2013.Q2 | Artonview 74 Winter 2013

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

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WINTER 2013 | 74

TURNER FROM THE TATE AUSTRALIA AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY

1 JUNE – 8 SEPTEMBER 2013 Book your date & time now PRESENTiNg PaRTNERS

or 1300 795 012 MaJoR PaRTNERS

nga.gov.au/turner oRgaNiSEd By

MEdia PaRTNER

aCCoMModaTioN PaRTNER

J.M.W. Turner, Rome, from the Vatican. Raffaelle, Accompanied by La Fornarina, Preparing his Pictures for the Decoration of the Loggia (detail), exhibited 1820. Photo: © Tate, 2013

SUPPoRTiNg PaRTNER

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Published quarterly by the National Gallery of Australia, PO Box 1150, Canberra ACT 2601, Australia artonview.editor@nga.gov.au | nga.gov.au

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© National Gallery of Australia 2013

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Copyright of works of art 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.

ENQUIRIES copyright@nga.gov.au Produced by the National Gallery of Australia Publishing Department EDITOR Eric Meredith DESIGNER Kristin Thomas PHOTOGRAPHY by the National Gallery of Australia Photography Department unless otherwise stated RIGHTS AND PERMISSIONS Nick Nicholson PRINTER Blue Star Print, Melbourne

EXHIBITIONS

Turner’s unusual gift Simeran Maxwell

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Product Lichtenstein Jaklyn Babington

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Born in South Africa: the politically subtle William Kentridge Jane Kinsman

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Australia at the Royal Academy Anne Gray

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Touring highlights Belinda Cotton

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ISSN 1323‑4552 PRINT POST APPROVED pp255003/00078 RRP A$9.95 | FREE TO MEMBERS

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WARNING Artonview may contain the names and images of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people now deceased.

Ambitions beyond a lifetime: the legacy of JMW Turner Lucina Ward

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Director’s word

A gathering of guides: 19th AAGGO Conference Judith Wood

VLI-BNE-SYD-MEL-CBR: the long journey from Vanuatu Lisa Addison, Georgia Cunningham and Crispin Howarth

ACQUISITIONS 32 William Kentridge Streets of the city 34 Andrea Zittel A–Z Homestead unit 36 Tommy McRae Duellers 37 Tom Roberts The south wind 38 Colin McCahon Muriwai. Necessary protection 39 Fred Williams Snow storm, Kosciusko 40 Korewori Caves region Hunter’s helper figure

REGULARS 41 Members news 42 Facesinview 44 News from the Foundation 46 Thank you …

48 Creative partnerships

(cover) JMW Turner Peace—burial at sea 1842 oil on canvas 87 x 86.7 cm Tate, London accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest, 1856 Photograph © Tate, 2013

Hiroko and Andrew Gwinnett and Andrew Lu OAM at the Foundation Gala Dinner and Weekend, 16 March 2013.

Ron Radford AM and John Gandel AO at the National Gallery of Australia Foundation Gala Dinner and Weekend, 16 March 2013.

Director’s word After the success of Toulouse-Lautrec: Paris and the Moulin Rouge, the National Gallery of Australia opens on 1 June the second of our three blockbuster exhibitions for 2013, the national capital’s centenary year.

Turner from the Tate: The Making of a Master is a rare opportunity to see in Australia the most comprehensive collection of JMW Turner’s work, held by the Tate in Britain. Turner’s oeuvre is quite simply timeless, explaining why he is one artist whose star continues to rise more than one-and-a-half centuries after his death.

Turner broke free of the landscape tradition of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, developing his own freer and distinctive landscape style, especially in later life. Audiences will revel in discovering his ability to capture radiant light and atmosphere, showing nature at its wildest or most serene.

With more than 300 of Turner’s oil paintings and tens of thousands of his watercolours and drawings, the collection at the Tate is unsurpassed in scope and scale. Turner himself amassed the collection before leaving it to the British people in his will. It is his legacy. Turner from the Tate is a selection of 110 oils and watercolours, illustrating Turner’s remarkable ascent to become the great master of the landscape tradition. The exhibition includes works that have never

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before been lent. You mustn’t miss this astounding exhibition.

Toulouse-Lautrec: Paris and the Moulin Rouge ended in early April and attracted more than 170 000 visitors, with an estimated injection of $37 million into the ACT economy. We were very pleased with its success and hope our audiences enjoyed this first comprehensive retrospective of Lautrec’s work to be seen in Australia.

Many have strongly expressed to me that the exhibition revealed to them the diversity of Lautrec’s talent. Indeed, he was not just instrumental in the birth of the modern poster, he was also, among other things, an innovative portrait painter, capturing striking characters of French nightlife in the Paris of the 1890s. I would like to express my sincere thanks to all thirty‑one lenders from around the world and to our generous sponsors, particularly our Presenting Partners the ACT Government and the Australian Government International Exhibitions Insurance Program and our Exhibition Partner ActewAGL. Without their support we could not continue to bring these blockbusters to Australia and to your National Gallery.

We are now in the final weeks of Kastom: art of Vanuatu, an exhibition of striking cultural objects from Vanuatu. I have enjoyed seeing visitors to the exhibition marvel at the mesmerising work Ni-Vanuatu

sand artist Samantha Leo created especially for the show. Ever since the National Gallery opened in 1982, the marvellous Ni-Vanuatu atingting drums from the islands of Ambrym and Malakula have stood near the pond in the Sculpture Garden.

However, many of you may not know that our collection of art from Vanuatu dates further back than this. In 1971, the National Gallery contracted Jean‑Michel Charpentier, a French linguist with museum training, to build a collection of the art of Vanuatu.

Though Charpentier worked on Ambrym, he concentrated his field collection on southern Malakula. In total, he collected and commissioned nearly 200 works for the Gallery. Our expert objects conservators have been carefully restoring many of these for the exhibition. More recently, we purchased a group of sculptures in 2009, including an impressive tree fern sculpture from the island of Ambrym.

In the last few years, we have also acquired some early works, such as the very fine and early Chubwan mask from Pentecost, of the sixteenth century. We further added to the collection late last year, with another group of sculptures, this time from Torba Province (commonly known as the Banks and Torres Islands). This is the first time we have exhibited our Vanuatu collection, and it is certainly the most significant survey exhibition of the art of Vanuatu that

has taken place in Australia. If you haven’t already visited this free exhibition, be sure to make your way to the Gallery before it closes on 16 June.

In July, Roy Lichtenstein: Pop remix returns to the Gallery after a hugely successful year touring venues around Australia.

It opens at the Gallery on 20 July and will occupy both the Orde Poynton Gallery and Project Gallery, giving audiences the opportunity to familiarise themselves with our superb collection of this Pop artist’s iconic prints and sculptures. Indeed, the National Gallery has an especially strong collection of twentieth-century American prints in general, partly due to the generosity of Kenneth Tyler AO, who was recently made an officer of the Order of Australia, and his wife Marabeth Cohen-Tyler. Ken Tyler will be travelling to Australia for the opening of the exhibition here and has kindly agreed to give a free public talk on Saturday 20 July. Visit our website for further details.

The Gallery currently has four exhibitions touring the nation. The second National Indigenous Art Triennial, unDisclosed, is on show in Adelaide until 7 July and will travel to Dubbo in early August. Capital and country: the Federation years 1900–1914 opened in Darwin in May, touring next to Ballarat in October. Stars of the Tokyo stage: Natori Shunsen’s kabuki actor prints

is on show in Tamworth from 15 June to 20 July and opens in Cowra in the second week of August. Before returning home to Canberra, Roy Lichtenstein: Pop remix is at the Araluen Arts Centre in Alice Springs until 10 June. In winter, we open a fifth touring exhibition, Carol Jerrems: photographic artist, which begins at Monash University Museum of Art in Melbourne on 6 July. Following that, Bodywork: Australian jewellery 1970–2012, a small but innovative touring exhibition of a selection of the Gallery’s fine Australian contemporary jewellery collection, will open at Moree Plains Gallery on 7 September. It will travel to ten venues.

At the end of September, we open William Kentridge: in focus at the National Gallery in Canberra. South African William Kentridge is one of the most esteemed international contemporary artists. His works explore the social milieu of growing up in apartheid South Africa with subtlety and grandeur, earnestness and wry humour. The Gallery’s exhibition of his works includes films, drawings, prints and a recently acquired large tapestry, Streets of the city 2009, and will be open from 27 September in the Temporary Exhibitions Gallery.

On the other side of the world, the Royal Academy of Arts in London has partnered with the National Gallery

of Australia to stage a large Australian landscape survey, Australia: land and landscape, at the Academy from 21 September to 8 December. This will be the largest historical survey exhibition of Australian art ever held outside Australia and will cover more than 200 years of Indigenous and non-Indigenous art from 1800 to the present day on the theme of land and landscape. The exhibition will include many of the finest Australian landscapes ever painted. It has been curated

by Anne Gray, the National Gallery’s Head of Australian Art, Kathleen Soriano, Exhibitions Coordinator at the Royal Academy, and me, with assistance from the National Gallery’s senior curators Franchesca Cubillo (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art), Roger Butler (prints and drawings), Gael Newton (photography) and Deborah Hart (sculpture and painting post 1920) as well as our former senior curator of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art Wally Caruana. For those of you who are lucky enough to be in London between late September and early December, I urge you not to miss this magnificent display of Australian art.

In March this year, the Gallery hosted its Foundation Gala Dinner and Weekend.

The event is held annually to raise funds for the acquisition of works and this year raised more than $150 000. These funds

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Carol Berg and Jane Kinsman at the Foundation Gala Dinner and Weekend, 16 March 2013. (opposite) JMW Turner The St Gotthard Road between Amsteg and Wassen looking up the Reuss Valley c 1803 or 1814–15 (detail) gouache, graphite and watercolour on paper 67.5 x 101 cm Tate, London accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest, 1856 Photograph © Tate, 2013

went toward the purchase of a number of Hilda Rix Nicholas works, including the stark but stunning landscape painting Snow, Tombong ranges c 1942. Hilda Rix Nicholas was the Canberra District’s first local artist and we are delighted to be improving our representation of her work in the national art collection. On behalf of the National Gallery of Australia, I thank the Foundation and our other generous guests at the Gala Dinner and Weekend for their continuing support.

Also in March, Andrea Zittel’s A–Z homestead unit was on display in the Gallery’s Sculpture Garden, with Melbourne artist Charlie Sofo living in the unit and recording his experience. The unit is now on display in the international gallery nearest our Temporary Exhibitions Gallery.

It is an excellent addition to our collection of contemporary international sculpture.

In autumn, the Gallery played host to two major arts sector conferences. In April, we welcomed the Association of American Art Museum Administrators, with participants coming from around Australia, New Zealand and the United States of America to discuss issues of significance affecting their institutions. This was a great information‑sharing opportunity and a chance for administrators to see how we do things in Australia. To coincide with Canberra’s centenary year, the 2013

biennial conference of the Association of Australian Gallery Guiding Organisations (AAGGO) was held in our James O Fairfax Theatre from 1 to 4 May. The conference theme was ‘A capital collection: art for the nation’, and included many fascinating and thought-provoking discussions covering the national art collection, national arts policies, specific art practices and guiding techniques and technologies. Also in May, the Gallery hosted the international sculpture symposium Sculpture: Space and Place in partnership with the Research School of Humanities and the Arts at the Australian National University. Patricia Piccinini’s major new work Skywhale 2013, commissioned for the Centenary of Canberra, was launched at the opening of the symposium, which brought together artists, sculptors, curators and consultants from around the world to explore ideas and issues around presenting sculpture in its various forms.

Turning to acquisitions, for our collection of early Australian art we acquired a small and magnificent late nineteenth-century pen-and-ink drawing by Tommy McRae, one of the earliest Indigenous artists to receive recognition outside his community.

Fred Williams radically changed the Australian landscape tradition in the twentieth century. The Gallery held a retrospective on Williams in 2011, which

then toured nationally throughout 2012.

Snow storm, Kosciusko 1976–77 was one of the revelations of the exhibition and has been acquired to add depth to the Gallery’s representation of the artist. A bold work by Colin McCahon was also recently acquired.

The work Muriwai. Necessary protection 1972 shows McCahon’s distinctive symbolic approach to landscape painting.

A four-centuries-old hunter’s helper figure from the Korewori Caves region was recently acquired. It is by far our earliest wooden object from Melanesia and adds significantly to our fine collection of works from Papua New Guinea.

I hope you had the chance to enjoy the many exhibitions and events at the Gallery during autumn. We look forward to welcoming you back for a bumper winter program.

Ron Radford AM

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AMB I T I O N S B E Y O ND A LIFETIME the legacy of JMW Turner Turner from the Tate: The Making of a Master 1 June – 8 September 2013 | nga.gov.au/Turner

A reader perusing the London newspapers on 23 April 1809 may have chanced upon a notice: ‘Tomorrow Mr Turner the Academician will gratuitously open to the classes of Dilettanti, Connoisseurs and Artists, his gallery in Queen Anne St West’.

Turner’s gallery, adjoining his house in Westminster, had opened in April 1804.

As well as being an important showcase of his art, it was rapidly becoming a must-see for visitors to the city.

JMW Turner was ambitious and highly conscious of his reputation. He made and circulated engravings after his paintings and watercolours. He set his prices high and, because he wanted his works seen together, often reacquired them. He also had strong ideas about the way his art should be seen. The walls of his gallery were ‘Indian red, neither pale nor dark’ and the light from the skylight was diffused using ‘nets covered with tissue paper and hung across the ceiling’. Turner retained his gallery—through several refurbishments and enlargements—until his works were accepted by the British nation after his death.

From 1 June to 8 September 2013, the National Gallery of Australia hosts an outstanding selection of works from the collection held in trust by the Tate for the British nation. As well as featuring some of the artist’s most famous paintings, Turner from the Tate: The Making of a Master

demonstrates Turner’s extraordinary virtuosity, from the largest canvases to intimate sketches. The exhibition reveals him as a master of the Sublime, an accomplished topographical and architectural draftsman, a mythology and history painter and inveterate experimenter. It offers fresh perspectives on an artist who was highly regarded in his lifetime and whose impact was felt as far away as Australia.

Turner entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1789 at age fourteen and progressed rapidly, becoming an Associate in 1799. His Lake District scene, shown at the 1798 Royal Academy exhibition, is deliberately awe-inspiring and intended to evoke in the viewer a sense of the power of nature. The painting followed from his tour of the North of England, where he produced sketches and made notes of the sensations he experienced, which acted as aide memoires back in the studio.

Turner was an inveterate traveller but Continental Europe remained cut off to him for a long time as a result of the Napoleonic Wars (1792–1815). During the Treaty of Amiens in 1802, a short‑lived truce between Britain, France, Spain and Holland, he travelled to Paris and toured Switzerland, making numerous sketches of Alpine scenery. Some of these

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were later worked up into larger works.

His large watercolour of St Gotthard Road between Amsteg and Wassen around 1803 or 1814–15 draws on the language of the Sublime. Mountains provided a dramatic illustration of mankind’s insignificance and are key to understanding the artist’s pictorial inventiveness: humans, for Turner, are always tiny against these colossal geological phenomena. Turner from the Tate includes another, earlier view of the region, the Devil’s Bridge from Turner’s St Gothard and Mont Blanc sketchbook, which shows the thin mountain passes that snake tortuously around the Alps.

Spithead: two captured Danish ships entering Portsmouth Harbour 1807–09 is a fine example of Turner’s topicality as an artist.

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In 1807 he was in Portsmouth, witness to the arrival of the Three Crowns and the Denmark, two ships of the surrendered Danish fleet. As a sign of submission the Danish flag is shown flying below that of England. Such was the outcry against the British bombardment of Copenhagen— more than 2000 civilians were killed and a third of the buildings destroyed—that, when the work was first shown at the Royal Academy in 1809, Turner thought it prudent to adjust the title. The following year, when displaying it in his own gallery, he reinstated the original title.

Another, far more experimental painting in Turner from the Tate suggests the importance of marine subjects in Turner’s oeuvre. Three seascapes, painted

around 1827, looks at first glance to be the sort of ‘harmony in grey’ painted

by James Abbott McNeill Whistler half a century later. On closer inspection, outlines of three scenes of sea and sky (one now showing as upside down) become evident, showing how Turner prepared multiple compositions on a single roll of canvas, later separated to form distinct works.

Turner travelled to Italy in 1819, where the strong colours and intense Mediterranean light had a profound impact on his practice. He desired above all to be regarded as the modern heir to Classical painting—to be the ‘English Claude’—a point made emphatically when he showed three paintings in

his 1828 exhibition in Rome. With Regulus 1828, reworked 1837, he set up a parallel with Claude Lorrain’s Port scene with the Villa Medici 1637. Turner’s rendition of the sorrowful plight of the Roman general Regulus, who failed to negotiate the release of Carthaginian prisoners and was punished by the removal of his eyelids, is made manifest by the blaze of light that structures and dominates the composition.

The painter Charles Eastlake, later director of the National Gallery in London, wrote of Turner’s Roman exhibition that it ‘astonished, enraged or delighted the different schools of artists’—and attracted more than a thousand people.

The artist’s love affair with Venice, and his lasting impressions of Italy, is illustrated

in Turner from the Tate. Turner visited the lagoon city three times—in 1819, 1833 and 1840—and, despite the fact that he only spent a total of about a month there, he produced more than twenty-five oils and one hundred watercolours of Venetian subjects. His views, as Ian Warrell points out in the exhibition catalogue, celebrate the city as a place of ‘sensuality and beauty’ while recognising its ‘mortality and transience’. Turner also recognised their commercial potential. Just as Turner regarded himself as the heir to Claudean classicism, the British considered themselves the natural successors to the great Italian traditions. Many of his patrons at home desired views of the great maritime empire on the Italian peninsula as they saw parallels

Regulus 1828, reworked 1837 oil on canvas 89.5 x 123.8 cm Tate, London accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest, 1856 Photograph © Tate, 2013

(opposite) Waves breaking on a Lee Shore at Margate (Study for ‘Rockets and blue lights’) c 1840 oil on canvas 59.7 x 95.2 cm Tate, London accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest, 1856 Photograph © Tate, 2013

(page 6) Spithead: two captured Danish ships entering Portsmouth Harbour 1807–09 (detail) oil on canvas 171.4 x 233.7 cm Tate, London accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest, 1856 Photograph © Tate, 2013

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with their own industry and manufacturing empires. Venice, the Bridge of Sighs, exhibited in 1840, is an exquisite painting, a harmony of golden light, pale pinks and blues juxtaposed against the black gondoliers.

A watercolour of the same year, Venice, moonrise from Turner’s Grand Canal and Guidecca sketchbook, shows how subtle and gorgeous twilight—and Venice—can be.

After the sale of another view of the Bridge of Sighs, Turner increased the price of his Venetian paintings; fellow painter and friend George Jones anecdotally recalled Turner caustically commenting, ‘… if they will have such scraps instead of important pictures, they must pay for them’.

Clearly he granted his historical subjects greater value.

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One of the most dramatic canvases— and heart-wrenching stories—in the exhibition is A disaster at sea of around 1835.

The painting, also known as The wrecked female convict ship, the Amphitrite: women and children abandoned in a gale, is regarded as one of Turner’s most powerful statements on the theme of maritime disaster. It is a flurry of marks, the distant horizon and menacing storm clouds rendered as a triangle of steel-blue and grey at left forming a diagonal against the tangle of bodies, sea spume and wreckage in white, gold and umber. A single upright, the mast valiantly held aloft by puny figures, seems defiant. The Amphitrite was a transport convict ship wrecked off the French coast near Boulogne in 1833. It caused a scandal

because the ship’s captain refused assistance to save the women and children: he was, he claimed, only authorised to land them in New South Wales. They tragically all drowned. The pyramid structure of the composition was probably modelled on Théodore Géricault’s famous Raft of the Medusa 1819, exhibited in London in 1822 and described by a critic as a ‘tremendous picture of human sufferings’. Although Turner left the painting unfinished in the mid 1830s, possibly thinking it too controversial a subject, he did go on to exhibit the equally dramatic and topical painting Slavers throwing overboard the dead and dying—typhoon coming on 1840.

Those who ventured to Turner’s gallery in later years found themselves within a large

room, lit by a central skylight, in which some paintings were hung and others rested on the floor. England: Richmond Hill, on the Prince Regent’s Birthday, exhibited in 1819, dominated the far end of the gallery, flanked by his War-and-Peace pair propped casually against the wall. Elsewhere in the room were Second sketch for The Battle of Trafalgar of around 1823, The fall of an avalanche in the Grisons, exhibited in 1810, and The Tenth Plague of Egypt, exhibited in 1802. Pauline, Lady Trevelyan, writing to her friend the physician John Brown after Turner’s death, recalled her visits to the gallery: I have seen Turner several times—and have been in that wonderful old house—where the old woman with her head wrapped up in dirty flannel used to open the door, and where on faded walls hardly weather tight—

and among bits of old furniture thick with dust like a place that has been forsaken for years, were those brilliant pictures all glowing with sunshine and colour …

Turner from the Tate celebrates Turner’s bequest and stands as testament to a great artist. Of the thirty-five paintings recorded as hanging in the gallery at the time of his death, six are among the 110 remarkable Turner oils and watercolours now on show in Australia. They retain the sunshine and colour that so impressed Lady Trevelyan and her contemporaries but have left behind the dust and damp of nineteenth‑century London.

Buttermere Lake, with part of Cromackwater, Cumberland, a shower exhibited 1798 oil on canvas 88.9 x 119.4 cm Tate, London accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest, 1856 Photograph © Tate, 2013

(opposite) Venice, the Bridge of Sighs exhibited 1840 oil on canvas 68.6 x 91.4 cm Tate, London accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest, 1856 Photograph © Tate, 2013

Lucina Ward Curator, International Painting and Sculpture

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TU R N E R ’S U NUS U A L G IFT Turner from the Tate: The Making of a Master 1 June – 8 September 2013 | nga.gov.au/Turner

The Turner Bequest, as JMW Turner’s legacy is known, is an unsurpassed body of work.

Now housed at the Tate, it comprises 300 oil paintings, 30 000 watercolours and drawings, as well as 280 bound sketchbooks. This was the contents of Turner’s studio at the time of his death in 1851, and the bequest remains one of the largest to the British nation. It includes many of Turner’s large, completed paintings, although much of the bequest is comprised of unfinished canvases, preparatory studies, watercolours and sketchbooks, providing a unique insight into the working methods of this great artist.

Turner left behind not only his grand artistic legacy but also a vast wealth in both financial assets and works of art. His fortune, as with many large estates, quickly became

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the source of much legal wrangling and disputes about the eccentric artist’s wishes.

So, despite the generosity of the gift, Turner’s bequest was overshadowed by controversy, largely due to the legal quagmire following his death but also due of his unusual requests. Even his close friend the art historian Lady Elizabeth Eastlake described Turner’s last will on 2 January 1852 as ‘a very stupid will—that of a man who lived out of the world of sense and public opinion’.

It is perhaps an apt, if harsh description.

Turner actually wrote two wills during his lifetime: the first following his father’s death in 1829 and a second, more detailed will in 1831. He also wrote five codicils between June 1831 and February 1849.

Turner’s ten named executors were left

to decipher and carry out the artist’s final wishes for his estate. Many of the named executors refused their positions, including the art critic John Ruskin, who is famously said to have destroyed some of the artist’s erotic drawings in a misguided attempt to preserve Turner’s artistic reputation.

Some of Turner’s wishes were unusual, others perplexing and, even for someone of Turner’s reputation, many of his requests were bold. A gift of two paintings to the National Gallery in London, for instance, came with the condition that they hang beside the two Claude Lorrain paintings that inspired them. Among other smaller financial bequests, Turner requested that his ‘finished Pictures’ be left to the nation and hung in a newly erected ‘Turner’s Gallery’ .

In line with this wish, the Tate built the Clore Gallery (named after the financer who funded the extension) in 1987 to exhibit works from the Turner Bequest.

Both of Turner’s wills also mention his unusual desire for his personal wealth to be spent on charity to support ‘decayed English artists (Landscape Painters only) and single men’ . His will, however, was contested on the grounds that he was not of sound mind. After a lengthy court battle, part of his monetary fortune was awarded in 1856 to his estranged cousins, who had previously been left nothing by the artist. The bequest to the British nation was then enlarged to include the entire contents of Turner’s studio at the time of his death. Thus, along with the many finished paintings that he exhibited at the

Royal Academy and sold during his life— only to buy back later in life—the remainder of the bequest consists of a large body of preparatory and incomplete work.

While the Turner Bequest remains controversial over a hundred and fifty years after the artist’s death, his wish ‘to keep my Pictures together so that they may be seen … and preserve my Pictures as a collection of my works’ is an admirable, if irregular one. It is an unusual gift, but one that will keep on giving, as it demonstrates the working processes of this remarkable nineteenth-century British artist.

Venice, moonrise 1840 from Grand Canal and Guidecca sketchbook watercolour 22 x 31.9 cm Tate, London accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest, 1856 Photograph © Tate, 2013

(opposite) Childe Harold’s pilgrimage—Italy exhibited 1832 oil on canvas 142.2 x 248.3 cm Tate, London accepted by the nation as part of the Turner Bequest, 1856 Photograph © Tate, 2013

Simeran Maxwell Assistant Curator, Exhibitions

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Nude with blue hair 1994 (detail) from the series Nudes colour relief 146.7 x 93.5 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra purchased with the assistance of the Orde Poynton Fund 2002 © estate of Roy Lichtenstein

PRO D U C T L I C H T E N S T E I N Roy Lichtenstein: Pop remix 20 July 2013 – 27 January 2014 | nga.gov.au/Lichtenstein

As a major Pop artist of the 1960s, Roy Lichtenstein produced works in a cool, detached and industrialised manner—an approach that was in direct opposition to the emotive content rendered visible in the unique gestures of Abstract Expressionism during the preceding decades. Lichtenstein’s work announced that art was no longer about the emotional self-expression of the artist but was engaged in an exploration of the signs and mechanisms of American visual culture.

With his first solo exhibition in New York in 1962, Lichtenstein’s work horrified audiences with its vapid content and apparent direct lifting of imagery from trashy teenage comic books and commercial advertising of the day.

As Robert Rosenblum recalled in a Tate exhibition catalogue in 1993, Lichtenstein’s first solo exhibition, ‘dumbfounded with horror or delighted everybody who saw it’.

Even the artist’s dealer, Leo Castelli, was somewhat bewildered by the imagery Lichtenstein was producing and professed to only partially understanding the artist’s strategy. Castelli was quoted in Newsweek on 26 February 1962 as having remarked,

‘Art is what you will it to be. One must rise above one’s own taste, sometimes’.

Early in his career, Lichtenstein chose to work with found images selected from popular culture: newspapers, magazines and comic books. Of specific interest was the clichéd image: images so overused that they had subsequently taken on a diluted, generic or hackneyed meaning. By the 1960s, Lichtenstein’s practice had extended to the appropriation of ‘high art’. Lichtenstein believed that art should function as a dialogue between artists, and appropriation served as a link to the creative minds of artists such as Monet, Picasso and de Kooning.

Such an exchange of ideas also provided Lichtenstein licence to experiment with the specific semiotics of historical movements and genres—Impressionism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, the still life, the multiple, the artists book and the nude.

Lichtenstein’s 1969 remix of Monet’s Haystacks comprises numerous images of two haystacks depicted at different times of the day and under varying light conditions.

Whereas Monet painted his haystacks, Lichtenstein’s haystacks are a series of printed remixes in which multiplication

and sequencing are used to investigate a progression of time and light. Starting with a bright yellow ink to depict the strong morning sunlight, the series progresses through oranges and reds to the final evening image of the series, composed of dark blue and black dots. In this way, Lichtenstein’s dawn-to-dusk cycle begins with realistic depictions of the haystack and closes with something closer to abstraction.

In an interview with John Coplans in 1970, Lichtenstein stated that his remixing of Monet was ‘an industrial way of making Impressionism … a vulgarization of Monet’s [art]’. Lichtenstein’s aesthetic aim was to engage with the semiotics of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism.

By cleverly recasting the Benday dot (the core unit of commercial halftone printing) as an ironic replacement of Georges Seurat’s Post-Impressionist pointillist brushstroke, Lichtenstein’s technique can be read as an extension of Seurat’s technical experimentation with colour; but, where Seurat used colour theory, Lichtenstein used print technology—a new paradigm of American industry—to produce imagery both unique and clichéd.

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While the clichéd images of America were established as Lichtenstein’s subject matter during the 1950s, the artist did not find a unique style with which to package his conceptual program until the 1960s. Once he had selected an image, Lichtenstein painstakingly recomposed and redrew it, enlarging the image with the use of a projector and tracing the recast image onto his chosen medium.

This was a process that removed obvious evidence of the artist’s hand and instead sought to imitate the look of mechanical reproduction by way of a flat, bright and hard-edged figuration. It was precisely Lichtenstein’s deliberate imitation of the commercial that delivered such a forceful aesthetic rupture.

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With the appropriation and remixing of commercial images, Lichtenstein discovered his distinctive ‘look’, a style centred upon the Benday dot. The two-tone printing process was transformed by Lichtenstein into a coded sign, one that was understood to mean ‘cheap reproduction’. So unsettling was the presence of this motif within the context of high art that the Benday dot almost instantly became recognised as the Lichtenstein style. By relentlessly repeating this graphic symbol, Lichtenstein effectively branded his art with a signature look, which to this day is instantly recognised as product Lichtenstein.

Along with the Benday dot, Lichtenstein was obsessed with the investigation of various symbols operating in our visual vernacular.

Text fragments, repetitive lines, thought bubbles, speech bubbles, explosions and reflections are all coded marks that we read as representing sudden movement, inner dialogue, spoken word, loud noise and reflective surfaces. Reflections on Crash 1990 is a composition hinged on pop culture semiotics.

In cinematic close-up, the image shows an epic battle in which a cool fighter pilot is at the centre of the action. An outwardly angled, jagged motif in yellow and red appears at the very centre of the work. This motif, one of Lichtenstein’s comic-book explosions, contains the text fragment ‘CRASH’. This text is deliberately rendered in capitalised letters and a carefully designed font to emphasis the impact of an explosion. Lichtenstein has constructed a visual onomatopoeia that

signifies not the physicality of the direct hit, but the loud noise of the hit.

Strafing the entire surface of Reflections on Crash is a set of diagonal shards— another of Lichtenstein’s signifiers—this time representative of the reflective surface of the pilot’s windshield. However, if one considers the artificial frame that Lichtenstein has placed around the edge of the composition, we realise that the set of diagonals also indicate the reflective surface of the protective glass of an artwork hung on a wall in a gallery. These visual devices, developed into a conceptual code, also carry the latent humour of Lichtenstein’s works.

Lichtenstein deliberately debased the established traditions of art history by presenting lowly, mass-produced kitsch on

the elevated pedestal usually reserved for the serious modernist concerns of the avantgarde. He successfully merged the avantgarde and kitsch and, by operating within the intersection of the commercial and the avant-garde, Lichtenstein’s art strategy provided a compelling precursor for much postmodernist practice. As a result, product Lichtenstein still has the ability to dumbfound or delight his audiences today.

From the series Haystacks 1969 lithograph each 34.2 x 59.8 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra purchased 1973 © estate of Roy Lichtenstein

(opposite) Reflections on Crash 1990 from the series Reflections 1989–90 lithograph, screenprint, collage, embossing 134.8 x 175.3 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra purchased 1991 © estate of Roy Lichtenstein

Jaklyn Babington Curator, International Prints, Drawings and Illustrated Books, and curator of the exhibition Sections of this text have been remixed from Roy Lichtenstein: Pop remix, available at the NGA Shop and selected bookstores nationally for only $24.95.

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BO R N I N S O U T H A F RIC A the politically subtle William Kentridge William Kentridge: in focus 27 September – 3 November 2013 | nga.gov.au/Kentridge

For the South African born artist William Kentridge, the family business was law.

His father, Sydney Kentridge KCMG, QC, played a significant part in the political trials during the era of white supremacy in South Africa, defending anti-apartheid activists Nelson Mandela and the family of Stephen Beko following the latter’s brutal death at the hands of police.

With this familial background, Kentridge has been ever mindful of the political and social issues in South Africa, both during apartheid and in the subsequent years. However, his imagery is not politically strident—he is too subtle for that. Kentridge’s art is a figurative one in the tradition of William Hogarth or Honoré Daumier yet set in the African landscape and dealing with recent social issues or inspired by music or literature. His is an art that relates to the local as well as the universal and is rich in allusion, often witty, and executed with consummate skill.

This is evident in Drawing for The magic flute (Tamino’s rhinoceros) 2004, a rich, velvety charcoal-and-red-pencil drawing of an African beast set within a geometric diagram. It is one of several drawings related to William Kentridge’s stage production of Mozart’s 1791 opera The magic flute, forming the basis of the backdrop of layers of drawings, film and photographs projected onto the stage behind opera singers.

Kentridge’s production was first staged in Brussels in 2005 and then at venues in Europe, the United States of America, Israel and South Africa. Kentridge chose the rhinoceros as the wildest of African beasts; the rhinoceros is then tamed by the heavenly

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strains of the magic flute and tenor voice of Prince Tamino. As a backdrop to Tamino’s aria, the beast prances and pirouettes in response to the dulcet musical tones.

In a 2011 interview with PBS series Art21, Kentridge noted that the opera was first performed at the height of the Enlightenment, when Germany was at its ‘most optimistic moment’ and great certainty existed. He suggested that the opera’s priest of light, Sarastro, ‘embodies both rational benevolence and all power’.

With this in mind, Kentridge reconfigured the opera, setting it at the time of German colonial rule in Namibia at the beginning of the twentieth century—a period when belief fashioned by what was considered rational was combined with all-powerful rule—and recasting Sarastro as colonial overlord.

Kentridge notes that what ‘the history of the last two hundred years has shown is … the most toxic combination in the world is the combination of the certainty of being right and a monopoly of power’.

This combination is witnessed in the tragic events of South-West Africa in the last century and, as Kentridge also points out, it was this combination that paved the way for Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot. This charcoal-and-pencil work of Tamino’s rhinoceros will be displayed as part of the National Gallery of Australia’s forthcoming exhibition William Kentridge: in focus, which opens on 27 September and includes films, drawings, prints and a tapestry.

Jane Kinsman Senior Curator, International Prints, Drawings and Illustrated Books, and curator of the exhibition

William Kentridge Drawing for ‘The magic flute’ (Tamino’s rhinoceros) 2004 charcoal, coloured pencil in red 44.4 x 59.6 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Poynton Bequest, 2013

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John Glover A corroboree of natives in Mills Plains 1832 oil on canvas 56.5 x 71.4 cm Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide Morgan Thomas Bequest Fund, 1951

AU S T R A L I A AT T H E R O YA L A C A D E M Y Australia: land and landscape 21 September – 8 December 2013 @ Royal Academy of Arts, London royalacademy.org.uk/exhibitions/australia

After many years of negotiation and then planning, Australia: land and landscape, an exhibition organised by the Royal Academy of Arts in partnership with the National Gallery of Australia, will open in London in September. The exhibition will be displayed at the Royal Academy, London’s premium temporary exhibition venue, and will be the largest historical survey of its kind ever staged outside Australia, covering Australian art from 1800 to the present day.

It is restricted to landscapes because the Australian landscape—the land, sea, cities and sunshine—is what pre-eminently defines our country for many people and because land or country is central to Australian Indigenous art. It is an exhibition of around two hundred works, some of the finest in Australian art, selected from public collections around Australia and a few in Britain. Half the works are from the National Gallery of Australia, the largest and most balanced collection of Australian art. It will demonstrate the creativeness of our artists as well as provide an image of Australian history and way of life.

A patron of natural history, Sir Joseph Banks was enthralled by the unknown curiosities he saw on the east coast of Australia during his scientific tour of the South Seas with Captain Cook in the eighteenth century. Long after Cook’s death, Sir Joseph recommended colonisation.

However, many early settlers found the coastal scrub and inland plains to be very different from the ‘pleasant pastures’ and ‘mountains green’ of ‘England’s green and pleasant land’, as invoked by William Blake in 1808.

Some yearned for their place of origin and returned home as soon as they could.

Convict artist William Lycett, for instance, after returning to Britain and being again arrested for forging banknotes, is believed to have slit his throat rather than endure a second visit to the fatal shore. Others, often free settlers such as John Lewin and GW Evans, flourished in their new homeland and provided some splendid watercolours of the early settlements, showing that they felt comfortable with both pastoral landscapes and the wilderness.

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Australia: land and landscape will present our country’s land and landscape as it has been variously depicted over time. There will be observations of highly urbanised early colonial lives with growing seaports that served the inland production of early wealth for export, chiefly wool and gold, but also whaling. And there will be works that reflect the way in which settler artists began to consider the distinctive forms of individual gum trees, of bush country and of tropical

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or temperate rainforests as well as the vast deserts that fill most of Australia, a land geologically far more ancient than Britain.

By the 1820s, landscape painting, headed

by JMW Turner and John Constable, had become the dominant tradition in Britain.

And, given the compelling natural scenery and distinctive light of Australia, landscape painting also soon became the central concern of Australian artists, and remained so for much of the twentieth century.

The light-filled pastoral scenes of British-born John Glover, who settled in Tasmania in 1831, shifted from what was often formulaic work in Britain to more natural and unusually high-keyed Australian landscapes. Moreover, when he incorporated Aboriginal figures into his work, this farmer-artist revealed his sympathy for the hunter-gatherer Aboriginal people who had preceded his family in caring for the land. His paintings and, later, those by the Austrian-born Eugene von Guérard also occasionally expressed guilt for taking the land from the previous Indigenous owners.

In the later nineteenth century, the artists began to dramatise the intense light, burning heat and dryness of many an Australian summer, using a characteristic blue-and-gold palette as well as the gently, subdued tones of early morning and evening. It was a time when some of Australia’s best known and most loved artists, Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin, Arthur Streeton and Charles Conder, came into prominence and when artists began to talk about an Australian tradition and a specifically Australian art. By this time, Australia had a number of Australian-born artists. They created a new vision of urban Australia, the bustle of modern city life populated with fashionably dressed people as well as landscapes in which men, women and children lived and leisured in harmony with their environment.

After Federation in 1901, artists used strong emblems in their landscapes, particularly the sturdy monumental eucalypt, redolent of masculine power.

They also depicted the city, suggestive of progress; and, after 1910, the beach again became indicative of Australian egalitarianism and a healthy lifestyle.

The 1920s and 1930s were a time when women artists came to the forefront, developing distinctive modernist approaches to their local environment. The construction of the massive Sydney Harbour Bridge from the mid 1920s became a symbol of hope for many as well as a sign of Sydney’s progress and modernity. It was a favourite subject of artists such as Grace Cossington Smith and Jessie Traill, who were attracted by the bridge’s modernist forms.

Sidney Nolan Ned Kelly 1946 enamel paint on composition board 90.8 x 121.5 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra gift of Sunday Reed, 1977

Russell Drysdale Emus in a landscape 1950 oil on canvas 101.6 x 127 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra purchased 1970 © estate of Russell Drysdale

(opposite) Grace Cossington Smith The Bridge in building 1929–30 oil on pulpboard 75 x 53 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra gift of Ellen Waugh, 2005

The 1940s were a dynamic and creative decade for Australian art. The Second World War, isolation and the threat of invasion, galvanised younger artists to express themselves with a new force, and their art took on a more personal, haunting expressiveness. The artist, and later Royal Academician, Sidney Nolan became one of the most imaginative and compelling painters of the Australian landscape.

In a 1948 edition of The Australian Artist, he said of his 1946 iconic Ned Kelly series that it was ‘a story arising out of the bush and ending in the bush’ and ‘the desire to paint the landscape involves a wish to hear more of the stories that take place in the landscape’. Russell Drysdale turned away from Australia’s fertile coastal regions to the less productive inland country and told stories of stoic women firmly located in the landscape. He showed Australia as a place loaded with strangeness, and in some works he depicted the dried up earth where only flightless emus remain.

During the past fifty years, although no longer a dominant subject, landscape has remained a recurring theme for painters, printmakers and photographers. Artists have been particularly conscious that the land here in Australia, and our way of viewing it, is markedly different from that elsewhere. The outstanding Australian landscape painter Fred Williams created a highly original way of viewing the Australian countryside. He made a virtue of flatness, sparseness and super-subtle

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tints in his delicate but weighty landscapes.

He explored different formats for viewing the land, to convey the unbounded, timeless country in which a European perspective becomes irrelevant.

The Australian sun, its blazing force and its seductiveness, has been an important motive in Australian art. In his Sydney sun 1965, John Olsen painted a joyous celebration of the sun cradling the surrounding landscape, ‘like a benevolent bath, bubbling and effervescent’ (as Olsen said in an letter to the Gallery in 2000, recalling his intentions at the time of painting it). Howard Taylor observed in a 1984 interview with Gary Dufour that

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in Australia ‘… the sun is straight above you, it tends to flatten things out. You miss that half covered sky or the diffused light that you get in Europe’.

When Bryan Robertson, former director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery, presented the exhibition Recent Australian painting in London in 1961, he observed in an article in The London Magazine that Australian painters ‘know the geology of the land and the names of plants and trees and the histories of particular regions in a way that European artists do not’. Certainly, from the beginning, explorers and artists have been concerned with the unique plant forms of Australia. Some present‑day artists

have refreshed old botanical observations.

Fiona Hall, for instance, has done so in Paradisus terrestris 1989–90, a suite of twenty‑three miniature aluminium sculptures of plants, both Australian and exotic, paired with human sexual organs.

Much Aboriginal art is about the land, made of materials gathered from the land, etched into its surfaces as rock engravings or ceremonial ground designs and painted onto bodies. The people’s relationship to the land, depicted in a visually rich language that varies considerably across the continent, is often embodied in the iconography of ‘The Dreaming’ or Creation narratives. The imagery can be traced back

Timmy Payungka Tjapangarti Sandhill country west of Wilkinkarra, Lake Mackay 1972 synthetic polymer paint on composition board 76 x 52 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra The Peter Fannin Collection of Early Western Desert Paintings, 1998

(opposite) Fred Williams Silver and grey 1969 oil on canvas 137.2 x 152.3 cm Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide gift of Howard and Christine Michell, 1992 © estate of Fred Williams

some fifty thousand years and constitutes the world’s oldest unbroken art tradition.

Painting in natural pigments on flattened sheets of eucalyptus bark is the archetypal art form in Arnhem Land and the surrounding regions and, until the 1970s, was regarded as the only traditional form of Aboriginal painting. The great revolution in modern Aboriginal art had its origins in the Western Desert in the Government settlement of Papunya. The catalyst for change was a non-Aboriginal outsider Geoffrey Bardon, who invited the senior men of the community to paint murals on the school walls in the Western Desert style.

The men went on to produce paintings

on portable supports in acrylic as well as natural ochres, creating works that are appreciated for their mystery and their beauty. Aboriginal desert painting is today a significant component of Australian national pride, partly for the extreme antiquity and aesthetic beauty of its traditional forms, each community with its own inflections of an ancient iconography.

In the mid 1900s, the first generation of urban-based Indigenous artists emerged.

Their art is often provocative and political in nature, as well as witty, and uses many different media.

These are just some of the many aspects of the rich Australian landscape tradition

that will be displayed at the Royal Academy later this year. It will demonstrate that our visual arts tradition has a longer and more venerable history than other art forms in this country and even our sporting tradition. As the National Gallery of Australia’s Director Ron Radford maintains, ‘our visual arts tradition has helped define Australia, and to understand the land we inhabit and who we are’.

Anne Gray Head of Australian Art

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TOU R I N G H I GH L I GH T S While the National Gallery has a particularly exciting exhibitions program in Canberra this year to celebrate the capital’s centenary, it is also launching numerous touring exhibitions throughout Australia. Roy Lichtenstein: Pop remix, which began touring last year, opens at its final venue, the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, on 20 July. Three new exhibitions have been launched since March—Stars of the Tokyo Stage: Natori Shunsen’s kabuki actor prints, unDisclosed: 2nd National Indigenous Art Triennial, Capital and country: the Federation years 1900–1914—and two more are set to begin touring before the end of the year—Carol Jerrems: photographic artist in July and Bodywork: Australian jewellery 1970–2012 in September.

The Gallery’s touring exhibitions showcase the quality, wealth and diversity of the national art collection, and this year audiences can explore and delight in the dynamic world of Japan’s kabuki theatre through the exquisitely rendered woodblock prints of Natori Shunsen in Stars of the Tokyo Stage, or they challenged and inspired by the snapshot of contemporary Indigenous Australian art in unDisclosed, the second National Indigenous Art Triennial. Capital and country was specially curated to celebrate the year

of Canberra’s centenary and to educate audiences about Australia’s Federation period (1900–14) and the formation of the national capital. It will tour almost every state and territory as the National Gallery’s centenary gift to nation. The exhibition features major oils rarely off display in Canberra alongside lesser-known gems, some of which have been recently acquired, reframed or conserved and are now on display for the first time.

Carol Jerrems begins its national tour in July at the Monash University Museum of Art in Jerrems’s hometown of Melbourne.

Her student work is on display in this exhibition for the first time since her art school days at Prahran Technical School in Melbourne and offers a tantalising insight into the early influences and explorations of themes that formed the essence of her mature output. Melbourne is also home to Australia’s first gallery of photography, Brummels, where Jerrems exhibited a number of works that are also on show in this retrospective. In her short life, Jerrems developed a gritty, poetic and complex photographic oeuvre reflecting the mood of personal freedom and social justice pursued by many in the 1970s. She did not travel much before she died at the age of thirty, but this touring retrospective will take her

Touring this winter Roy Lichtenstein: Pop remix Araluen Arts Centre, NT, until 10 June Stars of the Tokyo Stage: Natori Shunsen’s kabuki actor prints Tamworth Regional Gallery, NSW, 15 June – 20 July Cowra Regional Art Gallery, NSW, 10 August – 29 September Capital and country: the Federation years 1900–1914 Museum and Gallery of the Northern Territory, NT, until 29 September unDisclosed: 2nd National Indigenous Art Triennial Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, SA, until 7 July Western Plains Cultural Centre, NSW, 3 August – 6 October Carol Jerrems: photographic artist Monash University Museum of Art, Vic, 6 July – 29 September Bodywork: Australian jewellery 1970–2012 Moree Plains Gallery, NSW, 7 September – 3 November

Christel van der Laan Cut price red, bangle 2011 painted silver, polypropylene 11 x 11 x 3 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra purchased 2011

Helen Britton Brooch 2011 925 silver, paint 11.4 x 9.5 x 2.2 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra purchased 2012

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Carol Jerrems Juliet holding Vale Street 1976 gelatin silver photograph 22.7 x 15.2 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra gift of Mrs Joy Jerrems, 1981 © Ken Jerrems and the estate of Lance Jerrems

work around the country for all Australians to appreciate.

Bodywork includes the work of forty contemporary Australian jewellers and thematically explores the relationship of jewellery to the body through forty works from the national art collection.

The value of experience and memory is territory that many contemporary designers and makers articulate and make real, as they demonstrate the practical use of natural resources alongside the technical transformation of materials. The objects in Bodywork show how jewellers have manipulated graphic imagery and surface design, juxtaposed and repurposed materials, recycled objects and subverted techniques and traditions to bring new understandings to familiar forms, imbuing everyday materials with a poetic presence.

The exhibition has been specifically developed to travel to ten smaller venues throughout the country: Moree, Lake Macquarie and Port Macquarie in New South Wales, Port Pirie and Murray Bridge in South Australia, Geraldton in Western Australia, Devonport in Tasmania, Mackay and Rockhampton in Queensland and finally Canberra.

The National Gallery of Australia’s touring exhibitions program, now in its twenty-fifth year, has presented 119 exhibitions at nearly 1500 venues around Australia and overseas.

Well over nine million people have visited the Gallery’s touring exhibitions and have had the opportunity to connect firsthand, in their own cities, towns and communities, with significant works of art in the national collection. More people around Australia will have the same opportunity throughout Canberra’s centenary year and well into the future.

Belinda Cotton former head of Travelling Exhibitions

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A G ATHER I NG O F GUIDES 19th AAGGO Conference

Robyn Archer AO, Creative Director of the Centenary of Canberra, presents the keynote address on the first day of the 19th AAGGO Conference at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1 May 2013.

Naomi Guerin, Wendy Laver, Ilonka McInnes, Rowena Frith, Sylvia Fanning, Diana Gibson and Pamela Cheesman from Carrick Hill.

From 1 to 4 May, the National Gallery of Australia hosted the 19th AAGGO Conference, a biennial conference in which members of the Association of Australian Gallery Guiding Organisations gather to talk about art, discuss new ideas on guiding and refresh their enthusiasm for the important role they play in our public galleries and art museums.

Over 230 voluntary guides from nineteen galleries across Australia descended on Canberra to attend the event.

Planning for the conference began in 2009, when Pam Weiss, then president of the National Gallery of Australia Guides, proposed to AAGGO management that Canberra host the 2013 event to coincide with the ‘Arts Month’ for the Centenary of Canberra. A conference organising committee of eleven was set up and, after much thought and deliberation, the conference was themed ‘A capital collection: art for the nation’.

The theme was a deliberate play on words: ‘capital’ clearly referring to the national’s capital but also meaning

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‘the best’, alluding to the idea that the collections held by national institutions in Canberra are Australia’s premier collections. The theme also invited discussion on whether there is indeed a capital collection or simply several related but ultimately unconnected collections housed and cared for by different institutions in Canberra.

Twenty-six presenters—curators, artists, art historians and art administrators— made the conference memorable with lively panel discussions and individual presentations. As Creative Director of the Centenary of Canberra, Robyn Archer AO presented a keynote address on the first day of the conference. Her lively lecture canvassed ideas on the position of Canberra, its institutions and the arts in Australian culture—and she also cut a Canberra 100th birthday cake! Rupert Myer AM, Chairman of the Australia Council for the Arts and former chairman of the National Gallery’s Council, also presented an informative and engaging keynote address, ‘Building a national

collection’, in which he gave a wide‑ranging analysis of arts policy, funding and administration in Australia.

In the panel discussions on the second day, artists, art critics and writers, historians, curators and gallery and museum directors probed the nature of a national collection.

They promoted dialogue on national institutions and their collection and on the roles of director, curator, artist and critic in defining the national art collection.

The conference also included focus lectures by museum and gallery professionals exploring conservation, Australian glass art, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art and indigenous art of the Pacific region—all in relation to the national art collection. Expanding access to new audiences was at the heart of day three, with talks on the Gallery’s artmed and Art and Alzheimer’s programs and on the use of new and emerging technologies in galleries and guiding.

A number of panellists and presenters were artists whose work is represented in the national art collection: Robert Boynes

presented his view on how he, as an artist, relates to the national art collection; Danie Mellor spoke about Indigenous Australian art with curator and Indigenous Australian art specialist Wally Caruana; and South Australian ceramicist Stephen Bowers gave the Necia Gilbert memorial lecture. The memorial lecture, which honours the memory of Necia Gilbert, a much-loved voluntary guide from the Art Gallery of South Australia, has been generously supported for many years by the Gilbert family.

Of course, the conference also included social occasions. Guides and guests enjoyed food and wine on the first night while mingling at a reception held at the nearby National Portrait Gallery. On 3 May, a conference dinner was held in the Gallery’s premier event venue, the Gandel Hall.

The dinner was a highlight social event with cabaret entertainment by local vocalists Shortis and Simpson.

Many interstate guides had not visited Canberra for some time, so the conference presented the opportunity to

showcase a number of the relatively new local attractions, including the National Gallery’s eleven Indigenous art galleries, new entrance and Australian garden, which opened to the public in 2010. James Turrell’s large sculpture Within without 2010 is a feature of the Australian garden, and some guides braved the autumn cold to experience the work at its most spectacular at sunrise and sunset, when the changing light creates memorable effects in the work of art’s stupa. Guides also visited other attractions in the Parliamentary Zone—the National Library of Australia’s Treasurers Gallery, which opened in 2011, the Gallery of Australian Design, which opened in 2009, and the long-established National Archives of Australia. The program also included site visits to the Parliament House art collection and the nearby Canberra Glassworks, established in 2007, where guides also had the opportunity to see glass‑blowing demonstrations.

Organising a conference is a big task.

The combined efforts of many people were required to make the event run smoothly

but it quickly became apparent that the voluntary guides at the National Gallery are multi-talented. Most of them are recently retired professionals of one sort or another, and they had the required skills in technology, procurement and project management to ensure the 19th AAGGO Conference was a success.

The guides left Canberra energised and enthusiastic, ready to resume their roles with a wealth of new information and insight into the valuable service they provide.

Planning is already underway for the next AAGGO Conference in 2015 at the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide and for the following gathering of voluntary guides in 2017 at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth.

Judith Wood Convenor, 19th AAGGO Conference

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Director Ron Radford views fern figures at collector Paul Gardissat’s home on the island of Efate, Vanuatu, 26 May 2012.

Photograph: Crispin Howarth

VLI - B N E - S Y D - M E L - C BR the long journey from Vanuatu

The Gallery’s Director Ron Radford and Curator of Pacific Art Crispin Howarth travelled to Vanuatu in May last year as part of the development of the exhibition Kastom: art of Vanuatu, on display until 16 June 2013. They were there to seek cultural permissions from the Vanuatu Cultural Centre for the exhibition.

However, while there, they met Paul Gardissat, and an opportunity presented itself to acquire a number of imposingly large sculptures from the northern islands of Gaua and Vanua Lava that would supplement the Gallery’s strong holdings from the central island of Malekula.

Bringing the sculptures to Australia, however, involved some challenges.

The process of acquiring works such as these is a little more demanding than perhaps a painting bought at auction.

First and foremost, the National Gallery of Australia greatly values the importance of gaining the appropriate permissions when

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The crates being opened, after fumigation treatment, in secure quarantine-approved premises in Sydney, 14 November 2012.

Photograph: Lisa Addison

The large fern figure Tamat (left) from Gardissat’s garden on display in Kastom: art of Vanuatu, with a Torba Province grade board (centre) and Malampa province Narut (right), until 16 June 2013.

works of cultural significance are acquired or exhibited—which is, of course, why Radford and Howarth were there in the first place: to receive the blessing of the Vanuatu Cultural Centre to exhibit cultural works of art in Kastom. It helped that Gardissat (who sadly died early May 2013) had spent the past forty years working as a schoolteacher and broadcaster and was respected across Vanuatu for his work in recording and sharing kastom stories. Second, the sculptures were huge in scale, some nearly four metres high, making them difficult to ship. And third, most of the group are carved from tree fern, a potential haven for pests.

The latter was of particular concern in this instance as the works are made out of plant material and were dug out of a tropical garden—they had been kept in the owner’s garden, exposed to everything the tropical environment of Vanuatu might throw at them. This understandably meant that Australian quarantine authorities

were going to pay extra attention to the sculptures as they entered the country.

So began the long journey of these impressive works from Gardissat’s garden in Vanuatu to the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, where they were eagerly awaited. In particular, the Gallery’s Preventive Conservator Lisa Addison followed this journey closely, and she would be the first to inspect them once they arrived in secure quarantine-approved premises in Sydney.

The sculptures were removed from Gardissat’s garden, cleaned and dried out a little to prepare them for shipping to Australia. These first steps were vital in making their transition through quarantine smoother. Cleaning removed any soil from the sculptures, which would be undoubtedly quarantined in Australia and require heat or gamma irradiation treatment—and there are no gamma irradiation providers in Australia that

can accommodate objects of this size and weight. Drying out the works reduced dampness that could promote new mould or foliage growth in the sculptures during shipping.

Once the works were ready, they were moved to Port Vila, where they would begin their journey to the National Gallery of Australia, a journey on which these works of art would see more of the east coast of Australia than most tourists from Vanuatu.

From Port Vila to Brisbane, the works travelled atypically by passenger plane because the large freight plane runs most weeks but then sometimes not for a month or two. In Brisbane, the voyage slowed considerably as the crates were either too wide to fit on Australian domestic aircraft or too heavy to be loaded and unloaded like a suitcase; so they were then transferred to a truck to be shipped to Sydney, where they were to be examined by quarantine staff.

Addison opened the crates under the watchful eye of DAFF Biosecurity (part of the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) in secure quarantineapproved premises in Sydney. In one of the crates was a small army of Singapore ants (Monomorium destructor) so the entire shipment was quickly fumigated, which meant a short trip to the suburbs of Sydney for treatment. This particular species of ant is responsible for extensive economic damage around the world because they eat almost anything, including electrical cable components, rubber, plastic, polyethylene and fabric. Their distribution in Australia is currently limited to Western Australia and the Northern Territory.

A second and necessary quarantine sterilisation treatment was then conducted to eradicate any organisms, mould spores or bacteria that could not be seen or might be harbouring within the cores of the objects.

For this to happen, it was back on the road.

The sculptures headed to Melbourne, where there is a facility that can handle objects as large as these tree fern sculptures. One final check from DAFF Biosecurity in Melbourne gave them the green light to finally come to their new home, the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.

Several weeks after they left Port Vila they arrived and, not long afterwards, three of the newly acquired works became an important part of the exhibition that sparked the journey in the first place, Kastom: art of Vanuatu. The exhibition is the most significant survey of Ni-Vanuatu art to be held in Australia and features striking cultural objects as well as a video of artist Samantha Leo’s sand drawing, which was specially created for the exhibition.

Lisa Addison Preventive Conservator, Georgia Cunningham Associate Registrar, and Crispin Howarth Curator, Pacific Art

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William Kentridge The Marguerite Stephens Tapestry Studio (weaver) Streets of the city 2009, wool mohair weft, polyester warp and slit edging, 328 x 344 cm, purchased 2012

As a South African born in 1955, William Kentridge lived through apartheid, and his work often explores the tensions and conflicts that shape the communities and lives of people in post‑colonial cultures. He employs stereoscopic devices to create optical illusions and projections, using drawing, film, animation, sculpture and performance to explore ways in which we construct the world by looking. These devices and methodologies come together in his work in tapestry, a medium in which imagery is traditionally transferred from one form and scale to another and physically interpreted and produced by others.

He made Streets of the city and other tapestries in response to an invitation to create an exhibition of works with a particular reference to Naples, itself a cultural melting pot beset with conflict and crime. The series of tapestries temporarily replaced the historic tapestries of Naples’ Museo di Capodimonte. In them, an equestrian epic unfolds in which a riderless, disjointed and marionette-like horse, inspired by Don Quixote’s Rocinante, flees across an ancient map of the city.

Kentridge draws connections between the arts of cartography and weaving, both processes built point-by-point along defined axes.

He joins choreography and topography in a type of literal street theatre, where allusions to the theatre curtain, propaganda and the disjointed shadows of the homeless and dispossessed as ‘performers’ are reconnected through the courtly, stable and civilising process of weaving.

His seemingly chaotic collage of the horse, derived from torn fragments of Soviet propaganda and overlaid on map sections, is brought to order through the tapestry process. Weaver Marguerite Stephens, who has worked with Kentridge since 2001, scaled up the work from Kentridge’s drawing. With her team of weavers, Stephens used a high-warp loom to weave the image in the Gobelin technique, using mohair wool sourced, spun, prepared and dyed in a cottage workshop in Swaziland.

Robert Bell AM Senior Curator, Decorative Arts and Design Image courtesy Annandale Galleries, Sydney

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Andrea Zittel A–Z homestead unit (commission for the National Gallery of Australia, customised

by Charlie Sofo) 2012, powder-coated steel, painted wood, corrugated metal, glass and vinyl with furniture and accessories, 251.5 x 320 x 300.7 cm, purchased 2012

In 2000, the American artist Andrea Zittel acquired the first in a series of land parcels for her property A–Z West near Joshua Tree National Park in Southern California. By returning to this area, where her family had been ranchers, she satisfied an ambition to live an experimental life connected to the desert environment. However, she wondered how she could house visitors. The form of the A–Z homestead unit stemmed from this practical need for simple accommodation, but these works of art are also a reflection on the state of freedom and independence in contemporary society.

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Through her joint project the ‘Institute for Investigative Living’, Zittel and her collaborators at A–Z West examine human nature and the social construction of need. Their investigations illuminate how the significance we accord to chosen structures or ways of life can often be quite arbitrary. In developing and testing her utopian systems, Zittel often uses herself as guinea pig. She has also written a series of sixteen guiding principles she calls ‘These things I know for sure’, number ten of which is: ‘What makes us feel liberated is not total freedom, but rather living in a set of limitations that we have created and prescribed for ourselves’.

The A–Z homestead unit is a self‑contained structure, and its small footprint and portable nature mean it is exempt from many building regulations. It can be rapidly assembled and disassembled, is light enough to be moved from place to place and yet contains all the requirements for a minimal lifestyle.

Like her other works—trailer and wagon units, escape vehicles and deserted islands—the A–Z homestead unit appeals to a fantasy of self-sufficiency or nomadic existence. The work also

(above) The amenities inside A–Z homestead unit (commission for the National Gallery of Australia, customised by Charlie Sofo) 2012, installed in the National Gallery of Australia's Sculpture Garden. (right) Artist Andrea Zittel oversees the work of the Gallery’s professional installation team. (far right) Zittel with Charlie Sofo, who inhabited the sculpture while it was on display in the Sculpture Garden in March 2013.

refers to the homestead cabins, many now abandoned, that punctuate the high desert around the Morongo Basin east of Los Angeles. As the artist explains, in the 1940s and 1950s the ‘Baby Homestead Act’ granted people five‑acre land parcels on the condition these were ‘improved’ with a minimal structure.

In a statement accompanying the A–Z homestead unit commissioned by the Gallery, Zittel wrote: The original pioneering spirit of the ‘frontier’ considered autonomy and self-sufficiency as prerequisites of personal freedom. At A–Z West, we are investigating how such perceptions of freedom have been re‑adapted for contemporary living. We believe that personal liberation is now achieved through individual attempts to ‘slip between the cracks’.

Instead of building big ranches and permanent homesteads, today’s independence seekers prefer small portable structures, which evade the regulatory control of bureaucratic restrictions such as building and safety codes.

Zittel is interested in the notion of the work of art with multiple authors. While situated in the Sculpture Garden in March 2013, the National Gallery’s A–Z homestead unit was inhabited by

Charlie Sofo, a Canberra-trained, Melbourne-based artist.

Sofo worked in and around the unit, adapting it to his daily life, as a base for various activities in the Sculpture Garden and further afield.

Although Sofo was at times overwhelmed by the amount of interest caused by his inhabitation, his blog also records the simple pleasures of rambling and foraging around Canberra. His expedition to explore recommended spots for sleeping rough in the ‘Parliamentary Triangle’ is, however, a quiet reminder of the issue of homelessness in the national capital. He also draws connections between his own temporary habitation of the A–Z homestead unit and another key site within the triangle, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy.

By working beyond the usual confines of a gallery, Zittel and Sofo show us an art that lives in the world at large. This intriguing example of a Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, is now on display in the collection galleries.

Lucina Ward Curator, International Painting and Sculpture

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Tommy McRae Kwatkwat people Duellers 1880–1901, pen and black ink on two sheets of buff paper, 11 x 50.5 cm, purchased 2013

One of the earliest Indigenous artists to attain an artistic reputation outside his community, Tommy McRae produced some of the most insightful images of Australian Aboriginal life and culture during the nineteenth century. The pen-and-ink drawing Duellers is a particularly fine example of his work and records a highly ritualised form of physical combat between Aboriginal people. Rendered with McRae’s economic yet lucid use of line, four groups of silhouetted figures are engaged in battle across a frieze-like composition, shields and spears in hand.

Born near the Upper Murray region during the 1830s, McRae grew up witnessing the threats posed to his culture and traditions as colonists cleared the land and claimed its resources. He swiftly adapted and successfully negotiated with the growing settler population, selling fish, poultry and sketches. His drawings record Indigenous–European interactions and celebrate various aspects of traditional Aboriginal life such as ceremony, hunting and food

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gathering. They were primarily produced in his old age, which almost guaranteed, as noted by Andrew Sayers in his Aboriginal artists of the nineteenth century, that they ‘would have a retrospective cast’.

Duellers is certainly underpinned by a sense of nostalgia for a disrupted culture. The absence of non-Indigenous figures, landscape motifs or animals in the composition denies the scene a location or narrative and seems to aspire instead to the period before colonisation. While McRae maintained excellent relationships with nearby settler communities, he was nevertheless deeply affected by the changes wrought upon his way of life. Viewed within this context, McRae’s Duellers can be understood as a wistful reconstruction of Indigenous life and culture as he remembered it before European settlement of the Upper Murray region.

Rebecca Edwards Gordon Darling Intern, Australian Prints and Drawings

Tom Roberts The south wind 1924, oil on canvas on plywood, 35.6 x 46 cm, purchased with funds from the Ruth Robertson Bequest Fund in memory of Edwin Clive and Leila Jeanne Robertson, 2012

The south wind is an evocative late painting by Tom Roberts, a lyrical work painted in a delicate low-key palette, conveying the artist’s immediate response to his environment. In depicting three dead, white-trunked trees in the centre of the painting, Roberts directs our attention to the way trees were being destroyed in rural Victoria at that time.

Bushfires in the summers of 1919 and 1920 had burned large tracts of rural Victoria and in 1920 threatened the town of Sassafras (later re-named Kallista) in the Dandenong Ranges, forty-five kilometres to the east of Melbourne. When Roberts visited Melbourne in 1919, he wrote: ‘It all came back to me when I sat there with the blue sweep of the [Dandenong] Ranges before me, and the sunshine warm and golden and the dear remembered beauty’ . He was delighted to be back home, writing to his wife, who was still in England, ‘ … it had the sensation that as a child you thought it would be going to heaven’ .

Roberts then returned to live in Australia in 1923, having been in Britain for many years. He purchased a property in Sassafras and built a house there, which he named ‘Talisman’. This painting from 1924 is a view from the property. Jessie Traill, referring to Roberts’s Kallista landscapes, remarked: ‘never looked hills so blue and dreaming distant; never trees on the nearer slope so finely traced; never clouds massed so bold and luminous … ’ Tom Roberts was Australia’s leading artist of the late nineteenth century, promoting outdoor landscape painting and depicting important rural subjects. He played a major role in the development of the Australian school of outdoor landscape painting. The acquisition of this late Australian landscape by Roberts, a valuable addition to the collection, was made possible through the generous bequest fund of Ruth Robertson.

Anne Gray Head of Australian Art

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Colin McCahon Muriwai. Necessary protection 1972, synthetic polymer paint on composition board, 60.8 x 81.2 cm, bequest of Jane Flecknoe, 2013

Colin McCahon, one of New Zealand’s most significant artists, painted works of great subtlety and power. A striking example of this is Muriwai. Necessary protection 1972, a work informed by layers of meaning and association. Part of the series Necessary protection, the work relates to the idea of landscape as symbol. Painted at Muriwai, where McCahon had a studio close to the beach, the idea of protection relates to the environment, wildlife and his inner search for meaning.

Muriwai. Necessary protection was included in the exhibition Colin McCahon: a question of faith. As noted in the accompanying publication, McCahon feared the impact of tourism on an area that he described in 1971 as ‘ wild … empty and utterly beautiful. This is, after all, the coast the Maori souls pass over on their way from life to death—to Spirits Bay … ’ He was also interested in a colony of native gannets—risk-taking birds whose chicks, although nurtured and protected by their parents, plunge off tall cliffs to learn how to fly.

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The abstracted landscape of light and dark suggests high cliffs and the perilous leap between the two. The passage of white luminosity also recalls McCahon’s use of text: the ‘T’ relates to the Tau cross and the bright sky and watery landscape below forms an ‘I’, perhaps referring to the questions of individual doubt and revelation of the ‘I AM’ in McCahon’s major Victory over death 2 1970, also painted at Muriwai and a gift to the National Gallery of Australia from the New Zealand Government in 1978.

Muriwai. Necessary protection was bequeathed to the Gallery by the late Jane Flecknoe, who was born in New Zealand and arrived in Canberra in 1958. She was a great supporter of modern and contemporary art from our region. Her generous bequest is both a poetic statement and valuable addition to the collection.

Deborah Hart Senior Curator, Australian Painting and Sculpture post 1920

Fred Williams Snow storm, Kosciusko 1976–77, oil on canvas, 101.6 x 183 cm, purchased with funds from the Ruth Komon Bequest Fund, 2013. © estate of Fred Williams

Fred Williams’s remarkable Snow storm, Kosciusko was one of the surprises of the Gallery’s recent retrospective Fred Williams: infinite horizons. He has often been thought of as a painter of the dry landscape rather than of the cool-climate mountainous terrain.

However, as an avid weather-watcher, he became captivated by the landscape around Kosciusko National Park in New South Wales when he went with his wife Lyn and their children to stay with friends Ray and Diana Kidd in January 1975.

Ray Kidd recalls that Williams painted a work of the ‘bowl of Perisher’ the day after they arrived, rapidly completing a number of gouaches. Although it was summer, it was very cold with gusts blowing across the landscape. Williams was taken with the patterns of the snow and weather fluctuations. As he wrote in his diary on 11 January 1975: ‘The fascinating patches of snow form themselves into inventive shapes … The day has everything weather wise. There is rain, sleet & snow, lowering blue clouds & brilliant sunshine’.

This feeling is beautifully conveyed in Snow storm, Kosciusko, painted back in his Melbourne studio. The format of the canvas and composition accentuate the height of the mountains. Williams was attracted to the subtle variations of the cool summer environment, revealed in his contrasting palette of icy blues and warm ochres; the ground dotted with bright red blooms and bleached by extremes of temperature. The atmospheric sky with soft clouds billowing over the edges of the curved horizon recalls Williams’s early interest in JMW Turner. As an artist mindful of the Australian landscape tradition, he was also familiar with Eugene von Guérard’s painting North-east view from the northern top of Mount Kosciusko 1863, acquired by the National Gallery of Australia in 1973.

Williams played a key role in developing the national art collection, first on the Commonwealth Art Advisory Board and then on the National Gallery’s Council. It seems fitting that this evocative painting of the snow country close to the nation’s capital should enter the national art collection in the year of Canberra’s centenary.

It has been purchased with the Ruth Komon Bequest Fund.

Deborah Hart Senior Curator, Australian Painting and Sculpture post 1920

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Korewori caves East Sepik province, Papua New Guinea Hunter’s helper figure (Aripa) c 1480–1670, wood, ochre, 174.3 x 6.5 x 32 cm, purchased 2011

This exceptionally carved hunter’s helper figure (aripa) is a masterpiece in every sense of the word. It is ancient, life-sized and dominates the area around with its presence. By comparison with related figures in museums in Europe, we know that this is a male figure as males were created to be viewed from the side, females from the front. The two serrated spiral sections represent the heart and lung area of a body and are reminiscent of unfurling fern tips; the overarching finial of spikes gives us the impression that this figure is part human, part forest.

Aripa figures first came to the notice of the outside world in the early 1960s, when the few remaining Inyai-Ewa people living in the heavily forested region of the headwaters of the Upper Korewori (Karawari) River began trading the figures for goods or to pay head tax. These figures were originally used by hunters who understood that each aripa figure had a soul of its own, a soul that the hunter could interact with and induce to go out and find the soul of an animal that he wanted to hunt. After a hunter died, his aripa figure was left in a cave with his bones and some of his possessions. The bones and possessions were eventually scattered, but the aripa figures often remained, some for centuries. Most aripa figures are between two hundred and four hundred years old, with the most recent dating from the early nineteenth century.

The wood from which this recently acquired aripa was carved has been radiocarbon dated to around 1480–1670, making it the earliest wooden object in the Gallery’s Melanesian collection. The Gallery’s conservators have carefully stabilised the figure, which had dried out and become fragile after centuries in a cave, and it is ready to begin its second life as a work of art.

Michael Gunn Senior Curator, Pacific Art

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Members news

Cabaret of the senses Frocked up with feathers and boas, top hats and garters, members and their guests enjoyed a private viewing of Toulouse-Lautrec: Paris and the Moulin Rouge on 2 February before indulging in ‘A night with the green fairy’ in the Sculpture Garden Restaurant.

The gathering was entertained by the risqué but also very humorous performances of the girls from Miss Kitka’s House of Burlesque, including fan dances, comedy and magic acts. Gaye Valttila from the Absinthe Salon in Sydney also treated members to a fascinating demonstration of the art of preparing absinthe. A tasting of two styles of this legendary anise‑flavoured Swiss spirit, which rose to great popularity among Parisian artists and writers in the nineteenth century, certainly added to the gaiety of the evening.

Celebrate the Tate’s Turners in Canberra

but this time they are from the acclaimed collection that the artist bequeathed to Britain in 1856. Our last major exhibition of Turner’s works was very well received in 1996, seventeen years ago now, and he was, of course, a favourite among the artists in the Gallery’s Turner to Monet: the triumph of landscape in 2008. A host of events are planned for members over winter to celebrate this remarkable artist whose evocative paintings captured first the heart of his nation and then the admiration of people the world over.

To the Royal Academy, London Plans are now finalised for the Gallery and Foundation members five-day trip to London for the Gallery’s partner exhibition with the Royal Academy of Arts, Australia: land and landscape (page 20).

For further information, contact Liz Wilson, Manager, Membership and Development Programs, on (02) 6240 6469.

With three international blockbuster exhibitions this year, our events for members and their guests are particularly special.

The works of JMW Turner have returned to Canberra this winter,

As a member, you can play your part in the life of the National Gallery and enjoy the many benefits this brings to you and the community. To become a member, go to nga.gov.au/Members or free call 1800 020 068.

Members entertained by a magic show, courtesy of Miss Kitka’s House of Burlesque, at the special event ‘A night with the green fairy’ in the Gallery’s Sculpture Garden Restaurant, 2 February 2013.

Professor Brian Schmidt AC and Jennifer Gordon at the Members dinner for Toulouse-Lautrec: Paris and the Moulin Rouge, in the Gallery’s Gandel Hall, 22 February 2013.

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Sculpture Bar

1 Frances Bull and Jillian Grayson relax outdoors with a glass of wine, 15 February 2 Sarah Schmitt, Emily Pujin, Emily Johnson, Lucinda Kaval and Tao Van

Members 3 Iyanoosh Reporter and Mitali Tyagi enjoy a special viewing of Toulouse-Lautrec for ‘A night with the green fairy’, 2 February

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4,5 Performers Harley Quinn and Sugar Starr at A night with the green fairy

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6 Channel 9’s Leila McKinnon and Assistant Director Adam Worrall at the Members dinner for Toulouse-Lautrec, 22 February

8 Director Ron Radford with the Hon Peter Garrett MP and HE Charles Lepani, Papua New Guinea’s High Commissioner to Australia, at the opening of Kastom: art of Vanuatu, 7 February

Kastom

7 Marcellin Abong, Director of the Vanuatu Cultural Centre, talks about the kastom arts of Vanuatu, 9 February

9 Dancers from Mirramu Dance Company and the Yirrkala community perform to a sell-out crowd, 27 February

11 Yianni Kakavas and father Costa at the Paris, City of Light promenade, 9 March

Morning Star

Sculpture Garden Sunday

10 Children make their own art, 3 March 11 Israel Neidorf

Enlighten 2013

12 Peter Herbst, Sarah Vandermark and Saskia Herbst

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News from the Foundation

Kenneth Tyler awarded Order of Australia

Fundraising Gala Dinner and Weekend 2013

Kenneth Tyler AO is a master printmaker who has worked with great artists from all over the world. He has amassed an extraordinary personal collection and a wealth of experiences.

In recognition of his philanthropic endeavours and magnificent support of Australia’s national art collection through the Kenneth Tyler print collection, he was awarded a Queen’s Birthday honour in June 2012.

On the weekend of 16 and 17 March 2013, one hundred guests gathered from around Australia, China and the United Kingdom to attend the sixth annual Fundraising Gala Dinner and Weekend.

Guests and absent donors gave over $150 000 toward the acquisition of a number of Hilda Rix Nicholas works, including her evocative work Snow, Tombong ranges c 1942, which was on display for guests.

On 23 January 2013, Australia’s Ambassador to the United States of America the Honourable Kim Beazley AC conducted an investiture ceremony to admit Kenneth Tyler as an Officer of the Order of Australia. Tyler’s friends and family gathered with senior Australian diplomats and representatives of the American Friends of the National Gallery of Australia to celebrate this happy occasion at Ambassador’s residence in Washington DC. The National Gallery of Australia is incredibly lucky to count Kenneth Tyler among its ‘Visionary Benefactors’ . He has helped build a world-class international print collection, especially strong in representation of American art of the twentieth century.

Marabeth Cohen-Tyler, Kenneth Tyler AO and the Hon Kim Beazley AC, Australia’s Ambassador to United States of America, with guests at Kenneth Tyler’s investiture into the Order of Australia in Washington DC, 23 January 2013.

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Director Ron Radford AM spoke about the artist and her work, then escorted guests on a private tour of Toulouse‑Lautrec: Paris and the Moulin Rouge. Celebrated guest chef Guillaume Brahimi designed the night’s menu, and the weekend concluded with a festive brunch at the residence of His Excellency Mr Stéphane Romatet, French Ambassador to Australia.

Masterpieces for the Nation Fund 2013 This year’s Masterpieces for the Nation Fund is in full swing. Many generous donors have already given toward the acquisition of Florence Fuller’s A golden hour c 1905, a beautiful and impressive

painting on display in the Federation galleries. It shines resplendent in its new frame and sits brilliantly in the company of the work of Hans Heysen, Frederick McCubbin and others.

Donate to this fund by calling the Foundation on (02) 6240 6408.

Every donation at every level makes a difference.

Trip to the Royal Academy, London The itinerary is now finalised for the Gallery and Foundation members trip to London to celebrate the opening of Australia: land and landscape at the Royal Academy of Arts in September 2013.

100 Works for 100 Years In this year of Canberra’s centenary, the National Gallery of Australia has set a goal to acquire 100 significant works of art for the national art collection. The campaign was launched in October 2011 and forty major works of art have been secured through generous cash donations and gifts of works of art. Major supporters such as Tim Fairfax AM, Dr David Pfanner and Dr Ruth Pfanner, Sally White OAM and Geoffrey White OAM, Henry Dalrymple, Prudence MacLeod, the Thomas Foundation and others have already given generously in support of the Gallery’s ambitious target.

Commencing with the official opening reception on 17 September, the five-day program includes dinner in the spectacular galleries of the Wallace Collection, a private viewing of Australia, dinner at the Royal Academy Schools, attendance at the Arthur Boyd Memorial Lecture, a special reception at Australia House and more.

Bequest Circle

Each day will include a new art experience and the list of attendees is almost full. For further information, contact the Foundation’s Executive Director, Maryanne Voyazis, on (02) 6240 6691.

The support of donors to the fundraising initiatives of the Foundation is greatly appreciated. To get involved, contact Maryanne Voyazis on (02) 6240 6691 or foundation@nga.gov.au.

Ron Radford AM, Director of the National Gallery of Australia, Francesca Schwarzenbach and Charles Curran AC, former chairman of the National Gallery of Australia Foundation at this year’s Foundation Fundraising Gala Dinner and Weekend, 16 March 2013.

The Bequest Circle is a way to celebrate those who have made a bequest to the National Gallery. For more information, contact Liz Wilson on (02) 6240 6469 or at liz.wilson@nga.gov.au.

Ray Wilson OAM and John Gandel AO at the Gala Dinner, attended by many other generous benefactors of the National Gallery of Australia, 16 March 2013.

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Thank you …

Exhibitions, programs and acquisitions at the National Gallery of Australia are realised through the generous support of our partners and donors. The National Gallery of Australia would like to thank the following organisations and people:

Grants American Friends of the National Gallery of Australia, Inc, New York, made possible with the assistance of: Kenneth Tyler AO and Marabeth Cohen‑Tyler Wolfensohn Family Foundation The Aranday Foundation Gordon Darling Foundation The Lidia Perin Foundation National Gallery of Australia Council Exhibitions Fund National Gallery of Australia Foundation Board Publishing Fund Yulgilbar Foundation

Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, through: Council on Australian and Latin American Relations International Cultural Visits Program Department of Regional Australia, Local Government, Arts and Sport, through: The National Collecting Institutions Touring and Outreach Program, an Australian Government program aiming to improve access to the national collections for all Australians Visions of Australia, an Australian Government program supporting touring exhibitions by providing funding assistance for the development and touring of Australian cultural material across Australia, and through Art Indemnity Australia Australia Council for the Arts Queensland Indigenous Arts Marketing and Export Agency

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State and territory governments Queensland Government, through the Queensland Indigenous Arts Marketing and Export Agency (QIAMEA), Arts Queensland

Corporate partners ActewAGL Aerial Capital Group AGB Events Australian Broadcasting Commission ACT Government, through Australian Capital Tourism Barlens Brassey Hotel of Canberra Canberra Airport The Canberra Times Clayton Utz Coopers Brewery Eckersley’s Art & Craft Flash Photobition Forrest Hotel and Apartments Maddocks Moët Hennessy Australia Molonglo Group National Australia Bank Nine Network Australia Novotel Canberra Qantas Airlines Qantas Freight Aesop Rolfe Motors The Sydney Morning Herald WIN Television

Donations Includes donations received from 26 January to 19 April 2013 Abdul Abdullah Micky Allan Rue Beddie Jessie Birch Aynsley Cameron John Dermer Maggie Diaz

Erica Fisher The late Paul Gardissat Melinda Harper Lesley Kehoe and Noriaki Kaneko The estate of Barbara and Kevin Mayo Hans Neleman Mary Alice Pelham Thorman AM Theo Tremblay Ray Wilson OAM Masamichi Yoshikawa

100 Works for 100 Years Colin Hindmarsh and Barbara Hindmarsh Dr Helen Jessup and Philip Jessup Jr The Thomas Foundation

Foundation Fundraising Gala Dinner 2013 Antoinette Albert Rick Amor and Megan Williams Susan Armitage and the Hon Dr Michael Armitage Philip Bacon AM Julian Beaumont and Annie Beaumont Sandy Benjamin OAM and Phillip Benjamin Tony Berg AM and Carol Berg Sir Ron Brierley Julian Burt, Alexandra Burt and Elizabeth Burt Nick Burton-Taylor AM and Julia Burton-Taylor Robert Cadona Terry Campbell AO and Christine Campbell Maurice Cashmere Philip Constable and Mary Constable Tess Crotti and Emily Crotti Charles Curran AC and Eva Curran Henry Dalrymple James Darling AM The Hon Mrs Ashley DawsonDamer

Prof Geoffrey Driscoll and Jan Driscoll Dr Lee MacCormick Edwards and Michael Crane Tim Fairfax AM and Gina Fairfax John Gandel AO and Pauline Gandel Andrew Gwinnett and Hiroko Gwinnett Peter Hack Jennifer Hershon Sam Hill-Smith and Margo Hill‑Smith Meredith Hinchliffe John Hindmarsh AM and Rosanna Hindmarsh Michael Hobbs Neil Hobbs and Karina Harris Brand Hoff AM and Peta Hoff John Kirby and Carolyn Kirby Tony Lewis and Helen Lewis Richard Longes and Elizabeth Longes Dr Andrew Lu OAM Peter Mason AM and Kate Mason Gunther Mau and Cream Gilda Mau Dr Cathryn Mittelheuser AM Dr Margaret Mittelheuser AM Ron Murray AM and Pamela Cannon-Murray Allan J Myers AO, QC, and Maria Myers AO Geoffrey Pack and Leigh Pack Bruce Parncutt and Robin Campbell Dug Pomeroy and Lisa Pomeroy George Reid and Georgie Reid HE Stéphane Romatet and Agnes Espagne Evelyn Royal John Schaeffer AO and Bettina Dalton Francesca Schwarzenbach Penelope Seidler AM Ezekiel Solomon AM

Lady Southey AC Claudia Stahl and Michael Stahl Prof Ken Taylor AM and Maggie Taylor Lou Westende OAM and Mandy Thomas-Westende Brian White and Rosemary White Geoffrey White OAM and Sally White OAM Lyn Williams AM Ray Wilson OAM

Members Acquisition Fund 2012–13 Robert Aernout Margaret Aston Peter Bailey Suzanne J Baker-Dekker Virginia Berger Beryl Bevis Gillian Borger Maria Carmen Castello William Caukill and Debby Cramer Debbie Chua Michael Cockburn and Margaret Cockburn Copperfield Antiques Sydney Helen Croaker and David Croaker Prof Robert Crompton and Helen Crompton Susan Duffy and Shaun Duffy Mary Falconer Dr Peter Fullagar and Helen Topor Shirley Gollings and Ian Gollings Pauline Griffin Cheryl Hannah Maggie Hargraves Pat Harvey and Frank Harvey Clare Humphreys Marianne Ilbery John Jackson and Ros Jackson Pamela Jupp and David Jupp Christine King Ilse King Valerie Kirk Veronica Krizaic

Gerry Kruger and Ted Kruger Ann Lancaster Jennifer Lee and Robert Lee Liz Lynch and Mike Lynch Paul Mattiuzzo and Deborah Mattiuzzo Ralph Melano Gail Miller and Alistair Bragg Lisa Molvig Joanne Mulholland and David Rovers Neil C Mulveney Geoff Murray-Prior and Gillian Murray-Prior Mike Ogden PSM Robert Oser and Agie Oser Jill Parsons Elizabeth Percival and Adam Graycar Dr Lyn Riddett Paul Robilliard and Hanan Robilliard Raoul Salpeter and Ros Mandelberg Spectrum Consultancy Steensen Varming (Aust) Claudette Taylor in memory of Dylan Helen Tuite Peter Warfe and Pat Warfe Pat White Emeritus Professor David Williams AM and Margaret Williams

National Gallery of Australia Council Exhibitions Fund Jeanne Pratt AC

South Australian Contemporary Art Fund Macquarie Group Foundation

For more information about developing creative partnerships with the National Gallery of Australia, contact: Nicole Short Sponsorship and Development Manager +61 2 6240 6781 nicole.short@nga.gov.au For more information about making a donation, contact: Maryanne Voyazis Executive Director, National Gallery of Australia Foundation +61 2 6240 6691 maryanne.voyazis@nga.gov.au

Masterpieces for the Nation Fund 2013 Dr Lynne Badger Corinna Cullen Stephen Dyer Sue Dyer Wendy Rainbird Dr Romany White and Dr Russell White George Z Worthington and Cameron Mowat

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Creative partnerships

Make it interesting, Molonglo Group Molonglo Group does not fit the typical developer stereotype.

What sets them apart is their interest in cultural creation.

With their multi-use Nishi building (the latest addition to Molonglo Group’s NewActon precinct), for example, they have recently gone beyond simply inviting quality commercial tenants and have created one themselves: Hotel Hotel.

As the hotel’s name suggests, it strips away the grandiose and challenge guests to reframe what a hotel actually is and does.

It is an intense collaboration of artists, makers, designers and thinkers.

It is not just for travellers. Hotel Hotel has been created with Canberra in mind, going beyond the intimate hotel walls and connecting to the broader community. The hotel stairs are designed to be populated by all, the landscape is scattered with installations by land artists Alfio Bonanno and Steven Siegel, cafes and eateries have been curated, community gardens created, and artist programs and creative festivals put on for the community.

The National Gallery’s touring exhibition Roy Lichtenstein: Pop remix at QUT Art Museum, Brisbane, August 2012.

Photograph: Richard Stringer. Image courtesy QUT Art Museum, Brisbane.

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Molonglo Group realises that you can’t just plonk a building down and expect it to just work out; you need to create and foster the community that lives there. And, importantly, Molonglo Group have actively sought partnerships with cultural institutions such as the National Gallery of Australia to stage exhibitions and programs.

One such partnership with the Gallery is on the lively and dynamic exhibition Roy Lichtenstein: Pop remix, which opens at the Gallery on 20 July after its hugely successful tour comes to a close on 10 June at the Araluen Arts Centre in the Northern Territory.

Molonglo Group’s goal is to collaborate on setting new standards for social interactions and event programming and, in the end, accessible culture (of both the high- and low-brow varieties) in the everyday. This goal crosses over with the Gallery’s own goals as we seek to engage creatively with audiences, strive for excellence and improve access to the nation’s art collection for all Australians.

If you are interested in creating ties with the Australian community through the arts, contact Nicole Short, +61 2 6240 6781 or nicole.short@nga.gov.au.

Hotel Hotel A place for people people • Opening soon hotel-hotel. com.au Hotel Hotel NewActon Nishi, 25 Edinburgh Ave Canberra

For reservation or conferencing enquiries, please call 02 6287 6287 or email — hello@hotel-hotel.com.au

art for a new world 6 july – 7 october 2013 tickets artgallery.nsw.gov.au INFOLINE 1800 679 278

Anniversary partner

Strategic partners

Grace Cossington Smith The bridge in-curve 1930 (detail) National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, presented by the National Gallery Society of Victoria, 1967 Š Estate of Grace Cossington Smith

IAN FAIRWEATHER Boats at soochow creek, 1938, oil and pencil on paper on cardboard, 110.0 x 112.5 cm • soLD apriL 2013 $630,000 (incLuDing Buyers premium)

INVITATION TO CONSIGN important fine art auction • august 2013 For a confidential and obligation free appraisal please contact: melbourne 03 9865 6333 • sydney 02 9287 0600 info@deutscherandhackett.com • www.deutscherandhackett.com

Sistine chapel

Private viewing

Each day an average of 15,000 people squeeze in to the Sistine Chapel in Rome to admire Michelangelo’s stupendous frescoes. Imagine being one of just 20 people on a private visit!

This is just one exclusive feature of Academy Travel’s Grand Tour of Italy.

The tour begins with the unforgettable ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and continues to Rome, the medieval hill towns of Umbria, Renaissance Florence, Ravenna and Venice.

Accommodation is in centrally-located four star hotels. All stays are three or four nights. Meals at some fine restaurants, plus tickets to concerts and opera are included in the tour cost. An expert tour leader travels with your group, providing talks and on-site explanations.

‘The tour was the most amazing and unforgettable experience.

Everything was beautifully planned and executed without a hitch’.

Grand Tour of Italy participant, May 2012.

www.academytravel.com.au tailored small group Journeys › Expert tour leaders › Maximum 20 in a group › Carefully planned itineraries

Grand Tour of Italy 18 days From $6,500 pp, twin share Upcoming departures Sept 26-Oct 13, 2013 April 1-18, 2014 Sept 19 – Oct 6, 2014 Itinerary > Sorrento – 4 nights > Rome – 3 nights > Bevagna (Umbria) – 4 nights > Florence – 3 nights > Venice – 3 nights

Level 1, 341 George St Sydney NSW 2000 Ph: + 61 2 9235 0023 or 1800 639 699 (outside Sydney) Fax: + 61 2 9235 0123 Email: info@academytravel.com.au Web: www.academytravel.com.au

AUSTRALIAN HAYDN ENSEMBLE CONCERT SERIES 2013 Leading Australian specialists Performing classical music on Period instruments

SYDNEY - UTZON ROOM CANBERRA - WESLEY MUSIC CENTRE BOWRAL- ST JUDE’S CHURCH “Marvelously extrovert playing” The Australian

‘BEETHOVEN’S FORTEPIANO’ JULY 4th - 9th GUEST ARTIST NEAL PERES DA COSTA DIRECTS Historical Chamber Versions of BEETHOVEN HAYDN MOZART

PIANO CONCERTO NO. 1 ‘CLOCK’ SYMPHONY ‘JUPITER’ SYMPHONY

Erin Helyard - “A virtuosic and eloquent soloist”

‘THE PRUSSIAN PRINCE’

AUGUST 17th - 19th PINCHGUT OPERA’S ERIN HELYARD - SOLOIST & DIRECTOR MELISSA FARROW (Australian Brandenburg Orchestra) Flute Soloist CPE BACH STRING SINFONIA’S CPE BACH HARPSICHORD CONCERTO CARL BENDA FLUTE CONCERTO FREDERICK THE GREAT SINFONIA

TICKETS AND INFORMATION AVAILABLE VIA OUR WEBSITE WWW.AUSTRALIANHAYDN.COM.AU phone 0424 072 430

AUSTRALIAN HAYDN ENSEMBLE

art monthly AUSTRALIA

257 March 2013

Australia 1 year (10 issues) AUD$100 Asia Pacific 1 year AUD$180 rest of world 1 year AUD$220 digital edition 1 year $60 (+ access to back issues) exacteditions.com/artmonthlyaus rrp. $12.95; bumper issues $14.95 t (02) 6125 3988

the

emerging issue

Don’t miss an issue! subscribe!

www.artmonthly.org.au

Innovative. Inspiring. Iconic.

The all new Canberra Airport

ONE CITY,

ONE CENTURY,

ONE HUGE CM1212312/01

celebration

The innovative and artistic design of the new terminal reflects the modern city of Canberra, the Nation’s Capital.

Happy birthday Canberra – it’s an honour to celebrate with you.

It’s a very exciting time for our capital and as the Principal Partner, we’re committed to making the Centenary of Canberra a celebration to remember.

We’re proud to call Canberra home - we’ve been here since the beginning and we’ll be here into the next century and beyond.

We look forward to commemorating this milestone with you during the exciting year-long calendar of events.

Let’s celebrate the good times together.

PROUD PRINCIPAL

PARTNER ActewAGL Retail ABN 46 221 314 841.

actewagl.com.au

East Hotel, Canberra’s highly anticipated four and a half star contemporary design and lifestyle hotel is now open. With its focus on providing a memorable Canberra experience and its premium location just minutes from the National Gallery of Australia, between the fashionable retail and restaurant hubs of Manuka and Kingston, East Hotel ups the ante for local guests and visitors to the nation’s capital.

East Hotel provides a contemporary, cool and vibrant option for visitors to Canberra, whether overnighters, business guests, long stay guests or families. The six-story hotel has 140 rooms in various studio and apartment-style combinations, recognizing the challenges families can face with hotel accommodation by providing specially designated suites, cleverly designed in a modular, fun way specifically to cater for both adults and kids. The hotel has standalone dining and bar facilities, with Ox Eatery and it’s associated Bar and Delicatessen sure to become an instant classic.

East Hotel’s business facilities are state-of-the-art with modern and professional conference rooms, boardrooms and an all-day meeting lounge, complete with air hockey table, to foster the creative environment that leads to the success of any meeting. The facilities have the flexibility to fit perfectly to most business requirements with a distinctively edgy East Hotel touch.

69 Canberra Avenue, Kingston ACT 2604 | +61 2 6295 6925 | easthotel.com.au

ROLFE RENAULT

EXPRESS YOURSELF

ENJOY CUTTING EDGE DESIGN AND SUPREME SAFETY AT ROLFE RENAULT,

BOOK A TEST DRIVE TODAY.

MEGANE DYNAMIQUE

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ROLFE RENAULT 152 MELROSE DRIVE, PHILLIP ACT 2606 PH: (02) 6282 8000 15 JOSEPHSON STREET, BELCONNEN ACT 2617 PH: (02) 6253 5551 *Drive away price for vehicle described with no further options. Offer available on vehicles sold and delivered before 31st June 2013. Private buyers only, not available in conjunction with any other offer. DL: 17000532

rolferenault.com.au

C•A•N•B•E•R•R•A

1 June – 8 September 2013

JMW Turner Peace – Burial at Sea, exhibited 1842. Photo © Tate, 2013 Turner from the Tate: The Making of a Master is organised by Tate in association with Art Exhibitions Australia, the Art Gallery of South Australia and the National Gallery of Australia.

Turner from the Tate offers fresh perspectives on JMW Turner (1775–1851), one of Britain’s greatest artists and a key figure of the Romantic period. He is celebrated as a highly modern painter, his work much admired for its experimental character.

Turner from the Tate includes many of the artist’s most famous paintings. It provides a comprehensive overview of Turner’s monumental landscapes and atmospheric, light-filled seascapes while offering extraordinary insights into his working life and practices.

NatioNal gallery accommodatioN package Package Includes: • Accommodation in Heritage room for two guests.

• Two tickets to the Turner from the Tate exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia.

• Full buffet breakfast for two.

• Complementary bottle of bubbly.

• Free parking and daily newspaper.

• Rooms sold run of House.

The Brassey of Canberra Belmore Gardens and Macquarie Street, Barton ACT 2600 Phone: 02 6273 3766 Email: info@brassey.net.au

Toll Free Telephone Bookings 1800 659 191 www.Brassey.neT.au

Canberran Owned and Operated

Canberra’s Only Heritage bOu t ique HO t e l (es t. 192 7 )

ONE CITY,

ONE CENTURY,

ONE HUGE CM1212312/01

celebration

Happy birthday Canberra – it’s an honour to celebrate with you.

It’s a very exciting time for our capital and as the Principal Partner, we’re committed to making the Centenary of Canberra a celebration to remember.

We’re proud to call Canberra home - we’ve been here since the beginning and we’ll be here into the next century and beyond.

We look forward to commemorating this milestone with you during the exciting year-long calendar of events.

Let’s celebrate the good times together.

PROUD PRINCIPAL

PARTNER ActewAGL Retail ABN 46 221 314 841.

actewagl.com.au

Your world like you’ve never seen it

In Canberra?

Tune to your local radio station

go e th n o

air on

online Introducing The Canberra Times iPad app.

It brings Canberra’s best journalism to your fingertips. Whenever, wherever.

Download it now before you take off.

It’s free for a limited time.

Alex Sloan Adam Shirley Greg Bayliss Graham Williams Melanie Tait Ross Solly

Data download charges apply.

iPad is a trademark of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. App Store is a service mark of Apple Inc.

Genevieve Jacobs

Tim Gavel

TUR NE R FROM THE TATE

THE MAKING OF A MASTER

Turner from the Tate: The Making of a Master is organised by Tate in association with Art Exhibitions Australia, the Art Gallery of South Australia and the National Gallery of Australia.

The National Gallery of Australia is an Australian Government Agency.

enjoy a cultural getaway with the master at novotel canberra from $189* Enjoy overnight accommodation in a standard room, buffet breakfast for two people in One Restaurant and two untimed tickets to ‘Turner from the Tate: The Making of a Master’ exhibition.

Novotel Canberra - Official accommodation partner 65 Northbourne Avenue, Canberra. Tel. 02 6245 5000 | novotelcanberra.com.au *Valid for stays at Novotel Canberra only between 1 June 2013 and 8 September 2013 inclusive. Rate based on per room per night and two untimed tickets per stay to ‘Turner from the Tate: The Making of a Master’ exhibition. Bookings are payable at time of reservation and are non-exchangeable, non-refundable and non-transferable. For full terms and conditions visit novotelcanberra.com.au

J O I N O U R G L O B A L L O YA L T Y P RO G R A M AT ACCO R H OT E L S . CO M

J.M.W. Turner, Peace Burial at Sea, exhibited 1842. Photo: © Tate, 2013

OPENS IN CANBERRA 1 JUNE • UNTIL 8 SEPTEMBER 2013

Making connections across Australia and beyond For over 125 years Maddocks lawyers have helped clients understand the law, negotiate agreements and resolve disputes.

Celebrating 1 year in Canberra.

Maddocks law firm is the proud legal partner of the National Gallery of Australia and is deeply committed to supporting arts in Australia.

Canberra | Sydney | Melbourne www.maddocks.com.au