Fifty years after Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped the NSW coast at Little Bay, the Art Gallery of NSW celebrates the long term consequences of John Kaldor’s creative philanthropy.
The ambitiously named exhibition, The National: New Australian Art, lives up to its title as a visual examination of Australia in an age of uncertainty.
The first major loan to Australia from a repository of canonical art works of Chinese culture deserves to be seen by all those interested in Chinese art.
In the early 20th century, two families of collectors brought the best of modern French art to Russia. Many of their paintings - including works by Picasso, Matisse and Cezanne - can now be seen in Sydney.
Dorrit Black, Grace Cossington Smith and Grace Crowley were some of many talented modernist women artists. But only with the advent of second wave feminism in the 1970s was their work properly acknowledged.
The distinctive visual style of Robert Mapplethorpe’s beautiful, oversized images seems now more classical than shocking. But he can still reveal the subconscious of an era we think we have outgrown.
The research libraries attached to Australia’s art galleries are one of the nation’s great cultural assets. But the National Gallery of Australia’s library is losing crucial staff as ‘efficiency dividends’ hit home.
The Art Gallery of NSW’s summer blockbuster sparkles with famous names, including Picasso, Matisse, Turner and Rodin. But for all of its trumpeting of risk and daring, it remains essentially a rather puritanical exercise.
Honorary (Senior Fellow) School of Culture and Communication University of Melbourne. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne