Arts

Gough Whitlam & Enoch Powell

By Shane Maloney

At the 1938 ceremony for the conferring of degrees in the Faculties of Arts and Law at the University of Sydney, the address was given by the newly appointed professor of Greek, Enoch Powell. Although only 25, Powell came very well credentialled. The only son of ambitious schoolteacher parents, he was reading Ancient Greek by the age of five. An absolute swot, he’d gone on to master Platoni

'Life in Movement' by Bryan Mason and Sophie Hyde

By Anna Goldsworthy

Tanja Liedtke’s name was suddenly everywhere in May 2007, when she was appointed artistic director of Sydney Dance Company. The 29-year-old dancer and choreographer claimed to be “absolutely ecstatic” about her new role, and there was a great deal of ecstasy in the arts industry too: a notable lack of pre-emptive poppy-lopping, the genuine hope of generational change. Three months later

Akira Isogawa

The Bride Wore Black

By Peter Robb

Think ‘dress designer’ and what comes to mind? Not a whole lot of fun. Think of the last picture you saw of Karl Lagerfeld or John Galliano. I approached Akira Isogawa with great caution and serious questions. How was it that a designer so absorbed in the history of Japan and its ancient silks – their spinning, weaving, dyeing, their cutting into hieratic costumes of gorgeous formality and subdued splendour – should have found h

Wim Delvoye at MONA

The Art of Ideas

By Amanda Lohrey

The phenomenon that is Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) is a Plato’s cave of multi-layered subterranean space where shadows of the real in the form of artworks are installed within vaults of Triassic sandstone. Since the museum’s opening in January 2011 it has lured a staggering 400,000 visitors, of whom it is estimated 5% are of international

'Autumn Laing' By Alex Miller

By Janine Burke

The Heide mythos, which has grown from the circle that gathered around arts patrons Sunday and John Reed at their home in Victoria’s Yarra Valley, is a tantalising mix of passion, vision, heartbreak, betrayal and great art. Without the art, Heide would be me

Meeting Mary Finsterer

What Happens Next

By Andrew Ford

Mary Finsterer says she wants to write a Mass. As one of Australia’s finest composers, she’s entitled; composers have been making new musical settings of the Mass for the best part of 2000 years. But it is not such a common occurrence in the twenty-first c

Meeting Andrew Fraser

Line of Appeal

By Jack Marx

There is perhaps no justice quite so poetic as when an errant lawyer goes to jail. Like the image of a prancing matador being hoist to the heavens on the horns of a bull, the barrister trading his cape for prison garb somehow tells of a world where justice knows no boun

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 fe

Lindsay & Kerry Clare - 'Gallery of Modern Art', Queensland, 2006

Architecture Masterpiece

By Haig Beck

Nowadays ‘masterpiece’ refers to a work of extraordinary artistic merit. But it once described a work by a craftsman made specifically to demonstrate mastery of (his) craft and so gain entry to a guild. This older meaning is appropriate to architecture, a practice l

Brian Blanchflower - 'Canopy LI (Scelsi I–IV)', 2001

Visual Art (Two-Dimensional) Masterpiece

By Anthony Bond

Brian Blanchflower is one of the most important painters in the world today and yet he is largely overlooked outside his native Perth. His paintings are firstly material objects, not illustrations of anything beyond themselves, and yet they have the power to i

Amelia Lester

I Heart New Yorker

By Christine Kenneally

Amelia Lester’s ‘fearlessness’ sounds Australian. Her ‘integrate’ sounds American, and her ‘loved’ – as in, “I loved growing up in Sydney” – is strung out halfway over the Pacific. When she talks, her hands follow a complicated syntax all

Comment: ABC’s The Book Show and Ramona Koval

By Don Watson

Still, it might be apt enough for the ABC. What nobler ambitions does the national broadcaster have than uniting Australians in their feelings? The corporation’s charter talks about broadcasting “programs that contribute to a sense of national identity and inform an

'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 for a moment, however, look at avant-garde art of the Weimar Republic and see it apart from the wide

Stardust Memories: In Search of Real Italian Food

By Peter Robb

Tony Bilson has done incomparable good for eating in Sydney over a long time. The gold-coated egg yolk was a Melbourne boy’s astute pitch at Sydney’s easily bored diners – he talked of “keeping them interested”. Yet you wondered whether Bilson, who has been thrashing around a bit lately, losing hats and speaking out sharply, didn’t feel a twinge of regret. Was that all it came to, 40 y

Peter Robb on Shaun Gladwell

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 wor

Lian Hearn Reflects on Japan

The Work of Catfish

By Lian Hearn

The dark wave rises, and keeps on rising like the sea in a nightmare. Ships cascade over a wall built to protect the port town from typhoons and tsunami, and cars are swept away like plastic bottles. A flock of seagulls soars upwards. Out at sea, fishing boats

Who’s Afraid of Marcia Langton?

By Peter Robb

Marcia Langton has a longer and more various history than Pearson, and is a lot harder to place. She is 14 years older, a grandmother several times over, and she will turn 60 this year. She describes herself as “now an academic and writer” – which is not so much w

Bread and Butter

By Gay Bilson

For dessert we ate hot puff pastry with a filling of grated apple cooked with butter, eggs and lemon. It pleased the guests, although one of them asked about the filling and seemed shocked that the ingredients were so rich, which is to say (she implied by her look), unhealthy. Another guest, a food scientist who directs the FOODplus Research Centre at the University of Adelaide, demanded to be giv