reinvigorated McCubbin, allowing them to better appreciate his deft handling of paint and striking use of colour. The works in the exhibition portray a masterly rendering of light that powerfully conveys McCubbin’s passion and familiarity with the Australian bush and, equally, the expanding city of the Federation period.

McCubbin: Last Impressions 1907–17 is only on display for a short time, so I encourage you to see it early because you will want to visit the exhibition again before it closes on 1 November. It is curated by Anne Gray, Head of Australian Art. McCubbin’s contemporary, Tom Roberts, shared his passion for the Australian bush, and I remind you that, for the Masterpieces for the Nation Fund, we are seeking

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contributions toward the acquisition of Roberts’s brilliant Shearing shed, Newstead 1893–94, one of the artist’s few major works left in private hands. The Gallery relies on the generous benefaction and support of the Australian public to continue to collect and preserve masterpieces for the national art collection. The Masterpieces of the Nation Fund is an important initiative of our Foundation, whose support is imperative to our continuing effort to develop the collection.

The Gallery’s Development Office is also an important element in the Gallery’s ability to mount major local and international exhibitions in Australia, and to show Australian art to the world. For example, the major exhibition partnership between the Gallery and BHP Billiton resulted in a national tour of Culture Warriors, the inaugural Australian Indigenous Art Triennial, culminating in the United States in Washington from 8 September 2009.

For Soft sculpture, the Development Office has fostered a partnership with a difference—with MoMac (a partnership between Molonglo Group and Macquarie Bank). Along with their support of the exhibition, MoMac has developed an innovative program of events at their NewActon precinct in Canberra to coincide with

Soft sculpture, including a temporary sculpture–video installation. Although this is not a joint project between the Gallery and NewActon, we applaud MoMac’s creative engagement with Soft sculpture and encourage audiences to explore the events and installation at NewActon.

I have already mentioned new acquisitions and new exhibitions. We are also adding to the permanent Australian displays with some major loans. The Art Gallery of South Australia, because of their partial closure of galleries for the installation of new air conditioning and a lighting system, has allowed us to borrow four works for our Australian display. The National Gallery of Australia is not as rich as it should be in works from the smaller states, including South Australia, and three of the four works on loan are by South Australian artists. There are two colonial works, both portraits of the artists’ families. One is an 1840s portrait by Martha Berkeley, South Australia’s first professional artist, of her three young daughters, painted in her then newly established back garden in Walkerville, Adelaide. The other is a portrait by Charles Hill of his family at Sunday lunch in his front garden on South Terrace, Adelaide, painted in about 1869. The two twentiethcentury works on loan are Grace Cossington Smith’s

brilliant Poinsettias 1931 and Dorrit Black’s masterful postwar painting of outer Adelaide, The olive plantation 1946. The Gallery lacks a major work by the important Modernist Dorrit Black.

Finally, throughout winter, there will be significant changes on the main level as we refurbish our current Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander gallery, which will revert to being part of our international displays. We will also be refitting the current site of the NGA Shop with a new permanent display of Sydney Nolan’s Ned Kelly series, as well as purpose-built showcases for our collection of costumes and jewellery and a significant display area for photography. During this time of change, a temporary shop will be set up near the Asian galleries on the way to the cafe. We hope to keep the impact of these refurbishments to a minimum and know that you will still enjoy your time with us as we endeavour to make the Gallery an even better place to visit.

Ron Radford AM artonview winter 2009 5

credit lines Donations

Notified Bequest

Geoffrey and Vicki Ainsworth Antoinette Albert and Rupert Rosenblum Susan and Michael Armitage Beverly Allen Philip Bacon AM Betty Beaver AM Ann Burge Julian Burt Nick Burton Taylor AM and Julia Burton Taylor John Calvert Jones AM and Janet Calvert Jones AO Terrence Campbell AO and Christine Campbell Jim Cousins AO and Libby Cousins Cowra Art Gallery Charles Curran AC and Eva Curran Terence and Lynn Fern John Grant AM and Inge Grant Andrew and Hiroko Gwinnett Meredith Hinchliffe John and Rosanna Hindmarsh The Hon Robert Hunter QC and Pauline Hunter Claudia Hyles WG Jack John Kaldor AM and Naomi Milgrom Carolyn Kay and Simon Swaney Sir Richard Kingsland AO, CBE, DFC and Lady Kingsland Dr Colin Laverty OAM and Elizabeth Laverty Paul Legge Wilkinson and Beryl Legge Wilkinson Andrew Lu OAM Robert and Susie Maple-Brown Maureen McLoughlin Rupert Myer AM and Annabel Myer Myer Foundation Claude Neumann Roslyn Packer AO Terry and Mary Peabody Jason Prowd Alan Rose AO and Helen Rose John Schaeffer AO and Bettina Dalton Penelope Seidler AM Dr Gene and Brian Sherman AM Dr David Smithers AM and Isobel Smithers Village Roadshow Limited Muriel Wilkinson Peronelle and Jim Windeyer Peter Webster John Wylie AM and Myriam Wylie Lou Westende OAM and Mandy Thomas-Westende Ray Wilson OAM

Richard Gate

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Gifts Jane Bradhurst Patrick Corrigan AM Patrica Dalton Rodney Glick Annette Iggulden The Heike Foundation Professor Anthony Low Richard Tipping

Grants The Gordon Darling Foundation A Dementia Community Grant funded as part of the Australian Government’s Dementia Initiative.

Visions of Australia through its Contemporary Touring Initiative, an Australian Government program supporting touring exhibitions by providing funding assistance for the development and touring of Australian cultural material across Australia, and through the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian Government, and state and territory governments

Sponsorship ActewAGL Adshel apARTments Brassey Hotel of Canberra BHP Billiton Bistro Guillaume and Guillaume at Bennelong Canberra Times Diamant Hotel Eckersley’s Art & Craft Even Keel Wines Forrest Hotel and Apartments Gallagher’s Wine Grandiflora Hyatt Hotel Canberra Mantra on Northbourne National Australia Bank NewActon Qantas Sony Foundation Australia Threesides Yalumba Wines WIN Television ZOO

Foundation elegant Sunday brunch at the French Embassy, generously hosted by the Ambassador His Excellency Michel Filhol and Mrs Catherine Filhol.

We were very fortunate to receive sponsorship for this event. We would especially like to thank Guillaume Brahimi and his team from Guillaume at Bennelong, Sydney. We would also thank Saskia Havekes from Grandiflora, Sydney, for the wonderful flowers, and Sam Coverdale from Even Keel Wines, Mornington Peninsula, for supplying the wine.

Guests celebrated the 20th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Australia Foundation at the special Gala Dinner to raise funds for the acquisition of Edgar Degas’s Woman bathing 1880–85 .

Masterpieces for the Nation Fund

On the weekend of 21 and 22 March 2009, we celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the Foundation by holding a Gala Dinner and weekend of events at the National Gallery of Australia. Proceeds from the dinner raised $107 000, which assisted in the acquisition of the Edgar Degas pastel Woman bathing (Femme á sa toilette) c 1880–85—with major funding to secure this work having been obtained through the Orde Poynton Bequest. The Gallery was delighted at the opportunity to secure this work for the national art collection. See page 30 for an acquisition article by Jane Kinsman, Senior Curator, International Art. We were delighted that guests travelled from many states to join us in this celebration, which began with a luncheon in the Sculpture Garden, among the Rodin sculptures. Guests then toured the Conservation department, where they had the opportunity to view the beautiful Ballet Russes costumes being restored and repaired. The afternoon concluded with a guided tour of the exhibitions Misty moderns: Australian Tonalists 1915–1950 and Degas’ world: the rage for change.

The highlight of the weekend was, of course, the Gala Dinner, where guests were welcomed by Director Ron Radford at a champagne reception in the Sculpture Gallery, followed by a private viewing of the exhibition Degas: master of French art. The curator, Jane Kinsman, introduced the exhibition and spoke about the new acquisition Woman bathing. The sumptuous dinner, prepared by the award-winning guest chef Guillaume Brahimi, was held in the magnificently prepared space immediately adjoining the exhibition. To conclude the weekend, guests enjoyed an

We are pleased that the work of art to be acquired through our Masterpieces for the Nation Fund is Tom Roberts’s Shearing shed, Newstead 1893–94. This is an iconic work of art depicting a rural scene by Australia’s foremost artist of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Our aim is to raise $100 000 to assist with the acquisition of this painting. A brochure on the Masterpieces for the Nation Fund and further details on this work of art are included with this issue of artonview. All donations make a difference and will help us to achieve our goal.

For further information or to make a donation over the phone, please contact the Gallery’s Foundation Office on (02) 6240 6454.

Major gifts Andrew and Hiroko Gwinnett have been supporters for many years and, through their generous benefaction, have helped the Gallery to develop its collection of Japanese art.

They have recently donated to further enhance this area of the national art collection.

Brian Sherman AM and Dr Gene Sherman have also generously helped the Gallery to enrich the contemporary Asian art collection. Korean artist Choi Jeong Hwa’s installation Clear lotus 2009 has been acquired through the Gene and Brian Sherman Contemporary Asian Art Fund and is currently on display in the exhibition Soft sculpture.

See page 32 for an article on this intriguing work.

The Foundation Board extends its thanks to Dr Sherman, who has been a director of the National Gallery of Australia Foundation for nine years and has now joined the board of the National Portrait Gallery. We wish her great success in her new role.

Rupert Myer AM and Annabel Myer recently gifted Tracey Moffatt’s series First jobs 2008. The series comprises 12 works of art, and we are grateful for this very generous gift that will expand and complement the Gallery’s current collection of works by Tracey Moffatt.

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Development ZO O (Sp on sor s Cir c le) We welcome Zoo as sponsors of the National Gallery and extend our gratitude for their support of Soft sculpture.

We would especially like to thank Pawl Cubbin, CEO, Peter Ring, Managing Director, Judy Waters, Senior Client Manager/Associate Partner, Clinton Hutchinson, Senior Art Director/Associate Partner, and the entire team at ZOO for their enthusiasm in supporting this exhibition.

W I N Te levi sion (Sp on sor s Cir c l e) In addition to sponsoring Degas: master of French art, we would like to thank WIN Television for their support of Soft sculpture. Their commitment to assisting the Gallery to promote and communicate our exhibitions is greatly appreciated. We thank Corey Pitt, Station Manager, Natalie Tanchevski, Advertising Account Executive, and the entire team at WIN Television.

Jane Kinsman, curator of Degas, discussing the work of the French master at the special Corporate Members and Yalumba Dinner on 5 March 2009.

Sponsors Circle, a new sponsorship initiative The Sponsors Circle is a new sponsorship initiative in which Canberra companies are offered the opportunity to contribute creatively to the marketing and promotion of exhibitions. In addition to the benefits of the Corporate Members Program, the Sponsors Circle provides opportunities for networking and the lively exchange of ideas. The exhibition Soft sculpture was a great opportunity to introduce this new initiative.

Soft sculpture T he apA R Tm e nt s at N ewAc ton (E xhib it io n Par t ne r s) We extend our gratitude to our Exhibition Partners The apARTments at NewActon, a joint venture between Canberra developers Molonglo Group and Macquarie Group.

This unique partnership with the Gallery focuses on an innovative program of events at NewActon to coincide with Soft sculpture, including Spooky action at a distance (24 April – 12 July 2009), a temporary sculpture–video installation by national and international artists and curators.

We would like to thank Johnathan and Nectar Efkarpidis and Suzi McKinnon for their enthusiastic vision in working with us to create a partnership with a difference. Thank you to our Exhibition Partners for hosting a tremendous afterparty on the night of the exhibition opening. It was a night of music and art-infused festivities to remember.

Through this support, our Exhibition Partners are demonstrating their engagement and commitment to the arts on local, national and international levels.

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C anb erra T im e s (Sp on sor s Cir c l e) We are also grateful to Canberra Times for their support of Soft sculpture and for their ongoing commitment to working collaboratively with the Gallery. Promotions, competitions and ongoing editorial coverage of our exhibitions are vital to the exhibition marketing campaign and assist the Gallery in communicating exhibitions and programs to the community. We welcome the new editor, Rodd Quinn, and our thanks also goes to Ken Nichols, General Manager, Kylie Dennis and Ann Ronning.

D iamant H ote l (Sp on sor s Cir c l e) We welcome Diamant Hotel as sponsors of the Gallery and thank them for their generosity as the official accommodation sponsor for Soft sculpture. We also express our appreciation for their assistance in the opening-night after-party and for providing accommodation to all artists and special guests throughout the course of the exhibition.

Thank you to Konstanze Werhahn-Mees, Group Marketing/ PR Manager, Eight Hotels, Chris Hastings, General Manager, Diamant Hotel, and the entire team at the Diamant Hotel.

T hr e e si d e s (Sp on sor s Cir c l e) The local marketing, online and training business Threesides have become sponsors of the Gallery and the exhibition Soft sculpture. We are grateful to the Threesides team for their support and the energy in which they have approached this partnership. Our special thanks to company directors Clint and Todd Wright.

G alla gher W ine s We extend our appreciation to Gallagher Wines as the official wine sponsor of the Soft sculpture opening. We would like to thank Greg and Libby Gallagher and Bill Mason from Z4 Wines. Members of the National Gallery of Australia had the opportunity to excite their senses with a tour of Soft sculpture followed by a wine tasting by Gallagher Wines, renowned as one of the region’s finest wine producers.

National Australia Bank—Sculpture Garden Sunday We recognise and thank the National Australia Bank for its continued support of the Gallery’s annual family day event Sculpture Garden Sunday, with a special thank you to Jan Hopkins, Senior Business Banking Partner, NAB Business, for her warm words of welcome on the day. Over 1700 children and adults enjoyed workshops, music and the mandatory Scout’s sausage sizzle. Many also explored the National Australia Bank Sculpture Gallery with the children’s trail booklet that was launched at last year’s event.

BHP Billiton—Culture Warriors Congratulations and thanks go to BHP Billiton as Principal Sponsor of Culture Warriors, the inaugural Australian Indigenous Art Triennial. The exhibition travelled nationally to the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide, Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth and to the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane. The partnership with BHP Billiton has produced powerful outcomes, not the least

of which is the national, and soon to be international, exposure given to 30 Indigenous artists from around Australia. The national tour closed in Brisbane on 10 May 2009, and the exhibition begins at the University Art Museum at the Katzen Art Center in Washington, DC, on 8 September 2009.

Corporate Members Program Yalumba Wines, with the Corporate Members Program, held its second evening of fine art, wine and dining in conjunction with the exhibition Degas: master of French art on 5 March 2009. Yalumba winemaker, communicator and raconteur Jane Ferrari entertained guests with stories of her extensive travels, life and expert wine knowledge.

This annual event was a great success, and we would like to thank Yalumba Wines for their commitment in partnering with the Gallery for major exhibitions over the past two years.

Thank you to Eckersley’s Art and Craft as a sponsor of the National Gallery’s annual family day event Sculpture Garden Sunday on Sunday 8 March.

Jan Hopkins, Senior Partner—Business, National Australia Bank, and Jo Krabman, Gallery Educator, facilitated some of the many fun activities at the National Gallery of Australia’s Sculpture Garden Sunday on 8 March 2009.

Christine Wallace, Michael Costello, Managing Director, ActewAGL, and their daughter at the ActewAGL Degas Dinner on the evening of 8 March 2009.

We would like to thank all our sponsors and corporate members. If you would like more information about sponsorship and development at the National Gallery of Australia, contact Frances Corkhill on + 61 2 6240 6740 or frances.corkhill@nga.gov.au, or contact Belinda Cotton on + 61 2 6240 6556 or belinda.cotton@nga.gov.au.

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exhibition

Reinventions: sculpture + assemblage 16 May – 13 September 2009 | Project Gallery

Colin Lanceley Pianist, pianist where are you? 1964–65 stained and painted wood, enamel, polychrome piano keyboard and sounding board 183.5 x 248.5 x 30 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1976

Artists continually reinvent the world we live in. Their works have the capacity to surprise us and enable us to see the world afresh. The exhibition Reinventions is about the surprising, inventive adaptation of materials and ideas, including the ways in which artists engage with subjects of ongoing fascination: portraiture and identity, nature and abstraction, poetry and music, childhood and mortality. A dialogue with the past in the process of transformation is inherent in the art of assemblage: the process of re-assembling and re-constructing discarded, found objects and materials in new contexts. In this exhibition, found machinery parts, fragments of a piano, sawn wooden crates, a wide-eyed doll’s head, recycled magazines, portable turntables and a punching bag are just some examples of used objects adapted by artists in intriguing assemblages. A similarly inventive approach also appears in the use of materials such as crystal, Easter egg

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foil wrappers, bamboo, sand, fabric and porcelain in a diverse range of sculptures.

The exhibition Reinventions includes contemporary treasures from the collection: works from the 1960s and 1970s by Robert Klippel, Rosalie Gascoigne and Colin Lanceley, with those of a younger generation including Neil Roberts, Ricky Swallow and Tim Horn. The works of Gascoigne, Klippel and Lanceley show them to be masters of assemblage. Their inventive approaches to sculpture have some striking parallels with artists in the present. The earliest work is Lanceley’s dynamic, intricate assemblage Pianist, pianist where are you? 1965, while the most recent is Ricky Swallow’s meditation on mortality and love, Tusk 2007. What the artists share in common are innovative approaches to materials and making, a desire to take risks and a capacity for ongoing reinvention in their own work.

Robert Klippel (1920–2001) was an artist who continually reinvented himself in his work over the years.

In the process, he dramatically reinvigorated sculpture in this country. In Reinventions, his works No. 250 metal construction 1970 and No. 813 painted wood construction 1989 reveal connections as well as dramatic leaps across his own art practice. Although Klippel’s early work was made from carving stone and wood, he started to incorporate found materials in his works in the 1940s. By the 1960s and 1970s, Klippel’s passion for experimentation was matched only by his remarkable accumulation of materials of the machine age, such as typewriter parts and an array of found objects. He was interested in correlations between mechanical and organic forms, what he described as ‘machine-organic’ inter-relationships. In No. 250 metal construction, the framed construction of linear and curved forms is like a drawing in air. While the spikes

suggest an element of danger, it is essentially the formal, non-representational aspects of the work that make it so striking and convincing. The suspension and lightness of this welded assemblage stands in dramatic contrast to the later monumental presence of No. 813 painted wood construction. Yet monumentality in Klippel’s art is never grandiose. It is connected with things of humble origins transformed to enable us to see them afresh. The impressive scale is enlivened by the dynamic freewheeling interactions of pattern-parts for machinery. The colour in Klippel’s construction connects with another striking work, Pianist, pianist where are you? by Colin Lanceley (born 1938).

Klippel and Lanceley were friends in the 1960s and shared many conversations about art and literature.

Lanceley was inspired by the inventiveness of Klippel’s approach and interest in the relationships between collage and construction. Lanceley was, however, more overtly

Robert Klippel No. 813 painted wood construction 1989 painted wood 180 x 187 x 100 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Gift of Costain Resources Ltd 1992

Robert Klippel No. 250 metal construction 1970 brazed and welded steel, found objects 64.7 x 31.2 x 26 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1977

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Rosalie Gascoigne The colonel’s lady 1976 mixed media 39.1 x 59.7 x 8.8 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1976

concerned with poetic metaphors for human experience, noting that the unexpected relationships between disparate objects formed a poetic thread of creative possibility. In the early 1960s, Lanceley, with Mike Brown and Ross Crothall, formed a group known as the Annandale Imitation Realists.

Together they experimented with assemblage in the form of giant collages constructed out of an array of discarded materials from contemporary life. By the mid 1960s, the group had disbanded, but Lanceley continued to experiment with assemblage, resulting in impressive works like Pianist, pianist where are you?, exhibited at Gallery A soon after it was completed. The title evokes a sense of play, humour and poetic inference. In its fabrication, the work is both an imaginative reconstruction and deconstruction of musical associations. It simultaneously gathers and exposes the intricate parts of the whole, as though the very idea of music-making is encapsulated in the rhythms of the black and white keys, the exposed strings and sculpted objects moving organically around the whole. The artist recalls the excitement he felt at the time: Pieces of a small organ and the innards of a Bluthner piano dumped in the bush could be, in themselves, the subject for a work, but at the time it was the excitement of finding the materials and of re-constructing them after an imagined model that interested me. The transformation of materials, the metamorphosis, informed by a poetic sensibility, is the key to creativity.1

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A feeling for poetry is present in the work of one of Australia’s most persistent and significant assemblage artists, Rosalie Gascoigne (1917–1999). Her assemblages of the 1970s, often framed in boxes, reveal her sharp, clear vision for the placement of forms. Gascoigne’s feeling for the inter-relationship of text and image became increasingly present in her work but was already apparent in The colonel’s lady 1976. Close inspection of the objects, images and product labels, reveal her wry wit. For New Zealandborn Gascoigne, who grew up in the interwar years and came to Australia in 1943, the interplay of symbols is telling: tins of Kiwi boot polish, a boxing kangaroo, the repetition of ‘Waratah’ of her adopted country, references to Britain in the flag and ‘the Queen of Brooms’. The combined labels and objects, including a doll’s head and dismembered torso beneath colourful shotgun cartridges, make The colonel’s lady an intriguing contemporary diorama; a wry, intimate cross-cultural dialogue with the past.

This work contrasts dramatically with Gascoigne’s later expansive assemblage Wheat belt 1989, with its more obvious landscape associations. Comprising diagonal shards from soft-drink crates across four separate panels, the work is at once screen-like and evocative of the environment—of the warmth of the sun, the rustle of dry grasses in the wind and the weathered pale grey landscape affected by searing elements. Gascoigne, who lived and worked in Canberra

for many years, noted that her country was the eastern seaboard of Lake George and the Highlands, scoured by the sun and frost. Rather than tell a literal story, she wanted to find the truth of her experience in material that had a previous life within it: Beware of nice things that you find that say nothing: they are like new wood from a hardware shop. I look for things that have been somewhere, done something. Second hand materials aren’t deliberate; they have had sun and wind on them. Simple things. From simplicity you get to profundity.2

Neil Roberts (1954–2002) was fascinated in his art by the material memory of objects—the idea that they could in some ways transmit their histories through their very materiality. He often used glass as a sculptural component in his works and liked the idea of rehabilitating discarded objects. He was interested in ideas around masculinity and activities such as rural labour and sport, including football and boxing. The brilliance of his work Half ether, half dew mixed with sweat 2000 resides in the way that he retains the integrity of the original object of the punching bag while simultaneously transforming it within a glistening lead-light casing, opening up multiple associations in the process. Roberts wanted to capture something of the inherent history of the punching bag; the imperceptible substances and energies gathered over years and years.

As he noted: I wondered about the metaphysical visibility of all the force that had been applied to this punching bag in its time, and how such a trace might appear. The bag is an absorbent object, a kind of filter or pad that stands in for the body it resembles, and it required some form of extraction or distillation to make visible the substances imbedded within it.3

Roberts found an answer in a line from a poem by the American artist Raymond Pettibon: ‘half ether, half dew mixed with sweat’. Then, as he noted, ‘Like the gradual planetary transformation in J.G. Ballard’s book The Crystal World, a crystalline carapace in copper-foil glasswork overtook the punching bag’.4 To draw that structure, Roberts looked to a tradition of glass-making in the work of the famous early twentieth-century American glassmaker Louis Comfort Tiffany. For Roberts, Tiffany’s signature imagery of Arcadian wisteria and grapevines seemed to also be an evocation of crystalline growth. Suspended in mid-air the punching bag conflates the tough sport of boxing with the lyrical refinement of Tiffany’s design. The contrast between the solidity of the bag and the mutability and fragility of the glass can also be seen as a metaphor for male strength and vulnerability.

Over the past ten years, Ricky Swallow (born 1974) has become one of Australia’s most highly regarded contemporary artists. His series Even the odd orbit 1998–99, shown in the Melbourne International Biennial, created a stir. Six works from the series were gifted by

Peter Fay to the National Gallery of Australia. One of them, Rooftop shootout with chimpanzee 1999, comprised a model of the Melbourne building where the works were shown in the Biennial. Swallow made a cardboard model of this ten-storey building as a theatrical stage-set for a shootout. On the rooftop small-scale figures including a chimpanzee wielding a gun, recalls big hits of cinema, such as Star wars, and innumerable B-grade movies. With a miniaturists eye for detail and a remarkable capacity for reinvention, Swallow linked this ‘happening’ with a turntable base mechanism which allows the chimpanzee to rotate at the press of a button. In our current high-tech world, the portable record players as bases for these works are like relics of the past invested with new life.

The idea of the past being part of the present is a recurrent theme in Swallow’s work. He recalls that, while he was coming up with ideas for Tusk, he was playing Fleetwood Mac’s song of the same title in his studio.

There is an interplay of life-like or death-like qualities in this intriguing sculpture. At first sight, the bones appear uncannily real as a result of the patination of the bronze.

Part of the process of making, for Swallow, is to continually challenge himself, technically and philosophically—to be open to reinvention. As he noted:

Neil Roberts Half ether, half dew mixed with sweat 2000 canvas, cotton, leather, glass, copper foil and metal 244 x 28 x 28 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2002

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I told myself in the studio this year that I’d ‘stop making sense,’ meaning I’d try to make works that were harder to discuss and hopefully more successful as a result.

Tusk came about in a very improvised fashion through playing around with these bones in the studio, and when by chance they formed this heart, it seemed perfect. Its important how fused the hands are in the sculpture, how they make one object together, and perhaps in this way it’s a symbol for the security and proposed endurance of love or union … The work in person has a tactility which is more ambiguous than my other bronze finishes (due to its white patina), the surface complicates the material seeming more brittle than metal.5

Reinventing the past in the present through diverse materials recurs in the engaging works Glass slipper (ugly blister) 2001 and Stheno 2006 by Tim Horn (born 1964).

His audacious glass slipper gives the Cinderella story a contemporary twist. It is simultaneously a play on aspects of his own identity and his fascination with eighteenthcentury culture. Living in Paris in the late 1990s, Horn studied Baroque art and eighteenth-century jewellery and fashion design. The shape of the glass slipper originates from an eighteenth-century engraving and the pattern from eighteenth-century jewellery. Horn also adapted the eighteenth-century idea of foiling non-precious stones in his use of Easter egg foil and lead crystal. The sculpture appears to be glowing with shimmering rosy light, as if lit from within. The dramatically enlarged scale of the shoe creates a tension between dark humour and seductive beauty, constriction and desire. Horn recalls that the impetus for reworking the Cinderella theme came about when his mother was reading a feminist deconstruction of fairytales.

It struck him that there were parallels in the behaviour of his mother, sister and himself in wanting to find ‘the perfect prince’ of the Cinderella myth to make life complete.

So making this work was a way of examining what I perceive to be that behaviour and constricting objects to illustrate that dynamic … [to] rewrite that Cinderella story from a queer perspective informed by my experience. I wanted to take the story, tear it up and cut and paste it back together so that the characters weren’t squeaky clean and predictable … The image is opulent and seductive but I really wanted the title to suggest a counter-quality … I’m interested in the polarities and finding the point at where the beautiful becomes the grotesque and vice versa … I was concerned with making an object of visual complexity … [with] that element of visual excitement.6

A sense of play and revisiting the past is also apparent in Knowledge 1999 by David Watt (1952–1998). In this layered, imaginatively configured installation, we discover images of childhood learning. Constructed with care and deadpan humour, Watt carved and painted objects pertaining to all manner of topics: geography, history, science, anatomy, nutrition, animals, transport and mythology. Set along a shelf, the experience of the work is an incremental journey on which we discover overlapping images, bold disparities of scale and surreal, absurd juxtapositions of fact and fiction. It is a world that engages with the artist’s childhood of the 1950s and, specifically, the magazine Knowledge that was filled with these kinds of images. As Gordon Bull wrote:

David Watt Knowledge 1991–95 synthetic polymer paint on composition board 540 cm (dimensions variable) National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2000

(opposite) Ricky Swallow Tusk 2007 cast bronze with white patina 50 x 105 x 6 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Gift of the Prescott Family Foundation, 2008

Timothy Horn Glass slipper (ugly blister) 2001 lead crystal, nickelplated bronze, Easter egg foil, silicon 51 x 72 x 33 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2002

David had been seriously ill as a child in the ’50s and early ’60s. He was bedridden for extended periods and his loving parents gave the little boy books and lots of magazines. One of those magazines was ‘Knowledge: the new colour magazine which grows into an encyclopaedia’.

Produced for children and marketed in the format of weekly pamphlets sold at the newsagent or corner shop, ‘Knowledge’ was a commodity which promised growth and development through accumulation. It was a boy’s own world of information.7

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Watt had migrated with his family from Scotland to Australia and the magazine Knowledge reflects in part the closeness he felt to his parents (particularly his father). It is the memory of another time and place, real and imagined, brought into our present. The humour in relation to stereotypic 1950s images and approaches is quirky and gentle rather than acerbic. In line with the encyclopedic aspect of Knowledge, the multiplicity of objects suggests the sheer impossibility of ever knowing it all. No matter when or where we find ourselves in the world, the knowledge pool just keeps on growing, unstoppably and ultimately unknowably.

In contrast with the accumulation of objects and images in Knowledge, Hossein Valamanesh’s Falling 1990 is about distillation. The silhouette of the figure flying and falling is a kind of portrait, as though the essence of self, of body and spirit, has been transmuted into the substances of earth and air. Valamanesh (born 1949) came to Australia from Iran in 1970 and his experience of the desert landscape that he encountered on an early visit to Central Australia represented common ground with similar landscapes of his original homeland. The swooping lines of Falling are made from bamboo, which appears seamlessly joined with the torso and head of the figure carved out of wood and encrusted with red earth. The idea of a minimal silhouette as a portrait was also apparent in a related work, Falling breeze 1991, in which Valamanesh adapted the outline of his son Nassiem, whose name in Farsi means ‘breeze’.

For years Valamanesh has been inspired by the poetry of the Sufi poet and mystic Rumi and his capacity to convey an inner life. In relation to Falling, the artist also refers to another literary source, as he explains: In his book The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie describes the mid-air explosion of a passenger airliner on its way from India to England. He describes vividly bodies and debris falling towards the ocean beneath. Gibreel Farishta happens to be on this flight and, as everything around him falls apart, he gracefully falls, lands on the surface of the ocean and walks to the beach. Falling was my reading of this soft landing.

Leaving behind the narrative of the book, it stands for itself and it is more like falling with grace.8

The head of the falling figure rests on a circle of polished black granite that has a reflective surface, like water. The precise choices of materials that Valamanesh makes in his work is a concern shared by Ah Xian (born 1960) who also explores relationships between portraiture and nature in his intriguing, often exquisite, portrait busts. In his work he again makes connections with his personal, familial, cultural past reinvented in the present. Ah Xian arrived in Australia from Beijing in 1989 and experienced both a sense of liberation and loss in relation to China. His way of overcoming his feeling of disconnection was to reconnect with the culture in a meaningful way. He regularly travels

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back to China to make work, drawing on traditional skills.

In his porcelain busts, the idea of reinvention is as much to do with ideas as it is to do with materials; with keeping traditions alive and transforming them in personal ways that would have been unimaginable in the past.

In China China bust 15 1999 the hand-painted decoration of a traditional design is like a second skin or tattoo. As well as being a physical layer, it suggests an imprint on the psyche—as though a former culture travels with us and is heightened by the perspectives of a new and different culture. Respecting nature is another central tenet of Ah Xian’s thinking that also comes to the fore in the meditative, calm aura of China China bust 80 2004 in which lotus blooms and leaves float on the body. The aspect of reverie is important to Ah Xian, who writes: ‘It is about a beautiful dream, it is about fancy and fantasy, and it is about human beings, the natural environment surrounding us and the civilisation we have evolved’.9 He is concerned that the technologies we have been advancing are not respectful of nature. His work reminds us that we are the ancestors of the future, laying the groundwork for what will follow in hundreds of years time. As he recently wrote, reinvention can be both about union and creating something new: When I think about human history and civilization, it always appears to be like a string: one extreme is old time and tradition, current and contemporary is the other.

Interestingly, when we turn and join the two extremes together, it forms a perfect circle and creates a new language of art.10

What the varied works in the Reinventions exhibition reveal is that sculptures and assemblages from the 1960s to the present continue to have a vital presence in Australian art.

The exhibition is being held as part of a season sculpture at the Gallery, overlapping for a time with Soft sculpture and coinciding with a program of talks about sculptures on display throughout the galleries.

Hossein Valamanesh Falling 1990 wood, bamboo, sand, steel, black granite 390 x 55 x 50 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2002

Ah Xian China China bust 15 1999 cast porcelain, with hand-painted underglaze decoration 34.8 x 36.6 x 20 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2000

Deborah Hart Senior Curator, Australian Painting and Sculpture post 1920 notes 1 Colin Lanceley, in Australian art in the National Gallery of Australia, ed Anne Gray, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2002, p 262.

2 Rosalie Gascoigne, quoted in James Mollison and Steven Heath, ‘Rosalie Gascoigne in her own words’, Rosalie Gascoigne: material as landscape, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1997, p 7.

3 Neil Roberts, in Australian art in the National Gallery of Australia, p 426.

4 Roberts, p 426.

5 Ricky Swallow, interview in Goth: reality of the departed world, exhibition catalogue, Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama, 2007, p 169.

6 Tim Horn, in conversation with Beatrice Gralton, in National Sculpture Prize and exhibition 2001, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2001, p 48.

7 Gordon Bull, in David Watt: a tribute, exhibition catalogue, Galerie Düsseldorf and Stephanie Jones, Perth, 2000, p 3.

8 Hossein Valamanesh, in Australian art in the National Gallery of Australia, p 377.

9 Ah Xian, in Australian art in the National Gallery of Australia, p 420.

10 Ah Xian, correspondence with Deborah Hart, 3 April 2009.

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for thcoming exhibition

McCubbin: Last Impressions 1907–17 Largeness of vision 14 August – 1 November 2009 | Exhibition Galleries Frederick McCubbin Setting sun c 1911 oil on wood panel 23.6 x 33.4 cm Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide MJM Carter AO Collection, 2006

Collins Street c 1915 oil on cardboard 25 x 35.3 cm Geelong Gallery, Geelong HP Douglass Bequest Fund

McCubbin: Last Impressions 1907–17 showcases the work that Frederick McCubbin produced during the last eleven years of his life. It traces the radical changes in McCubbin’s work—after he viewed the works of JMW Turner and Claude Monet in London and Paris—and seeks to redefine this important Australian artist to show the way he developed a freer and more expressive art in his final years.

The exhibition considers McCubbin’s innovative approach to image making through the variety of his handling of paint and his striking use of colour. It looks at how he was concerned with conveying the varying effects of light—sparkling, flickering and hazed light. It also points to his interest in depicting the moods of nature and the different aspects of the changing seasons.

McCubbin gradually developed his approach over many years, continually building on his experience, drawing inspiration from a range of sources. Always and fundamentally his inspiration came from nature and the visual world around him. When his former colleagues Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton began to lose their way, McCubbin continued to advance. Indeed, in 1909, McCubbin wrote to Roberts that ‘in our past work we have been too timid’.1 He was painting with greater freedom, applying his pigments rapidly, to achieve broken fractured surfaces with high-keyed colour.

McCubbin once quoted Monet as observing that ‘Light is the chief sitter everywhere’, and this is true of many of McCubbin’s later paintings.2 When visiting Europe in 1907, he was hugely impressed by Turner’s work, praising the brilliance and luminosity of Turner’s late works: … they glow with a tender brilliancy that radiates from these canvasses—how he loved the dazzling brilliancy of morning or evening—these gems with their opal colour— you feel how he gloried in these tender visions of light and air. He worked from darkness into light.3

When he returned to Australia he sought to capture something of Turner’s radiant light in his paintings.

Indeed, more than any particular subject, it is light that is the subject of McCubbin’s last impressions: the light of early morning and early nightfall, and the glow of the setting sun.

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In his last impressions, McCubbin expressed his sense of delight in and comfort within the bush. Gone is his grey-green palette, and in its place is one of many colours: pinks, purples, golds and a huge variety of green. Here, men work productively at their labours, sawing wood or hauling timber, at one with the landscape. Here, there are happy children, with little girls roaming freely in the bush, picking berries, without fear.

McCubbin claimed that ‘it is precisely the pictures of things familiar to us, of homely subjects … which most appeal to us, and more often therefore rise to true greatness’.4 During his last years, McCubbin painted landscapes that he knew well: the bush around his own property at Mount Macedon and the views around his home at South Yarra. Here, he could paint unhindered, without concerns for what other artists were doing.

He looked at this landscape as one might the face of a beloved, exploring it each day afresh, seeing new and exciting aspects in it, capturing its changing moods and expressions.

There are also other subjects in these last impressions: the industrial life of the stone crusher at the Burnley Quarry, the shipping activity around the piers at Williamstown, as well as images of the inner city streets of Melbourne.

In these works, McCubbin showed that Australia was no longer just a place of pioneers—that Melbourne was a modern, established city—where people lived comfortably in the landscape, where industry prospered, where goods came in and out of the country and where trams and cars transported people to a bustling city life.

Anne Gray Head of Australian Art A book published in conjunction with the exhibition is available at the NGA Shop from 14 August for $39.95 (RRP $45.95). notes 1 Frederick McCubbin, letter to Tom Roberts, 27 January 1909, in Letters to Tom Roberts, vol 2, no 18, MS ML A2478, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney.

2 McCubbin, quoted in James MacDonald, The art of Frederick McCubbin, Boolarong Publications, Brisbane, 1986, p 84 (Lothian Book Publishing, Melbourne, 1916).

3 McCubbin, letter to Annie McCubbin, 19 July 1907, Frederick McCubbin Papers c 1900 – c 1915, MS 8525, State Library of Victoria, Melbourne.

4 Bridget Whitelaw, The art of Frederick McCubbin, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1991, p 104.

conser vation

In these dreams of colour: a close examination of McCubbin’s paintings in the national collection

Frederick McCubbin Girl with bird at the King Street bakery 1886 oil on canvas 40.7 x 46 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1969

(fig 1) X-ray showing the portrait beneath the painting Girl with bird at the King Street bakery 1886.

The National Gallery of Australia has 16 paintings by Frederick McCubbin in its collection, seven of which are from his earlier period. The earliest works in the collection, painted while he was at the National Gallery School in Melbourne in 1886, are Sunset glow, Girl with bird at the King Street bakery and At the falling of the year. Although he didn’t study abroad like so many of his contemporaries at the time, McCubbin was driven by a naturalist impulse derived from painters such as Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848–1884), Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret (1852–1929) and George Clausen (1852–1944).

With his only visit to Europe in 1906, McCubbin’s naturalism was replaced with the painterly concerns of the Impressionists and his particular appreciation for the late works of JMW Turner (1775–1851). The muted light and tone of his early works were replaced in his later paintings

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with skeins of pure colour woven across the surface of the canvas. Works, such as Violet and gold 1911 and Afterglow 1912, are masterpieces of this mature style, painted by an artist confident in his abilities.

The paintings of his last decade are the subject of the Gallery’s forthcoming exhibition McCubbin: Last Impressions 1907–17. In preparation for the exhibition, the Gallery began an active program of conservation on the McCubbin paintings held in the national collection.

Although McCubbin’s subjects and themes remained similar throughout his career, a close examination of his works reveals the marked changes in the painterly techniques by which he sought to portray familiar views from around his home—firstly in suburban Melbourne, then at Mount Macedon and finally in South Yarra.

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(fig 2) An X-ray of Afterglow 1912 shows a portrait painting beneath the landscape.

Frederick McCubbin Afterglow 1912 oil on canvas 91.5 x 117 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1970

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What this conservation program uncovered, beneath the many layers of paint and discoloured varnish, are fresh insights into these much loved works, as well as the changes in the many small but important decisions an artist makes during the creation of a painting—decisions about supports, techniques, palette and surface coatings.

Throughout his career, McCubbin typically painted on commercially prepared canvases supplied by artists’ colourmen in Melbourne, such as EW Cole in Collins Street and W & G Dean of Equitable Place. McCubbin probably originally bought his canvases ready stretched, as several paintings such as Sunset glow 1886 and Girl with clasped hands c 1900 remain on their original stretchers.

At the falling of the year 1899, from his early period, and his later work Self-portrait c 1908 are both painted on standard size, pre-stretched Winsor & Newton canvases, which would have been imported from England by one of his Melbourne suppliers.

Some of McCubbin’s early works, such as Winter landscape c 1897 and Triumphal Arch at Princes Bridge, Melbourne 1901, are on solid supports rather than canvas.

The former is painted on commercially prepared academy board and the latter is on a whitewood panel—both of which were commonly used by artists and were available from artist suppliers. They were particularly useful for plein air painting as they were inexpensive and portable.

Triumphal Arch at Princes Bridge, Melbourne is painted in a typical manner for this type of study, with the paint applied directly to the board and the natural tone of the wood providing a mid-tone in the composition of the foreground.

Most earlier works, however, are painted on a mediumfine plain woven linen canvas, which once the priming is applied has only a modest weave pattern This would have suited the painting technique he employed at the time which depended on washes and scumbles of colour as well as fine detailed brushwork.

The later paintings, on the other hand, are more variable. While most of them are still on commercially prepared canvases, there is a greater range of weights and weaves. Violet and gold 1911, for example, is painted on a heavy-weight linen canvas, while Floodwaters 1913 has a strong twill weave. In both cases, the assertive canvas weave is exploited as part of the work, giving further depth to the energetic paint layer. Whether this was a deliberate choice by the artist or a happy accident is open to interpretation, as it is more likely that this variation in the choice of painting support is purely pragmatic and driven by financial constraints.

The broken fence 1907 for example, is painted on a cotton canvas that the artist obviously sourced and prepared himself. The blue stripe visible on the back, and to some extent through the paint layer, suggests that this material was originally meant for a domestic purpose such as, perhaps, window awnings. The same material has also

been found on a work in the National Gallery of Victoria’s collection, suggesting that the artist had a small supply that he used for painting.

Throughout his career, McCubbin also appears to have maintained the practice of reusing canvases. Girl with bird at the King Street bakery, for example, was originally used to paint a portrait (possibly an early self-portrait) as a palette is visible in the upper right of the X-ray (fig 1).

Afterglow, painted some 25 years later, has a painting of a female figure underneath the surface (fig 2). X-rays of other paintings have also revealed similar portraits beneath them.

Mount Macedon landscape with children playing 1911 was probably first used for a portrait or figure painting before it was cut down and the present image painted. The folds of the old tacking margins and nail holes can be seen beneath the paint, along both sides of the image. Several paintings, including Child in the bush 1913, have also been cut down from existing canvases and re-stretched onto old stretchers before work began on the final image.

In all of the works in the national art collection, McCubbin seems to have been happy with simple white commercial priming and was content, at least initially, to paint directly onto it.

In 1886, McCubbin was a drawing master at the National Gallery School, and his approach to painting reflects the influence of the school’s director George F Folingsby. The paint layer in works from this period is built up of thin washes of colour reinforced by more opaque applications of paint. Compared to his later works his use of impasto is minimal.

Although McCubbin worked more freely in his plein air sketches and paintings, his 1886 Sunset glow is perhaps representative of his preferred studio working method at the time—and of Folingsby’s influence. As a first stage, he blocked in the main composition in dark brown paint, covering the whole surface. This approach of establishing the shadows first with bituminous paints and working from dark to light was old-fashioned by the standards of the day, referring to academic practice from the first half of the nineteenth century. Highlights and details have then been applied in thicker paint while allowing the initial layer to remain unaltered for much of the shadow areas. As a result, light in the paintings is muted and modified by the dark under-layers and, due to the oil paint becoming more transparent in the intervening 120 years, the painting has gradually become darker and warmer in overall tone.

A comparable method has been used in both Girl with clasped hands and An autumn pastoral 1899.

McCubbin continued to use a variation of this method, even in his later paintings; although, the washes tended to refer more to the colours in the final composition. It can be seen in the first layers of the cross-section from his later work of 1911, Mount Macedon landscape with children playing, where a thin wash of green has been applied directly over

the ground (fig 3 & 4). His use of thick impasto in the later works also meant that he could establish solid highlights independently of his darker initial layers. Even so, due to the extended time he seems to have worked on some paintings, there are anomalies; for example, the sky in Afterglow has thick green paint layers directly beneath much of it.

Analysis of McCubbin’s working methods is complex and not helped by the fact that many of the later works have earlier compositions underlying them. The broken fence, for instance, is dated 1907, but we know that McCubbin began painting this work much earlier. The dark brown–black paint visible across the surface in the gaps of the later pure paint layers suggest that it may be painted over a Folingsby-type composition.

McCubbin does not appear to have been particularly fussy when reusing a canvas. The cross-sections from Mount Macedon landscape with children playing show

(fig 3) Cross-section of Mount Macedon landscape with children playing 1911, magnified by 400x, showing two different paintings on one canvas: lower layers are the pale brown paint layers of original image; top layers form final image and show the swirling wet in wet paint application. (fig 4) As fig 3 viewed in ultraviolet light, which shows a fluorescent zinc white ground, bright varnish layer through the middle of the crosssection (over the original image) and swirling pink fluorescent Rose Madder pigment in the top layers.

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that the first composition was probably wholly finished, as the paint layers are intact and there is an uninterrupted varnish layer present. In artist’s manuals at the time, it was normally recommended that reused canvases be scraped or sanded back to provide tooth or a new priming is applied; McCubbin seems to commonly do neither. The undamaged initial layers show that he simply painted straight on top of them, without any preparation. As a result, it is common to find areas of anomalous colour in the later paintings, as paint strokes from earlier compositions break through the later paint. Similarly, there are textures throughout the surfaces from brushstrokes in previous states or compositions. Occasionally, McCubbin incorporated parts of an earlier painting into a later image; for example, parts of the dark paint in the centre of Girl with bird at the King Street bakery were originally part of the underlying portrait.

In general McCubbin’s palette throughout his career was relatively limited, and traditional. The late works, for all their range of colour—especially the shades of greens, blues and purples—are based on only a small number of individual paints. As well as carbon black and lead white, McCubbin used Prussian blue and cobalt blue, Rose madder and vermilion for his reds, lead chrome yellow and, occasionally, a lemon yellow. These were supplemented by a selection of yellow and red ochres with darker umbers.

The only modern colour he appears to have regularly used was the bright green pigment viridian.

The distinct characteristic that increasingly marks the later works is the sheer physicality of the paint. McCubbin’s earlier works, including landscapes such as At the falling of the year, are obviously constructed using traditional techniques, whereas the later works evolve from a complex surface. Typically, he paints wet in wet, using a whole range of brushes and, at times, possibly also his fingers.

McCubbin used a palette knife as often as he used brushes, layering on the paint in slabs, using it to roughly mix colour and to cut into and drag surfaces. The contrast can be demonstrated by his handling of grass and foliage: in his earlier works, the delicate flicks of a fine brush (so reminiscent of Bastien-Lepage) are later replaced by staccato stabs of the side of the palette knife.

In the course of completing a canvas, McCubbin would often rework and revise areas. This may mean overpainting; however, he also regularly scraped and abraded sections to reveal underlying colours, the ground or even earlier compositions (fig 5). The textural effects created by this process were then incorporated into the composition.

While some of the rubbing back was done during the initial painting, Afterglow and Violet and gold show that the abrasion was also carried out after the paint had dried, indicating that he revisited the paintings in the studio.

McCubbin also scratched into his wet paint with both the tip of the palette knife and the end of a brush handle to create sgraffito effects (fig 6).

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As a final stage, McCubbin would often modify the colour or tone of certain passages by applying very thin, transparent washes of colour. Although not glazes in the strict technical sense—that is, they are not composed of transparent pigment in varnish (he seems to have used oil instead)—they do function in a similar way. The sky in The broken fence, for instance, is dulled with a blue–grey oil glaze, and the bright green in the middle-ground of Floodwaters has been slightly darkened with a thin warm brown (fig 7). Shadow areas in foliage also commonly have a similar treatment to increase their depth or modify their tone. These, as well as any lighter scumbles, would again have been added once the main body of the painting had dried sufficiently so that mixing did not occur.

Whether McCubbin intended his later works to be varnished or not is debatable. Given his attention to the tones in his work and the dominant aesthetic at the time, which was for unvarnished paintings (at least among the artists who interested McCubbin), it is likely that his paintings were originally unvarnished. We also know that many of the varnished or waxed surfaces of his works are later restoration varnishes.

On the other hand, we also have evidence of varnish layers within cross-sections, which we know must be McCubbin’s work. What may account for these seemingly contradictory findings is that McCubbin may have made a

distinction between his portraits and landscapes, preferring that the latter remain unvarnished. It is unfortunately difficult to be sure of this as the situation is made more confusing by the fact that many of the paintings have had heavy restoration.

In many cases, previous restorations of the Gallery’s McCubbin works (before they were acquired for the national collection) have altered the works substantially.

Areas of deliberate abrasion and scraping back have been repainted to hide what was thought to be damage. Drying cracks, an inevitable result of McCubbin’s use of heavy impasto, have frequently been over-painted, as have old damages such as tears and holes. The variable gloss— again, a result of his technique—has also been balanced with a saturating coat of varnish.

The conservation preparations for the exhibition will no doubt provide further insights into the complexities of McCubbin’s painting methods and how they evolved. Even so one thing that never changed was McCubbin’s passion for painting and his dreams of colour.

Frederick McCubbin Floodwaters 1913 oil on canvas 92.5 x 182 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1973

(opposite) (fig 5) Detail of obscured sun of Floodwaters showing use of abraded paint to create highlights. (fig 6) Sgraffito used to create trees in Floodwaters. (fig 7) Brown tone wash of Floodwaters.

David Wise Senior Paintings Conservator

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collec tion focus

Photographing America’s South: Roll, Jordon roll

Our ways of looking change; the photograph not only documents a subject but records the vision of a person and a period.

Beaumont Newhall1 Doris Ulmann Baptism 1929–31 leaf 61, in Roll, Jordon, roll, Robert O Ballou, New York, 1933 photogravure image 23.7 x 18 cm sheet 28.5 x 20.5 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1978

In May 1929, Doris Ulmann left her home, 1000 Park Avenue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, at midnight (as was her habit) in her chauffeur-driven Lincoln. She was on her way to South Carolina to stay with her friend the novelist Julia Mood Peterkin, who had recently been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her 1928 novel Scarlet Sister Mary. Peterkin and her husband owned the cotton plantation Lang Syne at Fort Motte, which had around 300 Gullah tenant farmers—Gullah was the name given to African–Americans living in the midland and coastal lowlands of the southern states.

Ulmann was approaching her late forties. She was independently wealthy, divorced and frail—having suffered ill health much of her life. She had built a reputation as a portrait photographer to the scientific, artistic and literary elite, was an active member of the Pictorial Photographers of America, and her work had been exhibited and reproduced. She photographed in part to meet people she admired, and, having studied psychology at Columbia, to capture something essential about them on her glass plates. Pre-industrial, rural communities had become a focus—the Amish, Mennonites, Shakers and the Dunkard Brethren—and she was also making studies of Native Americans.

For the next three years, Ulmann made frequent trips to the deep South, along the coasts of South Carolina, Louisiana and Alabama and to cities such as New Orleans.

She was gathering material for a project that would result in the December 1933 publication of Roll, Jordan, roll (the title coming from a well-known traditional spiritual), with text written by Peterkin and 72 halftone images by Ulmann.

Early in the following year, a deluxe edition containing 90 hand-pulled copperplate gravures and with a limited printrun of 350 would be released, signed and numbered

by Peterkin and Ulmann.

On the face of it, the project was not so promising: a rich, privileged outsider examining the lives of those less fortunate at a time when African–Americans were becoming

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increasingly politicised. It was a potentially volatile situation and, at best, the communication barrier was sure to pose problems. To make matters worse, at Lang Syne, Ulmann was accompanied by the boss’s wife, and some the Gullah tenant farmers were leaving the plantation to head north in search of a better life—the beginnings of a major migration of African–Americans from the South to the North. Peterkin’s mother had died in childbirth, so she was raised by her Gullah nursemaid. She spoke Gullah dialect, had learnt many of their customs and considered them friends.

However, the nature of Ulmann’s project, focusing on the workers on the plantation, forced Peterkin to write of the interaction between black and white, which was something she had never done before. Prior to this, her novels were written from a solely black perspective with the dialogue in Gullah dialect. Her compromised position as plantation mistress compelled her to abandon the stark and violent tone of earlier work and, instead, evoke one that was sentimental and suffused with nostalgia for a world that did not exist, a world in which everyone was content with their lot in life. Her text for Roll, Jordan, roll, an uneasy blend of fiction and essay, is often startling in its condescending stereotypical assessment of the Gullah: ‘naturally cheerful’, living under their kind bosses and holding fast to the old ways and beliefs.

By the time Peterkin had finished her text for Roll, Jordan, roll in mid 1933, the close friendship between the two women had faltered, with both experiencing frustration and professional and petty personal jealousies. Far from seeing her words as auxiliary to the images, which was the original intention, Peterkin saw the book as her own.

Inversely, Ulmann did not want her work to appear merely illustrative, and so the interleaving of the caption-less plates with the text was done in such a way that they each have their own life within the book. Their placement and sequence also differs from one edition to the other, inevitably frustrating any attempt to link them in too literal a manner.

In the end, Ulmann’s images tell a subtle but fundamentally

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attributed to Doris Ulmann Self-portrait with Julia Peterkin c 1930 platinum print 19.6 x 15.5 cm South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston

Doris Ulmann Chain gang with overseer 1929–31 leaf 20, in Roll, Jordon, roll, Robert O Ballou, limited edn, New York, 1934 photogravure image 23.5 x 18 cm sheet 28.5 x 20.5 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1978

different story to Peterkin’s text and have little to do with the simplistic cheerfulness proposed by Peterkin.

In her late teens in New York, Ulmann had attended the Ethical Culture School and taken to heart the founder Felix Adler’s belief in the inherent worth of every human being. With the people she photographed, Ulmann would be very charming to put them at ease. Some of the Gullah, however, remained suspicious of her intentions because she was rather manipulative. For instance, in the October 1930 issue of The Bookman, one of Ulmann’s sitters, Dale Warren, described how Ulmann would tell ‘a funny story to make you laugh and another not so funny to see if you are easily reduced to tears’. On the other hand, Ulmann wrote that she found the Gullah ‘so strange that it is almost impossible to photograph them’.2 In many of the photographs, the sitters look Ulmann right in the eye, defiant and proud, yet in others they appear disarmingly relaxed. The relationship between Ulmann and the Gullah sitters was clearly complicated by a power imbalance and difficulty in connecting. This difficulty, however, was countered by Ulmann’s empathy, and the result is the fascinating images in Roll, Jordon, roll—images that are complex, powerful and disturbing.

The Gullah photographs are an honest document of what Ulmann experienced, and the authenticity that she sought is honoured.

Ulmann could see the frailty in others that Peterkin was at pains to ignore and she was acutely aware that the older members of the community had been born into slavery. In the chain-gang images—a reality hardly alluded to in the text, but given three powerful images by Ulmann—the

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vulnerability of the Gullah is emphasised: they look away as if trying to protect themselves from the camera’s scrutiny.

Again and again, Ulmann uses restrained and masterly compositional devices to underscore the reality of Gullah life—cropping and unusual angles indicate the influence of modernism despite her dislike of recent innovations in photography.

The soft-focus of her pictorial training is used for far more than beautiful effect—although that was always an obsessional concern. In images of glittery lights and dark impenetrable shadows, the people seem to pass from the material to the immaterial, and Ulmann (Jewish by birth, though agnostic) creates an almost palpable sense of the spiritual and mysterious. She was clearly moved and inspired by their religious life, which features prominently along with their working life in the images selected for Roll, Jordon, roll.

Years of ill health, serious falls and self-destructive behaviour (chain-smoking, a diet of black coffee and overwork), travelling extensively in remote, difficult areas, and printing all hours in the darkroom took its toll. Doris Ulmann died in the early hours of 28 August 1934, aged 52. Julia Peterkin lived until the early 1960s, but Roll, Jordan, roll was her last substantial piece of published writing (A plantation Christmas, a small illustrated book, was published the following year, in 1934) and she spent the final decades of her life quietly on the plantation, all but forgotten by the world.

Ulmann’s great work at the end of her life just preceded that of the government-sponsored Farm Security Administration photographers who directly addressed

the more urgent problems of the Great Depression: unemployment and drought, which led to poverty and social injustice. Ulmann, too, was all but forgotten until recent interest by curators and social historians brought attention to her work. For some time after her death, many of Ulmann’s prints and heavy glass plates were stored at Columbia University. In the 1950s, however, the foundation that owned her work decided to find a more permanent home for the collection. The University of Oregon, who had committed to preserving the collection in its entirety, took on the responsibility. However, before shipping the collection to Oregon, the foundation decided to reduce the weight of the shipment by selecting and destroying approximately 7000 glass plates.

In the late 1970s, the National Gallery of Australia acquired a copy of both editions as well as 62 vintage platinum prints of the Gullah. The prints, some of which were used in making the plates in the book, had been sitting in the barn of the publisher, Robert O Ballou, from the 1930s to the late 1960s. It is very likely that a third of these images, which do not appear in either edition, are unique prints, as multiples of Ulmann’s work are rare.

The Gallery has the only institutional holding of Ulmann’s prints outside the United States of America. The majority of her prints, as well as her papers, are to be found in university, library and historical society collections. The largest museum collections of her work are at the J Paul Getty Museum in California and George Eastman House in New York.3 Despite its complexities and difficulties, and despite the text—a revealing (but regrettable) insight into a

plantation owner’s outlook (albeit a less conventional plantation owner)—Roll, Jordan, roll and the other images that Ulmann created of African–Americans are remarkable documents. They were created when African–Americans were still subject to strict segregation, when racism went unquestioned and unpunished, particularly in the South, and when lynchings were still prevalent. At the time of its publication, Roll, Jordan, roll was endorsed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.4 According to Susan Millar Williams, who has written on Peterkin and Ulmann, the descendants of the Gullah people depicted in Roll, Jordon roll often seek out Ulmann’s images. This is not surprising considering her respectful, sensitive and intense portrayal.

Roll, Jordan, roll may not be the whole story, and it may not be the only story, but it is one of complexity and mysteriousness. It is one that opens a door to a period of American history and, more importantly, a still controversial subject that echoes throughout many nations of the world, including Australia.

Doris Ulmann Servant doing up boots 1929–31 leaf 40, in Roll, Jordon, roll, Robert O Ballou, New York, 1933 photogravure image 23.7 x 18 cm sheet 28.7 x 20.5 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1978

Doris Ulmann Girl 1929–31 leaf 112, Roll, Jordon, roll, Robert O Ballou, New York, 1933 photogravure image 23.2 x 17.2 cm sheet 28.5 x 20.5 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1978

Anne O’Hehir Assistant Curator, Photography notes 1 Beaumont Newhall, Photography 1839–1937, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1937, p 90.

2 Doris Ulmann, quoted in Judith Fryer Davidov, Women’s camera work: self/body/other in American visual culture, Duke University Press, Durham, 1998, p 189.

3 For a full listing see Philip Walker Jacobs, The life and photographs of Doris Ulmann, The University Press of Kentucky, Lexington, 2001, pp 225–33.

4 Michelle C Lamunière, ‘Roll, Jordan, roll and the Gullah photographs of Doris Ulmann’, History of photography, vol 21, no 4, Winter 1997, p 298.

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acquisition International Drawings

Edgar Degas Woman bathing

Edgar Degas Woman bathing (Femme à sa toilette) 1880–85 monotype over pastel image 27.8 x 38 cm sheet 32.2 x 42.2 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra The Poynton Bequest with the assistance of the National Gallery of Australia Foundation 2009

In March, the National Gallery of Australia announced the arrival of Edgar Degas’s Woman bathing (Femme à sa toilette) 1880–85, a significant pastel purchased in late February at the Yves Saint Laurent auction sale in Paris.

It arrived in Canberra just in time to be displayed among Degas’s other remarkable works in the final week of the exhibition Degas: master of French art.

The subject of a woman at her toilette was one of Degas’s favourites. He returned to the theme often throughout his life, experimenting with almost endless variations of such imagery using different media. This pastel is of a woman viewed from behind, her face silhouetted against the light flooding through the drawn curtains of a boudoir. She is seated on a bidet. Derived from a term meaning ‘pony’ or ‘little horse’, a bidet was a narrow bath that a woman could sit astride while washing herself.

Despite its daring subject matter, the pastel is a particularly intimate and tender rendering of the subject.

Around the time Degas created Woman bathing, he had become obsessed with working in pastel and he was to become known as the great French pastellist of the nineteenth century. Degas was aided in his success by a contemporary of his, the pastel-maker Henri Roché, who enhanced this medium by developing a rich array of powdered pigments and adding powdered pumice to his sticks of pastel. Pastels enabled the consummate draughtsman Degas to emphasise the linear qualities of compositions and, at the same time, to infuse a subject with colour.

In the late 1870s and1880s, Degas would often apply pastel in layers over a monotype—as in the case of

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Woman bathing. Adopting this method, Degas was able to embellish a silhouette of his bather and her surrounds with brilliant hues of blues, pinks, yellows and browns. The method also allowed him to add texture and patterned detail to his composition.

The work originally belonged to Degas’s brother René De Gas and, since then, was owned by a series of notable collectors in the French art world before being purchased by Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé in May 1987. The remarkable private collection of Saint Laurent and Bergé was assembled over three decades and mostly funded by the success of Saint Laurent’s ready-to-wear fashion.

The National Gallery of Australia had been looking for an important pastel or monotype to expand its collection of Degas’s works on paper. We are thrilled to have acquired such an important work at a price we could afford. Its purchase would not have been possible without the extraordinary benefaction of the late Orde Poynton AO, CMG, and the generosity shown by the patrons of the National Gallery of Australia Foundation’s Twentieth Anniversary Gala Dinner in March.

Visitors who saw the work in the exhibition Degas: master of French art or, subsequently, in Degas’ world: the rage for change will no doubt recall the beautiful silhouetted figure with its subtle colouration. However, for those who missed it, Woman bathing will be shown on a regular basis in the Gallery’s display of nineteenth-century international art.

Jane Kinsman Senior Curator, International Art

acquisition A sian Ar t

Choi Jeong Hwa Clear lotus

Choi Jeong Hwa Clear lotus 2009 urethane vinyl, motor 230 x 400 (diam) cm (approx) National Gallery of Australia, Canberra The Gene and Brian Sherman Contemporary Asian Art Fund 2009 Installed in the exhibition Soft sculpture at the National Gallery of Australia, 24 April – 12 July

An exciting recent acquisition of contemporary Asian art is Clear lotus, a huge clear vinyl inflatable flower by renowned Korean artist Choi Jeong Hwa. An artist, designer and active contributor to the development of the lively Korean contemporary art scene, he is renowned for his inflatable sculptures and constructions using mass-produced plastic products and re-presented found or borrowed objects. Born in 1961, Choi Jeong Hwa began his career as a painter and, in 1988, was awarded the relatively conservative National Art Competition Grand Prize for his efforts. By the early 1990s, however, he had abandoned painting for installation, video and sculpture, particularly inflatables.

In 1995, he created The death of the robot—about being irritated, a widely-exhibited orange blow-up robot who struggles to get up from the ground but, worn down by the effort, is continually thwarted. According to the artist: … the work had its start in a personal feeling of powerlessness. What’s most important is the contradiction between this apparent human vulnerability or failing in something that embodies supreme technological advancement.1

Many of Choi’s more recent works are gigantic floralform inflatables, including lotus blossoms in black, white and transparent plastic. While much of his work can be interpreted as communicating concerns about waste, consumer society, globalisation and other contemporary issues, the artist consciously avoids such discussion. Rather, he celebrates the peculiar beauty of synthetic materials and everyday objects with flippant lightness and deliberate ambiguity of purpose. While Choi is not easily drawn on the meaning behind his sculptures, about his floral works he has said: I feel strange when I see a real tree or flower. Nature, as such, is so rare in Korea these days, that I’m actually afraid when I encounter it. I’m afraid of the ‘real’. Maybe all I can

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deal with is an idea of nature, immune to destruction, so I make an artificial one to look at and enjoy.2

Choi Jeong Hwa’s blow-up lotuses have attracted considerable international attention since their first appearance in the Korean Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005. The motorised flowers magnificently inflate and open, deflating limply before the cycle begins again. Although not a practising Buddhist, Choi is familiar with the auspicious Buddhist symbolism of the lotus emerging from muddy waters to bloom pure and exquisite despite its filthy origins.

Generously supported by The Gene and Brian Sherman Contemporary Asian Art Fund, Clear lotus was commissioned by the National Gallery of Australia in early 2009. As a long-serving member of the Gallery’s Foundation, Gene Sherman directed her enormous enthusiasm and generous financial contributions towards building a national collection of significant works by Asian contemporary artists with strong international reputations, including Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang and Indonesian artist Dadang Christanto. Gene and Brian Sherman’s 2008 gift of Heri Dono’s Flying angels has been installed above a busy ramp where the flapping and chirruping angels bring pleasure to visitors on their way to the cafe and lower-level galleries.

Continually rising pristine, plump and sparkling, Choi Jeong Hwa’s Clear lotus is currently one of the most popular objects in the Soft sculpture exhibition.

Melanie Eastburn and Robyn Maxwell Curator and Senior Curator, Asian Art notes 1 Choi Jeong Hwa, interview with James B Lee, ‘Flim-flam and fabrication: an interview with Choi Jeong-Hwa’, Art Asia Pacific, vol 3, no 4, 1996, p 66.

2 Choi, p 66.

acquisition International Painting and Sculpture

Max Ernst King, queen and bishop

Max Ernst King, queen and bishop (Roi, reine et fou) 1929–30, cast 1974–75 no 26 from edition of 35 bronze 16 x 30 x 9.5 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2009

Max Ernst is a major figure in Dada and Surrealism, the revolutionary artistic and literary movements of the early twentieth century. He is known as a sculptor, a painter, a graphic artist and the inventor of frottage. Like his contemporary Marcel Duchamp, Ernst was fascinated by chess; images of chess recur in his work and he developed a stylised iconography of the game.

In King, queen and bishop 1929–30, three major chesspieces are captured: the bishop, in the middle, separates the king and queen. The figures were originally made in clay and show evidence of the squeezing and shaping of the artist’s hand. Ernst worked with plaster maquettes in the 1920s and 1930s. He had no money to cast in bronze at that time and he later made editions of some of the plasters. In 1974–75, two editions in bronze were produced by Valsuani Fondeur, Paris. This example is from the darkly patinated edition; the other edition, made at the same time, has a light patination.

The figures of King, queen and bishop, although fixed in their base, hint at action, either just completed or about to happen. The king is the most static of the three, as might be expected considering his role on the chessboard

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where any movement is limited to a single square.

Comically, the bishop has drawn his cape dramatically around him, ready to spin into action. The queen appears poised for stately progress, with coiffure piled high and chin tilted imperiously. Her arms, with hands demurely clasped across her belly, create an ovoid form that counterbalances her rounded buttocks and elongated head.

The balance and counterbalance of King, queen and bishop echo the composition of the monumental Habakuk 1934 (cast in 1970), acquired by the Gallery in 2006. It too is an assemblage, constructed from casts of flowerpots.

The small bronze augments the showcase in the Dada and Surrealist room of the International galleries, and is displayed among other disconcerting objects, including works from Africa, the Pacific and North America that were once owned by the artist. Ernst’s significance as a Surrealist artist, his subsequent influence on Abstract Expressionism and other twentieth-century art, and his role as a collector mean that King, queen and bishop is a welcome addition to the collection.

Christine Dixon and Krysia Kitch International Painting and Sculpture

acquisition Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Ar t

Ricardo Idagi GiriGiri Le (Bird of Paradise Man)

Like his uncles and grandfathers, Ricardo Idagi is a songman, painter and carver. Born in 1957, he is from Meriam Mer (Murray Island) in the Torres Straits Islands in Queensland, and much of his work relates to the species and spirits that live beneath the waves of the Arafura and Coral seas that surround the islands.

Idagi has a strong vision and commitment to revive traditional knowledge and techniques—in particular, the old mask-making practices—to ensure an ongoing strong artistic and cultural pride in the region.

The artefacts and cultural traditions of the region inform his art. However, Idagi’s work is not a pastiche of pre-missionary practices, or a nostalgic recreation of the past; rather, he seeks to revitalise what was, on many of the islands, denied to Indigenous inhabitants after European arrival. Idagi also continually questions the gaps in the knowledge of his elders and peers, as well as the cultural practices that have become distorted by Christian ideology.

I am very keen to initiate a creative art force in the region that uses the existing knowledge of the men and women in their areas of expertise as well as instructing the younger generations in the sourcing of materials … weaving and binding techniques … I have a vision to revitalise the original methods and integrity behind Torres Strait Islander culture pre-missionary contact.1

Masks such as GiriGiri Le (Bird of Paradise Man) 2008, which are made from the shells of green sea turtles, have not been produced for over a century. Although on the protected species list, the turtle is still captured, killed and eaten by Torres Strait Islander people, as they have done for centuries.

As an Islander, Idagi is able to access this rare material, combining it with traditional knowledge and modern techniques to produce stunning large masks reminiscent of pre-missionary times.

In this work, Idagi has combined two types of ceremonial wear—the hard shell masks and the feathered headdresses called dhoeri—in a modern interpretation of once more-prevalent cultural objects. This combination, or interpretation, of the past is what sets Idagi’s work apart from the work of other Torres Strait Islander artists today.

Ricardo Idagi Miriam Mer people GiriGiri Le (Bird of Paradise Man) 2008 green sea turtle shell, turtle flake, pearl shell, mussel shells, human hair, raffia grass, coral, wicker cane, goa nut, saimi saimi seeds and natural earth pigment 117 x 80 x 11 cm (approx) National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2008

Tina Baum Curator, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art note 1 Ricardo Idagi, in conversation with Vivien Anderson Gallery, 2008.

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acquisition International Photography

Margaret Benyon Pushing up the daisies and culture. Many artists in the 1970s developed social and political concerns—especially in regard to nuclear threat and environmental pollution. Benyon’s experiences in Australia, and her general sense of wider issues, influenced her move away from abstraction and marked the appearance of cross-cultural, social and political references

Margaret Benyon Pushing up the daisies 1996 collage of two reflection holograms on film, printed text, cover glass 60 x 80 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2009 Made using the facility of the Holography Unit, Royal College of Art, London and Artist’s Holography Studio, Dorset, UK

(above) Totem 1979 reflection hologram on glass plate, pen, ink and gouache drawings, feather 20.3 x 25.4 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2009 Made using the facility of Royal Military College, Canberra

In the late 1960s, British painter Margaret Benyon, who had been working with moiré effects in her Op art abstract paintings, became one of the first artists to see the creative possibilities of holograms—then being constructed in just a few advanced scientific labs. The new medium opened up interesting possibilities for Benyon to explore modern technology and her ideas about time and space, and to express personal, spiritual and social perceptions.

What is not well known is the role Benyon’s years in Australia, from 1977 to 1981, played in the development of her work. During this period, she had fellowships at the Australian National University in Canberra and worked as Coordinator, Graphic Investigation, at the Canberra School of Art. She was able to create holograms using the facilities at the Australian National University and Royal Military College in Canberra and at the CSIRO in Sydney. Also important at this time was Benyon’s introduction, through the resources at the Australian National University and the Aboriginal Studies Institute, to Indigenous Australian art

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in her hologram works.

In 1979 and 1981 respectively, the National Gallery of Australia acquired Hot air, Benyon’s laser-transmission hologram of 1970, and her Australian-made reflection hologram Binding 1979, a subtle work of lines and twigs.

Three decades on, Benyon’s return to live in Australia in 2005 has facilitated the acquisition of four works from the artist’s Australian period: Totem, which references Indigenous Australian’s understanding of land and culture; Lattice II, which showed Benyon’s continuing interest in abstract web-grids; and Greenhouse I: creation myths and Unclear world, which are both steeped in the big picture of ecological and nuclear threats.

In addition, Pushing up the daisies, a major large-scale holographic montage from 1996, was selected to represent Benyon’s later career. In this work, fresh daisies literally sprout from the head of a sad soldier dressed in modern camouflage gear and bathed in the eerie artificial light of 1990s night-vision goggles. Popularised by news coverage of recent wars and skirmishes, the green haze that we see when looking through these high-tech instruments has in many ways become symbolic of modern warfare.

The title of the work (like many of Benyon’s titles) plays on words and associations: ‘pushing up the daisies’, meaning to be dead and buried, was a euphemism popularised during the First World War and was also used by doomed British war poet Wilfred Owen. Benyon’s wordplay continues at the bottom of the work in a poetic, staccato cascade of different-sized fonts.

Benyon sombrely calls the work ‘an epitaph’, and it could be read as one. Replaced by technologies, the oldfashioned ideology of the soldier’s honour and glory in warfare has been made redundant. It is ‘pushing up the daisies’. The state of war has become inhuman, if it ever was.

Gael Newton Senior Curator, Photography

acquisition Australia Painting and Sculpture

Debra Dawes Parallel planes

Debra Dawes Parallel planes 2007 oil on canvas 261 x 180 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2008

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Debra Dawes is a leading contemporary Australian painter whose works explore the parameters of visual perception, optical illusion and abstraction. Parallel planes 2007 is a vibrant, sophisticated work from the series Double-dealing 2007 in which Dawes investigates the disruption of the visual plane and political subterfuge. This follows on from a series relating to camouflage, Cover up 2006, in which Dawes also explores ideas of the double-deal and the subtle ties between abstraction and politics.

In Parallel planes, brilliant orange and clean white shapes zigzag down the length of the canvas. These zigzags are painted with subtle tonal shifts that give the distinct impression of three-dimensional horizontal ridges. The ridges advance and recede to make the whole composition appear to shift and pulsate, and the optical illusion is further intensified by the large scale of the work.

The title refers to the illusory spatial effects within the work and reflects on the experience of viewing optical art. Dawes notes that when viewing this work, we receive two parallel, yet contradictory streams of information: the textured surface that is received by and deceives our eyes; and what we think we know is true about the twodimensional surface of a canvas. In a state of intrigue and confusion, we are drawn into the work, compelled to carefully inspect the canvas from the front and the side.

But this is not just a simple optical illusion. ‘What keeps the eye engaged’, writes art critic Sebastian Smee, ‘is Dawes’s encouragement of irregularity within what looks to be predetermined design’.1 Only on closer inspection does the work reveal the delicate hand-painted shapes, the clever nuances of tonal shifts and the true surface of the canvas.

Parallel planes is an engaging new addition to the National Gallery of Australia’s collection of contemporary Australian painting.

Miriam Kelly Associate Curator, Australian Painting and Sculpture note 1 Sebastian Smee, ‘Beauty and brains’, The Australian, 13 October 2007, p 18.

acquisition Pacific Ar t

Kiribas people Ririko

The works in the National Gallery of Australia’s collection of Micronesian arts, like the Islands themselves, are few and far between.

The islands of Tungaru, more commonly known as the Republic of Kiribati, are a series of low-lying atolls barely peeking out of the sea. They are home to small communities with limited resources who excel in the arts of tattoo, weaving and adornment. One impressive, pre-Christian form of art was necklaces made from human teeth.

The name given to this type of necklace is ririko, which translates literally as ‘the closely placed teeth’. The teeth have been pierced and threaded onto a string of coconut fibre, but are otherwise unmodified. Their form, texture and colour, like the finest natural pearls, are pleasing to the eye.

The necklace is a mixture of canines and incisors taken from the front of the lower jaw. The teeth of at least 30 individuals, or at most 180, were used in the production of this necklace, and it is likely, as Micronesian communities are quite small, that this single necklace includes the teeth of many generations of ancestors. For this reason, necklaces like this one are rare finds.

It is a prime expression of identity—quite literally: ‘this is my people’ and ‘I wear my lineage’. Little is known about why teeth are the main representative element in this necklace; although, teeth have obvious associations with the voice, the main communicative part of a person, and teeth chew food, effectively sustaining life. So, perhaps teeth are fitting objects to represent the essence of an ancestor.

The production and use of these necklaces was quickly abandoned under the influence of British missionaries in the late nineteenth century, with only a small number known to exist today.

Kiribas people Republic of Kiribati, Micronesia Ririko (necklace) 19th century teeth, coconut fibre 24 cm (diam) National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2009

Crispin Howarth Curator, Pacific Art

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acquisition Pacific Ar t

Bantor Irene Mague ne hiwir

Bantor Irene Melbera village, Ambrym, Vanuatu Mague ne hiwir prior to 2006 ariel fern, ochre 411 x 65 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2008

Vanuatu has a unique history. It was for the greater part of the twentieth century an Anglo-French ruled condominium—more affectionately known as the pandemonium. The colonial influences of two major powers surprisingly did little to affect the traditional arts of the islands of Malakula, Pentecost and Ambrym. The large circular eyes of the recently acquired, imposing sculptural work Mague ne hiwir are the foremost peculiarity of art from Ambrym, one of the volcanic islands in the centre of the archipelago.

Although the different cultural areas of Vanuatu share many characteristics, they also have their own distinct styles. Ambrym, as elsewhere in Vanuatu, has a distinctive complex social hierarchy in which men and women work towards attaining successively higher levels of prestige.

Each heavily ritualised level, or grade rank, has its own associated arts. For instance, a Mague figure, such as the one acquired by the Gallery, is created for the rituals that accompany ascension to the ninth grade or level. Reaching such a high level also comes at great financial expense to the individual—usually in the form of the ubiquitous nivanuatu currency, the pig.

Mague figures today are made for the same traditional purpose as they have been for generations. Although their form has subtly changed over time, carvers require an intimate knowledge of the ghost world of the ancestors; they must also be properly acquainted with the particular spirit that represents a grade to effectively render it as sculpture. Mague figures are carved from resilient tree fern, a layer of ochre is then applied and designs are carefully painted on its surface.

The Gallery’s Mague figure, Mague ne hiwir, was carved for the north Ambrym chief Gilbert Bangtor when he reached the ninth level. It is one of the largest and most sculptural Mague figures produced in recent years. The sculpture takes advantage of the natural tapering form of the fern from which it was carved, making this enormous ghost-like figure seem to float as if weightless. From its weathered and dilapidated surface, Mague ne hiwir may look very old but it was carved less than 20 years ago.

The surface ochres naturally fall away over time and these sculptures are rarely repainted—perhaps symbolic of the transition of life.

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After chief Bangtor’s succession to a higher grade, the Mague ne hiwir’s functional life ended. The work was later placed onto the art market in 2007 by its indigenous owners, finding its way into the National Gallery of Australia’s collection of Pacific arts.

Crispin Howarth Curator, Pacific Art

Travelling exhibitions winter 2008

Exhibition venues and dates may be subject to change. Please contact the Gallery or venue before your visit. For more information on travelling exhibitions, telephone (02) 6240 6525 or send an email to travex@nga.gov.au.

Culture Warriors

Maringka Baker Kuru Ala 2007 (detail) synthetic polymer paint on canvas 153.5 x 200 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2007 © Maringka Baker

Proudly supported by BHP Billiton; the Australia Council for the Arts through its Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Board, Visual Art Board and Community Partnerships and Market Development (International) Board; the Contemporary Touring Initiative through Visions of Australia, an Australian Government program; and the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative of the Australian Government and state and territory governments; the Queensland Government through the Queensland Indigenous Arts Marketing and Export Agency

Culture Warriors, the inaugural Australian Indigenous Art Triennial, presents the highly original and accomplished work of thirty Indigenous Australian artists from every state and territory. Featuring outstanding works in a variety of media, Culture Warriors draws inspiration from the fortieth anniversary of the 1967 Referendum (Aboriginals) and demonstrates the breadth and calibre of contemporary Indigenous art practice in Australia. nga.gov.au/culturewarriors

The Elaine and Jim Wolfensohn Gift Travelling Exhibitions

Karl Millard Lizard grinder 2000 brass, bronze, copper, sterling silver, money metal, Peugeot mechanism, stainless steel screws 10 x 8 x 23.5 cm in Blue case: technology The Elaine and Jim Wolfensohn Gift

Mathias Kauage Independence celebration I 1975 (detail) stencil 50.2 x 76.4 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Ulli and Georgina Beier Collection, purchased 2005

Imagining Papua New Guinea is an exhibition of prints from the national collection that celebrates Papua New Guinea’s independence and surveys its rich history of printmaking.

Artists whose works are in the exhibition include Timothy Akis, Mathias Kauage, David Lasisi, John Man and Martin Morububuna. nga.gov.au/imagining Aratoi-Wairarapa Museum of Art and History, Masterton, New Zealand, 2 May – 11 July 2009

For further details and bookings telephone (02) 6240 6650 or email travex@nga.gov.au.

Blue case: technology Victorian College of the Deaf, Melbourne, Vic, 4–26 June 2009 Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston, Tas, 29 July – 27 August 2009 Clarence City Council, Rosny Park, Tas, 27 August – 29 September 2009

University Art Museum at the Katzen Art Center, Washington, DC, USA, 8 September – 6 December 2009

Imagining Papua New Guinea: prints from the national collection

Three suitcases of works of art: Red case: myths and rituals includes works that reflect the spiritual beliefs of different cultures; Yellow case: form, space, design reflects a range of art making processes; and Blue case: technology. These suitcases thematically present a selection of art and design objects that may be borrowed free-of-charge for the enjoyment of children and adults in regional, remote and metropolitan centres. nga.gov.au/wolfensohn

Sri Lanka Seated Ganesha 9th–10th century bronze 10 x 6.8 x 4.4 cm in Red case: myths and rituals The Elaine and Jim Wolfensohn Gift

Red case: myths and rituals and Yellow case: form, space and design St Joseph’s School, Kununurra, WA, 22 May – 5 June 2009 Kununurra District High School, Kununurra, WA, 8–19 June 2009 Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery, Toowoomba, Qld, 28 June – 12 July 2009 Bundaberg Arts Centre, Bundaberg, Qld, 13–31 July 2009 Newcastle Region Art Gallery, Newcastle, NSW, 3–28 August 2009 Kurri Kurri and District Pre-school, Kurri Kurri , NSW, 1–25 September 2009 1888 Melbourne Cup New England Regional Art Museum, Armidale, NSW, 27 May – 28 June 2009 Grafton Regional Gallery, Grafton, NSW, 29 June – 30 July 2009 Coffs Harbour Regional Museum, Coffs Harbour, NSW, 30 July – 20 September 2009

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

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Hossein Valamanesh with his work Touch love 2006.

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Artist Vivienne Binns and Senior Curator Deborah Hart at her artist talk on 9 April 2009.

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Paul Fischmann and Diamant Hotel’s Claire Scrfati at the opening party for the Soft sculpture exhibition on 29 April 2009.

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Merryn Gates and Julie Marginson with artist Rosslynd Piggott and her work High bed 1998 at the Soft sculpture opening.

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Peter Garrett, Minister for Environment, Heritage and the Arts, and National Gallery of Australia Council members Ashley Dawson-Damer, John Calvert-Jones and Warwick Hemsley admire Les Kossatz’s Sheep on a couch 1972– 73 at the Soft sculpture opening.

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Susie Maple-Brown and Leon Gorr enjoy the National Gallery of Australia Foundation’s spectacular 20th Anniversary Gala Dinner on 21 March 2009.

7– Visitors of all ages enjoyed 11 wonderful weather and the many exciting activities at the special event Sculpture Garden Sunday on 8 March 2009.

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12 Director Ron Radford spoke about the works in the exhibition Misty moderns: Australian Tonalists 1915–1950, 16 April 2009.

13 Artist Michael Callaghan and Senior Curator Roger Butler with the vibrant Redback Graphix poster The 8-kin network 1985.

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C • A •N•B •E •R•R•A

B A R T O N

Set in two and a half acres of lawns and gardens on the fringe of the parliamentary triangle and within walking distance of Parliament House, the National Gallery of Australia, Lake Burley Griffin and Canberra’s most elite residences, embassies, cosmopolitan restaurants, nightclubs and Manuka & Kingston shopping villages.

Belmore Gardens and Macquarie Street, Barton ACT 2600 Telephone: 02 6273 3766 Facsimile: 02 6273 2791 Toll Free Telephone: Email: info@brassey.net.au Web: http: //www.brassey.net.au

Canberran Owned and Operated

ADSHEL PROUDLY SUPPORTS NATIONAL GALLERY OF AUSTRALIA

We believe that creativity comes in many forms.

Adshel recognises the importance of arts and culture in nurturing creativity and strongly supports National Gallery of Australia.

Collaborative video ⁄ sCulptural installation april 24th — July 12th 2009

By Anat Ben–David(London ⁄ Jerusalem) and Martin Bell(Melbourne) ..........................................................................

Curated by Adi Nachman(Tel Aviv ⁄ Berlin) and Andy Mac(Melbourne) ..........................................................................

Presented by Nectar Efkarpidis on behalf of the apARTments at NewActon ..........................................................................

NewActon East Foyer 21 Marcus Clarke Street Canberra 2601 spookyaction.com.au ..........................................................................

Presented by

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Proudly supporting

TURNING CANBERRA INSIDE OUT. THE APARTMENTS.

Surround yourself in the perfect environment. An inspired blend of interior and exterior beauty, The Apartments at NewActon are now under construction and due for completion in late 2010. Visit our unique display suite and secure one of the remaining luxury apartments.

Contact Derek Whitcombe on 02 6257 2121 or 0418 623 290 Display suite opening hours: Mon to Fri: 12pm to 2pm & 4pm to 6pm Sat & Sun: 12pm to 5pm / Address: 21 Marcus Clarke St, Acton.

www.theapartments.com.au

Proud supporters of the National Gallery of Australia.

The Met comes to Brisbane 30 May – 20 September 2009 Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane Tickets available:

(booking fee applies)

Hotel and exhibition packages available www.qag.qld.gov.au/the_met

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PRINCIPAL SPONSOR

PRINCIPAL DONOR

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Organised by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in collaboration with Queensland Art Gallery and Art Exhibitions Australia.

John White Alexander / Repose 1895 / Anonymous Gift, 1980 / Collection: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York / 1980.224 / Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

INDEMNIFIED BY

sidney nolan the gallipoli series A rare opportunity to experience striking and iconic works by one of Australia’s most acclaimed artists.

Featuring 82 drawings and paintings completed over a 20-year period.

7 August – 18 November Open daily 10am –5pm Free entry Treloar Crescent, Campbell, ACT One of the world’s great museums www.awm.gov.au

The Australian War Memorial’s Travelling Exhibitions program is funded by the Australian Government’s Commemorations program.

m 10 r em % ec b di e iv e r s sc e ou nt

ngashop SHOP FOR THE SEASON

The NGA Shop has temporarily been relocated to near the entrance of the Asian galleries, but still offers a great range of products:

Indigenous arts  books and catalogues calendars and diaries  prints and posters jewellery  fine art cards

9 May–19 July Newcastle RegioN aRt galleRy 1 laMaN st Newcastle 02 4974 5100 www.Nag.oRg.au

open 7 days 10 am – 5 pm Parkes Place, Canberra ACT 2601 free call 1800 808 337 (02) 6240 6420 ecom@nga.gov.au ngashop.com.au

a campbelltown arts centre and Newcastle Region art gallery Partnership

AIRING OF THE QUILTS a selection from the national collection Mary Jane Hannaford Time, quilt 1924 (detail) National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1982

1 August – 11 October 2009 nga.gov.au

SCULPTURE

CANBERRA ONLY NGA.GOV.AU 24 APRIL – 12 JULY 2009 The book Soft sculpture, published in conjunction with the exhibition, is available at the NGA Shop, for $9.95.

Please note that the NGA Shop has temporarily been relocated to near the entrance of the Asian galleries.

Go to nga.gov.au/softsculpture for more information about the works in Soft sculpture.

The National Gallery of Australia is an Australian Government Agency Christopher Langton Sugar the pill 1995 (detail) Collection of the artist

16 May – 13 September 2009 CANBERRA ONLY NGA.GOV.AU The National Gallery of Australia is an Australian Government Agency

Timothy Horn Glass slipper (ugly blister) 2001 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2002