2007.Q2 | artonview 50 Winter 2007

Athol Shmith Vivien Leigh 1948 gelatin silver photograph 50.0 x 39.3 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 26 May – 19 August 2007

artonview

IS

SU

E

No

.5

0

wi

nt

er

2

00

7

GEORGE W LAMBERT • VERy IMpORTAnT phOTOGRAphs

artonview

IS

SU

E N

o.5

0 w

INt

Er

20

07

NA

tIO

NA

L

GA

LL

Er

Y O

F

AU

St

rA

LIA

National Gallery of Australia, CanberraGeorge Lambert The white glove 1921 (detail) Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney purchased 1922 photograph: Jenni Carter for AGNSW

29 June – 9 September 2007

nga.gov.au

A brushstroke into our past ActewAGL is delighted to be major sponsor of the George Lambert Retrospective: Heroes and Icons exhibition. Lambert’s painting The squatter’s daughter, depicting Michelago in 1923, is symbolic to ActewAGL as it refl ects on a time when ActewAGL was building the foundations to provide essential services to Canberra and the region.

Recognising the importance of Australian art – always.

George Lambert The squatter’s daughter 1923–24

Michelago / New South Wales / Australia Oil on canvas

National Gallery of Australia, CanberraPurchased with the generous assistance of

James Fairfax AO and Philip Bacon AM, 1991

CCA

407/

10

ActewAGL Retail ABN 46 221 314 841.

2 Director’s foreword

5 Development office

6 George W Lambert retrospective: heroes and icons

16 Conservation: restoring Lambert

18 VIP: very important photographs 1840s–1940s

28 The Southeast Asian Gallery

34 Culture Warriors: National Indigenous Art Triennial

36 New acquisitions

50 Ocean to outback: Australian landscape painting 1850–1950

54 Colin McCahon: writing and imagining a journey

57 Travelling exhibitions

58 Faces in view

contents

Publisher National Gallery of Australia nga.gov.au

Editor Jeanie Watson

Designer MA@D Communication

Photography Eleni Kypridis Barry Le Lievre Brenton McGeachie Steve Nebauer John Tassie

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

artonview issn 1323-4552

Published quarterly: Issue no. 50, Winter 2007 © National Gallery of Australia

Print Post Approved pp255003/00078

All rights reserved. Reproduction without permission is strictly prohibited. The opinions expressed in artonview are not necessarily those of the editor or publisher.

Submissions and correspondence should be addressed to: The editor, artonview National Gallery of Australia GPO Box 1150 Canberra ACT 2601 [email protected]

Advertising (02) 6240 6587 facsimile (02) 6240 6427 [email protected]

RRP: $8.60 includes GST Free to members of the National Gallery of Australia

For further information on National Gallery of Australia Membership contact: Coordinator, Membership GPO Box 1150 Canberra ACT 2601 (02) 6240 6504 [email protected]

front cover: George W Lambert The convex mirror c. 1916 oil on wood panel 50.0 x 50.0 cm Private collection

artonview

2 national gallery of australia

director’s foreword

Welcome to the fiftieth issue of the magazine!

This month is marked by much excitement as the National

Australia Bank Sculpture Gallery has just opened to the

public, with two of the greatest works in the collection

returned to their original home – Brancusi’s black and

white marble Birds in space have been reinstated on their

sandstone bases into their calm pool in the only gallery

within an Australian museum dedicated to sculpture.

When the National Gallery of Australia opened

twenty-five years ago, the Sculpture Gallery was a unique,

contemplative space. Closed as a sculpture gallery in 1990

in the quest for more room for exhibitions and other uses,

it now seems time to try to do justice to some of our three-

dimensional masterpieces in this grand space. Donald

Judd’s brass boxes, Jannis Kounellis’ Senza titolo, Louise

Bourgeois’ pink wooden C.O.Y.O.T.E. and Anselm Kiefer’s

magisterial Abendland and The secret life of plates are

joined by works from renowned Australian artists Rosalie

Gascoigne, Robert Klippel and Ken Unsworth.

Some exciting new acquisitions are also on show –

above all Max Ernst’s giant black bronze Habakuk, a

striking and menacing work purchased with the assistance

of the National Australia Bank. Others include Cy

Twombly’s elegant pale bronze purchased last year with

the assistance of Ros Packer and other donors, Anthony

Caro’s Duccio variations no. 7, and Stella’s Mersin XVI to be

donated in honour of the late Harry Seidler by Ken Tyler.

Other Australian artists represented in the display include

Indigenous artist Glen Farmer Illortaminni and Bronwyn

Oliver, who unfortunately died last year.

I would also like to take this opportunity to thank

Margaret Olley AC for her very generous donation towards

the Mughal arcade in the Asian Gallery, a stunning work

proving to be very popular with visitors.

Another satisfying development in our permanent

displays will be the opening of a dedicated Pacific Arts

Gallery, overseen by the newly appointed curator for the

collection, Crispin Howarth. The small Pacific Arts Gallery

exhibits more than thirty of the finest works revealing the

diversity and depth of the art of our Pacific neighbours.

Since 1969 the Pacific Arts collection has been

growing, however, apart from the acquisition of prints,

we stopped adding to the collection from 1985 until the

acquisition of the Anthony Forge memorial gift and the

purchase of the very significant late nineteenth-century

Solomon Islands house post last year. Our Pacific Arts

collection comprises close to 2000 works and we will

be adding major works in the future. The collection

encompasses Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia with

myriad island cultures stretching from Papua New Guinea

Daniel Boyd, Arthur Pambegan Jnr, Jean

Baptiste Apuatimi and Philip Gudthaykudthay at the announcement of the

National Indigenous Art Triennial

artonview winter 2007 3

to New Zealand and the Bismarck archipelago to Easter

Island. During the past quarter of a century, the Gallery

has only displayed a handful of works from this intriguing

collection. Formed from the arts of preliterate cultures

from 1500 BC to around 1950, these works hold a visual

force intended to convey the will of ancestors and their

mastery over the world of man in a way that words alone

could never express. The names of the Pacific artists were

unfortunately very rarely recorded, although there are

many famous names associated with the collection: Max

Ernst, Andre Breton, Jacob Epstein, Sir William Dargie,

Douglas Newton, Lady Drysdale, King Kalakaua of Hawaii

to name a few.

I am also pleased to announce the Gallery’s new

major art initiative, the National Indigenous Art Triennial.

Generously sponsored by BHP Billiton, the Triennial

comprises works created by artists from every state and

territory within the past three years, resulting in a highly

considered snapshot of Aboriginal and Torres Strait

Islander contemporary art practice. The inaugural National

Indigenous Art Triennial exhibition, Culture Warriors,

is curated by Brenda L Croft, Senior Curator Aboriginal

and Torres Strait Islander Art at the National Gallery of

Australia. Culture Warriors will be on display at the Gallery

from 13 October 2007 to 10 February 2008. The opening

will coincide with our twenty-fifth anniversary party.

George W Lambert retrospective: heroes and icons is

the first major retrospective of the work of George Lambert

since his death in 1930. He is Australia’s preeminent war

artist, an outstanding draughtsman, an occasional painter

of delightful landscapes and flowerpieces, and the finest

Australian painter of his time for figure compositions and

portraits. In the 1920s he also became an excellent sculptor,

second only to Rayner Hoff in Australia. During that last

decade of his life Lambert was by far our most famous artist.

It is very appropriate that this one-venue exhibition

has been staged in Canberra by the National Gallery of

Australia. We own a fine collection of Lambert’s paintings

and drawings, but more particularly there are the iconic

Great War paintings, commissioned for the Australian

War Memorial, that cannot travel from Canberra, and

need to be seen for the first time in the full context of his

oeuvre. Other works are borrowed from public and private

collections from all over Australia. The exhibition, curated

by Dr Anne Gray, Head of Australian Art at the Gallery

and the foremost authority on the subject, is generously

supported by ActewWAGL.

Another interesting temporary exhibition on show at

the moment is VIP: very important photographs 1840s–

1940s. The exhibition showcases more than 200 works

from the Gallery’s extensive photography collection – from

pioneers of mid 19th-century photography such as William

Henry Talbot Fox and Julia Margaret Cameron to the years

after the Second World War with works by Henri Cartier-

Bresson, Man Ray, Olive Cotton and Walker Evans. While

some photographs have become national icons such as

Max Dupain’s Sunbaker, there are many hidden gems not

as widely recognised in the public realm. The collection

demonstrates the power and history of photography and

portrays significant developments of the art medium

during its first century of existence. The exhibition, curated

by Gael Newton, Senior Curator, Photography, and Anne

O’Hehir, Curator, Photography, is on display across the

Orde Poynton and Project galleries. It is sponsored by EMC

Australia and Infront Systems.

We will be launching in August the special twenty-

fifth anniversary exhibition Ocean to outback: Australian

landscape painting 1850–1950 which I have curated and

selected to tour nine of the smaller galleries throughout

Australia.

As we focus on an exceptionally busy and exciting

exhibition program and other events for our twenty-

fifth anniversary, we are also in the stages of formal

planning approvals for the proposed building additions so

construction can start later in the year.

Ron Radford AM


The following donations have been

received as part of the National Gallery of

Australia’s Twenty-fifth Anniversary

Gift Program.

Donations

R & M Champion de Crespigny

Foundation

Jacob Grossbard

Warwick Hemsley and Family

Meredith Hinchliffe

Julie Kantor

Maurice Newman AC and Jeannette

Newman

Margaret Hannah Olley Art Trust

Roslyn Packer AO

Greg and Kerry Paramor

Grestchen Philip

Dick Smith AO and Philippa Smith

Gifts

Phillip Berry

Susan Bienkowski

The late Jenny Brennan

Peter Burns

Doreen Coburn

Ian Dudgeon

Joachim Froese

John McBride

John McPhee

Adrian Slinger

Petronella Windeyer

Masterpieces for the Nation

Fund 2007

Annan Boag

Susan Boden Parsons

Cynthia, Richard, Laura and Penelope

Coleman

Esther Constable

Ann Cork

David Franks

James Hanratty: In memory of Dr Phillip

Hanratty

Sue Hegarty

Janet D Hine

C and J Hurlstone

Claudia Hyles

Judith Carol Johnson

Sir Richard Kingsland AO, CBE, DFC

Dr Geoffrey Lancaster AM

Margaret J Mashford

Shirley Jean O’Reilly

Kim Paterson

Kevin Riley

Judith Roach in memory of Joan Coulter

Alan Rose AO and Helen Rose

Kenneth Saxby

Kim Snepvangers

Elizabeth Ward: In memory of her beloved

husband Ronald

Dr Stephen Wild

Lady Joyce Wilson

Graham and Evelyn Young

We would also like to thank the numerous

anonymous donors who have donated to

Masterpieces for the Nation Fund 2007.

Sponsorship

NAB

BHP Billiton

ActewAGL

Brassey Hotel of Canberra

Casella Wines

EMC Australia

Forrest Inn and Apartments

Gordon Darling Foundation

Hindmarsh

Infront Systems

Saville Park Suites

credit lines


The first half of this year has proved to be a very busy

and exciting period for the Gallery. We are delighted to

announce several new partnerships, as well as welcoming

back two loyal corporate supporters. The Gallery greatly

values corporate support and is thrilled that our exciting

exhibition program has attracted some of Australia’s

leading corporations.

BHP and the National Indigenous Arts Triennial

On 18 April, the National Gallery of Australia announced

a major new arts initiative as well as a significant new

corporate partnership. The Gallery is delighted that BHP

Billiton has agreed to support the inaugural National

Indigenous Art Triennial which will open at the Gallery

on 13 October. Mr Chris Lynch, Excecutive Director and

Group President, Carbon Steel Materials, BHP Billiton,

attended and spoke at the media launch held at the Gallery

on 18 April 2006. The Triennial, Culture Warriors, will be

curated by Brenda L Croft, Senior Curator Aboriginal and

Torres Strait Islander Art at the Gallery and a member of

the Gurindji and Mudpurra communities. Artists selected

for Culture Warriors include Philip Gudthaykudthay, Jean

Baptiste Apuatimi, Arthur Koo-ekka Pambegan Jr and

Daniel Boyd who visited the Gallery on the day of the

announcement. BHP Billiton’s generous contribution will

enable the exhibition to be displayed at the National

Gallery of Australia and also to tour to Queensland,

Western Australia and South Australia.

National Australia Bank Sculpture Gallery

For the first time since 1990, the space designed for and

devoted to sculpture at the National Gallery of Australia

has been returned to its original purpose. It has been

extensively restored, refurbished and relit and includes the

reinstatement of Brancusi’s iconic Birds in a reflecting pool.

The National Australia Bank Sculpture Gallery will

display new acquisitions, purchased with the assistance

of the National Australia Bank’s annual contribution,

alongside sculptures already in the National Gallery of

Australia’s collection.

ActewAGL and George Lambert

As well as welcoming two new corporate partners to the

Gallery family, it is also fitting that one of the Gallery’s

most loyal local supporters, ActewAGL, is partnering the

Gallery to present George W Lambert retrospective: heroes

development office

and icons during this twenty-fifth anniversary year. This is

the most comprehensive exhibition of Lambert’s work in

more than thirty years and is only on display at the Gallery

in Canberra. Previously, ActewAGL has sponsored

Jackson Pollock’s Blue poles, Chihuly: masterworks in glass

and Bill Viola: the passions.

VIP and EMC Australia/Infront

Another previous supporter of the Gallery, EMC Australia,

in conjunction with Infront Systems, is supporting VIP:

very important photographs 1840s–1940s. This exhibition

provides an insight into the range of photographs by

Australian and international photographers in the national

collection. Previously, EMC sponsored The Edwardians

exhibition in 2004.

Twenty-fifth Anniversary Gift Program

The National Gallery of Australia Foundation is planning

a series of activities for Foundation members during the

twenty-fifth anniversary year. The Foundation has initiated

a gift program targeting $25 million dollars, which will be

the result of corporate sponsorship and benefaction during

the Gallery’s twenty-fifth anniversary.

Masterpieces for the Nation Fund 2007

Thank you to all donors who have already donated to

the Masterpieces for the Nation fund for 2007. Please

find enclosed a brochure in this edition of artonview, or

if you would like further information please phone the

Development Office on (02) 6240 6454.

Chris Lynch (BHP) addresses Rupert Myer, Ron Radford, and artists Jean Baptiste Apuatimi, (accompanied by Angela Hill), Philip Gudthaykudthay and Peter Minygululu at the announcement of the National Indigenous Art Triennial


exhibition galleries

George W Lambert retrospective: heroes and icons

‘Don’t call me an artistic genius’, George W Lambert told

a reporter from the Sydney Mail in 1922; he would much

rather have been told that he had done his job well, ‘as one

might address a bricklayer’.1 He said this because when he

returned to Australia in 1921 after twenty years in Paris

and London he was treated like a returning hero, féted

by the press and wined and dined by members of the

government and wealthy patrons – the artists in Victoria

welcomed him at a dinner at the Café Français, Melbourne,

on 15 April 1921, and later that year the New South Wales

Society of Artists held an official dinner in his honour at

the Wentworth Hotel, Sydney, on 29 June. All the items on

the menu were inspired by his work: ‘The Mask Cocktail’,

‘Salade Lambertine’ and ‘Important Peaches’. In the

end, he had to escape the enjoyable but overwhelming

hospitality in Sydney. He told his wife Amy that he had

‘bolted’ from Sydney, because ‘everybody seemed to think

my mission was to sit back and talk old memories’, but

that was not his way – he could not spend too much time

socialising because he needed to get on with his work.2

Lambert was tall and slender with light reddish hair

and a van Dyke beard; an athletic man with ‘a forceful,

challenging, robust, aggressive quality’, who had been a

boxer in his youth and was good with horses.3 He was fond

of music, had a baritone voice, an enquiring mind ‘with

an interest in the universe and whatever laws controlled

both it and him’, and was sceptical of all religions.4 He is

said to have had great charm and to be able to move easily

in fashionable circles as well as among humble people,

tempering his manner to the mood of the company.5 He

could be the life and soul of a gathering, an entertaining

raconteur, radiating good fellowship with his wit, goodwill

and capacity for mimicry.6

He was more than that, for he was a kind of

chameleon with a variety of personalities: a gentle, kindly

and sympathetic one for his friends and a brilliant and

flamboyant presence for his acquaintances and the public.

While creating fun and provoking laughter, he was said to

camouflage his inner self. He confessed to his wife that he

was grateful to keep going without letting everyone know

about his periods of melancholy.7 She was well acquainted

with this side of him and suggested that his extrovert

behaviour was a shield against his impressionable nature.

Like many creative people he was highly sensitive and from

time to time was unable to manage his stress or his bouts

of depression – and in such moments he needed privacy.

His temperament is evident within his work which at times

shows considerable empathy and perception and at others

a remarkable brilliance – and wit.

Different people admired Lambert for varying reasons,

but they almost universally praised him for his discipline

and hard work. His art teacher Julian Ashton said that ‘no

detail was too small’ to escape Lambert’s attention, ‘no

labour too great’ to achieve his goal, ‘he was ever his own

severest critic’.8 The great Australian landscape painter

Hans Heysen claimed that of course there is ‘always the

Poser in Lambert but his downright sincerity when it comes

to the art of painting demands the greatest respect’.9 His

assistant Arthur Murch was inspired by Lambert’s gospel of

devotion to work.10

The Australian official historian CEW Bean suggested

that he ‘worked like an assiduous student’, and that ‘there

was no trace of affectation in the sincerity with which he

set to work’, ‘he was completely ruled by some high motive

within’.11 After Lambert’s death, a friend wrote to Amy:

If we went to his studio we would find him hard

at work from early morning until late at night; his

heart and soul were in his work there, and there is

no doubt his strength was undermined by constant

hard work.12

When Lambert’s sister Sadie wrote to congratulate him

when he was awarded the Archibald Prize in 1927 for the

portrait Mrs Annie Murdoch 1927, he replied ‘when one

weighs the failures with the successes one finds it easy to

keep a level head’ and that ‘fortunately I am too busy to

enjoy limelight’.13


George W Lambert Self-portrait (unfinished)

c. 1930 oil on canvas 91.5 x 75.0 cm

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney,

purchased 1930



Lambert reflected his complex personality in his

many self-portraits, in which he presented himself as

an actor playing a role. Artists often paint their own

portrait because they are in need of a model and the

subject is readily available and because they can be freer

with themselves than they can with any other subject.

Rembrandt delighted in putting on different costumes and

guises, as did Lambert’s British associate and one of the

most successful of Edwardian portrait painters, William

Orpen. So when Lambert painted himself in a variety of

ways, in a pose derived from Velázquez or in a theatrical

stance wearing fancy dress, he was working within an

established tradition.

Lambert’s second oil self-portrait of 1906 is among his

most austere. He adopted a spare composition in which

he focused on the head, free from any distractions. His

tonalist approach derives from Velázquez, as does the

way he framed his head in darkness to draw attention to

it. While it is a youthful portrait the face has a startling

presence and alertness. He looked at himself intensely, not

just studying the structure and form of his physiognomy,

but also enquiring as to who he is and what his future

might be. There is a slight arrogance in the fixity of his

glance and the thrust of his chin, but a sense of enquiry in

his glance. It is a serious portrait of an earnest young man

on his way to success without any hint of the sense of fun

that he was later to give to his self-portraits.

In the audacious Life study of 1909, Lambert depicted

the familiar goatee beard and receding hairline; but

this man’s hair seems to be even more receding than

Lambert’s, his eyebrows higher, his cheeks chubbier and

his beard thicker. Indeed, it most probably is not a self-

portrait, but an image of a model with similar features

to Lambert. In tricking us into thinking it may be a self-

portrait we cannot but wonder whether Lambert was

playing a game, whether he chose such a model to create

a jest. While not yet making fun of himself he was on

his way to doing so. And in portraying this man with his

trousers around his feet, he made him appear outrageously

naked rather than nude.

By 1922 Lambert was a success, he was at the height

of his powers and he had been elected an Associate of

the Royal Academy. He had recently painted a dashing

portrait of Miss Gladys Collins, The white glove 1921, in

which he captured her vivacious personality, laughing with

her head tilted back, hamming it up for him. He followed

this with his Self-portrait with gladioli 1922, a bravura

image of himself posing artificially, as if giving a speech.

Although he was a dedicated artist who worked to the

point of exhaustion, he presented himself here as the

affected, self-admiring dandy, the precious, self-assured

aesthete some considered him to be. It was an elaborate

joke, a fiction which he acted out to its limit. He wittily

paid homage to the self-portrait by the first President of

George W Lambert Mrs Annie Murdoch 1927

oil on canvas 59.6 x 49.5 cm

The Murdoch collection

George W Lambert Self-portrait c. 1906


National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne,

The Joseph Brown Collection

(opposite) George W Lambert

Life study 1909 pencil 35.4 x 24.7 cm

State Art Collection, Art Gallery of Western Australia,

Perth Gift of John Brackenreg

in 1974


the Royal Academy, Joshua Reynolds (Royal Academy,

London), in which Reynolds depicted himself dressed in

his academic robes, standing aristocratically with his right

hand on his hip. He also made reference to the classical

marble sculpture, the Hermes Logios (National Museum

of Rome), an image of the god of eloquence who, like

Lambert in this portrait, stands with one arm raised up as if

speaking. He was laughingly positing himself as Australia’s

chief Academician and artistic orator. The following year

at the Society of Artists’ Ball Lambert took the joke further

with his friend Leon Gellert dressing up as Lambert had in

Self-portrait with gladioli while Lambert dressed as

a Persian prince. It is said that in the self-portraits of

Lambert’s British friend and contemporary William Orpen

‘the whole tendency is towards mockery both of himself

and of the world’.14 Likewise, in this self-portrait Lambert

created a tease, making fun of himself – and, as the

poet and author Arthur Adams put it, laughing ‘at all

conventions and the mode’.15

In his later portraits Lambert often showed himself

playing a part. We could conclude that he never revealed

himself, his inner being; but that would be too hasty. In

these images Lambert presented himself as an exuberant,

entertaining man with a delightful sense of humour. We

need only look at the eyes and the mouth in The official

artist 1927 and Self-portrait (unfinished) 1930 to see that

Lambert is having fun. He showed himself as a laughing

cavalier – fun-loving, but hard-working in a traditional

fashion, something most would agree was true of the man.

When Lambert painted or drew his best portraits he

created figures charged with life, even to the point of

suggesting the pulsating life under the skin. He sometimes

conveyed a woman’s sensuality through the dynamic

motive of gesture. In Miss Helen Beauclerk 1914 he

invested the subject with an intense self-awareness, her

facial muscles taut and alert, and he reminded the viewer

of her physicality by showing her putting on gloves and

rubbing one hand against another. Likewise, in some of his

portraits of men, such as The half-back (Maurice Lambert)

1920, he captured a masculine sense of physical alertness

by portraying his subjects with their muscles tensed. In this

portrait he used the man’s dark brushed-back hair and the

raised collar of his white sweater to emphasise the nape of

his neck and to give his subject a powerful and sensuous

presence like that of a matinee idol.

George W Lambert Self-portrait with gladioli

1922 oil on canvas

128.2 x 102.8 cm National Portrait Gallery,

Canberra, gift of John Schaeffer AO

in 2003

George W Lambert The official artist 1921



purchased through the Felton Bequest in 1921

(opposite) George W Lambert

Self-portrait 1927 pencil 38.5 x 28.2 cm


purchased in 1955



Whereas in drawings such as Light Horse veteran 1925,

he brilliantly modelled the head to capture the texture of

the old man’s skin and his underlying muscle structure, to

create such a living presence that we almost feel we have

encountered the subject. In all his best portraits Lambert

captured a dynamic body, the kinaesthetic tension of

the muscles under the skin to evoke a powerful sense of

physicality. What Lambert did in these portraits is what the

best actors do in their performances – they create a sense

of presence, an intensity of being, so that every word,

every tone and stress is absorbed – and yet almost without

our noticing that it happens.

Lambert died on 29 May 1930 at the age of fifty-six.

His heart failed while he was repairing his horse’s feed box,

at ‘Windamere’, Cobbity, New South Wales. On his death

he received many verbal tributes, and to make a visual

statement the Art Gallery of New South Wales swathed his

painting Across the black soil plains 1899 in black drapes.

Despite his personal rejection of being a genius, he was

generally acknowledged as such by his contemporaries.

Newspaper reporters said that his death ‘will be a tragic

loss to Australian art’, described him as ‘one of the finest

artists that Australia has produced’, and claimed that ‘never

was there a keener draughtsman than he’.16 The Sydney

Morning Herald suggested that ‘no one can estimate to-

day the immense value of the stimulus which the ideals

of the young Australian school received from his inspiring

influence, and the progress which art has made though

his example’.17

In a special memorial edition of Art in Australia, other

Australian artists stressed Lambert’s pre-eminence among

them, and said he was the only one who could boast of

an international reputation. George Bell suggested he

was ‘the great figure of Australian art’, Hans Heysen that

he was ‘a great draughtsman and designer and a very

beautiful colourist with an astounding sense of form’,

George W Lambert The half-back (Maurice Lambert) 1920 oil on canvas 76.2 x 61.0 cm Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide purchased through a South Australian Government Grant in 1958

George W Lambert Miss Helen Beauclerk 1914 oil on canvas 76.5 x 61.0 cm Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, purchased in 1921

George W Lambert Light Horse veteran 1925

pencil 38.5 x 27.8 cm Art Gallery of New South

Wales, Sydney, purchased in 1925


and Daryl Lindsay that he ‘stood for the finest ideals in

the contemporary English movement’.18 In Britain, Kineton

Parkes described Lambert in the Apollo as ‘a magnificent

technician’ and the Connoisseur suggested that he was

gifted with a daring expression and virile technique, and

painted portraits with a dashing approach.19 In 1933 when

a selection of more than seventy of Lambert’s works

were included in an exhibition at the Royal Academy

commemorating the work of members who had recently

died, British art critic Frank Rinder described Lambert as

‘the virile Australian who had just reached his best when

death came’.20

In 1930 Lambert was considered to be Australia’s

greatest painter ever, and much lauded. And then newer,

younger artists appeared. For a while Australian art was

held in the thrall of William Dobell and Russell Drysdale,

Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd, and after that by other

artists. The Edwardian, wartime and postwar world of

Lambert seemed to belong to another people and another

time. More recently, however, we have become fascinated

with Edwardian lives brought to our screens in films

based on the novels of EM Forster, Henry James and Edith

Wharton, nowadays young Australians flock to Gallipoli to

discover their heritage, and we want to know more about

the years in which Sydney built its Harbour Bridge.

The circle has turned and it is time to look again at the art

of George Lambert, and to discover afresh the work of one

of Australia’s most brilliant, witty and fascinating artists.

George Lambert retrospective: heroes and icons is a

tribute to one of Australia’s most significant artists who

created a number of much loved iconic images as well

as portraits of Australian heroes such as Breaker Morant,

Banjo Paterson and Henry Lawson and artists

Charles Conder, Thea Proctor, Hugh Ramsay and

Arthur Streeton. Seventy-seven years after his death, this

major survey – from 1894 to 1930 – shows the diverse

range of his work, from his Australian bush subjects to his

Edwardian portraits and figure groups, from his sparkling

oil sketches painted in Palestine and Gallipoli to his major

battle paintings and large sculpture. It includes some 120

paintings, drawings and sculpture from a wide range of

public and private collections in Australia and Britain.

Anne Gray Head of Australian Art

The exhibition catalogue is available from the National Gallery of Australia Shop on 62406420. Further information at nga.gov.au/Lambert

1 ‘The Eternal Quest for Beauty: Society of Artists show’, Sydney Mail, 13 September 1922, p. 10.2 George Lambert correspondence with Amy Lambert, 23 October 1921, Lambert Family Papers, ML MSS 97/10, p. 369.3 ‘The Eternal Quest for Beauty: Society of Artists show’, Sydney Mail, 13 September 1922, p. 10.4 CEW Bean, Gallipoli Mission, (1948), Sydney: ABC, 1990, pp. 26 and 29.5 David Fulton, ‘George Lambert at the Front III’, in Arthur Jose, et.al. The Art of George W. Lambert A. R. A., Sydney: Art in Australia, 1924 (Lambert 1924), p. 30.6 M.F. Bruxner, ‘George Lambert at the Front II’, in Lambert 1924, p. 26; David Fulton, ‘George Lambert at the Front III’, in Lambert 1924, p. 30; and CEW Bean, Gallipoli Mission, (1948), Sydney: ABC, 1990, p. 29.7 George Lambert correspondence with Amy Lambert, 25 November 1921, Lambert Family Papers, ML MSS 97/10, p. 383.8 Julian Ashton, ‘George Lambert: Painter and sculptor’, Lambert Memorial Number, Art In Australia, series 3, August –September 1930 (Lambert 1930), n.p.9 Hans Heysen correspondence with Lionel Lindsay, 18 December 1921, quoted in Colin Thiele, Heysen of Hahndorf, (1968), Adelaide: Rigby, 1976, p. 295.10 Arthur Murch, ‘Difficulties’, Undergrowth, Sydney, September–October 1926.11 CEW Bean, Gallipoli Mission, (1948), Sydney: ABC, 1990, p. 112; CEW Bean, ‘George Lambert at the Front I’, in Lambert 1924, p. 26.

12 AW Allen, Merioola, correspondence with Amy Lambert, 1 June 1930, Lambert Family Papers, ML MSS 97/11.13 George Lambert correspondence with Sadie Cox, 17 June 1928, Lambert Family Archive.14 Bruce Arnold, Orpen: Mirror to an Age, London: Jonathan Cape, 1981, p. 263.15 Arthur Adams, ‘The Laughing Cavalier’ in Lambert 1930, n.p.16 George Lambert: Death of famous artist – a distinguished career’, Sydney Morning Herald, 30 May 1930, p. 12; Sydney Ure Smith, ‘Obituary: Late G. W. Lambert, A. R .A.’, Sydney Morning Herald, 2 June 1930, p. 180; Thea Proctor, ‘The Late G. W. Lambert A. R. A.: An appreciation’, The Home, 1 July 1930, p. 21.17 ‘A great artist’, Sydney Morning Herald, 31 May 1930.18 George Bell, ‘Lambert’s Work’, Lambert 1930, n.p.; Hans Heysen, ‘George Lambert Passes’, Lambert 1930, n.p.; Daryl Lindsay, ‘The Significance of Lambert’s Work’, Lambert 1930, n.p.19 Kineton Parkes, ‘George Lambert’, Apollo, London, vol.12, July 1930, pp. 74–75; ‘The Late George W. Lambert, A. R. A, 1873–1930’, Connoisseur, London, vol. 86, July 1930, p. 58.20 Frank Rinder, ‘The Royal Academy – A Commemorative Show: Orpen in his brilliance’, Manchester Guardian, 7 January 1933, p. 14. The exhibition also included work by Bertram Mackennal and William Orpen.

notes

a


conservation

After treatment George Lambert

The sonnet c. 1907 oil on canvas 113.3 x 177.4

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

John B Pye Bequest 1963


The Gallery’s paintings conservation department has

been examining and preparing works in readiness for the

launch of the George W Lambert retrospective in June. For

conservators, the chance to work on an exhibition devoted

to a single artist presents an ideal opportunity to develop

an overview of the condition of the artist’s work, the

materials used and the range of techniques employed to

create the works.

Lambert has proved to be a fascinating subject. He

obviously enjoyed the process of painting and throughout

his career immersed himself in the study of the Masters.

We can see the influence of many of them, including

Velasquez, Hals, Manet and Whistler, in the varied way in

which he applied his paint from fluid, medium-rich washes

in backgrounds to bravura flicks and dashes of impasto in

draperies and fabrics. He has been portrayed as technically

conservative, given the period in which he worked.

Nevertheless, there is a deep pleasure to be gained from

the sheer craftsmanship and variety in his works.

It is clear that Lambert’s formal approach, founded

on solid study at Julian Ashton’s school and in Paris, has

served him well. Generally, his paintings have withstood

the test of time. The conservation issues we face stem

mostly from the accumulation of dirt on the surface of the

works and the natural alteration of organic materials rather

than the inherent self-destruction that can affect

artists’ work.

The sonnet was painted by Lambert in 1907, using

Arthur Streeton, Thea Proctor and Kitty Powell as models

in his homage to Manet’s Le dejeuner sur l’herbe and

Giorgione’s Fête Champêtre. The sonnet won a silver medal

at the Exposition Internationale de Arte, Barcelona, in 1911,

but met with a lukewarm response in England. When the

painting came into the Gallery’s conservation studio, it had

an extremely heavy layer of surface grime and a deeply

discoloured varnish. The canvas was also poorly attached

to a defective stretcher. We began treatment by repairing

the stretcher and reinforcing the tacking margins of the

canvas support. The canvas was then re-attached securely

and tensioned, ensuring that surface cleaning and varnish

removal could be carried out on a well-supported paint

layer. The cleaning of years of accumulated surface grime,

using a conservation standard detergent, produced a

marked brightening of the surface, but we were amazed

to see the dramatic results once varnish removal began.

Beautiful pinks and blues appeared in the sky; Thea

Proctor’s sleeves turned white before our eyes and Kitty

Powell’s robust suntan paled to an elegant Edwardian

alabaster. As Lambert’s paint was revealed it became

apparent that problems with The sonnet mainly concerned

structural support and neglect. To complete the treatment,

a saturating varnish was applied to the surface and small

areas of abrasion were subtly retouched.

As well as major loans from public and private

collections in Australia and overseas, the exhibition includes

all of the paintings by George Lambert in the Gallery’s

collection. The sonnet has been treated and The old dress

was conserved in 2001. We are now looking forward

to examining more closely Portrait group, Weighing the

fleece, The empty glass and A garden bunch. a

David Wise, Sheridan Roberts and Greg HowardPaintings Conservation

Restoring Lambert

Before treatment George Lambert The sonnet c. 1907 oil on canvas 113.3 x 177.4 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra John B Pye Bequest 1963


Orde Poynton and Project galleries

VIP: very important photographs 1840s–1940s

People are regarded as VIPs for many reasons – for

being brilliant and talented, for being rich and powerful.

Some by virtue of hard work and merit, others by notorious

misadventure. In this exhibition, rare and treasured

photographs from the national collection take to the red

carpet to show themselves off in all their glory: it celebrates

the twenty-fifth anniversary in 2007 of the first displays

of photography included in the inaugural exhibitions for

the opening of the National Gallery of Australia building

in 1982. Like their human equivalents, there is a variety of

explanations for why some photographs are celebrated,

why some garner such widespread admiration that they

achieve iconic status. Needless to say, big and brash or

small and dignified, they all have an essential quality that

raises them above the ordinary. If they were people, you

would say they had charisma.

The ‘A-listers’ are well represented in the exhibition:

Edward Weston, Man Ray, Julia Margaret Cameron,

Bill Brandt, Berenice Abbott, František Drtikol and

Walker Evans are on show with the images that made them

famous as well as other images which do not have as high

a level of recognition. Also lauded are our own ‘home-

grown’ celebrities – Charles Bayliss, Harold Cazneaux,

Olive Cotton and Max Dupain, for example. Fame is at

best a strange beast: also included are the photographic

equivalents of people well known and respected in their

field but who have had universal acclaim elude them.

And there is outstanding work from the early years of the

medium by the ever-elusive ‘Anonymous’. The exhibition

covers all genres of photography – portraiture, landscape,

urban photography, social documentary, photojournalism,

celebrity work, still life, advertising; photographs as single

images but also as found in albums and books; cut up,

collaged and hand-coloured, images made with the most

advanced cameras of the day to images made without

a camera at all; and from the intimate to Bayliss and

Holtermann’s nine-and-a-half metre long panorama of

Sydney Harbour. Photography, in other words, in all its

wondrous diversity.

A collection of photography in an art gallery has to

tell the history of the medium. The exhibition presents

premium examples of the almost bewildering range of

processes and techniques employed during photography’s

first century: from the daguerreotypes, salt prints and

cyanotypes of the earliest years, to the wet-plate then

dry-plate collodion albumen silver prints with their fine

detail that replaced the early processes, through to

the graphic quality of the processes employed by the

Pictorialists at the turn of the twentieth century –

the bromoils and gum bichromates, the carbons and

platinums and the supremely high quality photomechanical

reproduction – and finally the gelatin silver process that

became the mainstay of photography through to the

invention of digital. Early colour processes of the thirties

and forties such as Gasparcolor and dye transfer also make

an appearance. Prohibitively expensive and technically

sophisticated, they were principally found in the domain

of advertising and can be seen in the exhibition in work by

Anton Bruehl and Paul Outerbridge.

Collecting photography at the National Gallery of

Australia began in the early 1970s in tandem with the start

of concerted institutional acquisition of the medium by

art museums around the world. The Victoria and Albert

Museum had started doing so in 1852 and the Museum

of Modern Art in New York set up its photographic

department in 1940 – but they were very much the

exceptions. In Australia, photography had been acquired

by the state and university libraries, though primarily for

its documentary value, and by the Art Gallery of South

Australia, for example, since the 1920s. However, it was

only in 1975 that the big auction houses, Sotheby’s and

Christie’s, established photographic departments and the

medium took its first steps towards becoming the lucrative

part of the art market that it is today with its long list of

celebrity collectors that includes Elton John, Diane Keaton,

Tom Cruise and Madonna.

26 May – 19 August 2007

Bill Brandt East End girl, dancing the

Lambeth Walk 1938 gelatin silver photograph

21.2 x 17.4 cm National Gallery of Australia,

Canberra


The first formulation of policy in the Gallery’s annual

report of 1976–77 stated the aim was to ‘develop a

department of photography which will include both

Australian and overseas works. The Australian collection

will be historically comprehensive, while the collection of

overseas photographers will aim to represent the work

of the major artists in the history of photography’. Since

that statement of intent thirty years ago, the collection

has grown to include over 16,000 works. There are

approximately sixty per cent Australian to forty per cent

international photographs, a ratio that has remained

constant over the years. It is one of the largest and finest

collections in the region. This exhibition focuses on the

first 100 years of photography, a period which saw

photography move from its beginnings in the 1840s,

expensive and confined to a large degree to the upper

classes, to cementing itself by the 1940s as one of the

leading art forms of the twentieth century; a ubiquitous

one that, with its chameleon nature, technological

underpinnings and mechanical reproducibility, seemed best

equipped to serve and reflect the modern world.

Viscountess Frances Jocelyn

Circular design c. 1860 albumen silver photograph,

watercolour, pencil 28.0 x 23.2 cm


William Henry Fox Talbot The ladder before April 1845

plate XIV from The pencil of nature 1844–46

salted paper print from a calotype paper negative


Canberra

Given the strengths and depth of both its Australian

and international holdings, the Gallery has the capacity to

successfully display Australian photographers alongside

their international contemporaries. The interaction

between Australia and the rest of the world was, if not as

immediate during the first 100 years of the medium as in

the contemporary global world of internet communication,

then certainly as lively. The Australian scene was enriched

by the arrival of photographers from across the world

coming to settle or visit, and photographs and publications

travelled between the two worlds on both private and

professional missions.

Having Australian photographers and those from

Europe and America together in this exhibition allows for

rewarding dialogues between works: it is fascinating to

compare what happened on the colonial ‘periphery’ with

what happened at the ‘centre’ of cultural production,

regional interpretations sometimes displaying a greater

level of freedom and innovation. Photographs from the

1930s by Max Dupain are seen, for example, next to the

Surrealist-inspired works of Man Ray that so influenced

them; the Pictorialist works of Harold Cazneaux next

to Heinrich Kühn. It is the first time at the Gallery that

Australian and international works have been hung

together in this way.

In any discussion of what makes a photograph

special, it is well to keep in mind the American landscape

photographer Ansel Adams’s observation that ‘there

are no rules for good photographs, there are only good

photographs’. When people think of a classic, ‘good’

photograph they most likely reference the sort of

photography practised by Adams – usually black-and-white

and a beautiful print, pristine and rarified. But great works

can also take on somewhat more anarchic characteristics.

Viscountess Frances Jocelyn was a lady-in-waiting to


Queen Victoria, a great enthusiast who encouraged Jocelyn

to take up photography. Like others from her set, she

cut up her own photographs and those taken by others,

arranged them into new narratives and decorative patterns,

painted on and around them and made a hybrid album

incorporating elements of a lady’s sketchbook. Her album

is witty and irreverent. It is also a telling and perceptive

critique of the aristocratic Victorian society in which she

lived – one in which England created a vast empire through

its naval power, one in which everyone had their place

and responsibilities that could not be shirked.

Any attempt at compiling a checklist of stylistic must-

haves is always going to run aground coming up with a

definition of magic and appeal that speaks to everyone.

Walking through an exhibition it is easy enough to observe

that an image that ‘speaks’ profoundly to one person will

leave another yawning and unmoved. Having said that …

Photography is so much about subject matter and

it is overtly true that to some extent making a good

photograph is simply about being in the right place at

the right time and knowing – either intuitively or through

years of experience and probably both – the best place to

stand and the right moment to click the shutter. The ability

to do this is an essential skill for all great photographers

but particularly obvious perhaps in those practising street

photography and photo reportage who go out into the

world to find their picture: represented in the show with

images by Frenchman Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose term

‘the decisive moment’ has become a famous attempt to

define this mastery, as well as works by German-born

British photographer Bill Brandt and Americans Walker

Evans and Helen Levitt among others.

Harold Cazneaux The orphan sisters c. 1906 gelatin silver photograph 39.5 x 31.8 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Gift of the Cazneaux family 1981

František Drtikol Draped figure behind seated nude c. 1928 gelatin silver photograph 26.5 x 22.4 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Events caught by the photographic eye in this way can

be ones that change the course of world history or – as

often as not – something that passes totally unnoticed by

those not possessing the heightened observational intent

of the photographer. The camera’s ability to transform

the mundane into something poetic is one of its most

extraordinary characteristics and one that is present

strongly and majestically from its very earliest beginnings.

Englishman William Henry Fox Talbot was one of its

inventors and a great master in regard to this power to

remake the world around him into one of enigma and

heightened, almost mystical, significance. Talbot took

the simple things that surrounded him in his rural country

life – a piece of lace, a leaf, bonnets, glasses from a

cabinet, the china off the sideboard – arranged them

in front of the camera and through this reordering and

visionary flair transformed them into photographs that

continue to fascinate and give rise to debate as to their

meaning.


The Gallery is fortunate to have one of the few

remaining complete copies of The pencil of nature, the first

commercially available book with photographic illustration.

It was published in six parts between 1844 and 1846 to

publicise Talbot’s discoveries – and in a spirit of defiance

and counterclaim to Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre’s 1839

claim in Paris of being the first to capture successfully and

permanently the imprint of the world onto a surface (in

Daguerre’s case onto a piece of sensitised copper). There is

a wonder that comes with reflecting on the sheer survival

of works by the pioneers of the medium – and more so

in that they are sometimes in extraordinarily good and

sparkling condition. Talbot’s salt prints are a treasured part

of the collection as are the cyanotypes of plants made

in the 1840s by Anna Atkins and the small but always

affecting group of daguerreotypes and ambrotypes –

one-off images that in their protective cases often have a

jewel-like character.

One of the qualities unique to the medium

– unmistakably present wherever it was made and

discernible from the very first time a sliver of time was

fixed through the alchemy of chemistry and light – is its

potent and unbreakable relationship to the real. Startlingly

strong and unmediated, for example, is the presence of a

group of Aboriginal people in a daguerreotype made by

the English-born photographer Douglas T Kilburn, who

opened Melbourne’s first commercial photographic studio

in 1847. Along with five other surviving dageurreotypes

made by Kilburn, it is the first photographic record made

of Australia’s Indigenous people and the earliest Australian

image in the collection. The subjects of this photograph

have such appeal because of the way they live again in the

image as intensely as when their images were captured on

this polished silver iodide-coated copperplate 160 years

ago. And they in turn seem to be aware of us. Present

and past collide.

That it feels as if physical traces of their subject

are embedded in photographs gives them huge

talismanic power. Recording what something looks like,

through historic, ethnographic, proprietorial impulse,

will always be a strong raison d’être of the medium.

Such considerations are important for the curator of

photography but as important are the qualities of the

particular print, considerations that address the technical

and aesthetic qualities of the object itself, including such

concerns as how it fits into the photographer’s oeuvre,

into the collection, and more broadly into the history of

photography as well as its cultural significance. These

aspects of the work are indivisible and of equal importance

in acquiring work for an art museum collection.

Rarity is always a factor in making something special

and the same applies to the world of photography – more

Anton Bruehl Porgy and Bess 1942 Gasparcolor colour photograph 32.3 x 26.6 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra NGA Photography Fund: Farrell Family Foundation donation 2000

Doris Ulmann Woman and two children in doorway 1929–31 platinum print 20.6 x 15.4 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

(opposite) Max Dupain Brave new world 1935 gelatin silver photograph 46.3 x 35.0 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra


Albert Renger-Patzsch Railroad bridge c. 1927

gelatin silver photograph 16.8 x 22.8 cm


so in fact given the reproducibility of photographs.

Editioning of prints has only come into vogue in recent

years to meet the demands of a market. With older

material it is difficult to ascertain how many copies of

a particular print exist but as there was little market

for photographic prints as art works, huge print runs

were uncommon. There are photographers such as Tina

Modotti, who worked with Edward Weston in Mexico

in the mid to late 1920s. She was not a prolific printer

and her life was cut short – to have works by Modotti

and others like her is always special and they attract high

prices at auction (the Gallery has four fine Modotti prints).

Images by Henri Cartier-Bresson have been common

enough in later prints but vintage prints are extremely

rare. The Gallery is fortunate to have a vintage print of his

made in Mexico in 1934 that looks startlingly different to

the graphic high-contrast prints for which he is known.

Circumstances can also change, affecting the desiribility

of an artist’s work. Following Cartier-Bresson’s death in

2004, the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation prohibited any

further printing from his negatives. As a result, the value of

Cartier-Bresson prints has risen sharply and will

continue to do so.

Having a sizeable body of work that can tell the story

of a photographer’s career is indispensable in a collection,

allowing for serious research and proper understanding of

where a particular print fits into the big picture. As part

of the desired outcome of the acquisition policy,

this is especially important in the area of Australian

photography – comprehensive collections of work by

John Kauffmann, Harold Cazneaux, Olive Cotton,

Max Dupain and Australian-born expatriates such as

Anton Bruehl who worked in America, for example, are

held with representative works included in the exhibition.

Adding to the prestige of a collection are groups of

work relating to a particular project engaged in by a

photographer and this area is a distinct and spectacular

strength of the holdings: Lewis Hine’s documentation of

child labour made for the National Child Labor Committee

from 1908 to 1924, work which was instrumental in

reforms being implemented; more than sixty platinum

photographs by Doris Ulmann from 1929–31 of the Gullah

people of South Carolina and Georgia as well as the limited

edition book Roll, Jordan, Roll with fine photogravure

illustrations; more than 120 images by the early modernist

photographer Albert Renger-Patzsch, many of which


were included in his highly influential book, Die Welt ist

schön [The world is beautiful] of 1928; EO Hoppé’s rare

photographs of German industry taken for the 1930 book

Deutsche Arbeit [German work] on the wonders of modern

German engineering and manufacturing plants. These

groups of works contribute to make the Gallery’s collection

truly one of world standing.

It is preferable to acquire vintage prints made by

the artist in the years close to the exposure date of

the negative. Photographic papers change enormously

over time, negatives degenerate and are damaged and

photographers also print differently – each period has its

own printing ‘style’ (even a great image may not find a

place in an art gallery if only a soulless print is available for

acquisition). As always there are exceptions to this or

that is to say cases where later prints have their own

special quality. The Gallery, for instance, has portfolios

made in the late 1970s of images that were created

by Berenice Abbott in the 1930s for her project

Changing New York, one of the greatest ‘portraits’ of

a city ever compiled. They look very different to the

prints made at the time the images were shot, which

are characteristically warmer in tone, but are exquisitely

printed by Parasol Press nonetheless. Ansel Adams’s late

portfolios, including the Museum set, are also highly prized

and of the highest quality, as is Edward Weston’s Fiftieth

Anniversary Portfolio 1902–1952 printed by his son Brett

under Weston’s supervision. These portfolios of Adams and

Weston were made at the end of their careers and exist as

moving testimonials: two master photographers looking

back at a life devoted to photography and making an

eloquent final statement on what was important.

Photographs carrying a particular history or showing

strongly the hand of the photographer also lift them above

the ordinary. For example, the backs of photographs

by Felix Man in the collection are covered with stickers

and annotations, providing an insight into the world

of the photographer; The steerage of 1907 by Alfred

Stieglitz is made (if possible) even more wonderful by

the long handwritten inscription to his friend and fellow

photographer Paul B Haviland which accompanies it; the

inscription by the American high fashion photographer

Baron George Hoyningen-Huene to Max Dupain – while

on a short visit to Sydney in 1937 – on a portrait of Dupain,

Max after surfing, made by Olive Cotton, makes it unique

and special.

Carleton E Watkins Willamette Falls, Oregon City 1867 albumen silver photograph 39.2 x 52.1 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra NGA Photography Fund: Farrell Family Foundation donation 2000


It has been noted that sometimes photographs are

like windows, seemingly straightforward depictions of

the world, the camera almost a scientific instrument

of objectivity. Other times photographs are more like

mirrors reflecting back the photographer. And, of course,

photography must also work at revealing ourselves to

ourselves. Ansel Adams noted that ‘a photograph is usually

looked at – seldom looked into’. This exhibition asks the

viewer to engage with photographs in all their complexity

and diversity: to be charmed by the ‘stars’ certainly but

also to enjoy spending time with lesser known but equally

talented participants.

Great photography is always about exploring different

ways of looking at the world – and shifting, even if only

slightly, our perception of that world in some way. As we

enter the digital age the rules are changing. The value of

photography, whatever technology it employs, remains in

teaching us how to see and interpret our own world with

clarity, to stimulate our minds and evoke our emotions. a

Anne O’HehirCurator, Photography

Further information at nga.gov.au/VIP

Ansel Adams Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico 1941 gelatin silver photograph printed 1980 38.6 x 49.0 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

(opposite) Alfred Stieglitz The steerage 1907 photogravure on Japanese vellum printed 1915 33.4 x 26.6 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra


asian ar t galleries

The new Southeast Asian Gallery opened in late October

2006 with a special launch of the newest and most exciting

acquisition from the region – the sixth-century Bronze

Weaver from Indonesia (see artonview, no. 49, page 36).

Placed at the entrance to the new permanent displays of

Southeast Asian art, the sculpture highlights the Gallery’s

commitment to showing the most ancient and enduring

art forms from the region, including those associated with

animist and ancestral beliefs which long predate the arrival

of world religions, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam

and Christianity.

Like all South and Southeast Asian art in the national

collection, the ancestral art is comprised largely of

sculpture and textiles. Their integrated display, made

possible by the Gallery’s new lighting system which

allows works of stone and wood to be located beside

light-sensitive fabrics, visually reinforces a fundamental

feature of ancient Southeast Asian cultures – the essential

complementary of male and female elements. This is most

clearly evident in the textiles created by women, and the

wooden sculptures and smelted bronzes which are men’s

arts. A number of the works on display actually combine

these dual elements: a pair of male and female bulol rice

guardians from the northern Philippines stands beside

a set of male and female cloths from Sumba in eastern

Indonesia. The ceremonial textiles, which form the female

gift in the elaborate exchanges that accompany marriage

and funerals, feature male skull tree motifs associated with

the prestigious masculine ritual of headhunting.

Among the recurring images in this section of the

Southeast Asian installations are those associated with

the dark underworld realm, often viewed as female. In

particular, reptiles such as crocodiles, snakes and mythical

naga serpents are found on works in all media. A large

receptacle made from buffalo horn was created in the

form of a serpent to hold the magical potions of the village

shaman in northern Sumatra. The ship symbol found on

the striking woven hangings used in rites of passage in

south Sumatra often takes the form of a dragon boat.

Motifs of birds associated with the upper realm of the

gods and the deified ancestors are also evident in this part

of the permanent display, with striking wooden sculptures

of birds exhibited from the mountainous regions of north

Vietnam, the Lampung region of southern Sumatra and

as far afield as Madagascar where, in the distant past,

the ancestors of modern Indonesians arrived after long

sea voyages which also took them into remote parts of

the Pacific Ocean. The similarities in style between quite

remote parts of Southeast Asia speak of that shared

linguistic and cultural heritage. Also recurring in Southeast

Asian arts are tree motifs, a popular symbol of the axis

mundi that the ancestors travel down to join the middle

world of the living. One of the most prominent works

with this motif is found in the last section of the Southeast

Asian Gallery – the textile from Central Sulawesi was

intended for display at rites associated with fertility when

the founding ancestors of clan and village are dutifully

honoured by their descendants.

Entering the Southeast Asian Gallery with the Bronze

Weaver in the foreground, and a Sumba textile and pairs of guardian figures from the

Philippines and West Iran behind

The Southeast Asian Gallery




Better known are the Southeast Asian arts, especially

sculpture, influenced by India. The great architectural

wonders of Angkor and Borobodur, and the enduring

vitality of Buddhism for Thailand and Burma, and Hinduism

for Bali, reveal the impact of religious and court rituals

adopted from South Asia in the first millennium of the

current era. The interaction of Indian ideas and imagery

with pre-existing local traditions has resulted in regional art

forms distinct from India yet revealing common affinities

across the Southeast Asian region.

Following on from the Indian Gallery, located directly

adjacent to the new Southeast Asian permanent exhibition,

the visitor catches a first glimpse of Southeast Asian art

through the white marble arcade that has been erected

in the Islamic section of the South Asian displays. The

reassembling of Mughal-period architectural feature,

from the reign of the Emperor Aurangzeb, was a major

undertaking for the Gallery’s exhibition staff, assisted by

local stonemasons. The purchase of the arcade has been

generously supported by artist Margaret Olley, who also

assisted with the acquisition of the huge Indian brackets

and lintels which mark the entrance from the foyer to the

Asian Galleries.

Through the arches are some of the Gallery’s most

important Buddhist sculptures from Thailand, Burma and

Cambodia. Several Thai bronze sculptures are covered in

lacquer and gold leaf and reveal aspects of the narrative

of the life of the earthly Buddha Shakyamuni popular

throughout mainland Southeast Asia. While many images

allude to the moment of enlightenment when he reaches

down to touch the Earth, calling it to witness his lifetime

of good deeds, one striking sculpture shows the Buddha

seated in the forest where he had retreated from a quarrel

among his followers. Before him are the tiny figures of the

elephant and the monkey offering him a water pot and

honeycomb respectively.

A Burmese wooden Buddha with Hindu Balinese textiles and pages from a Thai manuscript on the adjacent wall

(opposite) Looking through the Mughal Indian marble arch at Thai and Burmese Buddhist sculpture



On the wall behind, the designs on the textiles are drawn

from another enduring aspect of Indian culture, the

importance of the great epics, the Ramayana and the

Mahabharata in mainland and insular Southeast Asia.

The Indonesian renditions of the tales, however, are

sometimes quite obscure, alluding to stories and dramatic

scenes unknown or not prominent in India. However, the

flat two-dimensional wayang form, a key feature of the

figures in the epics, is shared by Hindu Bali and Islamic

Java, appearing on batik, weavings, embroidery, painted

panels and even decorating a container for storing spurs

for fighting cocks.

While many of the sculptures are large and imposing,

and able to be displayed without the barrier of glass

panels, other works shown in showcases are small

and exquisite. In particular a number of small gold and

silver objects display the gamut of the region’s cultural

orientations. A gold mask from Tanimbar provides

protection in an animist rite. While the hilt of splendid

jewel-studded Balinese dagger takes the form of a demon,

another from a nearby Islamic kingdom reveals a stylised

human form. One intricate box in the form of a crab blends

Malay and Chinese elements in a decorative form popular

on both sides of the Straits of Malacca.

The existing collections of Southeast Asian art have been

supplemented by a number of recent acquisitions, allowing

the Gallery to present a more complex and comprehensive

history of the arts of the region. For example, juxtaposed

with the Mughal arch, sumptuous gold brocades from the

Gallery’s famous textile collection are displayed beside a

stone panel inscribed with Arabic calligraphy. The recently

acquired sculpture was a key work in the 2006 exhibition,

Crescent Moon: Islamic art and civilisation in Southeast

Asia. Hanging beside the textiles, the group speaks of

the pervasive and decorative nature of art of Islamic

communities in the region, often overshadowed by the

exuberant and better known art of the Balinese village and

Javanese court.

The Southeast Asian Gallery reveals the richness

and diversity of the arts of the regions of Asia closest to

Australia. The displays allow the visitor to enjoy the great

diversity of form, cultural origins, media, and technique,

while appreciating the commonalties displayed in the arts

of Southeast Asian cultures whose shared histories stretch

back thousands of years. a

Robyn MaxwellSenior Curator, Asian Art

Sumatran textiles featuring the popular ship motif flanked by an image of a Khmer goddess and a wooden bird sculpture from Vietnam

(opposite) An image of the Hindu god Shiva from Cambodia, with a Javanese and Balinese textile featuring Hindu designs, and a showcase containing a group of small Southeast Asian Hindu-Buddhist sculptures

Gilded Thai figures of the Buddha Shakyamuni in the foreground, and an Indonesian stone panel displaying Islamic calligraphy beside royal Malay gold and silk textiles on the rear wall. A section of the Indian Gallery is visible through the arches


Culture Warriors: National Indigenous Art Triennial

forthcoming exhibition

The inaugural National Indigenous Art Triennial

will be held at the Gallery in Canberra later this year.

Presenting the work of thirty artists from each state and

territory, the Triennial demonstrates the incredible range

of contemporary Indigenous art practice. It is the largest

survey show of Indigenous art at the Gallery in more

than fifteen years, featuring up to four works by each

artist created during the past three years in a variety of

media, including painting on bark and canvas, sculpture,

textiles, weaving, new media, photomedia, printmaking

and installation. The works selected not only create an

exhibition of outstanding quality but are also ultimately

important acquisitions for the national collection.

Internationally, there has been incredible interest in

contemporary Indigenous art from Australia, most notably

with the prestigious Australian Indigenous Art Commission

at the new Musée du quai Branly, Paris, in June 2006.

And there can be no doubt that locally the launch of the

Triennial is well-timed. Not only does it open the day after

the Gallery’s twenty-fifth anniversary, it also coincides

with the fortieth anniversary of the 1967 Referendum

(Aboriginals), whereby non-Indigenous Australians

(90.77%) voted overwhelmingly to include Indigenous

Australians on the census as citizens, and the fiftieth

anniversary of NAIDOC (National Aboriginal and Islander

Day Observance Committee). These anniversaries are a

major inspiration for the exhibition’s thematic context.

To ensure that successive National Indigenous Art

Triennials are as dynamic and as stimulating as possible

the Gallery will invite an Indigenous guest curator to direct

the exhibition’s theme and content. The theme of the

inaugural Triennial is Culture Warriors and this year’s guest

curator is Brenda L Croft, Senior Curator, Aboriginal and

Torres Strait Islander Art, National Gallery of Australia. The

guest curator position provides an outstanding opportunity

for Indigenous curators to develop skills and direct a major

Australian art event. The Gallery plans to extend the scope

of this project to include international Indigenous curators

from the Pacific and other regions. A substantial, fully-

illustrated publication will also accompany each triennial

exhibition and provide an ongoing authoritative critical

reference for contemporary Indigenous art in Australia.

The Gallery’s development of an Indigenous

art triennial is also in light of there being fewer

high-profile opportunities to showcase Australia’s

leading contemporary artists, especially considering

that some major forces in contemporary art such as the

Moët et Chandon Fellowship and the Art Gallery of

New South Wales’s biennial, Australian Perspecta, have

ceased. To date, the most widely acknowledged survey

of contemporary Indigenous Australian art has been the

highly popular annual Telstra National Aboriginal and

Torres Strait Islander Art Award, held each August at the

Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Darwin.

Although it is not a theme-based or curated show, the

Telstra Award features the work of more than 100 artists.

What defines the National Indigenous Art Triennial is that it

is curated, themed, and by invitation; therefore it stands as

an important counterpoint to existing annual, biennial and

triennial visual arts events.

Brenda L CroftSenior Curator, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art

Major sponsor BHP Billiton

13 October 2007 – 10 February 2008

Anniebell Marrngamarrnga

Kuninjku people Yalk Yalk mother and babies 2006 natural pigments dyed

on woven pandanus 285.0 x 172.0 cm

a


new acquisition Australian Paintings

Kathleen O’Connor In the studio

Kathleen O’Connor is a Western Australian artist of

national status. Like many other Australian artists of the

Edwardian era, she was an artist in exile, travelling abroad

in 1906 and remaining overseas to study and work for

almost fifty years. Many Australian artists gravitated to

London but O’Connor, like fellow Australians Rupert Bunny

and Phillips Fox, mostly lived and worked in Paris.

For a period O’Connor was an objective recorder of

Parisian life, painting images of girls in cafés or intimate

views of women in the Luxembourg Gardens – nannies

with prams and women reading. Following a brief period in

Australia in 1926, when she painted decorative objects for

Grace Bros and David Jones in Sydney, she turned to still

life, to the world of her studio, painting images such as In

the studio c. 1928.

In doing so she was taking up a modernist subject,

which allowed her to focus on formal arrangement, on

design and colour. In the still life In the studio she explored

the possibilities of flat patterning and intense colours to

construct her image. She drew the image in outline and

then applied the paint thinly, using large flat blocks of

colour, leaving areas of the card exposed so as to give

added warmth to the overall effect. The work is energised

by the patterned tablecloth, the folds in the blue fabric

backdrop and the vigorous flecks of green, red and white

paint that create the flowers in the pot. There is a sense of

distortion in the way the space has been flattened, and the

tabletop tilted in a modernist fashion.

It is a deeply personal image, a lived-in still life, with

objects from her personal life scattered on the table,

creating the impression that she has just walked out of the

room where she had been drinking a cup of coffee and

scanning through the well-thumbed magazine.

At around the time O’Connor painted this work she

received a favourable review in Les Artistes d’Aujourd-hui:

‘She is an incomparable colourist, as witness her still lifes,

which are magnificent mosaics, in which all the colours

vibrate and sing’.

Anne GrayHead of Australian Art

Kathleen O’Connor In the studio c. 1928

tempera on card 71.8 x 86.4 cm



Ray Crooke ‘Kingfisher’, Thursday Island

new acquisition Australian Painting and Sculpture

I find a strange island sometimes where ghosts

of ancient glories linger, where the winds and

the flowers are sweet and the people are still

gentle and smiling, where man is conscious of his

grandeur and is content to live simply in harmony

with the forces around and within him. Yet if we

found this island we would destroy it in a month.

(Ray Crooke, 1949 journal entry)

‘Kingfisher’, Thursday Island 1950 is a work that marks the

beginning of Ray Crooke’s longstanding interest in painting

the people and landscapes of Far North Queensland

and the Pacific. The work was made in Melbourne after

Crooke’s 1949 visit to the Torres Strait where he lived for

several months on Thursday Island (Waiben) working as

a cook, labourer and trochus diver. Lugger sailing vessels

such as the one depicted in this painting were used by

the fishermen to explore the waters of the Darnley Deeps.

During his time in the region, Crooke travelled around the

Great Barrier Reef visiting a number of islands, making

many drawings, and keeping a journal.

Crooke first visited the Torres Strait and Thursday Island

in 1943 as a soldier with the Australian Army. The artist

had enlisted in 1940 and throughout the war travelled

extensively throughout Far North Queensland and the

Pacific. During his first stay on Thursday Island soldiers

were billeted in the abandoned Federal Hotel, which

was built around 1903. The building is identifiable in

‘Kingfisher’, Thursday Island by its arched verandah

and red roof.

Australia’s northern-most settlement, Thursday Island,

has a long history of exchange and contact with Asian and

Melanesian peoples, and the first European contact dates

from early in the seventeenth century. Crooke’s writings

and works of art display his keen interest in the history of

the region and his awareness of the fine balance for the

Indigenous people between their traditional ways of life

and introduced elements of western medicine, religion

and industry.

Beatrice GraltonAssociate Curator, Australian Painting and Sculpture

‘Kingfisher’ Thursday Island is included in the forthcoming National Gallery of Australia travelling exhibition Ocean to outback: Australian landscape painting 1850–1950 which opens at Tamworth Regional Gallery on 3 August 2007.

Ray Crooke ‘Kingfisher’, Thursday Island 1950 egg tempera and oil on composition board 25.0 x 35.6 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2006


new acquisition Australian Prints and Drawings

Kenneth Macqueen Darling Downs landscape

There is a group of photographs in the National Gallery

of Australia’s Research Library taken around the property

where Kenneth Macqueen lived from 1922 until his death

in 1960. The images are immediately familiar for they are

the landscape of Macqueen’s watercolours, with the same

patterns of rhythmic rolling hills and endless flat-bottomed

clouds. It is the landscape he painted over and over again,

from the time when he and his brother Jack purchased

their farm atop a ridge at Mount Emlyn, Millmerran, on

Queensland’s Darling Downs.

Only a few years before, Macqueen had returned from

England where he had served in the AIF during the First

World War. After the war he studied art in London under

Bernard Meninsky at the Westminster School of Art and

with Henry Tonks at the Slade School. His spare time was

spent at the National Gallery or the Victoria and Albert

Museum, taking in the nuances of the watercolours of

Turner, Constable and especially the tonal landscapes of

John Sell Cotman.

Back in Australia Macqueen balanced his days

between farming and painting, often preferring to sketch

en plein air during the day (rather than use photographs

for they provided too much detail) and paint in the cool

of the evening when the conditions were more suitable

for the intricacies of watercolour painting. In his 1948

book Adventure in watercolour, Macqueen explained: ‘A

watercolour can be left, however much one hates to do so,

to be continued in the next lull. Then again watercolour is

such a delightful medium, full of the unexpected, with its

transparency giving one an extra stop on which to play’.

Watercolour became his preferred medium and

Macqueen was a master of the technique. An early

member of the Australian Watercolour Institute, he

maintained an association with them throughout his entire

life. He was also a member of the Society of Artists and

his first exhibition was with them in 1922. Macqueen

exhibited almost every year from 1922, and by 1926 was

receiving somewhat backhanded praise for his work. In a

review of the Society of Artists’ Annual Exhibition in the

Bulletin of 16 September 1926, came the somewhat wry

comment that ‘Kenneth Macqueen takes a queer view of

the earth’s surface; he succeeds in being extraordinary

anyway’. By 1935 an article in Art in Australia (May 15)

offered more refined praise: ‘Mr Macqueen’s work is

completely individual … every picture is alive with tender

serenity and charm’.

The watercolour Darling Downs was painted around

this time, when Macqueen’s landscapes had reached

a stylistic maturity. It is typically painted in flat areas

of colour, with sweeping rhythms. Fascinated with the

element of design in landscape, Macqueen wrote in 1948:

‘Design in landscape interests me tremendously though

involuntarily. When a subject strikes me, and quickens my

interest, I find it is nearly always a shape of a tree, hill or

cloud that has been the cause’. Here the eye is drawn to

the dark swathe of hillside in the middle ground and the

recently tilled rich dark soil, typical of the Darling Downs.

It is a bold and unexpected feature, which Macqueen

balances with the sweep of a winding road and its border

of repeating fence posts. The Twin Hills in the background

are moulded in shape and form by cloud shadows. The

azure blue of the sky, the touches of blue in the dams and

the tiny patch of blue on the box culvert in the foreground

all work seamlessly to create this wonderful composition.

Anne McDonaldCurator, Australian Prints and Drawings

Kenneth Macqueen Darling Downs landscape

c. 1935 watercolour on paper


Canberra




Kate Lohse Tools of the trade

In Tools of the trade, New South Wales-based artist

and midwife Kate Lohse explores ‘the historical

struggle between midwives and medical men for

the control of childbirth’. In her series of twenty-one

printed handkerchiefs, images of traditional midwifery

paraphernalia including ointments, salves and the birth

stool are juxtaposed with seventeenth-century engravings

of coldly glittering surgical instruments and anatomical

diagrams of the pregnant female. These images were

sourced from scientific journals in the Wellcome Library in

London, digitally manipulated and thermally transferred

onto the starched white cloth squares. Fine linen was

chosen to refer to the ‘churching of women’ after

childbirth (a purification ritual in which the new mother

makes an offering of linen to the priest) and what Lohse

pointedly refers to as the impositions made upon the

‘blank canvas’ of a woman’s pregnant body.

During the age of scientific enquiry, the concept of the

body as machine was invented, and childbirth began to be

viewed as a medical problem. The role of the female birth

attendant was usurped by the male midwife, who emerged

from the trade guild of the barber-surgeons and pushed

his way confidently into the bedchambers of middle-

class women. Childbirth became a potentially lucrative

occasion with the male midwife charging heavily for his

knowledge of anatomy, gained through study in male-

only academic circles, and flourishing the newly invented

maternity forceps. The female midwife became the target

of fear mongering, with her intuition and experience

overshadowed by the portrayal of her methods as ignorant

and unhygienic.

In this timely series, Lohse has illustrated the shift of

childbirth from the female community into the medical

domain. The artist draws on her experience as a midwife

to imbue this thought-provoking work with a personal

awareness of the troubled history of midwifery.

Sarina Noordhuis-FairfaxGordon Darling Intern, Australian Prints and Drawings

Kate Lohse A man midwife 2003

from Tools of the trade thermal transfer on linen

handkerchief 25.0 x 24.5 cm National Gallery of Australia,

Canberra Gordon Darling Australasian Print Fund 2007


The Omie barkcloths

I paint on the barkcloth the designs that were on

my grandparents’ bodies. Then we all remember

and our customs will not be forgotten.

(Nerry Keme)

Nerry Keme is one of four Omie artists who have

produced this group of barkcloths, or nyog’e, from the

Omie region of eastern Papua New Guinea. (Drusilla

Modjeska and David Baker brought attention to the

work of this group in their research for an exhibition at

Annandale Galleries in 2006.) Aspesa Gadai, Nerry Keme,

Stella Upia and Dapeni Jonevari are important artists

of the Omie: the women referred to as the duvahe, or

main producers, of the nyog’e. Each nyog’e, once worn

or hung during ceremony, is a single sheet of inner-bark,

dried in the sun and beaten flat to nearly twice its original

size. The black outlines are applied with charcoal and

then painted with dyes from the roots of plants.

The Omie visual language embraces a range of motifs.

Designs include those based on traditional tattooing

practices now no longer practised; curling plant-like

formations evocative of the flora of the surrounding

forest and traditional Omie weaving techniques. While

much of this appears abstract, the names of specific

cloths associate them with particular plants and animals.

In Vinohu’e – a body design by Aspesa Gadai, the

hooked tendrils of vinohu’e vine can be seen. The designs

featured in the more formally structured barkcloth by

Stella Upia entitled Sihau’e – a Sahote clan design reflect

the grid weave of the narrow fibrous belts that comprise

the customary attire of Omie huntsmen.

While these designs are rooted in the ancestral

past of the Omie, barkcloth production represents a

living tradition that has evolved to reflect the changing

circumstances of the region. What was once used locally

for ceremonial purposes now helps sustain the Omie

economically and provides a means for promoting their

culture to a wider audience.

Mary-Lou NugentCuratorial AssistantAustralian Prints and Drawings

Stella Upia Sihau’e – a Sahote clan design inner bark, charcoal and plants dyes 123.0 x 104.0 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra



new acquisition Asian Art

Christ crucified Indian Christian sculpture

Much of the historical art of South Asia was created for

religious purposes. While the Gallery has an important

collection of Hindu, Jain and early Buddhist objects from

India, the art of well-established, albeit smaller, Christian

communities has not, until now, been represented.

Generally overlooked by international museums and

standard art histories of the region, Christianity has

been an important inspiration for arts in India for many

centuries, as this fine sculpture attests.

Catholic missionaries began making some inroads into

India during the sixteenth century, following the opening

of the sea route from Europe heralded by Vasco da Gama’s

path-breaking voyage. The Franciscans and the Dominicans

were the first orders to begin the venture. The Portuguese

colony of Goa on the west coast felt the fullest impact of

this missionary drive. The art of Goa from the sixteenth

to the nineteenth centuries reflects the strong impact of

Christianity in this region. Located on the active trade route

between India and Africa, ivory was commonly used in Goa

for religious sculpture, especially during the seventeenth

and eighteenth centuries. Many of these objects were

exported to Spain and Portugal.

This is an exceptionally large and spectacular image

of Christ crucified, created in Portuguese Goa during

the eighteenth century. While the inspiration is clearly

European, features such as the pierced roundels, which

form the edging of the loincloth wrapped around Christ’s

hips, appear to be peculiar to Indian crucifix images. The

articulation of the textured hair, ribs and the veins on Jesus’

head, body and limbs is finely detailed. The stigmata are

marked with holes that pierce completely through the

ivory, indicating that this icon would have originally been

affixed to a large cross. The sculpture has been formed

from four pieces, with the arms and gathered end of

loincloth to the left of Christ’s body each carved separately.

Robyn MaxwellSenior Curator, Asian Art

Christ crucified Goa, India 18th century

ivory 71 cm (h) National Gallery of Australia,

Canberra



Gandharan region Head of a bodhisattva

This is a fine example of the Buddhist art of Gandhara,

a region that encompassed parts of modern-day

Afghanistan, Pakistan and northern India during the

Kushan period from the first century BCE until 320. Located

on the Silk Road trade route, Gandhara was an important

centre for the development of a new tradition of Buddhist

iconography which employed anthropomorphic depictions

instead of symbolic representations of the Buddha.

Carved from local grey schist, this head was once

part of a monumental statue depicting a bodhisattva,

a compassionate being who has chosen to defer

enlightenment in order to help other earthly beings

break the cycle of rebirth. Bodhisattvas are often depicted

as royalty to emphasise their high status. This bodhisattva

wears a bejewelled turban which symbolises material

and spiritual wealth and reminds worshippers that their

saviour is still of this world. Another feature of the

developing Buddhist iconography is the small indentation

for a precious jewel between the brows that marks the

urna, a small mole that is one of the thirty-two marks of a

great being.

Gandharan art is distinguished by its fusion of Greek,

Bactrian and Indian styles, a result of trade as well as

the foreign occupation of the region before Kushan rule.

The strong naturalistic facial features and wavy hair are a

reflection of Hellenistic naturalism. The depiction of griffin-

like beasts shows a debt to traditional Near Eastern and

Indian imagery.

An important addition to the Gallery’s collection of

early Buddhist art, the Head of a bodhisattva complements

other examples of Gandharan art in the Indian Gallery,

including a large figure of a standing bodhisattva, and a

panel from a stupa depicting a jataka story from a previous

life of the Buddha.

Niki van den HeuvelIntern, Asian Art

Head of a bodhisattva Gandharan region, Afghanistan or Pakistan Kushan period 3rd–4th century schist stone 53.4 x 44.4 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra



Phulkari shawls

A recent gift of fifteen fine examples of large phulkari

shawls expands the Gallery’s collection of Indian textiles

produced for domestic consumption. The embroidered

phulkari textiles (phul: flowers; kari: work) represent an

important aspect of South Asian textile art from the Punjab

and neighbouring areas in the north-west of the Indian

subcontinent. The phulkari appears to have developed

in the second half of the nineteenth and first half of the

twentieth centuries. The textiles are worn by Muslim, Hindu

and especially Sikh women as head coverings and shawls

and are also used as ceremonial hangings and covers at

festivals and religious and life-cycle rituals.

Shawls embroidered with dense designs in floss silks

are the most prestigious type and play a prominent role

at weddings. They are considered auspicious and an

appropriate gift from the groom’s family to his new bride.

As dowry, phulkari also symbolise the wealth of the bride

and her family.

Although the primary techniques used to create the

phulkari are the surface-darning stitch and the herringbone

stitch, embroidery styles vary between the different regions

within the Punjab, resulting in the textiles acting as a

marker of regional identity. While the luminous shimmering

silks in brilliant colours against bold plain cotton grounds

are common to all fine phulkari, the designs of the

eastern Punjab textiles are mainly floral and figural on a

fairly coarse cotton cloth base; those of the western

Punjab are dominated by technically sophisticated

geometric patterning.

The donor, Claudia Hyles, has had a long association

with India and the National Gallery of Australia. She has

travelled to the Subcontinent regularly for four decades

and was an early and long-serving member of the Gallery’s

voluntary guides. More recently, she worked for the Gallery

as a member of the Office of the Executive.

Robyn Maxwell, Senior Curator, Asian ArtHwei-Fe’n Cheah, Assistant Curator, Asian Art

Ceremonial cover or woman’s headcovering Punjab region

Indian or Pakistan early 20th century

cotton, floss silk 134.5 x 223.0 cm


Gift of Claudia Hyles, 2006


In the old days people used a powder, made by crushing

the roots of a certain tree. This powder was placed in

lagoons and waterways to stun the fish, which would then

float to the surface and be scooped up. This technique

made fishing very easy.

This one time, too much powder was placed in

the water which left hardly any fish left. All this

time the spirit man from the moon had been

watching. He wanted a wife so he descended

down to the lagoon where he turned himself into

a barramundi. Everyone was trying to catch this

fish but he was very tricky and would sink down

to the bottom where no one could see him. All

the men and women tried and no one could catch

him. The man from the moon which was disguised

as a barramundi had his eye on the two prettiest

women, two sisters. One day the two sisters

went for a swim in the lagoon, one by one they

swam out into the lagoon, where the barramundi

waited and hid. When the last sister swam out, the

barramundi caught the two sisters and took them

into the sky, back to the moon.

(Artist statement, 2006)

Jack Bell was born in 1950 at Aurukun, a small remote

Aboriginal community located in the Western Cape York

region of Far North Queensland. His language group is Wik

Mungkan and his clan group is Apalech. His totems are the

Dingo, Brolga and Ghost man.

Bell has been a practising artist for many years with

a major role in teaching the younger people Wik culture

through his art. Although primarily a sculptor, he also

paints, and is credited with many of the murals that adorn

Aurukun public spaces.

Simona BarkusActing Assistant Curator, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art

new acquisition Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art

Jack Bell Moon sisters

Jack Bell Wik Mungkan people Moon sisters 2005 synthetic polymer paint and ochre on milk wood National Gallery of Australia, Canberra


new acquisition Australian Photography

Douglas T Kilburn South-east Australian Aboriginal man and two younger companions

The Gallery recently acquired one of the rarest and most

sought after pioneer works of Australian photography –

a daguerreotype portrait of an Australian Aboriginal man

and two younger companions – that had lain for over

two decades in a private collection in London. The gem-

like image belongs to a group of at least ten portraits of

Victorian Aboriginal people taken in 1847 by Douglas

Thomas Kilburn (1811–1871), the first resident professional

photographer in Melbourne. Kilburn’s portraits are the

earliest surviving photographs of Aboriginal people in

Australia and among the earliest anywhere of

Indigenous people.

Born in London, Kilburn came from a large merchant

family. His Irish grandfather William was successful artist

and fabric designer but nothing is known of Douglas’s

education or employment before he arrived in Australia

possibly with his first wife and child. This was around 1842

probably at the same time as younger brother Charles

became a selector and formed a customs business trading

as Kilburn Brothers. In 1847, Douglas Kilburn set up a studio

in his residence in Little Collins Street.

Kilburn had a great advantage over any other aspiring

photographers in Australia as his younger brother William

E Kilburn (1818–1891) had opened one of the first

photographic portrait studios in London in 1846 and

soon secured royal favour. His brother’s success no doubt

encouraged Douglas to teach himself photography using

equipment and instructions sent out by William. Douglas

later exhibited watercolours, introduced colouring to

his daguerreotype portraits and did pioneer work with

photography on paper. After first advertising for paying

customers in August 1847, by October Kilburn had

undertaken a speculative venture making portraits of Port

Phillip Aboriginal people coming into the town. Kilburn later

described how ‘upon seeing their likenesses so suddenly

fixed, they took him for nothing less than a sorcerer’.

In these early years, portrait exposures were still at

least a minute and sitters had to be braced or supported.

In Kilburn’s Aboriginal portraits the various combinations

of male and female figures have a close-up and bunched

composition unusual for early daguerreotypes. The three

people in the Gallery’s portrait appear to be using each

other for support rather than the usual neck and head

braces and chairs employed by early photographers. They

wear a considerable array of adornments and artefacts,

including cloaks, some of which might have been supplied

by the photographer as Aboriginal people living close to

town no longer lived or dressed in completely traditional

ways. Their mixed dress, appearance and presence was

not welcome and in the 1850s they were banned from

lingering in the newly incorporated City of Melbourne.

Kilburn hoped to find a market for his Aboriginal portraits

in London but it seems there was not a great demand

either overseas or locally.

Eight Aboriginal portraits are known through

reproductions but only three of these have been located.

They are held by the National Gallery of Victoria, and have

been extensively researched by curator Dr Isobel Crombie.

Two other portraits are held in private collections and the

sixth example is in the National Gallery of Australia. These

were all acquired at different times and from different

sources in England.

On his return to Australia, Kilburn continued as a

photographer in Hobart where he prospered though

diversified activities and became a politician. He died in

Hobart in 1871 survived by his second wife and four sons

and a daughter by his first wife.

Despite Kilburn’s difficulties in persuading his sitters to

pose and their supposed fear of the camera, the Aboriginal

people in his daguerreotypes seem curious and composed.

That their descendents and the public can now return their

gaze is the miraculous gift of the art of the camera.

Gael NewtonSenior Curator, Photography

Douglas T Kilburn South-east Australian

Aboriginal man and two younger companions 1847

daguerreotype 7.8 x 6.5 cm



new acquisition Australian Photography

Bill Henson Untitled #33

The object of my photographs is not always the

subject. (Bill Henson)

Untitled #33 – an image of a boat at twilight caught just

as the last rays of sun fade from the water – is from the

artist’s most recent series, completed during 2005 and

2006. A distinguishing characteristic of Henson’s work is

the evolution over time of individual pieces within

larger series, suggesting that no single truth exists;

rather that multiple open-ended readings of the world are

the only possibility.

In this series, landscape images made wandering alone

at night in his hometown of Melbourne or wherever his

travels have taken him – often to places on the edge of

the urban environment – counterpoint images of languid

youths shot in the studio. The image of the bulk carrier,

the German owned Helga Selmer, is a departure from his

expected subject matter and yet it is quintessential

Henson – an intense yet subdued palette, painterly and

cinematic. The mysterious darkness and shimmering

artificial light reverberate with a dark, ominous presence

of threatening intent. There is a reference to the present,

the particular. It is difficult to look at a vessel likely to be

carrying chemicals or crude oil without thinking of

recent environmental incidents, and yet just as powerfully

the image is redolent of an energy that seems

otherworldly – mythical and timeless.

In Henson’s work the viewer moves into a world half-

glimpsed, into the dreamy gloaming hours, a place that

exists between wake and sleep. The mood echoes the

work of a writer such as Thomas Mann or the composer

Richard Strauss in their elegiac musings on the nature of

death and beauty. There is a reductive, distilled quality to

this image that reveals the photographer’s vision at its most

psychologically discerning.

Anne O’HehirAssistant Curator, Photography

Bill Henson Untitled #33 2005–06

Type C colour photograph 127.0 x 180.0 cm



new acquisition International Photography

Serimpies, or dancing girls of the Sultano

Serimpies, or dancing girls of the Sultano is one of the

earliest known photographs of Javanese people and

comes from a series on court dancers and musicians

made circa 1858 by the Woodbury & Page studio of

Batavia. Englishmen Walter Woodbury (1834–1885) and

James Page (1833–1865), having previously worked as

photographers in Victoria, arrived in Java from Australia in

1857, setting up a studio that year. The image of serimpi

dancers is one of a number of stereographs on glass sold

to London publishers Negretti and Zambra apparently in

1859 when Woodbury made a visit to London. The image

of the dancers was reproduced as an engraving in the

Illustrated London News, 31 July 1861.

A Negretti and Zambra catalogue of circa 1864 lists

the image under the title Serimpies, or dancing girls

of the Sultano among a number of scenes from Batoe

Toelis near Buitenzorg (Bogor) in the hills of west Java.

Woodbury alone appears to be the author of the serimpi

dancers picture as a small print of the subject appears

in his personal album held in the National Museum of

Photography, Film and Television in Bradford, England.

Court dancers, usually drawn from the ranks of royal

families, were trained from childhood in the graceful and

demanding movements of Javanese dance drama. One pair

of girls in the Woodbury picture is wearing the traditional

matching serimpi costumes. However, the Gallery’s Senior

Curator of Asian Art, Robyn Maxwell, has observed that

the dancers are of different ethnic appearance and the

check pattern costumes are south Sumatran in style.

The models may be local girls wearing dance costumes.

By 1864 Walter Woodbury had returned to England

but the Woodbury and Pagestudio remained in business

with family members and others as operators until 1912.

Walter continued to work in photography until his death in

1885, most notably inventing the Woodburytype printing

process. James Page died in Java in 1865.

Gael NewtonSenior Curator, Australian and International Photography

Walter Woodbury (attributed to) Serimpies, or dancing girls of the Sultano c. 1858 albumen silver photograph on card 14.3 x 17.4 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra


Chasing nature: landscape paintings by Eugene von Guérard and Sidney Nolan

forthcoming travelling exhibition

To mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the National

Gallery of Australia, the Gallery’s Director, Ron Radford,

has curated an exhibition of treasured paintings from

the national collection. Ocean to outback: Australian

landscape painting 1850–1950 celebrates the dynamic

century of Australian landscape painting from the colonial

period to the years immediately following the Second

World War. The exhibition reflects the great strengths of

the national collection and includes iconic paintings from

the permanent display by artists including Eugene von

Guérard, Arthur Streeton, Arthur Boyd, Margaret Preston

and Grace Cossington Smith. The exhibition also provides

an opportunity to showcase lesser-known works from the

Gallery’s rich holdings by artists including Sidney Nolan and

Frederick McCubbin as well as new acquisitions and works

which have been restored and reframed in period style.

Two of Australia’s eminent artists, Eugene von Guérard

(1811–1901) and Sidney Nolan (1917–1992) are represented

by a number of works in the exhibition. Both pursued

the artistic exploration of lands little-known to Australia’s

settler population in different ways – von Guérard as a

member of organised treks throughout much of south-

eastern Australia between 1856 and 1875, and Nolan

spending months at a time in Far North Queensland and

Central Australia between 1947 and 1950, on his own,

or accompanied by his wife and step-daughter. Both

artists also looked to their more immediate environs for

inspiration – in the case of the two works considered

here, areas on the fringe of the major metropolitan cities

where they lived.

Eugene von Guérard arrived in Australia from Europe

in 1852 seeking to make his fortune in the Victorian gold

fields. After an unsuccessful period mining in Ballarat, he

established himself in Melbourne where he became the

most celebrated artist of the period. Von Guérard avidly

pursued the representation of nature – as an observer,

an explorer and a resident. His remarkable imagery of

the Dandenong Ranges, some forty kilometres east of

Melbourne, conveys a sense of the landscape as a spiritual

sanctuary and haven, a rejuvenating life-force untainted by

human interference.

When von Guérard first visited the Dandenong Ranges,

the area was a dense bushland of temperate rainforests

and cool fern gullies. Sketchbooks held in the collection

of the Dixson Galleries, State Library of New South Wales,

contain a number of drawings which document the lush

and largely unexplored forests, a natural resource of

high-quality timber which was rapidly logged for the

growing industries and settlement within Victoria.

‘Prolific in God’s Gifts’ were the words selected in

September 1889 for the Shire of Ferntree Gully coat of

arms. The ranges were home to some fourteen different

species of eucalypt and more than sixty varieties of wild

flowers. Painted on return to the artist’s Melbourne

studio, Ferntree Gully in the Dandenong Ranges 1857

is a work which combines von Guérard’s meticulous

observation of local plant species with his artistic interests

in compositional arrangement and the creation of a ‘mood’

particular to this environment. In this case we are privy to

the magical world of a bower – an enclosed gully of natural

foliage created by the towering tree ferns. A pool of light

on the forest floor leads us to two male lyrebirds cast in

shadow, one with its characteristic tail feathers raised – a

natural mimic of the arch of the fern fronds. The theatrical

activities of the lyrebird were one of the early drawcards

for tourists to the area, who hoped to witness the singing

and dancing of the male bird.


Eugene von Guérard Ferntree Gully in the Dandenong Ranges 1857 oil on canvas 92.0 x 138.0 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Gift of Dr Joseph Brown AO OBE, 1975

Sidney Nolan Ku-ring-gai Chase 1948

synthetic polymer paint on composition board


Canberra Purchased 1976


Eugene von Guérard’s painting received much acclaim

in the Melbourne papers and within a few years after

this work was completed, ‘ferntree gully’ located close

to the Ferntree Gully Hotel had become a popular tourist

destination – especially during the summer months. The

residents of Melbourne sought the sanctuary of the cool

green gullies and active birdlife for their leisure. Chartered

horse coaches were available for hire, and by 1889 rail

had extended from Ringwood to Upper Ferntree Gully.

In the 1890s thousands of people visited the region

on Melbourne Cup Day, a perfect spot for recreational

activities in the bush.

For Sidney Nolan, the Australian landscape was a life-

long source of inspiration. Fuelled by a keen interest in

travel, Nolan’s personal experiences of the land are closely

linked to the development of Australian mythology within

his works, as seen in his images of Ned Kelly, Burke and

Wills, Mrs Fraser, and Daisy Bates. Between 1951 and 1952

Nolan also created a series of works depicting a number of

stories of Christian saints located in the deserts of Central

Australia. As with von Guérard, the landscape for Nolan

was both a real, lived experience and a vehicle for evoking

more personal and contemplative ideas.

In 1948, following a year spent travelling throughout

Queensland, Nolan settled in Sydney, where he married

Cynthia Hansen née Reed, the writer and sister of his

patron John Reed. The marriage between Nolan and

Cynthia had caused a painful rift with John and his wife

Sunday, and after an unsuccessful visit from the newlyweds

in March of 1948, Nolan would never see his first and most

important patrons again. The Nolans settled in Wahroonga,

a leafy suburb in the municipality of Ku-ring-gai about

twenty kilometres north of the city, on the edge of the

Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park.

Ku-ring-gai Chase 1948 is a startling image of a hazy,

smouldering bushfire. There had been an early start to

the summer season of bushfires during 1947, the Sydney

Morning Herald reporting on 27 October: ‘Last summer’s

late rains bought out a bountiful growth of tussock and

grass as well as a record season of wildflowers. An almost

continuous run of westerly winds to date has dried out the

forest to a condition like tinder. It requires only a spark to

start a fire, and with the prevailing winds behind it a small

blaze would soon become an inferno.’ Nolan may have

witnessed the fires in Wahroonga which were reported

by the Herald on 10 November 1947. It is also possible

the Herald’s front-page photo of leaping flames, burning

trees and hazy sky from a Manly/Brookvale bushfire on

25 October 1947 was used as a visual aid for this work.

Nolan’s skilful handling of paint, swift brushwork and

freshness of colour convey the ferocity of this scene – the

heat and dust of the wind, crackling of leaves and grasses

and the smell of the burning bush. There is a heightened

tension in the picture – an unease as to whether the fire is

receding or approaching, a knowledge that with a change

in conditions the situation could rapidly alter. In Ku-ring-

gai Chase the advantages of living in rural suburbia seem

reversed as the threat of danger encroaches.

Inscriptions on the back of the work suggest Nolan

gave the painting to Cynthia on 22 May 1948. A

message in pencil (only visible under infra-red) reads

‘Cynthia XXX Sidney’. In this powerful painting, it is

possible that Nolan is also exploring his personal reaction

to events taking place in his own life, the metaphor of

fire transferring to notions of passion, destruction and

regeneration.

As cultural commentators and visual communicators,

artists have gone beyond topographical analysis and

used the environment to explore a range of ideas and

concepts, including history and personal spirituality. The

works included in Ocean to outback: Australian landscape

painting 1850–1950 display the great breadth of imagery

produced in response to the land, which in turn, extends

and informs our understanding of the nation we live in. a

Beatrice GraltonAssociate Curator, Australian Painting and Sculpture

Ocean to outback: Australian landscape painting 1850–1950

opens at Tamworth Regional Gallery on 3 August 2007 and

travels to every state and territory until May 2009.


travelling exhibition

Colin McCahon Writing and imagining a journey

I look back with joy on taking a brush of white paint

and curving through the darkness with a line of

white. (Colin McCahon) 1

In 2008 it will be thirty years since Colin McCahon’s

great, monumental Victory over death 2 1970 entered

the National Gallery of Australia’s collection. For some it

is this region’s equivalent of Jackson Pollock’s Blue poles

1952. Both paintings are regarded as iconic works. Both have

increased dramatically in value since entering the collection

in the 1970s. Both caused something of a furore in the

press when they were acquired. When the New Zealand

Government gifted Victory over death 2 to the Australian

people in 1978 some saw it as a joke; a way of making front-

page news. Others on both sides of the Tasman, including

the Gallery’s first director, James Mollison, recognised the

significance of this daring painting that would become one

of the treasures of the national collection.

In 2007, as part of its twenty-fifth anniversary

celebrations, the Gallery is pleased to present a trans-

Tasman travelling exhibition featuring Victory over death 2.

The exhibition includes the Gallery’s remarkable collection

of McCahon’s works on paper along with his paintings,

providing an in-depth look at some of the artist’s key

concerns: faith, nature and the transformative and aesthetic

power of the written word. The show includes works from

1950 through to one of McCahon’s last paintings I applied

my mind … 1982, generously loaned by the artist’s long-time

New Zealand gallery representative, supporter and friend,

Peter McLeavey (who played a key role in recommending

Victory over death 2 as a gift to Australia).

In purely visual terms Victory over death 2 is

extraordinarily daring for its time with its palette of stark

black and white and tonalities of grey and in the way that

McCahon gave himself the freedom to embrace the text

itself – from the cursive handwriting to the architectural

capital letters, stretching over two metres high from the top

to the bottom of the composition. On the left in the velvety

black ground the very indistinct letters ‘AM’ pose a question

against the ‘I’. This faces the luminous ‘I AM’ that refers

to the voice of God. Guided by the palette and structure

of the work, we move from the dark chasm of doubt and

struggle to the affirmation of the presence of the Divine in

the luminous pillar ‘I’. Yet even in the towering presence of

these letters we are reminded that revelation is temporary, as

a fragment of the inscription reads: ‘The light is among you

still, but not for long’.

Victory over death 2 emerged after a long journey. The

use of written text may look very current but for McCahon

it was part of an ongoing search for faith and meaning in

his art and life. In the face of the issues of his time, including

the Cold War and threats to the environment, he often felt

he needed words. Early on, when he started his schooling

Colin McCahon Victory over death 2 1970 synthetic polymer paint on

unstretched canvas 207.5 x 597.7 cm


Gift of the New Zealand Government 1978


at the Maori Hill Primary School in Dunedin, the act of

writing was a frustrating challenge. As a left-hander he

was harshly punished for not writing as a particular teacher

wanted him to write. He recalled how other teachers were

more encouraging, introducing him to the world of poetry;

a lifelong passion he later shared with the poets James K

Baxter and John Caselberg who became his close friends and

collaborators. Early on too, writing presented the magic of

practical revelation. One day in Dunedin the young McCahon

came across a signwriter slowly plying his trade on a shop

window – HAIRDRESSER AND TOBACCONIST – and was

entranced.

I watched the work being done and fell in love with

signwriting. The grace of the lettering as it arched

across the window in gleaming gold, suspended on

its dull red field but leaping free from its own black

shadow, pointed to a new and magnificent world of

painting. I watched from outside as the artist working

from the inside slowly separated himself from me

(and light from dark) to make his new creation.

(Colin McCahon) 2

In the early 1930s text allied with religion manifested

itself tellingly through eccentric Uncle Frank, the uncle of

McCahon’s close artist-friend Toss Woollaston. On his visits

to his nephew’s house Uncle Frank brought along blackboard

signs lettered with religious texts and Christian symbols as

well as a large version of a diagrammatic aid to meditation

that he had painted himself. These teaching aids provided

a basis for lively debates. Although the younger men

eventually tired of Uncle Frank, images and ideas persisted.

In 1969 McCahon worked on a series called Practical religion.

He wanted to communicate ‘practical religion’ – not simply

as it was professed in a weekly Sunday ritual but faith tested

through a real, raw, direct engagement with ideas in his art.

Between 1946 and the early 1950s, following a

concerted period painting the landscape, McCahon did a

series of paintings based on religious subjects. He brought

the two aspects together in Crucifixion: the apple branch

1950, one of his most important and overtly personal

paintings. Exhibited only once during McCahon’s lifetime

in The Group exhibition of 1950, this work remained with

the artist in his studio until his death in 1987. It suggests his

struggle to reconcile faith, creative life and survival in the

‘real’ world at a time when he was finding it hard to make

ends meet and to care for his family. On the left McCahon

painted a self-portrait looking in towards the crucifixion set

against a Canterbury landscape.

On the right, his wife Anne Hamblett stands under the

apple tree alongside their son William, set against the hills

in Nelson. There are also two biblical timeframes, the Old

and New testaments: the laden apple tree of the Garden of

Colin McCahon Crucifixion: the apple branch 1950 oil on canvas 89.0 x 117.0 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased with funds from the Sir Otto and Lady Margaret Frankel Bequest 2004


cut into lengths of around 170 centimetres in height. He

accentuates certain letters and phrases, allowing the watery

washes to create irregular haloes around them.

By 1982 when McCahon finished I applied my mind …

he was at a low ebb. Alcohol had taken a heavy toll, as

had the years of struggle to be understood. In the

wider world, history kept repeating itself: wars kept

happening; people seemed mainly concerned with self and

money, ignoring the importance of the natural environment.

He found it hard to make sense of the world. In I applied

my mind …, he chose the biblical text accordingly. Also

reflecting his state of mind is the way in which he tautly

structured the composition into a horizontal band and two

vertical columns filled with a careful, obsessive journey of

words written over the dark ground. It was one of the last

works he painted.

Twenty years after McCahon’s death in 1987, the

National Gallery pays tribute to an artistic journey of great

intensity and commitment in this travelling exhibition. Along

with Victory over death 2, the artist’s personal struggle and

passionate enquiries can be discovered in a range of intimate

and expansive ways, inscribed in imagery, words and

abstractions – in drawings, gouaches, prints and paintings

– that continue to intrigue and inspire us. a

Deborah HartSenior Curator,Australian Painting and Sculpture (after 1920)

Further information at nga.gov.au/McCahon

notes1 Colin McCahon quoted in Marja Bloem and Martin Browne

(eds), Colin McCahon: A question of faith, Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum and Nelson, New Zealand, Craig Potton Publishing, 2003, p. 202

2 Colin McCahon: A question of faith p. 160

Colin McCahon North Otago landscape

no. 14 1967 synthetic polymer paint on

composition board 60.0 x 120.7 cm

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1997

Colin McCahon I applied my mind … 1982 synthetic polymer paint on

unstretched canvas 195.0 x 180.5 cm

on loan from a private collection, New Zealand

Eden (one of the most poetic images in McCahon’s art), and

the crucifixion and thirteen skulls representing Christ and his

disciples.

The background landscape in Crucifixion: the apple

branch points to important developments in his later work,

including landscapes such as North Otago landscape no. 14

1967 with its simplified, elemental forms. A couple of years

after painting this landscape McCahon completed a series of

about seventy-five ‘writing paintings and drawings’, applying

fragments of text onto vertical scrolls of off-white wallpaper.

The quotations come from several sources

including Matire Kereama’s The tail of the fish, poems by

Peter Hooper, and passages drawn from the New English

Bible which his wife, Anne, had given him. In these works

on paper McCahon embraces the shape of the long scrolls,

An artist abroad: the prints of James McNeill Whistler James McNeill Whistler was a key figure in the European art world of the 19th century. Influenced by the French Realists, the Dutch, Venetian and Japanese masters, Whistler’s prints are sublime visions of people and the places they inhabit. nga.gov.au/Whistler

Geelong Gallery, Geelong Vic., 7 June – 19 August 2007

Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery, Launceston Tas., 1 September – 4 November 2007

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

For further details and bookings telephone 02 6240 6432 or email [email protected]. nga.gov.au/Wolfensohn

Colin McCahon A focus exhibition showcasing the Gallery’s holdings of one of the Australasian region’s most renowned and respected artists – Colin McCahon (1919–1987). The exhibition includes paintings and works on paper spanning the period from the 1950s to early 1980s. It is significant that the exhibition’s tour of Australia and New Zealand coincides with the 30th anniversary of the New Zealand government gifting to Australia in 1978 the iconic work, Victory over death 2 1970 which has become a destination work for the Gallery. nga.gov.au/McCahon

Queen Victoria Museum & Art Gallery @ Inveresk, Launceston Tas., 16 June – 2 September 2007

Imagining Papua New Guinea: screenprints from the national collection Imagining Papua New Guinea is an exhibition of screenprints from the national collection that celebrates Papua New Guinea’s independence and surveys its rich history of printmaking. Artists whose works are in the exhibition include Timothy Akis, Mathias Kauage, David Lasisi, John Man and Martin Morububuna. nga.gov.au/Imagining

Geraldton Regional Art Gallery, Geraldton WA, 6 April – 17 June 2007

Artspace Mackay, Mackay Qld, 13 July – 26 August 2007

travelling exhibitions winter 2007

James McNeill Whistler Portrait of Whistler 1859 (detail) etching and drypoint National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Loundon Sainthill Costume design for the ugly sister from Cinderella 1958 (detail) gouache, pencil and watercolour on paper National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

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

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

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

Michael Riley untitled from the series cloud [cow] 2000 (detail) printed 2005 chromogenic pigment photograph National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Courtesy of the Michael Riley Foundation and VISCOPY, Australia

Michael Riley: sights unseen Supported by Visions of Australia, an Australian Government Program supporting touring exhibitions by providing funding assistance for the development and touring of cultural material across Australia

Michael Riley (1960–2004) was one of the most important contemporary Indigenous visual artists of the past two decades. His contribution to the contemporary Indigenous and broader Australian visual arts industry was substantial and his film and video work challenged non-Indigenous perceptions of Indigenous experience, particularly among the most disenfranchised communities in the eastern region of Australia. nga.gov.au/Riley

Dubbo Regional Gallery, Dubbo NSW, 12 May – 8 July 2007, and concurrently

Moree Plains Gallery, Moree NSW, 19 May – 15 July 2007

Museum of Brisbane, Brisbane Qld, 27 July – 18 November 2007

Stage fright: the art of theatre (Focus Exhibition) In partnership with Australian Theatre for Young People Supported by Visions of Australia, an Australian Government Program supporting touring exhibitions by providing funding assistance for the development and touring of cultural material across Australia

Stage fright: the art of theatre raises the curtain on the world of theatre and dance through works of art, interactives and a program of workshops conducted by educators from the National Gallery and Australian Theatre for Young People. Worlds from mythology, fairytales and fantasy characters intended for the ballet, opera and stage are shown in exquisitely rendered finished drawings alongside others that have been quickly executed capturing the essence of an idea, posture, movement or character. nga.gov.au/StageFright

Walter Nicholls Memorial Gallery, Port Lincoln SA, 5 May – 3 June 2007

Red case: myths and rituals and Yellow case: form, space and design Mosman Art Gallery and Community Centre, Mosman NSW, 9 May – 3 June 2007

Caloundra Regional Art Gallery, Caloundra Qld, 16 July – 21 September 2007

Blue case: technology Walter Nicholls Memorial Gallery, Port Pirie SA, 4 June – 1 July 2007

Manning Regional Art Gallery, Taree NSW, 9 July – 30 September 2007

The 1888 Melbourne Cup Hawkesbury Regional Gallery, Windsor NSW, 20 July – 16 September 2007

Exhibition venues and dates are subject to change. Please contact the gallery or venue before your visit. For more information please phone +61 2 6240 6556 or email [email protected]

Colin McCahon Crucifixion: the apple branch 1950 oil on canvas National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased with funds from the Sir Otto and Lady Margaret Frankel Bequest 2004

Mathias Kauage Independence Celebration I 1975 (detail) stencil National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

1 2

3 4 5

6 7

8 9 10

16 16

13

faces in view

1 John and Rosanna Hindmarsh with Ron Radford at the opening of

The story of Australian printmaking 1801–2005 2 Michael and Philippa

Kalazjich and Janita and Col Cunnington at the opening of Grace Crowley:

being modern 3 Ray Kennedy, Anne McDonald and Alex Selenitsch at the

Australia print symposium 4 Children participating in the Creeping through

the jungle musical tour 5 Children participating in the Creeping through

the jungle floortalk 6 Visitors enjoying Sculpture Garden Sunday

7 Daniel Thomas, Elena Taylor and Ron Radford at the opening of Grace

Crowley: being modern 8 Mandy and Lou Westende with Julienne Clunnies

Ross at the opening of The story of Australian printmaking 1801–2005

9 Participants at the Australian print symposium 10 Children enjoying

Sculpture Garden Sunday 11 & 12 Children participating in the Creeping

through the jungle floortalk 13 Visitors enjoying Sculpture Garden Sunday

14 John Hindmarsh, Rupert Myer, Roger Butler, and Gordon and Marilyn

Darling at the opening of The story of Australian printmaking 1801–2005

15 Heather Ried, Tom Rose, Evie Rose, Axel Debenham-Lendon, Pam

Debenham and Mary-Lou Nugent at the opening of The story of Australian

printmaking 1801–2005 16 Children enjoying Sculpture Garden Sunday

17 Hugh and Neve Elliott at Sculpture Garden Sunday

11 12 13

14 15

16

17

For free, confidential appraisals by our art specialists

Please contact: Sydney: Adrian Newstead or Litsa Veldekis02 8344 5404Melbourne: Tim Abdallah or John Keats 03 9822 1911

www.deutschermenzies.com

MAJOR FINE ART AUCTION

MELBOURNE12 SEPTEMBER 2007

T H E L E A D I N G A U S T R A L I A N O W N E D A R T A U C T I O N E E R S A N D V A L U E R S

(det

ail)

Alb

ert T

uck

er In

trud

er w

ith P

arro

ts S

OL

D M

arch

200

7 $1

11,0

00

E N T R I E S NOW INVITED

2007-04-26 DM artonview 1/5/07 10:43 AM Page 1

S&C

O.5

06b

POGGENPOHL HAS ARRIVED

SEE THE LATEST award-winning Poggenpohl series PLUSMODO’ at

INO Contract Furniture’s showroom 1st Floor, 42 Mort Street Braddon, Canberra.

phone: 02 6230 5466 :: web: inocontract.com.au

03TIWI NGA ad97x131.indd 1 15/4/07 10:14:58 PM

Gallery Shop open 7 days 10am–5pm Phone 02 6240 6420 ngashop.com.au

Indigenous arts and craft * books and

catalogues * calendars and diaries * prints

and posters * gifts * jewellery * fine art cards

* accessories * desirable objects * toys

Australian made bags by Nicola Cerini

Mysteries of Arnhem Land

it’s in our nature to explore

Art of Ancient Arnhem Land

The oldest evidence of Aboriginal occupationhas been recorded at around 60,000 years inthe rock shelters of Kakadu. To this day themany different clan and language groupsthat own and occupy nearly fifty percent ofthe Northern Territory are testimony to theoldest cultural continuum in the world. Theirancestors explored, occupied, altered andmanaged this landscape since the creationtimes and today their ongoing custodianshipblends traditional practices with the cuttingedge of modern technology.

Your journey has been carefully designed toprovide you with a cumulative experiencethat will connect you to the spirit of theland, its fascinating characters and history.

One of the most dramatic and visible elements of the rich cultural tapestry youwill experience is in the artistic expression of the many different cultural groups, whichhas gained worldwide interest. The stonecountry of the Arnhem Land plateau hostsone of the worlds treasure troves of rock artdisplayed in stunning surroundings reachingback over 20,000 years. This legacy is carriedon by a host of contemporary artists work-ing in many mediums and materials from thetraditional bark paintings and delicate fibrecrafts to intricate designs on fabric, ceramicsand even carpets. All of this work relatesback to the stories and traditions arisingfrom the varied landscapes, which havemoulded and governed the lives of the

indigenous people who in many cases regardthe land as their ‘mother’.

Your journey will bring you in touch withpeople both black and white with true pas-sion and a wealth of knowledge about thisunique part of Australia. Through theirinsight and interpretation you will gain arare experience of the power, beauty andmany contradictions of this area, whichremain a continuing fascination to all whoventure to the Top End.

Joc Schmiechen

Guest Lecturer – Orion Expedition Cruises

ORIO1061_ARNHEM_280x206 18/1/07 1:32 PM Page 1

it’s in our nature to explore

Art of Ancient Arnhem Land

The oldest evidence of Aboriginal occupationhas been recorded at around 60,000 years inthe rock shelters of Kakadu. To this day themany different clan and language groupsthat own and occupy nearly fifty percent ofthe Northern Territory are testimony to theoldest cultural continuum in the world. Theirancestors explored, occupied, altered andmanaged this landscape since the creationtimes and today their ongoing custodianshipblends traditional practices with the cuttingedge of modern technology.

Your journey has been carefully designed toprovide you with a cumulative experiencethat will connect you to the spirit of theland, its fascinating characters and history.

One of the most dramatic and visible elements of the rich cultural tapestry youwill experience is in the artistic expression of the many different cultural groups, whichhas gained worldwide interest. The stonecountry of the Arnhem Land plateau hostsone of the worlds treasure troves of rock artdisplayed in stunning surroundings reachingback over 20,000 years. This legacy is carriedon by a host of contemporary artists work-ing in many mediums and materials from thetraditional bark paintings and delicate fibrecrafts to intricate designs on fabric, ceramicsand even carpets. All of this work relatesback to the stories and traditions arisingfrom the varied landscapes, which havemoulded and governed the lives of the

indigenous people who in many cases regardthe land as their ‘mother’.

Your journey will bring you in touch withpeople both black and white with true pas-sion and a wealth of knowledge about thisunique part of Australia. Through theirinsight and interpretation you will gain arare experience of the power, beauty andmany contradictions of this area, whichremain a continuing fascination to all whoventure to the Top End.

Joc Schmiechen

Guest Lecturer – Orion Expedition Cruises


T E R M S A N D C O N D I T I O N S

ORIO1061

Call your travel agent or visit www.orioncruises.com.au Phone 1300 361 012 or (02) 9033 8777.

1 0 N I G H T C R U I S E F A R E S

Ctgy Type Deck Description 10nt

B Stateroom 3 Oval Window or twin portholes. Sitting Area 7,200

A Stateroom 3 Oval Window. Sitting Area 8,360

JS Junior Suite 4 & 5 Rectangular Window. Sitting Area 9,930

DS Deluxe Suite 5 Rectangular Window. Living Room 10,880

BS Balcony Suite 5 French Balcony. Living Room 12,980

OS Owners’ 5 French Balcony 15,080Suite Separate bedroom & Living Room

Orion custom built for voyages of exploration. Her yacht-like intimacy isdeceiving as she is large enough to offerall the amenities you would demand of acruise ship. And, with a professional andexperienced crew of 75 taking care of thecomfort of just 50 couples, you can beassured the service onboard is unassumingand polished. Indeed, the by-words for

life onboard are ‘easy’ & ‘relaxed’ with noparticular dress code except ‘smart casual’.Dining is leisurely. Our signature dinnermenus have been created by award-winningSydney chef Serge Dansereau of ‘The Bathers’Pavilion’ at Balmoral, featuring culinarytraditions and produce from the regionswe visit. As your comfort is paramount,our staterooms and suites are spacious

and well appointed. Each offers you thechoice of either twin or queen size beds,picture windows or French balcony withsweeping ocean views, marble bathroom,flat-screen TV and DVD/CD player. The perfect retreat at the end of the day.

Relax and indulge

Dili

E a s t T i m o r

N o r t h e r n Te r r i t o r y

Baucau Com

d

ontalrfalls

King George Falls

Wyndham

Mitchell Falls

DARWIN

ArnhemLand

Mt.Borradaile

Maningrida

Victoria SettlementPort Essingtion

Melville Island

GrooteEylandt

Cape WesselWessel Islands

Yirrkala

CapeYork

Peninsulat Bay

ft PointEl QuestroLake Argyle

Hunter River

Pirlangimpi

ArnhemBay

ElchoIsland

10 Night Art of Ancient Arnhem Land

Sep 6 Darwin

Sep 7 Pirlangimpi (Melville Island)

Sep 8 Victoria Settlement (Port Essington)

Sep 9 Maningrida

Sep 10 Arnhem Bay

Sep 11 Groote Eylandt

Sep 12 Yirrkala

Sep 13 Jensen Bay / Hole In The Wall

Sep 14 Elcho Island

Sep 15 at sea

Sep 16 Darwin

2007 Departure: September 6

Please note this replaces the previouslyscheduled Kimberley Expedition.

Fares are per person in Australian Dollars.

Fares are cruise only: quoted per person in Australian dollarsand are based on twin occupancy. All bookings are subject to theTerms and Conditions of the Orion Expedition Cruises PassageContract, a copy of which is available upon request, or by accessingwww.orioncruises.com.auFares include: accommodation as booked cruise transportation,all meals onboard, 24-hour room service, entertainment and educational programmes, use of ship’s sporting equipment andfacilities, port & handling charges, Zodiac and tender transfers,access to the ship’s library of CDs/DVDs, govt fees & taxes.Fares also include: the service of an experienced cruise staff.Gratuities are not expected, however if you wish to recogniseexceptional service from an individual staff member, you are welcome to do so at your discretion.Fares do not include: any items of a personal nature, not limitedto travel and medical insurance, laundry charges, shopping onboard,bar expenses, hairdressing and massage treatments optionalshore excursions, medical services, telephone and internet charges.

Prices: are current at the time of printing. They may be subjectto currency fluctuation, fuel price and tax increases until full pay-ment is received.Itineraries: are subject to prevailing tidal and weather condi-tions and may be changed without notice.Deposits: 25% of the cruise fare is due within 7 days of an offerof accommodation being made.Final payments: the balance of the cruise fare is due 90 daysprior to sailing date.Cancellations: received 121 days or more prior to sailing: forAntarctic cruises a penalty of A$1,000 per person applies. allother cruises, no penalty. Cancellations received 120-91 dayprior to sailing: penalty of loss of deposit applies.Cancellations received 90 days or less prior to sailing: penalty of100% applies. Orion Expedition Cruises offers a CancellationProtection Plan, details available upon request.

3rd/4th Guests: some staterooms accommodate a third or fourthperson. Adults aged 16 years and over pay 50% (children aged2-15 years pay 25%) of the applicable stateroom category farewhen sharing the room with two full-fare guests.Single Travellers: should request rates for sole occupancy ofstaterooms from Orion Expedition Cruises.All Staterooms and Suites: have ocean views, flat-screen TVand DVD/CD player, mini-refrigerator, marble bathroom withshower, safe-deposit box, ample wardrobe space, and the choiceof either Queen size or twin beds.Suites OS and BS have a French balcony (except suite OS509which has two large rectangular windows). The French balcony features floor to ceiling sliding glass doors and a small outsidearea for viewing. Suites DS and JS feature large rectangular windows(except suites JS418 and JS419 which have large oval windows).Staterooms B and A have large oval windows (except stateroomsB322 & B323 which have twin portholes) and sitting area withtub chair.



ORIO1061













Relax and indulge

Dili

E a s t T i m o r


Baucau Com

d

ontalrfalls

King George Falls

Wyndham

Mitchell Falls

DARWIN

ArnhemLand

Mt.Borradaile

Maningrida


Melville Island

GrooteEylandt


Yirrkala

CapeYork

Peninsulat Bay


Hunter River

Pirlangimpi

ArnhemBay

ElchoIsland


Sep 6 Darwin



Sep 9 Maningrida

Sep 10 Arnhem Bay


Sep 12 Yirrkala


Sep 14 Elcho Island

Sep 15 at sea

Sep 16 Darwin









ORIO1061













Relax and indulge

Dili

E a s t T i m o r


Baucau Com

d

ontalrfalls

King George Falls

Wyndham

Mitchell Falls

DARWIN

ArnhemLand

Mt.Borradaile

Maningrida


Melville Island

GrooteEylandt


Yirrkala

CapeYork

Peninsulat Bay


Hunter River

Pirlangimpi

ArnhemBay

ElchoIsland


Sep 6 Darwin



Sep 9 Maningrida

Sep 10 Arnhem Bay


Sep 12 Yirrkala


Sep 14 Elcho Island

Sep 15 at sea

Sep 16 Darwin









ORIO1061













Relax and indulge

Dili

E a s t T i m o r


Baucau Com

d

ontalrfalls

King George Falls

Wyndham

Mitchell Falls

DARWIN

ArnhemLand

Mt.Borradaile

Maningrida


Melville Island

GrooteEylandt


Yirrkala

CapeYork

Peninsulat Bay


Hunter River

Pirlangimpi

ArnhemBay

ElchoIsland


Sep 6 Darwin



Sep 9 Maningrida

Sep 10 Arnhem Bay


Sep 12 Yirrkala


Sep 14 Elcho Island

Sep 15 at sea

Sep 16 Darwin








For terms and conditions please refer to www.orioncruises.com.au


Join Orion as she explores Australia’s remote

Arnhem Land Coast. Led by Orion’s Expedition

team and supported by specialist Guest Lecturers

you will follow the history from Ancient Rock

to contemporary indigenous Art, visit remote

communities, meet the artists and feel their

connection with this timeless land.

Orion provides the ideal medium to taste a little

magic from the comforts of 5 star expedition

cruising in an unobtrusive manner that touches

land and people ever so lightly. Orion is custom

built for voyages of exploration. Her yacht-like

intimacy is deceiving as she is large enough to

offer all the amenities you would demand of a

cruise ship. As your comfort is paramount, our

Staterooms and Suites are spacious and well

appointed. All with ocean views, TV/DVD, sitting

areas and marble en-suite bathrooms. With a

professional and experienced crew of 75 taking

care of the comfort of just 50 couples, you can

be assured the service onboard is unassuming

and polished.

Explore Arnhem Land in 5 Star Luxury

Gallery Shop open 7 days 10am–5pm Phone 02 6240 6420 ngashop.com.au

Australian made bags by Nicola Cerini


Celebrating

the inaugural National Indigenous

Art Triennial


C•A•N•B•E•R•R•A

The Brassey of CanberraBelmore Gardens and Macquarie Street,

Barton ACT 2600

Telephone: 02 6273 3766Facsimile: 02 6273 2791

Toll Free Telephone: 1800 659 191Email: [email protected]: //www.brassey.net.au

B A R T O N

Canberran Owned and Operated

Hibernation Package

per night.Overnight accommodation in a Heritage Room.

Two full buffet breakfasts. Two bottles of Hardys Collection Wine, 1 Cabernet Merlot & 1 Semillion Chardonay.

Entry for 2 into Parliament House.Valid 01/03/07 – 31/08/07.

Subject to availability. *Extra person is $15.00

$159.00

Brassey Hibernation 233x297.indd1 1 17/5/07 10:13:12 AM

National Gallery of Australia, CanberraGeorge Lambert The white glove 1921 (detail) Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney purchased 1922 photograph: Jenni Carter for AGNSW


nga.gov.au

A brushstroke into our past ActewAGL is delighted to be major sponsor of the George Lambert Retrospective: Heroes and Icons exhibition. Lambert’s painting The squatter’s daughter, depicting Michelago in 1923, is symbolic to ActewAGL as it refl ects on a time when ActewAGL was building the foundations to provide essential services to Canberra and the region.

Recognising the importance of Australian art – always.

George Lambert The squatter’s daughter 1923–24

Michelago / New South Wales / Australia Oil on canvas

National Gallery of Australia, CanberraPurchased with the generous assistance of

James Fairfax AO and Philip Bacon AM, 1991

CCA

407/

10

ActewAGL Retail ABN 46 221 314 841.

Athol Shmith Vivien Leigh 1948 gelatin silver photograph 50.0 x 39.3 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 26 May – 19 August 2007

artonviewI

SS

UE

N

o.

50

w

in

te

r

20

07

GEORGE W LAMBERT • VERy IMpORTAnT phOTOGRAphs

artonview

IS

SU

E N

o.5

0 w

INt

Er

20

07

NA

tIO

NA

L

GA

LL

Er

Y O

F

AU

St

rA

LIA

Documents

2007.Q2 | artonview 50 Winter 2007