2009.Q2 | artonview 58 Winter 2009

artonview

REINVENTIONS: SCULPTURE + ASSEMBLAGE • FREDERICK McCUBBINFrederick McCubbin Golden sunlight 1914 (detail) Castlemaine Art Gallery & Historical Museum Gift of Dame Nellie Melba, 1923

The National Gallery of Australia is an Australian Government Agency

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Issue 58, winter 2009

2 Director’s foreword

7 Foundation

8 Development

exhibitions and displays

10 Reinventions: sculpture + assemblage Deborah Hart

18 McCubbin: Last Impressions 1907–17 Anne Gray

collection focus/conservation

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

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

acquisitions

30 Edgar Degas Woman bathing Jane Kinsman

32 Choi Jeong Hwa Clear lotus Melanie Eastburn and Robyn Maxwell

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

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

36 Margaret Benyon Pushing up the daisies Gael Newton

38 Debra Dawes Parallel planes Miriam Kelly

39 Kiribas people Ririko Crispin Howarth

40 Bantor Irene Mague ne hiwir Crispin Howarth

41 Travelling exhibitions

42 Faces in view

published quarterly by

National Gallery of Australia GPO Box 1150 Canberra ACT 2601 nga.gov.au

ISSN 1323-4552

Print Post Approved pp255003/00078

© National Gallery of Australia 2008

Copyright for reproductions of artworks is held by the artists or their estates. Apart from uses permitted under the Copyright Act 1968, no part of artonview may be reproduced, transmitted or copied without the prior permission of the National Gallery of Australia. Enquires about permissions should be made in writing to the Rights and Permissions Officer.

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

editor Eric Meredith

designer Kristin Thomas

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

rights and permissions Nick Nicholson

advertising Erica Seccombe

printed in Australia by Blue Star Print, Melbourne

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


2 national gallery of australia

I know many of you seized the opportunity to see our

highly successful exhibition Degas: master of French

art during its limited time at the Gallery between 12

December 2008 and 22 March 2009. The exhibition was a

unique experience for Australian audiences and attracted

a great number of interstate and overseas visitors to

Canberra. I was sad to see those masterful works packed

away to be returned to the lending institutions—the

Musée d’Orsay, Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art,

New York, the National Gallery, Washington, the British

Museum, London, and 40 other places. A compensation

was our acquisition of Degas’s brilliant pastel Woman

bathing (Femme à sa toilette) 1880–85 (on the cover of

this issue) at the auction of the Yves Saint Laurent and

Pierre Bergé collection in February. We were very lucky to

acquire such a high-quality and well-documented work

for a reasonable price and at such a famous auction. The

acquisition, a major coup for the Gallery, was generously

supported by the Orde Poynton Bequest Fund as well

as funds raised from the National Gallery of Australia

Foundation’s Twentieth Anniversary Gala Dinner in March.

The dinner was part of a weekend of events to celebrate

the anniversary. I extend my appreciation, on behalf of the

Gallery, to everyone who attended.

Degas was undeniably the greatest artist of the pastel

medium in the nineteenth century. He often made many

studies of a single subject—as evidenced in the exhibition

Degas: master of French art in the numerous scenes of

the horses and the racecourse, the ballet and opera, cafe

culture and, of course, women bathing. Woman bathing

has never been shown publicly before because it has

always been in private hands. It is similar to the group

of pastels exhibited at the eighth and final Impressionist

exhibition in Paris in 1886, in Degas’s ‘suite of nudes’,

which was heavily criticised for the ungainly poses of his

subjects. Today, these images still attract some controversy

but they also represent a radically changing period in

French art and society during the nineteenth century, a

period that has left its mark on history.

After the Degas exhibition, Woman bathing was put

on display in our print exhibition Degas’ world: the rage

for change and is part of our display of nineteenth-century

international art.

The Gallery has acquired Max Ernst’s King, queen and

bishop 1929–30 (cast 1974–75), a small but spectacular

precursor to his familiar chess imagery of the 1940s and

1950s. The work was acquired from the William Bowmore

collection. Ernst’s fascination with chess was shared by

many other Surrealist artists, including his wife Dorothea

Tanning, Marcel Duchamp, John Cage and Man Ray. The

tiny work is a radical counterbalance to the imposing

Habukuk 1934 (cast 1970), which we acquired in 2006 (see

artonview issue 51).

We have also acquired significant works in other

collecting areas, including two works for our Pacific art

collection. The first is a rare, nineteenth-century, pre-

Christian necklace made from human teeth, a disarmingly

striking object from the Republic of Kiribati, and one of

our few works from Micronesia. The second, from a small

volcanic island in Vanuatu, is one of the largest and most

sculptural Mague grade-figures made in recent decades.

This colossal contemporary figure was created as part of a

long tradition of ceremonies in the island’s strict hierarchical

social system. From the Torres Strait Islands we acquired

Ricardo Idagi’s intricate GiriGiri Le (Bird of Paradise Man)

2008, a stunning mask to complement the Gallery’s collection

of contemporary Torres Strait Islander masks and headdresses.

Other recent acquisitions include four early holographic

works from British artist Margaret Benyon’s Australian

Director’s foreword

Ron Radford, Director, National

Gallery of Australia, with the book Soft

sculpture, published in conjunction with the

exhibition.

artonview winter 2009 3

period (1977–81), as well as one of her more recent large-

scale works, Pushing up the daisies 1996; and Debra

Dawes’s Parallel planes 2007, which is less abstract than it

first appears—its subtle changes in tone and angle disrupt

what initially seems to be a predetermined optical design.

For the Gallery’s small holdings of contemporary

Asian art, we have a fascinating addition, Korean artist

Choi Jeong Hwa’s Clear lotus 2009. We thank Gene and

Brian Sherman for their financial support and continued

dedication in bringing works by contemporary Asian artists

with strong international reputations into the national

art collection. Clear lotus is currently on view in our Soft

sculpture exhibition.

The Gallery is currently celebrating creative

developments in three-dimensional art with two

exhibitions, Soft sculpture and Reinventions: sculpture +

assemblages, and a vibrant program of talks and events

about sculpture, assemblage, installation and the various

other ways in which artists engage with, create and

transform three-dimensional objects and environments.

Indeed, this winter, visitors will experience the creative

output of some of the world’s best contemporary artists

working in the area.

Soft sculpture was opened in April by the Minister for

Environment, Heritage and the Arts, Peter Garrett, who

delivered an engaging and passionate speech. Curated

by Lucina Ward, Curator of International Painting and

Sculpture, the exhibition looks at the ways artists use

unconventional materials such as plastic, rubber, fur and

fabrics to question the changing nature of sculpture. Soft

sculpture comprises 55 works by European, American,

Asian and Australian artists selected primarily from the

national art collection and combined with a small number

of loans. It focuses on anti-form works from the 1960s and

1970s through to present-day sculptures. These interesting

works inflate, droop and ooze!

Reinventions: sculpture + assemblage opened in the

Project Gallery on 16 May. Spanning four decades, from

1965 to 2007, the display draws on the Gallery’s collection

of Australian sculpture and assemblage and focuses on

artists’ fascination with taking old materials or established

ideas and finding fresh, distinctive and poetic ways to

Visitors marvel at the various objects in the exhibition Soft sculture at the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 24 April – 12 July 2009. Go to the Gallery’s extensive Soft sculpture website for more: nga.gov.au/softsculpture


express them. Reinventions is curated by Deborah Hart,

Senior Curator, Australian Painting and Sculpture post

1920, who has written an engaging article about the

display for this issue of artonview (page 10).

From 14 August our new exhibition, McCubbin: Last

Impressions 1907–17, will redefine one of Australia’s most

loved Impressionist painters. The exhibition focuses on the

radical changes in Frederick McCubbin’s approach to painting

in the final decade of his life. It will introduce our audiences to

the mature, more expressive, reinvigorated McCubbin, allowing

them to better appreciate his deft handling of paint and

striking use of colour. The works in the exhibition portray a

masterly rendering of light that powerfully conveys McCubbin’s

passion and familiarity with the Australian bush and, equally,

the expanding city of the Federation period.

McCubbin: Last Impressions 1907–17 is only on

display for a short time, so I encourage you to see it early

because you will want to visit the exhibition again before

it closes on 1 November. It is curated by Anne Gray, Head

of Australian Art.

McCubbin’s contemporary, Tom Roberts, shared his

passion for the Australian bush, and I remind you that,

for the Masterpieces for the Nation Fund, we are seeking

contributions toward the acquisition of Roberts’s brilliant

Shearing shed, Newstead 1893–94, one of the artist’s few

major works left in private hands. The Gallery relies on

the generous benefaction and support of the Australian

public to continue to collect and preserve masterpieces for

the national art collection. The Masterpieces of the Nation

Fund is an important initiative of our Foundation, whose

support is imperative to our continuing effort to develop

the collection.

The Gallery’s Development Office is also an important

element in the Gallery’s ability to mount major local

and international exhibitions in Australia, and to show

Australian art to the world. For example, the major

exhibition partnership between the Gallery and BHP

Billiton resulted in a national tour of Culture Warriors, the

inaugural Australian Indigenous Art Triennial, culminating in

the United States in Washington from 8 September 2009.

For Soft sculpture, the Development Office has

fostered a partnership with a difference—with MoMac

(a partnership between Molonglo Group and Macquarie

Bank). Along with their support of the exhibition,

MoMac has developed an innovative program of events

at their NewActon precinct in Canberra to coincide with

The Soft sculture exhibition at the Gallery, 24 April – 12 July 2009. Works from left to right: Richard Van Buren For

Najeeb 1972, Giselle Antmann Genetic

glimpse 1978, Ewa Pachucka Landscape

and bodies 1972.


Soft sculpture, including a temporary sculpture–video

installation. Although this is not a joint project between

the Gallery and NewActon, we applaud MoMac’s creative

engagement with Soft sculpture and encourage audiences

to explore the events and installation at NewActon.

I have already mentioned new acquisitions and

new exhibitions. We are also adding to the permanent

Australian displays with some major loans. The Art Gallery

of South Australia, because of their partial closure of

galleries for the installation of new air conditioning and a

lighting system, has allowed us to borrow four works for

our Australian display. The National Gallery of Australia is

not as rich as it should be in works from the smaller states,

including South Australia, and three of the four works on

loan are by South Australian artists. There are two colonial

works, both portraits of the artists’ families. One is an

1840s portrait by Martha Berkeley, South Australia’s first

professional artist, of her three young daughters, painted

in her then newly established back garden in Walkerville,

Adelaide. The other is a portrait by Charles Hill of his family

at Sunday lunch in his front garden on South Terrace,

Adelaide, painted in about 1869. The two twentieth-

century works on loan are Grace Cossington Smith’s

brilliant Poinsettias 1931 and Dorrit Black’s masterful

postwar painting of outer Adelaide, The olive plantation

1946. The Gallery lacks a major work by the important

Modernist Dorrit Black.

Finally, throughout winter, there will be significant

changes on the main level as we refurbish our current

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander gallery, which will

revert to being part of our international displays. We will

also be refitting the current site of the NGA Shop with a

new permanent display of Sydney Nolan’s Ned Kelly series,

as well as purpose-built showcases for our collection of

costumes and jewellery and a significant display area for

photography. During this time of change, a temporary shop

will be set up near the Asian galleries on the way to the

cafe. We hope to keep the impact of these refurbishments

to a minimum and know that you will still enjoy your time

with us as we endeavour to make the Gallery an even

better place to visit.

Ron Radford AM


DonationsGeoffrey and Vicki Ainsworth

Antoinette Albert and Rupert Rosenblum

Susan and Michael Armitage

Beverly Allen

Philip Bacon AM

Betty Beaver AM

Ann Burge

Julian Burt

Nick Burton Taylor AM and Julia Burton Taylor

John Calvert Jones AM and Janet Calvert Jones AO

Terrence Campbell AO and Christine Campbell

Jim Cousins AO and Libby Cousins

Cowra Art Gallery

Charles Curran AC and Eva Curran

Terence and Lynn Fern

John Grant AM and Inge Grant

Andrew and Hiroko Gwinnett

Meredith Hinchliffe

John and Rosanna Hindmarsh

The Hon Robert Hunter QC and Pauline Hunter

Claudia Hyles

WG Jack

John Kaldor AM and Naomi Milgrom

Carolyn Kay and Simon Swaney

Sir Richard Kingsland AO, CBE, DFC and Lady Kingsland

Dr Colin Laverty OAM and Elizabeth Laverty

Paul Legge Wilkinson and Beryl Legge Wilkinson

Andrew Lu OAM

Robert and Susie Maple-Brown

Maureen McLoughlin

Rupert Myer AM and Annabel Myer

Myer Foundation

Claude Neumann

Roslyn Packer AO

Terry and Mary Peabody

Jason Prowd

Alan Rose AO and Helen Rose

John Schaeffer AO and Bettina Dalton

Penelope Seidler AM

Dr Gene and Brian Sherman AM

Dr David Smithers AM and Isobel Smithers

Village Roadshow Limited

Muriel Wilkinson

Peronelle and Jim Windeyer

Peter Webster

John Wylie AM and Myriam Wylie

Lou Westende OAM and Mandy Thomas-Westende

Ray Wilson OAM

Notified Bequest Richard Gate

GiftsJane Bradhurst

Patrick Corrigan AM

Patrica Dalton

Rodney Glick

Annette Iggulden

The Heike Foundation

Professor Anthony Low

Richard Tipping

GrantsThe Gordon Darling Foundation

A Dementia Community Grant funded as part of the

Australian Government’s Dementia Initiative.

Visions of Australia through its Contemporary Touring

Initiative, an Australian Government program

supporting touring exhibitions by providing funding

assistance for the development and touring of

Australian cultural material across Australia, and

through the Visual Arts and Craft Strategy, an initiative

of the Australian Government, and state and territory

governments

SponsorshipActewAGL

Adshel

apARTments

Brassey Hotel of Canberra

BHP Billiton

Bistro Guillaume and Guillaume at Bennelong

Canberra Times

Diamant Hotel

Eckersley’s Art & Craft

Even Keel Wines

Forrest Hotel and Apartments

Gallagher’s Wine

Grandiflora

Hyatt Hotel Canberra

Mantra on Northbourne

National Australia Bank

NewActon

Qantas

Sony Foundation Australia

Threesides

Yalumba Wines

WIN Television

ZOO

credit lines


Foundation

On the weekend of 21 and 22 March 2009, we celebrated

the twentieth anniversary of the Foundation by holding a

Gala Dinner and weekend of events at the National Gallery

of Australia. Proceeds from the dinner raised $107 000,

which assisted in the acquisition of the Edgar Degas pastel

Woman bathing (Femme á sa toilette) c 1880–85—with

major funding to secure this work having been obtained

through the Orde Poynton Bequest. The Gallery was

delighted at the opportunity to secure this work for the

national art collection. See page 30 for an acquisition

article by Jane Kinsman, Senior Curator, International Art.

We were delighted that guests travelled from

many states to join us in this celebration, which began

with a luncheon in the Sculpture Garden, among the

Rodin sculptures. Guests then toured the Conservation

department, where they had the opportunity to view

the beautiful Ballet Russes costumes being restored and

repaired. The afternoon concluded with a guided tour

of the exhibitions Misty moderns: Australian Tonalists

1915–1950 and Degas’ world: the rage for change.

The highlight of the weekend was, of course, the Gala

Dinner, where guests were welcomed by Director Ron

Radford at a champagne reception in the Sculpture Gallery,

followed by a private viewing of the exhibition Degas:

master of French art. The curator, Jane Kinsman, introduced

the exhibition and spoke about the new acquisition

Woman bathing. The sumptuous dinner, prepared by the

award-winning guest chef Guillaume Brahimi, was held in

the magnificently prepared space immediately adjoining the

exhibition. To conclude the weekend, guests enjoyed an

elegant Sunday brunch at the French Embassy, generously

hosted by the Ambassador His Excellency Michel Filhol and

Mrs Catherine Filhol.

We were very fortunate to receive sponsorship for this

event. We would especially like to thank Guillaume Brahimi

and his team from Guillaume at Bennelong, Sydney. We

would also thank Saskia Havekes from Grandiflora, Sydney,

for the wonderful flowers, and Sam Coverdale from Even

Keel Wines, Mornington Peninsula, for supplying the wine.

Masterpieces for the Nation FundWe are pleased that the work of art to be acquired

through our Masterpieces for the Nation Fund is Tom

Roberts’s Shearing shed, Newstead 1893–94. This is an

iconic work of art depicting a rural scene by Australia’s

foremost artist of the nineteenth and early twentieth

century. Our aim is to raise $100 000 to assist with the

acquisition of this painting. A brochure on the Masterpieces

for the Nation Fund and further details on this work of art

are included with this issue of artonview. All donations

make a difference and will help us to achieve our goal.

For further information or to make a donation over the

phone, please contact the Gallery’s Foundation Office on

(02) 6240 6454.

Major giftsAndrew and Hiroko Gwinnett have been supporters for

many years and, through their generous benefaction, have

helped the Gallery to develop its collection of Japanese art.

They have recently donated to further enhance this area of

the national art collection.

Brian Sherman AM and Dr Gene Sherman have also

generously helped the Gallery to enrich the contemporary

Asian art collection. Korean artist Choi Jeong Hwa’s

installation Clear lotus 2009 has been acquired through the

Gene and Brian Sherman Contemporary Asian Art Fund

and is currently on display in the exhibition Soft sculpture.

See page 32 for an article on this intriguing work.

The Foundation Board extends its thanks to Dr Sherman,

who has been a director of the National Gallery of Australia

Foundation for nine years and has now joined the board of

the National Portrait Gallery. We wish her great success in

her new role.

Rupert Myer AM and Annabel Myer recently gifted

Tracey Moffatt’s series First jobs 2008. The series comprises

12 works of art, and we are grateful for this very generous

gift that will expand and complement the Gallery’s current

collection of works by Tracey Moffatt.

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


Sponsors Circle, a new sponsorship initiativeThe Sponsors Circle is a new sponsorship initiative in

which Canberra companies are offered the opportunity to

contribute creatively to the marketing and promotion of

exhibitions. In addition to the benefits of the Corporate

Members Program, the Sponsors Circle provides

opportunities for networking and the lively exchange of

ideas. The exhibition Soft sculpture was a great opportunity

to introduce this new initiative.

Soft sculpture

The apARTments at NewActon (Exhibition Partners)

We extend our gratitude to our Exhibition Partners The

apARTments at NewActon, a joint venture between

Canberra developers Molonglo Group and Macquarie Group.

This unique partnership with the Gallery focuses on

an innovative program of events at NewActon to coincide

with Soft sculpture, including Spooky action at a distance

(24 April – 12 July 2009), a temporary sculpture–video

installation by national and international artists and curators.

We would like to thank Johnathan and Nectar Efkarpidis

and Suzi McKinnon for their enthusiastic vision in working

with us to create a partnership with a difference. Thank you

to our Exhibition Partners for hosting a tremendous after-

party on the night of the exhibition opening. It was a night

of music and art-infused festivities to remember.

Through this support, our Exhibition Partners are

demonstrating their engagement and commitment to the

arts on local, national and international levels.

ZOO (Sponsors Circle)

We welcome Zoo as sponsors of the National Gallery and

extend our gratitude for their support of Soft sculpture.

We would especially like to thank Pawl Cubbin, CEO,

Peter Ring, Managing Director, Judy Waters, Senior Client

Manager/Associate Partner, Clinton Hutchinson, Senior Art

Director/Associate Partner, and the entire team at ZOO for

their enthusiasm in supporting this exhibition.

WIN Television (Sponsors Circle)

In addition to sponsoring Degas: master of French art,

we would like to thank WIN Television for their support of

Soft sculpture. Their commitment to assisting the Gallery

to promote and communicate our exhibitions is greatly

appreciated. We thank Corey Pitt, Station Manager, Natalie

Tanchevski, Advertising Account Executive, and the entire

team at WIN Television.

Canberra Times (Sponsors Circle)

We are also grateful to Canberra Times for their support

of Soft sculpture and for their ongoing commitment to

working collaboratively with the Gallery. Promotions,

competitions and ongoing editorial coverage of our

exhibitions are vital to the exhibition marketing campaign

and assist the Gallery in communicating exhibitions and

programs to the community. We welcome the new editor,

Rodd Quinn, and our thanks also goes to Ken Nichols,

General Manager, Kylie Dennis and Ann Ronning.

Diamant Hotel (Sponsors Circle)

We welcome Diamant Hotel as sponsors of the Gallery

and thank them for their generosity as the official

accommodation sponsor for Soft sculpture. We also express

our appreciation for their assistance in the opening-night

after-party and for providing accommodation to all artists

and special guests throughout the course of the exhibition.

Thank you to Konstanze Werhahn-Mees, Group Marketing/

PR Manager, Eight Hotels, Chris Hastings, General Manager,

Diamant Hotel, and the entire team at the Diamant Hotel.

Threesides (Sponsors Circle)

The local marketing, online and training business

Threesides have become sponsors of the Gallery and the

exhibition Soft sculpture. We are grateful to the Threesides

team for their support and the energy in which they

have approached this partnership. Our special thanks to

company directors Clint and Todd Wright.

Development

Jane Kinsman, curator of Degas, discussing

the work of the French master at the special

Corporate Members and Yalumba Dinner

on 5 March 2009.


Gallagher Wines

We extend our appreciation to Gallagher Wines as the

official wine sponsor of the Soft sculpture opening. We

would like to thank Greg and Libby Gallagher and Bill

Mason from Z4 Wines. Members of the National Gallery

of Australia had the opportunity to excite their senses

with a tour of Soft sculpture followed by a wine tasting by

Gallagher Wines, renowned as one of the region’s finest

wine producers.

National Australia Bank—Sculpture Garden SundayWe recognise and thank the National Australia Bank for its

continued support of the Gallery’s annual family day event

Sculpture Garden Sunday, with a special thank you to Jan

Hopkins, Senior Business Banking Partner, NAB Business,

for her warm words of welcome on the day. Over 1700

children and adults enjoyed workshops, music and the

mandatory Scout’s sausage sizzle. Many also explored the

National Australia Bank Sculpture Gallery with the children’s

trail booklet that was launched at last year’s event.

BHP Billiton—Culture WarriorsCongratulations and thanks go to BHP Billiton as Principal

Sponsor of Culture Warriors, the inaugural Australian

Indigenous Art Triennial. The exhibition travelled nationally

to the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide, Art

Gallery of Western Australia in Perth and to the Gallery

of Modern Art in Brisbane. The partnership with BHP

Billiton has produced powerful outcomes, not the least

of which is the national, and soon to be international,

exposure given to 30 Indigenous artists from around

Australia. The national tour closed in Brisbane on 10 May

2009, and the exhibition begins at the University Art

Museum at the Katzen Art Center in Washington, DC,

on 8 September 2009.

Corporate Members ProgramYalumba Wines, with the Corporate Members Program,

held its second evening of fine art, wine and dining in

conjunction with the exhibition Degas: master of French

art on 5 March 2009. Yalumba winemaker, communicator

and raconteur Jane Ferrari entertained guests with stories

of her extensive travels, life and expert wine knowledge.

This annual event was a great success, and we would

like to thank Yalumba Wines for their commitment in

partnering with the Gallery for major exhibitions over the

past two years.

Thank you to Eckersley’s Art and Craft as a sponsor of

the National Gallery’s annual family day event Sculpture

Garden Sunday on Sunday 8 March.

We would like to thank all our sponsors and corporate

members. If you would like more information about

sponsorship and development at the National Gallery of

Australia, contact Frances Corkhill on + 61 2 6240 6740 or

[email protected], or contact Belinda Cotton on

+ 61 2 6240 6556 or [email protected].

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

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


Artists continually reinvent the world we live in. Their

works have the capacity to surprise us and enable us to

see the world afresh. The exhibition Reinventions is about

the surprising, inventive adaptation of materials and

ideas, including the ways in which artists engage with

subjects of ongoing fascination: portraiture and identity,

nature and abstraction, poetry and music, childhood

and mortality. A dialogue with the past in the process of

transformation is inherent in the art of assemblage: the

process of re-assembling and re-constructing discarded,

found objects and materials in new contexts. In this

exhibition, found machinery parts, fragments of a piano,

sawn wooden crates, a wide-eyed doll’s head, recycled

magazines, portable turntables and a punching bag are

just some examples of used objects adapted by artists in

intriguing assemblages. A similarly inventive approach also

appears in the use of materials such as crystal, Easter egg

foil wrappers, bamboo, sand, fabric and porcelain in a diverse

range of sculptures.

The exhibition Reinventions includes contemporary

treasures from the collection: works from the 1960s and

1970s by Robert Klippel, Rosalie Gascoigne and Colin

Lanceley, with those of a younger generation including

Neil Roberts, Ricky Swallow and Tim Horn. The works of

Gascoigne, Klippel and Lanceley show them to be masters

of assemblage. Their inventive approaches to sculpture

have some striking parallels with artists in the present. The

earliest work is Lanceley’s dynamic, intricate assemblage

Pianist, pianist where are you? 1965, while the most

recent is Ricky Swallow’s meditation on mortality and

love, Tusk 2007. What the artists share in common are

innovative approaches to materials and making, a desire to

take risks and a capacity for ongoing reinvention in their

own work.

exhibition

Reinventions: sculpture + assemblage

16 May – 13 September 2009 | Project Gallery

Colin Lanceley Pianist, pianist where are

you? 1964–65 stained and painted

wood, enamel, polychrome piano

keyboard and sounding board

183.5 x 248.5 x 30 cm National Gallery of Australia,

Canberra Purchased 1976


Robert Klippel (1920–2001) was an artist who

continually reinvented himself in his work over the years.

In the process, he dramatically reinvigorated sculpture

in this country. In Reinventions, his works No. 250 metal

construction 1970 and No. 813 painted wood construction

1989 reveal connections as well as dramatic leaps across his

own art practice. Although Klippel’s early work was made

from carving stone and wood, he started to incorporate

found materials in his works in the 1940s. By the 1960s

and 1970s, Klippel’s passion for experimentation was

matched only by his remarkable accumulation of materials

of the machine age, such as typewriter parts and an

array of found objects. He was interested in correlations

between mechanical and organic forms, what he described

as ‘machine-organic’ inter-relationships. In No. 250 metal

construction, the framed construction of linear and

curved forms is like a drawing in air. While the spikes

suggest an element of danger, it is essentially the formal,

non-representational aspects of the work that make it

so striking and convincing. The suspension and lightness

of this welded assemblage stands in dramatic contrast

to the later monumental presence of No. 813 painted

wood construction. Yet monumentality in Klippel’s art is

never grandiose. It is connected with things of humble

origins transformed to enable us to see them afresh. The

impressive scale is enlivened by the dynamic freewheeling

interactions of pattern-parts for machinery. The colour in

Klippel’s construction connects with another striking work,

Pianist, pianist where are you? by Colin Lanceley (born 1938).

Klippel and Lanceley were friends in the 1960s and

shared many conversations about art and literature.

Lanceley was inspired by the inventiveness of Klippel’s

approach and interest in the relationships between collage

and construction. Lanceley was, however, more overtly

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

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


concerned with poetic metaphors for human experience,

noting that the unexpected relationships between disparate

objects formed a poetic thread of creative possibility. In the

early 1960s, Lanceley, with Mike Brown and Ross Crothall,

formed a group known as the Annandale Imitation Realists.

Together they experimented with assemblage in the form

of giant collages constructed out of an array of discarded

materials from contemporary life. By the mid 1960s,

the group had disbanded, but Lanceley continued to

experiment with assemblage, resulting in impressive works

like Pianist, pianist where are you?, exhibited at Gallery A

soon after it was completed. The title evokes a sense

of play, humour and poetic inference. In its fabrication,

the work is both an imaginative reconstruction and

deconstruction of musical associations. It simultaneously

gathers and exposes the intricate parts of the whole, as

though the very idea of music-making is encapsulated

in the rhythms of the black and white keys, the exposed

strings and sculpted objects moving organically around the

whole. The artist recalls the excitement he felt at the time:

Pieces of a small organ and the innards of a Bluthner

piano dumped in the bush could be, in themselves, the

subject for a work, but at the time it was the excitement

of finding the materials and of re-constructing them after

an imagined model that interested me. The transformation

of materials, the metamorphosis, informed by a poetic

sensibility, is the key to creativity.1

A feeling for poetry is present in the work of one of

Australia’s most persistent and significant assemblage

artists, Rosalie Gascoigne (1917–1999). Her assemblages

of the 1970s, often framed in boxes, reveal her sharp, clear

vision for the placement of forms. Gascoigne’s feeling for

the inter-relationship of text and image became increasingly

present in her work but was already apparent in The

colonel’s lady 1976. Close inspection of the objects, images

and product labels, reveal her wry wit. For New Zealand-

born Gascoigne, who grew up in the interwar years and

came to Australia in 1943, the interplay of symbols is

telling: tins of Kiwi boot polish, a boxing kangaroo, the

repetition of ‘Waratah’ of her adopted country, references

to Britain in the flag and ‘the Queen of Brooms’. The

combined labels and objects, including a doll’s head and

dismembered torso beneath colourful shotgun cartridges,

make The colonel’s lady an intriguing contemporary

diorama; a wry, intimate cross-cultural dialogue with the past.

This work contrasts dramatically with Gascoigne’s later

expansive assemblage Wheat belt 1989, with its more

obvious landscape associations. Comprising diagonal shards

from soft-drink crates across four separate panels, the work

is at once screen-like and evocative of the environment—of

the warmth of the sun, the rustle of dry grasses in the wind

and the weathered pale grey landscape affected by searing

elements. Gascoigne, who lived and worked in Canberra

Rosalie Gascoigne The colonel’s lady 1976

mixed media 39.1 x 59.7 x 8.8 cm

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Purchased 1976


for many years, noted that her country was the eastern

seaboard of Lake George and the Highlands, scoured by

the sun and frost. Rather than tell a literal story, she wanted

to find the truth of her experience in material that had a

previous life within it:

Beware of nice things that you find that say nothing: they

are like new wood from a hardware shop. I look for things

that have been somewhere, done something. Second

hand materials aren’t deliberate; they have had sun and

wind on them. Simple things. From simplicity you get to

profundity.2

Neil Roberts (1954–2002) was fascinated in his art by the

material memory of objects—the idea that they could

in some ways transmit their histories through their very

materiality. He often used glass as a sculptural component

in his works and liked the idea of rehabilitating discarded

objects. He was interested in ideas around masculinity and

activities such as rural labour and sport, including football

and boxing. The brilliance of his work Half ether, half dew

mixed with sweat 2000 resides in the way that he retains

the integrity of the original object of the punching bag

while simultaneously transforming it within a glistening

lead-light casing, opening up multiple associations in the

process. Roberts wanted to capture something of the

inherent history of the punching bag; the imperceptible

substances and energies gathered over years and years.

As he noted:

I wondered about the metaphysical visibility of all the force

that had been applied to this punching bag in its time, and

how such a trace might appear. The bag is an absorbent

object, a kind of filter or pad that stands in for the body it

resembles, and it required some form of extraction or

distillation to make visible the substances imbedded within it.3

Roberts found an answer in a line from a poem by the

American artist Raymond Pettibon: ‘half ether, half dew

mixed with sweat’. Then, as he noted, ‘Like the gradual

planetary transformation in J.G. Ballard’s book The Crystal

World, a crystalline carapace in copper-foil glasswork

overtook the punching bag’.4 To draw that structure,

Roberts looked to a tradition of glass-making in the work

of the famous early twentieth-century American glassmaker

Louis Comfort Tiffany. For Roberts, Tiffany’s signature

imagery of Arcadian wisteria and grapevines seemed to

also be an evocation of crystalline growth. Suspended in

mid-air the punching bag conflates the tough sport of

boxing with the lyrical refinement of Tiffany’s design. The

contrast between the solidity of the bag and the mutability

and fragility of the glass can also be seen as a metaphor for

male strength and vulnerability.

Over the past ten years, Ricky Swallow (born 1974)

has become one of Australia’s most highly regarded

contemporary artists. His series Even the odd orbit

1998–99, shown in the Melbourne International Biennial,

created a stir. Six works from the series were gifted by

Peter Fay to the National Gallery of Australia. One of them,

Rooftop shootout with chimpanzee 1999, comprised a

model of the Melbourne building where the works were

shown in the Biennial. Swallow made a cardboard model

of this ten-storey building as a theatrical stage-set for a

shootout. On the rooftop small-scale figures including a

chimpanzee wielding a gun, recalls big hits of cinema,

such as Star wars, and innumerable B-grade movies. With

a miniaturists eye for detail and a remarkable capacity

for reinvention, Swallow linked this ‘happening’ with a

turntable base mechanism which allows the chimpanzee

to rotate at the press of a button. In our current high-tech

world, the portable record players as bases for these works

are like relics of the past invested with new life.

The idea of the past being part of the present is a

recurrent theme in Swallow’s work. He recalls that, while

he was coming up with ideas for Tusk, he was playing

Fleetwood Mac’s song of the same title in his studio.

There is an interplay of life-like or death-like qualities in

this intriguing sculpture. At first sight, the bones appear

uncannily real as a result of the patination of the bronze.

Part of the process of making, for Swallow, is to continually

challenge himself, technically and philosophically—to be

open to reinvention. As he noted:

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


I told myself in the studio this year that I’d ‘stop making

sense,’ meaning I’d try to make works that were harder

to discuss and hopefully more successful as a result.

Tusk came about in a very improvised fashion through

playing around with these bones in the studio, and when

by chance they formed this heart, it seemed perfect. Its

important how fused the hands are in the sculpture, how

they make one object together, and perhaps in this way

it’s a symbol for the security and proposed endurance of

love or union … The work in person has a tactility which

is more ambiguous than my other bronze finishes (due

to its white patina), the surface complicates the material

seeming more brittle than metal.5

Reinventing the past in the present through diverse

materials recurs in the engaging works Glass slipper (ugly

blister) 2001 and Stheno 2006 by Tim Horn (born 1964).

His audacious glass slipper gives the Cinderella story a

contemporary twist. It is simultaneously a play on aspects

of his own identity and his fascination with eighteenth-

century culture. Living in Paris in the late 1990s, Horn

studied Baroque art and eighteenth-century jewellery and

fashion design. The shape of the glass slipper originates

from an eighteenth-century engraving and the pattern

from eighteenth-century jewellery. Horn also adapted the

eighteenth-century idea of foiling non-precious stones in

his use of Easter egg foil and lead crystal. The sculpture

appears to be glowing with shimmering rosy light, as if lit

from within. The dramatically enlarged scale of the shoe

creates a tension between dark humour and seductive

beauty, constriction and desire. Horn recalls that the impetus

for reworking the Cinderella theme came about when his

mother was reading a feminist deconstruction of fairytales.

It struck him that there were parallels in the behaviour

of his mother, sister and himself in wanting to find ‘the

perfect prince’ of the Cinderella myth to make life complete.

So making this work was a way of examining what I

perceive to be that behaviour and constricting objects to

illustrate that dynamic … [to] rewrite that Cinderella story

from a queer perspective informed by my experience. I

wanted to take the story, tear it up and cut and paste it

back together so that the characters weren’t squeaky clean

and predictable … The image is opulent and seductive but

I really wanted the title to suggest a counter-quality … I’m

interested in the polarities and finding the point at where

the beautiful becomes the grotesque and vice versa … I

was concerned with making an object of visual complexity

… [with] that element of visual excitement.6

A sense of play and revisiting the past is also apparent

in Knowledge 1999 by David Watt (1952–1998). In this

layered, imaginatively configured installation, we discover

images of childhood learning. Constructed with care

and deadpan humour, Watt carved and painted objects

pertaining to all manner of topics: geography, history,

science, anatomy, nutrition, animals, transport and

mythology. Set along a shelf, the experience of the work is

an incremental journey on which we discover overlapping

images, bold disparities of scale and surreal, absurd

juxtapositions of fact and fiction. It is a world that engages

with the artist’s childhood of the 1950s and, specifically,

the magazine Knowledge that was filled with these kinds

of images. As Gordon Bull wrote:

David had been seriously ill as a child in the ’50s and

early ’60s. He was bedridden for extended periods and

his loving parents gave the little boy books and lots of

magazines. One of those magazines was ‘Knowledge: the

new colour magazine which grows into an encyclopaedia’.

Produced for children and marketed in the format of

weekly pamphlets sold at the newsagent or corner shop,

‘Knowledge’ was a commodity which promised growth

and development through accumulation. It was a boy’s

own world of information.7

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

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

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


Watt had migrated with his family from Scotland to

Australia and the magazine Knowledge reflects in part the

closeness he felt to his parents (particularly his father). It is

the memory of another time and place, real and imagined,

brought into our present. The humour in relation to

stereotypic 1950s images and approaches is quirky and

gentle rather than acerbic. In line with the encyclopedic

aspect of Knowledge, the multiplicity of objects suggests

the sheer impossibility of ever knowing it all. No matter

when or where we find ourselves in the world, the

knowledge pool just keeps on growing, unstoppably and

ultimately unknowably.

In contrast with the accumulation of objects and images

in Knowledge, Hossein Valamanesh’s Falling 1990 is about

distillation. The silhouette of the figure flying and falling is a

kind of portrait, as though the essence of self, of body and

spirit, has been transmuted into the substances of earth

and air. Valamanesh (born 1949) came to Australia from

Iran in 1970 and his experience of the desert landscape

that he encountered on an early visit to Central Australia

represented common ground with similar landscapes of

his original homeland. The swooping lines of Falling are

made from bamboo, which appears seamlessly joined with

the torso and head of the figure carved out of wood and

encrusted with red earth. The idea of a minimal silhouette

as a portrait was also apparent in a related work, Falling

breeze 1991, in which Valamanesh adapted the outline

of his son Nassiem, whose name in Farsi means ‘breeze’.

For years Valamanesh has been inspired by the poetry of

the Sufi poet and mystic Rumi and his capacity to convey

an inner life. In relation to Falling, the artist also refers to

another literary source, as he explains:

In his book The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie describes

the mid-air explosion of a passenger airliner on its way

from India to England. He describes vividly bodies and

debris falling towards the ocean beneath. Gibreel Farishta

happens to be on this flight and, as everything around him

falls apart, he gracefully falls, lands on the surface of the

ocean and walks to the beach. Falling was my reading of

this soft landing.

Leaving behind the narrative of the book, it stands for

itself and it is more like falling with grace.8

The head of the falling figure rests on a circle of polished

black granite that has a reflective surface, like water. The

precise choices of materials that Valamanesh makes in his

work is a concern shared by Ah Xian (born 1960) who also

explores relationships between portraiture and nature in

his intriguing, often exquisite, portrait busts. In his work

he again makes connections with his personal, familial,

cultural past reinvented in the present. Ah Xian arrived

in Australia from Beijing in 1989 and experienced both a

sense of liberation and loss in relation to China. His way of

overcoming his feeling of disconnection was to reconnect

with the culture in a meaningful way. He regularly travels


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

In his porcelain busts, the idea of reinvention is as much

to do with ideas as it is to do with materials; with keeping

traditions alive and transforming them in personal ways

that would have been unimaginable in the past.

In China China bust 15 1999 the hand-painted

decoration of a traditional design is like a second skin or

tattoo. As well as being a physical layer, it suggests an

imprint on the psyche—as though a former culture travels

with us and is heightened by the perspectives of a new and

different culture. Respecting nature is another central tenet

of Ah Xian’s thinking that also comes to the fore in the

meditative, calm aura of China China bust 80 2004 in

which lotus blooms and leaves float on the body. The

aspect of reverie is important to Ah Xian, who writes: ‘It is

about a beautiful dream, it is about fancy and fantasy, and

it is about human beings, the natural environment surrounding

us and the civilisation we have evolved’.9 He is concerned

that the technologies we have been advancing are not respectful

of nature. His work reminds us that we are the ancestors of

the future, laying the groundwork for what will follow in

hundreds of years time. As he recently wrote, reinvention

can be both about union and creating something new:

When I think about human history and civilization, it

always appears to be like a string: one extreme is old time

and tradition, current and contemporary is the other.

Interestingly, when we turn and join the two extremes

together, it forms a perfect circle and creates a new

language of art.10

What the varied works in the Reinventions exhibition reveal

is that sculptures and assemblages from the 1960s to the

present continue to have a vital presence in Australian art.

The exhibition is being held as part of a season sculpture

at the Gallery, overlapping for a time with Soft sculpture

and coinciding with a program of talks about sculptures on

display throughout the galleries.

Deborah Hart Senior Curator, Australian Painting and Sculpture post 1920

notes1 Colin Lanceley, in Australian art in the National Gallery of Australia,

ed Anne Gray, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 2002, p 262.2 Rosalie Gascoigne, quoted in James Mollison and Steven Heath,

‘Rosalie Gascoigne in her own words’, Rosalie Gascoigne: material as landscape, exhibition catalogue, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 1997, p 7.

3 Neil Roberts, in Australian art in the National Gallery of Australia, p 426.4 Roberts, p 426.5 Ricky Swallow, interview in Goth: reality of the departed world,

exhibition catalogue, Yokohama Museum of Art, Yokohama, 2007, p 169.

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

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

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

9 Ah Xian, in Australian art in the National Gallery of Australia, p 420.10 Ah Xian, correspondence with Deborah Hart, 3 April 2009.

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

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


McCubbin: Last Impressions 1907–17 showcases the work

that Frederick McCubbin produced during the last eleven

years of his life. It traces the radical changes in McCubbin’s

work—after he viewed the works of JMW Turner and

Claude Monet in London and Paris—and seeks to redefine

this important Australian artist to show the way he

developed a freer and more expressive art in his final years.

The exhibition considers McCubbin’s innovative

approach to image making through the variety of his

handling of paint and his striking use of colour. It looks at

how he was concerned with conveying the varying effects

of light—sparkling, flickering and hazed light. It also points

to his interest in depicting the moods of nature and the

different aspects of the changing seasons.

McCubbin gradually developed his approach over

many years, continually building on his experience,

drawing inspiration from a range of sources. Always and

fundamentally his inspiration came from nature and the

visual world around him. When his former colleagues

Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton began to lose their

way, McCubbin continued to advance. Indeed, in 1909,

McCubbin wrote to Roberts that ‘in our past work we have

been too timid’.1 He was painting with greater freedom,

applying his pigments rapidly, to achieve broken fractured

surfaces with high-keyed colour.

McCubbin once quoted Monet as observing that ‘Light

is the chief sitter everywhere’, and this is true of many of

McCubbin’s later paintings.2 When visiting Europe in 1907,

he was hugely impressed by Turner’s work, praising the

brilliance and luminosity of Turner’s late works:

… they glow with a tender brilliancy that radiates from

these canvasses—how he loved the dazzling brilliancy of

morning or evening—these gems with their opal colour—

you feel how he gloried in these tender visions of light and

air. He worked from darkness into light.3

When he returned to Australia he sought to capture

something of Turner’s radiant light in his paintings.

Indeed, more than any particular subject, it is light that

is the subject of McCubbin’s last impressions: the light

of early morning and early nightfall, and the glow of the

setting sun.

In his last impressions, McCubbin expressed his sense

of delight in and comfort within the bush. Gone is his

grey-green palette, and in its place is one of many colours:

pinks, purples, golds and a huge variety of green. Here,

men work productively at their labours, sawing wood or

hauling timber, at one with the landscape. Here, there are

happy children, with little girls roaming freely in the bush,

picking berries, without fear.

McCubbin claimed that ‘it is precisely the pictures

of things familiar to us, of homely subjects … which

most appeal to us, and more often therefore rise to true

greatness’.4 During his last years, McCubbin painted

landscapes that he knew well: the bush around his own

property at Mount Macedon and the views around his

home at South Yarra. Here, he could paint unhindered,

without concerns for what other artists were doing.

He looked at this landscape as one might the face of a

beloved, exploring it each day afresh, seeing new and

exciting aspects in it, capturing its changing moods and

expressions.

There are also other subjects in these last impressions:

the industrial life of the stone crusher at the Burnley Quarry,

the shipping activity around the piers at Williamstown,

as well as images of the inner city streets of Melbourne.

In these works, McCubbin showed that Australia was no

longer just a place of pioneers—that Melbourne was a

modern, established city—where people lived comfortably

in the landscape, where industry prospered, where goods

came in and out of the country and where trams and cars

transported people to a bustling city life.

Anne Gray Head of Australian Art

A book published in conjunction with the exhibition is available at the NGA Shop from 14 August for $39.95 (RRP $45.95).

notes1 Frederick McCubbin, letter to Tom Roberts, 27 January 1909, in

Letters to Tom Roberts, vol 2, no 18, MS ML A2478, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney.

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

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

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

McCubbin: Last Impressions 1907–17

Largeness of vision

14 August – 1 November 2009 | Exhibition Galleries

for thcoming exhibition

Frederick McCubbin Setting sun c 1911 oil on wood panel

23.6 x 33.4 cm Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide

MJM Carter AO Collection, 2006

Collins Street c 1915 oil on cardboard

25 x 35.3 cm Geelong Gallery, Geelong

HP Douglass Bequest Fund


conservation

The National Gallery of Australia has 16 paintings by

Frederick McCubbin in its collection, seven of which are

from his earlier period. The earliest works in the collection,

painted while he was at the National Gallery School in

Melbourne in 1886, are Sunset glow, Girl with bird at the

King Street bakery and At the falling of the year. Although

he didn’t study abroad like so many of his contemporaries

at the time, McCubbin was driven by a naturalist impulse

derived from painters such as Jules Bastien-Lepage

(1848–1884), Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret (1852–1929) and

George Clausen (1852–1944).

With his only visit to Europe in 1906, McCubbin’s

naturalism was replaced with the painterly concerns of the

Impressionists and his particular appreciation for the late

works of JMW Turner (1775–1851). The muted light and

tone of his early works were replaced in his later paintings

with skeins of pure colour woven across the surface of the

canvas. Works, such as Violet and gold 1911 and Afterglow

1912, are masterpieces of this mature style, painted by an

artist confident in his abilities.

The paintings of his last decade are the subject of

the Gallery’s forthcoming exhibition McCubbin: Last

Impressions 1907–17. In preparation for the exhibition,

the Gallery began an active program of conservation on

the McCubbin paintings held in the national collection.

Although McCubbin’s subjects and themes remained similar

throughout his career, a close examination of his works

reveals the marked changes in the painterly techniques

by which he sought to portray familiar views from around

his home—firstly in suburban Melbourne, then at Mount

Macedon and finally in South Yarra.

In these dreams of colour: a close examination of

McCubbin’s paintings in the national collection

Frederick McCubbin Girl with bird at the

King Street bakery 1886 oil on canvas 40.7 x 46 cm


Purchased 1969

(fig 1) X-ray showing the portrait beneath the painting Girl with bird at

the King Street bakery 1886.



What this conservation program uncovered, beneath

the many layers of paint and discoloured varnish, are

fresh insights into these much loved works, as well as the

changes in the many small but important decisions an artist

makes during the creation of a painting—decisions about

supports, techniques, palette and surface coatings.

Throughout his career, McCubbin typically painted on

commercially prepared canvases supplied by artists’

colourmen in Melbourne, such as EW Cole in Collins

Street and W & G Dean of Equitable Place. McCubbin

probably originally bought his canvases ready stretched, as

several paintings such as Sunset glow 1886 and Girl with

clasped hands c 1900 remain on their original stretchers.

At the falling of the year 1899, from his early period, and

his later work Self-portrait c 1908 are both painted on

standard size, pre-stretched Winsor & Newton canvases,

which would have been imported from England by one of

his Melbourne suppliers.

Some of McCubbin’s early works, such as Winter

landscape c 1897 and Triumphal Arch at Princes Bridge,

Melbourne 1901, are on solid supports rather than canvas.

The former is painted on commercially prepared academy

board and the latter is on a whitewood panel—both of

which were commonly used by artists and were available

from artist suppliers. They were particularly useful for

plein air painting as they were inexpensive and portable.

Triumphal Arch at Princes Bridge, Melbourne is painted in a

typical manner for this type of study, with the paint applied

directly to the board and the natural tone of the wood

providing a mid-tone in the composition of the foreground.

Most earlier works, however, are painted on a medium-

fine plain woven linen canvas, which once the priming is

applied has only a modest weave pattern This would have

suited the painting technique he employed at the time

which depended on washes and scumbles of colour as well

as fine detailed brushwork.

The later paintings, on the other hand, are more

variable. While most of them are still on commercially

prepared canvases, there is a greater range of weights and

weaves. Violet and gold 1911, for example, is painted on

a heavy-weight linen canvas, while Floodwaters 1913 has

a strong twill weave. In both cases, the assertive canvas

weave is exploited as part of the work, giving further

depth to the energetic paint layer. Whether this was a

deliberate choice by the artist or a happy accident is open

to interpretation, as it is more likely that this variation in the

choice of painting support is purely pragmatic and driven

by financial constraints.

The broken fence 1907 for example, is painted on

a cotton canvas that the artist obviously sourced and

prepared himself. The blue stripe visible on the back, and

to some extent through the paint layer, suggests that this

material was originally meant for a domestic purpose such

as, perhaps, window awnings. The same material has also

(fig 2) An X-ray of Afterglow 1912 shows a portrait painting

beneath the landscape.

Frederick McCubbin Afterglow 1912

oil on canvas 91.5 x 117 cm


Purchased 1970


(fig 3) Cross-section of Mount Macedon landscape with children playing 1911, magnified by 400x, showing two different paintings on one canvas: lower layers are the pale brown paint layers of original image; top layers form final image and show the swirling wet in wet paint application.

(fig 4) As fig 3 viewed in ultraviolet light, which shows a fluorescent zinc white ground, bright varnish layer through the middle of the cross-section (over the original image) and swirling pink fluorescent Rose Madder pigment in the top layers.

been found on a work in the National Gallery of Victoria’s

collection, suggesting that the artist had a small supply that

he used for painting.

Throughout his career, McCubbin also appears to have

maintained the practice of reusing canvases. Girl with

bird at the King Street bakery, for example, was originally

used to paint a portrait (possibly an early self-portrait) as

a palette is visible in the upper right of the X-ray (fig 1).

Afterglow, painted some 25 years later, has a painting of a

female figure underneath the surface (fig 2). X-rays of other

paintings have also revealed similar portraits beneath them.

Mount Macedon landscape with children playing 1911 was

probably first used for a portrait or figure painting before it

was cut down and the present image painted. The folds of

the old tacking margins and nail holes can be seen beneath

the paint, along both sides of the image. Several paintings,

including Child in the bush 1913, have also been cut down

from existing canvases and re-stretched onto old stretchers

before work began on the final image.

In all of the works in the national art collection,

McCubbin seems to have been happy with simple white

commercial priming and was content, at least initially, to

paint directly onto it.

In 1886, McCubbin was a drawing master at the

National Gallery School, and his approach to painting

reflects the influence of the school’s director George F

Folingsby. The paint layer in works from this period is built

up of thin washes of colour reinforced by more opaque

applications of paint. Compared to his later works his use

of impasto is minimal.

Although McCubbin worked more freely in his plein air

sketches and paintings, his 1886 Sunset glow is perhaps

representative of his preferred studio working method at

the time—and of Folingsby’s influence. As a first stage,

he blocked in the main composition in dark brown paint,

covering the whole surface. This approach of establishing

the shadows first with bituminous paints and working

from dark to light was old-fashioned by the standards of

the day, referring to academic practice from the first half

of the nineteenth century. Highlights and details have then

been applied in thicker paint while allowing the initial layer

to remain unaltered for much of the shadow areas. As

a result, light in the paintings is muted and modified by

the dark under-layers and, due to the oil paint becoming

more transparent in the intervening 120 years, the painting

has gradually become darker and warmer in overall tone.

A comparable method has been used in both Girl with

clasped hands and An autumn pastoral 1899.

McCubbin continued to use a variation of this method,

even in his later paintings; although, the washes tended to

refer more to the colours in the final composition. It can be

seen in the first layers of the cross-section from his later work

of 1911, Mount Macedon landscape with children playing,

where a thin wash of green has been applied directly over

the ground (fig 3 & 4). His use of thick impasto in the later

works also meant that he could establish solid highlights

independently of his darker initial layers. Even so, due to the

extended time he seems to have worked on some paintings,

there are anomalies; for example, the sky in Afterglow has

thick green paint layers directly beneath much of it.

Analysis of McCubbin’s working methods is complex

and not helped by the fact that many of the later works

have earlier compositions underlying them. The broken

fence, for instance, is dated 1907, but we know that

McCubbin began painting this work much earlier. The dark

brown–black paint visible across the surface in the gaps of

the later pure paint layers suggest that it may be painted

over a Folingsby-type composition.

McCubbin does not appear to have been particularly

fussy when reusing a canvas. The cross-sections from

Mount Macedon landscape with children playing show


that the first composition was probably wholly finished,

as the paint layers are intact and there is an uninterrupted

varnish layer present. In artist’s manuals at the time, it was

normally recommended that reused canvases be scraped or

sanded back to provide tooth or a new priming is applied;

McCubbin seems to commonly do neither. The undamaged

initial layers show that he simply painted straight on top of

them, without any preparation. As a result, it is common

to find areas of anomalous colour in the later paintings,

as paint strokes from earlier compositions break through

the later paint. Similarly, there are textures throughout

the surfaces from brushstrokes in previous states or

compositions. Occasionally, McCubbin incorporated parts

of an earlier painting into a later image; for example, parts

of the dark paint in the centre of Girl with bird at the King

Street bakery were originally part of the underlying portrait.

In general McCubbin’s palette throughout his career

was relatively limited, and traditional. The late works, for

all their range of colour—especially the shades of greens,

blues and purples—are based on only a small number of

individual paints. As well as carbon black and lead white,

McCubbin used Prussian blue and cobalt blue, Rose

madder and vermilion for his reds, lead chrome yellow and,

occasionally, a lemon yellow. These were supplemented by

a selection of yellow and red ochres with darker umbers.

The only modern colour he appears to have regularly used

was the bright green pigment viridian.

The distinct characteristic that increasingly marks the

later works is the sheer physicality of the paint. McCubbin’s

earlier works, including landscapes such as At the falling

of the year, are obviously constructed using traditional

techniques, whereas the later works evolve from a complex

surface. Typically, he paints wet in wet, using a whole range

of brushes and, at times, possibly also his fingers.

McCubbin used a palette knife as often as he used

brushes, layering on the paint in slabs, using it to roughly

mix colour and to cut into and drag surfaces. The contrast

can be demonstrated by his handling of grass and foliage:

in his earlier works, the delicate flicks of a fine brush

(so reminiscent of Bastien-Lepage) are later replaced by

staccato stabs of the side of the palette knife.

In the course of completing a canvas, McCubbin

would often rework and revise areas. This may mean over-

painting; however, he also regularly scraped and abraded

sections to reveal underlying colours, the ground or even

earlier compositions (fig 5). The textural effects created by

this process were then incorporated into the composition.

While some of the rubbing back was done during the

initial painting, Afterglow and Violet and gold show that

the abrasion was also carried out after the paint had dried,

indicating that he revisited the paintings in the studio.

McCubbin also scratched into his wet paint with both the

tip of the palette knife and the end of a brush handle to

create sgraffito effects (fig 6).


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

(opposite) (fig 5) Detail of obscured sun of Floodwaters showing use of abraded paint to create highlights.

(fig 6) Sgraffito used to create trees in Floodwaters.

(fig 7) Brown tone wash of Floodwaters.

As a final stage, McCubbin would often modify the

colour or tone of certain passages by applying very thin,

transparent washes of colour. Although not glazes in the

strict technical sense—that is, they are not composed of

transparent pigment in varnish (he seems to have used

oil instead)—they do function in a similar way. The sky in

The broken fence, for instance, is dulled with a blue–grey

oil glaze, and the bright green in the middle-ground of

Floodwaters has been slightly darkened with a thin warm

brown (fig 7). Shadow areas in foliage also commonly have

a similar treatment to increase their depth or modify their

tone. These, as well as any lighter scumbles, would again

have been added once the main body of the painting had

dried sufficiently so that mixing did not occur.

Whether McCubbin intended his later works to be

varnished or not is debatable. Given his attention to the

tones in his work and the dominant aesthetic at the time,

which was for unvarnished paintings (at least among

the artists who interested McCubbin), it is likely that his

paintings were originally unvarnished. We also know that

many of the varnished or waxed surfaces of his works are

later restoration varnishes.

On the other hand, we also have evidence of varnish

layers within cross-sections, which we know must be

McCubbin’s work. What may account for these seemingly

contradictory findings is that McCubbin may have made a

distinction between his portraits and landscapes, preferring

that the latter remain unvarnished. It is unfortunately

difficult to be sure of this as the situation is made more

confusing by the fact that many of the paintings have had

heavy restoration.

In many cases, previous restorations of the Gallery’s

McCubbin works (before they were acquired for the

national collection) have altered the works substantially.

Areas of deliberate abrasion and scraping back have been

repainted to hide what was thought to be damage. Drying

cracks, an inevitable result of McCubbin’s use of heavy

impasto, have frequently been over-painted, as have old

damages such as tears and holes. The variable gloss—

again, a result of his technique—has also been balanced

with a saturating coat of varnish.

The conservation preparations for the exhibition will

no doubt provide further insights into the complexities of

McCubbin’s painting methods and how they evolved. Even

so one thing that never changed was McCubbin’s passion

for painting and his dreams of colour.

David Wise Senior Paintings Conservator


In May 1929, Doris Ulmann left her home, 1000 Park

Avenue on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, at midnight

(as was her habit) in her chauffeur-driven Lincoln. She

was on her way to South Carolina to stay with her friend

the novelist Julia Mood Peterkin, who had recently been

awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her 1928 novel Scarlet

Sister Mary. Peterkin and her husband owned the cotton

plantation Lang Syne at Fort Motte, which had around

300 Gullah tenant farmers—Gullah was the name given

to African–Americans living in the midland and coastal

lowlands of the southern states.

Ulmann was approaching her late forties. She was

independently wealthy, divorced and frail—having suffered

ill health much of her life. She had built a reputation as a

portrait photographer to the scientific, artistic and literary

elite, was an active member of the Pictorial Photographers

of America, and her work had been exhibited and

reproduced. She photographed in part to meet people she

admired, and, having studied psychology at Columbia,

to capture something essential about them on her glass

plates. Pre-industrial, rural communities had become a

focus—the Amish, Mennonites, Shakers and the Dunkard

Brethren—and she was also making studies of Native

Americans.

For the next three years, Ulmann made frequent trips

to the deep South, along the coasts of South Carolina,

Louisiana and Alabama and to cities such as New Orleans.

She was gathering material for a project that would result

in the December 1933 publication of Roll, Jordan, roll (the

title coming from a well-known traditional spiritual), with

text written by Peterkin and 72 halftone images by Ulmann.

Early in the following year, a deluxe edition containing

90 hand-pulled copperplate gravures and with a limited

printrun of 350 would be released, signed and numbered

by Peterkin and Ulmann.

On the face of it, the project was not so promising: a

rich, privileged outsider examining the lives of those less

fortunate at a time when African–Americans were becoming

increasingly politicised. It was a potentially volatile situation

and, at best, the communication barrier was sure to pose

problems. To make matters worse, at Lang Syne, Ulmann

was accompanied by the boss’s wife, and some the Gullah

tenant farmers were leaving the plantation to head north in

search of a better life—the beginnings of a major migration

of African–Americans from the South to the North. Peterkin’s

mother had died in childbirth, so she was raised by her

Gullah nursemaid. She spoke Gullah dialect, had learnt many

of their customs and considered them friends.

However, the nature of Ulmann’s project, focusing on

the workers on the plantation, forced Peterkin to write

of the interaction between black and white, which was

something she had never done before. Prior to this, her

novels were written from a solely black perspective with

the dialogue in Gullah dialect. Her compromised position

as plantation mistress compelled her to abandon the stark

and violent tone of earlier work and, instead, evoke one

that was sentimental and suffused with nostalgia for a

world that did not exist, a world in which everyone was

content with their lot in life. Her text for Roll, Jordan, roll,

an uneasy blend of fiction and essay, is often startling in

its condescending stereotypical assessment of the Gullah:

‘naturally cheerful’, living under their kind bosses and

holding fast to the old ways and beliefs.

By the time Peterkin had finished her text for Roll,

Jordan, roll in mid 1933, the close friendship between the

two women had faltered, with both experiencing frustration

and professional and petty personal jealousies. Far from

seeing her words as auxiliary to the images, which was

the original intention, Peterkin saw the book as her own.

Inversely, Ulmann did not want her work to appear merely

illustrative, and so the interleaving of the caption-less

plates with the text was done in such a way that they each

have their own life within the book. Their placement and

sequence also differs from one edition to the other, inevitably

frustrating any attempt to link them in too literal a manner.

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

Photographing America’s South: Roll, Jordon roll

collection focus

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

Beaumont Newhall1

Doris Ulmann Baptism 1929–31

leaf 61, in Roll, Jordon, roll, Robert O Ballou,

New York, 1933 photogravure

image 23.7 x 18 cm sheet 28.5 x 20.5 cm


Purchased 1978



different story to Peterkin’s text and have little to do with the

simplistic cheerfulness proposed by Peterkin.

In her late teens in New York, Ulmann had attended

the Ethical Culture School and taken to heart the founder

Felix Adler’s belief in the inherent worth of every human

being. With the people she photographed, Ulmann would

be very charming to put them at ease. Some of the Gullah,

however, remained suspicious of her intentions because

she was rather manipulative. For instance, in the October

1930 issue of The Bookman, one of Ulmann’s sitters, Dale

Warren, described how Ulmann would tell ‘a funny story to

make you laugh and another not so funny to see if you are

easily reduced to tears’. On the other hand, Ulmann wrote

that she found the Gullah ‘so strange that it is almost

impossible to photograph them’.2

In many of the photographs, the sitters look Ulmann

right in the eye, defiant and proud, yet in others they

appear disarmingly relaxed. The relationship between

Ulmann and the Gullah sitters was clearly complicated

by a power imbalance and difficulty in connecting. This

difficulty, however, was countered by Ulmann’s empathy,

and the result is the fascinating images in Roll, Jordon,

roll—images that are complex, powerful and disturbing.

The Gullah photographs are an honest document of what

Ulmann experienced, and the authenticity that she sought

is honoured.

Ulmann could see the frailty in others that Peterkin was

at pains to ignore and she was acutely aware that the older

members of the community had been born into slavery. In

the chain-gang images—a reality hardly alluded to in the

text, but given three powerful images by Ulmann—the

vulnerability of the Gullah is emphasised: they look away as

if trying to protect themselves from the camera’s scrutiny.

Again and again, Ulmann uses restrained and masterly

compositional devices to underscore the reality of Gullah

life—cropping and unusual angles indicate the influence

of modernism despite her dislike of recent innovations in

photography.

The soft-focus of her pictorial training is used for far

more than beautiful effect—although that was always an

obsessional concern. In images of glittery lights and dark

impenetrable shadows, the people seem to pass from the

material to the immaterial, and Ulmann (Jewish by birth,

though agnostic) creates an almost palpable sense of

the spiritual and mysterious. She was clearly moved and

inspired by their religious life, which features prominently

along with their working life in the images selected for Roll,

Jordon, roll.

Years of ill health, serious falls and self-destructive

behaviour (chain-smoking, a diet of black coffee and

overwork), travelling extensively in remote, difficult areas,

and printing all hours in the darkroom took its toll. Doris

Ulmann died in the early hours of 28 August 1934, aged

52. Julia Peterkin lived until the early 1960s, but Roll,

Jordan, roll was her last substantial piece of published

writing (A plantation Christmas, a small illustrated book,

was published the following year, in 1934) and she spent

the final decades of her life quietly on the plantation, all

but forgotten by the world.

Ulmann’s great work at the end of her life just

preceded that of the government-sponsored Farm Security

Administration photographers who directly addressed

attributed to Doris Ulmann

Self-portrait with Julia Peterkin c 1930 platinum print

19.6 x 15.5 cm South Carolina Historical

Society, Charleston

Doris Ulmann Chain gang with

overseer 1929–31 leaf 20, in Roll, Jordon,

roll, Robert O Ballou, limited edn, New York,

1934 photogravure

image 23.5 x 18 cm sheet 28.5 x 20.5 cm


Purchased 1978


the more urgent problems of the Great Depression:

unemployment and drought, which led to poverty and

social injustice. Ulmann, too, was all but forgotten until

recent interest by curators and social historians brought

attention to her work. For some time after her death, many

of Ulmann’s prints and heavy glass plates were stored at

Columbia University. In the 1950s, however, the foundation

that owned her work decided to find a more permanent

home for the collection. The University of Oregon, who

had committed to preserving the collection in its entirety,

took on the responsibility. However, before shipping the

collection to Oregon, the foundation decided to reduce

the weight of the shipment by selecting and destroying

approximately 7000 glass plates.

In the late 1970s, the National Gallery of Australia

acquired a copy of both editions as well as 62 vintage

platinum prints of the Gullah. The prints, some of which

were used in making the plates in the book, had been

sitting in the barn of the publisher, Robert O Ballou, from

the 1930s to the late 1960s. It is very likely that a third of

these images, which do not appear in either edition, are

unique prints, as multiples of Ulmann’s work are rare.

The Gallery has the only institutional holding of

Ulmann’s prints outside the United States of America. The

majority of her prints, as well as her papers, are to be found

in university, library and historical society collections. The

largest museum collections of her work are at the J Paul

Getty Museum in California and George Eastman House in

New York.3

Despite its complexities and difficulties, and despite

the text—a revealing (but regrettable) insight into a

plantation owner’s outlook (albeit a less conventional

plantation owner)—Roll, Jordan, roll and the other images

that Ulmann created of African–Americans are remarkable

documents. They were created when African–Americans

were still subject to strict segregation, when racism went

unquestioned and unpunished, particularly in the South,

and when lynchings were still prevalent. At the time of its

publication, Roll, Jordan, roll was endorsed by the National

Association for the Advancement of Colored People.4

According to Susan Millar Williams, who has written on

Peterkin and Ulmann, the descendants of the Gullah

people depicted in Roll, Jordon roll often seek out Ulmann’s

images. This is not surprising considering her respectful,

sensitive and intense portrayal.

Roll, Jordan, roll may not be the whole story, and it

may not be the only story, but it is one of complexity and

mysteriousness. It is one that opens a door to a period of

American history and, more importantly, a still controversial

subject that echoes throughout many nations of the world,

including Australia.

Anne O’Hehir Assistant Curator, Photography

notes1 Beaumont Newhall, Photography 1839–1937, Museum of Modern Art,

New York, 1937, p 90.2 Doris Ulmann, quoted in Judith Fryer Davidov, Women’s camera work:

self/body/other in American visual culture, Duke University Press, Durham, 1998, p 189.

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

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

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

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


In March, the National Gallery of Australia announced

the arrival of Edgar Degas’s Woman bathing (Femme à sa

toilette) 1880–85, a significant pastel purchased in late

February at the Yves Saint Laurent auction sale in Paris.

It arrived in Canberra just in time to be displayed among

Degas’s other remarkable works in the final week of the

exhibition Degas: master of French art.

The subject of a woman at her toilette was one

of Degas’s favourites. He returned to the theme often

throughout his life, experimenting with almost endless

variations of such imagery using different media. This pastel

is of a woman viewed from behind, her face silhouetted

against the light flooding through the drawn curtains of

a boudoir. She is seated on a bidet. Derived from a term

meaning ‘pony’ or ‘little horse’, a bidet was a narrow bath

that a woman could sit astride while washing herself.

Despite its daring subject matter, the pastel is a particularly

intimate and tender rendering of the subject.

Around the time Degas created Woman bathing,

he had become obsessed with working in pastel and he

was to become known as the great French pastellist of

the nineteenth century. Degas was aided in his success

by a contemporary of his, the pastel-maker Henri Roché,

who enhanced this medium by developing a rich array

of powdered pigments and adding powdered pumice

to his sticks of pastel. Pastels enabled the consummate

draughtsman Degas to emphasise the linear qualities of

compositions and, at the same time, to infuse a subject

with colour.

In the late 1870s and1880s, Degas would often

apply pastel in layers over a monotype—as in the case of

Woman bathing. Adopting this method, Degas was able

to embellish a silhouette of his bather and her surrounds

with brilliant hues of blues, pinks, yellows and browns. The

method also allowed him to add texture and patterned

detail to his composition.

The work originally belonged to Degas’s brother

René De Gas and, since then, was owned by a series of

notable collectors in the French art world before being

purchased by Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé in

May 1987. The remarkable private collection of Saint

Laurent and Bergé was assembled over three decades

and mostly funded by the success of Saint Laurent’s

ready-to-wear fashion.

The National Gallery of Australia had been looking

for an important pastel or monotype to expand its

collection of Degas’s works on paper. We are thrilled to

have acquired such an important work at a price we could

afford. Its purchase would not have been possible without

the extraordinary benefaction of the late Orde Poynton

AO, CMG, and the generosity shown by the patrons of

the National Gallery of Australia Foundation’s Twentieth

Anniversary Gala Dinner in March.

Visitors who saw the work in the exhibition Degas:

master of French art or, subsequently, in Degas’ world:

the rage for change will no doubt recall the beautiful

silhouetted figure with its subtle colouration. However, for

those who missed it, Woman bathing will be shown on a

regular basis in the Gallery’s display of nineteenth-century

international art.

Jane Kinsman Senior Curator, International Art

acquisition International Drawings

Edgar Degas Woman bathing

Edgar Degas Woman bathing

(Femme à sa toilette) 1880–85

monotype over pastel image 27.8 x 38 cm

sheet 32.2 x 42.2 cm National Gallery of Australia,

Canberra The Poynton Bequest

with the assistance of the National Gallery of Australia

Foundation 2009


An exciting recent acquisition of contemporary Asian art is

Clear lotus, a huge clear vinyl inflatable flower by renowned

Korean artist Choi Jeong Hwa. An artist, designer and

active contributor to the development of the lively Korean

contemporary art scene, he is renowned for his inflatable

sculptures and constructions using mass-produced plastic

products and re-presented found or borrowed objects. Born

in 1961, Choi Jeong Hwa began his career as a painter

and, in 1988, was awarded the relatively conservative

National Art Competition Grand Prize for his efforts. By

the early 1990s, however, he had abandoned painting for

installation, video and sculpture, particularly inflatables.

In 1995, he created The death of the robot—about being

irritated, a widely-exhibited orange blow-up robot who

struggles to get up from the ground but, worn down by

the effort, is continually thwarted. According to the artist:

… the work had its start in a personal feeling of

powerlessness. What’s most important is the contradiction

between this apparent human vulnerability or failing

in something that embodies supreme technological

advancement.1

Many of Choi’s more recent works are gigantic floral-

form inflatables, including lotus blossoms in black, white

and transparent plastic. While much of his work can be

interpreted as communicating concerns about waste,

consumer society, globalisation and other contemporary

issues, the artist consciously avoids such discussion. Rather,

he celebrates the peculiar beauty of synthetic materials

and everyday objects with flippant lightness and deliberate

ambiguity of purpose. While Choi is not easily drawn on

the meaning behind his sculptures, about his floral works

he has said:

I feel strange when I see a real tree or flower. Nature, as

such, is so rare in Korea these days, that I’m actually afraid

when I encounter it. I’m afraid of the ‘real’. Maybe all I can

deal with is an idea of nature, immune to destruction, so I

make an artificial one to look at and enjoy.2

Choi Jeong Hwa’s blow-up lotuses have attracted

considerable international attention since their first

appearance in the Korean Pavilion at the 51st Venice

Biennale in 2005. The motorised flowers magnificently

inflate and open, deflating limply before the cycle begins

again. Although not a practising Buddhist, Choi is familiar

with the auspicious Buddhist symbolism of the lotus

emerging from muddy waters to bloom pure and exquisite

despite its filthy origins.

Generously supported by The Gene and Brian

Sherman Contemporary Asian Art Fund, Clear lotus was

commissioned by the National Gallery of Australia in

early 2009. As a long-serving member of the Gallery’s

Foundation, Gene Sherman directed her enormous

enthusiasm and generous financial contributions towards

building a national collection of significant works by Asian

contemporary artists with strong international reputations,

including Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang and Indonesian

artist Dadang Christanto. Gene and Brian Sherman’s 2008

gift of Heri Dono’s Flying angels has been installed above a

busy ramp where the flapping and chirruping angels bring

pleasure to visitors on their way to the cafe and lower-level

galleries.

Continually rising pristine, plump and sparkling, Choi

Jeong Hwa’s Clear lotus is currently one of the most

popular objects in the Soft sculpture exhibition.

Melanie Eastburn and Robyn Maxwell Curator and Senior Curator, Asian Art

notes1 Choi Jeong Hwa, interview with James B Lee, ‘Flim-flam and fabrication:

an interview with Choi Jeong-Hwa’, Art Asia Pacific, vol 3, no 4, 1996, p 66.

2 Choi, p 66.

Choi Jeong Hwa Clear lotus

acquisition Asian Art

Choi Jeong Hwa Clear lotus 2009

urethane vinyl, motor 230 x 400 (diam) cm

(approx) National Gallery of Australia,

Canberra The Gene and Brian

Sherman Contemporary Asian Art Fund 2009

Installed in the exhibition Soft sculpture at the

National Gallery of Australia, 24 April – 12 July


Max Ernst is a major figure in Dada and Surrealism, the

revolutionary artistic and literary movements of the early

twentieth century. He is known as a sculptor, a painter,

a graphic artist and the inventor of frottage. Like his

contemporary Marcel Duchamp, Ernst was fascinated by

chess; images of chess recur in his work and he developed

a stylised iconography of the game.

In King, queen and bishop 1929–30, three major

chesspieces are captured: the bishop, in the middle,

separates the king and queen. The figures were originally

made in clay and show evidence of the squeezing and

shaping of the artist’s hand. Ernst worked with plaster

maquettes in the 1920s and 1930s. He had no money to

cast in bronze at that time and he later made editions of

some of the plasters. In 1974–75, two editions in bronze

were produced by Valsuani Fondeur, Paris. This example is

from the darkly patinated edition; the other edition, made

at the same time, has a light patination.

The figures of King, queen and bishop, although fixed

in their base, hint at action, either just completed or about

to happen. The king is the most static of the three, as

might be expected considering his role on the chessboard

where any movement is limited to a single square.

Comically, the bishop has drawn his cape dramatically

around him, ready to spin into action. The queen appears

poised for stately progress, with coiffure piled high and chin

tilted imperiously. Her arms, with hands demurely clasped

across her belly, create an ovoid form that counterbalances

her rounded buttocks and elongated head.

The balance and counterbalance of King, queen and

bishop echo the composition of the monumental Habakuk

1934 (cast in 1970), acquired by the Gallery in 2006. It too

is an assemblage, constructed from casts of flowerpots.

The small bronze augments the showcase in the Dada

and Surrealist room of the International galleries, and is

displayed among other disconcerting objects, including

works from Africa, the Pacific and North America that were

once owned by the artist. Ernst’s significance as a Surrealist

artist, his subsequent influence on Abstract Expressionism

and other twentieth-century art, and his role as a collector

mean that King, queen and bishop is a welcome addition

to the collection.

Christine Dixon and Krysia Kitch International Painting and Sculpture

Max Ernst King, queen and bishop

acquisition International Painting and Sculpture

Max Ernst King, queen and bishop

(Roi, reine et fou) 1929–30, cast 1974–75 no 26 from edition of 35

bronze 16 x 30 x 9.5 cm


Purchased 2009


Like his uncles and grandfathers, Ricardo Idagi is a

songman, painter and carver. Born in 1957, he is from

Meriam Mer (Murray Island) in the Torres Straits Islands in

Queensland, and much of his work relates to the species

and spirits that live beneath the waves of the Arafura and

Coral seas that surround the islands.

Idagi has a strong vision and commitment to revive

traditional knowledge and techniques—in particular, the

old mask-making practices—to ensure an ongoing strong

artistic and cultural pride in the region.

The artefacts and cultural traditions of the region

inform his art. However, Idagi’s work is not a pastiche of

pre-missionary practices, or a nostalgic recreation of the

past; rather, he seeks to revitalise what was, on many of the

islands, denied to Indigenous inhabitants after European

arrival. Idagi also continually questions the gaps in the

knowledge of his elders and peers, as well as the cultural

practices that have become distorted by Christian ideology.

I am very keen to initiate a creative art force in the

region that uses the existing knowledge of the men and

women in their areas of expertise as well as instructing

the younger generations in the sourcing of materials …

weaving and binding techniques … I have a vision to

revitalise the original methods and integrity behind Torres

Strait Islander culture pre-missionary contact.1

Masks such as GiriGiri Le (Bird of Paradise Man) 2008, which

are made from the shells of green sea turtles, have not been

produced for over a century. Although on the protected

species list, the turtle is still captured, killed and eaten by

Torres Strait Islander people, as they have done for centuries.

As an Islander, Idagi is able to access this rare material,

combining it with traditional knowledge and modern

techniques to produce stunning large masks reminiscent of

pre-missionary times.

In this work, Idagi has combined two types of

ceremonial wear—the hard shell masks and the feathered

headdresses called dhoeri—in a modern interpretation of

once more-prevalent cultural objects. This combination, or

interpretation, of the past is what sets Idagi’s work apart

from the work of other Torres Strait Islander artists today.

Tina Baum Curator, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art

note1 Ricardo Idagi, in conversation with Vivien Anderson Gallery, 2008.

Ricardo Idagi GiriGiri Le (Bird of Paradise Man)

acquisition Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art

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


In the late 1960s, British painter Margaret Benyon, who

had been working with moiré effects in her Op art abstract

paintings, became one of the first artists to see the creative

possibilities of holograms—then being constructed in just

a few advanced scientific labs. The new medium opened

up interesting possibilities for Benyon to explore modern

technology and her ideas about time and space, and to

express personal, spiritual and social perceptions.

What is not well known is the role Benyon’s years in

Australia, from 1977 to 1981, played in the development

of her work. During this period, she had fellowships at the

Australian National University in Canberra and worked as

Coordinator, Graphic Investigation, at the Canberra School

of Art. She was able to create holograms using the facilities

at the Australian National University and Royal Military

College in Canberra and at the CSIRO in Sydney. Also

important at this time was Benyon’s introduction, through

the resources at the Australian National University and the

Aboriginal Studies Institute, to Indigenous Australian art

and culture. Many artists in the 1970s developed social

and political concerns—especially in regard to nuclear

threat and environmental pollution. Benyon’s experiences in

Australia, and her general sense of wider issues, influenced

her move away from abstraction and marked the

appearance of cross-cultural, social and political references

in her hologram works.

In 1979 and 1981 respectively, the National Gallery

of Australia acquired Hot air, Benyon’s laser-transmission

hologram of 1970, and her Australian-made reflection

hologram Binding 1979, a subtle work of lines and twigs.

Three decades on, Benyon’s return to live in Australia in

2005 has facilitated the acquisition of four works from

the artist’s Australian period: Totem, which references

Indigenous Australian’s understanding of land and culture;

Lattice II, which showed Benyon’s continuing interest in

abstract web-grids; and Greenhouse I: creation myths and

Unclear world, which are both steeped in the big picture of

ecological and nuclear threats.

In addition, Pushing up the daisies, a major large-scale

holographic montage from 1996, was selected to represent

Benyon’s later career. In this work, fresh daisies literally

sprout from the head of a sad soldier dressed in modern

camouflage gear and bathed in the eerie artificial light of

1990s night-vision goggles. Popularised by news coverage

of recent wars and skirmishes, the green haze that we see

when looking through these high-tech instruments has in

many ways become symbolic of modern warfare.

The title of the work (like many of Benyon’s titles)

plays on words and associations: ‘pushing up the daisies’,

meaning to be dead and buried, was a euphemism

popularised during the First World War and was also used

by doomed British war poet Wilfred Owen. Benyon’s

wordplay continues at the bottom of the work in a poetic,

staccato cascade of different-sized fonts.

Benyon sombrely calls the work ‘an epitaph’, and it

could be read as one. Replaced by technologies, the old-

fashioned ideology of the soldier’s honour and glory in

warfare has been made redundant. It is ‘pushing up the

daisies’. The state of war has become inhuman, if it ever was.

Gael Newton Senior Curator, Photography

Margaret Benyon Pushing up the daisies

acquisition International Photography

Margaret Benyon Pushing up the daisies

1996 collage of two reflection

holograms on film, printed text, cover glass

60 x 80 cm National Gallery of Australia,


Made using the facility of the Holography Unit, Royal College of Art, London and Artist’s Holography Studio,

Dorset, UK

(above) Totem 1979

reflection hologram on glass plate, pen, ink

and gouache drawings, feather

20.3 x 25.4 cm National Gallery of Australia,


Made using the facility of Royal Military College,

Canberra


Debra Dawes is a leading contemporary Australian painter

whose works explore the parameters of visual perception,

optical illusion and abstraction. Parallel planes 2007 is a

vibrant, sophisticated work from the series Double-dealing

2007 in which Dawes investigates the disruption of the

visual plane and political subterfuge. This follows on from

a series relating to camouflage, Cover up 2006, in which

Dawes also explores ideas of the double-deal and the

subtle ties between abstraction and politics.

In Parallel planes, brilliant orange and clean white

shapes zigzag down the length of the canvas. These

zigzags are painted with subtle tonal shifts that give

the distinct impression of three-dimensional horizontal

ridges. The ridges advance and recede to make the

whole composition appear to shift and pulsate, and the

optical illusion is further intensified by the large scale of

the work.

The title refers to the illusory spatial effects within the

work and reflects on the experience of viewing optical

art. Dawes notes that when viewing this work, we receive

two parallel, yet contradictory streams of information:

the textured surface that is received by and deceives our

eyes; and what we think we know is true about the two-

dimensional surface of a canvas. In a state of intrigue and

confusion, we are drawn into the work, compelled to

carefully inspect the canvas from the front and the side.

But this is not just a simple optical illusion. ‘What

keeps the eye engaged’, writes art critic Sebastian Smee,

‘is Dawes’s encouragement of irregularity within what

looks to be predetermined design’.1 Only on closer

inspection does the work reveal the delicate hand-painted

shapes, the clever nuances of tonal shifts and the true

surface of the canvas.

Parallel planes is an engaging new addition to the

National Gallery of Australia’s collection of contemporary

Australian painting.

Miriam Kelly Associate Curator, Australian Painting and Sculpture

note1 Sebastian Smee, ‘Beauty and brains’, The Australian, 13 October

2007, p 18.

Debra Dawes Parallel planes

acquisition Australia Painting and Sculpture

Debra Dawes Parallel planes 2007

oil on canvas 261 x 180 cm


Purchased 2008


Kiribas people Ririko

acquisition Pacific Art

The works in the National Gallery of Australia’s collection of

Micronesian arts, like the Islands themselves, are few and

far between.

The islands of Tungaru, more commonly known as the

Republic of Kiribati, are a series of low-lying atolls barely

peeking out of the sea. They are home to small communities

with limited resources who excel in the arts of tattoo,

weaving and adornment. One impressive, pre-Christian

form of art was necklaces made from human teeth.

The name given to this type of necklace is ririko, which

translates literally as ‘the closely placed teeth’. The teeth

have been pierced and threaded onto a string of coconut

fibre, but are otherwise unmodified. Their form, texture

and colour, like the finest natural pearls, are pleasing to

the eye.

The necklace is a mixture of canines and incisors taken

from the front of the lower jaw. The teeth of at least 30

individuals, or at most 180, were used in the production of

this necklace, and it is likely, as Micronesian communities

are quite small, that this single necklace includes the

teeth of many generations of ancestors. For this reason,

necklaces like this one are rare finds.

It is a prime expression of identity—quite literally:

‘this is my people’ and ‘I wear my lineage’. Little is known

about why teeth are the main representative element in

this necklace; although, teeth have obvious associations

with the voice, the main communicative part of a person,

and teeth chew food, effectively sustaining life. So,

perhaps teeth are fitting objects to represent the essence

of an ancestor.

The production and use of these necklaces was quickly

abandoned under the influence of British missionaries

in the late nineteenth century, with only a small number

known to exist today.

Crispin Howarth Curator, Pacific Art

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


Vanuatu has a unique history. It was for the greater

part of the twentieth century an Anglo-French ruled

condominium—more affectionately known as the

pandemonium. The colonial influences of two major

powers surprisingly did little to affect the traditional arts of

the islands of Malakula, Pentecost and Ambrym. The large

circular eyes of the recently acquired, imposing sculptural

work Mague ne hiwir are the foremost peculiarity of art

from Ambrym, one of the volcanic islands in the centre of

the archipelago.

Although the different cultural areas of Vanuatu share

many characteristics, they also have their own distinct

styles. Ambrym, as elsewhere in Vanuatu, has a distinctive

complex social hierarchy in which men and women work

towards attaining successively higher levels of prestige.

Each heavily ritualised level, or grade rank, has its own

associated arts. For instance, a Mague figure, such as the

one acquired by the Gallery, is created for the rituals that

accompany ascension to the ninth grade or level. Reaching

such a high level also comes at great financial expense to

the individual—usually in the form of the ubiquitous ni-

vanuatu currency, the pig.

Mague figures today are made for the same traditional

purpose as they have been for generations. Although their

form has subtly changed over time, carvers require an

intimate knowledge of the ghost world of the ancestors;

they must also be properly acquainted with the particular

spirit that represents a grade to effectively render it as

sculpture. Mague figures are carved from resilient tree fern,

a layer of ochre is then applied and designs are carefully

painted on its surface.

The Gallery’s Mague figure, Mague ne hiwir, was

carved for the north Ambrym chief Gilbert Bangtor when

he reached the ninth level. It is one of the largest and most

sculptural Mague figures produced in recent years. The

sculpture takes advantage of the natural tapering form of

the fern from which it was carved, making this enormous

ghost-like figure seem to float as if weightless. From its

weathered and dilapidated surface, Mague ne hiwir may

look very old but it was carved less than 20 years ago.

The surface ochres naturally fall away over time and these

sculptures are rarely repainted—perhaps symbolic of the

transition of life.

After chief Bangtor’s succession to a higher grade,

the Mague ne hiwir’s functional life ended. The work was

later placed onto the art market in 2007 by its indigenous

owners, finding its way into the National Gallery of

Australia’s collection of Pacific arts.

Crispin Howarth Curator, Pacific Art

Bantor Irene Mague ne hiwir

acquisition Pacific Art

Bantor Irene Melbera village,

Ambrym, Vanuatu Mague ne hiwir

prior to 2006 ariel fern, ochre

411 x 65 cm National Gallery of Australia,



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

Travelling exhibitions winter 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aratoi-Wairarapa Museum of Art and History, Masterton, New Zealand, 2 May – 11 July 2009

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

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

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

For further details and bookings telephone (02) 6240 6650 or email [email protected].

Blue case: technologyVictorian College of the Deaf, Melbourne, Vic,

4–26 June 2009Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston, Tas,

29 July – 27 August 2009Clarence City Council, Rosny Park, Tas,

27 August – 29 September 2009

Red case: myths and rituals and Yellow case: form, space and design

St Joseph’s School, Kununurra, WA, 22 May – 5 June 2009Kununurra District High School, Kununurra, WA,

8–19 June 2009Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery, Toowoomba, Qld,

28 June – 12 July 2009Bundaberg Arts Centre, Bundaberg, Qld, 13–31 July 2009Newcastle Region Art Gallery, Newcastle, NSW,

3–28 August 2009Kurri Kurri and District Pre-school, Kurri Kurri , NSW,

1–25 September 2009

1888 Melbourne CupNew England Regional Art Museum, Armidale, NSW,

27 May – 28 June 2009Grafton Regional Gallery, Grafton, NSW,

29 June – 30 July 2009Coffs Harbour Regional Museum, Coffs Harbour, NSW,

30 July – 20 September 2009

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

1 2 3

4 5

6 7 8

9 10

faces in view

1 Hossein Valamanesh with his work Touch love 2006.

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

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

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

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

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

7– Visitors of all ages enjoyed 11 wonderful weather and the many

exciting activities at the special event Sculpture Garden Sunday on 8 March 2009.

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

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

10

11

12

13

TITLE: STE0259_19_297x233_4C DATE: 17/04/09 REVISION No: #01 PROOF No: #01

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STUDIO ARTIST: __________________STUDIO MANAGER: ______________ PROOFREADER: __________________

CREAT.DIRECTOR: _______________ART DIRECTOR: __________________ WRITER _________________________

ACC MANAGER: _________________PROD.MANAGER: ________________ CLIENT: __________________________

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Telephone: 02 6273 3766 Facsimile: 02 6273 2791Toll Free Telephone:

Email: [email protected] Web: http: //www.brassey.net.au

Set in two and a half acres of lawns and gardens on the fringe of the parliamentary triangle and within walking distance of Parliament House, the National Gallery of Australia, Lake Burley Griffi n and

Canberra’s most elite residences, embassies, cosmopolitan restaurants, nightclubs and Manuka & Kingston shopping villages.

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We believe that creativity comes in many forms. Adshel recognises the importance of arts and culture in nurturingcreativity and strongly supports National Gallery of Australia.

Collaborative video ⁄ sCulptural installation april 24th — July 12th 2009 By Anat Ben–David(London ⁄ Jerusalem) and Martin Bell(Melbourne) ..........................................................................

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

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

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

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Collaborative video ⁄ sCulptural installation april 24th — July 12th 2009 By Anat Ben–David(London ⁄ Jerusalem) and Martin Bell(Melbourne) ..........................................................................

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

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

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30 May – 20 September 2009Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane

The Met comes to Brisbane

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

(booking fee applies)Tickets available:

INDEMNIFIED BY

sidney nolan the gallipoli seriesA rare opportunity to experience striking and iconic works by one of Australia’s most acclaimed artists. Featuring 82 drawings and paintings completed over a 20-year period.

7 August – 18 November

Open daily 10am–5pmFree entryTreloar Crescent, Campbell, ACT

One of the world’s great museumswww.awm.gov.au

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30 May – 20 September 2009Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane

The Met comes to Brisbane

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

(booking fee applies)Tickets available:

INDEMNIFIED BY

9 May–19 July Newcastle RegioN aRt galleRy

1 laMaN st Newcastle 02 4974 5100 www.Nag.oRg.au

a campbelltown arts centre and Newcastle Region art gallery Partnership

ngashop

open 7 days 10 am – 5 pm Parkes Place, Canberra ACT 2601 free call 1800 808 337 (02) 6240 6420

[email protected] ngashop.com.au

SHOP FOR THE SEASON

Indigenous arts books and catalogues

calendars and diaries prints and posters

jewellery fine art cards

mem

bers

rece

ive

10%

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ount

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

Mary Jane Hannaford Time, quilt 1924 (detail) National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1982

AIRING OF THE QUILTS a selection from the national collection

1 August – 11 October 2009

nga.gov.au


16 May – 13 September 2009CANBERRA ONLY NGA.GOV.AU

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


CANBERRA ONLY NGA.GOV.AU

24 APRIL – 12 JULY 2009

Christopher Langton Sugar the pill 1995 (detail) Collection of the artist

SCULPTURE

The book Soft sculpture, published in conjunction with the exhibition, is available at the NGA Shop, for $9.95. Please note that the NGA Shop has temporarily been relocated to near the entrance of the Asian galleries.

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

Documents

2009.Q2 | artonview 58 Winter 2009