The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston is the 14th largest gallery in the world, and now Melbourne can see some of its masterpieces.
Clara Southern, Australia 1860-1940, An old bee farm, c.1900. Oil on canvas, 69.1 × 112.4 cm.
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Felton Bequest, 1942
Hyperbole surrounds the Impressionists, who are perennial blockbuster fodder. In truth, they were not a united group of radicals and their subject matter is far darker than commonly acknowledged.
Shirin Neshat’s video installation at NGV and the recent Asia TOPA concert by Abida Parveen highlight how ancient forms can unlock ecstatic spaces for contemporary audiences.
All of the big names are present in this show – from Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso and Frida Kahlo to Roy Lichtenstein and Cindy Sherman – and represented by some of their best-known work.
A 20th-century image of an anonymous ‘Aboriginal Chief’ becomes an investigation of power, colonialism and queer sexuality in the hands of Brook Andrew.
Degas and Manet’s stormy relationship is expressed in a portrait Degas painted of Manet and his wife, which has been slashed, presumably by Manet himself.
Detail of Edgar Degas, Édouard Manet and Mme. Manet (1868-69) Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art, via Wikimedia Commons
Edgar Degas’ relationship with Impressionism was to be a stormy one, but his encounter with Edouard Manet in 1862 was a turning-point in his career. Degas went on to paint a portrait of Manet and his wife - later slashed in mysterious circumstances.
Weiwei has taken Denmark to task for its asylum-seeker policy. Australia, for now, is another issue.
EPA/Filip Singer
Weiwei has taken Denmark to task for its asylum-seeker policy. Given Australia’s decision to return 267 asylum seekers to Nauru, he should surely consider pulling his current Melbourne exhibition.
The NGV’s summer exhibition is curated to create a dialogue between Ai Weiwei and Andy Warhol, and this conversation operates on multiple levels on a variety of themes, and across time and space.
Lurid Beauty is the first major examination of Australian Surrealism and its profound impact on Australian art from the 1930s to the present day. So how does it all hang together?
A new exhibition examines the meaning and enduring influence of the colour blue.
National Gallery of Victoria
Blue crops up in all sorts of idioms and registers. But, as a new National Gallery of Victoria exhibition demonstrates, there’s more to the colour, and its long history, than meets the eye.
A standard trope suggests this is a war between art and commerce – it isn’t.
EPA/ Facundo Arrizabalaga
Many voices have united in claiming the toy giant Lego is censoring the provocative Chinese artist Ai Weiwei. There are so many things wrong with those arguments it’s hard to know where to begin.
Who, exactly, was Catherine II, Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia?
Catherine II by Fyodor Rokotov. The Hermitage/ Wikimedia Commons.
Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The legacy of Catherine the Great is currently on show at the National Gallery of Victoria. But who, exactly was Catherine II, the Empress of Russia?
Works from the Hermitage Museum, the Winter Palace, St Petersburg, are on show in Melbourne.
Photo: Pavel Demidov. Images courtesy of NGV.
The selection of masterpieces from the Hermitage in Russia, currently on show at the National Gallery of Victoria, can be summed up by a single word: spectacular.
John Wolseley’s exhibition Heartlands and Headwaters, which opened last month at the National Gallery of Victoria, may be the most important exhibition about art and the environment to be held in Australia for a generation.
Jeff Wall, Untangling (1994, printed 2006), transparency in light box, AP 189.0 x 223.5 cm.
National Gallery of Victoria
Art as Therapy at Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) promises to “challenge visitors to examine assumptions about themselves, society, and how art is viewed in galleries”. And it would be right…
Corrado Giaquinto, Italian 1703–1766, worked in Spain 1753–62, Allegory of Justice and Peace (Allegoria della Giustizia e della Pace) c.1753–54 oil on canvas, 216.0 x 325.0 cm.
Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid (P00104), Spanish Royal Collection
Nationalism is not always a good thing where understanding art is concerned, but in the case of Italian Masterpieces from Spain’s Royal Court, Museo del Prado on show at the National Gallery of Victoria…