art ew - nga.gov.au · Richard Bell Australian art it’s an Aboriginal thing 2006 ... 20 The...

artonview

Sculpture Gallery • rOBert rauSchenBerG • Ocean tO OutBack

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 13 October 2007 – 10 February 2008

A National Gallery of Australia Travelling Exhibition The National Gallery of Australia is an Australian Government agency nga.gov.au/NIAT07

Richard Bell Australian art it’s an Aboriginal thing 2006 synthetic polymer paint on canvas Acquired 2006 TarraWarra Museum of Art collection courtesy the artist and Bellas Milani Gallery

IS

Su

e

no

.5

1

sp

ri

ng

2

00

7

artonview

IS

SU

E N

o.5

1 S

PR

ING

20

07

NA

TIO

NA

L

GA

LL

ER

Y O

F

AU

ST

RA

LIA

OC E A N to OUTBACK Australian landscape painting 1850 –1950The National Gallery of Australia’s 25th Anniversary Travelling Exhibition

Proudly supported by the National Gallery of Australia Council Exhibition Fund

Russell Drysdale Emus in a landscape 1950 (detail) oil on canvas National Gallery of Australia, Canberra © Estate of Russell Drysdale Robert Rauschenberg Publicon – Station I from the Publicons series enamel on wood, collaged laminated silk and cotton, gold leafed paddle, light bulb, perspex, enamel on polished aluminium

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1979 © Robert Rauschenberg Licensed by VAGA and VISCOPY, Australia, 2007 The National Gallery of Australia is an Australian Government agency

1 September 2007 – 27 January 2008National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

nga.gov.au/RauschenbergThis exhibition is supported by the Embassy of the United States of America

2 Director’s foreword

6 Development office

8 A new gallery for sculpture: wood, stone, metal, glass

14 Pacific arts in the Gallery

20 The ‘big guns’ of Culture Warriors

26 Robert Rauschenberg 1967–1978

34 Black robe, white mist: art of the Japanese Buddhist nun Rengetsu

40 Ocean to Outback: Australian landscape painting 1850–1950

48 Collection focus: Ricketts photography collection

54 New acquisitions

66 Drawn in

68 Faces in view

70 Travelling exhibitions

contents

Publisher National Gallery of Australia nga.gov.au

Editor Jeanie Watson

Designer MA@D Communication

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

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

artonview issn 1323-4552

Published quarterly: Issue no. 51, Spring 2007 © National Gallery of Australia

Print Post Approved pp255003/00078

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

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

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

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

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

front cover: Giorgio de Chirico La Mort d’un esprit [Death of a spirit] 1916 oil on canvas 36.0 x 33.0 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased with the assistance of Harold and Bevelly Mitchell, Rupert and Annabel Myer and the NGA Foundation © Giorgio de Chirico Licensed by VISCOPY, Australia, 2007

artonview

2 national gallery of australia

director’s foreword

Activity around the Gallery this year has been

building up towards the twenty-fifth anniversary on

12, 13 and 14 October. It will culminate in a gala weekend

of celebrations, including the launch of the National

Indigenous Art Triennial and an open day welcoming

people to help recognise a quarter of a century of art and

inspiration. The Gallery’s twenty-fifth anniversary year is a

celebration of our magnificent past and more recent

acquisitions, our excellent exhibitions and programs, the

recent refurbishment and radical refocusing of our

collection displays and, of course, the commencement of

our building redevelopment. Stage one has recently begun.

I am pleased to announce four very significant new

acquisitions in celebration of our twenty-fifth anniversary.

La Mort d’un esprit [Death of a spirit] 1916 is an early

work by Giorgio de Chirico, an important Metaphysical

artist who had a profound effect on Surrealism. This is the

Gallery’s first early European modernist painting acquired

in fifteen years. We have been searching for a work of this

kind for some time and it is especially valuable for us to

find one produced in Europe at a crucial period during the

First World War. It is one of only two de Chirico works held

in the country and the only early one. We acknowledge

the financial assistance of Harold and Bevelly Mitchell

and Rupert and Annabel Myer along with the Gallery’s

Foundation for this major acquisition. It is featured on the

cover of this issue of artonview.

The second important acquisition, mentioned briefly

in the last issue of the magazine, is Max Ernst’s Habakuk

1934/1970. The giant black creature presides over the

National Australia Bank Sculpture Gallery, its four-and-a-

half-metre form appearing to change as you approach it.

The knife-thin head, the eyes on stalks and the flowerpot-

like body seem to rotate in a cylinder. The Gallery holds

Ernst’s private collection of Indigenous art, which was so

influential on Surrealism. Habakuk is a significant example

of his work as a Surrealist artist and by far his largest work.

The National Australia Bank generously helped us purchase

the sculpture for the collection.

The third major acquisition is from India and is the

Gallery’s earliest image of the Buddha. The superb and

imposing early Indian sculpture is a cornerstone for the

Gallery’s ability to introduce visitors to the development of

Buddhist art in India and beyond. The bold red sandstone

seated Buddha from the second century Kushan centre of

Mathura sits marvellously – physically and art historically –

between the aniconic symbolism of our rare Amaravati

marble panel depicting the life of the Buddha and the

recently purchased large Gandharan Head of a bodhisattva

with its strong Hellenic influence. We are enormously

grateful for the generous assistance of Council member

Roslyn Packer in this purchase.

The fourth important acquisition is Clifford Possum

Tjapaltjarri’s Warlugulong 1977, a seminal work by this

pioneer of Papunya Tula painting of Central Australia.

Although the Gallery holds the largest Aboriginal art

collection, we have lacked a significant work by Clifford

Possum. Warlugulong will be on permanent display in our

main Central Desert room of the new Aboriginal and Torres

Strait Islander wing. A more detailed essay about this work

will appear in the next issue of artonview along with the

announcement of other significant twenty-fifth anniversary

acquisitions.

The new Pacific Arts Gallery is now open to the public

and features a number of spectacular works collected in

the late 1960s and early 1970s alongside some recent

acquisitions. Highlights include an imposing carved house

post figure from the Sawos people, near the Sepik River,

New Guinea, purchased in 1969. Conservation has recently

removed a layer of dirt to reveal an orange, yellow and

black painted face design. All too often the names of the

spirits associated with traditional art from the Pacific were

Director Ron Radford with Senator the

Hon. George Brandis SC, Minister for the Arts and Sport,

who opened the successful George W Lambert exhibition

(closes 16 September 2007)

artonview spring 2007 3

neglected. However, this is a very rare instance when

a work can be re-associated with its identity. We have

been fortunate to learn more about this particular piece

through an original photograph held at the Metropolitan

Museum of Art which has the personal name of the figure

written on the reverse: ‘Mogulapan’. Another particularly

noteworthy work in the Pacific Arts Gallery is the figure of

a man wearing a distinctly western hat yet also wearing

Indigenous adornments. This figure, a recent acquisition

from the Anthony Forge collection, is the only known

portrait of an Australian undertaken by a New Guinean

artist during the early twentieth century. Also featured is

a refined and masterful stone pestle that exhibits a rare

clarity of form for a daily utensil from any culture in the

world. It comes from a little known prehistoric culture

in New Guinea and is very likely to be 3500 years old,

produced during the same era as the Gallery’s iconic

Ambum stone which is also on display. Both stoneworks

from New Guinea are the most ancient works in the

Gallery’s large collection.

The inaugural National Indigenous Art Triennial opens

in October with the title Culture Warriors. This innovative

exhibition, very generously sponsored by BHP Billiton, will

be a permanent event in the Australian and international

art calendar. Works selected for the Triennial have been

created within the past three years and provide a highly

considered snapshot of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander

contemporary art practice. The exhibition features the

work of thirty-one artists and encompasses a wide range

of media including painting on canvas and bark, sculpture,

textiles, weaving, new media, photo-media, printmaking,

and installation work.

Spring sees the opening of Robert Rauschenberg, our

latest temporary exhibition in the Orde Poynton Gallery.

Robert Rauschenberg entered the New York art world in

1950 at a time when Abstract Expressionism was at its

peak. Working outside the restrictions imposed by media,

style and convention, he adopted a unique experimental

methodology that paved the way for a number of

subsequent movements, including Pop Art. His invention of

‘combines’ and unique photo-collage and image transfer

practices made him one of the most influential figures of

the postwar period. This exhibition is supported by the

Embassy of the United States of America.

Another new exhibition is Black robe, white mist: art

of the Japanese Buddhist nun Rengetsu. The tragic life of

Rengetsu (1791–1875), whose name translates as Lotus

Moon, inspired extraordinary creativity. One of a very few

successful professional female artists of nineteenth-century

Japan, Rengetsu was primarily a poet and calligrapher

Rupert Myer AM, Chairman of the National Gallery of Australia Council, Steven Münchenberg, National Australia Bank, and Director Ron Radford contemplate the new acquisition, Max Ernst’s Habakuk, purchased with the assistance of the National Australia Bank


but also excelled in pottery and scroll painting. Largely

drawn from international private collections, Black robe,

white mist shows contemplative works of paper and clay

inscribed with Rengetsu’s elegant poetry and understated

calligraphy. Her work reflects the beauty of the imperfect

and unconventional. This is the first time a major museum

exhibition on her work has been staged outside Japan.

The major travelling exhibition for the Gallery’s twenty-

fifth anniversary year, Ocean to Outback: Australian

landscapes 1850–1950, has been curated by me specifically

for the smaller galleries around Australia. Concentrating

on the dynamic century of Australian landscape painting

from the colonial 1850s and gold rush era to the

period immediately following the Second World War,

the exhibition features many of the Gallery’s treasured

Australian landscapes alongside some fine but lesser

known works from the national collection which have

been especially cleaned and appropriately reframed for the

exhibition. Ocean to Outback is truly national, travelling

to and including images of every state and territory –

from urban and suburban landscapes to outback and

coastal views. The exhibition, sponsored by RM Williams,

is accompanied by a substantial and very accessible fully

illustrated catalogue.

Internationally, as part of the Gallery’s anniversary

celebrations, an exhibition of Australian art will be

displayed at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh,

USA, in October. The show, Andy and Oz: parallel visions,

curated by Tom Sokolowski, Director of the Andy Warhol

Museum and Deborah Hart, Senior Curator, Australian

Painting and Sculpture (after 1920), coincides with a

festival of Australian culture, and focuses on the work of

Australian artists whose art has affinities with renowned

American artist Andy Warhol.

The Australian artists cross several generations and

include works from the 1970s through to the present day.

Artists such as Martin Sharp, Richard Larter, Tracey Moffatt,

Juan Davila, Fiona Hall, Christian Thompson and Tim

Horn will be featured. The works in the exhibition will be

drawn predominantly from the Gallery’s collection. Some

parallels between these artists’ works and Andy Warhol’s

art are immediately apparent, while others are totally

unexpected and surprising. This exciting event will provide

a greater awareness of significant Australian art and artists

internationally. We are grateful to Ann Lewis AM, Henry

Gillespie and Penelope Seidler for their generous support

of the exhibition.

Finally, I am pleased to announce the release of Printed

images by Australian artists 1885–1955 by Roger Butler,

the second volume in our series of publications on the

history of printing in Australia. It is as splendid as the first

volume, Printed images in colonial Australia 1801–1901.

The third volume, which deals with contemporary

printmaking, will be released later this year.

The celebrations for our twenty-fifth year won’t stop in

October! Keep an eye out for more twenty-fifth anniversary

events and major acquisitions throughout the year.

Ron Radford


The following donations have been received as part of the National Gallery of Australia’s Twenty-fifth Anniversary Gift Program.

Donations Aranday Foundation Myer Foundation Rotary Belconnen Sheila Bignell Roslynne Bracher John Calvert-Jones AM and Janet Calvert-Jones Patrick Corrigan AM David Craddock The Curran Family Foundation Ferris Family Foundation Jane Flecknoe Henry Gillespie June P Gordon Rolf Harris AM OBE MBE Maree Heffernan His Excellency Major General Michael Jeffery AC CVO MC Lou Klepac Ann Lewis AM Robert and Susie Maple-Brown Harold Mitchell AO and Bevelly Mitchell Charles Nodrum Roslyn Packer AO Jennifer Prescott and John Prescott AC Maxine Rochester Penelope Seidler Morna E Vellacott

The National Gallery of Australia Foundation would like to thank the family, friends and colleagues of Philippa Winn (NGA Educator 1996–2005) who have contributed to the Philippa Winn Memorial Acquisition.

Gifts and Bequests From the collection of Sir Francis Aglen

(1869–1932). Given in memory of his daughter and their mother, Mrs Marion Hutton, by Peronelle Windeyer, Margaret Hutton, Jeremy Hutton and John Hutton

Gift of Allan Behm and Rhyan Bloor Gift of Sue and Ian Bernadt Gift of Christopher and Philip Constable in memory of their mother Esther ConstableGift of Antony de Jong, grandson of the artist on behalf of The Duldig Studio Gift of the artist, Ruth Faerber Gift of Sara Kelly Gift of Mrs Ineke Kolder-Wicks Gift of Corbett Lyon and Yeuji Lyon Collection of Australian Contemporary Art, Melbourne Gift of Colonel NH Marshall, in memory of Prue Marshall Gift of the artist, Tracey Moffatt The Poynton Bequest Gift of Kenneth Tyler and Marabeth Cohen-Tyler in memory of Harry Seidler Gift of Dr Beverley Wood

Masterpieces for the Nation Fund 2007 In memory of Pixie Parsons (nee Roper) David Adams Ross Adamson Robert Albert AO Peter and Gillian Alderson Robert C Allmark Bill Anderson Susan Armitage Stuart Babbage Belinda Barrett Peter Boxall AO and Karen Chester Dr Berenice-Eve Calf Diana Colman in memory of her husband James Austin Colman Joan Daley OAM Winifred Davson MBE Maxwell Dickens Rosemary Dunn Tony Eastaway Peter Eddington and Joy Williams Brian Fitzpatrick Dr R and Mrs A Fleming Bill Galloway in memory of Ann Maria Paget Neilma Gantner Pauline M Griffin Aileen Hall Bill Hamilton Cheryl Hannah Natasha Hardy Karina Harris and Neil Hobbs John Harrison Ann Healey in memory of her husband David Healey Elizabeth Heard Shirley Hemmings Janet D Hine Rev Theodora Hobbs Joanne Glory Hooper Rev Bill Huff-Johnston and Rosemary Huff-Johnston Elspeth Humphries Dr Anthea Hyslop Fr WGA Jack Chris Johnson and Ann Parkinson Pamela V Kenny Dr Peter Kenny King O’Malley’s Sir Richard Kingsland AO CBE DFC Robyn Lance Paul and Beryl Legge Wilkinson Judith MacIntyre Jennifer J Manton Simon McGill Diana McRobbie in memory of her sister-in-law, Andrea Gibson McRobbie Joyce McRobbie in memory of her daughter-in-law, Andrea Gibson McRobbie Eveline Milne Joananne Mulholland and David Rivers

W Newbigin

Susan S Rogers

Roslyn Russell, Museum Services

Heather G Shakespeare

George and Irene Skilton

EJ Smith

Wendy Smith

Barry Smith-Roberts

Ann Somers

Prof. Ken and Maggie Taylor

H Neil Truscott AM

Chris van Reesch Snr

Diana Walder OAM

Joy Warren OAM, Director, Solander Gallery

The Hon. E Gough Whitlam AC QC

Y Wildash

Muriel Wilkinson

Tessa and Simon Wooldridge

We would also like to thank the numerous

anonymous donors who have donated to the

Masterpieces for the Nation Fund 2007.

Grants

Australia Council for the Arts through the

Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Art

Board, Visual Arts Board and Community

Partnerships & Market Development

(International) Board

Australia–Japan Foundation

Australian Government through Visions of

Australia

Japan Foundation (Tokyo)

Arts NT through the Northern Territory

Government’s Department of Natural

Resources, Environment and the Arts

Queensland Government (Australia), through

the Queensland Indigenous Arts Marketing

and Export Agency (QIAMEA) Arts

Partnership Program of Department of

Premier and Cabinet

Sponsorship

NAB

BHP Billiton

ActewAGL

Qantas

Embassy of the United States of America

Hindmarsh

R.M.Williams, The Bush Outfitter

Yalumba

O’Leary Walker Wines

Lambert Vineyards

Casella Wines

Forrest Inn and Apartments

Gordon Darling Foundation

Saville Park Suites

WIN Television

credit lines


development office

Culture Warriors: National Indigenous Art Triennial

The inaugural National Indigenous Art Triennial features a

range of contemporary Australian Indigenous art practice

and pays tribute to a key group of dedicated and important

artists – in particular those whose respective careers span

the four decades since the 1967 Referendum (Aboriginals).

In recognition of the national significance of the exhibition,

the following organisations have provided their support,

along with that of principal sponsor BHP Billiton.

Visions of Australia

Visions of Australia is an Australian Government program

supporting touring exhibitions by providing funding

assistance for the development and touring of Australian

cultural material across Australia. The National Gallery

of Australia is very proud of its longstanding relationship

with Visions of Australia which has seen fifteen travelling

exhibitions visit 110 venues throughout regional, remote

and metropolitan Australia over a period of twelve years.

Culture Warriors: National Indigenous Art Triennial has

been granted funds under Round 4 of 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.

Australia Council for the Arts

The Australia Council for the Arts, through its Aboriginal

and Torres Strait Islander Art Board, Visual Arts Board

and Community Partnerships and Market Development

(International) Board, has generously provided

funding support.

Arts NT

Arts NT, through the Northern Territory Government’s

Department of Natural Resources, Environment and the

Arts, has provided support to artists and writers with

cultural links to the Northern Territory to travel to Canberra

for the opening of the exhibition and to participate in

associated education and public programs.

Queensland Indigenous Art Marketing Export Agency

The exhibition has been generously supported by

the Queensland Government (Australia), through the

Queensland Indigenous Arts Marketing and Export Agency

(QIAMEA) Arts Partnership Program of Department of

Premier and Cabinet. The exhibition and the accompanying

catalogue include ten Indigenous artists and five writers

with cultural links to Queensland.

Ocean to Outback: Australian landscape painting

1850–1950

This bold and generous twenty-fifth anniversary initiative

aims to ensure that people across Australia have access

to the treasures of the national collection. The exhibition

will travel to Tamworth, Hobart, Mount Gambier, Ballarat,

Perth, Cairns, Alice Springs, Newcastle and Canberra.

R.M.Williams, The Bush Outfitter

We welcome R.M.Williams, The Bush Outfitter as a valued

sponsor of the Gallery’s twenty-fifth anniversary travelling

exhibition, Ocean to Outback: Australian landscape

painting 1850–1950. This is a historic partnership between

two iconic Australian organisations that will see fifty-eight

important landscape paintings travel 18,500 km over a

nineteen-month period to every state and territory in

the country. It is a project that goes to the heart of the

Gallery’s mandate of being truly national and the generous

support of R.M.Williams (celebrating their seventy-fifth

anniversary) has ensured that people in regional, remote

and metropolitan Australia will have access to the treasures

of their national collection.

Visions of Australia

In Round 28, Visions of Australia also granted funds to tour

Ocean to Outback.

The National Gallery of Australia Council

Exhibitions Fund

The fund has generously sponsored the national tour of

Ocean to Outback.

Black robe, white mist: art of the Japanese Buddhist

nun Rengetsu

Australia–Japan Foundation and Japan Foundation

(Tokyo)

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade through the

Australia–Japan Foundation and the Japan Foundation

The National Gallery of Australia acknowledges and thanks the government and corporate

supporters involved in our major twenty-fifth anniversary exhibitions, acquisitions and

education and public programs.


(Tokyo) through its Japan Foundation Exhibitions Abroad

Support Program have both generously contributed funds

to the exhibition and publication, Black robe, white mist:

art of the Japanese Buddhist nun Rengetsu. Their support

ensures that the work of this important nineteenth-century

Japanese artist will reach a new and broader Australian

audience.

Andy and Oz: Parallel Visions

This exhibition is a collaborative project between the

National Gallery of Australia and The Andy Warhol

Museum in Pittsburgh, USA, that will be the National

Gallery’s twenty-fifth anniversary international exhibition.

The work of four generations of Australian artists who

have been inspired by the famous artist, Andy Warhol, will

be brought together and exhibited at The Andy Warhol

Museum as part of the Australia Festival in Pittsburgh this

October. We are grateful to Qantas, which has generously

provided sponsorship to this exhibition, with support from

Ann Lewis AM, Penelope Seidler and Henry Gillespie.

Robert Rauschenberg 1967–1978

We welcome the generous support of the Embassy of

the United States of America towards the exhibition,

Robert Rauschenberg 1967–1978, which draws together

works from the Gallery’s rich collection of prints and

multiples and features the artist’s innovative printmaking

processes from the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s.

Philippa Winn Memorial Acquisition

Friends, family and colleagues of Philippa Winn, National

Gallery Educator (1996–2005), have been very generous

in their donation of funds to acquire a work of art for

the national collection. Philippa was greatly admired and

respected as an educator and for her ability to present

and develop creative education and public programs at

the Gallery.

Corporate Members Program

We are grateful to and thank the following for their

continued corporate support: Casella Wines Pty Limited,

The Brassey of Canberra, The Forrest Inn and Apartments

and Saville Park Suites. We formally welcome Lambert

Wines, Yalumba Wines, O’Leary Walker Wines, and JQ Pty

Limited to the Corporate Members program and thank

them for their generous support of the National Gallery’s

Twenty-fifth Anniversary Program and the Decorative Arts

and Design Fund respectively.

Twenty-fifth Anniversary Gift Program and

Masterpieces for the Nation Fund 2007

Our thanks go to all the donors who have generously

donated to both the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Gift Program

and the Masterpieces for the Nation Fund for 2007.

For further information please contact the NGA

Foundation Office on (02) 6240 6454.

(left to right) The Hon. Mark Vaile MP, Deputy Prime Minister, Leader of the Nationals and Minister for Transport and Regional Services; Rupert Myer AM (Chairman of NGA Council) and Ken Cowley AO, Chairman of R.M.Williams, The Bush Outfitter at the media launch of Ocean to Outback: Australian landscape painting 1850–1950, the National Gallery of Australia’s 25th Anniversary Travelling Exhibition

On the evening of 22 May 2007 the National Gallery

of Australia opened its new sculpture gallery, generously

sponsored by the National Australia Bank. A range of works

by American, European, Australian and Indigenous artists

are on show. When the Gallery opened in October 1982,

this impressive space originally showed sculpture from the

modern collection. It again features masterpieces including

Brancusi’s two Birds in space placed in a calm reflecting

pool. The architects have created a beautiful and generous

space, where light falls softly onto the works of art. Every

season and every time of day is marked by changing light,

which alters our perceptions of the sculptures.

Made from traditional materials, often in unconventional

ways, the works on show are created by carving and casting,

assembled from found objects or even manufactured by

industrial processes. Donald Judd’s untitled brass boxes

of 1974, for example, replicate the exact geometry and

uniformity of modern factory products. Their shiny,

regulated march across the floor reflects and refracts their

surroundings, which include the feet of visitors and the

beautiful smoky grey tiles of the renewed slate flooring.

Rocks and mirror square II 1971 unites a clean, crisp

construction of factory-made mirrored glass with rough,

hard rocks picked up in the countryside by the artist.

Robert Smithson’s installation – which like Judd’s is placed

directly onto the floor – hugs the ground, striving to merge

into it and levitate at the same time. In his Suspended

stone wallpiece 1976, Ken Unsworth uses river stones,

made round through erosion over time, each tied up with

thin wire. The rocks form a semicircle above the floor,

which seems to defy the laws of physics. Stone becomes

lighter than air.

The most common manifestation of wood on show in

the gallery is not carved, but roughly hewn or found objects,

painted rather than raw or varnished. Louise Bourgeois

made her sculpture originally between 1941 and 1948,

and covered it with red and black paint. She talked of its

genesis: as children, she and her brother hid under a table

and watched their parents’ legs as they walked to and fro.

The work’s meaning changed in 1979 when Bourgeois re-

painted it salmon pink and renamed it C.O.Y.O.T.E. after the

prostitutes’ rights campaign ‘Call off your old tired ethics’.

A new gallery for sculpture: wood, stone, metal, glass

Constantin Brancusi L’Oiseau dans l’espace [Bird

in space] 1931–36 white marble, limestone ‘collar’,

sandstone base overall 318.1 x 42.5 (diameter) cm and

L’Oiseau dans l’espace [Bird in space] c.1931–36 black

marble, white marble ‘collar’, sandstone base overall

328.4 x 51.4 (diameter) cm Purchased 1973

national australia bank sculpture gallery


Both Robert Klippel and Rosalie Gascoigne

collected and re-used wooden objects. Klippel plays

with architectonic elements in No. 757 Painted wood

construction 1988–89 to create a new reality, based on

manufactured things but now useful only as art. The

weatherbeaten panels of Gascoigne’s Plenty 1986 are

made of recycled box slats. The installation shines on a

dull grey concrete wall, its golden hues and title perhaps

implying fields of wheat or blond grass stretching out

before our eyes.

The earliest work on display is Elie Nadelman’s Horse

c. 1911–15, which seems to gallop into the gallery. The

animal’s sturdy body, carved from white plaster, balances

on its absurdly delicate thoroughbred legs. The modernist

sculptor’s impulse to pure form is taken to its ultimate

abstract end in Brancusi’s black marble and white marble

Birds in space of 1931–36. They embody the idea of flight,

an upward striving which separates the earthbound from

the free. Purchased from the sculptor by the Maharajah of

Indore, the works were originally meant to be installed in a

pavilion designed by Brancusi. Their current placement on

simple geometric sandstone bases in a silent pool is based

on a similar idea of contemplation and reflection.

Combining stone and metal is unusual, because of

possible contradictions between the methods of carving

or casting employed by the sculptor. Anthony Caro’s

Duccio variations no. 7 2000 is a promised gift from Ken

Tyler and Maribeth Cohen through the American Friends

of the Australian National Gallery. When Caro was invited

to respond to a painting in the collection of the National

Gallery, London, he made seven works in different

materials. Each was based on Duccio’s Annunciation 1311,

but responds to the painter’s depiction of architecture

rather than the traditional subject. Here Caro assembles a

new altarpiece with pieces of golden sandstone and found

metal objects, painted gunmetal grey-blue.

Max Ernst’s giant bronze Habakuk is a major new

acquisition, purchased with the help of the National

Australia Bank. It is a curious figure, conjuring up thoughts

of birds, or reptiles, even partly machine or human. Ernst

was a major Surrealist sculptor: this is a large version of

an original work which he made in plaster in 1934, and

reworked later that decade. A small edition in this size was

authorised by the artist in 1970. His alter-ego was a bird-

man called Loplop. Habakuk’s body was created from casts

of flowerpots, stacked on top of and inside one another.

(left to right) Jannis Kounellis Untitled

1990 (detail) three steel panels, clothes and beams

each 200.0 x 181.0 x 25.0 cm Purchased 1992; Louise Bourgeois C.O.Y.O.T.E. 1941–48 painted wood 137.4 x 214.5 x 28.9 cm

Purchased 1981; Robert Klippel No. 757 painted

wood construction 1988–89 painted wood

253.0 x 171.0 x 146.0 cm Purchased 1989; Donald

Judd Untitled 1974 brass each 101.6 x 101.6 x 101.6 cm

Purchased 1975; Anselm Kiefer La Vie

secrète des plantes [The secret life of plants] 2002

lead, oil, chalk, pigment 195.0 x 300.0 (diameter) cm

Purchased 2003; Robert Smithson Rocks and mirror square II 1971 basalt

rocks and mirrors 36.0 x 220.0 x 220.0 cm

Purchased 1977; Anselm Kiefer Abendland [Twilight

of the West] 1989 lead sheet, synthetic polymer

paint, ash, plaster, cement, earth, varnish on canvas and

wood 400.0 x 380.0 x 12.0 cm Purchased 1989



Ernst then added a head, consisting of a giant tilted bill and

eyes. At the foot of the figure is a third eye, and the plinth

also bears a negative impression of another. Together these

stand for inward and outward vision, forming a veiled

reference to the biblical prophet Habakuk, for whom the

sculpture is named.

An untitled triptych by Jannis Kounellis from 1990

combines hard-grade steel panels with I-beams used in

building construction and pieces of men’s clothing. It

serves as a contemporary crucifixion, implying Christ’s

absent body, as well as the Trinity, by a man’s coat, jacket

and trousers. The three parts also refer to conventional

medieval and Renaissance iconography, the painted

altarpiece with two wings around a central panel. The

clothes provoke a more recent memory, that of the great

post-war artist Joseph Beuys, whose use of men’s jackets,

as well as felt and fat, haunts contemporary art.

References to the natural world include a new sculpture

by Glen Farmer Illortaminni, Jongijongini [Egret] 2005–06.

Bronze is an unusual choice of material for a Tiwi artist,

but the bird’s essentialised form, as with Brancusi’s birds

and Nadelman’s horse, is conveyed by combining intense

observation with artistic simplification. Maria Fernanda

Cardoso uses the remains of real starfish in her installation

Woven water: submarine landscape II 2003, where delicate,

porous white skeletons float above the viewer, suspended

on almost-invisible wires. Bronwyn Oliver weaves a similarly

fragile web in Clasp 2006 and Garland 2006, but her

medium is metal. Originally taken from the earth, the wire

is forged and remade into forms analogous to nature’s.

The only artist with two objects in the Sculpture

Gallery is Anselm Kiefer, a German who now lives in

France. Kiefer’s artistic practice centres on encounters

with his country’s history and universal moral choices. His

magisterial Twilight of the West 1990 combines embossed

lead sheeting with oil paint and plaster below, depicting

railway tracks leading into a desolate landscape. References

include the soft, poisonous and alchemical metal lead, the

impression of a manhole cover representing the sun, the

Nazis’ use of trains to transport people to death camps,

while the German title ‘Abendland’ implies the sun setting

on civilisation.

In his massive book The secret life of plants 2002,

Kiefer obscures the possibility of anyone reading this

tome inscribed with oil paint, chalk and pigments.

The sculpture has a secret life of its own. As Shaun Lakin

(left to right) Klippel No. 757 painted wood construction 1988–89; Kounellis Untitled 1990; Max Ernst Habakuk 1934/70, cast 1995–98 bronze 449.9 x 162.9 x 162.9 cm Purchased with the assistance of the National Australia Bank; Ken Unsworth Suspended stone wallpiece 1976 river stones, steel wire 215.0 x 140.0 x 104.5 cm Purchased 1976; Anthony Caro Duccio variations no.7 2000 sandstone and steel 189.5 x 198.0 x 103.0 cm On loan from Kenneth Tyler and Marabeth Cohen-Tyler

(opposite, left to right) Kiefer La Vie secrète des plantes [The secret life of plants] 2002; Smithson Rocks and mirror square II 1971; Kiefer Abendland [Twilight of the West] 1989

(left to right) Brancusi Birds in space 1931–36; Cy Twombly Untitled 1987–2004 bronze, no. 4 from an edition of six 368.3 x 88.9 x 34.3 cm Purchased 2006 with the generous assistance of Roslyn Packer and members of the NGA Foundation: John Kaldor and Naomi Milgrom, Julie Kantor, Andrew Rogers; Kounellis Untitled 1990 (detail); Bourgeois C.O.Y.O.T.E. 1941–48



has remarked, it is named after a 1973 book by Peter

Tompkins and Christopher Bird which investigates the

physical, emotional and spiritual relations between plants,

humans and the universe.

Another contemporary artist who cogitates on

questions of culture and history is the American Cy

Twombly, who has lived and worked in Italy for the last

fifty-five years. As well as paintings and drawings, Twombly

makes sculptures. They are often assembled from industrial

metal, plastic or wooden objects, then painted white and

occasionally cast in bronze in small editions. Untitled 2005,

one of an edition of six, has a unique patina, or surface

treatment, of mottled pale grey-green.

The patina has something of the quality of lichen

covering gravestones in a shady cemetery, which is

appropriate as it serves as a kind of memorial to a friend of

the artist. Inscribed on the base are the words ‘In memory

of Dominique Bozo’, who was head of the Pompidou

Centre until his premature death in 1993. But ‘Victory’

is also written high on the work. It has a sail form, and a

rectangular base, and stands the same height as a classical

Greek sculpture in the Louvre, the Victory of Samothrace.

She was the goddess of victory. The equivocal nature

of death and memory is recalled when we consider that

Admiral Nelson won the Battle of Trafalgar from his

flagship – and was fatally wounded on board – the Victory.

Returning sculpture to the grand, meditative space of

the lower level, now known as the National Australia Bank

Sculpture Gallery, hopefully restores the original intention

of the National Gallery’s founders to showcase sculpture

as a central part of the collection, and to display it as a

powerful and extraordinary medium of modern art. a

Christine Dixon Senior Curator, International Painting and Sculpture


The National Gallery has a long history in bringing the

arts of the non-Western world to its visitors – from Indian

miniature paintings to faïence figures from Ancient Egypt.

However, until recently, the Pacific Arts collection remained

perhaps the least known of the world’s many spheres of

art to our visitors. With the opening of the new Pacific

Arts Gallery in July, some of the finest Pacific artworks in

Australia, dating from around 3500 years ago to the mid-

twentieth century, are now on display. The origins of the

collection stem from 1968 when the first item – a wood

sculpture of a Papua New Guinean woman wearing a rain

cape – was purchased from a Sydney art dealer by acting

chairperson for the Commonwealth Advisory Board,

Sir William Dargie.

In broad geographic terms, the Pacific Arts collection

encompasses around one-third of the world’s surface and

is divided into three main areas: Polynesia, Micronesia and

Melanesia. Within each of these areas exist many unique

cultures, some sustained by less than 100 people and each

with their own artistic forms of expression. Melanesia is

by far the most diverse area of the collection, with works

from New Caledonia, Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands and

the great landmass of Papua New Guinea where more than

800 languages are spoken. Given the diversity of Papua

New Guinea’s Indigenous cultures, its proximity to Australia

and the long and entwined history we share, it is not

surprising that a greater portion of the collection is from

Papua New Guinea.

The next area of the Pacific Arts collection comes

from Polynesia (meaning many islands), a vast triangular

region of the Pacific with the three outermost points being

New Zealand, Hawaii and remote Easter Island. Within

the Polynesian triangle are the islands that fascinated

eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European society

with notions of noble savages and idyllic paradises – Tahiti,

the Cook Islands, the Austral Islands and the Marquesas

Islands. The Gallery holds only a small collection from these

islands yet each work is more than 150 years old. Notable

among them is the very fine Poutokomanawa house

post figure carved by the great carver-priest and warrior

Raharuhi Rukupo in the early 1840s.

The qualities of the collection’s sometimes sublime,

sometimes aggressively confronting works can be

appreciated through their sculptural value alone. However,

Pacific arts in the Gallery

Raharuhi Rukupo Aotearoa [New Zealand], North Island, Manutuke, Rongowhakaata people

Figure from a house post [poutokomanawa]

c. 1825–1840 (detail) wood, natural pigments

79.7 x 26.5 x 20.2 cm National Gallery of Australia,

Canberra Purchased 1981

pacific ar ts gallery


they are all the more impressive after reflecting upon how

each work was created. Connections to the environment

played a great part in sourcing raw materials for sculpture.

For example, the tree trunk used for the impressive

Kanganaman village house post at the entrance to the

Pacific Arts Gallery would have been selected because the

spirit that lived in the tree made itself ‘known’ to the artist.

Once the tree was chosen, the artist simply worked on the

natural shape of the wood to reveal the spirit’s true form.

The tools used by some artists are remarkable in

themselves – sharply ground edged stones (which in

themselves took considerable time to produce) acted as

the cutting blades of adzes for hewing out the mass and

volume of an object. Smaller pieces of worked shell and

bone, even the sharp teeth from small mammals, were

employed to complete the finer details of a figure, mask or

sculpture. To achieve a pleasingly smooth surface required

laborious rubbing with the tough edge of a boar tusk or

the rough skin of rays, sharks and certain plant leaves with

abrasive properties.

For Pacific art, colour can be equally as important

as form, and the application of colour was often a ritual

event in itself. Particular colours are known to be powerful

visual communicators for different island cultures. Colour,

when used within an important event or ceremony for

many communities, symbolically communicates otherwise

unsaid ideas and concepts. The colours used in arts from

the Pacific were sourced from a variety of natural resources

– plants, pounded shells, ochre and soot obtained by

burning fruits such as candlenut all contributed to the

artists’ palette. An exception is the Lower Sepik Spirit mask

which is highlighted with Reckitt’s laundry bluing dye. This

interesting adaptation shows that artists were not afraid

to incorporate exotic materials. (Indeed the use of Western

materials may have been considered a way to imbue a work

with extra magical capabilities.) What seems to be a limited

range of natural resources did not dim the imagination of

the artist – the individuality, uniqueness and latent power

of each artwork can still be felt in works that have endured

many years of exposure to the tropical elements.

Specialisation in certain media was common for many

Pacific artists and their communities. A prestigious object

such as a delicate Marquesan fan, Tahi, was made by

specialists known as tuhuna who focused on refining

the singular aspect of fan making in order to elevate the

production to an artform difficult for others to replicate.

Fans were made only on Tahuata Island and were exported

great distances across the Marquesas group. The finely

braided continuous cordage of the Hawaiian necklace,

Lei niho palaoa, was once the preserve of artists who

worked only with human hair – one of the most important

materials in Hawaii. Hair was highly regarded as being

Lower Sepik people Papua New Guinea, Lower Sepik River area Spirit mask c. 1885–1920 wood, pigment, laundry dye 89.0 x 24.0 x 28.0 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1970

Te Fenua ‘Enata people French Polynesia, Marquesas Islands, Tahuata Island Fan [tahi’i] 1800–1850 wood, pandanus, coconut fibre National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1972


charged with mana, a spiritual power, as it grows

directly from the head, which was considered the seat

of the human spirit. As with the Marquesan fan, this

necklace was a collaborative work and likely to have been

commissioned by a wealthy member of the community. An

artist skilled in working marine ivory would have produced

the refined central hook-shaped pendant. These pendants

have long been considered stylised fishhooks. They are also

said to represent ‘the tongue of god’ in a protruding and

aggressive manner. The pendant is fashioned from a whale

tooth, indicating a connection to Kanaloa, the god of the

sea, who provides a bounty of fish and seafood and whose

waters surround all the Hawaiian Islands. These kinds of

connections between art and life in the Pacific were and

are inseparable.

Many of the works in the Pacific Arts Gallery

were created to give younger generations a better

understanding of what it meant to be a member of

a community. Initiation on the Sepik River was often

part of the process of becoming an adult member of

the community. The initiate would undergo a period of

hardship and stressful rituals that culminated in a short-

lived confrontation with a powerful spirit in the Haus

tambaran (a place where spirits dwell). Pacific artists

conceived works with the greatest possible visual force for

the Haus tambaran in order to create a menacing reverence

which viewers would clearly remember and cautiously

regard all their lives, even if their glimpse was only fleeting.

Artists depicted otherworldly beings, ancestors or spirits

in forms that held a physical presence that conveyed the

ancestors’ will and underlined their mastery over the

environment in which the community lived. For some

cultures, this environment was shaped by the deeds of

distant primordial ancestors and was demonstrated by

connections to natural features – lakes, mountains and

coastlines. Animals such as crocodiles, hornbill birds,

sago beetles, sea eagles, bonito fish and sharks were also

incorporated into ancestral mythologies. These connections

were stressed to the young so they would never forget

their association with the local environment.

Visitors to the Pacific Arts Gallery may be unsettled by

the convulsive nature and compositions of some sculptures

that do not immediately conform to the Western eye.

In particular, the works from Melanesia hold great physical

complexity, an example of which is the spirit figure

Maunwial whose vestigial limbs, bulbous head and intense

colours are a synthesis of the concrete and the abstract.

Maunwial and several other works have been displayed

floating free of the wall, in much the same manner as they

once were displayed in spirit houses suspended from the

rafters by cords of fibre.

Recognition of Pacific arts has been a slow process due

to the blossoming of anthropology in the late nineteenth

and early twentieth century when the arts of Indigenous

peoples were exhibited solely in museums and primarily as

documents to one aspect of human history. Appreciation,

however, did grow through the esteem shown by

individuals in the Expressionist, Dadaist and Surrealist art

collectives, including Pablo Picasso, Max Pechstein, André

Breton and Paul Éluard, whose passion was guided by an

aesthetic approach of pure contemplation and intuitive

interpretation rather than any deeper understanding of

the cultures of the Pacific. This appreciation blossomed

during the mid-twentieth century, as seen in the history of

the exquisite To-reri uno double figure from Lake Sentani

that has been internationally acknowledged as one of

the finest known works from the Pacific. For more than

a decade, when works from the Pacific were making the

slow transition from artefact to art, it stood in the gallery of

Parisian art dealer Pierre Loeb, overlooked and unsold. The

beauty inherent in the sculpture did not change, but the

comprehension and susceptibility of the viewer did.

In the intervening years from the building of our

Pacific Arts collection in the late 1960s to today, this same

transitory process means visitors to the gallery will see the

masks and sculptures as more than curiosities or specimens

of ‘the other’. They are objects of potent visual force

that stand equally next to art from any period, culture or

individual artist across the world. a

Crispin Howarth Assistant Curator, Pacific Arts

Hawaiian people United States of America, Hawaiian Islands Necklace [lei niho palaoa] 1820–1860 marine ivory, human hair, plant fibre National Gallery of Australia, Canberrra Purchased 1970


The ‘big guns’ of Culture Warriors

Through their art and culture, the artists in Culture

Warriors: National Indigenous Art Triennial tell the stories

of their communities in an incredible diversity of ‘voices’ –

humble, venerated, spiritual, customary, poignant, satirical,

political, innovative and overt. Among the thirty-one artists

featured in the Triennial, a core group of dedicated and

significant artists deserve singular focus. Jean Baptiste

Apuatimi, Philip Gudthaykudthay, John Mawurndjul, Lofty

Bardayal Nadjamerrek and Arthur Koo’ekka Pambegan

Jr are fêted through major installations of their work in

the exhibition, and through essay contributions in the

accompanying exhibition publication. Colloquially referred

to as ‘the big guns’, their respective careers span the four

decades since the 1967 Referendum (Aboriginals). Culture

Warriors ensures that their work is seen and celebrated

during their lifetime.

Jean Baptiste Apuatimi, the only female artist in

‘the big guns’, is a Tiwi elder whose traditional name is

Pulukatu (female buffalo) and dance Jarrangini (buffalo).

Apuatimi began working as an artist alongside her

husband, acclaimed Tiwi elder and artist, Declan Apuatimi

(1930–1985). Earlier this year, Jean talked with Angela Hill,

Art Centre Co-ordinator at Tiwi Designs, about her art

and culture:

My name is Jean Baptiste Apuatimi. I am a painter.

My husband Declan Karrilikiya Apuatimi taught me

how to paint. I love my painting, I love doing it ...

Now I am doing that. Painting makes me alive.1

Jean Baptiste Apuatimi Tiwi people Yirrikapayi 2007

natural earth pigments on canvas 160.0 x 200.0 cm

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Philip Gudthaykudthay Liyagalawumirr people Wagilag Sisters 2007

natural earth pigments and Liquitex Matte Binder

on Belgian linen 172.0 x 120.0 cm


exhibitions galleries

13 October 2007 – 10 February 2008


Apuatimi learnt by assisting her husband with his art-making

and had her first solo exhibition in 1991. She has created

a striking series of large canvases especially for Culture

Warriors, which include figurative representations of tutini

and pukumani objects, and body painting. A tiny figure, she

nonetheless has a powerful presence, accompanied by a

wicked sense of humour, declaring herself ‘a famous artist

now’, through her inclusion in Culture Warriors.

Philip Gudthaykudthay, one of the last conversant

Liyagalawumirri speakers, was born c. 1925 and is a

senior custodian of the Wagilag creation narrative.

Gudthaykudthay’s totem is Burruwara, the native cat,

which has seen him endowed with the nickname of

‘Pussycat’. In 1983 Gudthaykudthay was the first Central

Arnhem Land artist to have a solo show at a contemporary

gallery, Garry Anderson Gallery in Sydney, making him

possibly the first Aboriginal artist in Australia to hold a

solo exhibition in a contemporary artspace.

Although consistent in his artistic output, since being

awarded an artist fellowship from the Aboriginal and

Torres Strait Islander Art Board in 2006, his creative well-

spring has been replenished, and he has produced a

magnificent series of badurru (hollow logs) for Culture

Warriors in his characteristically elegant and spare miny’tji

(clan body design) and rarrk (cross-hatching), quite

distinct from the larrakitj and lorrkon from Yirrkala and

Maningrida, respectively.

I’m botj [boss] here. Ramingining … Me, number

one painter … Right up from painting, Milingimbi,

Ngangalala, Ramingining, Maningrida, now come

here, Ramingining. Stop here. Number one painter

here. Bark, finish ‘im up here; canvas, finish ‘im up

here. Hollow log. All painting here. Me, number one.

John Mawurndjul is a member of the Kurulk clan of

Kuninjku-speaking people of Western Arnhem Land. He is

without doubt the most renowned Kuninjku artist working

today, with an international reputation and lauded as a

‘maestro’ by former French president Jacques Chirac at

the opening of the Australian Indigenous Art Commission

for the newest Parisian museum, Musée du quai Branly,

in June 2006.

My work and my rarrk (cross-hatching) have

changed a lot since I started painting a long time

ago [late 1970s]. That was with my brother [Jimmy

Njiminjuma] and together, we have changed the

rarrk and started to paint in a new style. We are

new people … Now, I concentrate on painting

important places, my land, my djang [sacred places].

I paint the power of that land … I keep thinking, I

keep finding new ways, new styles for my paintings.

I just can’t stop thinking about my paintings.

Mawurndjul’s representations of Mardayin and sites

associated with his traditional country of Milmilngkan –

on bark and hollow logs – have become increasingly

refined in his expert use of rarrk. Inspired by great classical

Kuninjku artists such as Peter Marralwanga (Mawurndjul’s

wife, Kay, is Marralwanga’s daughter and an artist in her

own right) along with Yirawala and his elder brother Jimmy

Njiminjuma, Mawurndjul’s artistic and cultural mastery

was acknowledged when he was awarded the Clemenger

Contemporary Art Award in 2003, and honoured in the

solo exhibition Rärrk: John Mawurndjul journey through

time in Northern Australia at the Museum Tinguely, Basel,

in 2005.

John Mawurndjul Kuninjku (Eastern Kunwinjku) people Billabong at Milmilngkan 2006 natural earth pigment on bark 200.0 x 47.0 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Arthur Koo’ekka Pambegan Jnr Wik Mungkan/Winchanam peoples Face painting 2006 natural earth pigments and hibiscus charcoal with synthetic polymer binder on canvas 56.0 x 168.0 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra


Lofty Bardayal Nadjamerrek is rightly acknowledged

as one of the most learned elders of the Arnhem Land

escarpment known as ‘Stone Country’, and is the last of

the painters of the magnificent rock art galleries of the

region; his final work, a simple, dynamic kangaroo and

hunter in white ochre, was created in 2005. From the

Kundedjnjenghm people, Mok clan, Nadjamerrek was born

c. 1926 at Kukkulumurr, Western Arnhem Land, and, as his

name suggests, his elevated, graceful physique was often

seen traversing the length and breadth of Arnhem Land in

his early adult years.

Now residing at his outstation at Kabulwarnamyo,

Bardayal paints sparingly, passing on his traditions to his

grandsons, who sit quietly watching him as he paints.

Although his hand is now somewhat unsteady, his great

skill as an ‘old-style’ rock art painter is evident in the

stunning barks and works on paper which have been

secured for Culture Warriors. Bardayal may scrape back

some of the ochre pigments on the bark canvases or

paper sheets when dissatisfied with a particular line, but

the stature of his figures – creation beings and totemic

animals – remains unchallenged. Whereas Mawurndjul

continually works on refining his sublime rarrk, filling the

entire surface of his canvas, Bardayal’s painting reflects

a fidelity to his cultural traditions, with the figurative

elements reigning supreme.

Arthur Koo’ekka Pambegan Jnr is one of the most

respected Winchanam ceremonial elders in Aurukun,

a community based on the western side of Cape York

Peninsula in far north Queensland. Pambegan Jnr comes

from a family of great standing in the community, learning

his cultural traditions through his father, Arthur Koo’ekka

Pambegan Snr (also an artist and cultural activist of great

renown) who was among the first of the Wik-speaking

people to live at Aurukun, a mission established by the

Moravians at Archer River in 1904.

I’d just say … I WON’T STOP DOING IT. This belong

to all of us. We share it together … we share our

culture and you sharing your culture. The culture,

what you see in the carvings, in the body painting,

what you see in the canvas, they more important,

because this is the way we are, not going to lose it.

Pambegan Jnr is known for his wonderful sculptural

installations of ancestral stories, Bonefish Story Place and

Flying Fox Story Place. The distinctive art of Aurukun –

trademark body-paint design worn by performers in a set

of horizontal stripes, alternating red, white and black2 –

has also enjoyed a gradual move into the art market in the

past twenty-five years, with younger artists encouraged

by elders such as Pambegan Jnr. He is equally renowned

for his skill and acumen as a ceremonial dancer and leader.

Culture Warriors presents the first works on canvas by

Pambegan Jnr alongside his installations.

It has been a great honour to work with such

inspirational artists and cultural activists, whose work and

lives inspired the title of the inaugural National Indigenous

Art Triennial. a

Brenda L Croft Senior Curator, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Curator, Culture Warriors: National Indigenous Art Triennial

notes1 From an essay with Angela Hill, ‘Jean Baptiste recorded this

introduction in Tiwi at Nguiu, Bathurst Island, on 3 February 2007 which was transcribed and translated by Margaret Renee Kerinauia’.

2 Peter Sutton, essay for the exhibition catalogue accompanying Culture Warriors.

Lofty Bardayal Nadjamerrek Kundedjnjenghm people Ngalyod I 2005 natural earth pigments on bark 45.0 x 134.0 cm on loan from Joseph Fekete and Annie Bartlett


Robert Rauschenberg 1967–1978

1 September 2007 – 27 January 2008

orde poynton gallery

Robert Rauschenberg has had an extensive impact

on late twentieth-century visual culture. His work has

been of central influence in many of the significant

developments of post-war American art and has provided

countless blueprints for artistic innovation by younger

generations. Rauschenberg’s radical approach to his artistic

practice was always sensational, with the artist producing

works so experimental that they eluded definition and

categorisation. The National Gallery of Australia holds

an important collection of Rauschenberg’s works. These

works exemplify the artist’s striking transition in subject

matter and material during the late 1960s and throughout

the 1970s – a shift from the imagery of American

popular culture to a focus on the handmade and unique

combinations of natural and found materials. Many of the

works exhibited in Robert Rauschenberg 1967–1978 reveal

the artist’s overarching aim to ‘drag ordinary materials

into the art world for a direct confrontation’.2 It has been

Rauschenberg’s perpetual mix of art with life that has

ensured that his work appears as innovative today as it

was forty years ago.

The legendary Bauhaus figure, Josef Albers, was

the head of fine art at Black Mountain College, North

Carolina, when Rauschenberg enrolled in 1948. Under

the supervision of the strict disciplinarian, Rauschenberg

learnt about the essential qualities, or unique spirit, within

all kinds of materials. Rauschenberg said of their student-

teacher relationship, that Albers was ‘a beautiful teacher

and an impossible person. He didn’t teach you how to

“do art”. The focus was on the development of your own

personal sense of looking. Years later … I’m still learning

from what he taught me. What he taught me had to do

with the whole visual world’.3

Beauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look.

John Cage, avant-garde composer, 19611

Artist Robert Rauschenberg in 1953 Photo by Allan Grant,

Life Magazine © Time Warner Inc/Robert

Rauschenberg/VAGA, New York/DACS, London

Booster 1967

from the Booster and seven studies series 1967

colour lithograph, screenprint 183.0 x 89.0 cm

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1973


It was also at Black Mountain College that Rauschenberg

came into contact with several other key art world figures

who had a vital and long-lasting impact upon his thinking

and artistic pursuits. The artists Ben Shahn, Robert

Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, Jack Tworkov, Franz Kline

and Aaron Sisskind were all teaching at Black Mountain.

However, the most significant influence on the young

artist was the celebrated avant-garde composer John

Cage. Rauschenberg and Cage developed a relationship of

reciprocal inspiration – a connection that provided both the

artist and the composer with the daring that was required in

the creation of their most innovative works.

In contrast to the environment of Black Mountain

College, the New York avant-garde art scene in 1949

was dominated by Abstract Expressionism. The artistic

giants Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock had

established themselves as the most innovative of the

Abstract Expressionists. Discussions focused on the inner

emotional state of the individual artist as expressed in

highly charged painted gestures. The more free-thinking

Rauschenberg, however, worked outside these confines,

adopting a methodology that sought to reunite art with

everyday life, an ideology that was in complete opposition

to the central tenets of Abstract Expressionism. Early in his

career, Rauschenberg created controversy within the New

York art scene with a series of ‘artistic pranks’, including

his infamous erasure of a Willem de Kooning drawing. This

rebellious act of destroying an established artist’s work

gained him instant notoriety and secured Rauschenberg

the position of New York’s enfant terrible.

Despite his ‘prankster’ reputation, Rauschenberg

was highly self-disciplined and determined to challenge

himself. In 1951, Rauschenberg completed a series of white

paintings, which were in contrast, followed by a series of

black paintings. By limiting himself to a monochromatic

palette, Rauschenberg performed an artistic exorcism,

rendering the restrictions imposed by media, style and

convention obsolete so that there were no psychological

boundaries to what he could do from that point onwards.

Only after such self-imposed regulation was Rauschenberg

prepared for what he was to attempt next. In a radical

transgression of artistic conventions, Rauschenberg

began to fuse vertical, wall-mounted painterly works with

horizontal, floor-based sculptural elements, usually in the

form of found objects. His fusion of the two-dimensional

picture plane and the three-dimensional object is now of

legendary status. It was the invention of a new ‘species’ of

art, which Rauschenberg termed ‘Combines’.

Rauschenberg developed his own unique style by

combining gestural mark-making with its antithesis –

mechanically reproduced imagery. It was this remarkable

clash of visual elements in Rauschenberg’s art that provided

a major aesthetic fracture – a departure from the heroic

painterly gestures of Abstract Expressionism and a move

towards the adoption of popular culture as subject matter.

This radical schism, however, would not have occurred had

it not been for Jasper Johns, with whom Rauschenberg

had a long and intense partnership, beginning in 1954.

Rauschenberg and Johns lived above one another in the

Storyline I from the Reels (B+C)

series 1968 colour lithograph

54.6 x 43.3 cm National Gallery of Australia,


Storyline III from the Reels (B+C)

series 1968 colour lithograph




same building, visiting each other every day and setting

artistic challenges for each other. Rauschenberg has said

of his partnership with Johns that, ‘He and I were each

other’s first critics … Jasper and I literally traded ideas.

He would say, “I’ve got a terrific idea for you” and then I

would have to find one for him’.4 The Rauschenberg–Johns

relationship was one of the great creative relationships of

the twentieth century. It propelled them both in radically

new directions and contributed to the development of the

Pop Art movement.

Rauschenberg’s modus operandi has always been

collage – the combination of disparate elements within a

single composition. He has been a cultural archaeologist –

a master of collecting, editing and assembling the imagery

of society, the environment, life and time. He insists that

there is no personal narrative embedded within his work,

but rather that his imagery is arranged through a series of

rapidly made associations based upon intuition.

Rauschenberg’s series of dense collage works,

Horsefeathers thirteen, is a striking example of the artist’s

innate talent in constructing compositions of detailed

sophistication. Mass media action images, such as running

races, horse-riding and rowing, are mixed with more

generalised subjects that blend the natural environment

with the manufactured environment. Each image is

poised on the precarious dynamic moment and, in this

way, Rauschenberg succeeds in investing his works with a

simultaneous sense of movement and suspense. There is no

hierarchy of images – the path of visual exploration for each

composition is of our own choosing, despite the occasional

(and humorous) directional arrow. The Horsefeathers

thirteen series is a visual experiment in the ‘random order’

of experience.5 By presenting us with a series of signs

that encourage multiple complex readings, the artist has

attempted a collaboration with the specific memories,

associations and thought processes of the individual viewer.

Albino cactus (scale) 1977 from the scale series 1977–81 ink transfer on silk, synthetic polymer paint on composition board, mirrorised synthetic polymer film, electric light, wood, rubber tyre 88.7 x 442.1 x 122.0 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1978


While the images and objects selected for inclusion

within the artist’s compositions may not be personally

symbolic, they do reveal much about the American social

events and political issues of the cultural period in which

they were created. The garishly coloured Reels (B + C)

series appropriate the film stills from the 1967 Bonnie and

Clyde movie, starring Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty,

and expose Rauschenberg’s fascination with celebrity and

the entertainment industry. In a similar fashion, the photo-

collage work Signs operates as a succinct visual summary

of the cultural and political events of the 1960s, depicting

the tragic musician Janis Joplin, the assassination of

John F Kennedy, America’s race riots and the Vietnam War.

Rauschenberg has always been an artist-activist, skilled

in employing art to raise individual awareness of social,

environmental and political issues.

Rauschenberg’s work from the 1950s and 1960s can

also be seen as a presentation of the street culture of the

urban environment. During this period, Rauschenberg lived

in New York and regularly walked the streets in order to

collect the ‘surprises’ that the city had left for him. Many

of these found objects were incorporated into his artwork,

the most famous of which is a stuffed goat (Monogram

1953–59). The Gallery’s Albino cactus (scale) with its

combination of two-dimensional photographic imagery

and three-dimensional found objects can be considered a

late ‘Combine’ work.

A ‘found’ tyre in Albino cactus (scale) is incorporated

into Rauschenberg’s artistic expression, but it cannot be

completely detached from its life spirit. The Duchampian

displacement of the found object from life, and its

subsequent transference to art, creates something akin to a

split personality; that is, all found objects bring with them a

history and/or pre-function which the artist allows to seep

into the composition. Thus, in a collaborative encounter

with his material, Rauschenberg becomes a choreographer

of the historical meaning and value of the found object.

The images collaged along the material panel

backdrop of Albino cactus (scale) have been printed via a

solvent-transfer process – a technique that Rauschenberg

began to experiment with in 1959. However, the look of

Albino cactus (scale) also recalls Rauschenberg’s many

screenprinted paintings, first explored by the artist in 1962.

(It was at the same time that Andy Warhol also adopted

the screenprinting technique and the two artists traded

ideas about the method.) The solvent transfer process and

screenprinting technique liberated Rauschenberg’s work.

With both forms of printmaking, the artist discovered ways

Publicon – Station IV from the Publicons series

1978 enamel on wood construction, collaged

laminated silk and cotton, bicycle wheel,

fluorescent light fixture, perspex, enamel on polished aluminium

open 154.8 x 146.2 x 29.0 cm National Gallery of Australia,



in which he could quickly and repetitively transfer his found

imagery to the canvas of his paintings and Combines.

Rauschenberg believed that the printmaking technique

of lithography was old-fashioned and is notorious for

having stated that ‘the second half of the twentieth

century is no time to start writing on rocks’. Ironically,

it is Rauschenberg who became a significant figure in

the resurrection of American printmaking that occurred

during the 1960s. He has subsequently worked with many

leading print workshops to create more than 800 published

editions. Printmaking is a technique that was perfectly

suited to his methodology of layering found images and

one which gave him total control over the size and scale of

each component image. It was through printmaking that

Rauschenberg was able to once again blur the distinctions

between media and perfectly unite his obsessive use of the

photographic image with painterly techniques.

One of the most successful of Rauschenberg’s

collaborations has been with the Gemini GEL print

workshop – a printmaking partnership that has permanently

changed the terrain of American printmaking. The artist’s

highly experimental approach to print processes comes to

the fore in the colour lithograph and screenprint Booster,

created in 1967. For Booster, Rauschenberg decided to

use a life-sized X-ray portrait of himself combined with

an astrological chart, magazine images of athletes, the

image of a chair and the images of two power drills.

Printer Kenneth Tyler was a masterful facilitator for

Rauschenberg’s ambitious project and the collaboration

radically altered the aesthetic possibilities of planographic

printmaking. Rauschenberg and Tyler pushed beyond what

had previously been done by combining lithography and

screenprinting in a new type of ‘hybrid’ print. The rules

governing the size of lithographic printmaking were also

ignored, and at the time of its creation Booster stood

as the largest and most technically sophisticated print

ever produced. Today, Booster remains one of the most

significant prints of the twentieth century, a watershed that

catapulted printmaking into a new era of experimentation.

Rauschenberg’s collaborations with printmakers and

print workshops have often not resembled traditional

prints at all. In his typical mix of techniques and processes,

the artist has radically re-interpreted the traditional notion

of what constitutes a print. Seizing upon the notion of

multiplicity, inherent in the printed form, Rauschenberg

has frequently applied it to sculpture to create multiple

sculptural works that are editioned, just as a traditional

print can be editioned. His three-dimensional Publicon

Cardbird III from the Cardbird series 1971 photo-lithograph, screenprint, corrugated cardboard, tape 98.0 x 90.6 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1973


station multiples are seven physical expressions of the clash

of art and religion and a reference to Christ’s fourteen

stations of the cross. Early in his life Rauschenberg was very

involved in the Church and wanted to become a preacher.

His decision was reversed, however, when he was told

that the Church would not tolerate dancing (an activity

that Rauschenberg was particularly good at). Just like this

clash of religion and culture in life, the Publicon stations

represent a similar clash of visual elements in art. They are

austere containers that unfold to display intricately

collaged, bright fabrics and electrical components. Akin to

the individual steps that make up a choreographed dance,

the works are adjustable through various configurations.

As box-like containers, the Publicon stations also reveal

the influence of Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Cornell.

Rauschenberg closely studied the works of the two masters

and repetitively referenced them in his own work.

A fundamental shift in subject and material occurred

in Rauschenberg’s work from the 1960s to the 1970s.

In the 1960s he relied heavily upon American visual

culture whereas in the 1970s Rauschenberg embraced

an international perspective. The works from the 1970s

also reflect the artist’s incessant experimentation with

new materials. Where the 1960s were dominated by

repetitive mass media imagery, the 1970s reveal a focus

on natural fibres, a simplification of the artist’s materials to

incorporate fabric, cardboard and other natural elements

such as mud, rope and handmade paper. The catalyst for

this dramatic change in both subject matter and material

can be explained by a change in Rauschenberg’s physical

environment – his decision to move from New York City

to Captiva Island, Florida, had a profound effect on the

appearance of his work.

With no city to offer up its detritus, the artist turned

to the things that surrounded him in his new environment

and the move had yielded numerous cardboard boxes.

Rauschenberg has suggested that his choice of cardboard

as a new material was the result of ‘a desire … to work

in a material of waste and softness. Something yielding

with its only message a collection of lines imprinted like a

friendly joke. A silent discussion of their history exposed

by their new shapes’.6 The Cardbird series of 1971 is a

tongue-in-cheek visual joke, a printed mimic of cardboard

constructions. The labour intensive process involved in the

creation of the series remains invisible to the viewer – the

artist created a prototype cardboard construction which

was then photographed and the image transferred to a

lithographic press and printed before a final lamination

onto cardboard backing. The extreme complexity of

construction belies the banality of the series and, in this

way, Rauschenberg references both Pop’s Brillo boxes by

Andy Warhol and Minimalist boxes, such as those by

Donald Judd. By selecting the most mundane of materials,

Rauschenberg once again succeeds in a glamorous

makeover of the most ordinary of objects. This is an

exploration of a new order of materials, a radical scrambling

of the material hierarchy of modernism.

During the 1970s, Rauschenberg’s new international

focus required him to travel to several countries where he

entered into significant collaborations with local artists

and craftspeople. The first was in 1973 with the medieval

paper mill Richard de Bas in Ambert, France. Once again,

Rauschenberg imposed a disciplined stripping back of his

art materials – this time it was not to do with colour but

with the notion of the handmade. In particular, the artist

wanted to engage with handmade paper as one of the

most ancient of artistic traditions. The resulting series,

Pages and fuses, is a group of paper pulp works where

the Pages are formed from natural pulp and shaped into

paper pieces that incorporate twine or scraps of fabric. In

contrast, the Fuses are vivid pulp pieces dyed with bright

pigments. It was precisely this innovative experiment with

paper pulp that sparked a renewed interest in handmade

paper, which inspired major paper works by artists such as

Ellsworth Kelly, David Hockney and Helen Frankenthaler.

Throughout his career, Rauschenberg worked with fabric

in the creation of theatre costumes and stage sets. In 1974,

however, his interest in the inherent properties of natural

materials led him to experiment with the combination

of fabric and printmaking. The Hoarfrost editions series,

created at Gemini GEL, is named after the thin layer

of ice that forms on cold surfaces and was inspired by

Rauschenberg’s observation of printmakers using ‘large

sheets of gauze … to wipe stones and presses … and hung

about the room to dry … how they float in the air, veiling

machinery, prints tacked to walls, furniture’.7 The imagery

of the Hoarfrost editions was drawn from the Sunday

Los Angeles Times and printed onto layers of silk, muslin

and cheesecloth. The artist has exploited the transparent

layering of material in order to suspend the image within

the work itself, enabling the viewer to both look at and

look through the work – to see both the positive space and

the negative space in conjunction with the environment

behind the work. Everyday objects, such as paper bags, are

in sophisticated contrast with the ghostly imprinted imagery

and the delicate fabric folds and layers.

Rauschenberg’s quest for continued international

involvement took him to Ahmadabad, India, to work in

a paper mill that had been established as an ashram for

untouchables. Rauschenberg was immediately struck by

the contrast between the rich paper mill owners and the

absolute poverty of the mill workers. The artist’s specific

environment once again provided him with materials

and in 1975 he set about making the Bones and unions

series. For the Bones, the collaborative team wove strips of

bamboo with handmade paper embedded with segments


Preview from the Hoarfrost editions series 1974 lithograph and screenprint transferred to a collage of paper bags, silk chiffon, silk taffeta 175.3 x 204.5 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1976

of brightly coloured Indian saris. In the creation of the

Unions, Rauschenberg sought to incorporate the mud

that was used by the villagers to build their homes. He

achieved this by concocting a rag-mud mixture consisting

of paper pulp, fenugreek powder, ground tamarind

seed, chalk powder, gum powder and copper sulphate

mixed with water, all of which was then kiln fired. For

Rauschenberg, the striking contrast between the sensuous

colour of the saris against the aromatic and earthy

aesthetic of the rag-mud encapsulated the manifest social

and cultural contrasts of India.

In all of his artistic pursuits, Rauschenberg has been

an enthusiast for collaboration, working with numerous

artists, composers, papermakers and printmakers. His joy in

creating works of art within a reciprocal exchange has also

extended to his materials. By looking beyond the apparent

ordinariness of everyday experience, Rauschenberg

celebrates the life spirit of all things, realising the unique

qualities of everything from individual colours, mass media

clippings, paper, fabric and mud to electric lightbulbs and

old tyres. In this way, Rauschenberg has imbued his art

with the visual ‘poetry of infinite possibilities’.8 a

Jaklyn Babington Curator, International Prints and Drawings

This exhibition is supported by the Embassy of the United States of America

notes1 John Cage, ‘On Robert Rauschenberg, artist, and his work’ (first

published in Metro, Milan, 1961); republished in Silence, 4th edition, The M.I.T Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, 1970, p. 98.

2 Walter Hopps, ‘Introduction: Rauschenberg’s art of fusion’ in Walter Hopps and Susan Davidson, Robert Rauschenberg: a retrospective, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, 1997, p. 29.

3 Calvin Tomkins, Off the wall: the art world of our time, Doubleday & co., New York, 1980, p. 32.

4 Tomkins, p. 118.5 Robert Rauschenberg, ‘Random order’, Location, New York, Volume 1

Spring 1963, pp. 27–31.6 Robert Rauschenberg, ‘Note: Cardbirds’ in Rauschenberg: Cardbirds,

promotional brochure, Gemini G.E.L, Los Angeles, 1971, n.p.7 Ruth Fine, ‘Writing on rocks, rubbing on silk, layering on paper’

in Walter Hopps and Susan Davidson, Robert Rauschenberg: a retrospective, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York, 1997, p. 384.

8 Cage, p.103.


Black robe, white mist celebrates the life and work of

Otagaki Rengetsu or Lotus Moon (1791–1875). Featuring

delicate ceramics, calligraphy and scroll painting, it is the

first exhibition outside Japan to focus solely on the work of

Rengetsu, who lived an exceptional life at a time of great

social and political upheaval. Black robe, white mist brings

together many objects never before exhibited, the majority

of which are in private collections.

Born the illegitimate daughter of a courtesan and a

high-ranking samurai in a Kyoto pleasure district, Rengetsu

died a Buddhist nun renowned as a poet, calligrapher,

potter and painter. She was included in Heian jinbutsu

shi, a list of prominent people in Kyoto, in 1838, 1852

and 1867, and even today she is one of the characters in

Kyoto’s annual Jidai Matsuri or Festival of the Ages, which

includes a parade of historical figures.

Despite her fame, relatively little is known with

certainty about Rengetsu and much that is believed about

her owes more to fantasy and romantic conceptions of

her character and astonishing beauty than to reality. She

endured personal tragedy from early in her life and it was

these experiences that led to her remarkably productive

artistic career.

Originally called Nobu, Rengetsu was adopted as

a baby by Otagaki Hanzaemon Teruhisa, a lay priest at

Chion’in, the major Pure Land Buddhist temple in Kyoto,

and his wife Nawa. Teruhisa and Nawa had five sons

only one of whom, Katahisa, was still alive at the time

of Rengetsu’s adoption. When she was eight or nine,

Rengetsu went to live at Kameoka Castle where, as a lady-

in-waiting, she received training in poetry, calligraphy,

dance, needlework and martial arts. During the time

Rengetsu was at Kameoka, Nawa and Katahisa both died.

At the age of sixteen or seventeen Rengetsu returned

to Kyoto and married Oka Tenzo. In keeping with custom,

he was adopted into the Otagaki family and his name

changed accordingly. He became Naoichi Mochihisa.

Rengetsu’s first child, a son, was born soon after the

marriage but lived only twenty days. The couple also had

two daughters but they too died young, one at a few

months and the other as a small child. In a rare occurrence

for the time, Rengetsu eventually divorced the apparently

depraved Mochihisa.

Her second marriage was a happy match but ended

tragically when her husband Ishikawa Jujiro (who became

Hisatoshi upon adoption) died from tuberculosis. The pair

had at least one daughter and possibly two. The night

before his death, Rengetsu marked her intention never to

remarry by cutting off her hair. Aged thirty-three, she soon

became a nun, adopting Lotus Moon as her name. Teruhisa

was ordained at the same time and, with Rengetsu’s

remaining child, or children, they moved to a Chion’in

Black robe, white mist: art of the Japanese Buddhist nun Rengetsu

Rengetsu’s memorial stone at Saihoji, near Jinkoin.

The calligraphy was designed by Tomioka Tessai

8 September 2007 – 27 January 2008

project gallery


hermitage. Within a decade Teruhisa and the last of

Rengetsu’s children had died. The nun then left the temple

to make her own way in the world.

In search of a means of support, she considered

teaching the board game gõ, which Teruhisa had taught

her, or waka poetry, which she had studied at Kameoka.

(Waka poems have thirty-one syllables divided into five

lines of five-seven-five-seven-seven syllables.) Although

neither career was a success, Rengetsu’s verse did

contribute to her later work. In her late forties or early

fifties, Rengetsu began making tea ceramics. In describing

her teapots, Rengetsu modestly wrote, ‘they were very

humble and the shapes were unrefined. The poems I

carved on them I wrote when I had a moment free. I never

had much free time.’1

Rengetsu’s combination of pottery, poetry and

calligraphy, usually using Japanese kana rather than

Chinese kanji characters, was inspired. These simple,

often roughly made, objects proved enormously popular.

Though doubtless an exaggeration, it has been said that

Rengetsu made more than 50,000 works in her lifetime

and that every Kyoto household included at least one

example, be it a tea vessel, sweets dish, sake flask or

cup, tanzaku poem sheet, or a painting with calligraphy.

Rengetsu’s work was so popular that even within her

lifetime it was imitated and faked, a practice that has

continued intermittently to the present and which makes

it difficult to confidently attribute many Rengetsu-

style objects to the artist herself. In many ways this is

unimportant as such things did not concern Rengetsu.

She is believed to have willingly helped others make

their ceramics and paintings more saleable by adding her

calligraphy to them. In one story, a ceramics manufacturer

asked Rengetsu to inscribe copies of her work because

they couldn’t duplicate her calligraphy. She agreed, even

presenting some originals so better copies could be made.

To keep up with demand for her ceramics, Rengetsu also

worked with professional potters, including Isso (dates

unknown) and Kuroda Koryo (1822–1895). Known as

Rengetsu II, Kuroda had Rengetsu’s permission to sign his

work with her name and continued to do so after her death.

The Makuzuan hermitage at Chion’in, Kyoto, where Rengetsu lived with her daughter/s and her adoptive father Teruhisa

(opposite) Otagaki Rengetsu and Tomioka Tessai In this world hanging scroll [kakemono] c. 1855 ink on paper 92.0 x 20.0 cm overall National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Otagaki Rengetsu and Wada Gozan/Gesshin The goddess Amaterasu’s divine light hanging scroll [kakemono] 1864 (detail) ink on paper sheet 33.1 x 56.6 cm Museum DKM/Stiftung DKM, Duisburg, Germany

Down to the Kamo river vase [hanaire] 1850–75 glazed ceramic, incising 29.3 x 3.5 x 3.5 cm Private collection, Basel


With her work sought after and a reputation for beauty

as well as generous acts of charity, the reclusive Rengetsu

often moved several times a year to avoid unwanted

attention. She eventually settled at Jinkoin, a Shingon

Buddhist temple outside Kyoto city, and stayed there

until the end of her life. Rengetsu’s time at the temple

resulted in thousands of works, especially paintings and

calligraphies. In a poem about calligraphy that evokes

the feeling of her delicate, but powerful, rounded hand,

Rengetsu wrote:

Taking up the brush

just for the joy of it,

writing on and on,

leaving behind

long lines of dancing letters.

(translation John Stevens)2

At Jinkoin, Rengetsu often collaborated with Wada

Gozan/Gesshin (Moon Mind), who became a priest at

the temple after the death of his wife. She also created

collaborative works, gassaku, with a number of other

artists, including the painters Mori Kansai (1814–1894)

and Tomioka Tessai (1835–1924). Rengetsu and the much

younger Tessai were very close and she thought of him as a

son. A scroll painting in the Gallery’s collection featuring a

painting of eggplants by Tessai and calligraphy by Rengetsu

reads: ‘In this world there are certain forms which bring

[welcome] thoughts to mind. The eggplant serves as a

symbol of happiness’ (translation Patricia Fister).3

Rengetsu’s poems also appear without illustration on

tanzaku poem sheet and scrolls.

In 1875 Rengetsu died in the temple tearoom she

had lived and worked in for a decade. She requested that

Tessai alone be contacted following her death, and it was

her adored friend who designed the calligraphy on her

unassuming memorial stone near Jinkoin. In her eighties,

Rengetsu wrote her autobiography in waka and prose in

a letter to Tessai. It included the poem:

The day begins

I’m busy with my crafts

the day ends

I pray to Buddha

and I have nothing to worry about.

(translation Lee Johnson)4 a

Melanie Eastburn Curator, Asian Art

The exhibition catalogue is available from the National Gallery of Australia Shop on 02 6240 6420

Further information at nga.gov.au/Rengetsu

notes1 Lee Johnson, ‘The life and art of Otagaki Rengetsu’, Master of Arts

thesis, University of Kansas, 1988, appendix 2.2 John Stevens, Lotus Moon: the poetry of the Buddhist nun Rengetsu,

Buffalo: White Pine Press, 2005, p. 98.3 Patricia Fister, ‘Waka poet-painters in Kyoto’, in Japanese women

artists: 1600–1900, Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, New York: Lawrence, Harper & Row Publishers Inc., 1988, p.153

4 A translation of Rengetsu’s autobiography appears in Johnson, 1988, appendix 2.

Set of five sencha tea cups 1873 glazed stoneware height: 4.5 cm each Private collection, Brussels

(opposite) Let us consider ageing, teapot [kyusu] c. 1850 ceramic, incising 11.1 x 17.0 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Fluttering merrily sake flask [tokkuri] 1870 glazed stoneware, incising 15.0 x 8.0 x 8.0 cm Museum DKM/Stiftung DKM, Duisburg, Germany


travelling exhibition

From the white heat of our beaches to the red heart of

central Australia, Ocean to Outback: Australian landscape

painting 1850–1950 conveys the great beauty and diversity

of the Australian continent. Curated by the National Gallery’s

Director Ron Radford, this major travelling exhibition is

a celebration of the Gallery’s twenty-fifth anniversary. It

features treasured Australian landscape paintings from the

national collection and will travel to venues throughout each

Australian state and territory until 2009.

Encompassing colonial through to modernist works, the

exhibition spans the great century of Australian landscape

art. From 1850 to 1950 landscape was the most painted

and celebrated theme in Australian art. As well as images

which convey the geographical extremes of the continent,

Ocean to Outback includes works that reflect significant

events that transformed the social fabric of Australia –

droughts and bushfires, the gold rushes, the Depression,

and times of war.

The exhibition begins with a dramatic shipwreck scene

off Tasmania’s east coast painted by convict artist Knut Bull

(1811–1889). The wreck of the ‘George the Third’ 1850

depicts the aftermath of the shipwreck in 1835 of the

convict transport ship. Following a four-month voyage from

London and bound for Hobart, the 35-metre ship entered

D’Entrecasteaux Channel on the evening of 12 April 1835.

Less than 200 kilometres from its destination, the ship

struck submerged rock and in the catastrophe that followed

127 of the 220 convicts on board died.2 Survivors’ accounts

said the ship’s crew fired their weapons at convicts who, in

a state of panic, attempted to break from their confines as

the vessel went down.

The painting is dominated by a huge sky, with the

broken George the Third dwarfed by the expanse. Waves

crash over the decks of the ship while a few figures in the

foreground attempt to salvage cargo and supplies. This is

a seascape that evokes trepidation and anxiety. The small

figures contribute to the feeling of human vulnerability

when challenged by the extremities of nature.

Australia’s finest late colonial landscape artist from

the period, Eugene von Guérard (1811–1901), painted

images of Australia from the perspective of an observer,

explorer and a resident. Von Guérard received numerous

commissions for ‘homestead portraits’. These commissions

were generally paintings of properties owned by graziers

who were keen to display the results of their hard

labours on the land. Schnapper Point from ‘Beleura’ 1870

was painted for James Butchart who owned Beleura

homestead, built in 1863. Schnapper Point is located near

Mornington Peninsula on Melbourne’s Port Phillip Bay

(approximately forty kilometres from Melbourne). Von

Guérard depicts the sweeping views from the property

across the bay – an area that had become a popular

holiday destination for Melbourne residents.

Ocean to Outback: Australian landscape painting 1850–1950

Knut Bull The wreck of the

‘George the Third’ 1850 oil on canvas


Canberra Purchased with funds from the Nerissa Johnson Bequest 2001

Eugene von Guérard Schnapper Point from

‘Beleura’ 1870 oil on canvas 66.1 x 104.2 cm

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra From the James

Fairfax collection, gift of Bridgestar Pty Ltd 1995

4 August 2007 – 3 May 2009

… it is continually exciting, these curious and strange rhythms which one discovers in a vast

landscape, the juxtaposition of figures, of objects, all these things are exciting. Add to that

again the peculiarity of the particular land in which we live here, and you get a quality of

strangeness that you do not find, I think, anywhere else. Russell Drysdale, 19601

Exploration of the Australian continent by Europeans

was a risky and arduous pursuit. The professional

explorer–artist Thomas Baines (1820–1875) was one of

a group of eighteen people who formed the 1855 North

Australian Expedition party. The purpose of this expedition

was to determine the existence of natural resources for

settlement in far north-west Australia. Under the command

of Augustus Charles Gregory the expedition lasted from

August 1855 to November 1856, with the group reaching

the mouth of the Victoria River on the upper north-west

coast of the Northern Territory on 15 September 1855.

Baines’s official role in the party was as artist and

storekeeper – he made hundreds of sketches, recorded

weather conditions and kept a detailed journal of daily

life. Painted in London some thirteen years after the

expedition, Gouty stem tree, Adansonia Gregorii, 58

feet circumference, near a creek south-east of Stokes

Range, Victoria River 1868 depicts the party campsite

and an enormous water-yielding baobab tree. The artist

has painted himself in the lower right-hand side, sitting

underneath a makeshift shelter sketching the tree.

While artists such as Thomas Baines recorded the far

reaches of Australia, the major settlements of Sydney and

Melbourne continued to expand. Rail soon connected

townships located close to the Blue Mountains and

Dandenong Ranges to Sydney and Melbourne. Tom Roberts

(1856–1931) and Arthur Streeton (1867–1943) used the

rail to travel to the outskirts of Melbourne where they

established artists’ camps on the fringe of suburbia, first at

Box Hill and later at Eaglemont.

Tom Roberts first visited Box Hill to paint in 1882,

accompanied by Frederick McCubbin (1855–1917) and

Louis Abrahams (1852–1903). The artists set up camp on

land owned by a local farmer, David Houston.3 In A Sunday

afternoon c. 1886 Roberts depicts an intimate picnic.

Framed by spindly gums and bathed in dappled light, a

young couple relax in the bush, the woman reading to her

companion from a newspaper. At the time, a belief in the

health benefits of country air was becoming popular with

city dwellers, who sought recreational activities in the bush

or by the ocean. Roberts’s observant eye depicts small

details in this scene such as the trail of smoke from the

man’s pipe, the dark wine bottle on the crisp white cloth

and the light falling softly on the leaves of the eucalypts.

Thomas Baines Gouty stem tree,

Adansonia Gregorii, 58 feet circumference, near a creek south-east of Stokes Range, Victoria River 1868

oil on canvas 45.2 x 66.5 cm National Gallery of Australia,




Arthur Streeton’s The selector’s hut (Whelan on the

log) 1890 is an image that conveys the ‘pioneering spirit’

which underpinned the Australian nationalist attitude

of the late nineteenth century. Streeton depicted iconic

elements of the land – the ‘blue and gold’ of sky and

earth, golden grass and shimmering light, a slender

silhouetted gum tree, and a bush pioneer. He shows a

man at rest from the toil of clearing the land and making

his home. The man depicted is Jack Whelan, the caretaker

of the Eaglemont estate where Streeton had been given

permission to set up ‘camp’ in an old house in the summer

of 1888. Early the next year he was joined by Charles

Conder (1868–1909) and Tom Roberts. The camp provided

the perfect working environment – a reasonably isolated

bush location close to the city of Melbourne.

Works by Australian Impressionists such as Roberts,

Streeton and Conder showcase the national collection’s

great holdings from this period. Alongside these are scenes

of modern, misty Melbourne as captured by Clarice Beckett

(1887–1935). Beckett’s lyrical and evocative landscapes

remained largely unknown to Australian audiences during her

lifetime. She was a dedicated artist who, despite dismissive

reviews and few sales, continued to paint and exhibit regularly.

Beckett always painted outdoors, usually in the early

morning or evening, around the bays and streets of

her family home in the Melbourne beachside suburb of

Beaumaris. She sought to convey the beauty of her local

environment, be it through the afterglow of a bright

sunset, the shimmering heat of a tarred road or

headlights shining through misty rain. She excelled at

depicting particular effects of nature, such as haze,

rain, mist and smoke. Beaumaris seascape c. 1925 is a

meditative image of a still sea, a tree-lined cliff and distant

coastline. Beckett has paid close attention to the subtle

effects of light and shade reflected in the water. The soft

lilac and pink hues of the sea, coastline and sky dissolve

into bands of colour. The subject is so tonally reduced it

appears to be almost abstracted.

Work by another female artist of the period, Elise

Blumann (1897–1990), depicts a ferocious storm scene

on Perth’s Swan River. Blumann painted the Swan and the

native melaleuca trees of the region many times. Escaping

the Nazi regime that devastated much of Europe, German-

born Blumann came to Perth with her husband and two

children in 1938. Educated at the Berlin Academy of Arts

and the Royal Art School Berlin, Blumann was familiar

Tom Roberts A Sunday afternoon c.1886 oil on canvas 41.0 x 30.8 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1984

Arthur Streeton The selector’s hut (Whelan on the log) 1890 oil on canvas 76.7 x 51.2 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1961


with the modern art of Europe. In Australia her modernist

painting was unconventional, and she was regarded as a

valued member of Perth’s artistic community.

In Storm on the Swan 1946 Blumann uses broad

sweeping gestures – strong horizontal and diagonal

brushwork – to capture the power of a storm. Wind and

rain beat against the limbs of the trees which appear

to almost float in space. This dynamic and sensitive

composition displays Blumann’s modern approach to her

art and her desire to capture the ‘essential spirit’ of nature.4

Areas of the painting’s surface are blank, while others are

scratched with the end of her brush to indicate sharp, fast

rain. This is a vigorous, physical and quickly executed work,

a powerful response to the speed in which a storm can

approach and pass.

Modernist experiments of colour theory by Roland

Wakelin (1887–1971) and Roy de Maistre (1894–1968) are

included in the exhibition. In de Maistre’s rarely exhibited

Forest landscape c. 1920 he has adapted the subject of a

felled tree to create a painting concerned with modernist

principles of form, rhythm, symmetry and colour.

Historically, the subject of the felled tree in the Australian

bush has reflected artistic interests in rural industry, the

natural grandeur of forests and, in some instances, an

awareness of conservation issues related to loss and

destruction. For de Maistre, tree trunks have been reduced

to angular planes of colour and the composition is united

by vivid greens that portray the forest floor and foliage.

De Maistre has explored a range of colour tones, using subtle

shifts in greens, reds and browns throughout the painting.

Forest landscape belongs to a period when de Maistre

was interested in the broken colour approach of Cézanne

and the relationship between colour and music. He had

studied violin and viola at the Sydney Conservatorium,

and art at the Royal Art Society of New South Wales and

Julian Ashton Art School. Working with musician Adrian

Verbrugghen he developed a colour music scale where

the spectrum of colours related to notes of the major and

minor musical scales. The colour music theory was further

underscored by de Maistre’s interest in the psychological

effects of colour and its relationship to the expression of

emotional states. Quoting the English poet-performer and

colour theorist Beatrice Irwin, de Maistre wrote that colour

‘brings the conscious realisation of the deepest underlying

principles of nature … it constitutes the very song of life

and is, as it were, the spiritual speech of every living thing’.5

A number of paintings in Ocean to Outback reveal how

artists used the landscape as inspiration during difficult

times of drought, depression or war. Works by Russell

Drysdale (1912–1981) and Sidney Nolan (1917–1992)

explore the drama and expressive possibilities inherent

in the land. In 1944 Drysdale was commissioned by the

Sydney Morning Herald to accompany journalist Keith

Newman to western New South Wales to document

Elise Blumann Storm on the Swan 1946 oil on paper mounted on cardboard on composition board 57.0 x 67.0 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1978

Roy de Maistre Forest landscape c.1920 oil on cardboard 35.4 x 40.6 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1971

(opposite) Clarice Beckett Beaumaris seascape c.1925 oil on cardboard 50.0 x 49.0 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1971

the effects of the drought. This experience significantly

changed the way he viewed the Australian landscape.

The photographs and sketches he made on the trip

informed much of his work in the following years.

In Emus in a landscape 1950 Drysdale explores the

strange and surreal qualities of the Australian outback.

The native birds move quietly through the landscape,

passing a precariously arranged structure of wood and

corrugated iron. This sculptured mass of refuse represents

the remains of a previous settlement. It could be an

abandoned dwelling or a wrecked ship on a dried inland

sea. Drysdale creates a sliding space between reality and

imagination, fact and myth, and captures the vast space

and timelessness of the outback.

Between 1947 and 1950 Sidney Nolan spent months

travelling through remote areas of Australia. Using money

he had made from a successful exhibition of Queensland

outback paintings held at the David Jones Gallery in Sydney

in March 1949, Nolan, accompanied by his wife Cynthia

and stepdaughter Jinx, travelled through Central Australia,

the Northern Territory, Western Australia and South

Australia. This trip, from June to September 1949, inspired

a body of work and a series of paintings that depict inland

Australia from an aerial perspective.

Inland Australia 1950 is an extraordinary aerial image of

the ‘heart’ of the continent, possibly of the Durack Range.

With the composition board lying flat on a table Nolan has

pushed the paint around the surface of the work. In some

areas the paint has been wiped back, exposing the white

undercoat of the composition board. The undulating shapes

and intense colour of the red earth evoke an ‘otherworldly’

sensation – a feeling of the land’s inherent grandeur,

timelessness and mystery. Nolan described the work as ‘a

composite impression of the country from the air’. Painted

in his Sydney studio, he used photographs taken from the

aeroplane as a visual aid. Inland Australia is an example of

Nolan’s technique of fusing elements from existing locations

with a landscape remembered from experience.

Ocean to Outback: Australian landscape painting

1850–1950 includes images of the furthest points of

Russell Drysdale Emus in a landscape 1950 oil on canvas





Sidney Nolan Inland Australia 1950 oil and enamel paint on composition board 91.5 x 121.0 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1961

distance and geography across Australia. Created by some

of our greatest landscape artists, these paintings reveal the

compelling beauty, extreme conditions and qualities of the

Australian environment that have made landscape painting

a vital force in Australian culture. a

Beatrice Gralton Associate Curator, Australian Painting and Sculpture

The exhibition catalogue is available from the National Gallery of Australia Shop on 02 6240 6420

Further information at nga.gov.au/OceantoOutback

notes1 Russell Drysdale, interview by Hazel de Berg, 1960, Canberra:

National Library of Australia, [deB 27].2 Michael Roe, An Imperial disaster: the wreck of George the Third,

Hobart: Blubber Head Press, 2006, p. 12. 3 Leigh Astbury, ‘Memory and desire: Box Hill 1855–88’, in Terence

Lane (ed.), Australian impressionism, Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2007, p. 51.

4 John Scott & Richard Woldendorp, Landscapes of Western Australia, Claremont, Western Australia: Aeolian Press, 1986, p. 17.

5 Roy de Maistre, extract from lecture on ‘Colour in relation to painting’, in Colour in art, exhibition catalogue, The Art Salon, Penzance Chambers, Sydney, 1919.

Tamworth Regional Gallery, Tamworth NSW, 4 August – 22 September 2007

Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart Tas., 5 October – 25 November 2007

Riddoch Art Gallery, Mt Gambier SA, 8 December 2007 – 20 January 2008

Ballarat Fine Art Gallery, Ballarat Vic., 2 February – 30 March 2008

Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, Perth WA, 13 April – 1 June 2008

Cairns Regional Gallery, Cairns QLD, 21 June – 27 July 2008

Araluen Arts Centre, Alice Springs NT, 9 August – 19 October 2008

Newcastle Region Art Gallery, Newcastle NSW, 8 November 2008 – 18 January 2009

Canberra Museum and Gallery, Canberra ACT, 31 January – 3 May 2009


Since 1973 the Gallery’s photography collection has

grown to include about 15,000 Australian and international

works, with the latter category chiefly being by twentieth-

century European and American photographers. An

energetic program of acquiring South and Southeast Asian

photographs began in 2006 after Director Ron Radford

initiated a more central role for art of the Asia–Pacific

region. In February 2007 the Gallery acquired more than

200 nineteenth-century photographs from India along with

a small group of works from Burma (Myanmar) and Ceylon

(Sri Lanka). These came from a collection assembled over

thirty years in London by Howard and Jane Ricketts whose

holdings and research have formed the basis of a number

of pioneering survey shows of Indian photography. Chiefly

dating from the 1850s to the 1880s, the photographs

from the Ricketts collection acquired by the Gallery include

individual photographs on paper and those in albums and

illustrated books by the best-known British photographers

who collectively made some of the earliest images in India,

Burma and Ceylon.

India was one of the first countries outside Europe

and America to take up photography. By January 1840

a daguerreotype apparatus was for sale in Calcutta

(Kolkata). Despite the difficulties of photochemistry in

a tropical climate, a number of daguerreotype studios

existed in India. Surviving daguerreotypes from anywhere

in Asia, however, are scarce. From the mid-1850s the

daguerreotype was superseded by the alternative process

of photographs on paper from a negative on glass. The

process appealed to the legions of mostly British men

stationed in India as part of the East India Company and

other colonial ventures. It was a diversion and a way of

conveying what India was like to families, friends and

investors. Photography also became for Indians a means

of presenting themselves to the foreigners. Government

bodies also soon adopted pioneering survey projects using

photography to encompass and manage the huge physical

and cultural diversity of India.

Among the earliest works in the Ricketts collection are

twenty-six views from 1858 of significant sites in the First

War of Independence (also known as the Indian ‘Mutiny’).

These were taken by Italian-born British professional

photographer Felice Beato, who, having previously

photographed in the Crimea and the Middle East, was

the most experienced photographer to work in India. His

images are the only known photographs of many of the

historic buildings in the conflict that were later demolished.

Beato went on to China in 1860 where he made pictures

of the Boxer rebellion (of which an album is also held by

the Gallery) and then established a studio in Japan. Beato

went to Burma in 1885 to document the Third Burma War.

He remained there developing studios which specialised in

photographs of ‘Burmese beauties’ and ‘native types’.

Ricketts photography collection

Samuel Bourne Wanga Valley, view 1860s albumen silver photograph


Canberra

collection focus


Large-scale albumen prints are the exemplary

achievements of the nineteenth century; costly and

technically demanding, only the best resourced

photographers could undertake such mammoth prints.

Those who did included military officers who had learned

photography in India and came to be assigned on official

monuments surveys or took on projects out of personal

interest and ambition. In the Ricketts collection this type

of survey work is represented by eleven large prints from

1855 to 1857 by Captain Thomas Biggs (1822–1905) of

the Bombay Artillery and Dr William Pigou (1818–1858)

of the Bombay Medical Service, which come from

Architecture in Dharwar and Mysore, a three-volume

photographically illustrated book by Anglo-Indian scholar

Colonel Meadows Taylor published in London in 1866.

Working from 1855 to 1857 Biggs and Pigou were the first

designated ‘architectural photographers’ of sites in western

India. Dr John Murray (1809–1898) of the Bengal Medical

Establishment specialised in Mughal architecture of Agra,

Fatehpur Sikri and Delhi and mastered the difficult process

of mammoth plate paper negatives. The Gallery holds two

of his dense but mezzotint-like prints, including one from

his 1858 portfolio Agra and its vicinity.

Bombay photographers William Johnson and William

Henderson were among the earliest to make ethnographic

studies in India in 1857. Johnson’s The oriental races and

tribes, residents and visitors of Bombay (issued in two

volumes in London from 1863 to 1866) was the first

photographically illustrated ethnographical publication

on India.

Consumption of photography was by no means

limited to foreigners’ interests; royalty and upper echelon

administrators in India and elsewhere in Asia were keen

to present images of themselves as presents in exchange

for the many photographs sent to them by the crowned

heads and statesmen of Europe. A small group of portraits

of maharajas by unknown photographers in the Ricketts

collection reveal the splendour of the royal courts.

The largest individual holding and aesthetically the

‘jewel in the crown’ of the Ricketts collection is the group

Colin Murray Reversing station on the

S.I.P. at Khandalla on the Bhue Ghats albumen silver

photograph 18.8 x 30.4 cm National Gallery of Australia,

Canberra

Charles T Scowen Sinhalese girl 1870s

albumen silver photograph 28.0 x 22.0 cm



of sixty-four large prints by landscape photographer

Samuel Bourne, an experienced landscape and portrait

photographer in England active in societies and salons who

moved to India in 1862 and worked there until 1870 and

returned in the 1880s. He was in partnership with Charles

Shepherd and later Colin Murray at various times. Bourne

made a series on the sites of the ‘Mutiny’ in 1864 but his

renown comes from the distinctive elegant abstract design

of his landscape and wilderness views taken on extensive

journeys to Simla, Kashmir and Himalayas in the 1860s,

which won him medals in Britain.

Photography in India was impossible without local

labourers. Bourne, for example, had some thirty porters

and assistants on his Himalayan journeys. Indians were

widely employed as assistants to foreign photographers

but increasingly became photographers in their own

right. In the 1870s a photographer at the Madras School

of Industrial Art was employed by James Breeks to take

photographs for his book An account of the primitive

tribes and monuments of the Nilagiris, published in 1873.

Current scholarly consensus is that the photographer was

a local, C Lyahsawmy. The first high profile Indian-born

photographer was Lala Deen Dayal (1844–1905), a civil

engineer who became skilled as an amateur photographer

by the 1870s while working for Sir Henry Daly, the Agent

to the Governor General for Central India. Deen Dayal

set up on his own studio in 1885, becoming the most

prominent and acclaimed photographer of Princely India

until his death in 1905.

Research into the spread of photography in the

Asia–Pacific region has revealed that while some

photographers and eras are widely celebrated, others such

as Charles Scowen in Ceylon and Beato in Burma are not

because their works are later than the colonial era of high

adventures or ‘first’ views. The Gallery aims to bring to

greater prominence many of these lesser-known bodies

of work by pioneer photographers in the Asia–Pacific in

the National Photography Festival exhibition from July

until October 2008. The Gallery’s survey exhibition will

showcase many works from the Ricketts collection and will

be the first such survey of photographic art in the region. a

Gael Newton Senior Curator, Photography

Unknown photographer Maharana’s elephant, Udaipur 1880s–90s albumen silver photograph 19.2 x 24.4 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra (opposite) Charles Shepherd Khyber Pass 1860s albumen silver photograph 19.9 x 29.1 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Felice Beato The Mosque Picket on the ridge, Delhi 1858 albumen silver photograph 25.5 x 30.4 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra


Max Ernst was a towering figure in the revolutionary

artistic and literary movement of Surrealism, a sculptor,

painter, graphic artist and inventor of frottage. His

monumental bronze Habakuk is a memorable and

outstanding statement of modern art. A dark, looming,

bird-like column, Habakuk is engaging and eccentric, yet at

the same time its huge size and shiny black patina make it

seem severe, even ominous. The sculpture is a large version

of the original plaster executed by Ernst in 1934 and

reworked later in the 1930s.

Habakuk’s body was created from casts of flowerpots,

stacked on top of and inside one another. Ernst then added

a head, consisting of a giant tilted bill and eyes, and a

circular plinth. At the foot of the figure is a third eye, and

the plinth also bears a negative impression of one of the

eyes. These were cast from a desert stone found by Roland

Penrose, the English Surrealist collector, painter and poet,

who gave it to Ernst in 1929. He called it Rose de sable, œil

de sphinx [Rose of sand, eye of the sphinx].

Together, the eye and the impression on the plinth

represent inward and outward vision, and form a veiled

reference to the biblical prophet Habakuk, after whom

the sculpture is named. In his study, Max Ernst: sculpture,

Jürgen Pech draws a parallel between Ernst’s perceived

connection ‘between the soothsayer and visionary of the

Bible and the visionary, transcendental aspects of his own

work.’ The Book of Habakuk is one of the last, and shortest,

books of the Old Testament. It is a song, a conversation

between the prophet and God, in which Habakuk asks God

to curse his enemies. These include the Chaldeans, and

interestingly, the makers of idols, that is, sculptors:

What profiteth the graven image that the maker

thereof hath graven it; the molten image, and a

teacher of lies, that the maker of his work trusteth

therein, to make dumb idols?

When Ernst first worked with plaster maquettes,

he had no money to cast them in bronze. According to

Werner Spies in Max Ernst: sculptures, maisons, paysages,

‘Ernst agreed, in 1970, that a monumental version of

Habakuk should be carried out, expressing above all the

still-remaining Dada refusal to accept formal purism, which

he had denigrated in Cologne [fifty years earlier] ...’ One

cast of the larger version was made in 1970 for Düsseldorf,

and is now installed in the Grabbeplatz. The Gallery’s

cast is numbered ‘6’, part of the planned edition of ten

authorised and plaster signed by Ernst in 1970, and cast

by Susse Fondeur, Paris. Only four were realised. The large

plaster has been destroyed, so no more can be made.

Its totemic form places Habakuk within the context of

Ernst’s own enthusiastic and discerning collecting of art

from Africa, the Pacific and the Americas. These sculptures

reflect his personal taste, acquired as they caught his eye

and resonated with him aesthetically. Ninety-six works from

his collection are held in the National Gallery of Australia.

Christine Dixon and Bronwyn Campbell International Painting and Sculpture

new acquisition International Painting and Sculpture

Max Ernst Habakuk

Max Ernst Habakuk 1934/1970 bronze

449.9 x 162.9 x 162.9 cm no. six of a planned edition

of ten, cast 1995–1998 National Gallery of Australia,

Canberra Purchased with the assistance of the

National Australia Bank


Giorgio de Chirico is an important figure in twentieth-

century art, renowned for his invention of Metaphysical

painting (pittura metafisica), which preceded Dada and

Surrealism from about 1911 into the 1930s. The artist’s

imaginative symbolic language – especially human figures

meshed with machines, often placed in incongruous

settings such as classical or mechanical landscapes – is

seminal to modern art.

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that examines

the nature of reality. For de Chirico, true reality was hidden

behind appearances. He invented a language of images

which represented human presence by placing everyday

objects such as statues, mannequins, set-squares and

biscuits within a compressed and fictional space. The poet

Guillaume Apollinaire named the style ‘metaphysical’

in 1913. According to the art historian Matthew Gale,

de Chirico thought that reality was ‘visible only to the

“clearsighted” at enigmatic moments’.

De Chirico studied art in Munich from 1905, moving to

Paris in 1911. There he met such Cubist and Fauvist artists

as Picasso, Derain, Braque and Brancusi, and avant-garde

writers such as Apollinaire. His first solo exhibition, largely

unsuccessful, was held in Rome in 1919. Viewers found his

paintings disturbing, especially the unusual treatment of

space: claustrophobic interiors, unusual angles and cut-off

planes, with deadpan representations of classical statues or

tailor’s dummies lending an eerie quasi-human presence.

In 1914 de Chirico enlisted in the Italian army and was

sent to Ferrara. There he met Carrà and Papini, soon to be

his colleagues in Metaphysical painting, and mixed with

Futurist and Dada artists. By 1916 de Chirico concentrated on

small, stifling still-life compositions, often featuring biscuits,

set-squares, planks, maps, military insignia and flags.

Death of a spirit features two French biscuits frontally

placed onto orange geometric receding planes, flanked

by a black disc and surrounded by yellow, red and green

forms. The elements crowd uneasily into an ambiguous

space, which reads as an interior, opening onto an

unsettling urban landscape. The tense composition and

bright, constrained palette animate this small and vigorous

painting. Its content and style embody an extraordinary

moment in modern painting when Cubism, Dada and

Abstraction collided in de Chirico’s new Metaphysics.

The style of Metaphysical painting strongly influenced

Surrealist artists such as Salvador Dalí and Max Ernst, as

Gale notes in the Grove Dictionary of art:

On his arrival in Paris in 1922, Ernst’s painting

reflected the admiration of his poet friends for de

Chirico … the painters who became Surrealists after

Ernst almost all passed through a period of stylistic

debt to de Chirico, notably Salvador Dalí and Alberto

Giacometti (the leading creators of the Surrealist

Object), René Magritte [and others].

De Chirico was also important to the Australian

painters James Cant and James Gleeson. Indeed, Cant

almost certainly saw Death of a spirit in London. It was

shown there twice while he lived there, first in 1937 at the

Zwemmer Gallery in the exhibition Chirico–Picasso, and

again at the London Gallery in Giorgio de Chirico 1911–

1917, in October–November 1938. Some of the costumes

de Chirico designed for Diaghilev’s production of Le Bal in

1929 are held in the Gallery’s collection.

Christine Dixon Senior Curator, International Painting and Sculpture

new acquisition International Painting and Sculpture

Giorgio de Chirico Death of a spirit

Giorgio de Chirico La Mort d’un esprit

[Death of a spirit] 1916 oil on canvas 36.0 x 33.0 cm National Gallery of Australia,

Canberra Purchased with the assistance of Harold and Bevelly Mitchell, Rupert and

Annabel Myer and the NGA Foundation


new acquisition Asian Art

Kushan Buddha

This superb Indian sculpture has recently been added

to the permanent display of art from South Asia. The

unusually large seated Buddha is not only a spectacular

example of early Indian sculpture, but also a key image

in understanding the development of Buddhist art

throughout Asia. The sculpture has survived, largely intact,

from the second century of the Current Era.

During the first to third centuries a large part of

northern and western India and Pakistan was ruled

by the powerful Kushan dynasty that originated in

central Asia. The two great Kushan political centres – at

Gandhara and Mathura – each developed its own style of

monumental Buddhist art. Importantly, both were noted

for their anthropomorphic depictions of the Buddha who

had hitherto been represented by symbols such as his

footprints, the empty throne, the bodhi tree and the wheel

of law. These are the central focus of the Gallery’s fine

large marble Amaravati frieze from a stupa from eastern

India, dated to roughly the same period.

Mathura was a prosperous city and an ancient religious

and political capital that predated the rise of the Kushan

dynasty. It was also a centre for stone carving to serve

the temple complexes. A bold and distinctively Indian

style of figurative sculpture developed at Mathura, in

contrast to the strongly Hellenic but rather delicate

figures of neighbouring Gandhara, which are superbly

represented in the Gallery’s collection by a large grey-schist

standing bodhisattva and the recently acquired head of

a bodhisattva. In contrast, this sculpture is formed from

the striking mottled-red Sikri sandstone typical of the

Mathuran region of northern India.

Buddhism flourished in India at this time and it was

during the Kushan dynasty that the representation

of the Buddha, with his characteristic features

of a cranial protuberance and extended earlobes

dressed in the monastic robe that would become the

enduring iconography for the depiction of Buddha in

anthropomorphic form, was established. This is a fine

early example of this key development in Asian art.

Characteristic of the evolving, quintessentially Indian

style of sculpture from Mathura, the torso of the Buddha

is robust and powerful, with a plump, gently smiling

face and wide-open eyes. He is shown with several of

the thirty-two marks (lakshanas) of a great man – the

broad ‘chest of a lion’, the urna or tuft of hair between

the eyebrows (which in this case would once have been

embellished with a precious jewel), circles or wheels on

the soles of his feet, webbed fingers, folds of flesh at the

neck, elongated earlobes and a topknot of hair. The last

of these is the ushnisha, or cranial protuberance, that

signifies Buddha’s spiritual advancement. In contrast to

the Gandharan images of Buddha and bodhisattvas clad

in elaborate royal robes, Mathuran Buddhas are depicted

in almost diaphanous garments that cling to the body and

accentuate the human form.

The Buddha is seated in the meditation posture with

his legs crossed, the upturned soles of his feet carved with

two auspicious symbols in shallow relief – a discus (cakra)

and a triratna. The cakra represents the wheel of Buddhist

teachings, with the ‘turning of the wheel’ signifying the

transmission of Buddhist teachings. Each of the Buddha’s

toes is carved with a small swastika, another recurring

symbol of Buddhism. The figure holds one hand, now

missing, aloft in what would have been the fear-dispelling

gesture (abhaya mudra), while his other hand is placed

squarely on his left knee.

Installed in a niche in the new Indian Gallery, the

Seated Buddha provides visitors with new insights into

the history of Asian art. We are grateful to Ros Packer,

Chair of the Acquisitions Committee of the Gallery’s

governing Council, for her timely donation that secured

this masterpiece for the national collection.

Robyn Maxwell Senior Curator, Asian Art

Kushan dynasty Mathura, India

Seated Buddha 1st–2nd century red sandstone

129.5 x 101.6 x 30.5 cm Purchased with the

generous assistance of Roslyn Packer 2007


new acquisition Photography

Robyn Stacey Gorilla skull

Robyn Stacey belongs to a generation of photomedia

artists who came to prominence in the 1980s. These

artists were unconcerned with, even suspicious of, the

claims to truth by various styles of personal documentary

photography dominant in art museums in the 1970s. They

spurned reportage photography and embraced visual

culture as a source rather than the ‘real’ world. The artists

of this movement (later called Postmodernism) happily

appropriated images from the past as well as popular

culture, including the look of ‘old master’ paintings or

fifties and sixties magazines and television.

From her earliest series in the mid 1980s, Robyn Stacey

has created seductive and vibrantly coloured tableaux

involving great technical expertise in synthesising multiple

sources and motifs which has been greatly facilitated by

the emergence of digital manipulation. Her earliest efforts

are hand-coloured black-and-white prints; later works

involve complex overlays. Stacey’s series works, such as Kiss

kiss bang bang 1985 and All the sounds of fear 1990, were

grounded in popular culture with a slightly sixties Pop look,

but presented a modern world made somewhat anxious

and edgy. By contrast her work since the 1990s has made

use of science and the deathly quiet of a number of natural

history museum collections in which she worked during

several residencies.

Gorilla skull 2005 comes from Stacey’s Beau monde

series which draws on collections at the Macleay Museum,

Sydney, and recalls the tradition of the Dutch genre of

nature morte paintings in which the still-life objects provide

a moral lesson on the vanity of world. The reference to the

gorilla (a threatened species symbolising humankind) and

coral (a threatened wonder of Australia’s northern coast)

alongside dead specimens under the microscope and an

ominously placed geological hammer, combine to create

an anxiety often found in her early works. Stacey’s art

entertains and yet reminds us of dangers to the planet.

Gael Newton Senior Curator, Photography

Robyn Stacey Gorilla skull 2005

Type C colour photograph 100.0 x 162.0 cm



new acquisition Australian Painting and Sculpture

Howard Taylor Rainbow and supernumerary

Howard Taylor was an incessant observer of nature,

concerned with recording perceived phenomena in nature.

In 1976, largely influenced by his admiration of Constable,

Taylor painted a group of paintings in a small format in

which he focused on clouds and the skies. One of these is

Rainbow and supernumerary 1976. He based the works

on drawings in his sketchbook, where he made day–to-day

observations, including details of weather, sunlight and

shadow. Rainbows were a particular source of fascination.

In Rainbow and supernumerary Taylor demonstrated his

commitment to looking, his fascination with the natural

world and his sensitivity to recording the transient

effects of light.

Taylor was born in Hamilton, Victoria, on 29 August

1918 and moved to Perth with his family in 1932. He

served with the air force during the Second World War

until his capture in 1940. In 1949 Taylor returned to

Western Australia and settled in the Darling Ranges on the

outskirts of Perth, where he became fascinated with the

bush landscape and forest forms which became central to

his work. In 1967 he moved to Northcliffe in the heart of

the tall-timber karri and jarrah forests of the south-west

of Western Australia where he produced some of his most

powerful, impeccably crafted evocations of nature. He died

on 19 July 2001.

As Daniel Thomas has remarked, ‘Howard Taylor was

an Australian and his brilliant gifts and stunning vision was

totally focused on the depiction of his beloved Australian

bush. His vision, however, went far beyond the focus of

any painter before him, in that none of them, irrespective

of their unquestioned brilliance, ever interrogated and

captured the complexity of structure, the ephemeral quality

of its light and colour, or the rich and subtle patina of its

living forms, as he did’.

Anne Gray Head of Australian Art

Howard Taylor Rainbow and supernumerary 1976 oil on composition board 21.7 x 30.5 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Gift of Sue and Ian Bernadt 2007


new acquisition Australian Prints and Drawings

Roy Kennedy I’m never alone

Wiradjuri artist Roy Kennedy was born in the early 1930s

in Griffith in central New South Wales. Kennedy spent

his childhood on a government-run mission located on

the banks of the Murrumbidgee River, downstream from

Narrandera and Hay. As a young man he worked on farms in

the district and later moved to Sydney. In 1995 he enrolled

at the Eora Centre for Aboriginal Studies at the Sydney

Institute of Technology where he pursued his interest in

printmaking. He was student and artist of the year at Eora in

1999, and won a NAIDOC Week award that same year.

Kennedy’s etchings provide a graphic documentation

of his memories of the Aboriginal mission environment.

Through his sure placement of key elements – the church,

the police station, his own mission hut and recreation

areas – a vivid and very personal picture emerges of how

people lived on the mission during the Depression. Of

I’m never alone he writes ‘all my lovely memories of my

mission are always there. Some are sad times and some are

good memories’. His family had been moved from nearby

stations to the mission many years before and the concept

of relocation is a constant theme in his art. Of Mission boy

dreams Kennedy recalls ‘from far back as I can remember

I’ve always wondered when we would have our own home

and years on I’m still wondering’.

The mission on which Kennedy spent his youth was

closed in 1941. His graphic etchings provide us with a

historically acute and sensitive picture of mission life

during this period.

Mary-Lou Nugent Curatorial Assistant, Australia Prints and Drawings

Roy Kennedy Wiradjuri people

I’m never alone 2005 etching, printed in black ink

from one plate platemark 25.0 x 33.0 cm



William Nicholas Lady and child

A ready market for portraiture arose with the spread of

settlement and the rise of prosperity in colonial Australia.

From the 1820s to the 1850s there were more professional

portraitists working in both watercolour and oil in the

colony than landscape artists.

Watercolourist, etcher and lithographer William

Nicholas (1807–1854) found acclaim after just ten years in

Australia, with the Sydney Morning Herald of 27 July 1847

reporting: ‘His fame is now established in Sydney as the

best portrait painter in watercolours in the colony, and the

consequence is that there are more heads offered to him

for decapitation than he is able to take off.’

Nicholas’s sensitively rendered untitled watercolour

reflects the much sought-after English portrait style of

the period. An exquisitely painted portrait, the faces in

particular are superb examples of the stippling technique

for which Nicholas was renowned. Further research may

well reveal the identity of this fashionable, well-to-do

young mother and her child, dressed in finely embroidered

christening robe and bonnet.

Even in the distant colonies, the quiet, demure aspects

of women’s dress of the Victorian period dictated fashion.

Watered silks in pastel tones were the height of fashion

in the 1840s, and the woman’s gown of celestial blue

typically has a high bodice with a low-waisted, V-shaped

front panel trimmed with a white lace collar. The influence

of medievalism is evident in the angular lines of the bodice

with its reference to the Gothic arch. Showy, full sleeves

slowly lost favour in the Victorian period and the dress has

stylish, closely fitting sleeves with pleating at the elbow. By

contrast, the skirt is full, to emphasise the narrow sculpted

waistline. The hairstyle is also typical of contemporary

fashion: centrally parted, held by combs, ringlets forward

of the ears, and a plaited knot at the back. The gold

brooch on her bodice, painted in a blend of ground gold

leaf and gum arabic, is a delicate final touch.

Anne McDonald Curator, Australian Prints and Drawings

new acquisition Australian Prints and Drawings

William Nicholas not titled [Lady and child] c. 1847 watercolour, pencil and ground gold leaf and gum arabic on cardboard image 22.4 x 17.6 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra


new acquisition Decorative Arts and Design

Toots Zynsky Pennellata

The ethereal quality of Toots Zynsky’s 2005 work,

Pennellata, is characteristic of the extraordinary glass

vessels that have placed her among the leading

practitioners of contemporary studio glass. Its layered

colours are animated by reflected and refracted light,

each linear element inflecting the visual quality of the

next as the viewer’s gaze moves from its outer to its inner

surfaces. Their shaded, drawing-like quality is the result

of a complex and demanding process of construction by

which two layers of glass threads, in about sixty colours,

are assembled flat before being fused and formed into a

circular sheet of glass. This sheet is then mould-slumped

in the kiln before final manipulation into the undulating,

organic form that characterises all of Zynsky’s work.

Mary Ann (Toots) Zynsky was born in Boston,

Massachusetts, in 1951, and gained a Bachelor of Fine Arts

from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1973. After

moving to New York in 1980, she founded and developed

the second New York Experimental Glass Workshop (now

known as Urban Glass), where she developed technical

processes for the production of the fine glass threads, or

‘canes’, used as a key element in the design of her glass

works. Zynsky describes the technique of constructing

open vessel forms works entirely composed of these fused

and thermo-formed glass elements as ‘filet de verre’.

From 1983 to 1999, she worked from a studio base in

Amsterdam, The Netherlands, immersing herself in the

traditions of European glass, drawing inspiration and

technical knowledge from Venetian glass in particular.

An interest in music also took her to West Africa, where

she participated in a recording project of West Ghanaian

traditional music, an experience that exposed her to the

vibrant colours and patterns of the region’s traditional art

and design, influences that were interpreted in the complex

colour orchestrations of her later work.

Robert Bell Senior Curator, Decorative Arts and Design

Toots Zynsky Pennellata 2005 glass filet de verre

27.0 x 59.5 x 31.0 cm National Gallery of Australia,

Canberra


new acquisition Decorative Arts and Design

Marion Mahony Griffin Window panel

Marion Mahony Griffin was born in the United States of

America in 1871 and died there in 1961. She graduated

in Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of

Technology in 1894, and became one of the world’s first

registered women architects. In 1895, she joined the

Chicago practice of architect Frank Lloyd Wright where,

in addition to working as an architect, she became

Wright’s key delineator and developed his designs for

architectural glass and other decorative arts and interior

design projects. A professional relationship with another of

Wright’s staff, the architect Walter Burley Griffin became

personal with their marriage in 1911. When Walter Burley

Griffin won the competition for the design of Canberra,

with an entry prepared jointly with Marion, she joined him

in Australia, living and working in Canberra, Melbourne,

and Castlecrag in Sydney from 1914 to 1937.

This coloured and iridised glass window panel, with a

geometric border design around a clear glass centre panel,

is similar to designs for window panels designed by Wright

and delineated by his staff in Chicago from 1907 to 1912.

While ‘leaded glass’ is used as a generic descriptor for

such window panels, the glass elements of the work are

fixed together with zinc, allowing a more precise fit of the

complex geometrical elements of Wright’s designs. Such

work was usually carried out to Wright’s specifications by

the Linden Glass Company in Chicago. The design of this

panel has been attributed to Marion Mahony Griffin and

it is a work closely associated with her and Walter Burley

Griffin during a critical time in their partnership with Frank

Lloyd Wright. As it was a valued part of their personal

possessions in Australia, it is highly probable that the

Griffins intended to use the panel in one of their projects

in Australia, or to use it as a model for further works and

a demonstration of their design approach to architectural

decoration.

Robert Bell Senior Curator, Decorative Arts and Design

Marion Mahony Griffin, in association with Walter Burley Griffin and Frank Lloyd Wright Window panel c. 1910 glass, zinc cames, wood frame 45.0 x 45.0 x 4.5 cm National Gallery of Australia, Canberra


A dot becomes a line and then a form; each drawing

unfolds from a single mark. It is the finished drawing that

shows how this simple beginning can be transformed.

More than any other medium, drawing is accessible

to everyone. Sketching a map, doodling while on the

telephone, even writing can be considered drawing.

Design, animation, architecture, mathematics and the

sciences all use drawing. Individual observations are

interpreted through drawing by both the maker and

their audience. It is a means to record experience,

whether literally or imaginatively. Children draw, and so

did Leonardo da Vinci and Albert Einstein. For all three,

drawing is a means for experimentation and exploration.

Drawn in, an exhibition for children, highlights figure

drawing by many Australian artists. The drawings selected

include portraits, self-portraits, figures in landscapes and

imaginary forms. Even within this relatively narrow range of

subjects, the materials and techniques used by each artist

show the diversity of drawing.

Children will be able to see that drawing is not one

thing. It can be about replicating the world around them, it

can be about the creative power of mark making and it can

be about the process itself, how each mark predetermines

the ones that follow. Some drawings focus on line, some

on tone, some use colour and some incorporate all of

these elements. The vertical black pen lines used by

Richard Larter in his drawing, Untitled, portrait of a woman

with a scarf 1975, are confident and bold. This work

demonstrates Larter’s unique use of line, for the balance

he creates between his marks and the page forms the

portrait. Another artist in the exhibition who plays with the

arrangement of positive and negative space is Tim Johnson

in his drawing MN at Papunya 1987. This drawing uses

tone rather than line to hint at a figure in the landscape.

Johnson’s airy technique suggests the heat of central

Australia, and the Indigenous artist working in the open is

shown as part of the country, rather than separate from his

surroundings.

Drawing examines the act of looking – looking out

and looking in. Drawing can also link directly to memory

and imagination. The charcoal drawings of Sidney Nolan’s

rugged band of bushrangers, including Bushranger head

with red and yellow mask 1947, display an uncertainty

and vulnerability through their smudged and broken lines.

In these drawings Nolan is not only examining these men

as individuals with thoughts and feelings, he is also using

them to think about the bushranger as an expression of

Australian identity.

Drawing is a wonderful activity used with skill and

humour by a range of Australian artists in this exhibition.

Drawing can be neat or messy, cool or hot and it can

be about concrete and abstract ideas. Drawn in invites

children and their parents to participate in various drawing

activities in the exhibition space. An easel and mirror allow

visitors to observe and draw themselves, tables provide

materials for drawing in response to music, free drawing

with pencil and paper and the mechanical etch-a-sketch

which makes a continuous line as two dials are rotated.

The exhibition will give children and their parents the

confidence to see that when it comes to drawing, there is

no right way to do it.

Adriane Boag Educator, Youth and Community Programs

Drawn in

14 July – 25 November 2007

Mike Brown Half lady on chair 1975 pen on

paper sheet 26.0 x 26.0 cm National Gallery of Australia,

Canberra

Sidney Nolan Bushranger head with

red and yellow mask 1947 charcoal, enamel


Canberra

children’s gallery


6 7 8

4 5

109

1 2 3


1211

151413

16 17

17

faces in view

1 Anna Gray, curator, and Daniel Thomas AM at the opening of the exhibition, George W

Lambert retrospective: heroes and icons 2 Sir Richard Kingsland AO CBE DFC and Lady

Kathleen Kingsland at the opening of the exhibition, George W Lambert retrospective:

heroes and icons 3 John Mackay, ActewAGL, and Colette Mackay at the opening of the

exhibition, George W Lambert retrospective: heroes and icons 4 Brian and Lesley Oakes at

the Members’ opening of the exhibition, George W Lambert retrospective: heroes and icons

5 Geoffrey King OAM and Rae King at the Members’ opening of the exhibition, George W

Lambert retrospective: heroes and icons 6,7,8 Children participating in a shell workshop

with Marilyn Russell (pictured) and Esme Timbery during NAIDOC Week 9 Children at the

National Australia Bank Sculpture Gallery open day 10 Performance by Emma Bossard

and Jane Ryan in response to Brancusi’s Birds in space; part of the National Australia Bank

Sculpture Gallery open day 11 Family attending the tour of the Aboriginal memorial during

NAIDOC Week 12 Jean Baptiste Apuatimi, Angela Hill, Philip Gudthaykudthay, Peter

Mingululu, Belinda Scott, Arthur Pambegan Jr, Luke Kawangka, Daniel Boyd and Brenda L

Croft at the announcement of the National Indigenous Art Triennial 13 Rupert Myer AM at

the announcement of the National Indigenous Art Triennial 14 Arthur Pambegan Jr at the

announcement of the National Indigenous Art Triennial 15 Peter Mingululu and Belinda Scott

at the announcement of the National Indigenous Art Triennial 16 His Excellency Mr Robert

McCallum Jr, United States Ambassador to Australia and Mrs Mary McCallum with Director

Ron Radford AM 17 Jean Baptiste Apuatimi performing at the announcement of the National

Indigenous Art Triennial

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

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

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

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

Lake Macquarie City Art Gallery, Booragul NSW, 14 September – 28 October 2007

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

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

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

Imagining Papua New Guinea: screenprints from the national collection This exhibition of screenprints from the national collection 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

Noosa Regional Gallery, Noosa Qld, 9 November – 5 December 2007

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

Dell Gallery@QCA, Brisbane Qld, 19 September – 28 October 2007

travelling exhibitions spring 2007

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

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

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

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

Grace Crowley: being modern One of the leading figures in the development of modernism in Australia, Grace Crowley’s life and art intersected with some of the major movements of 20th century art. This will be the first exhibition of Grace Crowley’s work since 1975 and will include important works from public and private collections. Spanning the 1920s through to the 1960s, the exhibition will trace her remarkable artistic journey from painter of atmospheric Australian landscapes to her extraordinary late abstracts. nga.gov.au/Crowley

Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide SA, 27 July – 28 October 2007

Ocean to Outback: Australian landscape painting 1850–1950 The National Gallery of Australia’s 25th Anniversary Travelling Exhibition

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

Proudly sponsored by R.M.Williams, The Bush Outfitter and the National Gallery of Australia Council Exhibitions Fund

To mark the Gallery’s 25th anniversary, this exhibition of treasured works from the National Collection has been curated by Director Ron Radford for a national tour. Every Australian state and territory is represented through the works of iconic artists such as Clarice Beckett, Arthur Boyd, Grace Cossington Smith, Russell Drysdale, Hans Heysen, Max Meldrum, Sidney Nolan, Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and Eugene von Guérard. nga.gov.au/OceantoOutback

Tamworth Regional Gallery, Tamworth NSW, 3 August – 22 September 2007

Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, Hobart Tas., 5 October – 25 November 2007

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

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

Red case: myths and rituals and Yellow case: form, space and design Caloundra Regional Art Gallery, Caloundra Qld, 16 July – 21 September 2007

Blue case: technology Manning Regional Art Gallery, Taree NSW, 9 July – 30 September 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grace Crowley Abstract painting 1947 (detail) oil on cardboard National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Russell Drysdale Emus in a landscape 1950 (detail) oil on canvas National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1970

a new star is bornVibrant. Dynamic. Inspiring. Unique. It’s what made the National Gallery of Australia one of the world’s great art institutions and it’s why we’re shaping a new direction with the National Australia Bank Sculpture Gallery.

Create a new direction for yourself and enjoy the new star of the Sculpture Gallery.

NAB is proud to partner with the National Gallery of Australia to bring you the National Australia Bank Sculpture Gallery.

©2007 National Australia Bank Limited ABN 12 004 044 937 30874 �7/07�

Max

Ern

st, H

abakuk

,

-

, b

ron

ze. P

urc

has

ed w

ith

th

e as

sist

ance

of N

atio

nal

Au

stra

lia B

ank

Co

llect

ion

: Nat

ion

al G

alle

ry o

f Au

stra

lia, C

anb

erra

. ©M

ax E

rnst

. Lic

ense

d b

y V

ISCO

PY, A

ust

ralia

,

.

03Art on view ad.indd 1 28/6/07 10:51:49 AM

The art of relaxationat SAVILLE.

extraordinary every day

With Saville Park Suites Canberra’s convenient location in the heart of the city, the National Gallery, shopping and many of Canberra’s attractions are all just a short stroll away.

View one of the many exhibitions on display at the National Gallery and enjoy apartment facilities or relax and be pampered by traditional hotel services at Saville.

Gallery Packages start from $189* per night

Includes overnight accomodation and breakfast for two. Special car parking rate of $5.00 per day and 25% discount off food when dining in Zipp Restaurant in conjunction with this package.

*Subject to availability and conditions apply. Valid to 14 September 2007.

For more information or to make a booking call 1800 630 588 or visit savillehotelgroup.com

To purchase O’Leary Walker wines visit www.discountwines.com/nga.htm

Proud Supporter of the

National Gallery of Australia

Proudly supporting the National Gallery of Australia

To purchase Yalumba wines visit www.discountwines.com/nga.htm

The BurrowsTugalong RoadCanyonleigh NSW 2577

Take the Illwarra Hwy exit from the Hume Highway and follow the signs to Canyonleigh.

Open Garden&Gallery

Southern Highlands

Blue Pond by John Kirton

28th October - 4th November, 200710am - 4pm

This exquisite ten acre garden, often likened to the garden of French impressionist Claude Monet in Giverny, France and which HighLife Magazine described as a “Highlands’ Garden Oasis with a Touch of Monet”, will be open to the public for the first time this year.The Burrows is a roaming garden transformed from bare paddocks at Canyonleigh. Situated on the south-western edge of the Southern Highlands, half way between Sydney and Canberra, The Burrows has been part of the Australian Open Garden scheme and has been featured in a number of magazines.Also open will be The Kirton Gallery, a private art gallery housed in a restored hay shed adjacent to the garden.

An exciting collection by:John Kirton Margie MullinsNadine Harvey Libby HobbsMargaret ShepherdJenny StewartCindy PrymaJean Griffin Patrice CookeMelinda HaylockMartial CosynVanessa Forbes

Entry to garden $5.00 - supporting NSW Rural Fire Service.


THE LEADING AUSTRALIAN OWNED ART AUCTIONEERS AND VALUERS

Major Fine Art AuctionSYDNEY 5+6 December 2007

Entries close 24 October 2007

For confi dential appraisals by our art specialists, please contact:

Melbourne 03 9822 1911 Sydney 02 8344 5404

www.deutschermenzies.comwww.lawsonmenzies.com.au

Final Entries Invited

Robert Klippel NO. 251 1985-86 1970, 87.0 cm height.


C•A•N•B•E•R•R•A

The Brassey of CanberraBelmore Gardens and Macquarie Street,

Barton ACT 2600

Telephone: 02 6273 3766Facsimile: 02 6273 2791

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

B A R T O N

Canberran Owned and Operated

National Gallery ofAustralia Package

per night.Based on Twin share/double and includes full buffet breakfast for 2 people,

admission to the National Gallery including George Lambert Exhibition and entry for 2 at Old Parliament House.

$30.00 extra person per night. Valid until 16th September 2007.

$175.00

LAMBERT, George

The red shawl(Olave Cunninghame Graham) 1913oil on canvas96.70 (H) x 76.00 (W) cmGallery of New South Art Wales, Sydney, purchased in 1934Sydney photograph: Jenni Carter

celebrating 25 years

The Brassey of Canberra Celebrating our 80th birthday

INDIGENOUS HERITAGE MANY STORIES, MANY FORMS

The deep wealth of Indigenous art, music and dance enriches all Australians. BHP Billiton

values our Indigenous heritage, traditional and contemporary.

Through our offi ces and operations across Australia, many of which are located within rural

and remote areas, we have long-standing relationships with Indigenous communities.

We have a long history of supporting Indigenous cross-cultural programs in Australia and

we continue to look for ways that we can help contribute to the communities in which we

operate or have a presence, so that we can leave a lasting, positive legacy within our

communities. BHP Billiton are immensely proud to be associated with the National

Gallery of Australia and their landmark event, the inaugural National Indigenous Art

Triennial, CULTURE WARRIORS.

May the Indigenous stories in all their forms be seen and heard forever.

bhpbilliton.com

Richard BELL (1953) Kamilaroi/Kooma/Jiman/Gurang Gurang peoples

Australian Art It’s an Aboriginal thing, 2006 (detail)synthetic polymer paint on canvas

Collection: TarraWarra Museum of Art, Victoria Courtesy the artist and Bellas Milani Gallery

OC E A N to OUTBACK Australian landscape painting 1850 –1950The National Gallery of Australia’s 25th Anniversary Travelling Exhibition

Proudly supported by the National Gallery of Australia Council Exhibition Fund

Russell Drysdale Emus in a landscape 1950 (detail) oil on canvas National Gallery of Australia, Canberra © Estate of Russell Drysdale Robert Rauschenberg Publicon – Station I from the Publicons series enamel on wood, collaged laminated silk and cotton, gold leafed paddle, light bulb, perspex, enamel on polished aluminium

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 1979 © Robert Rauschenberg Licensed by VAGA and VISCOPY, Australia, 2007 The National Gallery of Australia is an Australian Government agency

1 September 2007 – 27 January 2008National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

nga.gov.au/RauschenbergThis exhibition is supported by the Embassy of the United States of America

artonview

Sculpture Gallery • rOBert rauSchenBerG • Ocean tO OutBack

National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 13 October 2007 – 10 February 2008

A National Gallery of Australia Travelling Exhibition The National Gallery of Australia is an Australian Government agency nga.gov.au/NIAT07

Richard Bell Australian art it’s an Aboriginal thing 2006 synthetic polymer paint on canvas Acquired 2006 TarraWarra Museum of Art collection courtesy the artist and Bellas Milani Gallery

IS

Su

e

no

.5

1

sp

ri

ng

2

00

7

artonview

IS

SU

E N

o.5

1 S

PR

ING

20

07

NA

TIO

NA

L

GA

LL

ER

Y O

F

AU

ST

RA

LIA

art ew - nga.gov.au · Richard Bell Australian art it’s an Aboriginal thing 2006 ... 20 The...

Documents

Transcript of art ew - nga.gov.au · Richard Bell Australian art it’s an Aboriginal thing 2006 ... 20 The...