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WINTER 2016 | 86
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National Gallery of Australia
National Gallery of Australia
MIKE PARR
Interview with Elspeth Pitt
JOAN MITCHELL
Behind the ‘biting tongue and searing temper’
PART OF DOMAHOTELS
LUDWIG HIRSCHFELD-MACK A Bauhaus visionary in Australia
Issue no 86 | Winter 2016 A$9.95 nga.gov.au
Hilda Rix NiCHOlaS The Shepherd of Knockalong, 1933 oil on canvas 99.5 x 80.5 cm SOld $219,600 (inc. BP) D+H December 2015
call for entries important australian + international fine art
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FREE EXHIBITION
Fiona Hall WRONG WAY TIME
From the 2015 Venice Biennale until 10 July 2016
With a career spanning over four decades, Fiona Hall is one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists. Her exhibition Wrong Way Time at the 2015 Venice Biennale received international acclaim and is brought back to Australia for local audiences to enjoy. Hall’s diverse and detailed art transforms everyday objects to address a range of contemporary issues such as postcolonialism, consumerism and natural history. Wrong Way Time explores three main concerns: global politics, world finances and the environment in a remarkable, dramatic installation. The exhibition also includes well-known, breathtaking works by Hall from the NGA’s collection. 10 am – 5 pm daily | Free entry Untitled 2014 (detail), aluminium, burnt volume from the British Museum’s General Catalogue of Printed Books: Ten-year Supplement, 1956–1965. Williams Sinclair Collection
NGA CANBERRA The world is beautiful Ends 5 June @ NGA Some of the greatest photographs of the last 100 years.
Black Ends 13 June @ NGA Exploring the significance and power of black in 20th-centrury art.
Fiona Hall: Wrong Way Time Ends 10 July @ NGA Hall’s installation Wrong Way Time from last year’s Venice Biennale arrives at the NGA.
William Robinson: selections from the collection Ends 24 July @ NGA A unique visualisation of the lush rainforest of south-east Queensland.
Diane Arbus: American portraits Opens 3 June @ NGA Exploring the raw edges of American life through the celebrated photography of Diane Arbus and others.
Mike Parr: Foreign Looking Opens 12 August @ NGA One of Australia’s most provocative and influential artists.
NGA ELSEWHERE Light moves Ends 19 June @ Broken Hill Art Gallery 1 July – 21 August @ RMIT Gallery Opens 2 September @ Academy Gallery, University of Tasmania A selection of video art since its early days in the 1960s to now.
William Kentridge Ends 26 June @ Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery A major figure in contemporary art.
Max and Olive Ends 24 July @ Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne 6 August – 4 September @ Cowra Regional Art Gallery Opens 10 September @ Wangaratta Art Gallery The exceptional partnership between Olive Cotton and Max Dupain.
Olive Cotton Papyrus 1938 (detail), gelatin silver photograph. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1987
WINTER 2016
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42
5
Director’s word
6
News and review
14
In brief Flowers in art, Natalia Goncharova,
32
with Elspeth Pitt 42
19
Behind the scenes
20
Painting Joan Mitchell Julia Greenstreet reveals
48
Diary of an object Lucie Folan examines the provenance of a twelfth-century standing Buddha
52
Profiles Virginia Cuppaidge, Robert Foster
Joan Mitchell
56
NGA Shop
Worry will vanish revelation Jaklyn Babington
58
Sharing our vision
the exceptional life of artist-philanthropist 26
One time, one place Hannah Hutchison explores the legacy of Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack
Tom Roberts, Robert Jacks, Marion Mahony Griffin, Bea Maddock
Mike Parr The artist shares his experiences
introduces the hypnotic, engaging and profoundly affecting work of Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist
Artonview 86 | Winter 2016 3
Issue no 86 | Winter 2016 NGA Cover: Mike Parr Cartesian Corpse 2008, performance for as long as possible, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart Editor Eric Meredith Designer Kirsty Morrison Proofreader Meredith McKendry Photographers Sam Birch, Alanna Bishop, Eleni Kypridis, Lisa Mattiazzi, John Tassie, Dominic Thomas Pre-press Michael Tonna Printing CanPrint, Canberra NGA contributors Jaklyn Babington, Senior Curator, Contemporary Art Practice—Global Dr Robert Bell AM, Senior Curator, Decorative Arts and Design Lucie Folan, Curator and Provenance Researcher, Asian Art Julia Greenstreet, Curatorial Assistant, Kenneth E Tyler Collection Hannah Hutchison, Gordon Darling Graduate Intern Lara Nicholls, Assistant Curator, Australian Paintings and Sculpture Elspeth Pitt, Curator, Australian Prints and Drawings Editorial artonview.editor@nga.gov.au Advertising artonview.advertising@nga.gov.au Reproductions copyright@nga.gov.au Back issues nga.gov.au/artonview 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 Views expressed by writers are not necessarily those of the NGA. 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 FSC-C017269 | PEFC/21-31-41
Mike Parr Kingdom Come and/or Punch Holes in the Body Politic 2005, performance for as long as possible, Artspace, Sydney. Image courtesy the artist
4 Artonview 86 | Winter 2016
Director’s word Gerard Vaughan Our recent Tom Roberts exhibition was a huge success, in part because our audiences detected in his work the strong beginnings of an Australian sensibility, history and sense of place. It was very rewarding to discover this common observation as I walked through the galleries and spoke to many of our visitors. After all, one of our primary aims is to make the NGA relevant to all Australians. It was a truly national event, and we must thank our colleagues and friends from around the country who loaned their treasured works for the show. Their generosity gave our now former head of Australian Art, Dr Anna Gray, the opportunity to curate an incisive and comprehensive exhibition. Anna retired in April, shortly after the exhibition closed—a very fitting final exhibition as senior curator and a triumph in every sense. She was a huge asset to the NGA during her thirteen busy years here but has contributed to the arts in Australia over a lifetime. To honour Anna’s commitment to Australian art the NGA purchased Roberts’s The Thames and Cleopatra’s Needle in March. It is one of his small landscapes from 1884 and, in a way, a precursor to his rapidly executed 9 x 5 paintings. We found a place for the work in the exhibition, and it served as a special treat for the almost ten thousand patrons who farewelled the show in its final, long weekend. Emma Kindred tells the painting’s story on page 16. Visitors to the Roberts exhibition will have also noticed Jim Lambie’s vibrant floor installation Sound system 2015 as they walked in (it was one of the three ‘interventions’ that writer Melissa Loughnan discussed in our last issue of Artonview). The installation, although no longer on display, was the first in a new series of interventions. The latest, on 12 May, was Gosia Wlodarczak’s broader eight-day performative work stCloud, part of Canberra’s Segue 2016 festival. We are continuing to rethink the use of the NGA’s many different spaces, especially foyers, to present work by contemporary artists that will prove both surprising and engaging for our visitors. Our aim is to offer the best of global and Australian contemporary practice. Exhibitions of the work of two major Australians in the contemporary arena, Fiona Hall and Mike Parr, are the next ‘must-sees’ in the NGA calendar. Hall was Australia’s representative at last year’s Venice Biennale, and her exhibition there, Wrong Way Time, is now on show, free to all visitors, at the NGA in Canberra thanks to both the Australia Council and the exceptional group of our exhibition patrons, including Simon and Catriona Mordant, Susan and Michael Armitage, John and Janet Calvert-Jones and Pauline and John Gandel, whose contributions made it possible. A selection of Hall’s major works from the national art collection extends her Venice contribution, so that Australian audiences will get both a portrait of her astonishing output over the past four decades and a taste of the Venice Biennale experience. The show must end on 10 July.
Then, come 22 August, we will present an extraordinary selection of works by Parr, whose often confronting approach to art has provoked a fascinating outpouring of critical commentary since the 1960s. Few, however, would dispute the importance and centrality of his practice in contemporary Australian art, particularly defined in the areas of performance and printmaking. Arguably, no other Australian artist has manifested the radical spirit of the postmodernist vanguard to such a degree. Parr operates as a kind of self-propelled renegade (even grenade) within the art scene in Australia and overseas, garnering momentum and mischief that feed directly into the range and depth of his resolutely experimental work. Don’t miss his engaging interview with curator Elspeth Pitt in this issue. In other news, we have rethought the concept behind our Members Lounge, redesigning and redecorating the space to deliver a more comfortable, club-like feel that promotes relaxation and social engagement with like-minded art lovers. In our main foyer, provocative new ceramics by Sri Lankan-born, Sydney-based artist Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran will greet visitors from 6 July, and he will discusses his work on 16 July. I expect that by now you will have heard about our next summer show, Versailles: treasures from the palace. This astonishing exhibition will take us beyond the shores of Australia and back to a time of refined artistry when the French monarchy promoted a level of luxury and beauty unmatched in other countries. Countless artisans took decades to bring about the Sun King Louis XIV’s vision for a palace to surpass any other in Europe, defining through its grandeur the absolute power of the French king and his successors, Louis XV and Louis XVI. Coming issues of Artonview will have more on this extraordinary place and time in history. This issue also presents some of the interesting research we are doing on artists and on provenance in our collection, including profiles on Australian expatriate Virginia Cuppaidge, whose story speaks to the romantic in us all, and on local maker Robert Foster of FINK Design. We introduce an important new contemporary piece of immersive moving image just acquired for the national collection, Pipilotti Rist’s Worry will vanish revelation 2015, and we look at the fascinating path a twelfthcentury standing Buddha took on its way into the national collection. The highly engaging story of émigré Bauhaus artist Ludwig HirshfieldMack, as revealed in the extensive archive given to the NGA last year by the artist’s grandson Chris Bell, finds relevance today for those who undergo hardships as they seek to call Australia home. We also look at the life of Abstract Expressionist Joan Mitchell, whose forthright personality pushed her to succeed and whose generosity of spirit encouraged others. I hope you enjoy reading this issue and make the time to visit the NGA as often as possible this year, both for our memorable line-up of exhibitions and for our re-presented and ever changing collection displays.
Artonview 86 | Winter 2016 5
News and review
Versailles: treasures from the palace This summer, the National Gallery of Australia, in association with the Chateau de Versailles, presents an exhibition of original works from the palace and gardens of the Sun King, Louis XIV. Boldly sculpted marble and bronze, striking portraits of royalty and nobles, fine porcelain, ornate furniture and gilded objets d’art are some of the extravagant works from the Palace of Versailles travelling to Canberra for the exhibition. Visitors will enter a world where luxury was normal and where the elite lived and played in the beautiful halls and grounds of an enormous chateau built to serve the ambitions of Louis XIV, king of France. The tumult of the French Revolution would bring this fantasy world to an abrupt end less than a hundred and thirty years later. In 1661, King Louis XIV decided to build a large palace to outdo in grandeur the residences of his European rivals. For decades, he expanded his father’s hunting lodge in the village of Versailles, twenty kilometres from Paris, constructing a magnificent chateau. Decorated with gold and mirrors, and with
Tjanpi Desert Weavers During the land rights struggles of the 1970s, Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara women realised that they would have greater power and a stronger voice and be able to improve the life of women and children on their lands if they formed a collective. The NPY Women’s Council was born, and from this flagship Indigenous organisation grew the social enterprise Tjanpi Desert Weavers in 1995, a meaningful and
Women regularly come together to collect grass for their fibre art, taking the time to hunt, gather food, visit significant sites, perform inma (cultural song and dance) and teach their children about country while creating an everevolving array of fibre art. The shared stories, skills and experiences of this wide-reaching network of mothers, daughters, aunties, sisters and grandmothers form the bloodline of the desert fibre phenomenon and have fuelled Tjanpi’s rich history of collaborative practice. Recently, a growing tradition of artist camps
culturally appropriate form of employment
held in bush locations has proved fertile ground
for Aboriginal women on their homelands to
for realising major commissions and projects.
better provide for their families.
An artist camp with Fiona Hall near Irrunytju
huge tapestries from the Royal Gobelin factory, the palace was filled with luxurious art and furniture and surrounded by elaborate gardens with pavilions and fountains. Not only a home for the king, his extended family and his mistresses, the palace of Versailles also housed a court of thousands of aristocrats, functionaries and servants. It was the centre of French political and cultural life during the reign of Louis XIV from 1643 to 1715. He was succeeded by his greatgrandson Louis XV (1715–1774) and, finally, by Louis XVI (1774–1792). Handpainted fans, the fine porcelain service designed for and used by the tragic queen Marie Antoinette and the Dauphin’s writing
in Western Australia led to the creation of
desk reveal life inside the chateau. We then
women across three states to make spectacular
Kuka irititja (Animals from other times) for the
encounter the woods and gardens: a hunting
contemporary fibre art from locally collected
TarraWarra Biennial in 2014. This work was
horn and rifle, a life-sized marble group for the
grasses, and working with fibre has become
then included in Hall’s exhibition Wrong Way
fountain depicting Latona and her children and
a fundamental part of Central and Western
Time at the 56th Venice Biennale and can now
images of extravagant festivities and fireworks.
Desert culture. Although Tjanpi has been
be seen at the NGA in an expanded exhibition
An abundance of floral motifs inhabits nearly
involved in an impressive array of national
in Canberra.
every surface, adorning wooden panels, textiles,
Today, Tjanpi supports over four hundred
metal, paintings and china, to reinforce the
and international projects, exhibitions and commissions, the core focus for the women is
Fiona Hall: Wrong Way Time @ NGA,
image of the king as the god Apollo, the sun,
still very much country, culture and community.
Canberra, until 10 July
the source of life and fertility who guaranteed
6 Artonview 86 | Winter 2016
that the French people would flourish under his beneficent reign. The exhibition Versailles: treasures from the palace gives audiences a unique and intimate insight into the luxury, extravagance and beauty of the life of the aristocracy in a period that embodied opulence and symbolised the absolute power of the French monarchy. Versailles: treasures from the palace @ NGA, Canberra, opens 9 December
Above: Palace of Versailles. Photo: Nick Nicholson Right: The Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles. © Jose Ignacio Soto/Shutterstock.com Opposite: Rene Kulitja in Venice with Kuka iritija (Animals from another time) 2014, a collaboration between Fiona Hall and the Tjanpi Desert Weavers of the Central and Western Deserts
Artonview 86 | Winter 2016 7
News and review
No heavy hammer
Above: Heather B Swann Banksia men 2015 (detail), wood, metal, silk, glass, nine elements Top: Nell The wake 2014–16, mixed media. Courtesy the artist, Roslyn Oxley Gallery and STATION, Sydney Opposite: Danila Vassilieff, Bristol, 1934
8 Artonview 86 | Winter 2016
Being invited to exhibit in the Adelaide Biennial is a milestone. Some have shown three times, others never, and it was this never that was one of the drivers for the 2016 curator, Lisa Slade. Twenty-five artists, old and new, all makers of magic objects that made a sparkle in her eye, that could sit in her eclectic cabinet of curiosity. This singular eccentricity has produced a jumble of seemingly unconnected things, a basket of bits and bobs, a few dark places, lots of colour and fun. That was my first impression on a quick run-through before the opening events. At the first of these, a breakfast for artists at the Town Hall, we milled around and sort of introduced ourselves in that Australian way we have, nonchalant, not giving much away. All dressed up and smiley, I realised that everyone was hiding something. Throughout the officialia I thought about the David Shrigley maxim: ‘It’s okay to run away from your problems. It’s a good idea’. There is a lot of heavy hammer in art now, messages said out loud and easy to read, and I recognised that there is none of that in this exhibition and I was glad.
So I slowed down. I contemplated individual works of art. I did not like every work but I certainly felt them all. I found some of the hidden stuff. There were spots everywhere covering secret forms. Shells strung on a lost thread and different yarns hiding historical shapes. Many smiley faces enveloping a tear. A bright pink diary coding the telling moments. Flowers masking terrible beauty. Books that can never be read. Close-stitched mouths. Environmental sadness in animal disguise. The delicate balance between nature and clumsy humanity camouflaged in pattern. Artificialia and naturalia finely fingered together by artists seeking mirabilia. I walked slower. I thought harder. I looked through the light. What happened is that the works spoke softly of the sincerity and critical engagement and deep thought of the artists. Heather B Swann, artist For the diary: World premiere of Nervous, Heather B Swann’s live performance and art installation 3 September, 7.30 pm, & 4 September, 2.00 pm Tickets on sale soon
Marilyn in regional Australia Bendigo Art Gallery’s Tansy Curtin answered a few questions we had about their Marilyn Monroe exhibition. Why Marilyn and why now? The idea for our Marilyn show started when we became aware of the archive belonging to Twentieth Century Fox. Over the last eight years, we’ve built a reputation for bringing high-quality international exhibitions to Australia, particularly those featuring fashion and textiles, so the choice was obvious and the search for ‘Marilyn’ began. We found her film costumes, personal clothing, artefacts and other personal effects. ‘Why Marilyn?’, you ask. She was one of the most photographed figures of the twentieth century, a gorgeous and glamorous woman who oozed sensuality while exuding an air of vulnerability, which so enticed her audience. The fact that she died young, aged only 36, under questionable circumstances has, of course, helped to add to the public fascination. Why now? This year marks what would have been Marilyn’s 90th birthday, few of her contemporaries remain and we are coming to the end of her time in living memory, so it seems fitting to celebrate her now.
How has it been received so far? The exhibition has been extremely successful and has attracted audiences from across Australia. The whole of Bendigo gets on board and supports us with our exhibitions. Around town, you can see innumerable Marilyn-themed window displays, film screenings and events. We also brought Seward Johnson’s iconic Forever Marilyn sculpture to Bendigo. Locals and visitors are vying every day to take selfies with this monumental eight-metre work. Did you know about MAMA’s Marilyn show when you were planning yours? We only became aware of the exhibition at MAMA after we had already developed our exhibition and, knowing how vastly different the content and premises for the exhibition was, we felt that they would complement each other well. That two regional galleries working independently decided to present exhibitions on Marilyn simply goes to show that she remains as relevant and captivating today as she was in her time. Bendigo Art Gallery and Twentieth Century Fox present Marilyn Monroe @ Bendigo Art Gallery, ends 10 July Right: Marilyn Monroe publicity image for How to marry a millionaire. © 1953 and 2016 Twentieth Century Fox
Art in film From serious documentaries to Hollywood productions, films have long played a role in bringing to life the stories of the world’s art and artists. And, this winter, the compelling story of major Australian artist and personality Danila Vassilieff is told for the first time in The wolf in Australian art, screening on 23 July at the NGA, home to his Peter and the wolf illustrations and a brilliant collection of his work. The screening will be introduced by the film’s
Based on Felicity Moore’s book Vassilieff and his art, the film shows how Vassilieff’s art led to Sidney Nolan’s Ned Kelly paintings, one of which (First-class marksman, AGNSW) was painted not at Heide but at Vassilieff’s home in Warrandyte. Also at the NGA this season, you can catch some of the most exciting recent cinema about art and culture in the Winter Film Series, presented by Simon Weaving. From the formative years of the incomparable David Hockney to the unlikely alliance between a German officer and museum director that saved
director, Richard Moore. He will then join
the Louvre’s masterpieces, you won’t want to
Felicity St John Moore and NGA curator Sarina
miss a frame.
Noordhuis-Fairfax in a Q&A session to discuss the making of the film and the life and work of
For the diary:
this fascinating artist, who liberated a group
Winter Film Series 2016, five films over five
of younger painters to paint their own original
Wednesdays, 15 June – 13 July, 6.30 pm
visions, including Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd,
The wolf in Australian art, screening and Q&A,
Albert Tucker, Joy Hester and John Perceval.
23 July, 2 pm
Artonview 86 | Winter 2016 9
News and review
Frida and Diego This June the Art Gallery of New South Wales will present Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera: from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection, an exhibition exploring the lives and art of two of the world’s most famous artists of the twentieth century. More than thirty works of art from the Gelman Collection, widely regarded as the world’s most significant private holding of Mexican modern art, are exhibited along with forty-nine photographs of Kahlo and Rivera, taken by renowned photographers Edward Weston, Nikolas Muray, Hector Garcia Cobo, and Guillermo Kahlo (Frida’s father), that track the artists’ lives from 1911 to the 1950s.
The world of Diane Arbus The photographs of Diane Arbus (1923–1971) stand as powerful allegories of postwar America undergoing seismic social change. Once seen, they are rarely forgotten. Works such as Identical twins, Roselle, NJ, 1967 and Child with toy hand grenade, in Central Park, New York City are among the most celebrated images in the history of photography. They are also among the most contentious. Her work has always polarised audiences and critics, whose opinions are as divided today as they ever have been. The question of whether she was empathetic to the people she photographed, often those living on the fringes of society, or an exploitative voyeur remains ultimately unanswerable and endlessly interesting. But, as the photographs of the twins
her life and the period in which her mature,
The exhibition includes some of Kahlo’s most
recognisable style was in full flight—and images
iconic works, including Diego on my mind and
that are lesser known but all the rarer for it.
Self-portrait with monkeys, both 1943, as well
Leading photographers such as Lisette
as major examples of Rivera’s canvas paintings.
Model and Walker Evans played a role in Arbus’s development as a photographer, and their compelling images can be seen alongside Arbus’s in a new exhibition at the NGA, Diane Arbus: American portraits, which opens 3 June. Prints by her contemporaries Garry Winogrand, William Klein and Milton Rogovin bring further context to her work and present a fuller picture of postwar American photography. A selection of prints by leading contemporary American photographer Katy Grannan, described as the true heir to Arbus’s dark vision of America, adds another dimension, presenting Arbus’s ongoing legacy. Three photographs from Grannan’s acclaimed series The 99 2011–14, portraits of people living in the poverty-stricken
in New Jersey and of the boy in Central Park
towns of California’s Central Valley, open up
make clear, everyone in an Arbus photograph
complex and often polarising questions about
looks a little strange, no matter their background.
the role of the photographer in society—just as
While other photographers have touched on the
Arbus did in her day.
ethical concerns of capturing people’s unguarded
Arbus traversed one of the great paradoxes
moments, Arbus’s work was, and still is, among
of photography, as she understood that, by
the most provocative in this regard.
being very specific and engaged with the people
The NGA holds thirty-six rare vintage prints,
around her, she could capture images that
which were some of the first to be acquired from
are timeless—images as surprising, relevant
Arbus’s estate following her suicide at the age
and moving today as they were when made.
of forty-eight. This collection is arguably one of
America raw sets her iconic images among her
the most impressive in the world, only bettered
lesser-known, affording visitors a fresh look at
institutionally by those at the Museum of
her work.
Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It comprises her most iconic
Diane Arbus: American portraits @ NGA,
images from 1961 to 1971—the last decade of
Canberra, opens 3 June
10 Artonview 86 | Winter 2016
For a quarter of a century, Kahlo and Rivera were passionate companions. They married
Above: Frida Kahlo Diego on my mind (Selfportrait as Tehuana) 1943, oil on Masonite. The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection of Mexican Art. © 2016 Banco de Mexico Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust, Mexico DF Top left: Diane Arbus Child with toy hand grenade, in Central Park, New York City 1962 and Identical twins, Roselle, NJ, 1967 1967, gelatin silver photographs. Both National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1980
in August 1929, a union that Kahlo’s parents described as a ‘marriage between an elephant and a dove’. Kahlo’s art was small scale and took a mostly autobiographical focus, while Rivera tackled large-scale public murals with strong political convictions. This contrast is visible even in their portrayals of each other: Rivera painted Kahlo as a cultural symbol and she painted him as her beloved husband. While stylistically and conceptually divergent, their approaches to painting reflect common themes, from the dramatic story of their life together to their shared investment in the cultural life of Mexico.
A family tree The work of Zhang Huan, an internationally renowned contemporary artist based in Shanghai and New York, provides a significant focus for the NGA’s new display of contemporary Chinese art. Among the works shown are images from performances he created between 1997 and 2002. The earliest is the well‑known To raise the water level in a fishpond for which he asked a group of forty labourers who travelled from rural China for work in Beijing to stand with him in a shallow
Rivera and Kahlo’s relationship was often
fishpond. Against a belief that the actions
troubled, but their support of each other’s art
of individuals cannot effect change, their
endured. Rivera, who was much lauded during
presence together in the water raised its level,
his lifetime, named Frida as his best critic. Their
however slightly.
relationship remained a source of inspiration for
The nine large photographs in Zhang Huan’s
Kahlo’s work, which unlike Rivera’s, was not
Family tree present an event in which three
widely celebrated until after her death.
calligraphers devoted a day to writing on the artist’s face and neck, gradually obscuring his
Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera @ Art Gallery of
skin with glossy ink. The text relates to ideas of
New South Wales, Sydney, 25 June – 9 October
fate and divination from physical characteristics
and to family and traditional stories, bringing together opposing ideas of fatalism and the power of individual will. The script in the centre of his forehead relates to Yu Kong Yi Shan (The fool who moved mountains), a well-known folk tale about a man whose great determination to level two mountains inspired the help of the immortals. Since returning to China from New York in 2005, Zhang Huan has concentrated on sculpture, installation and painting, often with reference to Buddhist sculpture and old photographs. His works on show at the NGA are from the Gene and Brian Sherman collection in Sydney and a private collection in Melbourne. We are extremely grateful for their generosity in sharing these incredible images with visitors to the NGA.
Zhang Huan Family tree 2000, series of nine C-Type prints. The Gene and Brian Sherman collection, Sydney
Artonview 86 | Winter 2016 11
News and review
Ten millionth visitor
Mary-Lou Nugent, Camilla Greville, Rebecca Fletcher, Alison Wright and Jael Muspratt meet at the NGA to celebrate the ten millionth visitor to an NGA travelling exhibition, 2016
William Robinson To see space and time twist and turn in a single moment, we need only encounter a painting by William Robinson. He is a senior contemporary figure in Australian art, and his remarkable vision of the rainforests of Queensland has earned him a spot as one of our most significant landscape artists. His unique sense of place, drawn from
Since its official launch in 1988, the National Gallery of Australia’s travelling exhibition program has hosted ten million people visiting more than 125 travelling exhibitions at over 1660 venues in all states and territories and overseas. In late February this year, while visiting William Kentridge: drawn from Africa at the Art Gallery of Ballarat, Rebecca Fletcher received the surprise news that she was the ten millionth visitor to an NGA travelling exhibition. The NGA celebrated this milestone by providing Rebecca with an overnight trip for two to Canberra to see one of the many NGA exhibitions, lunch at the NGA, and a complimentary three-year membership. Over the past twenty-five years, the NGA travelling exhibition program has toured
interview with curator Deborah Hart in 2001,
also revealing his wry humour and insight in
‘the seasons, the clouds, nothing is set. There are
relation to portraiture—are on display at the
things behind you, all around you, and you are
NGA for a limited time. So, with the help of
in it … You begin to question what time is. Time
this Queensland artist’s extraordinary paintings,
isn’t something that is just measured on a clock’.
transport yourself to a warmer climate
This description captures the experience of solid’. He doesn’t just show us the landscape, he transports us there, to the places he knows so well. In a single image, he conveys the allencompassing foliage and the tumbling light unique to the verdant rainforests of Queensland.
and fluctuating aspects of the environment,
More so, he conveys the passing of time felt
is richly conveyed in the modulating textures
nowhere else.
country, everything moves’, he has said in an
12 Artonview 86 | Winter 2016
this winter.
his paintings, which are equally ‘indefinite, not
memories of time spent absorbing the intimate
and perspectives of his paintings. ‘Living in the
over 8800 works of art across the country for display in remote, regional and metropolitan areas. Through these exhibitions, more Australians can connect with the art in the national collection, and the range of education and public programs that that accompany these touring shows provides valuable resources to schools and communities that can’t make it to Canberra. In 2015, the NGA toured seven major exhibitions, covering prints, paintings, decorative arts and contemporary and international art, to places such as Darwin, Cairns, Albury and Geelong. The travelling exhibitions program is generously supported by the National Collecting Institutions Touring and Outreach program, Visions of Australia and our Media Partner ABC Local Radio.
To celebrate his 80th year, Robinson’s paintings and works on paper—the latter
William Robinson @ NGA, Canberra, until 24 July William Robinson Creation landscape—fountains of the earth 2002, oil on two canvases. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, acquired with the assistance of the Masterpieces for the Nation Fund 2003
Privilege afforded them the luxury to paint, passion drove them to succeed at a time when men dominated the field
Masterpieces for the Nation Fund Support the NGA’s bid to acquire these evocative works by two women who skilfully painted Australian subjects during and before the birth of the colonies Give now by contacting us on (02) 6240 6408 or via foundation@nga.gov.au Donations of $2 or more are tax deductible
Florence Williams (England 1856 – Australia 1931) A native bird with mountain berries and native flora, backed by Mount Wellington 1873–75, oil on canvas Sarah Stone (England c 1760–1844) Shells 1781, drawing in watercolour (including Pacific and Australian shells almost certainly collected by Joseph Banks on Cook’s first Pacific voyage from 1768 to 1771)
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In brief
The still-life tradition Many of Australia’s most loved artists have painted still lifes depicting flowers. Margaret Preston’s images of Australian wild flowers are widely known. In her Banksia 1927, for instance, she radically reduced her subjects to dramatic forms, emphasising the structure of the native flowers and the black cylindrical vases, and set the scene with an equally dramatic background of strong black horizontals and verticals. In works such as this, Preston developed a distinctive, modern expression of Australian flora. In the same year she painted Banksia, she wrote in her essay ‘From eggs to electrolux’, speaking of herself, ‘the time has come to express her surroundings in her work. All around her in the simple domestic life is machinery … They all surround her and influence her mind [and her art]’. But, images of Australian native flowers were not new, only Preston’s way of depicting them. During the early decades of the colony, some of Australia’s first resident professional artists were drawn to depict Australian native flora. John Lewin was trained as a natural history artist, and he sent images of what he regarded as strange and unique plants back to his patrons in London. Some sixty years later, Florence Williams painted and exhibited Australian native flower works of a different kind. Her stunning A native bird with mountain berries and native flora, backed by Mount Wellington 1873–75 (the subject of this year’s Masterpieces for the Nation Fund appeal) is a detailed representation of the flora and fauna native to Tasmania. It depicts an eastern rosella, found in eastern Tasmania, with snowberries, common heath, Australian olives, red heartberries and purple climbing blueberries. Her painting has evident Pre-Raphaelite characteristics, including bright colours, fidelity to nature and meticulous detail, and a somewhat conventional idea of beauty. The Australian Impressionists also painted flower pieces, which were often based on flowers picked from their own gardens. Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton, in particular, were ardent gardeners in their later years and painted still lifes of flowers. Indeed, one of the most popular paintings in the NGA’s recent Tom Roberts exhibition was Poppies 1921. In the spring of 1921, Roberts had returned to his Golders Green house in London after a brief visit to
14 Artonview 86 | Winter 2016
Australia during 1919–20, and he depicted poppies freshly picked from his garden and arranged naturally in a glass vase. He painted
Goncharova’s CuboFuturist fashion
the flowers to show the bends and twists of their stalks, petals and leaves, which gives the work
An exquisite 1920s dress by turn-of-the‑century
a sense of movement and animation. Moreover,
Russian avant-garde artist and costume and
Roberts captured the subtle differences in
fashion designer Natalia Goncharova graces
the textures of the flowers and the contrast
the National Gallery of Australia over winter.
between the sharpness of the glass vase and
Part of the NGA’s small collection of modernist
the softness of the blooms, set off against a
fashion from the 1920s, this is one of only a
neutral background.
few Goncharova dresses remaining from her time
George W Lambert painted flowers that he had picked from the English countryside in his A garden bunch 1916, depicting convolvulus, delphinium, fuchsia, love in the mist, lupin, pink and white roses and snapdragon arranged in a glass vase. While it is possible to ascribe meaning to the arrangement by noting the gamut of attitudes and emotions that the flowers can be said to represent (convolvulus, for instance, stands for perseverance and pink rose for grace and happiness), it may well be that Lambert sought only to elicit visual delight. Hans Heysen, a contemporary of Roberts and Lambert, also painted images of fruits and flowers, such as Still life with quinces 1924 and Spring flowers 1932. Colin Thiele, however, quoted Heysen as saying in 1921 that Australia held ‘an underlying prejudice against all still-life paintings’. And, as Roger Butler has recorded, the governor of South Australia, Henry Galway, remarked at the 1919 opening of an exhibition of work by Margaret Preston and Gladys Reynell that he ‘preferred landscapes to still lifes as he could always get still life studies in his own home’. Given the plethora of books and articles on the subject and the enjoyment that so many have expressed in appreciating the varied qualities of the still lifes painted by Australian artists, both at home and abroad, we can fairly safely say that we’ve moved on and that the limited view expressed by the governor is in the minority.
as a designer for French fashion house Myrbor. Goncharova was born in the village of Nagayevo in Russia on 4 June 1881. She began studying sculpture at the Moscow Institute of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture in 1898. She also studied Eastern and Byzantine art, Russian folk art—particularly lubok prints and icon paintings—as well as embroidery and fabric design. All of these influenced the development of her Neo-Primitive style. She became a French citizen in 1938 and died in Paris on 17 October 1962. Her work was included in Sergei Diaghilev’s 1906 Russian exhibition at the Salon d’Automne in Paris. She exhibited with many important Russian Modernist movements, such as the Union of Youth in St Petersburg in 1910, and organised, with her partner Michel Larionov, the exhibition The Knave of Diamonds in Moscow in the same year. In 1913, she was involved with Larionov and Kazimir Malevich in staging the exhibition Target in Moscow, where their Rayonism style was launched, and was commissioned by Diaghilev to produce scenery and costumes for the Ballets Russes’ production of Le Coq d’Or. During this period, she was involved with a young avant-garde movement that made experimental films and staged cutting-edge cabaret revues. After the outbreak of the First World War, she returned to Russia, where she continued
Anne Gray, former head of Australian Art
to design costumes for the theatre. She joined
Masterpieces for the Nation Fund 2016
and produced costume designs for Liturgie.
Give now by contacting us on (02) 6240 6408
Later, among the post-Bolshevik Russian
or via foundation@nga.gov.au
diaspora in Paris, she designed Cubo-Futurist
Your support will go toward acquiring two
fashion garments for Myrbor, owned by
exceptional still lifes of Australian subjects,
art collector and design entrepreneur Marie
Sarah Stone’s Shells 1781 and Florence
Cuttoli, from 1922 to 1926, which is when she
Williams’s A native bird with mountain berries
produced this richly embroidered and appliquéd
and native flora, backed by Mount Wellington
cocktail dress. Dr Robert Bell AM, Senior
1873–75.
Curator, Decorative Arts and Design
Diaghilev in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1915
Above: Natalia Goncharova Cocktail dress c 1924, silk crepe-de-chine, velvet and gold thread embroidery. Purchased 2013 Opposite, clockwise from top: Florence Williams A native bird with mountain berries and native flora, backed by Mount Wellington 1873–75, oil on canvas; Margaret Preston Banksia 1927, oil on canvas. Purchased 1962. © Margaret Rose Preston Estate. Represented by Viscopy; John Lewin The South Head Lyllie of New South Wales 1810, watercolour over pencil. Purchased 2000. All works National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
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In brief
The Thames and Cleopatra’s Needle In the last known photograph of Tom Roberts, taken in 1931 at his home Talisman in Kallista, Victoria, he enjoys the simple pleasure of a pipe as he sits before the fireplace. Displayed on an adjacent sideboard is a small landscape, The Thames and Cleopatra’s Needle, which he painted in London in 1884. This treasured memento of the city remained in his collection for almost half a century and has recently found a new home at the NGA. From 1881, Roberts attended the Royal Academy Schools in London and travelled through Spain and France before returning to Melbourne in 1884. In the months leading up to his departure, he painted several views of the Thames Embankment. These were seen and admired by Arthur Streeton, who, in a June 1932 edition of The Argus, maintained the importance of these ‘impressions’ in developing a new approach to landscape painting in Australia and the impetus to paint directly from nature. Working on small panels to capture the changing effect of light falling on the Thames, Roberts was influenced by James McNeill Whistler’s small-scale sea and river landscapes shrouded in mist or in half-light or twilight. In The Thames and Cleopatra’s Needle, his masterful composition of repeating arcs and staccato-like verticals is expressed in tonal harmonies of blushing pink, green and mauve, weighted by blue and purple-grey shadows. Using a small square brush, Roberts pulled paint across the sky in waves to create the subtle sense of atmospheric movement, while energetic daubs of green covey the liveliness of broken water lapping at the Embankment in the lower left corner. The painting has been acquired in honour of Dr Anna Gray for her distinguished service to the NGA and for her contribution as curator of Tom Roberts. Visitors in the final weekend of the exhibition were fortunate enough to see this wonderful work on public display for the first time since 1974. Dr Emma Kindred, Assistant Curator, Australian Paintings and Sculpture before 1920
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Works of a prodigy In 1959, when he painted a series of prescient geometric abstractions at the age of sixteen, Robert Jacks foreshadowed a revolution in Australian painting that would happen nine years later and culminate in the historic exhibition The Field at the National Gallery of Victoria and Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1968. More so, he demonstrated an understanding and vision that would ordinarily be well beyond someone his age.
the dominance of figuration in Australian art, these seminal abstract masterpieces distinctively show the persistent influence and power that abstraction was exerting on the younger generation of artists. Evident in them is an artist consciously working through the key tenets underpinning the philosophy of abstraction, which sought to locate the essence of things— geometry, shape, form and colour—rather than represent them. Jacks plays with the concept of the picture plane and with the materiality of his task as a
He was still a student at Prahran Technical
painter and experiments with tone and balance,
College, and yet these works clearly show the
exploring the different effects of grey and cream
qualities of a prodigy. Painted in the same year
circles against backgrounds ranging from ink
as the exhibition Antipodeans at the Victorian
black to soft grey. But it is not only shape and
Artists Society, which attempted to reassert
colour that preoccupy the paintings. The ideas
Opposite: Tom Roberts The Thames and Cleopatra’s Needle c 1884, oil on cardboard. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 2016 Right: Marion Griffin Cafe Australia chair 1916, blackwood, plywood, leather. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 2015 Below: Robert Jacks Four circles 1959, oil on composition board; Three points of the circle 1959, oil on composition board; Depth of the circle 1959, oil on composition board; Weight of the circle 1959, oil on composition board; House of circles 1959, oil on composition board. All National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 2016
One hundred years on The highly fashionable, although now demolished, Cafe Australia was among the most significant interior-design projects produced by Marion Mahony Griffin and Walter Burley Griffin Associate Architects between 1914 and 1920. Designed in 1915–16 and located in the Australia Hotel on Collins Street in Melbourne, this grand banquet hall featured a balcony mezzanine. The project, which incorporated a completely integrated facade, furniture design and other elements, was led by Marion Griffin, one of the world’s first registered female architects. Her husband, Water Burley Griffin, we all know, won the contest to design our national capital in 1912. Prior to that, both had worked in the office of eminent American architect Frank Lloyd Wright—Marion from 1895 and Walter from 1901 to 1905. The couple married
contained within the deceptively simple geometry of a circle—the depth, weight and parts of a circle—also find footing. These are ideas that absorbed artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, who saw a divine geometry in spheres and circles. The building blocks laid down in these works
in 1911 and, soon after moving to Australia in 1914, established their own firm in Melbourne and Sydney. Together, they worked on hundreds of architectural projects, including urban designs, buildings, landscapes and interiors, as well as furniture and other household items. To commemorate this incredible partnership,
served Jacks throughout his career as an artist
the NGA has purchased a significant furniture
purely dedicated to the great creative adventure
element from Cafe Australia’s now lost interior.
of abstraction in the twentieth century until his
If it was still standing today, the cafe would be
untimely death just weeks before the opening
celebrating its 100th anniversary. The dining
of his retrospective at the National Gallery of
chair, once used in quantity in the cafe, is now
Victoria in 2014. They represent a seminal point
one of only four known examples to have
not only in his development as an artist but
survived the remodelling of the hotel in 1927.
also in the emergence of abstraction as a critical
Its angular design was an important element in
movement in Australian art. Lara Nicholls,
the Griffins’ complex geometric design program
Assistant Curator, Australian Painting
and had its genesis in their work in the late
and Sculpture
1890s with Chicago architect Louis Sullivan.
The chair bears the manufacturer’s stamp of Melbourne firm H Goldman Manufacturing Company, which made the Griffin-designed furniture for the cafe. The firm’s expertise in fine joinery made it possible to realise the complex geometric details of the chair, which place it firmly among the Griffins’ most significant expressions of early twentieth-century modern design in their adopted Australian context. Dr Robert Bell AM, Senior Curator, Decorative Arts and Design
Artonview 86 | Winter 2016 17
In brief
of elements within individual works and
meanings we are able to discern 1987, in the
in the written word—drawing on diaristic
national art collection, came out of a journey
references and extracts of poetry, prose and
she made to Antarctica in 1987. It is the first
philosophical texts—both became important
of her Heard Island Trilogy paintings that
aspects of her work. Implicit in her adaptation
developed from numerous delicate sketchbook
of language is the suggestiveness of the sounds
drawings tracing the topography of Heard
and multiple meanings of words, a powerful
Island. The painting extends across seven panels
open-ended means of questioning the nature of
that are in turn divided into three distinct layers.
human experience.
The top half reveals a panoramic vista, referring
Maddock’s nuanced word painting Solitary
Bea Maddock When Bea Maddock died in Launceston on 9 April this year, we lost in her a great printmaker, painter, papermaker, book artist,
Maddock’s major painting We live in the
from one work to another and her interest
to the traces of human occupation and the open
1979 conveys great subtlety. It reveals her
expanse of a glacial wilderness. The fusion of
interest in American artist Jasper Johns,
Aboriginal place names with the landscape in
whose retrospective exhibition she had seen
this work is again apparent in Terra spiritus
at the Whitney Museum of American Art
... with a darker shade of pale 1993–98.
in 1977. But it is also very personal and
An expansive panoramic print comprising some
distinctive. A close reading reveals definitions
fifty sheets of paper and depicting the coastline
of the meanings of ‘solitary’, ‘solstice’, ‘solus’,
of Tasmania, it is one of the greatest works of
gently moving across the lines, until, toward
her illustrious career.
the end, we find ‘solve, untie, loosen, unravel,
Along with paintings and sculptures, the
dissolve, find answer to (problem) or way
NGA holds the major collection of her prints
out. Hence solvable again’. The poetic intent
and drawings—many generous gifts of the artist.
and fluctuating patterns in this work evoke
Maddock taught and mentored generations of
states of mind, the movement of the sun in
artists, particularly in Victoria, where she once
relation to the seasons and a feeling of being
of Art in England. She never opted for easy
headed the Victorian College of the Arts, and
on the edge of disappearance, only to reappear
solutions, in any medium, and believed that a
in her home state of Tasmania. She served on
again. The letters were initially collaged
work needed time to come into being.
the Council of the then Australian National
from newspaper headlines, stuck down with
Gallery from 1985 until 1987. She will be
hot wax and then painted over. There were
greatly missed. The NGA is exhibiting a display
uncompromising, as she was always seeking
quotidian, practical concerns involved in its
of her works in the next Australian art rehang.
to understand the larger questions regarding
making, as she noted in Being and nothingness,
Deborah Hart and Roger Butler
existence. Metaphysical concerns were often
the catalogue for her retrospective exhibition
played out in her introspective self-portraits,
at the Queensland Art Gallery in 1992
her panoramic views of Antarctica and the
(curated by Roger Butler and Anne Kirker):
Tasmanian landscape and her works that
‘It was controlled by whether the words fitted
incorporate the language of the Tasmanian
and whether they sounded alright, so it took a
Aboriginal people. Over the years, the repetition
long while to get it working’.
sculptor, potter, educationalist, environmentalist and journal writer. She came to prominence in the early 1960s, after returning to Australia from postgraduate studies at the Slade School
Her subject matter was equally
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Above: Bea Maddock, 1989. Photo: Gregory Heath Below: Terra spiritus … with a darker shade of pale 1993–98 (detail), stencil print, hand-drawn script. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Gordon Darling Australia Pacific Print Fund, 1998
Behind the scenes
Conserving Cucchi Enzo Cucchi’s painting Il Vento Dei Galli Neri 1983 is in Conservation for some much-needed treatment. The work was acquired soon after it was painted, when the paint was still soft. Executed with gusto, its surface is composed of thickly impasted oil paint that is over a centimetre thick in some places. The use of such dramatic impasto has contributed to the painting’s present problems. As the paint has begun to dry, it has shrunk, tearing the paint layer and causing large ‘curls’ and smaller fissures to lift away from the surface. The present treatment involves using a small syringe to inject a synthetic adhesive into the gaps. Warm air is then used to make the paint sufficiently pliable so that it can be repositioned.
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Art and artists
PAINTING JOAN MITCHELL Julia Greenstreet reveals, behind a ‘biting tongue and searing temper’, the exceptional life of artistphilanthropist Joan Mitchell. A rare woman among the American Abstract Expressionists and a guiding star to many that followed, she was a force to be reckoned with and a potent and generous advocate for the arts, finding powerful expression in the way she lived as much as in her work as a painter and printmaker.
Joan Mitchell in her Vétheuil studio, 1983. Joan Mitchell Foundation Archives. Photo: Robert Freson
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At just twelve years old, Joan Mitchell knew she wanted to be an artist. From her debut on the New York scene in the 1950s through to the 1990s, she painted her way into the annals of Abstract Expressionism with steely determination, creating a body of work of soaring lyrical beauty. Painting was her solace, a lifeline: ‘painting is what allows me to survive’. She espoused an unerring belief in the vital role of painting in nurturing the careers of younger, less established artists, fostering a legacy that straddles both artistic and philanthropic spheres. The NGA is fortunate to hold a substantial collection of prints by Mitchell, providing us with a unique entry point into the life and practice of this highly regarded artist. Having graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, the next logical step for Mitchell was New York— postwar capital of the Western art world—and she settled there in 1949. At this time, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning reigned over an art scene that relegated women artists to the periphery. The prevailing and well-vocalised belief among male painters that women couldn’t paint was echoed at an institutional level. Prominent galleries such as Kootz and Sidney Janis didn’t represent women, while membership to the Ninth Street Club, aka ‘The Club’, intellectual hub of the New York School, was strictly off limits until 1951—and, even then, very few women were invited (Mitchell, as it happens, was one of them). Confronted with this macho milieu, Mitchell didn’t shrink—she snarled. Drinking, smoking, cursing and ‘playing the field’ on par with the men, she also had a biting tongue and searing temper. Her active involvement in The Club and frequent attendance at the Cedar Street Tavern combined with her tough persona, sharp intellect and fierce commitment to painting saw Mitchell enjoy a level of acceptance unusual for her gender. It didn’t hurt that she idolised them, too: ‘I adulated the men so much they sort of liked me … I don’t think women in any way were a threat to these men, so they could encourage the “lady painter” ’. And encouragement Mitchell needed. For, despite her inclusion in the landmark Ninth Street Show of 1951 and a string of solo exhibitions, her struggle to make it as a painter was real, and she was often plagued by self-doubt, loneliness and depression. During this fledgling period, the friendship and support of revered painter-idols Franz Kline and de Kooning provided the young artist with vital reassurance. Mitchell was buoyed not only by their warmth and openness but, most importantly, by their belief in her as a painter. Kline, she recalled, was generous ‘about other painters, which is very unlike many painters … He was so honest and not snobby, not saying: “Why don’t you forget it—get a job or something?” Always generous. No, he really never forgot and always helped other people … Absolutely marvellous’. De Kooning, too, was a valued mentor to Mitchell, who called him ‘my father’.
Left, from top: Joan Mitchell Cobble hill, from the portfolio Poems 1992, lithograph; Weeds I 1992, etching, aquatint. Both National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased with the assistance of the Orde Poynton Fund, 2002. © Estate of Joan Mitchell; Kenneth Tyler and Joan Mitchell with proofs of Fields, Trees and Weeds works in background, Tyler Graphics Ltd, New York, 1991. Photo: Marabeth Cohen-Tyler Opposite: Joan Mitchell Sunflowers II, from the series Sunflowers 1992, lithograph. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased with the assistance of the Orde Poynton Fund, 2002. © Estate of Joan Mitchell
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Art and artists
Memories of Kline’s and de Kooning’s encouraging words stayed with Mitchell for years to come and, in turn, were reflected in her own relationships with younger artists. As an established painter in the 1970s and 1980s living in Vétheuil, France, Mitchell opened her home to countless emerging, struggling artists, adopting the role of mentor, teacher, friend and financial backer. She instilled in them the importance of feeling and her love of painting, poetry, light, landscape and colour. Although Mitchell was a painter above all else (oil on canvas was her preferred medium), she was also an accomplished printmaker and produced a significant graphic oeuvre of prints and artist books. The NGA’s collection of Mitchell prints and associated proofs numbers in the hundreds and is the largest in Australia. Completed over two sessions in 1981 and 1992, the works bear witness to the fruitful collaboration between Mitchell and Kenneth Tyler, postwar America’s pre-eminent printer-publisher. Tyler Graphics Ltd, established by Tyler in 1974, was the first print workshop she worked in that offered a full range of techniques and was affectionately referred to by the printer as his ‘candy store’. While Mitchell wasn’t interested in the intricacies of print processes, the workshop’s technical excellence and ethos of innovation nonetheless excited her, and she would ask Tyler, ‘what piece of candy do I get today?’ Both grew up in Chicago and had many mutual art world connections, which set the stage for their close friendship to come. Tyler was unfazed by Mitchell’s forceful personality, heavy drinking and swearing, finding
her to be ‘a very bright, charming and lovable person with a good sense of humour’. Their camaraderie fed into an equally successful working relationship that resulted in some of Mitchell’s most powerful graphics. In 1981, Mitchell produced ten large lithographs collectively titled the Bedford series after the workshop’s Bedford Village location in New York. Keen to facilitate Mitchell’s drawing process, Tyler provided her with clear sheets of Mylar, which, when layered over one another on the studio wall, allowed her to view the entire image at once and thus work with greater immediacy. For the printers, this served the dual function of creating instant colour separations, which could then be directly transferred to photosensitive lithographic plates for proofing. Mitchell harnessed Tyler’s innovative technique to expand her printmaking palette and incorporated up to ten colours in one work, marking a significant break from the more subdued tones of earlier prints. Tyler was struck by Mitchell’s ‘mastery of colour unparalleled by her contemporaries. I never worked with anyone since [Josef] Albers that had such a keen knowledge of colour and how colours interacted with each other’. Abstract but always precise, she would say, ‘Ken, I want to try a colour like the colour of dying sunflowers’. Blue was particularly significant to Mitchell and, when she requested cobalt blue—illegal in printer’s ink in 1991—for Trees V, Tyler went to great lengths to get it for her, sourcing a box of cobalt blue oil sticks from a New York art supply store and grinding them up to make ink.
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Art and artists
For a week in October 1992, Mitchell stayed at TGL to complete a cycle of prints she had started the year prior. During this visit, she was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer and the session became a ‘marathon race to the finish’. Printer Susan Hover Oehme recalls, ‘she knew she was dying, and Ken knew she was dying, and we knew she was dying. It was such a weird situation. It was very sad, and yet she was very pragmatic about it’. The Trees, Sunflowers, Weeds and Fields works feature many of Mitchell’s favourite natural subjects and are remarkable for their energy and sweeping physicality. With enormous lithographic presses at her disposal, she seized the opportunity to incorporate the full range of her movement in monumental diptychs such as Sunflowers II and Trees IV, the largest prints she ever produced. Another project completed at this time was Poems, a book of eight lithographs illuminating the poetry of Nathan Kernan. When Kernan met Mitchell, he had made ‘hesitant beginnings in writing poetry’ and was as yet unpublished. Before he knew it, though, Mitchell was reading his work and declaring to all that he was a poet, much to his dismay. When Tyler approached Mitchell to make an artist book, she was determined to work with a young, unknown poet and chose Kernan. Despite Kernan’s protests, she persisted, saying, ‘let’s just make something and have fun’. The collaboration had a lasting impact on the poet, who reflected in 2013, ‘There remains something unfinished about our friendship, not least in my feeling that I haven’t yet lived up to her belief in me … When I see her on film her presence rushes forcefully back: her voice, her mannerisms, her vulnerability, her sharp retorts, and I miss Joan terribly’. Kernan’s story is not unique. Indeed, during her lifetime, Mitchell took many young artists under her wing. Biographer Patricia Albers outlines how, in New York, Mitchell gave painter Howard Kanovitz advice on art materials and discussed ‘how to live, how to make it, what it was all about’, while providing emotional support to a struggling Marilyn Stark, who thought of Mitchell as her ‘big sister’. At her home in Vétheuil, Mitchell received a steady flow of artist guests, with several staying for months or years at a time. Her childlessness, loneliness and outsider mentality arguably played a part in her nurturing relationships with young artists. In addition, her isolation from New York likely fed a desire to recreate the sense of community and lively artistic debate she had herself found so enriching as a youth. While Mitchell turned down prestigious teaching opportunities at institutions such as the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, she found satisfaction in passing on some of her formidable knowledge about the craft of painting to fledgling artists. Phyllis Hailey, who lived at Vétheuil for over a year, wrote that Mitchell was ‘truly doing wonders for me painting-wise and person-wise’. Student and painter Christopher Campbell, initially told by Mitchell that his work was ‘a complete pile of shit’, was subsequently given an ‘amazing lesson’ in colour. Today the Joan Mitchell Foundation—established in 1993 as stipulated in the artist’s will—continues her advocacy for the support and professional development of artists on a national scale. Key initiatives include free studio classes for emerging artists, an annual grants program, and funding of community arts organisations. The Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, conceived in response to the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, runs a residency program providing artists with living quarters and studio space. In the United States, artist-endowed organisations such as the Joan Mitchell Foundation are on the rise and are playing
an increasingly important role in the cultural landscape as government funding declines. Mitchell’s art and life were inseparable from one another. Despite the gender discrimination of the art establishment, and compelled by a ‘rage to paint’, Mitchell carved a path uniquely hers, passing her passion and commitment on to successive generations of artists. For a figure so integral to the story of Abstract Expressionism, Mitchell is underrepresented in Australian collections. Tyler’s generous donation to the NGA of over four hundred of her prints in 2001 is, therefore, all the more precious. Above, from top: Joan Mitchell in her garden, Vétheuil, 1991. Joan Mitchell Foundation Archives. © David Turnley; Susan Hover Oehme pulling impression for Joan Mitchell’s Weeds I 1992, Tyler Graphics Ltd, New York, 1992. Photo: Marabeth Cohen-Tyler Opposite: Joan Mitchell Flower I, from the series Bedford 1981, lithograph. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, gift of Kenneth Tyler, 2002. © Estate of Joan Mitchell
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WORRY WILL VANISH REVELATION Jaklyn Babington introduces the hypnotic, engaging and profoundly affecting work of Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist, whose immersive film-based installations invite viewers to be absorbed in a shared experience. A major new work by Rist, Worry will vanish revelation was purchased by the NGA, with the help of its Foundation, early this year and will premiere for Australian audiences at the first opportunity. Artonview 86 | Winter 2016 27
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Art and artists
Remove your shoes and step inside an alternative space. Recline on a soft cushion. Give yourself permission to stop and stretch out. Allow your mind a reprieve from the day’s schedule. Release your worry. Slow your breathing by relaxing each body part, starting with the soles of your feet right to the top of your head. Absorb your new surrounds through your eyes and ears, and try to sense your environment through every pore of your skin. Listen to the soundscape of a rhythmic, whirring pulse. As an entity now open to both supraliminal and subliminal forces, give yourself over to the ‘moment of now’, where your physical boundaries start to dissolve and your mind is free to glide, tilt and flow. Accept the invitation to explore the sensation of being at one with the universe and every living organism in it. Be seduced by the close-up, colour-saturated universe of Pipilotti Rist. As a master of the moving image, with few comparisons, Swiss-born Rist is well known on the global contemporary art stage. Since the late 1980s, she has carved a unique position in experimental video and film, making her name with works such as I’m not the girl who misses much 1986 and Pickle porno 1992. She has shown in international biennales, including representing Switzerland at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005, and had major solo exhibitions and commissions such as Open my glade for Times Square in 2000 and the enormous projected installation Pour your body out at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2008–09. Worry will vanish revelation 2015, her most recent large-scale moving image work, was shown at Hauser & Wirth in London in 2015 and as part of her major survey at the Kunsthaus Zurich earlier this year. Over the last fifteen years, Rist has moved from single-channel to multi-channel works, creating large-scale immersive environments that merge image, sound and scenario-specific props. In developing Worry will vanish revelation, Rist adopted the lessons of ‘autogenic training’, a set of physical exercises combined with repeated visualisations developed in the 1930s by psychiatrist Johannes Heinrich Schultz. The work invites viewers to recline, lulling them into a meditative state, and the sequencing of hyper-visuals that follows takes the viewer on a journey both inside the human body and traversing the skin. We, at times, fly like insects among the micro-cosmos of nature and, at others, seem to be exploring the vastness of the universe. Rist’s offering here is both visceral and psychological, a trip through the sensual and sublime. Despite temporary showings at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne in 2011 and her inclusion in the 2014 Sydney Biennale, Australian audiences have not yet had an extended opportunity to experience Rist’s immersive film-based installations. The Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane and the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart have both collected her early video works but, until now, no public collection here has included a recent large-scale work like Worry will vanish revelation. With the help of the NGA’s Foundation members, this major international purchase of ‘destination quality’ has been acquired for the national art collection. When opportunity arises, the NGA in Canberra will premiere Worry will vanish revelation for our Australian audiences. Watch this space.
All images in this feature Worry will vanish revelation, from the series Worry work family 2015, audio-video installation, music by Anders Guggisberg. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Luhring Augustine. © Pipilotti Rist
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UNSTABLE GROUND Mike Parr speaks to Elspeth Pitt ahead of the opening of his major exhibition Mike Parr: Foreign Looking. As a young man, Parr’s refusal of authority led him into the arts. His critical mindedness, embrace of risk and fierce intelligence have since set him apart as one of the most remarkable artists of our time.
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Mike Parr
Elspeth Pitt: Discussions of your work are often addressed in isolation, apart from the works of others. So, I’d like to start by asking if there are particular artists, or writers even, who figure in your development as an artist. Mike Parr: If you mean something like the ‘anxiety of influence’, all I can say is that my art is so anxious it has no need of additional affect. I’m being facetious, of course. In 1965, I went to Bribie Island in the middle of the night with a young friend who was a criminal. We hoped to meet Ian Fairweather. It was my idea. We spent some hours with him, and I was intrigued by the state of his pyjamas and his peculiar detachment. The inside of his hut was very interesting, too. I explained to Mary Eagle quite some years ago that I attribute the exhausted grey of his paintings to the mosquito-coil ash which was thick on the floor and mixed up with the paint. His detachment was aggravated by the same coating. At various distances from the hut, he’d accumulated very interesting mounds of tea-tree roots. I thought they were analogues to the paintings inside. We financed our breakfast with Fairweather by stealing milk Above: Wall Definition 1971, photocopied typescript. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1973 Opposite: Black Box: The Theatre of Self Correction Part I, performance I 1979, Biennale of Sydney, direct positive colour photograph. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1980 Previous: Dream 1978, performance for ACT 1, Lake Burley Griffin, Canberra. Photo: Robert Little
I was typing at the edge of oblivion, and I imagined breaking through the wall of words into a state of revelation. money in the early hours of the morning, money which had been left with empty milk bottles on people’s porches all the way down the main street. After our breakfast, we were arrested by the local police, separated in the watch-house and invited to dob one another in. Fairweather’s detachment was a resource that day, and the cops drove us back over the pontoon bridge in the early evening and told us never to return. I date a lot of my inspiration as an artist to that single meeting. I admire many other artists but none have had quite the same effect as Fairweather’s own inimitable combination of non sequiturs. Elspeth: And that’s the year you started to consider of yourself an artist, at least according to a quote in the introductory chapter to David Bromfield’s 1991 monograph on your work to date. Your words were, ‘I began to think of myself as an artist’, but you also said, ‘I wasn’t an artist … I had no training as an artist—that was my first handicap. My second handicap was a physical one; how do you make things when you’ve got one arm’.
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Mike: The anxiety of that claim suddenly seems characteristic of the whole improvised nature of my career. At the time, being an artist meant not being a lawyer. It also meant not being dominated by my father and not continuing to see a state psychiatrist. In David’s book, I also said, ‘the first decisions about becoming an artist coincided with the idea that I was going to move into a context where I could decide things for myself’. David didn’t try to unpack the deeper significance of what that meant, but it was his lead-in to talking about the way I was living then and my attempt to write poetry. It seems to me now that declaring myself to be an artist was my way of trying to identify more deeply with my mother. My mother thought of herself as an artist. She’d studied at the Julian Ashton School in the 1930s. I wonder, though, if that was really true. She could certainly draw. She helped me to complete a drawing of a bushranger when I was about twelve. It got the second prize in a school competition and was pinned up on the wall of the classroom. I can remember feeling that I hadn’t quite earned that praise but it is now bound up in my memory with the love and gratitude that I feel toward my mother. Domination was the key concept in my upbringing. I was very aware of the dominant role that my father played within our family. We were all inordinately, anxiously dependent on him. He would often be gone for fairly long periods of time as he tried to make a living in the 1950s and 1960s. We were left behind on the farm. My mother didn’t drive, and it was six miles through the bush to Southport, which was a small coastal Above: Red triangle and Black triangle, in Word Situations 1971, photocopied typescript. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1973 Opposite: Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi, Oi (Democratic Torture) 2003, thirty‑hour performance, Artspace, Sydney. Image courtesy the artist
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town then, so we were isolated, and the people on the neighbouring farms regarded our family as foreigners and my father, in particular, with a mixture of incredulity and awe. When we were alone, my mother would step up her artistic activities, but these were hidden away on my father’s return because he regarded art as ‘irrational, a waste of time, escapism’. Elspeth: You wrote in 1974 that all your work since 1970 had been ‘basically part of the same programme’. Is that still the case? Mike: That was the introductory sentence to Some Notes On My Work. I’d just completed a decisive transition from writing a kind of concrete poetry as proto-conceptual art to performing written instructions that reflected the processes of inversion or regression induced by using a typewriter. Wall Definition 1971, part of my exhibition Word Situations II, is the paradigmatic piece in this development because it foregrounds time or the performative aspect of typing words that define a word (in this case, ‘wall’), then typing words that define the words that define the word, and so on. I carried on typing for forty days (the symbolism of forty days and forty nights wasn’t lost on me), completing 254 pages of words by the end of it. I was typing at the edge of oblivion, and I imagined breaking through the wall of words into a state of revelation. The wall in this instance was a kind of totalising negation, a Stalinist supersession, but it was also the ground zero of minimal and conceptual art. In Some Notes On My Work, I wrote that ‘words are like a wall’ and that that was ‘a sort of autism’. I’d also drawn the further conclusion ‘of art as a means for behaviour modification’. It’s this account of a transition that’s interesting: the way in which words, typing and performance get linked
Mike Parr
The extremes of my performance are necessary. They reveal the deep continuity of all my work. and how this linkage opens up a new understanding about the significance of and possibilities for art as individuation, not art as a stylistic impasse or reification, and for art in an indefinitely magnified or hybrid sense, which was utterly antithetical thinking on my part to the art-speak of the day. It’s plain that my thinking was steeped in both psychoanalysis and dialectical materialism. Friedrich Nietzsche defined the nodal points, providing a conceptual basis for thinking about the notion of transformation, while Ludwig Wittgenstein bedevilled problems of tautology and self-reflexivity. This is actually a very un-ideological and contradictory admixture, but it is very characteristic of my thought, then and now. What I had become certain about was the role of thinking in relation to art making, and this analytical or situationalist proclivity has defined my work ever since. Elspeth: Before that, in the 1960s, not many people know this but you mentioned it earlier, you began your career as a poet, publishing work in journals and small magazines. Is poetry something that still figures in your work?
I am saying that the order of things gives access to meaning, which makes clear why my poetry became concrete poetry, then conceptual art, then performance art and installation art, and why I use style as a form of content. Performing for as long as possible is a primary parameter for all my
Mike: I think that poetry was a purely contingent form for me, though
performance work. It was spawned by my work with the ‘machine’.
my interest in language and writing has remained one of my fundamental
A parameter like that determines the appearance of the work in a
mediums as an artist. Bromfield talks about my eventual hostility to
fundamental way. Concrete poetry is a form of convergence that also
poetry but, actually, poetry always seemed like self-indulgence to me.
determines the appearance of the work but concrete poets failed to really
In a way, for me, poetry was a provisional organising of essentially visual
think the role of the machine …
perceptions. It was also a conventional romantic identification that I was
Elspeth: Machines, and emergent technologies, figure strongly in
waiting to violate, and the opportunity to delay this poetry, to overwrite and agglutinate it, came with my acquisition of a typewriter in 1967. I think that I actually learnt to write on my typewriter because writing in longhand was a tremendous distraction. I’m congenitally left-handed, but I’ve never had a left hand, so handwriting has always been very close to drawing for me. The machine enabled me to separate the impulse to draw from the process of writing. As the Word Situations from 1971 testify, I spent hours typing individual words into a kind of substance or lattice of signification. Using the typewriter was my first experience of performanceenabling-me-to-think. It was that revelatory experience that enabled me to say ‘I am a writer’ or, interchangeably, ‘I am an artist’, so we should think of the typewriter, a machine for making marks, as my first medium as an artist. The distinction between ‘writer’ and ‘artist’ is essentially meaningless in my case because the whole course of my work makes clear that I only use these labels to dispense with them. I’m interested, really, in consolidating my thought, in seeing it situated. But, having said that, writing is one of
your work, and have done so since you began using the typewriter to create vast word pieces and installations in the early 1970s. More recently, you allowed spectators to electrically shock you by clicking a web button in Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi, Oi (Democratic Torture) 2003. Can you say something about this aspect of your work? Mike: They figure strongly because machines get interposed between the idea and its inscription and, as a consequence, they masticate selfexpression and distance it in salutary ways. You could say that machines reveal levels of alienation that self-expression mitigates, so machines are part of the inherent realism of my work. Clicking on a web button and typing are similarly dissociated, and the violence of this dissociation is increasingly modern. Elspeth: But this has often left you pegged as a masochist in the mainstream media: the artist who ‘cuts, brands, stitches, burns and nails’ his body. Do you conceive your performance practice in
the continuous forms of my work. The greater part of every day is spent
terms of extremes, or are these just the visible parts of your work?
writing, either writing a diary in longhand, typing with my computer,
Mike: The extremes of my performance are necessary. They reveal the
writing in relation to drawings or inventing odd word games. It’s a
deep continuity of all my work. Dennis Oppenheim’s Reading position for
fragmentation of thinking that is only properly resolved by performative
second degree burn 1970, where he lay ‘asleep’ in the sun for several hours
instantiation, because situating my thought is the basic imperative of all
with an open book covering his bare chest so that the after-performance
my work. It explains the distinctive condensations of ‘the piece’, which is
photograph would reveal a white rectangle against the angry red of his
an exact aesthetic construction before it is a properly assimilated meaning.
burned skin, is a wonderfully wry and sophisticated piece that perfectly
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Mike Parr
‘I. Push tacks into your leg until a line of tacks is made up your leg. (Wound by measurement I.)’, in Rules and Displacement Activities Part I, Sydney, 1973–74, 16 mm film, black and white, optical sound. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1977
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to re-performance. Repetition can produce difference but, in the context of ‘the risk’, it’s more likely to produce a kind of void. Elspeth: Yes, it’s not that the risk is lessened in repeating it, but the experience of it is dulled. The audience becomes numb to it. You’ve done numerous performances in Canberra over the years, and Lake Burley Griffin is a clear leitmotif. In Dream 1 1978, for example, you spent the night floating on the lake in a rowing boat, while in Deep Sleep 1999 you roamed the shore dressed as your alter ego, The Bride. Could you say something of the lake’s significance within the context of your work? Mike: Carl Jung advances the figure of the lake as a kind of archetype of the collective unconscious. I thought it extraordinarily revealing, then, that Lake Burley Griffin is a man-made lake at the centre of our national capital—a capital itself that has been designed and imposed. My dissociations performed in relation to the lake down the last thirty years all draw attention to this peculiar discrepancy. Elspeth: Now you have this major exhibition opening at the NGA in Canberra on 12 August. It’s not a retrospective, but you have had to consider the full range of your work to date. I wonder if this process has been discomforting for you, or is it something you are already constantly engaged in.
summarises the mood of early 1970s conceptual performance. I was, and still am, deeply interested in this kind of pitch-perfect conceptual performance that extends the body as a material parameter for a kind of ironic open-form sculpture—conceptual performance as a means to investigate the limits of art—but the elegance of it is very fragile and ambiguous at the level of behaviour. My drive as a 1970s performance artist was more acute, more ruthlessly personal and more political. The ‘visibility’ of my performance is not just an appearance to be mediated into understanding but a substantive exposure of content that can’t be avoided. Traditional theatrical mimesis, empathy and catharsis are not part of my program, and the attractively calculated effect of so much conceptual performance art now seems a bit aimless to me. I have a radical doubt about the whole topical move
Above: Dennis Oppenheim Reading position for second degree burn 1970, Jones Beach, New York Stage #1 and Stage #2, skin, book, solar energy, exposure time: five hours, colour photography and text. © Dennis Oppenheim. Photo: D Sundberg, New York Right and opposite: Mike Parr Deep Sleep 1999, 24-hour performance, Old Parliament House and Lake Burley Griffin, Canberra. Photo: Paul Green; Light a Candle. Hold Your Finger in the Flame for as Long as Possible 1972, 16 mm film, black and white, optical sound. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1973
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Mike Parr
… a portrait of the Australian art world. It’s a very telling portrait, too, because our interaction very often records the difficulties of carrying on a critical practice in a culture that tends to resist innovation in the arts. Mike: It’s stimulating because I’m much more interested in the relationships between my works, of situating works in relation to works, than I am in individual works. Preparing for the NGA show has given me the chance to think through such relationships in a very extended way. But it’s also a unique risk. At an earlier stage in the planning, I remember suggesting that Pluchart’s 1970s dictum ‘risk as the practice of thought’ might be a good title, as it suggests that the risk that makes performance art meaningful can be extended to the structure of art as a whole. Retrospective exhibitions give one the chance to organise a body of works diachronically and synchronically, vertically and horizontally, to complete a grid of relationships that is a picture or representation of the works’ coherence. But this kind of meta-statement also seems very risky to me, because the grid is a kind of Procrustean bed where what sticks out is amputated to fit. You can see immediately that this kind of completeness would make me feel deeply anxious, because it obscures a difference that is the essential drive behind all my work. I’m hoping that our exhibition, though, as it’s not a retrospective as such, will allow works to ‘stick out’, to be episodically a stick into I/eye. Unease is ‘risk as the practice of thought’. It’s also a delicate balancing act. I want an essential aspect of the show to remain uncertain or vulnerable until the end, until the point of final installation. In a flash, I’m reminded of Antonin Artaud’s concept of the ‘Nerve Meter’. Elspeth: Which, in its simplest form, might be understood as a blurring of the boundaries between spiritual and physical. To end, could you talk a little about the huge archive you gave to the NGA
in 2012, which will be included in an Information Centre developed as part of the exhibition. Mike: It is really an accidental configuration. It’s the outcome of the most humdrum, ‘automatic’ aspect of my activity as an artist. My father used to collect newspapers, and much else besides, and his widowed mother stocked the family home with an endless accumulation of corks, string, bottles and so on. Some of my father’s siblings and his father died from tuberculosis, at home before and after the First World War. The disease scourged the family, and his mother seemingly filled the absence implied by their empty rooms with her vast compulsive collections. Similarly, my activity as an archivist is obsessive accumulation without much pre-thought. But, having said that, I also began to think about my accumulations in relation to my production and display of autonomous works of art, because my works can’t really be separated out from the background that produced them, and the archive has come to preserve that background in a particularly complex way. It includes all kinds of documents: detailed specifications for projects, written accounts of my international travel (for tax-return purposes), texts for language pieces, critical articles and, in due course, obsessively detailed diaries that span the whole of my career. All this material constitutes the routine daily accumulations of my work and can be thought of as a portrait of the Australian art world. It’s a very telling portrait, too, because our interaction very often records the difficulties of carrying on a critical practice in a culture that tends to resist innovation in the arts. At this level, the archive exposes me as much as it exposes my correspondents and interlocutors, although perhaps me much more, and to my disadvantage, because my frustrations are often close to the surface. Elspeth: Is an artist better, then, if she or he operates on unstable ground? Mike: Yes. Mike Parr: Foreign Looking @ NGA, Canberra, opens 12 August For the diary: ‘Artist talk’, Mike Parr, 13 August, 2.00 pm ‘Art for lunch’, Roger Butler, 18 August, 12.45 pm ‘Curator’s tour’, Elspeth Pitt, 20 August, 2.00 pm
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One time, one place
A BAUHAUS VISIONARY IN AUSTRALIA Hannah Hutchison explores the legacy of Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack as revealed in an archive of art and ephemera given to the NGA last year. Although interned here during the Second World War, he adopted Australia as his new home upon his release, imparting the principles of the Bauhaus through his commitment to art education.
Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack teaching ‘Study of Materials’ course at a UNESCO seminar, Canberra, 1963
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The year is 1940. Confined by a barbed wire fence, a lone figure is illuminated against the night sky by sweeping searchlights. He gazes up at the unfamiliar Southern Cross, a reminder of his incarceration under an Antipodean sky. How did he come to be in this strange place, separated from loved ones in an immense and alien environment? I remember the first time I encountered this print by émigré artist Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack. His raw portrayal of displacement and isolation is heartbreaking. This powerful woodcut, created during the tumult of the Second World War, was carved and printed in an internment camp in Australia, far from the fighting in Europe. Hirschfeld-Mack used a pocketknife to roughly gouge the outline into a scrap of wood, and the
Above: Desolation, internment camp, Hay, NSW 1940–41, woodcut. Gift of Olive Hirschfeld, 1979 Right: Instruction board, blue, yellow, red on black, grey & white 1922, handcut paper and gouache. Gift of Chris Bell, 2015 Opposite: not titled (Study for costume design) 1920, watercolour over pencil. Gift of Olive Hirschfeld, 1979 All works in this feature are in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
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image was printed using materials scrounged from inside the camp— boot polish sometimes served as printing ink. This print endures as one of the most poignant and powerful images to emerge from Australia during the Second World War. Last year, the artist’s grandson Chris Bell gave the National Gallery of Australia the Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack archive, a treasure trove of primary source material that chronicles his study and teaching at the Weimar Bauhaus in Germany through to his later years in Australia. The collection of documents, works of art, photographs, musical instruments, personal correspondence and ephemera was initially amassed by the artist, then cared for by his second wife, Olive Hirschfeld, before being catalogued by his grandson. At first, it took me some time to decipher the inked lines of Hirschfeld-Mack’s handwriting, but what soon emerged was the wisdom and articulated thoughts of a humble yet gifted man. Before returning to the lone figure, imprisoned beneath the Southern Cross, it is informative to go back to where Hirschfeld-Mack’s artistic journey began. He was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, in 1893. His parents recognised his gift for art and encouraged his creativity from a young age. In 1912, at eighteen years old, he began studying painting and art history in Munich. He was then conscripted into the army at the outbreak of the First World War and served with distinction for four and a half years. Early etchings expose the profound effect that war had on him. In these prints, he does not depict war as a heroic and noble pursuit but as a devastating and cruel undertaking. Germany emerged from the annihilation of war as a changed place. Under the leadership of the new liberal Weimar Republic, there was an upsurge of radical experimentation that is now regarded in German history as one of the most innovative periods of intellectual, artistic and cultural productivity. In 1919, Hirschfeld-Mack attended the Stuttgart Academy to undertake Adolf Hölzel’s masterclass in colour theory. That year, Walter Gropius established a revolutionary new school in Weimar, the Bauhaus, which aspired to a more harmonious and utopian ideal of society in which fine arts, design and craft were merged. Hirschfeld-Mack enrolled as a student in late 1919 and was taught by modernist luminaries such as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Johannes Itten. In this environment, he produced dynamic works of abstract lyrical imagery that were characterised by whimsical forms and a controlled yet luminous palette. He was apprenticed to Lyonel Feininger in the print workshop
One time, one place
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where, in 1922, he was promoted to the status of journeyman, signifying the completion of his apprenticeship. He taught at the Bauhaus from 1922 and presented seminars on his attempts to capture the dynamic and rhythmic qualities of colour. This inspired the development of his spinning colour tops and his celebrated colour-light plays (Farbenlicht-Spielen), moving projected abstract light compositions set to his own musical accompaniments. The relationship between colour and music was a lifelong fascination for him. One work in the archive, a bold geometric collage, Instruction board, blue, yellow, red on black, grey & white 1922, is quite different to the others. Much is revealed by a small label affixed to the verso, which reads, ‘Museum of Modern Art / LOAN / A.38.1713 / Bayer’. A letter dated 21 November 1943 in which Hirschfeld-Mack mentions works that he sent for the ‘Bauhaus exhibition in New York shortly before the war’ supports the inscription, and registration staff at MoMA confirm that the work was loaned to their 1938 exhibition The Bauhaus 1919–1928. The collage depicts a leitmotif of the Weimar Bauhaus and is inspired by Kandinsky’s famous colour experiment for which he issued a questionnaire on one thousand postcards asking staff, students and the local community to match red, blue and yellow with circle,
square and triangle. An overwhelming majority of respondents answered with the same colour-shape combinations. Kandinsky’s intent was to determine a universal relationship between form and colour in the eye of the beholder. By 1936, the situation in Germany had become hostile. HirschfeldMack’s part-Jewish ancestry forced him to flee, and he emigrated to London with his eldest daughter, Marga, where he took various teaching appointments, made musical instruments and developed a colour band in which primary school children were directed to play instruments using colour cues. Fragments of this period materialise out of the archive through photographs and surviving instruments, including a colour chord played by Queen Mary. As the war advanced, paranoia intensified. All potential enemy aliens were forced into internment camps on the Isle of Man, where deportation was assured. Earnest correspondence between Hirschfeld-Mack and his daughter reveals their anguish. On 10 July 1940, he boarded the now infamous ship Dunera, along with two thousand others embarking on the harrowing journey. They sailed not to Canada, as originally promised, but to an undisclosed destination that turned out to be Australia. The first words to find Hirschfeld-Mack in an internment camp in Hay in rural New South Wales are in a letter from Marga of 19 August 1940: ‘My dear Father, Strange how you suddenly should be on the other side of this wretched globe … Last time I had a sign of life from you was on 9th July from Douglas and you hoped to sail for Canada … Of course now you will be living under the Southern Cross and it will be day when it is night with us’. The vast sky pierced by the Southern Cross reappears, and we find ourselves reunited with the lone figure behind barbed wire. Through deciphered scrawled handwriting on scraps of paper, Hirschfeld-Mack’s voice again emerges in a letter to Marga in April the following year, ‘… I walk several hours in the evening every day seeing the … star sky of the Southern Cross. This walking means several hundred times round and round our barbed wire garden. I am in those evening hours in thoughts with … all I love. I am quite certain that this horrible suffering in our time will create a better world …’ These powerful words not only reflect his internee experience and the initial shock of being forced from the bustling hub of London and deposited into this isolated environment but also his strong will as, looking up, the clear and starry sky becomes a shining beacon of hope for a better future. Hirschfeld-Mack recorded camp life through a series of woodcuts by carving his surroundings into discarded pieces of wood. Immediately apparent in these prints is a departure from his earlier lyrical abstract style.
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One time, one place
These works are literal depictions of the rural landscape as he saw it. Drawing became a way of translating his surroundings, and ingraining them in wood a way to make them more familiar. Moments of pure imagination surface, however, through watercolour drawings transforming the sandstorms that sweep across the barren land into metaphysical beings twisting and menacing their way across the camp. Striving to keep camp life rewarding, Hirschfeld-Mack organised art exhibitions and performances, ran workshops in painting and drawing and led groups of internees in carving wooden animals as Christmas gifts for underprivileged children in neighbouring towns. According to a letter of recommendation from Hay Camp School, dated 17 May 1941, he also delivered lectures on topics such as the ‘Science of colours’ and a ‘Preliminary course in the elements of line, shape and movement’. Teaching, undoubtedly, was Hirschfeld-Mack’s true calling, and it was this skill that saved him from his bleak existence in the camp. In March 1942, upon hearing from a mutual friend in London of Hirschfeld-Mack’s pedagogic excellence at the Bauhaus, the headmaster of Geelong Grammar
Dr James Darling hastened to secure the artist’s release. Darling then appointed him art master, a position he held until his retirement in 1957. Hirschfeld-Mack is solely responsible for instilling Bauhaus principles into Australian models of art education and his work as an artist and educator has influenced generations of Australian artists and teachers. In hindsight, I realise my own art education was based on these progressive principles. One of the last things I come across in the archive (now familiar with his unruly handwriting) is a letter he wrote to Marga on 29 May 1942 about his enjoyment of camping with friends in the mountains near Melbourne. He writes of Australia: ‘I am most grateful, it is a grand country with a real future’. It is somewhat comforting to know that, so soon after his release, this once alien land started to feel more like a home. Opposite, from top: Colour chord (Queen Mary) c 1939, wood; Sandstorm 1940, watercolour over pencil, additions in varnish. Gift of Chris Bell, 2015 Above, clockwise from top left: Orange, Tatura and Tatura 1941 and Hay, Murrumbidgee River landscape 1940, woodcut. Gift of Chris Bell, 2015
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Diary of an object
STANDING ADORNED BUDDHA Lucie Folan examines the provenance of a twelfth-century standing Buddha, the striking countenance of which has graced the collections of many prominent figures over the centuries, before arriving at the NGA in Canberra.
Cambodia or Thailand (Angkor Wat period) Standing adorned Buddha 12th century, bronze, precious stones. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, purchased 1998
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Diary of an object
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Diary of an object
Fragmentary details of the early life of the National Gallery of Australia’s Standing adorned Buddha can be inferred through an art historical reading of its appearance. The elegant bronze sculpture depicts the Buddha dressed in regal finery, embellished with small, inlaid precious stones and ornamental motifs. With a peaceful expression and hands held in a double gesture of fearlessness (abhaya mudra), the Buddha offers benevolent reassurance and protection. A wheel, or chakra, decorates each of the figure’s palms, denoting Buddhist teachings set in motion. Stylistically, the sculpture is emblematic of the Buddhist art produced during the Angkor Wat period (1100–75) when the Khmer empire dominated much of mainland Southeast Asia, and both Buddhism and Brahmanical Hinduism were practised. It is likely that the bronze was created for religious use in the twelfth century in the region of present-day Cambodia or Thailand, probably by an accomplished artist for an influential patron. Scientific analysis provides additional clues about the sculpture’s history. In 2002, NGA conservators found green, crystalline patches of bronze disease on the Standing adorned Buddha. Bronze disease is the term used to describe corrosion caused by the interaction of copper-based metals and chlorides. Eventually, it destroys the metal it affects and can spread to other objects of similar chemical composition. Before treating the sculpture, thermoluminescent tests were carried out on its core, which confirmed that it was created in the twelfth century. Conservator Gillian Mitchell later speculated that the corrosion to Standing adorned Buddha, as for many bronze archaeological objects, may have been caused by
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prolonged burial. There is, however, no way of knowing why, when, where or for how long the bronze was interred. There is more certainty about the sculpture’s modern ownership. Documentary evidence shows that Standing adorned Buddha was held in a number of private collections, including those of some of the most prominent Asian art collectors of the early to mid twentieth century. The sculpture is illustrated in the auction catalogue of the Parke-Bernet Galleries’ estate sale of Mrs Christian R Holmes (1871–1941), held in New York in 1942. The catalogue lists its provenance as CT Loo, Paris. Ching Tsai Loo (1880–1957) was born in China and later moved to France, where he established a successful art dealership specialising in Asian, particularly Chinese, art. He later opened additional commercial galleries in New York, Shanghai and Beijing. From the early twentieth century, Loo held successful sale exhibitions of Chinese, Japanese, Indian, Thai and Khmer sculpture, paintings and ceramics in China, Paris and New York. He is considered to have been a great connoisseur and is credited with cultivating European and American tastes in Asian art. Works from his inventory are now found in some of the world’s greatest art collections, including the Louvre, the British Museum, the Freer and Sackler galleries and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Many of these works were also held by the important private collectors of the time. Loo was also famous for commissioning architect Fernand Bloch (1864– 1945) to transform a nineteenth-century Parisian townhouse into an iconic five-storey gallery and home for his family in the style of a Chinese pagoda. The exterior of the building, which opened in 1928, was painted red and its interiors were decorated with lavish Asian antique furnishings and painted wood panelling in Chinese, Indian and Japanese styles, which created an immersive experience for Loo’s gallery clients. It is not yet known precisely how or when Standing adorned Buddha came into CT Loo’s possession, but it is probable that the sculpture was shown in his Paris pagoda alongside other fine South and Southeast Asian works of art. Mrs Christian R Holmes, born Bettie Fleischmann, was the oldest daughter of the industrialist Charles Louis Fleischmann (1835–1897), cofounder of the multimillion dollar Fleischmann Yeast Company. She married medical doctor Christian Rasmus Holmes (1857–1920) in 1892 and later inherited much of her father’s fortune and an interest in
his company. According to cultural anthropologist P Christiaan Klieger’s
parties for the rich and famous. The guest list included politicians, movie stars such as Errol Flynn, John Wayne and Shirley Temple and the aviator Amelia Earhart. Standing adorned Buddha was acquired by Bettie Fleischmann Holmes during one of her many visits to Europe prior to the Second World War. After her death it was bought by another famous and wealthy collector, the Belgian banker of noble lineage Baron Jean Germain Léon Cassel van Doorn (1882–1952). He and his wife Marij owned homes in Europe and America, including a New Jersey mansion, as well as an extraordinarily large and eclectic collection of Renaissance and Old Master paintings, antique furniture and works of art from around the world. Incidentally, the Nazis confiscated three of his paintings from his Cannes property during the Second World War, which, as Doreen Carvajal reported in the New York Times, were only returned to his descendants in March 2014. Cassel van Doorn supported many museums and lent Standing adorned Buddha to the Detroit Institute of Arts for the 1942 exhibition Buddhist art soon after purchasing it at auction. Interestingly, there is some mystery about the bronze sculpture’s more recent chain of ownership. Much of the Cassel van Doorn collection was dispersed in sales in Europe and America after the 1940s, but no information has yet been uncovered about the transfer of Standing adorned Buddha and it may have changed hands privately or by descent. The sculpture again surfaced in the public domain at a Christie’s auction in Amsterdam in 1996, after the death of both Baron and Baroness Cassel van Doorn, but its owner at the time was not made public. The NGA bought the sculpture from a New York Sotheby’s sale in 1998, also from a private collection. From its origins in twelfth-century Thailand or Cambodia, the NGA’s Standing adorned Buddha has travelled to France, the east coast of the United States of America, Detroit, Amsterdam, back to New York and eventually to Canberra, Australia, and perhaps many places in between. It has moved from religious veneration to obscure burial, to world famous collections and prominent auction houses and been displayed in remarkable homes and important art institutions. Unusually, there is a significant record of its journey, which has probably only been retained because many of the people who owned Standing adorned Buddha were noteworthy historical figures and proud of their sculpture’s provenance.
2004 book The Fleischmann Yeast family, she was instrumental in steering Fleischmann Yeast through America’s Prohibition Era, promoting the health benefits of yeast when its role in alcohol production was proscribed during the 1920s and early 1930s. Bettie Fleischmann Holmes financed her husband’s establishment of a private hospital at the University of Cincinnati and was a well-known philanthropist and art collector. She amassed a large and diverse collection of antiques and Asian art, much of which was housed in The Chimneys, her Tudor-style 42-room mansion at Sands Point, Long Island, New York. The immense and enduring wealth of the Fleischmann family is perhaps best illustrated by the lifestyle of Bettie’s son Christian Rasmus Holmes II. Moku O Lo‘e: a history of Coconut Island (2007), Klieger’s second book about the Fleischmann dynasty, describes how Christian Holmes II bought and extended a private Hawaiian island that he stocked with a menagerie of exotic plants and animals including chimpanzees, baby elephants, birds, tropical fish and porpoises. The island had a number of luxurious buildings, a bowling alley and swimming pools and hosted decadent
Opposite, from left: Chinese art dealer CT Loo, 1910s; Bettie Fleischmann’s ‘The Chimneys’ estate, Long Island, c 1933. DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University, Dallas. Photo: Robert Yarnall Richie Above: Page 89 of the auction catalogue Art collection of the late Mrs Christian Holmes: Chinese ceramics and jades, Persian pottery, Egyptian antiquities, Parke-Bernet Galleries, 1942
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Profile
Virginia Cuppaidge Into the unknown Lara Nicholls It’s a muggy Sydney day in March and I am waiting to meet Virginia Cuppaidge, the Australian abstract painter who has been living in New York since 1969. When I learned that she was coming to Australia to exhibit some of her 1970s geometric abstractions, I emailed her to say, ‘I’ve booked a flight. Shall we meet for a coffee?’ She replied, ‘That’s a good plan. I’ll be the tall woman’. I wanted to talk to her about Lyon, her large, pastel-coloured geometric abstract painting in the national collection. Mostly, I wanted to know what it was like for a young Brisbane girl to land in New York in one of the most radical times in art history. In her unpublished memoirs, Cuppaidge writes, ‘Since sixteen years of age, I had longed to go to New York to experience the Abstract Expressionist paintings up close. So, in 1969, I arrived … on a hot May Saturday night wearing a pink satin miniskirt, clutching my one suitcase and one telephone number’. After a night in ‘a cheap Welfare Hotel on the Lower East Side ... in the midst of that cockroach- and drug-infested part of the city, I walked ten blocks in a straight line, in case I got lost, to find a working phone booth’. From that booth in East Village, she called her only contact, Australian sculptor Clement Meadmore. ‘Clem welcomed me at the door of his apartment on West 99th Street and said, “Put down your suitcase, we’re going downtown to see a new Andy Warhol movie”. The Warhol Movie Empire … was showing in a “loft” in a factory area that was later called SoHo’. The pair fell in love that year and thus began Cuppaidge’s adventure in the world’s most coveted concrete jungle. She moved into Meadmore’s apartment and he found her a studio to accommodate her large-scale work, ‘a huge dusty space’ in Hell’s Kitchen, Cuppaidge writes. ‘One evening I admired a small maquette he had created that day. Clem said, “guess what I’ve named it?” He then left the room smiling … he had inscribed with a stylus, “Virginia”. Tears sprang in my eyes. Clem never gave his sculptures the names of people … this title was the ultimate expression of his feeling for me.’ The maquette was for Meadmore’s monumental Corten steel sculpture Virginia 1970 that rests in NGA’s Sculpture Garden in Canberra. It was in the Hell’s Kitchen studio that Cuppaidge commenced her series of geometric abstractions, including Lyon, which was named for Meadmore, Lyon being his middle name. He loved the work so much that she gave it to him, and it hung in the bedroom of his lower Fifth Avenue apartment until his death in 2005. The series began with ‘the idea of painting something of the streets of New York, with looming skyscrapers on the dark avenues’, she says. All of the canvases in the series are three‑metres wide with their picture plane organised by an arrangement of deftly painted horizontals, like the grid of the New York streets,
intersected by swaths of colour, cubes and lines. Arriving in New York, she had been immediately impressed by the emergence of Minimalism, as it cast aside the ascendancy of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. In 1971, she visited the Guggenheim’s Piet Mondrian retrospective, describing it as ‘an epiphany moment in my life that still reverberates today’. Despite the weight of European and American abstraction, Cuppaidge was drawn back to the landscapes of Australia, and the subjects for her series evolved to include more general meditations on time and place. She writes, ‘No matter how hard I tried to create images that were born in New York City, the nature of my homeland made its mark on my paintings’. When she first exhibited the works in 1973, at AM Sachs Gallery, the predominantly American audience apparently commented that they were ‘So Australian’. Corinne Robins wrote about the works in Arts Magazine in 1975 stating that, ‘Within the paintings’ carefully mapped out limits, Cuppaidge’s balancing of color blocks, together with her strange color sense, gave the viewer a feeling of openness, of landscape obsessed of another kind of light’. Later, Christine France wrote, ‘although her paintings are non-representational, they are influenced primarily by her experience of the two countries in which she has lived: Australia and the United States’. Cuppaidge and I talk about her realisation at the age of six that she would be an artist, her mother’s indelible influence as a botanical painter and her final move away from the family home in Brisbane to a place in Sydney. Then, while we are discussing her venture into textiles in the 1960s (her designs were considered de rigueur among Sydney’s bohemian elite), something uncannily serendipitous happens. The daughter of the late Nancy Goldfinch arrives and unfolds a swath of Cuppaidge’s fabrics, which radiate 1960s boho-chic handmade glamour—the pièce de résistance being a floor-length pink velvet A-line skirt emblazoned with abstract flowers and foliage in cardinal purple. Looking at these alongside the series of her early 1970s New York paintings, I see Cuppaidge as not only a great abstractionist but as an intuitive colourist. An observation she supports when she says, ‘colour totally dominates my painting decisions. It is not form, it is colour first’. In many ways, the painting Lyon and Cuppaidge’s departure from Australia for New York with only a small suitcase and one phone number embody the very notion Mark Rothko stated when he wrote to a New York Times critic in 1943, saying, ‘to us art is an adventure into an unknown world which can be explored only by those willing to take risks’. Cuppaidge certainly took those risks and the resulting body of work from which Lyon belongs speaks volumes for the value of inspired bravery.
Virginia Cuppaidge on the corner of Avenue D and 3rd Street, East Village, New York, 2016
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Fiona Hall surrounded by All the king’s men 2014–15 in her exhibition Wrong Way Time at the Venice Biennale, 2015. Photo: Angus Mordant
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Profile
Robert Foster New dimensions Robert Bell
Some of the most visually engaging objects in the National Gallery of Australia’s contemporary Australian craft and design collection are from the designer Robert Foster. Born in 1962 in Kyneton in Victoria, he completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts (Gold & Silversmithing) at the Canberra School of Art in 1981, studying with the Norwegian silversmith Ragnar Hansen. He is the founder and chief designer of Fink + Co, a design and manufacturing company established in 1993 in Queanbeyan, New South Wales, to produce metal and glass tableware, jewellery, decorative objects and lighting. Although production-ware comprises a large proportion of Foster’s output, he continues to make unique objects for exhibition that often provide further impetus for his production work. Favouring materials such as anodised aluminium and stainless steel, his experiments with technique and process have led to innovative methods of shaping metals such as explosion forming and water forming, allowing him to efficiently create a wider variety of forms from which to develop standardised production objects. He uses form, texture and colour to create a unique design vocabulary that distinguishes his work. Foster’s earliest work in the national collection is his The turtle teapot 1995, a double-spouted teapot. With a visual and tactile quality that enhances the metal’s colour and lustre, this engaging object invites the hand to test its balance while pouring. Its surface is the colour of a mound of black tea leaves, while its arched polished handle serves to remind us of simple industrial clamps or the makeshift wire handles of billy tea containers. This investigation into the teapot form continued in his sculptural yet functional Emerald odyssey teapot of 2008. Its highly polished stainless steel body, in the shape of a large droplet of liquid and incorporating an almost imperceptible circular lid, is pierced by an iridescent green aluminium parabolic tube, serving as a handle at one end and a spout at the other. It is a graphic illusion of the impossibility of picking up a drop of water with a rod, cartoon-like in its audacious simplicity, yet grounded by his formidable metalworking skills. Foster and his design collaborators often draw on twentieth-century Scandinavian modernist design traditions, juxtaposing the soft organic forms of the natural world with abstracted linear geometric components. Cornucopia 2014 is a work in silver, a more complex interpretation of the fluid, organic form associated with his work in less precious metals. Its informal open-ended shape, appearing to be made from lightweight crumpled silver paper, downplays the rigorous craftsmanship required to achieve such visual effortlessness with a hard metal such as silver. While he works mostly with aluminium, stainless steel and plastics in the design of his functional production products, his work with precious
metal, by necessity, reveals his ability to invest unique objects with a visual and tactile quality that enhances the metal’s colour and lustre. Bandaliero II 2009 showcases Foster’s mastery over his chosen industrial materials of aluminium and acrylics. This is an innovative object for the body that works as both a functional object and sculptural form. To be worn diagonally across the chest, it is a linked series of articulated containers for everyday objects such as phones, keys, fitness trackers and even packaged comestibles. Foster is one the few Australian designers to create such stylised bodywear targeted, in particular, at young men wanting a hands-free night out. The work is functional and makes a dramatic visual statement for the wearer, with the fluorescent acrylic lids of each container glowing in the ultraviolet lighting of some nightclubs. The work juxtaposes soft organic form and linear geometric components, but its structural use of industrial webbing also references the blunt functionalism of military equipment and high-visibility work clothing. It is a continuation of his series of design solutions for functional bodywear combining aluminium and textiles to give the wearer a carapace of brilliant colour. Foster’s approach to form is also influenced by his work for some of the world’s most innovative design companies such as Alessi in Italy, where he designed and prototyped teapots in 1996 and 2000, and Ingo Maurer in Germany, where he designed lighting prototypes in 2000. He has worked in collaboration with Australian designers and makers such as Sean Booth, Bronwen Riddiford, Elizabeth Kelly, Rachel Bowak, Oliver Smith, Rohan Nicol, Jonathan Baskett and Marie Hagerty. Many of the objects he has designed over the past twenty years are still in production. Foster and his associates’ work shows a strong development of Fink + Co’s characteristic design language. Experiments in lighting and large-scale projects have manifested in commissioned works, some of which can be seen in public venues in Canberra. Its production represents the significant achievements of a Canberra-Queanbeyan-based Australian design company that is known internationally. The company’s first commercial design, the Water jug is retailed at major stores, including the Museum of Modern Art store in New York (and a wider range is regularly stocked in the NGA’s shop). Often also seen in design-focused restaurants and bars, the jug leans forward as if pouring itself and draws on our fond memories of the generously sized aluminium milkshake cups and drink sets that rose to prominence in the 1950s. It is among a number of Fink + Co’s production objects that have been acquired for the NGA’s Australian design collection to show the scope of Foster’s work as a designer and maker in forging new dimensions in object design.
Robert Foster with a Fink + Co water jug
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NGA Shop
Consummate reader Claudia Hyles is a well-travelled writer and reviewer who has lived, worked and adventured in many exotic and extraordinary locations around the world. She has a great interest in art, textiles, traditional crafts, gardens, music and food, and her next book will be published in spring 2016. She has a more than thirty-year connection with the NGA and currently facilitates the thought-provoking, and occasionally spirited, sessions of the NGA Book Club, which meets seasonally in the NGA Shop to discuss books broadly related to art, from novels to memoirs to historical accounts. Anyone is welcome to join the conversation. The next one, on 17 August, is on Dominic Smith’s The last painting of Sara de Vos. What are you reading at the moment? Several books. John Harvey’s The story of black, a fascinating survey of the ambiguous colour—symbolic of death and despair but at the same time the essence of chic—from prehistoric times to the present day. Ferdinand Mount’s The tears of the rajas, the story of a Scottish family’s role in the British Raj in India. Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín, one of my favourite writers. And, to continue the Irish theme, A terrible beauty: poetry of 1916, a collection of poems selected by Mairéad Ashe Fitzgerald, which was given to me at Easter. Where do you like to read? Anywhere. The bank queues in Trinidad, when I lived there, were so slow I used to get through chapters! If I have to make notes, I sit at my dining table. Otherwise, I do my best reading in bed at night. I also like long train or plane trips but can’t read in a car. What book is on top of your bedside reading pile? The three towering piles of books were becoming dangerous, so they migrated to underneath my bedside table. Small mounds are building up again, but Brooklyn is on top at the moment. Which books are you planning to read next? I’m thinking about the fourth Neapolitan novel by Elena Ferrante, although I think Lenu, our protagonist, might have just made a big mistake. Ramita Navai’s City of Lies also waits to be read as preparation for my visit to Iran later in the year.
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What books do you like to take on holiday with you? I usually like to read books set in the holiday location, as a kind of cultural immersion. But in India recently I enjoyed A legacy, a book about Prussia written in 1956 by Sybille Bedford, who is said to be one of the twentieth century’s most underrated writers. It is a fictionalised version of her parents’ marriage and their troublesome families in the atmosphere of Prussian militarism leading up to the First World War. What book have you read the most? Apart from Ethel Turner’s Seven little Australians, probably EM Forster’s A passage to India. I’ve read it five or six times. Do you have a book that you loved reading and also loved watching as a movie? All four books of Paul Scott’s The Raj quartet were adapted for television in The jewel in the crown in 1984. Both are brilliant. And the coda to the quartet, Staying on, which won the Booker Prize in 1977, was also turned into a great film for television some years earlier in 1980. What is your oldest book? I own quite a few old books about India. One was given as a prize in an essay competition for the young men of the Free Church Congregation of Newport Fife in Scotland in 1857. Which author living or dead do you most admire? Too many, but two contemporary authors I admire greatly are Vikram Seth and William Dalrymple. I think I have read all their books. Is there a book that has stayed with you? Two. Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and Marguerite Duras’s The lover. Do you have an e-reader? Absolutely not. What do you like to eat, or drink, while you are reading? I don’t eat or drink while reading, but I have some wonderful cookbooks. Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi’s Jerusalem and Greg Malouf’s Saha are current favourites. For the diary: NGA Book Club, Dominic Smith’s The last painting of Sara de Vos, 17 August, 10.30 am
The book corner
Not just jam: the Fat Pig Farm book of preserves, pickles and sauces
Selected by Claudia Hyles.
Matthew Evans. Murdoch Books $35
The pattern sourcebook Drusilla Cole. Laurence King Publishing $25
Cloth lullaby: the woven life of Louise Bourgeois Amy Novesky. Abrams $28
Nopi: the cookbook Yotam Ottolenghi and Ramael Scully. Ebury Press $60
Surrender: a journal for my daughter Joshua Yeldham. Picador $50
Rosetta: a scandalous true story Alexandra Joel. Random House Australia $35
Miffy the artist (lift-the-flap book) Dick Bruna. Tate Publishing $18
The flowers Dr Lisa Cooper. Murdoch Books $60
NGA Shop shop.nga.gov.au
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Sharing our vision
A case study in creative partnerships Wesfarmers Arts has long worked collaboratively with major arts organisations across the country to foster the cultural life of the community, and in 2009 they joined the National Gallery of Australia in establishing the Indigenous Arts Program, which seeks to address the relatively small percentage of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander professionals participating in the visual arts sector. Today, this multifaceted program includes an annual ten-day intensive
There are now sixty-four alumni of the program’s ten-day leadership program, six alumni of the fellowship program and one scholarship recipient. The fellows Jirra Harvey, Glenn Iseger-Pilkington, Kevin O’Brien, Bradley Harkin and Katina Davidson have all completed placements at the NGA and Kimberley Moulton at the Kluge-Ruhe in the United States, and they have taken their experiences back home to embark on impressive careers. Some of their stories can be found on the NGA’s Indigenous Arts Program website. The creative partnership between these two socially engaged Australian organisations, the National Gallery of Australia and Wesfarmers Arts,
leadership program, a biannual offering of Fellowships at the NGA in
goes beyond the usual sponsorship agreement and has presented significant
Canberra and at major galleries and museums overseas and discretionary
benefits for the visual arts sector and for the long-term development,
scholarships of up to $10 000. The program assists Indigenous people who
training and mentorship of Indigenous Australians from around
are, or want to be, working in the visual arts to explore the different career
the country.
paths available in the industry and to build a network of professional
To discover how your organisation can contribute to the fabric of Australian culture, go to nga.gov.au or call us on +61 2 6240 6729.
Indigenous arts workers.
Corporate partnerships Presenting Partner
Principal Partner
Major Partners
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Corporate Members
Supporters
Brassey of Canberra Forrest Hotel & Apartments Hotel Hotel Hotel Realm
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Private donors
Foundation Board Publishing Fund Ray Wilson OAM
The NGA acknowledges the support of its many private donors between 10 October 2015 and 8 April 2016. We offer our warmest thanks.
Donations Lenore Adamson Donna Bush Elliott Dorman Colin Hindmarsh and Barbara Hindmarsh Prudence MacLeod and Alasdair MacLeod Allan Myers AC, QC Andrew Rogers and Judith Rogers Denis Savill and Anne Clarke Krystyna Campbell-Pretty The Hon Dr Diana V Laidlaw AM
Asian Art Fund Andrew Gwinnett and Hiroko Gwinnett
Cézanne Watercolour and Drawing Fund Helen Brack Wendy Edwards Theodore Jenkel and Georgette Grezak GR Lansell Graeme Morgan John Sharpe and Claire Armstrong Alice Spigelman and the Hon James Spigelman AC, QC Susan Wyndham
Decorative Arts and Design Fund Meredith Hinchliffe
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Gifts of works of art Alison Alder Sir David Attenborough Australian Centre for Concrete Art Trevor Bail and Siew Lim Bail Glenn Barkley and Lisa Havilah Prof Geoffrey Batchen William Bush and Mary Bush Patrick Corrigan AM John Cruthers Lucilla d’Abrera Richard Frolich and Jan Frolich Gordon Darling Australia Pacific Print Fund
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Grants American Friends of the National Gallery of Australia, Inc, made possible with the assistance of Kenneth Tyler AO and Marabeth Cohen Tyler American Friends of the National Gallery of Australia, Inc, with the generous assistance of Sir James Wolfensohn KBE, AO, and Elaine Wolfensohn Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne Australia-Japan Foundation Harold Mitchell Foundation
Masterpieces for the Nation Fund 2015 Commander Andrew Dale and Barbara Dale Susan Dimitriadis David Holgate David Kennemore and Rosemary Kennemore
Masterpieces for the Nation Fund 2016 The Hon Dr Michael Armitage Sue Dyer Alan Froud Patricia McCullough
Members Acquisition Fund 2014–15 Commander Andrew Dale and Barbara Dale Didactic Enterprises Michael Gillespie and Nicole Gillespie
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Sharing our vision
Peter D’Arcy and Robyn D’Arcy Meredith J Dart Dimity Davy Bette Debenham Jonathan de B Persse and Georgina Persse Peter Deighan Jim Donaldson Shaun Duffy and Susan Duffy Robyn Duncan Ian Dunlop OAM Rosemary Dupont James Edmondson Glenys Eggleton and Tony Eggleton Gillian Elliott Valerie Farthing-Bennetts Emer Prof Norman Feather Peter Flanagan and Cheryllee Flanagan Gillian Foley Barbara Franks David Franks Peter A Frost Justin Fuller Helen Fyfe Sally Gallimore Dorothy Galvin Geraldine Gibbs and William Gibbs Marya Glyn-Daniel Moya Gnezdiloff and Robert Gnezdiloff June Gordon Lyn Gorman Ross Gough Lea Grant and Nicholas Grant Lynnere Gray Karen Greenfield Pauline Griffin AM Peter Hack Jon Hancock and Carlene Hancock Cheryl Hannah and Helen McKenna Yvonne Harrington Pat Harvey and Frank Harvey Margaret Haslum Anthony L Hayward Prof CR Heathcote J Hetherington and M Hetherington Richard Higgins Colin Hill and Linda Hill Dr Marian Hill Meredith Hinchliffe Chris Howard and Mary Howard Chris Hoy and Phoebe Hoy Carolyn Hughes and Peter Hughes Gordon Hutchinson Claudia Hyles Peter Ingle and Rosemary Ingle
John Jackson and Ros Jackson Lucie Jacobs Victoria Jennings Dr Joseph Johnson CSC, AAM, and Madeleine Johnson Elaine Johnston Brian Jones Meryl Joyce Margaret Kellond David Kennemore and Rosemary Kennemore Joan Kitchin Robyn Lance Dr Clara Lawson Ralph Lawton Claude Lecomte and Valerie Lecomte David Lewis OAM Dr Frederick Lilley and Penelope Lilley Chris Lindesay, Janette Lindesay and David Lindesay Pamela Linstead and Peter Linstead Jinnie Lovett and John Lovett Steven Maas and Billie Maas Judith MacIntyre John Malone Richard Mann and Mary Curtis Margaret J Mashford Rosamund Mason Judy Matear Robyn McAdam Patricia McCullough Tina Merriman Dr Cathryn Mittelheuser AM Lisa Molvig Ross Monk and Beth Monk Andrew Moorhead Jennifer Morgan Dr John Morris Anne Moten and John Moten Janet Moyle Frances Muecke Dr Angus Muir Sue Myatt National Gallery of Australia Voluntary Guides Claude Neumann Dr Maria Helena Nicoll and Paul Nicoll Barbara Noden and Victor Noden Kathleen Y Nowik Mike Ogden PSM Diana-Rose Orr Milton Osborne Robert Oser and Agie Oser Geoffrey Pack and Leigh Pack Beth Parsons
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Gillian Parsons Tony Patis Elaine Paton AO Fred Polman and Kate Polman Anne Prins Ronald Raines and Jan Raines Colin Rea Anne Reese and David Reese Mary Jo Reeve and Tom Reeve Ardyne Reid Margaret Reid William Reid and Judith Reid Helen Rey Penny Richardson Lyn Riddett Paul Robilliard and Hanan Robilliard Susan S Rogers Alan Rose AO and Helen Rose Peter Rossiter and Linda Rossiter Ray Rummery and Barbara Rummery Annette Sadler Marg Safron Raoul Salpeter and Roslyn Mandelberg Mark Sampson and Ruth Sampson Peter Sharp and Lesley Fisk Prof Ivan Shearer AM Judith Shelley and Michael Shelley Rosamond C Shepherd Kaye Slack-Smith and Peter Slack-Smith Dallas Smith and Robin Smith Jan Smith and Ric Smith Spectrum Consultancy David Stanley and Anne Stanley Patricia Stephenson Margaret Stevenson Sydney Joy Stewart Robert Swift and Lynette Swift Emer Prof Ken Taylor AM and Maggie Taylor The Taylor-Cannon family Susan Telford and Richard Telford Graham Thomas and Pamela Thomas Mandy Thomas-Westende and Lou Westende OAM Phillip Thompson Alison Thomson and Lincoln Smith Jacqueline Thomson OAM Juliet Tootell Helen Topor and Peter Fullagar Sylvia Tracey Shirley Troy
Judy Twist Janice Tynan Nick Van Vucht and Jenny Van Vucht Morna Vellacott Derek Volker and Susan Volker Ami Ward and David Swanton Mark Ward and Mirabel Fitzgerald Dr Hilary Warren Ingrid Waters and Megan Jenner Wendy Webb Alexandra Wedutenko Angela Westacott Joy Wheatley and Norm Wheatley Barbara White and Brian White Rowena Whittle Dr Ian Wilkey Emer Prof David Williams AM and Margaret Williams Dr Jonathan Williams and Cathryn Williams Shirley Wilmot Robin Windsor Ellen Woodward Simon Woolrych and Jenny Woolrych Mike Wright and Robyn Wright Barbara Young AO Giovanna Zeroni
Mike Parr Exhibition Fund Robyn Burke and Graham Burke Village Roadshow
National Gallery of Australia Council Exhibitions Fund John Calvert-Jones AM and Janet Calvert-Jones AO
Sculpture Garden Fund Andrew Rogers and Judith Rogers
Tom Roberts’s Louis Abrahams 1886 Krystyna Campbell-Pretty Alan Cowen and Mavourneen Cowen Kerry Stokes AC and Christine Simpson-Stokes
Treasure a Textile Dr Maxine Rochester
Creating Australia’s art legacy When Alan Boxer died in 2014, the nation’s art collection became richer. Boxer’s love of the NGA resulted in nineteen important works of art bequeathed to the people of Australia. There are many ways to contribute to the Gallery, through gifts or bequests of cash or works of art, all of which can transform the national collection, for our visitors to enjoy in perpetuity. nga.gov.au/giving John Olsen Childhood by the seaport 1965, oil on composition board. National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, The Alan Boxer Bequest, 2014.© John Olsen. Licensed by Viscopy
A new focus on the Asia-Pacific Issue 289 / May 2016
AU ST R A L A S I A
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Queensland bumper edition Sally Gabori; Jenny Watson Artist pages by Michael Cook and Badu Art Centre artmonthly.org.au
Take out a one-year digital subscription today for AU$60 and gain access to over 60 back issues: http://www.exacteditions.com/browseEditions.do?titleId=738
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62 Artonview 85 | Autumn 2016
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Claire Bridge Sanctuary oil on canvas 2014 People’s Choice Winner
Aesop is pleased to partner with the National Gallery of Australia once again in 2016. While our primary business is skin care, we explore and support the arts as an avenue through which to inspire, learn and communicate.
17 June - 20 August 2016 gallery.begavalley.nsw.gov.au
Aesop Canberra Store AF01, Canberra Centre 148 Bunda Street Canberra 2601 ‘All that is worth remembering of life is the poetry of it.’ William Hazlitt
ANNE MARIE GRAHAM A SURVEY EXHIBITION: 1956–2016 7 to 28 August 2016 Opening Sunday 7 August 2.00–4.00 pm Without Pier Gallery, 1/320 Bay Road Cheltenham, Victoria, 3192 Monday to Saturday 10.00 am – 5.00 pm Sunday 12 noon to 5.00 pm Telephone: +61 3 9583 7577 Mobile: +61 419 541 892 E-mail: info@withoutpier.com.au Website: www.withoutpier.com.au Followed by: Anne Marie Graham: Vineyards, Farms and Orchards, Barossa Regional Gallery, 3 Basedow Rd, Tanunda, South Australia, 5232 6 September to 1 November 2016 Autumn Vineyard, TarraWarra 2014, oil on linen, 98 x 162 cm
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Custom LED Lightboxes
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Flash Graphics are proud to be the supplier of the Tuffline® LED Fabric Lightbox used in the recent exhibition James Turrell: A Retrospective at the National Gallery of Australia.
Free Call: 1800 606 682 or visit www.flash.com.au
“We choose an exceptional retirement lifestyle.”
Located in the heart of Crace, close to boutique shops, cafés, restaurants, parks and cycle ways is The Central. A new concept in retirement living, it features a choice of stunning apartments, townhouses and penthouses – all with access to an exclusive Lifestyle Club and a range of services aimed at helping you get the most out of life. And with up to $2,500 in relocation assistance available plus no stamp duty, now is the time to see for yourself why The Central is the better life choice.
Call 02 6175 5057 Visit centralbygoodwin.org.au Drop in to 20 Galore Street, Crace open Wednesday, Friday and Saturday 10am to 1pm or by appointment.
AV FINA AI L LA ST BL AG E NO E W
Hilda Rix NiCHOlaS The Shepherd of Knockalong, 1933 oil on canvas 99.5 x 80.5 cm SOld $219,600 (inc. BP) D+H December 2015
call for entries important australian + international fine art
AUCTION | Sydney | August 2016
Always checking and re-checking For appraisals, please contact Sydney • 02 9287 0600 info@deutscherandhackett.com www.deutscherandhackett.com
Rachel Bacon, Engineer, Brisbane
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WINTER 2016 | 86
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National Gallery of Australia
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MIKE PARR
Interview with Elspeth Pitt
JOAN MITCHELL
Behind the ‘biting tongue and searing temper’
PART OF DOMAHOTELS
LUDWIG HIRSCHFELD-MACK A Bauhaus visionary in Australia
Issue no 86 | Winter 2016 A$9.95 nga.gov.au