Painting

Aztec Music’s Archaelogical Dig

That Blockhead Thing

By Richard Guilliatt

The ’60s, so the saying goes, didn’t start in Australia until the ’70s. Richard Nixon was well into his first term in the White House by the time any Aquarian gathering happened here, and it was 1972 when the Sunbury Pop Festival tried to replicate Woodstock in a paddock outside Melbourne. It’s a matter of record that Sunbury’s “three days of sun-filled togetherness” turned into

The Museum of Contemporary Art Australia

Sydney Gets a Laneway

By Drusilla Modjeska

Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art on Circular Quay West re-opened on 29 March with a new wing, as the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. Abutting the old building with its whiff of Art Deco, and glancing across to the Opera House, its stepped facade of white blocks creates a shifting pattern of light and shadow, as viewed from the harbour ferries, Bennelong Point or the lawn outside. T

In conversation with Robert Dessaix

As Robert Was Saying

By Gail Bell

Robert Dessaix refers to the heart attack that almost ended his life in July 2011 as “the emergency”. “I’m not interested in the physical details of what happened,” he says, breaking my gaze to watch the playful nosings of his dog, Polly, on the back terrace of his Hobart home. “If I wrote about it, I might not even give the emergency a name, just as I didn’t when I wrote about AIDS in Night Letters. I didn’t use the wor

Pedro Almodóvar’s 'The Skin I Live In' and Lars von Trier’s 'Melancholia'

An Auteur Planet

By Peter Conrad

Ah, to be an auteur, with the power to impose your own kinked or crazy worldview on reality! Pleasing only yourself, you can cosmetically rejig the human species, or – if you happen to be a miserable depressive – ensure that your gloom spreads through the cosmos by decreeing a planetary collision that will exterminate all life on earth. New fi

William Kentridge

No Script, No Storyboard

By Sebastian Smee

“What times are these,” wrote Bertolt Brecht in his poem, ‘To Those Born After’, “when a talk about trees is almost a crime because it implies silence on so many wrongs?” Brecht’s grim point – that an appreciation of nature, beauty and art can

Three Boys

By Sonya Hartnett

He straightens from the grass and sees them immediately, already close, already seeing him, and he’s stunned he didn’t hear the danger coming, like you ought to hear a train. Walking along the path are two boys he knows from school, not close friends of hi

Portrait Painting

The Sitting Act

By Charlotte Wood

In my early twenties I earned money sitting for life drawing classes at the small and beloved art school in my university town. I was by no means alone – it was a popular way for students to earn cash. But some friends worried: how could I expose myself like that, sit

Melbourne Zoo at 150

Work and Play

By Christine Kenneally

The exoskeleton of the Lord Howe Island Stick Insect is such a deep, glazed black that it looks like it crawled out of a Flemish oil painting. When Jenny Gray, the CEO of Zoos Victoria, holds one in her outstretched hand (firmly cuffing her sleeve with the oth

Alice Neel and Louise Bourgeois

Bodying Forth

By Drusilla Modjeska

The bodies of old women are rarely celebrated in art, and representations of them are few. The faces of older women who’ve achieved status and standing have long had their place in portraiture, which can indeed be a celebration. But the aged and unclothed female body

Romance Was Born - ‘The Oracle’, 2011

Fashion Masterpiece

By Clare Press

‘The Oracle’, the fifth major show by two Sydney-based iconoclasts, initially had Australian Vogue decrying the absence of the “madcap prop styling, the fireworks, the pizzazz” for which the designers, Anna Plunkett and Luke Sales, have become known. (

'The Mad Square: Modernity in German Art 1910–37'

Republic of Art

By Sebastian Smee

You can look at French art of the 1870s and momentarily forget about the Franco–Prussian War and the Paris Commune. You can study the paintings of Picasso and Matisse between 1914 and 1918 and tentatively put aside the grim fact of the Great War. You cannot

'Saatchi Gallery in Adelaide: British Art Now' Art Gallery of South Australia

By Terry Smith

Saatchi Gallery in Adelaide: British Art Now is another instalment in the Art Gallery of South Australia’s effort to re-badge itself as a contemporary art space. Already this year audiences have been treated to strong shows by Tracey Moffatt and Patricia Piccinini, bo

'Fred Williams: Infinite Horizons'

Under the Skin

By Peter Conrad

Until not long ago, Australian nature seemed averse to art. The trees were unkempt and drab, the vistas flat and dry, the colours industrial not organic. In European painting, man – represented, for instance, by John Constable’s farmers – enjoys dominion over a world that has been cleared, tamed, cultivated. In American painting, man – represented by

The 54th Venice Biennale

Vanity Case

By Sebastian Smee

Who would have thought that the first major movement of the twenty-first century would be a revival of trompe l’oeil? I admit, it’s unexpected. But it’s difficult not to notice at this year’s Venice Biennale that – after more than a century of scepticism directed at the business – painstaking, eye-fooling reproductions of reality are sneaking back onto artists’ agendas. The British a

Robert Hughes’s 'Rome'

Empire of the Mind

By Peter Conrad

In 1966 Robert Hughes concluded his first book, The Art of Australia, with a sardonic farewell to a country he had already quit. The final paragraph quotes an anonymous painter who told Hughes, “you can’t begin to grow up until you’ve left the place”,

John Safran’s new ABC TV project

The Quest for Muslim Jedis

By Craig Sherborne

The world is up this way, just over here. Follow me. Mind your head, you are entering human nature. There are narrow tunnels of religion. There is politics and bad blood. It’s a maze of superstitions and fears. Writers bother with this sort of thing but so d

Expert Appetite: The Plight of the Connoisseur

By Robert Dessaix

I am in Soups and Tinned Veg at my local Coles supermarket, immobilised by an attack of anomie. Why am I feeling like this? I stare catatonically at the rows of tinned soups, quite unable to move. There is no point in discussing Durkheim and the roots of anomie with the

Lessons in Unlearning

By Peter Robb

When the Olympic Games came to Sydney in 2000 I decided to rent a TV and watch some. Tweaking the rabbit’s ears – no time for an antenna – I watched Cathy and Ian and the others going for gold in extreme blizzard conditions. Outside in the real, mild world I saw triathletes ride their bikes up through the Domain and the marathon runners pass by Taylor Square. The marathon is the greatest thi