2015.Q3 | Artonview 83 Spring 2015

Australian Art London, King Street · 24 September 2015

Viewing 19–23 September 8 King Street London SW1Y 6QT Contact Nicholas Lambourn nlambourn@christies.com +44 (0) 20 7389 2040

THOMAS (TOM) WILLIAM ROBERTS (1856–1931)

Portrait of Louis Abrahams indistinctly signed, dedicated and dated ‘Tom Roberts /for/ friend / Don Luis/1886’ (above the sitter’s head) oil on canvas 16 x 14 in. (40.6 x 35.6 cm.) £30,000–50,000

REGIONAL AUSTRALIA The Art People christies.com

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nga.gov.au | Follow us on Papua New Guinea, East Sepik Province, Yuat River Mask 19th century (detail), wood, ochres, fibre, shell. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 2010 Qantas Airways Limited ABN 16 009 661 901

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FEATURES Reimagining print | 6 Emilie Owens explores groundbreaking print projects from the workshops of master printer Kenneth Tyler

Behind the scenes at Tyler Graphics Ltd | 12 Emilie Owens gets the inside stories from key players in America’s most innovative print workshop

A taste of art | 14 Gerard Vaughan answers the question ‘Do you have a favourite work of art, artist, art movement, region, style?’ with his thoughts on taste

‘Paint what you love’ | 18 Mary Eagle introduces us to the poetry that Tom Roberts found in his rural subjects, which defined his concept of an Australian way of life

Built on culture | 26 Andrew Moutu and Peter Naumann celebrate the art and culture of Papua New Guinea in the fortieth year since independence

MAMA vs MoMA | 30 Mary-Lou Nugent and Eric Meredith spoke to some of Australia’s most recently appointed art gallery directors about the regional experience

High-interest loans we can all agree on | 38 Mark Van Veen highlights what it means to offer high-interest loans when the lender is a country’s national gallery

REGULARS Director’s word | 4 Members news | 40 Acquisitions | 42 Gilbert & George, Ted Secombe, Marc Newson, Jane Burton, Jimmy Thaiday, Meiji‑period Japanese vase

Thank you … | 50

Issue 83 | Spring 2015 Cover: Tom Roberts Slumbering sea, Mentone 1887 (detail), oil paint on canvas. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, purchased with the assistance of a special grant from the Government of Victoria, 1979 9442 Right: Tom Roberts Cloudscape 1923 (detail), oil paint on plywood. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 2008 184046

Exhibitions NGA CANBERRA Myth and magic Temporary Exhibitions Gallery, until 1 November Tom Roberts (pages 18–25) Temporary Exhibitions Gallery, 4 December – 28 March Adult $20.00 | Free for children 16 and under Concession $17.50 | Member $15.00 Limited timed tickets available for each session Book now at ticketek.com or 1300 795 012 Behind the scenes (pages 6–13) Orde Poynton Gallery, 4 December – 3 April

Editor Eric Meredith Designer Kristin Thomas Proofreader Meredith McKendry Photographers Alanna Bishop, Eleni Kypridis, Lisa Mattiazzi, Brooke Shannon, John Tassie, Dominic Thomas Pre-press Michael Tonna Printing CanPrint, Canberra Guest contributors Mary Eagle, art historian Andrew Moutu, Director, Papua New Guinea National Museum and Art Gallery Peter Naumann, Museum Consultant And many thanks to gallery directors Marcus Schutenko, Jacqui Hemsley, Kallie Blauhorn and Bridget Guthrie for their contributions Contributors Eric Meredith, Editor Mary-Lou Nugent, Head of Travelling Exhibitions Emilie Owens, Assistant Curator, International Prints, Drawings and Illustrated Books Mark Van Veen, Associate Registrar Gerard Vaughan, Director Editorial artonview.editor@nga.gov.au Advertising artonview.advertising@nga.gov.au Reproductions copyright@nga.gov.au Back issues nga.gov.au/artonview

NGA ELSEWHERE Impressions of Paris Monash Gallery of Art, until 20 September Capital and country UQ Art Museum, St Lucia, until 1 November Canberra Museum and Gallery, 21 November – 21 February Stars in the river Western Plains Cultural Centre, until 11 October Geelong Art Gallery, 28 November – 21 February Bodywork Craft ACT, 11 September – 24 October Light moves Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, 2 October – 31 January William Kentridge Ian Potter Museum of Art, 20 October – 17 January

National Gallery of Australia PO Box 1150 Canberra ACT 2601, Australia +61 (0)2 6240 6411 nga.gov.au Membership nga.gov.au/members | 1800 020 068 Artonview is free with membership, which comes with additional perks such as reciprocal benefits at art institutions nationally Donations +61 (0)2 6240 6691 Sponsorship +61 (0)2 6240 6740 The National Gallery of Australia in Canberra is a not-for-profit entity.

Many acquisitions, exhibitions and programs are made possible through private and corporate supporters. © National Galley of Australia Published quarterly. Copyright of works of art is held by the artists or their estates. Every effort has been made to identify copyright holders but omissions may occur.

The views expressed by writers are not necessarily those of the National Gallery of Australia. Artonview may contain names and images of deceased Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

ISSN 1323‑4552 Printed on FSC and PEFC certified paper using vegetable-based inks.

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Editorial In our last issue of Artonview, I said that I’d share the results of our reader survey.

There wasn’t much that we didn’t suspect already or that you (particularly our more social members) have no doubt come to know about yourselves as a group. But it has given us clarity and new drive to act in your interests as our readers. Many of you provided additional, glowing commentary, which is both encouraging and humbling, and your ideas will all be discussed at length. What perhaps stood out most, though, was the variety of your art interests.

We all have different tastes when it comes to art, travel, love, food and literature—the list is endless. It is the spice of life. And, while Artonview can’t cater to all our tastes, and certainly not all the time, it can continue to bring fresh perspectives and old favourites to your table, and plenty of treats (because a diet of the mind is no diet at all). We have a great team of photographers and the best pool of art experts in the country—a knowledge buffet. The design too is clean, crisp and purposeful. But we’re still ‘evolving’—to return to NGA Director Gerard Vaughan’s characterisation of the process in our autumn interview—and we hope you’ll evolve with us.

Try new things, new flavours.

This idea of taste is particularly close to Gerard’s heart and often at the forefront of his mind. As a historian of taste, his views on the subject are enlightening. From the aforementioned interview, a dialogue on taste ensued from a simple question of favourites.

What he had to say on the topic set itself apart from the rest of the discussion at the time, and we held it over in the hope of finding a place for it in a future issue—and this is that issue.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

We’ve also seasoned this issue with a ‘regional Australia’ flavour. Guest writer Mary Eagle has written a brilliant piece on Tom Roberts’s ventures into the rural areas pursuing his own brand of poetry, in oils and graphite—poetry that was, at times, gutsy and full of action and, at others, eminently sensitive.

Roberts has to be the best of the Australian Impressionists, in my humble opinion, but you can make your own minds up when the NGA presents a new retrospective of his work in December. Mark Van Veen looks at the NGA’s loans program and some of the works from the national collection that have been welcomed to regional centres. And Mary-Lou Nugent (to whom I’m indebted for her contribution to this issue) and I present the thoughts of some of Australia’s regional gallery directors newly appointed to their positions, which we though apt given the NGA’s recent change of leadership, with Gerard now firmly at the helm. The insights of Bridget Guthrie, Marcus Schutenko, Kallie Blauhorn and Jacqui Hemsley were invaluable, and Tamworth, Darwin, Monash and Albury respectively are lucky to have them.

Some of the relationships the NGA shares with Australia’s regional galleries are almost as old the NGA itself. Directors have come and gone over the years. They have moved from one place to another or have retired and been replaced by new generations, but the exchange remains as strong, vibrant and relevant as ever. More than that, though, I’d suggest that our national institutions in Canberra have a pretty good grasp of the regional experience. We are home to just 350 000 people. A friend of mine calls it ‘the comfy slipper capital of the world’, but that mostly applies to its residents—we

don’t have to sit in gridlock for two hours a day! It’s also an exciting place to live and particularly to visit, and much of that is to do with it being home to Australia’s preeminent cultural and educational institutions.

Being in the national capital gives places such as the NGA international reach and national manifests. The NGA is in a position to bring the big-ticket exhibitions to Australia and deliver great exhibitions and works of art to all parts of Australia, but it also understands the country’s regional towns and their residents. Perhaps no more so now than with its new Deputy Director, Kirsten Paisley, who comes directly from Shepparton Art Museum in Victoria—the state, I might add, with the most regional galleries in Australia. We’re all excited to discover what she will add to the mix that is the NGA. Also in this issue, Emilie Owens writes about the Ken Tyler print workshops that gave artists from the 1960s to the turn of the century the opportunity to push the outer limits of the medium. Tyler and his team at Tyler Graphics Limited injected new ideas into printmaking at a time when the medium could so easily have settled into a niche. Guest writers Andrew Moutu and Peter Naumann present the multi-faceted art of Papua New Guinea on show in an exhibition at the PNG National Museum and Art Gallery in Port Moresby this spring.

The exhibition, Built on culture, celebrates forty years of the county’s independence. And don’t forget the NGA’s Myth and magic on now in Canberra. It includes some of the great masterpieces from the Sepik River region— the book, too, is exquisitely detailed, a real treat for scholar and beginner alike.

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NGA curator Crispin Howarth with the giant six-metre-long 19th century spirit crocodile Saki, on loan from the PNG National Museum and Art Gallery for the NGA’s exhibition Myth and magic in Canberra only from 16 September

DIRECTOR’S WORD Gerard Vaughan

Recent visitors to the NGA will have noticed that we have begun an ambitious and transformative project to revitalise our collection displays, a significant part of which is to bring Australian art to our principal level.

Significant areas of the Gallery are currently closed both to facilitate a speedy changeover and to make some much-needed building upgrades while minimising the impact on visitors. But we haven’t deprived you entirely.

Our Indigenous Australian, Asian and Pacific collections remain outside the current project, and our Australian and international destination pieces have been moved into special ‘highlights’ displays for the interim.

We have made no secret of the fact that long ago we ran out of display space to adequately present the grand narrative of Australian art and the stories of our neighbours in Asia and the Pacific region, as well as those of Europe and America. Notwithstanding this inhibition—for which the only solution is proceeding with Stage 2 of our redevelopment, intended to nearly double the current size of the NGA—we are making the most of the space we have, and our new displays of Australian and international art

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will achieve that splendidly, at least for the foreseeable future.

October will be the month in which to rediscover the Australian collections in a new light. You will also be introduced to a different approach, presenting the collection through themes and narratives, and these will change regularly to ensure our collection is lively, fresh and consistently engaging.

It will be a new experience every time you visit the Gallery. Of course, key masterpieces will always be there but, in this way, there will be new discoveries each time—even for our most regular visitors. You can follow the project’s progress through our Twitter feed @NatGalleryAus #ChangingNGA. The international collection will receive the same treatment, but a bit later, near the end of November and in time for the opening of two really important exhibitions that also showcase the riches of the national collection.

The first will present one hundred and twenty of our finest international and Australian photographs, offering the opportunity to see a carefully selected group of the most important photographs ever created. We will open at the same time a fascinating exhibition of the

groundbreaking work done at the Ken Tyler workshops in America in the latter part of the twentieth century. And, to top it all, you can visit the unmissable Tom Roberts retrospective, drawn from collections around Australia.

Many of our visitors may be surprised to discover that Tom Roberts’s works have an unmistakable familiarity. Echoes of his vision of Australia and Australians are as strong in some places around the country as they were over a century ago, instantly recognisable as icons of Australian identity. As an artist, Roberts firmly believed that a great painting of one time and place could be an expression for all time and of all places—and who could disagree that this is certainly the case with Shearing the rams 1888–90. So I can safely say that everyone will find in Roberts something of real value. And it is the first time since 1988 that his grand painting Opening of the First Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia 1903 will be shown outside Parliament House, particularly appropriate as so much of Roberts’s imagery reflects the ideas about what Australia could be so hotly debated in the lead-up to Federation. You will see a deep and fascinating selection of works by

Roberts, gathered for this important Canberraonly retrospective.

Of course, before Roberts, before Tyler and our photography show and before the unveiling of the new displays is Myth and magic, which is already rewarding many visitors. This exhibition of the powerful art of the unique cultures of the Sepik River region in Papua New Guinea is only in Canberra until 1 November and celebrates our northern neighbour’s fortieth anniversary of independence. The Papua New Guinea Museum and Art Gallery in Port Moresby, whose history dovetails with that of the country at large, is also celebrating this anniversary with the exhibition Built on culture.

It comes after an intense period of rejuvenation of the museum’s building and collections and we, at the NGA, have been helping with that as part of a twinning project between the museum and the Australian Government.

I look forward to visiting the museum when Built on culture opens on 16 September and to speaking to Director Andrew Moutu about how we might collaborate on future projects.

In other news, we have appointed our new Deputy Director, Kirsten Paisley, who

commenced her role only a few weeks ago but is already making her presence felt. She brings significant expertise in arts management and a successful career in fundraising, and we are very pleased to be welcoming her to the NGA. Being a fairly new resident myself, I look forward to showing Kirsten and her family some of what Rose and I have discovered in the capital and to working with her on making the nation’s collections, and all the programs we offer, accessible and rewarding for all Australians, wherever they may live.

Kirsten comes from the Shepparton Art Museum in regional Victoria so, in the same way that we urge everyone to rediscover the NGA in Canberra, I encourage you all to look locally. State and regional galleries present many amazing shows each year—and you will frequently discover art from the national collection in them. The NGA has extensive loans and touring exhibition programs because we want to make sure all Australians have a chance to enjoy the national collection. Last year, we contributed close to two thousand loans to exhibitions around Australia. You’ll also find us in Wheelers Hill, Dubbo, Geelong, Bendigo, Darwin as well as in Melbourne,

Sydney and Adelaide and many places in between. And the stories we, and our state and regional partners, have to tell are fascinating.

On a final note, I’d like to make special mention of Inge King, who will be celebrating her 100th birthday in November. A display of Inge’s work, alongside a selection of important modernist prints by her late husband, Graham King, will pay tribute to this milestone in her remarkable life and to her career as one of Australia’s premier sculptors. The exhibition, simply titled ‘Happy birthday, Inge’, will be drawn from our holdings of her work, augmented by the generous gifts she has made to the national collection.

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Terence La Noue Beyond the shore 1992 (detail), etching, aquatint, carborundum, relief, woodcut.

Gift of Kenneth Tyler, 2002 55537 All works in this feature from National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

REINVENTING THE PRINT Emilie Owens explores groundbreaking print projects from the workshops of master printer Kenneth Tyler

The print workshops of master printer Kenneth Tyler were at the vanguard of printmaking. From 1966 to 2001, Tyler collaborated with some of the twentieth century’s most brilliant artists on projects that categorically redefined the medium.

These works of art cannot be classified according to a traditional understanding of printmaking: when we think of prints we think of paper, of two-dimensionality, even flatness; often we think of multiplicity and print’s inherent reproducibility. The prints produced at Tyler’s workshops, however, encourage audiences to abandon such conventional notions of printmaking and reimagine the possibilities of the medium.

At over seven metres long and printed in sixty-seven colours from three woodblocks inlaid with one hundred and five intaglio plates, Frank Stella’s The Fountain 1992 is truly a monumental print. Stella’s enduring fascination with Herman Melville’s 1851 epic Moby-Dick provided inspiration for the work. Its title is taken from chapter eighty‑five of the novel in which Ishmael muses about the function of a whale’s spout and the ‘fountain’ produced as it breaches

the ocean’s surface for air. Ishmael describes whales as creatures ‘both ponderous and profound’, and these words provide us with a guide to contemplating Stella’s print, with its riot of colour and line. As viewers we are dwarfed by the immense work, seemingly poised on the deck of a whaling ship, witness to the chaos of a sea set to churning by the surfacing of a huge whale. Amid this turbulence, Stella creates a rhythmic sense of order by repeating areas of deep black scored by lines of stark white that are reminiscent of the striations of whale skin. Like Melville’s novel, Stella’s The Fountain invokes a sense of wonder at the majesty of nature and our place within it.

James Rosenquist’s 1989 series Welcome to the Water Planet prompts similar considerations.

The large, round format of Skull snap simultaneously references the shape of the earth and that of a coin. Onto this shape, Rosenquist imposes what, at first, appears to be a map of the earth’s rivers and tidal patterns but, in fact, is a fluid representation of an American penny, showing the profile of Abraham Lincoln and the inscriptions ‘Liberty’ and ‘In God we trust’, over a ground

of deep velvet black studded with flecks of pink, blue and white. The image is at once a clear night sky shimmering with galaxies of stars and the ghostly outline of a skull.

Against this celestial–cerebral landscape hovers a mousetrap above which a tap is suspended, a drip poised to fall right onto the trap’s trigger. The idea that this single drop of water may set off the trap and tip the world into unknown chaos—a ‘skull snap’—is Rosenquist’s meditation on the earth, science, technology, economics and the fine line between progress and destruction.

Rosenquist and Tyler employed innovative techniques in the realisation of this project, repurposing pattern pistols used to render buildings to spray swathes of vividly coloured paper pulp in subtle gradations.

While Tyler worked with many of the most influential artists of the twentieth century, he also opened his doors to those less well known. Like Stella and Rosenquist, Terence La Noue was interested in challenging the potential of print. La Noue’s work is inspired by a web of personal iconography with references including his wide travels, his interest in the art and culture of Africa and

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Oceania, his fascination with the spiritual and the art of the German Expressionists.

The multifarious references that inspire La Noue’s art are echoed in his layering of techniques. His paintings begin with an acrylic mould to which layers of colour, drawing and further sheets of acrylic—often cast from the scored floor of his studio—are added.

At Tyler Graphics Ltd (TGL), this experimental approach to art making was embraced and resulted in Beyond the shore 1992, an adventurous thirty-colour etching, aquatint, carborundum, relief, woodcut printed from one cast copper plate inlaid with ten copper plates and eighteen flexible plates and one assembled plate made from thirty rectangular woodblocks, printed on handmade, handcoloured paper. Unsurprisingly, due to its complexity, the print was produced in an edition of just fifteen, with ten artist’s proofs.

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When we look at projects as complicated as those undertaken by Stella, Rosenquist and La Noue, the question of how inevitably comes to mind. As well as an eager collaborator and technical impresario, Tyler is an avid believer in the value of education and this was the motivating force behind the rigorous program of documentary film, audio recording and photography that characterised his workshops. Tyler acknowledges the opacity of printmaking, particularly the kinds of experiments that he was conducting, saying in a recording from 1989, ‘a lot of this is not easily explainable in words; whereas, if you envision it as you do through the filming, then you have a different concept of how it works’. In the films, we witness the continual addition and subtraction of elements to Stella’s preparatory collage for The Fountain, hear the roar of pattern pistols as Rosenquist

creates Welcome to the Water Planet and sense the sheer weight of the bronze cast plate used for La Noue’s Beyond the shore as five staff members struggle to lift it to the press bed.

As well as illuminating the technical aspects of the workshop, the films, audio recordings and photographs give an insight into the working practices of artists at TGL. In one recording from 1993, Anthony Caro asserts, ‘I never work from maquettes, I never make drawings: I work from the material. It’s a sort of technique for letting it flow out of yourself without worrying too much’. For Caro, a sculptor in the modernist tradition whose work in industrial steel was typically produced on a massive scale, the transition to small paper constructions was surprisingly natural: ‘The idea of making sculpture with paper was never heard of. Ken started a whole new thing, using paper for all sorts of things—

it’s wonderful’. Caro completed thirty-five unique paper sculptures at TGL in 1993 that continue his exploration of space and form in intimate proportions. Despite their small size, the works create intriguing architectural spaces accented with additions in paint, charcoal and printed ink that contrast soft curls of thick handmade paper with the sharp edges of folded card. Modelled on the concept of a box, the pieces invite close inspection; the little constructions are about ‘looking into things, with as much of the sculpture inside as outside’.

Caro was not a printmaker, but this did not concern Tyler, who was keen to introduce artists to print whether experienced or not.

John Newman is another sculptor who was enticed to work at TGL and who, like Caro, completed three-dimensional work at the studio. Prior to working with Tyler, Newman’s sculptures were large and often installed

outdoors. In 1992, Newman was one of several artists to join Tyler on a trip to Japan. This visit, along with Newman’s own travels in Africa and India, alerted him to the significance of small objects in non-Western cultures and prompted him to reconsider scale in his work.

In an interview with the author at his New York studio in October 2014, Newman said, ‘I wanted to make things much more modestly.

I wanted to be able to control them. I wanted to be able to make them at home … I want to be able to sit at a table and imagine certain things that, then, I could form in front of me’.

The idea for On the other hand 1992–95, a series of sculptural multiples, began in Japan with simple, bulbous forms made from papiermache Kozo paper sheets; the final series took over three years to realise and incorporated a staggering range of techniques. The materiality of the sculptures was important

to Newman, and he set up tensions through material—between hard and soft (the cast polyester versus the felt in Starting from scratch (Das fingerspitzengefühl) 1995) and between fragile and sturdy (the delicate bamboo tea whisks versus the steel rod in that same work)—in the hope that, ‘like a metaphor, it would function as either a relationship or conflict that created a third meaning’.

Not all of the art produced at TGL took such an unconventional approach to printmaking.

Joan Mitchell worked with both lithographic and intaglio techniques, translating the lyrical language of her abstract paintings into prints of startling beauty. Mitchell created the series Sunflowers and Trees at TGL in 1992. Tyler has written of the importance of blue in the work that he and Mitchell completed together, and the luminous blue of Sunflowers II dominates an abstract composition of vigorous mark-

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making imbued with a measured sense of rhythm. In Trees IV, bold black trunks stand against a backdrop of vivid magenta punctuated by burnt orange, peachy cream and grey. Commanding in size and presence, these large diptychs are a triumph of technique from an intuitive colourist with an innate understanding of light and space.

From these massive lithographs, Mitchell moved to a drastically reduced format to create the portfolio Poems, an artist’s book of eight lithographs illuminating the words of Nathan Kernan. Literature, particularly poetry, was a major influence on Mitchell, and her sensitivity to the subtleties of language is clearly apparent in the seamless marriage of text and image in this portfolio. On film, we see her discussing the project with Rosenquist in the TGL artist studio. She is exacting in her description of how the text will appear:

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clean black against the white of the paper.

Completed just months before the artist’s death, these works are an assertive testament to Mitchell’s mastery of print.

Like Mitchell, Steven Sorman was an accomplished printmaker with a solid foundation in print techniques before coming to work at TGL. In 1988, Sorman created from away, a fixed, two-sided screen with a set of sculptural steps through the centre that incorporates tradition and innovation.

The screen’s brightly coloured front is comprised of lithographic and screenprinted elements in organic shapes, collaged to the surface and then painted. In striking contrast, the back of the screen is coloured in deep blue punctuated by meandering passages of exposed wood that recall Henri Matisse’s undulating line work. In an audio recording from the early 1990s, Sorman explains that he saw this

screen ‘as a kind of warm up exercise for then getting into a group of smaller pieces’, namely the seven linocuts those from away I–VII 1989, which echo the amorphous organic shapes and sinuous lines of the screen. To create this group of work, Sorman and Tyler collaborated via correspondence with the Fuji Paper Mills Cooperative in Tokushima, Japan, to have uniquely shaped papers created. The seven different shaped sheets made especially for those from away are combinations of two or three sheets of the same size, and so Sorman sees the works as a ‘little family of prints’.

The idea of a family of prints is a pleasing one and perhaps not too far-fetched a way of envisaging the work of Stella, Rosenquist, La Noue, Caro, Newman, Mitchell and Sorman.

Each artist used the workshops differently, harnessing the myriad of available techniques to produce works that pushed the boundaries

Pages 8–9: Frank Stella The Fountain 1992, woodcut, etching, aquatint, relief, drypoint, screenprint, collage. Gift of Orde Poynton Esq CMG, 1999 18290 © Frank Stella/ARS

Opposite: Anthony Caro Angle #8 1993, from the series Paper sculptures, paper and plaster.

Purchased with the assistance of the Orde Poynton Fund, 2002 121957 Right: James Rosenquist Skull snap 1989, from the series Welcome to the Water Planet, lithograph, collage, pressed paper pulp.

Purchased with the assistance of the Orde Poynton Fund, 2002 121134 © James Rosenquist/VAGA

of print in new and provocative directions.

Representing the full scope of art produced at Tyler’s print workshops, the projects created by these artists are related by place of origin and breadth of vision in a complex modern family.

At TGL, the journey to achieve a finished print was a fascinating one, but one rarely apparent to us as witnesses to the final product.

As an arts educator, Tyler wants people to be excited by prints and hopes to broaden our imagination of what print can mean by offering a glimpse behind the scenes of his workshops through film and still photography.

‘Show them exciting stuff and they’ll get excited’, says Tyler in a snippet of audio recording from the late 1980s, and the National Gallery of Australia intends to do just that this summer in an exhibition showcasing the work of Stella, Rosenquist, La Noue, Caro, Newman, Mitchell and

Sorman. The elaborate prints that these seven artists created with Tyler will be presented in the context of their making. Accompanying prints in all media and unique sculptural editions are behind-the-scenes photographs and a series of specially produced short films that show artists at work in the TGL studio, allowing audiences a rare insight into the technical aspects of fine art printmaking.

All works and the meticulous documentation on display are part of the NGA’s Kenneth Tyler collection, the most comprehensive collection of postwar American art outside the United States of America. Consisting of over seven thousand works of art and extensive holdings of documentary film, audio and photographic material, the collection provides an in-depth historical overview of the workings of the most innovative print workshop of the twentieth century and the artists who worked there.

BEHIND THE SCENES Some of the most extraordinary prints of the twentieth century. At the NGA from 4 December to 3 April For the bookshelf: Workshop: the Kenneth Tyler collection is available at the NGA Shop and selected bookstores nationally from November

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BEHIND THE SCENES AT TYLER GRAPHICS LTD Emilie Owens gets the inside stories from key players in America’s most innovative print workshop

Kenneth Tyler’s print workshops gave artists the opportunity to push the limits of printmaking. To facilitate the often radical projects that resulted from his ‘no rules’ ethos, Tyler selected a highly skilled team of printers and workshop staff who each played key roles in the success of his print studios. In search of insight into what it was really like inside these pioneering and creative high-pressure workshops, I have conducted interviews over the past three years with members of the Tyler Graphics Ltd (TGL) team. From Susan HoverOehme’s recollections of Friday afternoon baseball to Anthony Kirk’s birthday card from Frank Stella and from Stones the rabbit, who Mark Mahaffey brought to work to keep David Hockney company, to Kimberley Bursic’s steady hand under pressure, TGL emerged from these memories as a place of hard work, determination and camaraderie coloured by a palpable sense of excitement and fun.

John Hutcheson was Tyler’s right-hand man and workshop manager for over sixteen years.

He remembers the exhilaration of the early

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days at the Bedford Village studio, working on groundbreaking projects such as Frank Stella’s series Exotic birds 1977: ‘We were challenging the rules of original prints … The work was controversial at the time, but it affected and changed the entire world’s attitudes towards creative printmaking … we were inventing unheard of variations … I loved being a vital part of such important art. We were flying by the seat of our pants and it worked!’

A workshop on the scale of TGL is expensive to run. Despite this, John Wagner, who worked as Tyler’s associate director and chief financial officer, says, ‘in thirty years, I never heard Ken tell an artist that something wasn’t possible or was too expensive … My job was to stay out of the way—for the most part—and to try not to remind Ken of how much things cost’.

For Wagner, the TGL workshop holds many precious memories but one, in particular, stands out: ‘It is hard to come up with just one favourite memory of the workshop because there were many … The best has to be the day I met my future wife, Gabriella, there’.

BEHIND THE SCENES Some of the most extraordinary prints of the twentieth century. At the NGA from 4 December to 3 April For the bookshelf: Workshop: the Kenneth Tyler collection is available at the NGA Shop and selected bookstores nationally from November

Memories of working with artists were fresh in the minds of the TGL staff I interviewed.

Barbara Delano managed front-of-house operations and documentation for more than seventeen years, and her recollections offer insight into the lives and working methods of some of the twentieth century’s most significant artists: Robert Motherwell’s sporty new Cadillac convertible, which he purchased to replace the Rolls Royce he found too ostentatious; Celia Birtwell, ‘the perfect female version of David [Hockney]’, visiting to sit for Hockney’s series Moving focus 1984–87; Helen Frankenthaler’s romance with Stephen DuBrul, the inspiration for Valentine for Mr Wonderful 1995; and Friday afternoon champagne during the printing of James Rosenquist’s series Welcome to the Water Planet 1989. Delano also remembers the attractive young bodyguards sent to protect the crown princess of Sweden, who interned at TGL for a summer. The bodyguards would strip down and sunbathe while the princess worked, giving visitors, including a busload of MoMA

members, a decidedly different visual thrill than they might have expected.

Rodney Konopaki, specialist etcher and another long-serving member of the TGL team, remembers the night he arrived in Bedford Village to begin work with Tyler: ‘It was a dark and rainy evening … Claes Oldenburg was there, and they were proofing stones for Chicago stuffed with numbers. Ken was kinetic, buzzing around like he often did when projects were underway. I came to know this buzz very well. He barely greeted me and said, “Put your bags down and grab a sponge. Let’s get printing” ’. Learning was central to the culture of TGL. Konopaki’s next project was with Nancy Graves, whom he recalls ‘had made a few prints prior to … TGL, and we were really learning together’.

Marabeth Cohen-Tyler started at the workshop in 1985 and, after marrying Tyler, became half of what the pair refers to as ‘The TGL Satellite Duo’. Cohen-Tyler used her skills as a photographer to document artists in the studio, and her photographs

provide a valuable record of the dynamic creative environment at TGL. During her early years, Cohen-Tyler: ‘… enjoyed how no one was pigeonholed into a single job or skill set. The best collaborators moved across disciplines: from clerical work … to inking plates, to papermaking and printing, to schmoozing with clients in the gallery at openings. There was no rigid hierarchical ladder. Instead, at Tyler Graphics, we were like hummingbirds fluttering with bees in an overgrown flower garden’.

What became most apparent to me while collecting these memories was the significance of collaboration, and these interviews allow us a glimpse beyond the technical brilliance for which TGL was known and into the private moments that helped make the workshop a vital place around which its staff built careers, forged friendships and dedicated themselves to their passion for print. These and other interviews will be published in November in Workshop: the Kenneth Tyler collection, a new book illuminating the art and people of TGL.

Clockwise from top left: Rodney Konopaki, Kim Halliday, John Hutcheson and Jab Baum screen-printing Frank Stella’s Bermuda petrel from the series Exotic birds, Tyler Graphics Ltd, Bedford Village, New York, 1978 Photo: Lindsay Green 183892

Anthony Kirk pulling an impression for Steven Sorman’s when from his series the long year after printing with red encaustic paint, Tyler Graphics Ltd, Mount Kisco, New York, 1992 Photo: Kenneth Tyler 190802

Nancy Graves consulting with Rodney Konopaki as she mixes inks for her intaglio prints, Tyler Graphics Ltd, Bedford Village, New York, 1977 Photo: Douglas Abdelnour 187877

Mark Mahaffey carrying newly inked magnesium printing element for Stubb & Flask Kill a Right Whale (dome) from Frank Stella’s series Moby Dick domes, Tyler Graphics Ltd, Mount Kisco, New York, 1988 Photo: Marabeth Cohen-Tyler 183037

All photos in this feature from the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, gift of Kenneth Tyler, 2002

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Stanislaus Rapotec Experience in summer no 2 1964 (detail), polyvinyl acetate and pigment on composition board All works in this feature from National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Alan Boxer Bequest, 2014 264588

A TASTE OF ART Gerard Vaughan responds to the question ‘Do you have a favourite work of art, artist, art movement, region, style?’ with his thoughts on taste

The first issue of Artonview this year included an interview with Director Gerard Vaughan.

One question ended up on the cutting-room floor, not because Gerard’s answer wasn’t interesting (far from it) but because it deserved an article of its own. Indeed, what we find in his answer to this seemingly simple question is an approach to art that encourages a greater consideration and appreciation of taste and how it changes over time and from place to place.

We might prefer Impressionism to Surrealism or the Dutch masters to the Italians, for instance, but the greatest benefit for art lovers comes from experiencing a wide variety of art, and particularly art that we might not otherwise think is relevant to us, to our lives and to our time. Thinking about who valued, or still values, this or that artist, work of art or art form and why, may expand our own palates and, if we’re lucky, our world views. Artists come in and out of fashion, and the art market reflects this, and sometimes directs it.

So, when Gerard, who is a historian of taste, was asked, ‘Do you have a favourite work of art, artist, art movement, region, style?’ this was his response.

I’ve often been asked that question—in other roles, too—and I suppose that my instant answer has always been, ‘I do have a favourite work of art but it changes every day’. In a funny way, that’s because I walk around the galleries; there are different things on my mind every day, different moments when I’m reading about this or thinking about that— some future exhibition or a new lecture for a conference—and suddenly I’m concentrating on particular works. But, as an art historian, I have always studied the history of taste and the history of art collecting, so I’m deeply interested in shifts in taste: why things come into fashion and go out of fashion, why particular artists rise above the others or why the art market supports enormous prices for one artist but not for another who might strike me as equally interesting or important art historically—what I might call the social history of art. And that probably means, by definition, that my tastes are wide and varied.

I do have a great belief in quality in art.

I believe in the concept of the masterpiece.

Not every picture that every artist produces is a masterpiece. Some artists paint more

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masterpieces, or paint more consistently well, than others. Some are luckier when it comes to having the right art dealer, the right marketing program, getting the right people to write about their art or to buy it. That all gets sorted out, to an extent, by posterity.

As a historian of taste, I look back and see artists we hardly notice today who were the heroes of their moment. Why have they been forgotten? Why don’t we value their art today?

Why do we choose to privilege other kinds of art and artists? Why are New York School pictures so sought after by the world’s mega rich and why, right now, are old masters so relatively neglected by the art market? These are all interesting questions for me. So, to come back, walking around the NGA, I do have key favourites, but others emerge and recede in my focus according to the interests of the moment.

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The Australian newspaper asked me the week I arrived if I would pose for a photograph with one of my favourite works of art, and I requested that the photograph be taken in front of the Lake Sentani double figures from New Guinea, which I think is a remarkable, fantastic work, a global masterpiece—once in the collection of Jacob Epstein. But there are a dozen other things I could have stood in front of. Like everybody else, I believe that Blue poles 1952 is perhaps the defining work of this institution, our principal destination picture. If you were to stop anyone in the street anywhere in this country and say, ‘Tell us about the art collection of the NGA in Canberra. What have they got?’, most people would say, ‘They’ve got Blue poles; they’ve got Jackson Pollock’.

And there is no question that it is one of the greatest twentieth‑century pictures in the

world. So, we have an incomparable global masterpiece—an American masterpiece at the same time—in many ways defining the collection. In terms of Australian art, many people and especially school children, following a visit to the NGA, might remember above all Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly series.

Because I study taste and shifts in taste, I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking about artists who were once extremely prominent but have become sidelined, even forgotten—whom, today, even specialists regard as minor. Why are they not written about? Why aren’t they included in the textbooks in the way other artists are? At the end of the day, it’s got to be about understanding both inherent quality and a picture’s social, cultural and art historical relevance—the story it can tell in terms of the society in which it was produced and, therefore, the society it reflects.

Opposite: Elwyn Lynn Winter field 1964, oil and mixed media on canvas 264584 Right: Arthur Boyd Dreaming bridegroom II 1958, oil and tempera on canvas Reproduced with the permission of Bundanon Trust 255450

The Alan Boxer Bequest to the NGA is full of masterpieces; most of the great Australian painters of the 1950s and 1960s are there.

We’ve got Boyd, we’ve got Nolan, Albert Tucker, John Perceval and Charles Blackman, but there is another artist included in the bequest who was popular in his day and regarded as representing the global avant-garde but has since been somewhat overlooked: Stanislaus Rapotec. He was an Abstractionist.

For me, the Rapotec is one of the great masterpieces of the Boxer bequest. It’s a fabulous picture and yet his name is hardly recalled today. Some might argue he’s had his moment. But I have no doubt that Alan Boxer, when he purchased that work, felt he was acquiring someone he saw as radical and totally in line with the global contemporary mainstream—more advanced than the figurative Expressionists we are constantly

urged by a deluge of publications to regard as representing Australian modernity. Perhaps it’s time to reassess a whole group of our mid-century Abstractionists. And the fantastic picture by Elwyn Lynn in the bequest, almost like a Antoni Tàpies, reinforces this.

All of this makes art history perpetually thought-provoking, and what makes galleries and museums so interesting is that, as the years go on, this kind of layering becomes one of the most fascinating and enduring aspects of our collections. A well-curated museum collection not only reflects the tastes of the generations of directors and curators who have built it up but also becomes beyond taste.

Why do directors and curators today choose to hang some artists but not others? And what will curators fifty years from now regard as important? I suspect that, if we could come back later this century, we’d find that a lot of

the works we admire most today won’t be on view and a lot of works on the racks right now might well be out. And that’s good. That’s all part of the cut and thrust of the very complex art world we inhabit—and we should never forget the shifting interests and motivations of the art market, and the pressure to promote expenditure on certain kinds of art, for better or worse.

At the end of the day, we need to be openminded and courageous, willing to look beyond the fads of the moment, the favourites of certain art critics and, yes, even curators, and to concentrate on quality and how a work of art might both speak to its moment and illuminate the future.

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Shearing the rams 1889–90 (detail), oil paint on canvas mounted on board. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Felton Bequest Fund, 1932 267613

‘PAINT WHAT YOU LOVE’ Mary Eagle introduces us to the poetry that Tom Roberts found in his rural subjects, which defined his concept of an Australian way of life

Completing Shearing the rams 1889–90, Tom Roberts was buoyed by the realisation that he had brought off a major work of art. Its success was recognised immediately by country people who knew the subject at first hand. Back in Melbourne, even the influential lecturer, critic and gallery trustee James Smith praised the painting. Smith nonetheless opposed the purchase of the work by the National Gallery of Victoria and saw fit to present his case in a lengthy editorial for the Melbourne Argus of 28 June 1890.

He wrote, ‘provinciality is as exceptionable and as distinctly a note of inferiority in art as in society … The trustees are told to purchase the work [Shearing the rams] because it is a true Australian shearing in the true Australian colour’; however, ‘something besides truth of Australian colour and fidelity of fact is required’ for a painting to be art. ‘A picture

must of course represent something which is seen, or is supposed to be seen, in some particular place at some particular time’ but the true work of art does much more; it reverberates universally ‘for all time (and all places)’, with ‘qualities which make it “for all who look upon it, to the utmost serviceable, memorable and beautiful” ’.

Roberts was in full agreement with these sentiments, which is why he was stung by Smith’s blindness to the classical reference in his painting’s composition and its ambient poetry. His response, published in Argus on 4 July, has become the most quoted of all artist’s statements in Australian art history:

It seems to me that one of the best words spoken to an artist is ‘Paint what you love, and love what you paint’ … and so it came that being in the bush and feeling the delight and fascination of the great pastoral life and work I have tried to express it … I had there [in Shearing

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Left: The quarry, Maria Island 1926, oil paint on canvas. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, the Oscar Paul collection, gift of Henriette von Dallwitz and of Richard Paul in honour of his father, 1965 45161 Opposite: A quiet day on Darebin Creek 1885, oil paint on pine wood panel. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1969 41399

the rams] the best expression of my subject, a subject noble enough and worthy enough if I could express the meaning and spirit—of strong masculine labour, the patience of the animals whose year’s growth is being stripped from them for man’s use, and the great human interest of the whole scene.

In conclusion, ‘I would only wish to add, of what the writer says that art should be of all times, not of one time, of all places, not of one place, that I believe it should rather be taken conversely—that by making art the perfect expression of one time and one place, it becomes art for all time and of all places’.

A style of Federal politics and the military legend of ANZAC have come to represent Australia’s national image abroad. Since both postdate the 1880s and 1890s, it should not surprise us if Roberts’s concept of the ‘native’ Australian way of life should now seem foreign. In the 1996 book Tom Roberts, Virginia

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Spate, writing on the subject of Roberts and the British Empire, observed that Roberts described nature as a ‘mistress’; Leigh Astbury, writing about Roberts as a proponent of nineteenth-century masculinist culture, saw fit to quote artist John Russell’s description of Roberts’s ‘wondrously tender manner’ with women and to note his ‘proclivity for sensitive portraits of women’; and I suggested that Roberts’s stand-out achievement was to represent ‘the intimate texture of life at first hand’, an ambition that arose for him in Europe in the early 1880s.

Roberts gave a national title to only three paintings in his entire oeuvre: his first, An Australian native 1888, the portrait of a young native-born Victorian woman of modest composure, was a Centenary picture; the second, the Opening of the First Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia

1903 was commissioned as a historical record; and Australian pastoral 1904–05, a scene of women and men dancing in the open air at Sydney’s Cremorne Point, grew from a small 1893 etching into an expatriate dream of an Australian ‘golden summer’.

Family, love and friendship were important to Roberts; they took him places and influenced his creative imagination. An early instance of this, Churchyard at Shillingstone 1884, was painted in England after a summer pilgrimage through Dorset, his home county, from which he had emigrated as a boy just three months after his father’s unexpected death. Without the viewer needing to be cued to the indirect biographical reference, the quiet scene of tombstones in the churchyard makes its suggestion about the dead who rest there, under a protective canopy of trees.

Likewise, other paintings by Roberts benefited

from, but did not directly refer to, a personal association that countryside had for him.

He favoured Tasmania as a sketching place from early on. It was where he went sneakily from Melbourne at a low moment in 1890.

His 1920s sketching trips to Tasmania were productive of ebullient skies and a soaring vista, such as in The quarry, Maria Island 1926. He met both his wives in Tasmania: the first, Lillie Williamson, in Launceston in March 1878. It is a toss up whether Tom and cousin Henson Bancroft were visiting for the opening of an Art Union or for a concert in which another cousin, Alice Fairthorne, was to sing. Lillie and Alice shared a music teacher and had performed together in concerts in Launceston. Cementing the connection, Lillie and Tom were passengers on the same steamer to Melbourne. Within a year they were sufficiently good friends for Tom to enter his

name and year of birth into Lillie’s birthday book, as I discovered when visiting their daughter-in-law in 1982.

Roberts’s major works were of places that had some personal resonance for him.

Outdoor painters had frequented Darebin Creek and Heidelberg before he went there.

Having no personal association with those places, he produced no major painting of them apart from A quiet day on Darebin Creek 1885.

Hawthorn, Box Hill, Gembrook and Corowa were another matter. Family lore has it that the youth crossing the bridge on horseback in Winter morning after rain, Gardiner’s Creek 1885 is one of Tom’s cousins, Charles Germaine Burchill. The 9-by-5 impression Evening train to Hawthorn of around 1889 represented a scene with which he was very familiar from decades of visiting the Burchills at Glenferrie Road, Hawthorn. The general store at Gembrook,

where Roberts and his cohorts visited for weekend painting excursions, was managed by two of the Burchill brothers. Tom was a Pommy newcomer but every single one of his cousins—Burchill, Higgs, Fairthorne, Iles, Evans, Catterson—were ‘native-born’ colonials.

The concept of belonging to Australia by virtue of birth, much advertised by the Australian Natives Association in the decades leading to Federation, resonated with Roberts in ways less specific to Australia. In England between 1881 and 1885, he became a devotee of the novels of Thomas Hardy (who, like him, was a native of Dorchester) and of paintings by artists such as Jules Bastien-Lepage that showed country folk embedded in their saltof-the-earth folk traditions. Upon returning to Australia in 1885, he sought out subjects that showed an affinity between people and their native setting. By painting such

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subjects, Roberts made Australia his home of preference. It would be by his connivance that Melbourne’s gossipy weekly Table Talk on 15 March 1923 would announce his third arrival in Australia under a headline that quoted the title of one of Hardy’s novels ‘The return of the native’. However, it is an open question whether Roberts’s adoption of Australia made his country subjects ‘national’.

Box Hill, which became famous in Australian art as the scene of outdoor paintings by Roberts and his friends Frederick McCubbin, Arthur Streeton, Louis Abrahams and Jane Sutherland, had particular meaning for Roberts. It was where he first encountered Australian bushland, at the age of thirteen, fresh off the ship from England, fatherless and bewildered by the sudden transition in his life. In 1870, Roberts lived at Box Hill for a while, his mother having

temporarily exchanged her accommodation in Richmond for the Houstons’ house next door to where her sister Ann Higgs lay ill.

Like Dorset, the Box Hill around which the newcomer roamed was occupied by wood carters, charcoal burners, apple growers, small farmers and rural cottagers. Fifteen years later, freshly arrived again from study at the Royal Academy Schools, Roberts returned to Box Hill with two artist friends and set up a weekend painting camp near the creek and immediately adjacent to the bark-shingled hut owned by David and Amelia Houston.

Running in his head as he painted such works as Turning the soil c 1886, Charcoal burners 1886 and the profoundly elegiac ‘Evening, when the quiet east flushes faintly at the sun’s last look’ c 1887 were the scenes of Dorset pictured in Thomas Hardy’s novels and his own matching memories of Box Hill.

Roberts was introduced to Australian pastoral life at Corowa in December 1886 when he attended the marriage of a Burchill cousin to the daughter of Alexander Anderson of Brocklesby station. In September 1888 he wangled an invitation to visit during the shearing season when, during the one or two weeks that Brocklesby’s shearing lasted, he produced some seventy to eighty small sketches. Putting together information about the shearing seasons of 1888 and 1889, and the sequence of events outlined by Roberts in his response to Smith, this shearing season, not the next, was when he took in the atmospherics of a shed in action: ‘lying on piled up woolbales, and hearing and seeing the troops come pattering into their pens, the quick running of the wool-carriers, the screwing of the presses, the subdued hum of hard, fast working …’ .

He went on to relate that the following year

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262633 237080 165581 266890 268607

Page 22, from top: Winter morning after rain, Gardiner’s Creek 1885, oil paint on canvas. Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, MJM Carter AO Collection through the Art Gallery of South Australia Foundation to mark the 130th anniversary of the Gallery, 2011 Evening train to Hawthorn c 1889, oil paint on cedar panel. Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Edward Stinson Bequest Fund, 1991 Page 23: ‘Evening, when the quiet east flushes faintly at the sun’s last look’ c 1887, oil paint on canvas. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, WH Short Bequest, 1944 Left: Turning the soil c 1886, oil paint on panel.

Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, South Australian Government Grant, 1982 Opposite: Charcoal burners 1886, oil paint on canvas.

Art Gallery of Ballarat, bequest of JR Hartley, 1961

Anderson generously ‘arranged all matters to suit’ his plan to paint the scene on a large canvas in situ. The district’s shearing season had fallen a full month earlier that year, done and dusted at Brocklesby a fortnight before Roberts arrived. He could immediately set up his easel in the empty woolshed and begin the work of laying in the composition and refining the figure studies.

Anderson’s employees were available as models. ‘A good shearer received £12 to pose as required for a good many days,’ and had to pose again when Roberts decided to improve the composition by altering the placement and poses of the foremost shearers, whereas ‘a merry-faced tar-boy got a pound or two to stand to attention when required’—the ‘boy’ laughing out at us is young Susan Bourne, the overseer’s daughter. Over three months, he slowly brought the subject near to completion.

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Toward the end of November, a farmer hunting for lost sheep came into the woolshed at Redlands and found ‘a veritable “Landseer” or “Raphael”—calmly and unostentatiously squatting down on the shearing board … dressed in blue shirt and moleskins or cords (I forget which), with brush in hand, giving the last finishing touches to a picture in oils, about 5 ft by 4 ft …’ , as was reported in the Corowa Free Press on 29 November 1890.

A few last‑minute touches in his city studio the following May completed the work.

Living in quarters near the woolshed ten miles from the main homestead and Corowa, Roberts was circled by a broad horizon of thinly grassed red-sand country with little else to distract him apart from sheep and passing drovers. Returning in the hot summer of 1891 to paint A break away!, he relegated the action to one corner of his image, so making

the landscape’s sublime emptiness his main subject. By then, Roberts’s pattern of work was established. He relied on compatible hosts to give him what he required. Principally this was time, unstressed time, in which he could linger with a subject and take it in through a synaesthesia of sights, sounds, scents and suggestions of metaphor. In Roberts’s papers at the Mitchell Library are some notes, which he scrawled from the saddle in 1894 while trekking through hilly country in northern New South Wales, comparing the grass trees to London guards with busbies, the high rounded banks to human shoulders, the fringe of native oaks against the evening sky to the hair of a woman. Night brought music: … the orchestra of crickets chirp and chirp, the tree frog easy craaak further down in the wet blady grass, another like a castanet, and down where the creek moves silently under the range a horrible bass ‘parrorchal phot’ now and

again, occasionally the clear cry of the plover.

The intense activity is a stress … and it rests the thoughts to see the still line of gums up the hill crest, dusk and dark against the moonlit sky and a long smudge of fleecy whiteness that streaks slowly across the quiet heaven and leaves the moon to look down from her dead solitude on this endless agitation that underlies our being.

TOM ROBERTS A retrospective of Australia’s premier Impressionist, who built for us a national identity as the country embarked on the journey to become a Federation.

At the NGA from 4 December to 10 April For the bookshelf: Tom Roberts will be available at the NGA Shop and selected bookstores nationally from December For the diary: Members opening party, book now! 4 December, 6.00 pm

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Simbai people, Madang province Headdress 2012, wood, feathers, fur and beetles 2013.11.01_051 All works in this feature from National Museum and Art Gallery, Port Moresby

BUILT ON CULTURE Andrew Moutu and Peter Naumann celebrate the art and culture of Papua New Guinea in the fortieth year since the country’s independence

The realisation of a national museum for Papua New Guinea coincided with the emergence of the country as an independent state. Even before the museum was built in 1975, key individuals, who provided the administrative and political leadership that ushered the country into existence, saw how important it was to invest time and energy into building the foundations of a national museum. Now home to over eighty thousand of the country’s most remarkable cultural treasures, historical remains, contemporary art and more, the museum celebrates forty years of PNG independence with an exhibition displaying the foundations of PNG’s unique national identity.

The exhibition Built on culture: the art of Papua New Guinea, celebrating 40 years of PNG independence, which is supported by the Australian Government, will feature over a hundred outstanding works of art from the museum’s extensive collection. The title of the exhibition refers to how the country is shaped by over eight hundred cultural and language groups, who came together in 1975 as a single nation. However, it also refers to how, in 1959, the museum and art gallery

was in the basement rooms of the building that housed PNG’s first House of Assembly and, then, National Parliament. The modern independent nation of Papua New Guinea was literally forged out of and physically above the foundations of the cultural collections of the nation.

The exhibition will include works from each of PNG’s twenty provinces, the autonomous region of Bougainville and the National Capital District. On display will be enigmatic stone sculptures from thousands of years ago and stunning works of art made in recent decades, including paintings and prints by Mathias Kauage, Jakupa Ako and Timothy Akis, who, around the time of PNG’s independence, forged a new style of art fusing traditional stories with new forms of expression.

Almost all the objects in Built on culture have never been on public display, due to the lack of adequate display spaces and a recent history of administrative trouble that had brought the museum into stagnation. With the Australian Government’s assistance, however, the museum has undergone significant change both in management and in its physical structure.

The building is now repaired and some of the galleries renovated, and we are on a path to full rehabilitation and growth. Built on culture, which opens in September, not only celebrates our independence but also draws on our knowledge of the past and our anticipation of the future. It will be the first of many great displays to come.

Two of the oldest pieces on display are stone sculptures made some five thousands years ago in the Highlands. One of these pieces is a bird-shaped pestle, which was collected from Ningerum in the upper Fly River region by the late Herman Mandu, former chief archaeologist at the PNG National Museum and Art Gallery. Bird-shaped pestles come from areas of New Guinea where both bird-of-paradise and taro are found and are thought to have been used to make taro pudding three to five thousand years ago.

The distribution centre of these stone pestles is predominately in the Eastern Highlands, but they are also known to come from Morobe province and areas around the Sepik and upper Fly rivers—and wanderers and traders are thought to have carried them further afield.

In areas where taro was not available they may

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have been used as talismans and in ceremonial food production. Another stone figure in the exhibition resembles the National Gallery of Australia’s ancient Ambum stone and is likely as old. These exceedingly rare sculptures were created by unknown prehistoric cultures in the Enga province in the Highlands around the same time as the bird-shaped pestle, but they show a higher degree of figurative detail.

Although not old, a Simbai headdress 2012 is perhaps the most amazing item on display. To make this headdress, you must collect thousands of iridescent green beetles.

The beetles’ heads are then carefully placed in a concentric pattern around melon-like hats. The piece is finished off with cuscus-fur bands and cockatoo and cassowary feathers.

In ceremony in the Simbai area of Madang province, as many as twenty men would dance in these intricate and spectacularly arrayed

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headdresses. Another recent work is a skeleton sculpture made in response to the growing tuberculosis epidemic that threatens many parts of contemporary PNG; it is a tour de force of delicate carving from the hard black central section of the ebony tree.

The items in Built on culture are all among the most valued treasures in the care of the museum and were collected over a long period of time—some from as early as 1886 and others very recently. A highlight will be the first display in PNG of a selection of cultural works known as the Official Papuan Collection. More than fifty district and patrol officers under the direction of Sir Hubert Murray, Australia’s Lieutenant-Governor of Papua from 1908 to 1940, amassed the three thousand objects in this collection over a period of twenty-six years. The works were collected from what was once the Territory of

Papua. Rarely displayed in Australia and never in Papua New Guinea, the collection has been in storage in Australia for seventy-five years and will form a key component to the exhibition, tracing the development of a new nation.

Colonial administrators as well as our first Papua New Guinean leader, Sir Michael Somare, were significant people that shaped our nation state and were also some of the greatest proponents for establishing a national museum. Leaders the world over have long recognised the importance of culture in the development of national identity. In a country such as PNG, with over eight hundred languages and many different peoples, culture plays a vital role in bringing people together and developing a shared understanding of our past. This is the cultural foundation on which PNG will develop a truly modern, independent and vibrant future.

Nowadays, the museum does not collect that much because of financial constraints.

Some items come in as gifts and others are confiscated as illegal exports but most are collected by the museum or through collaborations with external organisations and museums. Unlike most of our counterparts in other metropolitan centres around the world, our museum is a regulatory government authority. We ensure that development interventions do not compromise the archaeological and cultural integrity of our found heritage, and we regulate the overseas traffic of national cultural property, historical remains and natural-history specimens in concert with other key government agencies.

New capital projects such as the International Convention Center, the historic Old Parliament House and a proposed new Modern History Museum add to our portfolio

as we continue to mould the museum into a significant place for fun and learning in PNG. Some overseas museums have enquired about hosting Built on culture once it closes here, but we are very focused on renovating galleries, conserving works of art, presenting the exhibition, developing school and public programs and researching the collection.

So, at this stage, we are uncertain about touring the works. We are also conscious that, leading up to and during the forthcoming APEC meeting scheduled to be held in Port Moresby in 2017, a display of the rich cultural heritage of this nation is our first priority.

From far left: Highlands region Bird-shaped pestle c 1500 BCE, stone Tukusenda village, Enga province Stone figure c 1500 BCE, stone Sepik River area, East Sepik province Mask figure late 19th century, wood Noel Tokwa Skeleton carving 2010, ebony wood Wanenara area, Eastern Highlands Female figure early 20th century, wood

BUILT ON CULTURE Celebrating the cultural diversity that forms the vibrant democracy of present-day Papua New Guinea.

At the PNG National Museum and Art Gallery from 16 September

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Christian Thompson Howl your troubles 2011, printed 2013, from the series Native’s instinct, chromogenic print. Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection, acquired 2013 Reproduction courtesy the artist and Michael Reid (Sydney)

MAMA VS MOMA Mary-Lou Nugent and Eric Meredith spoke to some of Australia’s most recently appointed art gallery directors about the regional experience

When we visit Paris, we go to the Louvre.

In London, it’s the National Gallery and, if there’s time, the Tate and V&A. New York is MoMA, the Met and the Guggenheim. We time Venice for the biennale. And then there’s the Prado in Madrid, the Uffizi in Florence and Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum. These are destinations of international renown. They attract millions and house the world’s greatest masterpieces or are themselves masterpieces.

So, why is it that we sometimes forget those galleries closest to us? They are small in comparison but the experiences to be had can be similarly rewarding. Understandably, we get caught up in the daily ritual of our lives but perhaps it’s time to reflect on the richness that regular local art experiences can bring, if we don’t already.

So, with that in mind and considering the atmosphere of change and renewal that comes with a new director at a gallery (which we at the NGA experienced less than a year ago), we thought it time to talk to some recently appointed heads of regional galleries in Australia, including Marcus Schutenko at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT) in Darwin, Jacqui Hemsley

of Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA) on the border on New South Wales and Victoria, Kallie Blauhorn of Victoria’s Monash Gallery of Art (MGA) and Bridget Guthrie at Tamworth Regional Gallery in the New England region of New South Wales. We spoke to them about the issues regional galleries face, and how they combat them, about their collections and forthcoming exhibitions and about the future for their institutions.

Coming up for Tamworth Regional Gallery in December, for instance, is Roy Jackson retrospective 1963–2013, which later tours to Wollongong, Orange and Maitland. With Jackson’s death in July 2013, Guthrie says, ‘we lost a unique voice in Australian art … not easy to characterise’. In the longer term, the gallery will also be addressing ‘the links to place and identity’ distinct to Tamworth—such as embracing the Tamworth Country Music Festival and ‘this unique influx of cultural tourism’ with their upcoming exhibition Beyond boot scooting. Guthrie hopes to ‘capture new audiences who would not typically seek out the arts and to address existing stereotypes’.

Further still, she is already thinking about the gallery’s centenary year in 2019 and says they

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will celebrate ‘with one hundred highlights from our collection’.

Undergoing the most significant changes at the moment is undoubtedly MAMA (until recently, Albury Regional Art Gallery). They have a flashy new building and new facilities, a catchy new name and a new and experienced director piloting them into the future. MAMA opens this month and, within the first few months, will be showing five exhibitions: Wiradjuri ngurambanggu (On Wiraduri Country), Deborah Kelly’s No human being is illegal (in all our glory), Andrew Pearce’s music videos filmed in the local region in Sonic splendour, emerging artist Nicole Welch’s Eastern interiors and the NGA’s touring show Impressions of Paris. ‘We wanted to go from celebrating local, celebrating the visual arts in Australia and then on an international stage’, said Hemsley, teasingly adding, ‘The next blockbuster

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exhibition after Impressions of Paris will showcase an international collection, toured from the United States of America with works from private collections in Germany’.

Exhibitions at MAGNT have a decidedly contemporary flavour this season with Monster Pop!, the NGA’s Light moves: contemporary Australian video art, Museum of Sydney’s Towers of tomorrow with LEGO® bricks and the annual Telstra National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Award (NATSIAA). They are also ‘developing a series of major surveys of significant Northern Territory artists as part of a new focus on supporting contemporary art in the top end of Australia’, says Schutenko.

The first, Evolution: a disrespective by Rob Brown, was presented last year and will be followed by a showcase of work by renowned Darwin papermaker Winsome Jobling and, later, a survey on printmaker Frank Gohier.

The NATSIAA is always a big event for contemporary Australian art and is now in its thirty-second year. ‘Next year, we mark twentyfive years of partnering with Telstra,’ says Schutenko, ‘and it is going to be something very special!’

The MGA also has a yearly art award show, albeit with a more specialised focus—the Bowness Photography Prize, the winner of which will be announced on 1 October— and the gallery itself is celebrating twenty five years since it opened. ‘It’s both a great time to reflect as well as plan for our future’, says Blauhorn. ‘I think the title of our recent publication, The first 25 years, summarises our current frame of mind, as it pays respect to where we’ve come from and references the fact that we are looking ahead to our next twenty-five years and growing our mission of being the home of Australian photography.’

Highlights from the MGA Collection at Monash Gallery of Art, 2015

The MGA specialises and, for this reason, has ‘one of the most focused and purposeful public art collections in Australia. Fostering the heritage of photography and supporting the photographic works of today’s artists are central to our mission and we aim to achieve this through both our collection building and exhibition calendar’.

Similarly, MAMA has a strong photography collection, supported by their acquisitive National Photography Prize. But smaller collections of paintings, ceramics, bronzes, woodcarvings, sculptures and Indigenous artefacts have also been built up over the years—partly through their Albury Art Prize established in 1947, which has brought in ‘over 130 works, including some by artists such as Fred Williams, Kenneth Jack, Noel Counihan, Mary Beetson and Franz Kempf’. MAMA’s collection contains 2400 items and is still

growing, says Hemsley, ‘quicker now that we are near opening our new gallery’, with its ‘seven flexible exhibition spaces, an education workshop, permanent collection storage, an accessible loading dock, a restaurant and a shop’.

Many regional galleries have modest collections with particular and important strengths. The textiles of Tamworth Regional Gallery are another good example. Among them are ‘works from some of Australia’s most innovative and acclaimed fibre textile artists as well as local craft persons and regional artists’, says Guthrie. The collection forms an important and growing record of the development of textile practice not only in the region but also Australia-wide, contributing significantly to the ongoing national dialogue on contemporary craft practice. The first Tamworth Textile Triennial,

held in 2011, ‘marked an important new phase in the evolution of the Tamworth Regional Gallery’s Fibre Textile Collection. The triennial showcases the best of textile art from across the country … attracting the participation of artists from all states, wide audiences and critical review’. Tamworth’s collection began in 1919, when artist John Salvana presented the city council with one hundred paintings, drawings, etchings and art books to ‘encourage art in the country’.

MAGNT, on the other hand, as a museum and gallery, has a much wider lens, but one still focused on its region, reflecting ‘the distinctive natural history, cultural heritage and visual art of northern Australia’ through works ‘that explore cultural issues, identities, linkages and exchanges within the Northern Territory and with its neighbours’, says Schutenko. Contemporary Indigenous art

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Left: Fiona Gavino Perspectives shift 2008, pith cane. Tamworth Regional Gallery, Tamworth, acquired 2009 Photo: Lou Farina 2008 gavino f

Opposite: Russell Drysdale Albury platform 1943, gouache and ink on pulpboard. Murray Art Museum Albury, donated by the Herbert family, 1989 Drysdale

is its strength—acquired mainly through NATSIAA, which has been going since 1984— but they also have ‘Southeast Asian textiles that document cultural and ethnic diversity in the region and a significant collection of ceramics that tell the story of extensive trade and exchanges across the region from the seventeenth century onward’. Acquisitions are made through donation, bequest, commission and purchase, and Schutenko makes a point of mentioning the ‘donors, sponsors and funding bodies, whose generosity ensures that we can continue to build and care for our collection and inspire, engage and foster a greater understanding of the Northern Territory and its nearest neighbours’.

Just as reflecting the communities in which they operate is central to the concerns of regional galleries, so too is engaging these communities. MAMA illustrates this ‘nurturing’

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aspect nicely (to extend the metaphor to which their acronym so easily lends itself) with their ‘mini narratives and peepholes’ that aim to deliver ‘art by accident’ to younger audiences, the building’s 24‑hour ‘art skin’ and the ‘playful, dynamic, changing public art and ongoing place creation programs’ that connect MAMA with QEII Square and Albury’s CBD. ‘We want people excited about art even before they walk through MAMA’s doors’, says Hemsley. The new building will also provide ‘multipurpose spaces, 24-hour educational suite access and … hot desks for private creative industry professionals such as photographers, filmmakers, graphic designers, interior designers and architects to intermingle with the MAMA team in a creative environment’.

This creative local community engagement is very much at the core of regional galleries

and MAMA is tackling it head on. One of ‘the biggest challenges,’ says Hemsley, ‘is maintaining the ethos of public galleries as accessible stepping stones for regional artists … and providing the community with creative opportunities to celebrate and appreciate the arts … The modern regional gallery focuses on the customer not the collection’. Tamworth, too, wants to provide ‘opportunities for innovation and creativity to flourish’, says Guthrie, and to ‘generate meaningful audience engagement and create a safe place for unsafe discussions’. The MGA’s Blauhorn characterises this engagement by borrowing the slogan of America’s Southwest Airlines, ‘We like to think of ourselves as a Customer Service company that happens to fly airplanes’. Of course, we’d insert ‘collect and exhibit art’, but the point she is making is that the slogan is ‘great in reminding us that success is putting our

customers at the heart of all we do’. The MGA is ‘looking ahead to 2020 and developing a strategy to centralise the gallery around the many customers we service, whether they be artists, public and private galleries, collectors, patrons or members of the community’.

A sentiment reflected by Schutenko, who identifies that perhaps the most important ongoing commitment for MAGNT is ‘representing the needs and expectations of the Northern Territory community through dynamic programming decisions and by creating vibrant local spaces’. This speaks volumes to the importance of community to a regional gallery, particularly because, after becoming a statutory body on 1 July 2014, MAGNT has been in a ‘period of intensive strategic planning across all sites and areas of its programs’. Their other core goals are ‘engaging audiences in new and innovative

ways, strengthening our collection to inform our research and exhibition development strategies and improving discoverability both in the gallery and online’, he says. But achieving these goals is not always easy. ‘There are many issues that face institutions such as MAGNT’, Schutenko says: ‘Balancing deep engagement with one’s local community while being a leader both nationally and internationally (these are not necessarily mutually exclusive), securing the resources to realise one’s vision, ensuring continual improvement to keep up with or ahead of best practice’.

Hemsley, too, suggests that this balancing act is becoming an increasingly pressing issue: ‘Regional galleries must compete on levels that were unheard of in the recent past: the internet, accessible travel choices, leisure options and lack of time have made a traditional gallery experience more difficult to

achieve’. Audience expectations are higher than they have ever been, and the danger is that ‘galleries that do not meet these expectations are finding their audiences dwindle as they move to galleries and museums that do value branding and entertainment, that are attractive and vibrant spaces’. So, how do our galleries become more attractive in our ‘growingly sophisticated regional centres’ while maintaining core public art museum values? Being creative is one way but, even then, resourcing is paramount: ‘MAMA has had to relearn how to increase income levels threefold, operate as a commercial entity to offset social enterprise projects, embrace philanthropy instead of funding, be civic minded yet individual and, at all times, honouring and supporting the creative’.

The issue of resourcing, in particular, was echoed by all the directors we interviewed,

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and it remains one of the greatest challenges for the cultural sector Australia-wide and the world over at any level—regional, state and national. The cost involved in presenting exhibitions restricts ‘the projects and exhibitions we can generate and the calibre of artists we can attract’, says Guthrie. Help comes in part from touring exhibitions such as the NGA’s, but doing more with less has become the standard in the cultural sector: ‘We always manage to achieve a lot with little funds … but production costs continue to climb—graphic design, interpretation text, labelling, film, audio. We want to be able to offer the whole package but sometimes, despite the ideas, we cannot afford to execute the innovation’.

She characterises it as ‘a juggling act’, and adds, ‘we have many balls in the air!’ Schutenko suggests that ‘Combatting these issues is best done by engagement: engaging one’s board,

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staff, key stakeholders, the broader museum sector and the community’.

At the end of the day, the ‘juggling act’ is performed for our communities. Regional galleries are all about making art more accessible, about engaging the community, about being relevant to the lives of locals and reflecting the region around them—for the residents and for visitors—and about ‘building and reaffirming … trust and relationships’, as Hemsley suggests. And the art is local, it’s national and, at times, international—often, but not always, through touring exhibitions from state galleries or the NGA. For instance, the NGA’s Impressions of Paris, which was at MAGNT from March to June, is currently at the MGA until the end of September and will open at MAMA in November. ‘Exhibitions of the standard of Impressions of Paris deliver on so many levels for our audiences’, says Hemsley,

and ‘not only provide irreplaceable education and art appreciation opportunities that are relevant to all people, regardless of age, but also establish a level of credibility and value for MAMA as a place to visit and experience something unexpected’.

MAGNT also hosted Stars in the river at the beginning of the year and will open Light moves in October (previously at Araluen Arts Centre)—a total of three NGA exhibitions across two venues for the Northern Territory in less than twelve months. ‘The relationship between the MAGNT and NGA’, says Schutenko, ‘is incredibly important, as it gives all Territorians, especially those living remotely, the opportunity to see significant works from the national collection that may otherwise be inaccessible … to ensure that children and families continue to have unforgettable, educational experiences in their own backyard’.

Opposite: Josh Muir Buninyong 2015, digital print on aluminium0029 Right: Jukuja Dolly Snell Kurtal 2015, synthetic polymer paint on canvas In the NATSIAA exhibition at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin 0030

Next year, Light moves goes to Cairns Regional Gallery in north Queensland, Broken Hill Regional Art Gallery in New South Wales, RMIT Gallery in Victoria, Academy Gallery in Tasmania and Geraldton Art Gallery in Western Australia.

The NGA’s most spectacular shows are only in Canberra—and there are many reasons for that (not least of which are logistical or financial)—but some of the most important, the most rewarding, are those that travel to regional centres, that reach audiences near their own homes. The same could be said of our collection: the bulk and most cohesive display is in Canberra but many works are sent out on loan to regional and state galleries to supplement their exhibitions. As Blauhorn points out, ‘The NGA holds the most expansive collection of photography in Australia and this is an important resource for smaller galleries like MGA. Being able to draw on the professional expertise and materials at the NGA helps us deliver high calibre cultural experiences for our supporters and the community’, astutely adding, ‘I would also like to think these collaborations allow the NGA to meet its ambitions in sharing its public assets with the nation’.

Although the title of this article suggests a rivalry between New York’s MoMA and Albury’s MAMA, there is none; they operate and reward us on different levels. They are both representative and part of the myriad galleries on the world stage and in the local theatre of our lives. So make this spring the season for really connecting with your local, for building a lasting relationship with your nearest gallery. Take the time. Do it more than once a week and see what’s on—the exhibitions, the talks, the workshops. You may be surprised what you find.

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HIGH-INTEREST LOANS WE CAN ALL AGREE ON Mark Van Veen highlights what it means to offer high-interest loans when the lender is a country’s national gallery

The tens of thousands of works within the national collection belong to all Australians and, like all galleries with large collections, providing access to viewing them within the walls of the institution—through displays and scheduled viewing, for instance—can only ever be realised on a relatively small scale. The National Gallery of Australia has long been committed to lending works of art from the national collection to other galleries throughout the world and more extensively to other galleries in Australia.

The NGA is the only gallery in Australia with a truly national imperative, and sharing the collection with state and regional galleries is a major part of that. We cannot simply exist for one state or territory but for the nation as a whole. In the last financial year alone, the NGA lent 964 works that have been seen by 3.65 million people at eighty-seven venues

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nationally and internationally, and our touring exhibitions have reached a further 340 000 people at thirty‑four venues around the country.

The NGA has a Registration team dedicated to administering these loans and the hundreds that go out every year. The impact of requests for works is embraced by many at the NGA whose task is to ensure not only that we meet our obligation to lend works from the collection but also that the NGA’s duty of care for these treasures remains paramount.

Requests require careful assessment to ensure works of art are suitable to travel. Some works are rarely lent because of their fragile nature or excessive value; others simply because they are destination pieces that visitors expect to see when they arrive at the Gallery in Canberra (Blue poles being the prime example). Slow deterioration of works, which can be caused

by the rigors of transportation and exposure to climatic changes, is another less obvious but very important factor in determining the suitability of a work for loan.

Our regional partners are understanding of these many issues and continue to improve their standards to protect not only the national collection on loan to them but also their own collections. The NGA also works with venues to negotiate the requirements for loans and to facilitate the safe arrival and return of works from the collection. Venues provide detailed reports on their security measures, climate data (indicating stable temperature and humidity levels) and display proposals to reassure the NGA that they adhere to international best practice for care of works of art. And these same exacting standards are stridently followed by the NGA in

Opposite: Ron Mueck Pregnant woman 2002, fibreglass, resin, silicone. Purchased with the assistance of Tony and Carol Berg, 2003 © Ron Mueck 122875

Right: Dadang Christanto Red rain (Hujan merah) 2003, mixed media including wool, paper, gold, ink, pigments. Gift of Gene and Brian Sherman, 2003.

Yarn generously supplied by Cleckheaton Hand Knitting Yarns, Australia 126157

caring for our collection and for the works that we have on loan from institutions around the world.

The range of works requested for loan reflects the many collecting areas at the NGA. The Hazelhurst Regional Gallery and Arts Centre currently has a selection of exquisite quilts from the NGA’s amazing textile collection in its exhibition Labours of love: Australian quilts 1845–2015. The delicate nature of these works and the requirements for their display means that one of our textile conservators had to travel to Hazelhurst to assist with the installation and will return again for the demount.

Ron Mueck’s powerful and much soughtafter Pregnant woman 2002 is being lent to Bendigo Art Gallery as a feature work for display in December. It was recently on show at the National Portrait Gallery for the

exhibition In the flesh and briefly before that in our collection highlights exhibition that launched NGA Contemporary on the edge of Lake Burley Griffin. Indeed, this ‘pregnant woman’ is more travelled than most, having spent a fair bit of time at different venues around the country since it was acquired by the NGA in 2003.

The complexity and scale of some contemporary art and the NGA’s prolific collecting in this area often prohibit lengthy displays at the Gallery in Canberra. The NGA’s loan program is, then, instrumental in extending, as well as broadening, access to works of art of this nature. One such work, Dadang Christanto large installation Red rain 2003 will dominate an exhibition of the artist’s work at the QUT Art Museum in November.

As a final note, I’d like to make special mention of a few exhibitions opening around the country.

Aleks Danko’s My fellow Aus-tra-aliens at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, a major exhibition on Robert MacPherson at Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art and Birth of the cool at Samstag in Adelaide are just some of the other exhibitions you may have visited recently (or are planning to visit) that include NGA works. Many more loans from Australia’s national collection can be seen in venues around the world and quite possibly in an exhibition near you.

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MEMBERS NEWS The Members Acquisition Fund helps shape the stories in our national collection, and, this year, you can contribute to Jeffrey Smart’s

What spring will bring

Smart’s key to the future

Spring’s finally here and, with it, we’re trialling a new series of events called ‘Meet the maker’ in which members get a chance to tour the studios and workshops of local artists and to talk to them about their process and work.

The first in the series is with Canberra-based silversmith Alison Jackson and on Saturday 3 October at 11.00 am. Jackson’s first solo show opens at Craft ACT on 11 September, at the same time as the NGA’s touring show of Australian contemporary jewellery, Bodywork.

Of course, spring also brings a new work for the Members Acquisition Fund. And, this year, it’s a brilliant early oil painting by Jeffrey Smart, who, ‘In the story of modern Australian art,’ Edmund Capon once said, ‘stands alone’. With your help, it will be the earliest painting by Smart to enter the national collection and, along with his last major painting, Labyrinth 2011, which is in a similar style, will effectively bookend his career as it is represented in the collection.

We also have a mystery tour on 23 October for those of you willing to walk into the unknown on the chance you’ll discover something new. And, although it’s still months away, don’t forget to book your tickets for the opening party for Tom Roberts. These opening events book out fast so, if you want to be among the first in Australia to view this insightful retrospective of Roberts’s work, go online or call us now.

Jeffrey Smart’s The salvagers 1946 represents one of his most significant seminal paintings from his years as a burgeoning young artist in Adelaide. It represents the first decade of his practice and has many of the key elements that would play out in his later work, including his fascination with geometry and the urban built environment—in this case, the industrial wreckage of that world.

Smart’s intricately constructed composition also presages his best known works: his compression of forms under a dark sky evoking an uncanny, dreamlike atmosphere.

David Malouf, author and friend of the artist, commented in a conversation that Smart’s works do not represent the known landscape but rather the ‘dreamscape in his head’. In other words, as Malouf points out, ‘the objects that we recognise from the real world are arranged in a certain way that creates a feeling in us, mysterious as it may be, that are already in him’. This resonates with Smart’s ongoing eschewal of narrative, pointing instead to a poetic distillation that is ever‑present.

Poetry was an abiding interest for Smart, and TS Eliot was a recurring favourite from the 1940s. He shared with Eliot the idea that seemingly mundane things could make great subjects. As Smart said in a Talking Heads interview on ABC TV in 2008, the imagery was ‘not about daffodils and roses in the spring, it was about vacant lots and suburban houses, slummy corridors—ordinary, ordinary things made into great poetry’. In The salvagers, it is as though the two figures have been scavenging for the remnants of the past, washed ashore in a postwar sense of isolation.

MEMBERSHIP nga.gov.au/members | free call 1800 028 068 Play your part in the life of the National Gallery of Australia and enjoy the many benefits of membership.

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40 ARTONVIEW | SPRING 2015

Yet the work is also beyond time. A sense of the classical and the modern in Smart’s art came through his early academic training in drawing with Australia’s longest serving war artist Ivor Hele and in diverse approaches to modernism introduced by Marie Tuck and Dorrit Black, two modern women of South Australia who had received tuition in France.

Smart recalled in his memoir, Not quite straight, that Black brought an awareness of Cubism, specifically through her training under Albert Gleizes and Andre Lhote: ‘The design, the composition was all important. The word that impressed was “when you make a picture” ’.

Compared with Smart’s better known mid-career paintings, the application of the paint in The salvagers is denser and more painterly—an approach that reappears toward the end of his life in Labyrinth 2011, Smart’s last major painting, which came into the national collection in 2014. On the other hand, the forms that inhabit the construction of The salvagers, including large circular arcs (the main one slumped a little like the human figure) and an oil drum, would recur in future works. These objects are like the props in a theatre set. Yet the action that will take place in this small masterful work is inevitably the activity of the minds and imaginations of the viewers who encounter it, in all its implied drama and haunting stillness.

Deborah Hart, Senior Curator, Australian Painting and Sculpture Post 1920

MEMBERS ACQUISITION FUND Members can extend their contribution to the NGA by supporting the acquisition of this early Jeffrey Smart painting nga.gov.au/members | +61 (0)2 6240 6408 Donations above $2 are tax deductible

Jeffrey Smart The salvagers 1946, oil paint on canvas Š The estate of Jeffrey Smart 273644

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The living sculptures speak Gilbert & George Crusade 2014 from the series Utopian pictures digital print 245 x 377 cm The Poynton Bequest, 2015 269765 Gilbert Proesch and George Passmore met in 1967 as sculpture students at St Martins School of Art in London. Renouncing their individual identities and assuming the title Gilbert & George, the artists formed a lifelong creative partnership and one of the most personally demanding collaborations in art history. They have declared themselves ‘living sculptures’—not performance artists (the ‘p’ word was banned from their vocabulary many decades ago)—and they both embody and create art about contemporary city life, morals, sex, religion and cultural beliefs.

When I interviewed them in Singapore earlier this year, we discussed their recent series Utopian pictures.

Utopian pictures echoes with the visual clash of subcultures that form the East End’s liberated exuberance: ‘We do think that Shoreditch is the centre of the world! It is like Hogarth’s London in some way. The modern one. And it’s endless, and it is vulgar, and everything is there. That’s why we call it “utopia”. Because, in some way, everybody can do whatever they want’. Crusade, the NGA’s newly acquired twenty-panelled digital print from the series, is big, bold and unflinching, a work created via a direct absorption and regurgitation of the pulsing life of the city in which Gilbert & George live. Larger-than-lifesize images of the artists flank the composition.

Positioned frontally, staring straight ahead at the viewer in a trance-like state, they appear as contemporary soothsayers: We make ourselves the centre of our art. It is us, surrounded with our thoughts. It is the modern world outside of us. We ask ourselves, ‘What is there?,’ ‘What do we want?,’ ‘What do we feel?’

We never look at art to make art, we have never done that. We look at the world: ‘What is living today?’ Each picture is like us writing a letter to the public, with our thoughts …

The living sculpture speaking.

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Emptied of their individual characteristics, Gilbert & George’s presence creates an arresting tension in the work, where the artists act as a medium between the world and their audience.

Despite its bright, glossy facade, a closer reading of the lurid, multilayered composition presents a set of serious social, religious and political issues. Various aspects, including the helmets, chainmail coifs and the colouring of figures in the red and white of the St George’s Cross, position the artists as medieval crusaders. Literally and symbolically, Crusade represents the artists’ public crusade for homosexual rights: ‘Yes, we are campaigning. Crusading … all the time!

We always like our art to … have a moral dimension. It has good and bad. What is the evil that we are campaigning in front of?

It’s homophobia, when it boils up’.

Reappearing throughout the Utopian pictures series is the motif of the mask, and the artists are variously depicted wearing balaclavas and eye masks or have calling cards, flyers and stickers covering their faces. If the mask serves as a mark of membership to a group, Gilbert & George use it to reveal the many different and often competing cultural messages that reverberate through the streets of London.

For the artists, the mask is indicative of ‘The new world’, where there are ‘still the goodies and the baddies. Armed forces, police forces, gangsters, the Taliban, left-wing students. They are all masked. Yes, the mask is quite important … The idea of hiding your face to shout’.

And what is it that is being shouted?

When we look at the twenty-six pictures that comprise the Utopian pictures series, we are bombarded with slogans, advertising, news headlines, government warnings and private messages scrawled in public spaces: a complex mixture of textural and pictorial elements that create a new kind of language, that of a fast-paced, heaving contemporary city. Contributing to this visual noise are the collaged stickers arranged along all four sides of Crusade as a high-density framing device.

These stickers are the products of street artists and are created as part of a subcultural practice

that forms a street-level communication system: ‘You can feel the temperature of the world in the stickers. What people think behind the scenes. Because what’s on the street, it’s extraordinary’.

Over many years, Gilbert & George photographed and collected street stickers, flyers, advertisements and calling cards in the thousands. Each is painstakingly archived, categorised according to subject, placed in contact sheets and stored in books.

This meticulous methodology has been central to the artists’ creative process for decades.

In contrast, their production period is rapid, an adrenalin-fuelled automatic state: ‘The most extraordinary part … is when we are actually in the studio … we start to see; the feelings, the souls are in those negatives. We collect them, and they speak in variations … It has to be subconsciously done. It cannot be ordinary.

It cannot be known. They have to more or less make themselves for us. Bully us if necessary’.

For the artists, Shoreditch is a microcosm of the world, of city life, of contemporary communication systems, of ‘What people think behind the scenes’. But, more than that: as ‘living sculptures’, Gilbert & George reflect our world back at us to raise questions of how we live as individuals and how we might better live as global citizens.

Gilbert & George Crusade 2014 269765

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

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Nature formed

Ted Secombe Tall vase 2015 © Ted Secombe 274292

Ted Secombe Tall vase 2015 porcelain with matt crystal glaze 58 cm, 38 cm (diam) Purchased with the assistance of the National Gallery of Australia Foundation and Barbara van Ernst AM, 2015 274292 With its organic crystalline pattern and subtle blue-green colour orchestration, this commanding work shows Ted Secombe’s confident and highly refined handling of form, glaze and colour. Its large ovoid shape, attenuated neck and smooth texture suggests the egg or egg case of an unknown creature, while its mottled colour evokes a process of transformation, transporting the viewer to an

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unknown territory of the natural world. A keen observer of nature, Secombe has developed glaze colours inspired by the changing seasons, investing his pots with a sense of transience, a quality underscored by the apparent fragility of his porcelain forms.

Secombe was born in Australia in 1957.

He graduated with degrees in Biochemistry and Medical Technology from Downlands College in Queensland before commencing work in ceramics in 1979 while living in Toowoomba. He moved to the Yarra Valley in Victoria in 1989, where he established his pottery. Working full-time as a ceramicist, his specialty is the research, development and use of crystalline glazes on wheel-thrown porcelain

forms, work that has placed him among the world’s leading crystalline glaze technologists.

The crystalline glaze technique produces surfaces with clusters of crystalline shapes embedded into a uniform zinc or calcium glaze. The control of these glazes is one of the most challenging of all ceramic techniques, requiring regulated cooling of the work after high-temperature firing to allow the crystals to develop variations in colour and pattern across the surface. With this accomplished work, Secombe invites the viewer to share the visual poetry of these explorations.

Robert Bell AM, Senior Curator, Decorative Arts and Design

Inviting curiosity

Marc Newson Embryo chair 1988 274334

Marc Newson Embryo chair 1988 neoprene, polyurethane, aluminium, steel 79 x 81 x 86 cm Gift of Jason Yeap OAM, 2015 274334 Embryo chair is one of Marc Newson’s most well-known designs. With its title conjuring an image of promise, it marked a prescient moment in this acclaimed Australian designer’s international trajectory as a shaper of engaging products. Produced early in his career and originally made in Sydney for the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences’s exhibition Take a seat in 1988, it was later produced industrially in Japan by Idée and in Italy by Cappellini and still remains in continuous production.

Breaking away from conventional chair design and construction, it reflects Newson’s interest in functional yet playful forms that animate interior space and invite curiosity.

It evokes the world of 1960s European automobile design, surfing and science-fiction illustration. This example is from Idée’s early production, when Newson took a direct role in the development of the manufacturing process.

Its amoeba-like, figure-eight form is supported on three tubular steel legs protruding from aluminium apertures, and its glossy black neoprene upholstery is held tight with a prominent zipper down the back of the chair.

Born in Sydney in 1963, Newson studied sculpture and jewellery at the Sydney College

of the Arts. After graduating in 1984, he made unique, and now highly collectable, objects in his studio before relocating his practice to Tokyo in 1987, where he was able to realise innovative projects on an industrial scale for a number of companies. He established his own company, Marc Newson Ltd, in London in 1997.

Embryo chair is one of the first examples of Newson’s work acquired through a program to research and acquire a group of his most innovative works showing his development and achievements over the past thirty years.

Robert Bell AM, Senior Curator, Decorative Arts and Design

SPRING 2015 | ARTONVIEW 45

Strange erotics

Jane Burton White stain 2011 pigment inkjet prints each 110 x 110 cm Gift of William Bowness, 2015 248701 248702 248704 248703 Jane Burton belongs to an important generation of women photographers who emerged in Australia during the late 1990s.

While the stylistic and formal concerns of these artists—Burton, Deborah Paauwe, Sharon Green, Jane Eisemann, Petrina Hicks and others—are diverse, their work tends to engage the subject of solitary female figures in domestic and outdoor settings. Informed by the feminist art and theory that preceded it, their work provided a direct response to the long history of images of women ‘to be looked at’. But, in place of the often didactic

46 ARTONVIEW | SPRING 2015

interventions of earlier feminist artists whose work questioned the ways in which images of women have been produced and circulated in art history and visual culture, the work of Burton’s generation tends to present ambiguous, postfeminist reflections on what it means to make images of women—especially images of women that appear to engage in pleasurable or erotic activities.

For Burton and her peers, it is possible to make such pictures without them necessarily falling prey to the ‘male gaze’, with all its titillating power and political implications.

Burton’s pictures summon what art historian Helen McDonald in the early 2000s termed ‘erotic ambiguity’, a prominent motif of art made by young women during the late 1990s and 2000s. The work made by these artists situated women as subjects that were

capable of a broad range of emotional and psychological experiences and responses.

It also demonstrated that images of naked women were not always made for the viewing pleasure of men.

Four photographs from Burton’s 2011 series White stain were recently acquired for the national collection. They are set in a pastoral landscape and gothic interiors. Two feature a naked woman caught, seemingly unawares, enacting a strange, erotic performance in a gloomy interior space. The dark edges of each scene suggest that they have been photographed covertly, perhaps in a predatory way, with a long-focal-length lens or through gaps in a wall or tree. Their voyeuristic and, to use the artist’s own terms, ‘obsessive’ point of view infers that we are witnessing the unfolding of a dark, potentially violent

Jane Burton White stain 2011 (nos 5, 7, 8 & 10) 248701–03

event, but one that is never fully resolved or acknowledged. As with Burton’s work more generally, the heavy use of dark and light creates a dramatic, psychologically charged scene, implying a narrative without resolution and without ever really disclosing its details.

This untold story is their allure, and it is all part of Burton’s strategy: suggestive imagery that evokes the erotic, the hint of narrative and the careful manipulation of the various formal and compositional codes of photography (and, by extension, film). These tropes engage the viewer in what, at first glance, promises to be a straightforward encounter but, in the end, recognises the limits of what we can know from observation alone.

Burton’s pictures are often preoccupied with the way that photography produces images of women ‘to be looked at’. She draws

on the stylistic and material attributes of historic photographs: edges are vignetted, black-and-white prints are toned, images are printed in ways that reference now long-passed photographic processes such as albumen printing. Instead of the promises historically made of photography of command and control over its subjects, Burton’s photographs—in line with the work of her postfeminist peers—invoke the codes of historic photographs so as to confuse our expectations of them. Any expectation of titillation that might come with the territory of the photographic nude is quickly circumvented by the irreconcilable ambiguity of the pictures and their relationship to each other.

These important photographs were recently donated to the NGA by Melbourne-based art

collector and philanthropist Bill Bowness.

They join two of Burton’s photographs from the early 2000s in the national art collection and are powerful examples of work by a member of an important generation of women artists working in Australia.

Shaune Lakin, Senior Curator, Photography

SPRING 2015 | ARTONVIEW 47

Sacred and profane Jimmy Thaiday Gaba gabas 2014 274364 274366

Jimmy Thaiday Erub Mer people Gaba gabas 2014 ceramic, cane, twine, resin each 37 x 16 cm Purchased with the assistance of the National Gallery of Australia Foundation ATSI Fund, 2015 On display: Torres Strait Islander gallery 252867 Many Indigenous artists look to the past to celebrate, honour and commemorate their connection with their culture and their ancestors. This connectedness can manifest itself in many ways, sometimes depicting ancient mythological narratives while other times referencing historic artefacts. These

48 ARTONVIEW | SPRING 2015

works by young Erub (Darnley Island) painter, printer and ceramicist Jimmy Thaiday do the latter; they are life-sized ceramic replicas of gaba gabas, stone-headed war clubs used by Torres Strait Islander warriors during battle.

There is much anthropological speculation as to the origin of these remarkably dangerous weapons because historical ethnographic accounts note that the stones themselves were quarried in the Torres Strait, in Cape York Peninsula and in Papua New Guinea.

It is argued, then, that the gaba gaba was a significantly valuable item and was created, traded and even looted by many cultural groups across this expansive geographical

region of the Torres Strait and Papua New Guinea. It was also a prized ceremonial object.

These contemporary interpretations in ceramic, natural fibres and resin nod to the original deadly purpose of the weapon.

The several handmade resin skulls—hanging provocatively from the top of one club and around the handle of the other—make this purpose clear: they were historically used to maim and decapitate an enemy in battle.

Thaiday’s exquisite ceramics stand as eloquent reminders of both sacred and profane aspects of a Torres Strait Islander way of life that once was.

Franchesca Cubillo, Senior Curator, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art

Blossoming new trade Meiji period Kyoto, Japan Vase c 1900 stoneware, overglaze enamels and gilding 55 x 32 x 25 cm Gift of Peter Hack in memory of William Liu OBE, Barbara Stephenson and Ilona Hack, 2015 Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program 254336 With its distinct Art Nouveau elements, this exceptional Japanese vase is a fine example of European influence on design in East Asia. Produced around 1900, the vessel was created in a Kyoto commercial workshop.

Its form and decoration display the high standard of skill and precision expected by the exacting international markets in the early twentieth century.

Coinciding with the reopening of Japan to the rest of the world from the 1850s, Japanese art began attracting increased international interest. During the Meiji period (1868–1912), Japan actively sought international trade and began to incorporate European aesthetics into traditional Japanese designs. By 1900, approximately half of the ceramics produced in Japan appear to have been produced to send overseas.

This particular vase was acquired by William Liu, an Australian-born businessman of Chinese and English descent. A founder of the China-Australia Mail Steamship Line, established in 1917, Liu spent much of the 1930s in Shanghai, as well as in Canton (Guangzhou) and Hong Kong, as an advisor to the Sun Company’s group of Australianowned department stores, which were among the largest in China. He brought the vase to Sydney in 1936, where he presented it to his friend and former teacher Barbara Stephenson.

In 1960, Stephenson gave the vase as a wedding gift to her nephew’s new wife IIona Hack.

Peter Hack inherited it in 2007 and has now given it to the NGA in memory of those who have cherished the vase over the past century.

Using techniques similar to those applied to Satsuma-style ceramics of the time, the vase is decorated with textural chrysanthemums, wisteria and irises rendered in enamels and gilt on a blue and green opaque base coat.

The foliate-form Art Nouveau handles are

highly unusual for Japanese ceramics and can be traced to the influential Sevres porcelain

Meiji period, Japan Vase c 1900 254336

factory in France in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Superior examples of export ware such as this gift of a Hack family treasure are now appreciated as astonishing works of art the world over.

Katie McGowan, Intern, Asian Art

SPRING 2015 | ARTONVIEW 49

THANK YOU …

Exhibitions, programs and acquisitions at the NGA are realised through the generous support of:

GRANTS American Friends of the National Gallery of Australia Inc, with the generous assistance of Kenneth Tyler AO and Marabeth Cohen Tyler The Aranday Foundation Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne Australian National University Centre for European Studies The Lidia Perin Foundation The Yulgilbar Foundation

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50 ARTONVIEW | SPRING 2015

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SPRING 2015 | ARTONVIEW 51

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nga.gov.au | Follow us on Papua New Guinea, East Sepik Province, Yuat River Mask 19th century (detail), wood, ochres, fibre, shell. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 2010 Qantas Airways Limited ABN 16 009 661 901

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