August 2015 – Art Blart _ art and cultural memory archive

Exhibition: ‘Indigenous Beauty: Masterworks of American Indian Art from the Diker Collection’ at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

Exhibition dates: 5th July – 13th September 2015

Elizabeth Conrad Hickox (Karuk)
Somes Bar, California
“Fancy” lidded basket
c. 1917-1926
Conifer root, maidenhair fern stems, porcupine quills, hazel shoots
Courtesy American Federation of Arts Diker no. 445

Just one word: glorious.

And to think, these disparate cultures were nearly wiped out through genocide enacted upon them by the white race.

Marcus

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Many thankx to the Amon Carter Museum of American Art for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Drawn from the celebrated American Indian art collection of Charles and Valerie Diker, Indigenous Beauty: Masterworks of American Indian Art from the Diker Collection showcases approximately 120 masterworks, including fine examples of basketry, pottery, sculpture, ivories, kachina dolls, regalia, and pictographic arts from tribes across the North American continent. The exhibition provides rare access to many exquisite works from one of the most comprehensive and diverse collections of American Indian art in private hands.

Indigenous Beauty is organised by the American Federation of Arts. This exhibition was made possible by the generosity of an anonymous donor, the JFM Foundation, and Mrs. Donald Cox.

Text from the Amon Carter website

Louisa Keyser (also known as Datsolalee, Washoe)
Carson City, Nevada
Basket bowl
1907
Willow shoots, redbud shoots, bracken fern root
Courtesy American Federation of Arts Diker no. 326

Nampeyo (Hopi-Tewa)
Hano Village, Hopi, Arizona
Water jar
c. 1900
Clay, slip
Courtesy American Federation of Arts Diker no. 824

Ancestral Pueblo
New Mexico
Water jar
c. 1150
Clay, slip
Courtesy American Federation of Arts Diker no. 313

Old Bering Sea III culture
Bering Strait region, Alaska
Harpoon counterweight (Winged object)
5th-9th century
Walrus ivory
Courtesy American Federation of Arts Diker no. 731

Niimiipu (Nez Perce)
Oregon or Idaho
Man’s shirt
c. 1850
Hide, porcupine quills, horsehair, wool, glass beads, pigment
Courtesy American Federation of Arts Diker no. 666

Julian Scott ledger Artist B (Ka’igwu [Kiowa])
Kiowa and Comanche Indian Reservation, Oklahoma
Twelve High-Ranking Kiowa Men
Nd
Pencil, coloured pencil, and ink on paper
Courtesy American Federation of Arts Diker no. 059 LD

This summer, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art presents the traveling exhibition Indigenous Beauty: Masterworks of American Indian Art from the Diker Collection. Organised by the American Federation of Arts (AFA), the exhibition is drawn from the celebrated holdings of Charles and Valerie Diker and features approximately 120 masterworks representing tribes across the North American continent. The exhibition is on view at the Amon Carter from July 7 through September 13, 2015.

“This exhibition has been shaped by the Dikers’ passion for Native American art, and their collection is renowned as one of the largest and most comprehensive in private hands,” says AFA Director Pauline Willis. “We are delighted to bring these exquisite works to Fort Worth.”

Selections from the collection have been presented previously at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1998-2000) and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (2003-2006), but Indigenous Beauty showcases recent acquisitions never before seen by the public. This is the first traveling exhibition curated from this remarkable collection.

“Charles and Valerie Diker are collectors and stewards of exceptional works of art from all corners of native North America, and audiences will be awed by the transformative spirit of creativity of the First Peoples whose ‘art schools’ were their families and communities,” says Barbara Brotherton, curator of Native American Art at the Seattle Art Museum. “This traveling exhibition and accompanying catalogue will invigorate new perspectives and rich discussion about the ways in which these objects affirm cultural values and express refined aesthetic sensibilities.”

Indigenous Beauty emphasises three interrelated themes – diversity, beauty and knowledge – that relate both to the works’ original contexts and to the ways in which they might be experienced by non-Native visitors in a contemporary museum setting. The exhibition is organised in 11 sections; while the objects within each section demonstrate common formal and functional qualities, the groupings are based primarily on geographic and cultural factors, allowing the viewer to perceive the impact of historical events as well as stylistic shifts over the course of decades or centuries. The range of work represented includes sculpture of the Northwest Coast; ancient ivories from the Bering Strait region; Yup’ik and Aleut masks from the Western Arctic; Kachina dolls of the Southwest pueblos; Southwest pottery; sculptural objects from the Eastern Woodlands; Eastern regalia; Plains regalia; pictographic arts of the Plains; and Western baskets.

Diversity is underlined as an essential aspect of indigenous American art, a corrective to the notion of a homogenous “American Indian” cultural and ethnic identity.

“Visitors to the exhibition are reminded that there is not just one North American Indian culture but hundreds of unique groups whose languages, mythologies and customs have evolved over the centuries,” says Andrew J. Walker, director of the Amon Carter. The comprehensive nature of the Dikers’ collection allows for this broad view of Native American art in all its complexity and historical specificity.”

A hallmark of the Diker Collection is the beauty and visual richness of the objects it comprises. The concept of formal beauty is the oldest and perhaps the strongest link between the material cultures of indigenous people and those of the Euro-American West. All known Native American languages include words that signify beauty or aesthetic quality, and many have more than one term to convey these concepts. For instance, in the language of Anishinaabe peoples which includes the Ottawa, Ojibwa or Algonquin, the word miikawaadiziwin refers to physical comeliness or handsomeness, while bishigendaagoziwin denotes beauty of a more spiritual and ethical nature. Such nuanced vocabularies influence the creation of objects within Native communities, each with its own criteria for technical excellence and aesthetic merit.

Cultural knowledge is inseparable from the practices of traditional art making in Native communities. From their elders, artists learn techniques for gathering and processing materials; production methods; a repertory of designs and patterns and the meanings they may contain; and often songs, prayers and rituals that are closely tied to art making. Over the last few decades, increased scholarship and closer collaborations between museums and Native communities have resulted in the recovery of knowledge about how objects were made, as well as their provenance and the ways they might have been used and understood in the contexts in which they originated.

Indigenous Beauty celebrates native North American artists whose visionary creativity and technical mastery have helped preserve cultural values across generations. The artists identified as members of many tribes and nations, each the product of complex and intertwined histories; and the captivating objects they created convey the extraordinary breadth and variety of Native American experience in North America. The exhibition shows both the deep historical roots of Native art and its dynamism, emphasising the living cultures and traditions of Native American groups through to the contemporary era.

Visitors to the Amon Carter can have a hands-on experience with many of the materials the artists used to create the objects in the exhibition. Tactile boards with several authentic materials (such as buffalo hide, abalone shells and seed beads) will be available for visitors to interact with while viewing the artworks.

Indigenous Beauty: Masterworks of American Indian Art from the Diker Collection is organised by the American Federation of Arts. This exhibition was made possible by the generosity of an anonymous donor, the JFM Foundation and Mrs. Donald M. Cox. The guest curator, David Penney, is an internationally recognized scholar of American Indian art. A fully illustrated catalogue presenting new research on the objects in the exhibition will include an essay by Penney, and contributions offer insight into the visual and material diversity of the collection, providing a greater understanding of the social and cultural worlds from which these works came. The catalogue will retail for $55 in the Museum Store. After closing at the Amon Carter, the exhibition travels to the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University (October 8, 2015 – January 3, 2016) and Toledo Museum of Art (February 14 – May 11, 2016).

Press release from the Amon Carter Museum of American Art website

Muscogee (Creek)(?)
Georgia or Alabama
Pipe bowl
c. 1780
Wood, brass (?), ferrous nails (?), tin
American Federation of Arts Diker no. 531

Anishinaabe, Ojibwa
Ontario
Shoulder bag (without strap)
c. 1820
Hide, porcupine quills, tin cones, silk ribbon, dyed hair
Courtesy American Federation of Arts Diker no. 586

Apsáalooke (Crow)
Montana
Boy’s shirt
c. 1870
Hide, glass beads, cotton fabric, wool cloth, sinew, cotton thread
Courtesy American Federation of Arts Diker no. 665

Tsimshian
British Columbia
Maskette
1780-1830
Wood, copper, opercula shell, pigment
Courtesy American Federation of Arts Diker no. 681

Yup’ik
Hooper Bay, Alaska
Mask
1916-1918
Wood, pigment, vegetal fiber
Courtesy American Federation of Arts Diker no. 788

Ancestral Columbia River people
Washington State or Oregon
Figure (Pendant?)
3rd-13th century
Antler
Courtesy American Federation of Arts Diker no. 529

Tlingit, Chilkat
Klukwan, Alaska
Tunic and leggings
late 19th century
Cedar bark, wool, metal cones
Courtesy American Federation of Arts Diker no. 795

Zuni
New Mexico
Situlilu (Rattlesnake) Katsina
1910-1930
Cottonwood, pine, gesso, pigment, dyed horsehair, cornhusk, cotton cord
Courtesy American Federation of Arts Diker no. 835

Hopi
Arizona
Qötsa Nata’aska Katsina
1910
Cottonwood, cloth, hide, metal, pigment
Courtesy American Federation of Arts Diker no. 831

Amon Carter Museum of American Art
3501 Camp Bowie Boulevard
Fort Worth, TX 76107-2695

Opening hours:
Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday:  10 am – 5 pm
Thursday: 10am – 8pm
Sunday: 12am – 5pm
Closed Mondays and major holidays.

Amon Carter Museum of American Art website

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Exhibition: ‘Light, Paper, Process: Revolutionizing Photography’ at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, Los Angeles

Exhibition dates: 14th April – 6th September 2015

Man Ray (Emmanuel Radnitsky) (American, 1890-1976)
Untitled (Smoke)
1928
Gelatin silver print
24.6 x 19.8cm (9 11/16 x 7 13/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Man Ray Trust ARS-ADAG

These days, photography can be anything your imagination, concept and process desires…

Whether that makes for interesting / lasting (ie. memorable) / good, (post)photographic outcomes is up to you to decide.

Marcus

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Many thankx to the J. Paul Getty Museum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Chargesheimer (Karl Heinz Hargesheimer) (German, 1924-1971)
Picturesque
1949
Gelatin silver print
49.5 x 39.6cm (19 1/2 x 15 9/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Museum Ludwig, Cologne

Henry Holmes Smith (American, 1909-1986)
Man and Woman
1976
Dye imbibition print
33.2 x 26.2cm (13 1/16 x 10 5/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of the Smith Family Trust
© J. Paul Getty Trust

Edmund Teske (American, 1911-1996)
Leaves on Glass, Topanga Canyon, California
1952; print 1960s
Gelatin silver duotone solarized print
35.4 x 27.9cm (13 15/16 x 11 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Edmund Teske Archives/Laurence Bump and Nils Vidstrand, 2001

Alison Rossiter (American, b. 1953)
Gevaert Gevarto 47, exact expiration date unknown, about 1960s, processed 2013 (#37)
2013
Four gelatin silver print
Each image: 10.8 x 8.3cm (4 1/4 x 3 1/4 in.)
Courtesy of the artist and Yossi Milo Gallery, New York
© Alison Rossiter

Chris McCaw (American, b. 1971)
Sunburned GSP #202 (San Francisco Bay)
2008
Gelatin silver print
37.5 x 47.6cm (14 3/4 x 18 3/4 in.)
Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Museum Purchase
© Chris McCaw

Pierre Cordier (Belgian, b. 1933)
Chemigram II
1976
Gelatin silver print
23.8 x 17.9cm (9 3/8 x 7 1/16 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SABAM, Brussels

From its very beginnings in the 19th century, photography has been shaped by the desire of the artist to continually explore and expand its possibilities through experimentation. Taking that spirit of invention and discovery as a point of departure, some artists today have chosen to distill photography to its most essential components of light-sensitivity and the chemical processing of photographic papers, challenging viewers to see the medium anew. Light, Paper, Process: Reinventing Photography, on view at the Getty Center April 14-September 6, 2015, features the work of seven contemporary artists – Alison Rossiter, Marco Breuer, James Welling, Lisa Oppenheim, Chris McCaw, John Chiara, and Matthew Brandt – all of whom have created inventive photographs that reveal aspects of their making (or unmaking).

The artists in the exhibition utilize an extensive array of practices – often achieved through trial and error, accident, or chance – that shift the understanding of photography from a medium that accurately records the world to one that revels in its materiality. Whether they use handmade cameras or none at all, work with expired papers or toxic chemicals, the images remain latent until processed, fixed, or otherwise coaxed from the paper.

“Each of the artists in this exhibition engages in some way with the process by which the photographic medium captures and transmutes light into a two-dimensional image on paper,” says Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum. “But rather than seeing this process as something to be ‘perfected,’ or even neutralised, they exploit its ability to be manipulated and deconstructed, thus collapsing process and product into a single creative activity. I am particularly pleased that the Getty Museum Photographs Council has provided funds to acquire works by Matthew Brandt, Marco Breuer, John Chiara, and Allison Rossiter for our permanent collection that are included in the exhibition.”

The exhibition begins with an overview of 20th-century practices that were experimental in nature, featuring works by Man Ray, László Moholy-Nagy, Nathan Lerner, Edmund Teske, and others. The renewed interest of artists of this period in techniques such as camera-less photograms, chemigrams, and solarisation serves as inspiration for today’s artists. Each of the subsequent galleries in the Getty Museum’s Center for Photographs will be dedicated to the work of one of the seven featured contemporary artists, and follows a progression from abstract, camera-less works to representative images made with custom-built cameras.

“This exhibition is an excellent opportunity to feature the work of living artists alongside earlier photographs from our permanent collection,” says Virginia Heckert, department head of the Getty Museum’s Department of Photographs and curator of the exhibition. “By focusing on work of a more experimental nature, visitors will be reminded that the exploration of materiality and process has been an important aspect of photography since its inception and continues to motivate and inspire artists working with the medium today.”

Alison Rossiter (American, born 1953) takes a minimalist approach to the materials she uses to create her photographic works. She does not use a camera, film, or light, but instead only uses unprocessed sheets of expired gelatin silver paper and photographic chemicals in the darkroom. Through the simple acts of immersing or dipping a sheet of paper in developer or pouring and pooling developer onto the paper’s surface, she achieves a rich array or results. Some suggest faint impressions of primitive mark-making, others resemble landscapes, and still others call to mind abstract painting of the mid-20th-century.

Working since the early 1990s without a camera or film, Marco Breuer (German, born 1966) subjects light-sensitive paper to various acts that abrade, burn, or scrape away the emulsion layer. Completely nonrepresentational, his “photographs” look like no others; they elicit the hues and textures of rare metals, mineral deposits, or oil spills, and display marks ranging from fine incisions and abrasions to scar-like burns and gashes. His deliberate misuse of black-and-white and photographic papers is the starting point for a negotiation between the paper as recording material, the hand, and the tools employed.

James Welling (American, born 1951) spent the first ten years of his career exploring painting, sculpture, performance art, video art, conceptual art, and installation before he committed to thinking of himself as a photographer. For the past four decades, he has explored photography, from documentary to experimental, with and without a camera, using black-and-white, colour, and Polaroid films and papers, as well as digital files and printing. Since 1995 he has worked increasingly with colour, filters, and camera-less photography. Three bodies of recent work presented in the exhibition include variations on the photogram, chemigram, and printing-out process.

Influenced by her background in structural/materialist filmmaking, Lisa Oppenheim (American, born 1975) is interested in exploring the ways in which a photograph can record both its subject and the process by which it was made. In three bodies of work dating from 2010 to present, she enlists the very entities depicted in the negatives – the sun, the moon, and smoke / fire – in the act of exposing them. Although they sound scientific, the titles of two of these bodies of work, Heliograms and Lunagrams, are made up, combining the name of the camera-less photogram technique and the source of light by which the enlarged negatives have been contact-printed.

Chris McCaw (American, born 1971) establishes an immediate, visceral relationship between his subject, the sun, and his process, which involves loading photographic paper directly into the camera. The photographs in his Sunburn series record the sun’s movement, which literally sears its path into the paper in the form of dots, lines, or arcs, depending on its position, the weather conditions, and the length of the exposure(s). McCaw uses customised cameras outfitted with vintage military lenses pointed directly at the sun to function like a magnifying glass that burns through the emulsion layer and paper base, leaving behind singe marks and solarised passages.

John Chiara’s (American, born 1971) large-scale colour prints convey a hands-on – rather than pristine, mechanised – aesthetic. For the past decade his subjects have been both uninhabited landscapes and the built environment. He works with large custom-built cameras that he loads with colour photographic paper that he then processes himself by pouring chemicals into a six-foot-long section of PVC sewer pipe, sealing the tube, and then rolling it back and forth on the floor. Irregular streaks and drips characterise his prints, as do areas of overexposure and underexposure, flare from light leaks, and unevenly saturated colours.

Matthew Brandt (American, born 1982) has created diverse bodies of work, some of which are realised with photographic means and others that are more tangentially related to photographic images, techniques, or ideas. He may begin with a photograph that he has made with a 4 x 5-inch view camera, a digital camera, or his iPhone, one that he has sourced from archives in public libraries, or one that he has clicked and dragged from Ebay. His fascination with early photographic processes has led him to experiment with salted paper prints, gum bichromate prints, and heliographs, examples of which will be on view. Brandt’s interest in both photographic/visual and the physical/material forms of representation has led him to bring the two together, incorporating physical elements from his subjects into his photographic representations of them.

Light, Paper, Process: Reinventing Photography, is on view April 14-September 6, 2015 at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center. The exhibition is curated by Virginia Heckert, department head of the Museum’s Department of Photographs. A related publication of the same title will be produced by Getty Publications.

Press release from the J. Paul Getty Museum website

Alison Rossiter (American, b. 1953)
Haloid Platina, exact expiration date unknown, about 1915, processed 2010
2010
Gelatin silver print
Image (each): 21.6 x 16.5cm (8 1/2 x 6 1/2 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Purchased with funds provided by the Photographs Council
© Alison Rossiter

Alison Rossiter (American, b. 1953)
Fuji gaslight, exact expiration date unknown, about 1920s, processed 2010
2010
Gelatin silver print
30.5 x 25.4cm (12 x 10 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Purchased with funds provided by the Photographs Council
© Alison Rossiter

Alison Rossiter (American, b. 1953)
Kilbourn Acme Kruxo, exact expiration date unknown, about 1940s, processed 2013
2013
Gelatin silver print
12.7 x 17.8cm (5 x 7 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Purchased with funds provided by the Photographs Council
© Alison Rossiter

Marco Breuer (German, b. 1966)
Untitled (Heat/Gun)
2001
Gelatin silver paper, burned
27.9 x 21.6cm (11 x 8 1/2 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Purchased with funds provided by the Photographs Council
© Marco Breuer

Marco Breuer (German, b. 1966)
Untitled (C-62)
2002
Chromogenic paper, exposed and abraded
35.6 x 27.9cm (14 x 11 in.)
Courtesy of the artist and Yossi Milo Gallery, New York
© Marco Breuer

Marco Breuer (German, b. 1966)
Spin (C-824)
2008
Chromogenic paper, embossed and scratched
34.6 x 27cm (13 5/8 x 10 5/8 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Purchased with funds provided by the Photographs Council
© Marco Breuer

James Welling (American, b. 1951)
Water
2009
Chromogenic print
60.3 x 50.2cm (23 3/4 x 19 3/4 in.)
Courtesy of the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles
© James Welling

James Welling (American, b. 1951)
Water
2009
Chromogenic print
58.7 x 49.5cm (23 1/8 x 19 1/2 in.)
Courtesy of the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles
© James Welling

James Welling (American, b. 1951)
Chemical
2013
Chemigram on chromogenic paper
35.6 x 27.9cm (14 x 11 in.)
Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, New York/London
© James Welling

Lisa Oppenheim (American, b. 1975)
Heliograms July 8, 1876 / October 16, 2011
2011
Gelatin silver print exposed with sunlight, toned
30 x 27.9cm (11 13/16 x 11 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© Lisa Oppenheim

Lisa Oppenheim (American, b. 1975)
A Handley Page Halifax of No. 4 Group flies over the suburbs of Caen, France, during a major daylight raid to assist the Normandy land battle. 467 aircraft took part in the attack, which was originally intended to have bombed German strongpoints north of Caen, but the bombing area was eventually shifted nearer the city because of the proximity of Allied troops to the original targets. The resulting bombing devastated the northern suburbs, 1944/2012
2012
Gelatin silver print
Framed (approx.): 71.1 x 86.4 cm (28 x 34 in.)
Overall: Five gelatin silver prints (photograms)
Overall (approx.): 24 × 110″ (61 × 279.4 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Fund for the Twenty-First Century
Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY
© Lisa Oppenheim

Lisa Oppenheim (American, b. 1975)
A Handley Page Halifax of No. 4 Group flies over the suburbs of Caen, France, during a major daylight raid to assist the Normandy land battle. 467 aircraft took part in the attack, which was originally intended to have bombed German strongpoints north of Caen, but the bombing area was eventually shifted nearer the city because of the proximity of Allied troops to the original targets. The resulting bombing devastated the northern suburbs, 1944/2012 (detail)
2012
Gelatin silver print
Framed (approx.): 71.1 x 86.4 cm (28 x 34 in.)
Overall: Five gelatin silver prints (photograms)
Overall (approx.): 24 × 110″ (61 × 279.4 cm)
The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Fund for the Twenty-First Century
Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY
© Lisa Oppenheim

Oppenheim produces experimental films and photograms (photographs made without a camera). In Smoke and related works she uses the techniques of documentary photography to call the premises of the genre into question. She begins with the photo-sharing site Flickr, as a source for images of fire caused by natural or industrial disasters or bombing attacks (such as those over occupied France during World War II), and outputs segments of these pictures to create digital negatives. She then exposes photographic paper through the negatives, using firelight instead of the typical darkroom enlarger as a light source, then develops the photographic paper in solarol, a specially designed developer that creates a solarised effect, reversing lights and darks. The schism between the optical expressiveness of the pictures and the scientism of the captions (which are long, descriptive, and include the date and location of the event), shows that one’s understanding of the world is partial, that photography can only represent the world, and that the documentary genre is ultimately fraught with uncertainty.

Gallery label from New Photography 2013, September 14, 2013 – January 6, 2014, Museum of Modern Art website.

Chris McCaw (American, b. 1971)
Sunburned GSP #609 (San Francisco Bay)
2012
Gelatin silver paper negatives
76.1 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Chris McCaw (American, b. 1971)
Sunburned GSP #555 (San Francisco Bay)
2012
Gelatin silver paper negative
20.3 x 25.4cm (8 x 10 in.)
Courtesy of Stephen Wirtz Gallery San Francisco
© Chris McCaw

Chris McCaw (American, b. 1971)
Poly-optic #10
2012
Gelatin silver paper negative
20.3 x 25.4cm (8 x 10 in.)
Collection of Leslie, Judith and Gabrielle Schreyer, Courtesy of Stephen Wirtz Gallery
© Chris McCaw

John Chiara (American, b. 1971)
Longview at Panorama
2007
Dye destruction photograph on Ilfochrome paper
50.8 x 40.6cm (20 x 16 in.)
Rose Gallery and Von Lintel Gallery
© John Chiara

John Chiara (American, b. 1971)
Grandview at Elysian
2012
Dye destruction photographs on Ilfochrome paper
Each image: 85.1 x 71.1cm (33 1/2 x 28 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of Trish and Jan de Bont
© John Chiara

John Chiara (American, b. 1971)
Starr King: 30th: Coral
2013
Dye destruction photograph on Ilfochrome paper
83.8 x 71.1cm (33 x 28 in.)
Kerstin Morehead
© John Chiara

John Chiara (American, b. 1971)
Sierra at Edison
2012
Chromogenic photograph on Kodak Professional Endura Metallic paper
127 x 182.9cm (50 x 72 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Purchased with funds provided by the Photographs Council
© John Chiara

Matthew Brandt (American, b. 1982)
00036082-3 “Mathers Department Store, Pasadena, 1971”
2013
Gum bichromate print with dust from AT&T parking structure level 2
110.5 x 143.5cm (43 1/2 x 56 1/2 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Gift of the artist and M+B
© Matthew Brandt, Source image courtesy of the Los Angeles Public Library Photo Collection

Matthew Brandt (American, b. 1982)
Rainbow Lake, WY A4
Negative 2012; print 2013
Chromogenic print, soaked in Rainbow Lake water
76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Purchased with funds provided by the Photographs Council
© Matthew Brandt

Matthew Brandt (American, b. 1982)
Rainbow Lake, WY A20
Negative 2012; print 2013
Chromogenic print, soaked in Rainbow Lake water
76.2 x 101.6cm (30 x 40 in.)
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Purchased with funds provided by the Photographs Council
© Matthew Brandt

The J. Paul Getty Museum
1200 Getty Center Drive
Los Angeles, California 90049

Opening hours:
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Closed Mondays

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Exhibition: ‘The view from here: The photographic world of Alfred Elliott 1890-1940’ at the Museum of Brisbane

Exhibition dates: 13 February – 30 August 2015

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Brisbane Botanic Gardens, near the Edward Street entrance
1895
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

This is more like it… what a find!

There are some fascinating punctum (which denote the wounding, personally touching detail which establishes a direct relationship with the object or person within the image), contained among this recently discovered treasure trove of photographs by Alfred Elliott.

At first, what looks like a real dog is actually a toy sitting in front of Alfred Goldsbrough Elliott, Stanley Terrace, Taringa (1908). And then you notice the hard-nosed stare of the little girl in Dorothy Elliott (1911). She is not a happy camper. Then the scruffy, bare-footed urchin in ‘Welcome to Brisbane’ arch, Queen Street (1895). Or the unhappy woman staring directly into the camera in Grand Arch, Queen Street, visit of the Duke of York (1901), as though her thoughts are being transmitted to us from beyond the grave. And finally, to the two young, blurred children running in front of a white picket fence in Windmill, Wickham Terrace (1895), the smaller of the children noticing the photographer and camera and looking towards both. Just a joy!

And don’t forget, all of these early photographs were taken with a large plate camera (the photographs after 1921 were taken with a film camera and have a totally different feel to them). For an artist to obtain the street photographs and potraits out in the field with this type of camera is superb. Just look at the image Members of the QLD League of Wheelmen, Wellington Point (1897). You can tell the personality of every individual in this image through the clarity, not just of the image but of the thought of the photographer, before he exposed his plate. It is so Australian in its iconography, it could come from nowhere else in the world. This photograph deserves to be up there with one of the seminal images of Australian photography.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

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Many thanks to the Museum of Brisbane for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

The view from here: The photographic world of Alfred Elliott 1890-1940

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Brisbane, from the Windmill
1895
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Aborigines fishing in the Maroochy River
1890
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Central Railway Station, from Edward Street
1922
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
‘Citizens’ Welcome’ arch, Queen Street
1927
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
‘Citizens’ Welcome’ arch, Queen Street (detail)
1927
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Museum of Brisbane’s latest exhibition offers an amazing visual portrait of a lost city – Brisbane at the turn of the 20th century – through a rare collection of photographs, all shot by a single resident and left forgotten under an inner-city house for decades. The view from here: The photographic world of Alfred Elliott 1890-1940 showcases the life’s work of the avid Brisbane-based photographer, offering a fascinating chronicle of the places he visited, major events he witnessed and intimate glimpses into his family life.

The historic collection of glass-plate and film negatives remained stored in cigar boxes under a house in Red Hill until they were uncovered in 1983 and acquired by Museum of Brisbane. For the past 30 years ‘The Elliott Collection’ was thought to comprise 285 glass plate negatives, until a neglected cigar box with more than 400 film negatives was uncovered at the Museum’s storage facility last year. This significant discovery has allowed the Museum to further piece together fragments of the passionate amateur photographer’s past. The collection provides a window into both his life and the life of a quickly changing city.

Elliott’s work also captures significant moments in Brisbane’s history, including the Duke and Duchess of York’s visit in 1901 and the farewell of the troops aboard SS Cornwall from Pinkenba in 1899. Museum of Brisbane Director Peter Denham said the collection was an exceptional record of one man’s perspective of Brisbane at a very exciting time.

“These unseen photographs offer a unique view of Brisbane at a significant turning point – the city’s population was booming, grand civic structures were erected and huge social change was occurring,” Mr Denham said. “The interactive elements of The view from here offer visitors the chance to get up close with buildings from our past, as well as investigate the photographic technology from the turn of last century.”

“With the discovery of hundreds of new photos, we have learned a lot about Elliott and his family and were even able to locate his much-loved home in Taringa. It is part of our mission as the city’s museum to uncover new stories and we are thrilled to share these findings with visitors. The exhibition wonderfully captures how much our city has changed and I think it will encourage people to reflect on their own perceptions of Brisbane.” The view from here will run until 30 August 2015.

Press release from the Museum of Brisbane website

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Dorothy Elliott, Amy Lock, Mrs Lock and Elizabeth Ellen Elliott
Nd
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Elizabeth Ellen Elliott w the Dillon sisters Mary, Clare, Margo
Nd
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Government House, George Street
1908
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Maroochy
1890
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Maroochy (detail)
1890
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Members of the QLD League of Wheelmen, Wellington Point
1897
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

The first shipment of tricycles arrived in Brisbane in 1870 and the first race is reported to have been between a cyclist and a Cobb and Co coach from Brisbane to Sandgate. No official timing was recorded.

The initial Brisbane Bicycle Club meeting was held in 1881 at the Belle Vue Hotel. High wheel bicycles including the Penny Farthing were the only bikes available and novelty Penny Farthing races were held in the Brisbane Botanic Gardens where more riders fell off than stayed on. By 1886 Brisbane had 200 bicycles and 50 of these were used for racing…

The first Queensland championship was held at the Breakfast Creek Sports Ground in 1891 and was won by Lou Isles. Isles also rode long distance, riding from Brisbane to Sydney in 1891 a 700 mile trek which he completed in 7 days. Imported bicycles cost £30 although local bicycles could be bought for two pound ten. Successful Queensland riders of the day included Ben Goodsen, Billy Dowd and Percy Davies.

In 1895 a record of 1 hour 2 minutes and 10 seconds was set by George Stombaco for a 34 kilometre race over rough dirt roads from Brisbane and Cleveland. That same year, The League of Queensland Wheelmen held a Christmas Carnival with over 8000 attendees. Brisbane wasn’t the only town with a club as Maryborough, Townsville, Ipswich and Rockhampton also had successful clubs.

Karen Hind. “Cycling in Queensland.” 18 July 2011 [Online] Cited 19/08/2015.

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Treasury Building, William Street
1895
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Victoria Bridge, decorated for the Duke of York
1901
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Victoria Bridge, decorated for the Duke of York (detail)
1901
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

The images chronicle a broad range of Elliott’s life – from private moments with friends on family trips and picnics at the Glasshouse Mountains to key moments in Brisbane’s history such as the construction of Central Railway Station in 1899 and the visit from the Duke and Duchess of York in 1901. Images were captured in locations including Mt Coot-tha, the city’s Botanic Gardens, Tweeds Heads just south of the border and the Moreton Bay Region – all undertaken by train, bus, boat, car and possibly even by horse and bicycle.

Curator Phil Manning, who discovered the last cigar box, said it was evident from the body of work that Elliott was proud of his city.

“He documented the city by walking the streets and going on travels with his family,” Mr Manning said. “He had a strong connection to the British Empire, that was probably the area he was most drawn to documenting … royal visits and the Queensland troops going off to the Boer War. But he’s also photographed Brisbane’s new buildings and structures such as the bridges that went up following the 1893 flood.”

Elliot’s first photographs were dated 1890 and captured on dry-plate glass negatives, including both single image and stereograph negatives. They were a mixture of amateur and professionally produced plates. Elliot used glass plates until 1921 when it appeared he changed to a camera with film.

Very little was known about Alfred Henrie Elliott. He was born in Paignton in England in 1870 and was the youngest of seven children. His family came to Queensland when he was seven years old, with his father taking up post as principal of Humpybong Primary School in Redcliffe, north of Brisbane. Elliott was known to have worked in Brisbane as a civil servant in a variety of roles. His working life also included jobs as a law clerk, professional shorthand writer and a bank clerk.

Patrick Williams and Maria Hatzakis. “Uncovered glass plates and film negatives capturing 50 years of Brisbane’s history go on display,” on the ABC News website, 10 Feb 2015 [Online] Cited on 19/08/2015.

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Eight hour day procession on Queen Street in Brisbane city
1893
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Alfred Goldsbrough Elliott, Stanley Terrace, Taringa
1908
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Dorothy Elliott
1911
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Dorothy Elliott (detail)
1911
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Grand Arch, Queen Street, visit of the Duke of York
1901
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Grand Arch, Queen Street, visit of the Duke of York (detail)
1901
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Picnic party on Brisbane River at Seventeen Mile Rocks
1898
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Picnic party on Brisbane River at Seventeen Mile Rocks (detail)
1898
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Queen Street, Brisbane
1899
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Treasury Building, Queen and William Street
1901
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
‘Welcome to Brisbane’ arch, Queen Street
1920
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
‘Welcome to Brisbane’ arch, Queen Street (detail)
1920
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Windmill, Wickham Terrace
1895
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Windmill, Wickham Terrace (detail)
1895
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Alfred Henry Elliott (1870-1954)
1899
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Alfred Elliott (Australian, 1870-1954)
Elizabeth Ellen Elliott and Alfred Elliott
1899
City of Brisbane Collection, Museum of Brisbane

Museum of Brisbane

Museum of Brisbane is located on Level 3, Brisbane City Hall (Adelaide and Ann Street, Brisbane QLD)

Opening hours:
Open 7 days a week, 10am – 5pm

Museum of Brisbane website

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Exhibition: ‘Robert Mapplethorpe’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki

Exhibition dates: 13th March – 13th September 2015

Curators: The exhibition is curated by Jérôme Neutres from Paris with Director Pirkko Siitari and Chief Curator Marja Sakari from Kiasma.

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Ken Moody and Robert Sherman
1984
Gelatin silver print
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

These images are good to see… but not really what I want to see.

I want to see some of the early work, and some of the S/M photographs. You never get to see these online. It’s almost as though the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation is too scared to authorise the online publication of these works, for fear of – heaven forbid – letting people understand all the facets of Mapplethorpe’s work.

Its the origin story and the picturing of his sexual proclivities that are some of his most powerful work… and we never get to see them. Eros (denied).

Marcus
.
Many thankx to the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Robert Mapplethorpe @ Kiasma 13.3. – 13.9.2015

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Self-Portrait
1980
Gelatin silver print
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Leather Crotch
1980
Gelatin silver print
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

The American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) lived a life of passion in the New York underground and rock scenes in the 1970s and ’80s. That passion also made its way into his art.

Consisting of more than 250 works, the retrospective exhibition in the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma offers a broad overview of the key periods of Mapplethorpe’s career. In their aspiration for perfection, Mapplethorpe’s pictures blend beauty and eroticism with pain, pleasure and death. Mapplethorpe also photographed his celebrity friends such as Patti Smith, Andy Warhol and Richard Gere. Although solidly anchored in their time, his photographs are also universal and topical even today.

Arriving from Paris to Helsinki, the high-profile exhibition is a unique opportunity to learn about the art and life of one of the most important photographic artists of our time. The exhibition is curated by Jérôme Neutres from Paris with Director Pirkko Siitari and Chief Curator Marja Sakari from Kiasma.

This exhibition is organised by The Finnish National Gallery – Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma and the Réunion des Musées Nationaux – Grand Palais, with the collaboration of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation New York.

Exhibition themes

Body sculpture

“If I had been born one hundred or two hundred years ago, I might have been a sculptor, but photography is a very quick way to see, to make sculpture.” ~ Robert Mapplethorpe

Mapplethorpe became interested in photographing sculpture during his first trip to Paris in the early 1970s. He also began taking pictures of people in poses that imitated classical sculptures. Lisa Lyon, the first World Women’s Bodybuilding Champion, was the subject in many of the pictures.

Body and geometry

Mapplethorpe prized order and purity of form in his art. He was also particular about the frames of his pictures, which he often designed himself. He had great respect for the long history of art. Some of his nude studies echo Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man which shows an idealised human body inside a circle and a square

Still lifes and body details

“I am looking for perfection in form. I do that with portraits. I do it with cocks. I do it with flowers.” ~ Robert Mapplethorpe

Mapplethorpe’s still lifes and pictures of body parts play with stormy associations. They are distinctly corporeal and vitalistic, whether the subject is an exposed penis or an aubergine on a table. Mapplethorpe said he looked at all objects in precisely the same way. According to Patti Smith, “Robert infused objects, whether for art or life, with his creative impulse, his sacred sexual power. He transformed a ring of keys, a kitchen knife, or a simple wooden frame into art.”

Chapel and Colour bracket

“I was a Catholic boy, I went to church every Sunday. A church has a certain magic and mystery for a child.” ~ Robert Mapplethorpe

Mapplethorpe came from a Roman Catholic family, but his interest in the church was primarily aesthetic. He said he wanted his pictures to be viewed like altars. The figure of a crucified Christ appears in some of his works, as does the human skull, a traditional reminder of death. Instead of suffering, however, the images convey a sense of sinful pleasure. Mapplethorpe worked with colour film starting in the late 1970s, but did not routinely exhibit his colour photos until the end of the 1980s.

Mapplethorpe and women

“Lisa Lyon reminded me of Michelangelo’s subjects, because he did muscular women.” ~ Robert Mapplethorpe

Poet and musician Patti Smith was Mapplethorpe’s first and last model and muse. Mapplethorpe photographed covers for Smith’s albums and books of poems. Another important model was the body builder Lisa Lyon, who is the subject of Mapplethorpe’s book Lady: Lisa Lyon. Both women could be described as androgynous. Locating himself in the same intermediate space between femininity and masculinity, Mapplethorpe photographed himself in drag.

Portraits

New York and the Chelsea Hotel in particular were places where the American cultural intelligentsia used to gather in the 1970s. There Mapplethorpe met writers, musicians and artists such as William Burroughs, Iggy Pop and David Hockney, and enjoyed the attention lavished on him. He became the court photographer of certain cultural circles, his camera capturing friends, celebrities and famous figures in the art world.

Eros

“I don’t think anyone understands sexuality. It’s about an unknown, which is why it’s so exciting.” ~ Robert Mapplethorpe

Sadomasochism, S&M, was both sex and magic for Mapplethorpe. Like the French writer Jean Genet, he too wanted to elevate things into art that were not yet considered art. Mapplethorpe’s depiction of fetishes in his photographs was deliberately formal. He documented spontaneous acts only very infrequently. The sex he captured in his pictures was neither malicious nor repugnant. S&M is about desire and pleasure, and above all about trust.

Polaroids

“I’m trying to record the moment I’m living in and where I’m living, which happens to be in New York. These pictures could not have been done at any other time.” ~ Robert Mapplethorpe

Mapplethorpe got his first Polaroid camera in 1970 and fell in love with its simplicity: there were few adjustments to make and you could see the results instantly. Because the film was expensive, Mapplethorpe felt that every picture had to be perfect. Precision and economy became a habit that endured throughout his career. In 1975, he switched over to the more versatile Hasselblad 500.

Still moving

“We were like two children playing together, like the brother and sister in Cocteau’s ‘Enfants Terribles’.” ~ Patti Smith

Robert Mapplethorpe and Patti Smith began their creative careers together. Frequently they would not plan their projects in advance. The experimental short Still Moving had no script, and Smith improvised her movements and lines. The camera operator was Lisa Rinzler. “He wordlessly guided me. I was an oar in the water and his the steady hand,” Smith has said.

Robert Mapplethorpe – Portraits

New York was home to America’s cultural intelligentsia in the 1970s. Mapplethorpe was the court photographer of the cultural elite. His portraits feature his friends, celebrities and influential figures on the art scene.

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Self-Portrait
1975
Gelatin silver print
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Patti Smith
1979
Gelatin silver print
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Poppy
1988
Unique dye transfer
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Installation views of the exhibition Robert Mapplethorpe at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki
Finnish National Gallery / Pirje Mykkänen

Who’s who?

Princesse Diane de Beauvau
French aristocrat, model and fashion muse
Bruno Bischofberger
Swiss gallerist and art dealer known for bringing American Pop Art to Europe, long-term associate of Andy Warhol
Louise Bourgeois
French-born sculptor known for her gigantic spider sculptures
Miep Brons
Dutch porn dealer
William Burroughs
Writer and primary figure of the Beat Generation
Alistair Butler
New York dancer
Patrice Calmettes
French photographer
Truman Capote
American author and journalist whose best known titles include Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood
Leo Castelli
American-Italian gallerist, influential promoter of contemporary art in New York
Katherine Cebrian
San Francisco socialite
Francesco Clemente
Italian-born contemporary artist
Ed and Melody
Mapplethorpe’s brother Edward and his girlfriend at the time, Melody, a friend of Mapplethorpe’s
Richard Gere
American actor, idolised at the time of this portrait following his performance in American Gigolo
Philip Glass and Robert Wilson
Glass is a contemporary composer, Wilson a director and playwright. At the time of this portrait, they had worked together on their opera Einstein on the Beach
Keith Haring
American Pop and graffiti artist
Deborah Harry
Singer and actress, best known as lead singer of Blondie
David Hockney and Henry Geldzahler
Hockney is a British artist and Pop Art pioneer. Belgian-born Geldzahler was a curator, critic and art historian
Grace Jones
Jamaican-born singer, producer, actress and model
Amanda Lear
French singer, performer, painter and author, friend of celebrities such as David Bowie, Salvador Dalí and Brian Jones
Annie Leibovitz
American photographer whose work featured on the cover Rolling Stone and Vanity Fair
Roy Lichtenstein
American painter, sculptor and leading Pop artist
Lisa and Robert
Mapplethorpe and his long-term muse, bodybuilder Lisa Lyon
John McKendry
Curator of prints and photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and personal friend who first introduced Mapplethorpe to the MET’s fine art photography collection
Louise Nevelson
American sculptor
Yoko Ono
Japanese-born artist and musician
Philippe
French socialite
Iggy Pop
Singer, songwriter and actor known for his energetic stage presence as lead singer of The Stooges
Robert Rauschenberg
American artist who inspired later generations of artists including Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, regarded as a major figure in the transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art
Isabella Rossellini
Italian-born actress, model, filmmaker, author, and philanthropist
Giorgio di Sant’Angelo
Italian-born fashion designer
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Budding actor and award-winning bodybuilder at the time of this portrait, he later achieved world renown as a Hollywood star and Governor of California
Cindy Sherman
American contemporary artist, known for photographs analysing women’s roles and place in society
Holly Solomon
A self-anointed ‘Pop princess’, Solomon was a prominent collector and subsequent dealer of contemporary art. She was famously immortalised by other artists such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein
Susan Sontag
American writer and essayist
Tom of Finland
Finnish artist and illustrator. His drawings had a major influence on gay culture from the 1970s onwards. Mapplethorpe and Andy Warhol were among his admirers
Sam Wagstaff
Curator, collector, Mapplethorpe’s lifetime companion and artistic mentor
Andy Warhol
Pop Art pioneer and filmmaker, greatly admired by Mapplethorpe
Edmund White
American author, known for his work on gay themes

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Ajitto
1981
Gelatin silver print
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Lisa Lyon
1982
Gelatin silver print
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Robert Mapplethorpe (American, 1946-1989)
Self-Portrait
1988
Gelatin silver print
© Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma
Mannerheiminaukio 2, FIN-00100
Helsinki, Finland
Phone:+358 (0)294 500 501

Opening hours:
Tuesday – Friday 10 – 20.30
Saturday 10 – 18
Sunday 10 – 17
Monday closed

Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma website

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Exhibition: ‘Early Photography in Imperial China’ at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Exhibition dates: 5th June – 23rd August 2015

Afong (Lai Afong) (Chinese, 1838 or 1839-1890)
A Chinese Party Game
c. 1895
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

For me, the standout photographs in this posting are Mee Cheung’s rhythmic Buddhist Monks in Chefoo and the work of Baron Raimund von Stillfried und Ratenitz, especially the three photographs Portrait of two Chinese Buddhist monks with rosary, bell and slit drum, Portrait of a Chinese woman and Portrait of Chinese Admiral Ting.

The latter three have a deceptively simple structure, delicate hand colouring, and a visual and metaphysical presence that is almost beyond description… as though you know the character and personality of these anonymous human beings through the rendition of their image. In a way they are humanist portraits presaging the tradition of the more scientific and archetypal portraits of August Sander.

You can see in the face of Admiral Ting that he is a prosperous and powerful man, you can see the individuality of each person in these images, the individualisation of these people, a tradition which is continued by today’s documentary photographers. But not generally by today’s art photographers looking at the portrait because, for them, the portrait is surface and detail – controlled by the photographer and not responsive to the subject.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

.
Many thankx to the Rijksmuseum for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

A. Chan (YA Zhen) (Chinese)
Sheung-mun-tai Street in Canton
c. 1870
Collectie Ferry Bertholet, Amsterdam

A. Chan (YA Zhen) (Chinese)
Sheung-mun-tai Street in Canton (detail)
c. 1870
Collectie Ferry Bertholet, Amsterdam

Mee Cheung & Co
Buddhist Monks in Chefoo
c. 1880-1890
Collection Ferry Bertholet, Amsterdam

Mee Cheung & Co
Buddhist Monks in Chefoo (detail)
c. 1880-1890
Collection Ferry Bertholet, Amsterdam

Afong (Lai Afong) (Chinese, 1838 or 1839-1890)
Studio Portrait of Courtesans in Shanghai
c. 1875-1880
Collections Ferry Bertholet, Amsterdam

Afong (Lai Afong) (Chinese, 1838 or 1839-1890)
Studio Portrait of Courtesans in Shanghai (detail)
c. 1875-1880
Collections Ferry Bertholet, Amsterdam

Rare photos, photo albums and stereo photos from the collection of China expert Ferry Bertholet, enhanced with photographs from the Rijksmuseum’s collection, show 19th century unknown China at the time of the last emperors for the very first time. From 5 June to 23 August 2015 the Rijksmuseum is presenting Early Photography in Imperial China in it’s Photo Gallery.

In the 19th century Imperial China was almost entirely hidden away from the world until the last Emperor was deposed in 1912. Access was limited to port cities such as Shanghai, Hong Kong and Canton, which were forced to be open to the West after 1842 so that Westerners could trade unimpeded. The advent of photography coincided with a rapidly growing interest in the unknown China. The photographs in the exhibition take the visitor into this exciting unknown world of ports, quays and rickshaws, but also of narrow crowded streets bustling with the multitude of shops and ‘tea houses’ and their hostesses.

The display includes important photographs by such as Felice Beato (his famous photograph of the Second Opium War 1857-1860) and the famous China photographer John Thomson. They were among the first Europeans able to record images of a country that – even at that time – was still barely accessible to the rest of the world. Furthermore, this is also the first time that the work of Chinese photographers such as Afong, Lan Wah and Sze Yuen Ming has ever been shown in the Netherlands.  Other highlights of the exhibition include a rare Chinese family portrait from 1860 from the Bertholet collection of American photographer Milton Miller, as well as the coloured photos of ‘types of people’ by Baron Raimund Ratenitz von Stillfried.

Besides the 35 photos in the exhibition, a huge travel camera from that time is also on display, illustrating how awkward it was to photograph such material. There are also stereo photos in 3D, including a special shot of the city of Peking in 1860, and photo albums and amateur photos of travellers to China are also on display. A richly illustrated book was published recently: Ferry Bertholet & Lambert van der Aalsvoort, Among the Celestials. China in Early Photographs, Brussels 2014.

Press release from the Rijksmuseum website

Anonymous photographer
Peking
c. 1860 – c. 1930

Attributed to Baron Raimund von Stillfried und Ratenitz (Austrian, 1839-1911)
Chinese carriers
c. 1861 – c. 1880

Attributed to Baron Raimund von Stillfried und Ratenitz (Austrian, 1839-1911)
Portrait of two Chinese Buddhist monks with rosary, bell and slit drum
1875

Attributed to Baron Raimund von Stillfried und Ratenitz (Austrian, 1839-1911)
Portrait of two Chinese Buddhist monks with rosary, bell and slit drum (detail)
1875

Attributed to Baron Raimund von Stillfried und Ratenitz (Austrian, 1839-1911)
Portrait of a Chinese woman
1860 – 1870

Attributed to Baron Raimund von Stillfried und Ratenitz (Austrian, 1839-1911)
Portrait of Chinese Admiral Ting
c. 1861 – c. 1880

Attributed to Baron Raimund von Stillfried und Ratenitz (Austrian, 1839-1911)
Portrait of Chinese Admiral Ting (detail)
c. 1861 – c. 1880

Attributed to Jan Adriani (Dutch, d. 1948)
A street with several people in Kinkiang, China
1907

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Jan Luijkenstraat 1, Amsterdam

Opening hours:
Every day from 9:00 to 18:00

Rijksmuseum website

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Exhibition: ‘Crowd Source’ at the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney

Exhibition dates: 4th April – 23rd August 2015

Arthur K. Syer (Australian, d. 1935)
Argyle Cut, The Rocks
c. 1880s-1900
Albumen print
From an album of Sydney street life, harbour and beach scenes, domestic animals
81 photographs in album: 15.2 x 20.4cm or smaller
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

There is an almost Dickensian mellow dramatic feel to some of these 1880s-1900 albumen photographs by Sydney photographer Arthur K. Syer.

While the photographs offer a unique point of view (low down by the waist) of Victorian era Sydney, you get the feeling that Syer was more interested in the fact that his camera was hidden, and the game he was playing to get these photographs, than in the visual construction of the images themselves.

The best of them are photographs – such as Hawker haggling with customers, with its links to the photography of Atget, and crowd scenes like Men in street, where the different poses of the men and the rising and falling of the six items of headgear – which offer a rhythmic consideration and interest that other photographs in the posting lack.

The gem in this group of images is the outstanding Forest Lodge double decker steam tram stopped on Elizabeth Street near Supreme Court N.S.W. Again, it is the attitude and rhythm of the protagonists within the image frame that makes this diorama so engaging. The man at left looks away from us with his back to the camera, while above him a man stands in the tram perpendicular to him, giving a nice play to the space between the tram carriages. Three people in alternating dark and light hats wait patiently for a old biddie to descend from the open door of the tram, the man holding on to the hand rail of the tram ready to pull himself up, just as everyone still does on old trams in Melbourne to this day. Above on the top deck sits a young man staring straight at the camera (without knowing it is there), with his legs crossed in a most unusual and uncomfortable way.

Below him to the right a gent in a bowler hat talks with his wife, cigar stuck in his mouth. His facial outline, lit by the sun, is echoed in the darkness of the interior of the tram by another man with a beard and hat sitting in shadow. In front of this husband and wife is a son with his mother / grandmother – she, clutching her bag in heavy tassel-fringed cloak, protecting herself with umbrella against the sun – he, in long gents morning coat and hat looking very dapper. It must be mid afternoon by the length of the shadows cast by the sun. To the right of this pair is an older, heavy set man with great beard and hat, looking out of the image to the right. His gaze is cut across by a man sitting in the tram, all darkness and outline, beard and hat, looking out onto the scene from the interior. Finally, to ground the foreground of the image, there is a mother and daughter at bottom right of the image, with the small child clutching at the mother’s dress.

The characters in this Dickens play rise and fall from left to right. They wash over you in their happenstance, frozen interaction. It is a superbly constructed image. Interesting as they are in their own vernacular way, it just makes the other images in this posting seem rather, well, prosaic.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

.
Many thankx to the State Library of New South Wales for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Arthur K. Syer (Australian, d. 1935)
George Street, The Rocks
c. 1880s-1900
Albumen print
From an album of Sydney street life, harbour and beach scenes, domestic animals
81 photographs in album: 15.2 x 20.4cm or smaller
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Thank you to Philip Cohen for pointing out this is Little Essex Street, looking East towards George Street; this street is no more as the underground railway now comes out at this point.

Arthur K. Syer (Australian, d. 1935)
George Street, The Rocks (detail)
c. 1880s-1900
Albumen print
From an album of Sydney street life, harbour and beach scenes, domestic animals
81 photographs in album: 15.2 x 20.4 cm or smaller
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Arthur K. Syer (Australian, d. 1935)
Martin Place near the GPO Colonnade
c. 1880s-1900
Albumen print
From an album of Sydney street life, harbour and beach scenes, domestic animals
81 photographs in album: 15.2 x 20.4cm or smaller
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Arthur K. Syer (Australian, d. 1935)
Devonshire and Chalmers Streets near Central Station
c. 1880s-1900
Albumen print
From an album of Sydney street life, harbour and beach scenes, domestic animals
81 photographs in album: 15.2 x 20.4cm or smaller
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Arthur K. Syer (Australian, d. 1935)
Forest Lodge double decker steam tram stopped on Elizabeth Street near Supreme Court N.S.W.
c. 1880s-1900
Albumen print
From an album of Sydney street life, harbour and beach scenes, domestic animals
81 photographs in album: 15.2 x 20.4cm or smaller
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Thank you to Philip Cohen for the following comments:

“I’d love to know how you [the Mitchell Library that is] identified this view as being “near Supreme Court”. Does this imply that it is King Street on the left? But the building behind the tram has a window on the corner facade; the Supreme Court building has no such feature; then, the destination is Forest Lodge which implies that the tram is traveling South. The building behind the tram looks more like that one on the corner of Park Street, complete with telegraph pole; see “Trams in Elizabeth Street, Sydney, 1886” on the City of Sydney Archives & History Resources website Len Stone and Vic Solomons Collection Nd [Online] Cited 29/01/202.

Arthur K. Syer (Australian, d. 1935)
Forest Lodge double decker steam tram stopped on Elizabeth Street near Supreme Court N.S.W. (detail)
c. 1880s-1900
Albumen print
From an album of Sydney street life, harbour and beach scenes, domestic animals
81 photographs in album: 15.2 x 20.4cm or smaller
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Some of the world’s earliest street photographs, capturing many previously unseen views of Sydney from the 1880s will go on public display for the first time in a new exhibition opening at the State Library of NSW, from Saturday 4 April. Crowd Source presents over 50 rare snapshots of Sydneysiders and Sydney’s bustling streets secretly taken with the world’s first hand‐held camera – branded the ‘Detective Camera’ – by amateur local photographer Arthur Syer.

“Arthur Syer took candid photographs of ordinary people in everyday situations which he supplied to illustrators to use as ‘source material’ to help them create a life-like quality and characters in their drawings,” says exhibition co-curator Margot Riley. “Syer’s distinctive low angle photographs evocatively capture the buzz of 1880s Sydney showing the shoe-shiners and fruit sellers, road workers, transport deliveries and barrow shopping, queues at Circular Quay, children playing, shipping and scenes at the horses races,” said Ms Riley.

Syer crossed into the publishing industry through his artist brother Walter, who introduced him to internationally renowned English cartoonist, Phil May. Invited to Sydney by The Bulletin in 1885, May often used Syer’s images to add authenticity to the backgrounds for his illustrations, for example drawings of people at the racecourse.

When the hand‐held camera was introduced in Australia in the mid‐1880s “it became a craze much like the smart phone or selfie stick of today, with photographs for the first time being able to be taken quickly and unnoticed,” said Ms Riley. The camera resembled “a square case… disguised as a … shoeblack’s box, or even a book. The operator places it upon the ground, or under his arm, the pressure of the pneumatic ball opening or closing the hidden lens at the required moment.” (The Sydney Mail, 2 July 1881).

No skill was required to operate the Detective Camera, signalling the beginning of mass photography. It used dry plate negatives – commercialised by George Eastman of Kodak fame – which were available over the counter at photography shops where negatives could be taken for developing and printing.

“This new technology, which also saw the introduction of other novelties like the ‘vest camera’ and ‘watch camera’, triggered debate around issues of privacy which led to the passing of new privacy laws in America,” says Ms Riley. “Manners and rules around candid photography continue to be a hot topic today.”

The State Library holds over 170 original Arthur Syer photographs – the most extensive collection of early Australian street photography known to exist. With the help of the Flickr community the Library has been able to label many of the images in the collection.

Crowd Source is a free exhibition at the State Library of NSW from 4 April to 23 August 2015. #1880Sydney @statelibrarynsw

Press release from the State Library of New South Wales

Arthur K. Syer (Australian, d. 1935)
Tram, West Crescent St., North Sydney
c. 1880s-1900
Albumen print
From an album of Sydney street life, harbour and beach scenes, domestic animals
81 photographs in album: 15.2 x 20.4cm or smaller
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Thank you to Philip Cohen for pointing out this is in fact Elizabeth Street, near King Street.

Arthur K. Syer (Australian, d. 1935)
Tram, West Crescent St., North Sydney (detail)
c. 1880s-1900
Albumen print
From an album of Sydney street life, harbour and beach scenes, domestic animals
81 photographs in album: 15.2 x 20.4cm or smaller
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Arthur K. Syer (Australian, d. 1935)
Pyrmont Bridge looking across to City
c. 1880s-1900
Albumen print
From an album of Sydney street life, harbour and beach scenes, domestic animals
81 photographs in album: 15.2 x 20.4cm or smaller
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Arthur K. Syer (Australian, d. 1935)
Circular Quay near First Fleet Park
c. 1880s-1900
Albumen print
From an album of Sydney street life, harbour and beach scenes, domestic animals
81 photographs in album: 15.2 x 20.4cm or smaller
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Arthur K. Syer (Australian, d. 1935)
Children crowd around a ladder
c. 1880s-1900
Albumen print
From an album of Sydney street life, harbour and beach scenes, domestic animals
81 photographs in album: 15.2 x 20.4cm or smaller
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Arthur K. Syer (Australian, d. 1935)
Children crowd around a ladder (detail)
c. 1880s-1900
Albumen print
From an album of Sydney street life, harbour and beach scenes, domestic animals
81 photographs in album: 15.2 x 20.4cm or smaller
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Arthur K. Syer (Australian, d. 1935)
Royal Exchange Building in Bridge Street
c. 1880s-1900
Albumen print
From an album of Sydney street life, harbour and beach scenes, domestic animals
81 photographs in album: 15.2 x 20.4cm or smaller
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Arthur K. Syer (Australian, d. 1935)
Men in street
c. 1880s-1900
Albumen print
From an album of Sydney street life, harbour and beach scenes, domestic animals
81 photographs in album: 15.2 x 20.4cm or smaller
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Arthur K. Syer (Australian, d. 1935)
Hawker haggling with customers
c. 1880s-1900
Albumen print
From an album of Sydney street life, harbour and beach scenes, domestic animals
81 photographs in album: 15.2 x 20.4cm or smaller
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

Arthur K. Syer (Australian, d. 1935)
Shoe shiner with customer
c. 1880s-1900
Albumen print
From an album of Sydney street life, harbour and beach scenes, domestic animals
81 photographs in album: 15.2 x 20.4cm or smaller
Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales

State Library of New South Wales
Macquarie Street, Sydney
NSW 2000 Australia
Phone: +61 2 9273 1414

Opening hours:
Monday – Friday 9 am – 5 pm
Saturday – Sunday 10 am – 5 pm

State Library of New South Wales website

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Exhibition: ‘John Wolseley – Heartlands and Headwaters’ at The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 11th April – 16th August 2015

John Wolseley (Australian, b. 1938)
Regeneration after fire – the seeders and the sprouters, Mallee (detail)
2009-2011
Watercolour, charcoal, pencil and pigment
152.2 x 256.7cm irreg.
Collection of Sir Roderick Carnegie AC and Family
© John Wolseley

I went for a long walk through recently burnt mallee scrub in the Big Desert Wilderness Park. Some of the mallee roots had vivid amber, scarlet and mauve new growth exploding from the surviving stumps. Nearby were scatterings of tiny, bright banksia seedlings that had germinated after the fire, causing seed pods to burst open and expel their seeds. Botanists call such trees ‘seeders’, while their companions, the mallee eucalypts, are known as ‘sprouters’. Sprouters have a large root, known as a lignotuber, which stores water and nutrients – this is part of a brilliant strategy for survival in arid landscapes.

This is a wondrous exhibition by John Wolseley at NGV Australia. The whole feeling of the exhibition, its scale and intimacy, the attention to detail and the sheer the beauty of the work is quite outstanding. I was fascinated with the text descriptions the artist gives with each piece of work, included here in the posting.

While Wolseley plays with time (deep time, shallow time and now time) and space here it is more than that, for deep time (or “the zone” in the alternative parlance of athletes) is also used in artistic activity to refer to the experience of being lost in the act of creation or the consumption of a work. To the viewer, so it would seem here for we become lost in the art of creation. There is a sense of timelessness, the experience of unusual freedom within time, an unawareness of time, within Wolseley’s work, yet still grounded in the past and present, flowing into the future of this planet. This sense of place, context, space and time(lessness) are lucidly resolved in the artist’s work.

As the Introduction to the exhibition states, Wolseley conceives the exhibition as gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art, presenting new possibilities for understanding landscape in the twenty-first century. This generally works well in revealing the unique, dynamic processes of natural ecosystems when the work is on the wall. However, the floor of the gallery (natural timber boards) lessened the experience of the “total work of art” for me. If you are designing an exhibition that would seem to me to be immersive (to some extent) then the work needed more grounding than it contains here.

This is a minor observation in an otherwise superlative exhibition. The colours, the sensitivity of the painting, the flow of the images, water, music, prose… are a narrative almost like a fable if the issues were not so real. The heightened imagery and emotional effects of the work make us truly aware that now is the time for action. The future development of the new coal power stations must be stopped. Renewable energy is the energy of the future as much as it is light emanating from the past.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

.
Many thankx to the National Gallery of Victoria for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Artist Interview | John Wolseley

Over the past four years, John Wolseley has travelled and painted throughout the Australian continent. He has journeyed from the swamps of the Tasmanian high country to the coastal flood plains of the tropical north, exploring the nature and action of water and how it has shaped the land.

Wolseley has worked on site beside strange and diverse wetlands – sphagnum bogs, ephemeral waterholes, bilabongs and mangrove swamps – and combined his own distinctive mark-making processes with more traditional watercolour techniques. He has ‘collaborated’ with plants, birds and insects and used a range of drawing systems that includes frottaging (rubbing against) burnt trees, burying papers in sand and swamps and nature printing from leaves, wood and rocks.

The artist’s layered and collaged papers have been assembled as an installation in the shape of a giant branching tree, surrounded by large-scale works which enclose the viewer in an immersive environment. Wolseley has rejected European landscape conventions that often reduce a complex, living system to a static and generalised representation. Instead, he endeavours to reveal the unique, dynamic processes of natural ecosystems. Conceived as gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art), Heartlands and headwaters presents new possibilities for understanding landscape in the twenty-first century.

Introduction text to the exhibition

John Wolseley (Australian, b. 1938)
History of the Whipstick Forest with ephemeral swamps and gold bearing reefs (detail)
2011
Watercolour, charcoal and pencil on 2 sheets (a-b)
233.5 x 286.6cm (overall)
Collection of Sir Roderick Carnegie AC and Family
© John Wolseley

One summer’s day I walked from my studio into the forest and followed a dry creek to some swamps and pools bursting with life. This arid landscape, so torn up and churned over, was still miraculously reinventing itself. Such resilience!

In this drawing I bring together the histories of three kinds of time: the ‘deep time’ of geology, ‘shallow time’ since European arrival, and ‘now time’ in October 2011. The history of the hidden workings of the earth I stole from a geologist’s map. Resting on this ancient framework in the painting’s centre is the green swamp. Above this is another map, which tells the story of William Johnson, a visitor to this forest 160 years ago, whose discovery of gold was the birth of the Bendigo goldfields.

When I was working on this painting, this bush was burnt in line with the government’s draconian legislation to burn all public bushland in Victoria every ten years. This often gives no time for vegetation to mature and seed, and biodiversity in certain fire-sensitive ecologies is being ravaged. My reverence for nature’s resilience was moved to a sense of deep chagrin that yet again we are destroying the matrix which is our home.

John Wolseley (Australian, b. 1938)
From Siberia to Roebuck Bay – the godwits reach the mangrove swamps, WA (detail)
2012
Watercolour over pencil, charcoal and coloured chalk
151.9 x 199cm irreg.
Collection of Sir Roderick Carnegie AC and Family
© John Wolseley

Each year in June the bar-tailed godwits fly 12,000 kilometres from their breeding grounds in Siberia to the north coast of Australia. I was standing by the sea on the north Kimberley coast when out of a clear sky the godwits arrived in vast, pulsing flocks that swooped down to rest on the mudflats. The land, with its mudflats and sandbanks, had been formed by the great king tides, dragged for eons by the cycles of the moon. And now I could see these great tides of godwit, pulled by another powerful force, flow down and merge with the waters.

John Wolseley (Australian, b. 1938)
Natural history of swamps III, heron in swamp – Loy Yang Power Station (detail)
2009-2010
Watercolour, pencil, ink, black chalk, scratching out and leaf
114 x 176cm
Collection of Sir Roderick Carnegie AC and Family
© John Wolseley

I was looking at a dam in the grounds of the Loy Yang Power Station, when in flew a black-backed heron. It looked for fish in the water and then peered at a billboard declaring ‘Hazelwood Power Station – WETLAND DEVELOPMENT PROJECT’. I walked down to the vast open-cut coalmine, and looked for fish fossils and Cryptogamic flora among the seams of coal. Then I returned to the heron, which now seemed to be looking at the steam and CO2 belching out of the cooling towers – those clouds of CO2 that came from the coal which was once a carboniferous swamp.

For four years, artist John Wolseley has roamed the coastal floodplains of the Northern Territory through to the glacial lakes of Tasmania, exploring and recording in exquisite detail the diverse wetlands of Australia. The works he has created will be revealed at NGV Australia.

This series of eighteen evocative works on paper, many of them monumental in scale (up to 10 metres in size), detail the geographical features and unique plants and animals of these wetlands in works characterised by minutely-observed drawing and rich watercolour washes.

Many works combine collage and unusual markings made through burying works or hoisting large sheets of paper across the charred remains of burnt tree trunks and branches. Through this ‘collaboration’ with the natural environment, Wolseley subverts traditional approaches to the depiction of landscape and seeking to give the natural world a more active presence in the work of art.

‘Heartlands and Headwaters celebrates Australia’s unique and diverse natural environment,’ said Tony Ellwood, Director, NGV. ‘Wolseley’s work is not only of great beauty, but also demonstrates how depicting the landscape has become an important form of activism’.

The mangrove swamps of Roebuck Bay in Western Australia, the flood plains of the Gulf of Carpentaria in the Northern Territory, the Finke River in the Simpson Desert and the sphagnum swamps of Skullbone Plains in central Tasmania are just some of the sites detailed in these impressive works.

Commissioned by Sir Roderick Carnegie AC, these works celebrate the beauty of the Australian wilderness and encourage an understanding of the significance and environmental fragility of these remote and little-known sites.

About John Wolseley

Born in England in 1938, John Wolseley immigrated to Australia in 1976 and has gained recognition in the past four decades as one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists whose work engages passionately with the environment.

Over the years Wolseley has travelled extensively throughout the country, into the arid interior and remote wilderness areas in all states, camping out for extended periods and immersing himself in the landscape.

This approach is reflected in the distinctly non-traditional character of the landscape works Wolseley produces. Instead of presenting a single overarching view of a particular site they are composite images that combine precisely observed details of flora and fauna. Informed by readings in geology, biology, cartography and other disciplines, these provide multiple perspectives on the location’s topography, journal notations and observations of natural cycles or patterns of the area.

Press release from the NGV website

John Wolseley (Australian, b. 1938)
Murray-Sunset refugia with 14 ventifacts
2008-2010
From The Great Tree of Drawings 1959-2015, installed 2015
Pencil, watercolour and charcoal on 15 sheets (a-o)
Dimensions variable (overall)
Collection of Sir Roderick Carnegie AC and Family
© John Wolseley

John Wolseley (Australian, b. 1938)
Murray-Sunset refugia with 14 ventifacts (details)
2008-2010
From The Great Tree of Drawings 1959-2015, installed 2015
Pencil, watercolour and charcoal on 15 sheets (a-o)
Dimensions variable (overall)
Collection of Sir Roderick Carnegie AC and Family
© John Wolseley

This work was made in the Murray-Sunset National Park, where I found an island of unburnt scrub remaining after a bushfire. This refugium, or sanctuary, provided shelter for plants and small creatures from which they could later gradually recolonise the surrounding sand dunes. The small, flying sheets are papers I released to blow on the desert winds for weeks and sometimes months. Each sheet records carbon traces made by the burnt fingers of trees and shrubs. Having been made soft from dews and showers, and dried and tossed by the desert winds, they have become fixed in a variety of sculptural forms.

John Wolseley (Australian, b. 1938)
Natural history of a sphagnum bog, Lake Ina, Tasmania
2013
Watercolour, pencil, pen and ink, and sphagnum on 8 sheets (a-h)
155.6 x 407.6cm (overall)
Collection of Sir Roderick Carnegie AC and Family
© John Wolseley

John Wolseley (Australian, b. 1938)
Natural history of a sphagnum bog, Lake Ina, Tasmania (details)
2013
Watercolour, pencil, pen and ink, and sphagnum on 8 sheets (a-h)
155.6 x 407.6cm (overall)
Collection of Sir Roderick Carnegie AC and Family
© John Wolseley

As a creek moves down to the shores of Lake Ina in the central highlands of Tasmania, it swells out into an ancient sphagnum moss swamp. I leant over and peered into a gap between the mats of sphagnum, and a small fish emerged in the crystal water. This brief phantom – a Clarence galaxias – was only miraculously there because its ancestors had been isolated by a glacial moraine (ridge) upstream, which six million years later had saved it from the European trout, which had supplanted most of the other galaxias in the rest of Tasmania. And then, marvellously, it had been saved again by the Tasmanian Land Conservancy, which had purchased these plains to protect them from further loss and degradation.

As the grey shadows moved down the hill and melted into the lake, I soaked and painted the spongy sphagnum mats with tinctures of watercolour – viridian and crimson and Indian yellow – and laid them on several sheets of paper. I did the same with water milfoils, spike reed, tassel sedges and bladderwort, and weighted them down overnight with slabs of bark. Their images were imprinted on the paper, emerging slowly like a photograph being developed.

John Wolseley (Australian, b. 1938)
From the edge of the great flood plains of Garrangari and Garrangalli, NT
2012-2014
Pencil, charcoal, black and brown chalk, watercolour, coloured pencil, coloured pastel, frottage and collages of linocut, wood relief printed in black and brown ink, watercolour, charcoal and coloured pencil over pencil and pen and ink on Japanese and wove paper
155.5 x 961.7cm irreg.
Collection of Sir Roderick Carnegie AC and Family
© John Wolseley

In June 2011 I was standing on the edge of the monsoon rainforest bordering a vast flood plain in East Arnhem Land with Djambawa Marawili, the great Yolngu leader and artist. Djambawa recounted how in the dawn of creation ancestral figures had moved up from the coast, digging for edible roots as they went, creating springs of fresh water that still bubble out along the plains. He described how when the first sun came up these ancestor women turned into brolga cranes. As he sang the song several brolgas emerged from the mists and flew slowly towards the coast.

This was the originary moment of this painting. For the next three years, guided by the Dhudi-Djapu clan leader and artist Mulkun Wirrpanda, I collected and drew specimens of plants and trees of the flood plain, and their edible roots and tubers. In the painting I have drawn many of them, along with the various trees festooned with vines.

For me the great miracle of that morning rested in that moment of time – being there, seeing the living land and sensing the ‘deep time’ so intimately linked with the life and art of the people who have lived in it for so long.

John Wolseley (Australian, b. 1938)
A Daly River creek, NT
2012
Watercolour, pastel, pencil, charcoal, ink, yellow pencil and collage of woodcut and linocut on Japanese paper (a-c)
152 x 602cm (overall)
Collection of Sir Roderick Carnegie AC and Family
© John Wolseley

John Wolseley (Australian, b. 1938)
A Daly River creek, NT (detail)
2012
Watercolour, pastel, pencil, charcoal, ink, yellow pencil and collage of woodcut and linocut on Japanese paper (a-c)
152 x 602cm (overall)
Collection of Sir Roderick Carnegie AC and Family
© John Wolseley

Here is a flowing tropical creek near Nauiyu, about two hours’ drive south of Darwin. It shows the fecund, flowing mass of life and aquatic plants and fish, and how they are all an integral part of one particular ecosystem. The plants were all drawn on the spot or collected and drawn later in Darwin. It was May 2012 and I went on several trips with the ethnobiologist Glenn Wightman, the Ngan’gi elder Patricia Marrfurra McTaggart AM and other artists from the arts centre at Nauiyu. They showed me the plants in their living habitat so that I could draw them in action, rather than as dried museum specimens – the Nymphaea waterlily, with its long, convulsive stems, several species of bladderwort, water chestnuts and duckweed.

In this tropical aquatic painting I have tried to show how landscape for me is made up of energy fields that I draw as passages of particular plant forms, in which the individual plants move or dance with different rhythms. My intention is to show how these rafts of different species weave in and out of one another, and across the surface of my painting, rather as a passage of a symphony changes key and mood.

John Wolseley (Australian, b. 1938)
Cycles of fire and water – Lake Tyrrell, Victoria
2011-2012
Watercolour, charcoal, pencil, sponging and scratching out on 2 sheets (a-b)
154 x 610cm (overall)
Collection of Sir Roderick Carnegie AC and Family
© John Wolseley

John Wolseley (Australian, b. 1938)
Cycles of fire and water – Lake Tyrrell, Victoria (detail)
2011-2012
Watercolour, charcoal, pencil, sponging and scratching out on 2 sheets (a-b)
154 x 610cm (overall)
Collection of Sir Roderick Carnegie AC and Family
© John Wolseley

I was sitting on a low sandbank and drawing the pools of water that lay on this ancient salt lake. A rust-coloured cloud erupted into the air and darkened the sky over the water. The wind grew stronger, as if emanating from the core of the fire, and it carried embers and burning branches like dismembered limbs. I felt a kind of disquiet, almost dread. I knew such fires had always been part of the natural cycles of the bush, but this was one of several I had experienced that season where it felt as if fire itself was behaving in a different, more erratic way; as if the subtle equilibrium of the climate was changing.

From out of the billowing clouds of smoke some spoonbills, ibis and cormorants emerged, and flew far out over the lake. Several of them alighted on a patch of sunlit water and remained there, as if illustrating some cycle of eternal return – from action to stillness, from noise to quiet. But as I watched, the great black cloud drifted over their resting place, moving them on as if they were being chased away from the world they had known.

John Wolseley (Australian, b. 1938)
After fire – spiny-cheeked honeyeaters at Lake Monibeong (detail)
2009-2011
Watercolour, charcoal, pencil, gouache and brown chalk
151.7 x 128.9cm
Collection of Sir Roderick Carnegie AC and Family
© John Wolseley

Walking through the recently burnt Cobboboonee Forest in Victoria one morning, I reached a lake where fresh water rested in sand dunes bordering the sea. I stood beside a burnt banksia tree with powdery black, corrugated bark. It had been a stormy night, but now the sea and lake were calm. Several spiny-cheeked honeyeaters swooped down, perched in the tree and sung out jubilantly. It was as if they were filled with elation at all these elements coming to rest in equilibrium – the lake resting within the sand dune, the quietening of the wind and the passing of the fire.

The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia
Federation Square
Corner of Russell and  Flinders Streets, Melbourne

Opening hours:
Open daily 10am – 5pm

National Gallery of Victoria website

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Exhibition: ‘The EY Exhibition: Sonia Delaunay’ at Tate Modern, London

Exhibition dates: 15th April – 9th August 2015

Curators: curated at Tate Modern by Juliet Bingham, Curator International Art, with Juliette Rizzi, Assistant Curator.

The EY Exhibition: Sonia Delaunay at Tate Modern

One of my favourite female artists of all time. Up there with Georgia O’Keeffe, Lee Krasner, Agnes Martin and Louise Bourgeois.

The early portrait paintings are a revelation. And then, how avant-garde her Electric Prisms paintings, fashion designs, theatre costumes, embroidering poetry onto fabric, turning her apartment into a three-dimensional collage… the very epitome of a “progressive woman synonymous with modernity.”

I have always loved her creativity, vibrancy, colours and asymmetric, musical rhythm – her photogeneity, in the sense of her works producing or emitting light, like an organism does. They seem to grab you, like a jolt of electricity, saying “Wake up!” and “Look at me!”

Perhaps I’m a little bit in love with this very wonderful women.

Dr Marcus Bunyan

.
Many thankx to the Tate Modern for allowing me to publish the art work in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

“In this case, the pram in the hall was not the enemy of promise. (In any case, surely poverty is the more likely candidate.) It is still rare, however, for a cradle cover to be given gallery space and acknowledged as an important artwork. The little blanket Sonia stitched for her son, Charles, in 1911 [see image below] is to be exhibited, and it seems to have been a breakthrough piece which moved her from figurative work to abstract. The coverlet is a patchwork medley of pinks, creams and greens with hints of maroon and black. It shows how Sonia melded Russian folk-craft with Parisian avant garde, and anticipated the experiments with colour and shape that would become the Delaunay hallmark style, simultané.

As well as the baby quilt, there is on display the child’s painted toy box, and the outfit Sonia made in the same manner, the one in the photograph mentioned above: by 1913 the Delaunays had found a babysitter and were setting off to the dancehall, the Bal Bullier. As well as making clothing for herself and her friends, Sonia still painted. Next to the dress, which is composed of swatches of fabric in different textures, is her large canvas ‘Bal Bullier’. A flow of colour and rhythm, it shows several couples (or one couple twirling) under a new Parisian sensation: coloured electric lights.”

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Kathleen Jamie. “Sonia Delaunay: the avant-garde queen of loud, wearable art,” on the Guardian website, Saturday 28 March 2015 [Online] Cited 03/08/2015

Sonia Delaunay (French, 1885-1979)
Quilt cover
1911

Sonia Delaunay (French, 1885-1979)
Syncopated rhythm, so-called The Black Snake
1967
Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes, France
© Pracusa 2014083

Sonia Delaunay (French, 1885-1979)
Propeller (Air Pavilion)
1937
Skissernas Museum, Lund, Sweden
© Pracusa 2014083
Photo: Emma Krantz

Sonia Delaunay (French, 1885-1979)
Propeller (Air Pavilion) (detail)
1937
Skissernas Museum, Lund, Sweden
© Pracusa 2014083
Photo: Emma Krantz

Sonia Delaunay (French, 1885-1979)
Rhythm Colour no. 1076
1939
Centre National des Arts Plastiques/Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris, on loan to Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille
© Pracusa 2014083

Sonia Delaunay (French, 1885-1979)
Court shoes
1925

Unknown photographer
Sonia Delaunay (right) and two friends in Robert Delaunay’s studio, rue des Grands-Augustins, Paris
1924
Image courtesy of Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris

Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979) was a key figure in the Parisian avant-garde, whose vivid and colourful work spanned painting, fashion and design. Tate Modern presents the first UK retrospective to assess the breadth of her vibrant artistic career, from her early figurative painting in the 1900s to her energetic abstract work in the 1960s. This exhibition offers a radical reassessment of Delaunay’s importance as an artist, showcasing her originality and creativity across the twentieth century.

Born in Odessaand trained in Germany, Sonia Delaunay (née Stern, then Terk) came to Parisin 1906 to join the emerging avant-garde. She met and married the artist Robert Delaunay, with whom she developed ‘Simultaneism’ – abstract compositions of dynamic contrasting colours and shapes. Many iconic examples of these works are brought together at Tate Modern, including Bal Bullier 1913 and Electric Prisms 1914. Her work expressed the energy of modern urban life, celebrating the birth of electric street lighting and the excitement of contemporary ballets and ballrooms.

The EY Exhibition: Sonia Delaunay shows how the artist dedicated her life to experimenting with colour and abstraction, bringing her ideas off the canvas and into the world through tapestry, textiles, mosaic and fashion. Delaunay premiered her first ‘simultaneous dress’ of bright patchwork colours in 1913 and opened a boutique in Madrid in 1918. Her Atelier Simultané in Paris went on to produce radical and progressive designs for scarves, umbrellas, hats, shoes and swimming costumes throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Clients included the Hollywood star Gloria Swanson and the architect Erno Goldfinger, as well department stores like Metz & Co and Liberty. The exhibition reveals how Delaunay’s designs presented her as a progressive woman synonymous with modernity: embroidering poetry onto fabric, turning her apartment into a three-dimensional collage, and creating daring costumes for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.

The diverse inspirations behind Delaunay’s work are also explored, from the highly personal approach to colour which harked back to her childhood in Russia, to the impact of her years in Spain and Portugal where she painted The Orange Seller 1915 and Flamenco Singers 1915-16. The show also reveals the inspiration provided by modern technology throughout Delaunay’s career, from the Trans-Siberian Railway to the aeroplane, and from the Eiffel Tower to the electric light bulb. It also includes her vast seven-metre murals Motor, Dashboard and Propeller, created for the 1937 International Exposition in Paris and never before shown in the UK.

Following her husband’s death in 1941, Sonia Delaunay’s work took on more formal freedom, including rhythmic compositions in angular forms and harlequin colours, which in turn inspired geometric tapestries, carpets and mosaics. Delaunay continued to experiment with abstraction in the post-war era, just as she had done since its birth in the 1910s, becoming a champion for a new generation of artists and an inspiring figure for creative practitioners to this day.

The EY Exhibition: Sonia Delaunay is curated at Tate Modern by Juliet Bingham, Curator International Art, with Juliette Rizzi, Assistant Curator. It was organised by the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris-Musées and Tate Modern, and was realised with the exceptional help of Bibliothèque nationale de France and Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou.

Text from the Tate Modern website

Sonia Delaunay (French, 1885-1979)
Finnish woman
1908

Sonia Delaunay (French, 1885-1979)
Sleeping girl
1907

Sonia Delaunay (French, 1885-1979)
Philomene
1907

Sonia Delaunay (French, 1885-1979)
Electric Prisms
1913
Davis Museum at Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA, Gift of Mr. Theodore Racoosin
© Pracusa

Sonia Delaunay (French, 1885-1979)
Electric Prisms
1913-1914

Who is Sonia Delaunay?

Who is she?

Sonia Delaunay was a multi-disciplinary abstract artist and key figure in the Parisian avant-garde. Alongside her husband, Robert Delaunay, she pioneered the movement Simultanism. Her exploration of the interaction between colours has created a sense of depth and movement throughout her oeuvre.

What is her background?

She was born Sonia Illinitchna Stern to a Jewish Ukrainian family. At the age of seven she went to live with her comparatively wealthy uncle Henri Terk and his wife, Anna, in St Petersburg, Russia. The Terk’s offered her a privileged and cultured upbringing in St Petersburg. Nevertheless, her childhood memories of Ukraine remained with her and she often referred back to the ‘pure’ colour and bright costumes of the Ukrainian peasant weddings.

How did she start her career as an abstract artist?

“About 1911 I had the idea of making for my son, who had just been born, a blanket composed of bits of fabric like those I had seen in the houses of Russian peasants. When it was finished, the arrangement of the pieces of material seemed to me to evoke cubist conceptions and we then tried to apply the same process to other objects and paintings.”

What does she do?

“I always changed everything around me… I made my first white walls so our paintings would look better. I designed my furniture; I have done everything. I have lived my art.”

Delaunay’s creativity expanded beyond painting to include many other outlets such as Casa Sonia, an interiors and fashion boutique that she set up 1918; The entire set and costume design of Tristan Tzara’s 1923 play Le Cœur à Gaz; An illustration for the cover of Vogue in 1926; Costumes for the films Le Vertige directed by Marcel L’Herbier and Le p’tit Parigot, directed by René Le Somptier; Furniture for the set of the 1929 film Parce que je t’aime; And her textiles label Tissus Delaunay, which sold her designs worldwide.

What is Orphism?

Orphism is a term originating from 1912 when French poet and art critic Guillaume Appollinaire identified the new style of Cubist painting. Appollinaire was inspired by the work of František Kupka and the Delaunays, who, although channelling the Cubist vision, prioritised colour in their work. Appollinaire felt this use of colour brought movement, light and musical qualities to the artwork and therefore referenced the legendary poet and singer of ancient Greek mythology, Orpheus, when naming the movement.

What is Simultanism?

Simultanism is the strand of Orphism practised by the Delaunays. The name comes from the work of French scientist Michel Eugène Chevreul who identified the phenomenon of ‘simultaneous contrast’, in which colours look different depending on the colours around them. For example, a grey will look lighter on a dark background than it does on a light one. The Delaunays dispensed with form and aimed to created rhythm, motion and depth through overlapping patches of vibrant hues.

What are her key artworks?

Prismes électriques (Electric Prisms), 1914, displays Delaunay’s trademark concentric circles at their best. Interpreted as an ode to modernity, Delaunay refracts the lights and bustle of Boulevard Saint Michel into almost complete abstraction. Everything disintegrates into colour except two figures, which remain discernible in the lower centre of the piece.

Nu jaune, 1908, juxtaposes the models’ warm yellow skin against lashings of cool emerald. This is one of Delaunay’s most striking uses of tone. The bright colours are frequently offset by black marks. These create a bold and heavy outline which is primitivist in its intention. The face of the model is mask like, suggesting melancholy. Delaunay makes no attempt to depict her as attractive, giving the artwork a brusque, modern feel.

What are her thoughts on colour?

Colour is the skin of the world.

Colour was the hue of number.

One who knows how to appreciate colour relationships, the influence of one colour on another, their contrasts and dissonances, is promised an infinitely diverse imagery.

9 April 2015 on the Tate Modern website

Unknown photographer
Lizica Codreanu wearing the Pierrot-Éclair costume designed by Sonia Delaunay, on the set of René Le Somptier’s 1926 film ‘Le P’tit Parigot’
1926
Still photo from the film Le P’tit Parigot, written by Paul Cartoux, Directed by René Le Somptier, 1926, collection of Antoine Blanchette
© L & M SERVICES B.V. The Hague 20100623

Unknown photographer
Sonia Delaunay in front of her door-poem in the Delaunays’ apartment, Boulevard Malesherbes, Paris
1924
© Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris

Germaine Krull (German, 1897-1985)
Sonia Delaunay in her studio at boulevard Malesherbes, Paris, France
1925
Bibliothèque Nationale de France, © L & M SERVICES B.V. The Hague 20100623

Unknown photographer
Sonia Delaunay in Simultaneous dress
c. 1913

Unknown photographer
Bathing suits designed by Delaunay
c. 1920s

It was extremely inspiring to see a woman working with different disciplines – design, painting, textiles. Her reach was enviable. She was part of a tradition of Russian artists such as Liubov Popova and Varvara Stepanova who combined their knowledge of artisanal techniques with their beaux arts training as a way into the world of fashion. And her designs were outstanding. Look at her marvellous knitted bathing suit or patterned overcoat. If you were to walk into an exhibition and saw a woman dressed in that overcoat, she would steal the show.

Of course in Paris there were other powerful women designers, such as Madame Grès and Coco Chanel. The former’s designs were very sinuous, and Chanel was cutting back to the bone, whereas Sonia seemed to work on a frontal level. I like the powerful geometry of her designs – encasing a curvilinear body, contained and boxed-in like a walking cubist form. They were definitely not cute; they were harsh designs for husky women. I would have loved to see Gertrude Stein dressed in Sonia Delaunay’s clothes.

I admire her early paintings, especially Yellow Nude from 1908. You can’t really tell if the reclining figure that she has painted is male or female. It is coy, seductive, androgynous, as if she didn’t seem to care whether it was either. And if you read her biography, you find that she had a rather open attitude to sexuality – her first marriage was to a homosexual, and later to Robert. It was probably part of her shrewdness too – in making things work for her.

Has her work influenced mine? I came out of the Josef Albers camp, where colour was more magical and less obvious than Delaunay. I tend to go for unexpected nuanced colour combinations. So I would say not, but her workaholic attitude and willingness to experiment and try out things in different ways has. She was fearless, so why shouldn’t we be fearless. And I am very influenced by her teamwork – the big mural paintings she did for Palais de l’Air in 1937. I love those. She would have had teams of people working on them. They are such powerful works, so present and timeless. They send out a strong message – pronouncing a new world. They are not domestic works done at the easel. They are out in space. They are universal.

Sheila Hicks. “The multi-talented Delaunay. Sonia Delaunay: The Fortune of Colour,” Tate Etc. issue 34: Summer 2015 on the Tate Modern website, 8 June 2015 [Online] Cited 03/08/2015

Sonia Delaunay (French, 1885-1979)
Illustration for cover of Vogue
1926

Sonia Delaunay (French, 1885-1979)
Simultané playing cards
1964

Sonia Delaunay (French, 1885-1979)
Simultaneous Dresses (The three women)
1925
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid
© Pracusa 2014083

Sonia Delaunay (French, 1885-1979)
Rythme
1938

Tate Modern
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London SE1 9TG
United Kingdom

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Exhibition: ‘Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great’ at NGV International, Melbourne

Exhibition dates: 31st July – 8th November 2015

Installation view of room 1 of the exhibition Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great at NGV International, Melbourne featuring Alexander Roslin (Swedish 1718-93) Portrait of Catherine II 1776-77
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

A scintillating exhibition at NGV International which showcases one of the world’s greatest art collections. Exhibition design is outstanding (particularly the floor tiling), as are the Da Vinci, Titian, Rembrandt, van Dyck, Rubens and Flemish still life. Among my favourites is a small Watteau Savoyard with a Marmot (1716) which is absolutely still, delicate and exquisite: I thought of the photographs of Atget, his street sellers, when I saw this painting; and Frans Snyders’ tour-de-force Concert of birds (1630-40) which has such presence.

Well done to the curators, the Hermitage Museum and the NGV for staging such a magnificent exhibition.

Marcus

.
Many thankx to the National Gallery of Victoria for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image. All photographs © Dr Marcus Bunyan and the National Gallery of Victoria.

Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great showcases one of the world’s greatest art collections. Featuring works by artists including Rembrandt, Rubens, Velázquez and Van Dyck, the exhibition offers a dazzling array of works including the finest group of Dutch and Flemish art to come to Australia.

This exclusive Melbourne exhibition will also highlight the innovation and vision of Catherine the Great, whose inexhaustible passion for education, the arts and culture heralded a period of enlightenment in the region. The extraordinary works sourced and commissioned by Catherine during her thirty-four year reign, created the foundations for the Hermitage today – considered to be one of the world’s greatest treasure houses of art and decorative arts. The exhibition will offer audiences an immersive experience, recreating the rich atmosphere of the Hermitage to showcase these exquisite works.

German-born Catherine the Great (Catherine II) came to power in 1762, aged thirty-three, and ruled Russia for the next thirty-four years, until her death in 1796. She saw herself as a Philosopher Queen, a new kind of ruler in the Age of Enlightenment. Guided by Europe’s leading intellectuals, she modernised Russia’s economy, industry and government, drawing inspiration both from Antiquity and contemporary cultural and political developments in Western Europe. A fluent speaker of Russian, French and German, Catherine was largely self-educated, independent, idealistic and visionary.

While her reign was not always peaceful, Catherine sought to bring order, stability and prosperity to the vast Russian Empire. Her ideals of abolishing serfdom and ensuring the equality of all citizens under the law were ahead of her time, and strongly resisted by the nobility of the day; however, she achieved numerous other reforms, including the introduction of paper money and modernisation of Russia’s education system. French philosopher Denis Diderot, who visited St Petersburg in 1773, described an audience with Catherine as being ‘more like study than anything else: she is a stranger to no subject; there is no man in the Empire who knows her nation as well as she’.

Room 1 Catherine the collector

Between 1762 and 1796, the years of her reign, Catherine the Great oversaw a period of cultural renaissance in Russia. The world of ideas in which she was deeply involved from an early age found tangible expression in the material world the Empress later created around herself. The great complexes of imperial buildings Catherine constructed reflected her informed interest in both Classical and Chinese culture.

Catherine not only assembled a collection of Old Master paintings equal in scale and quality to leading European collections, but also paid considerable attention to the acquisition of contemporary art. While the richness and technical perfection of her diverse collections of decorative arts aimed to dazzle and please, they also had the more practical purpose of raising standards of artistic production in Russia. The fact that more than 400 exemplary works of art from her personal collection, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, porcelain, silver and precious gems, are seen here for the first time in Australia is cause for celebration.

Installation views of room 1 of the exhibition Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great at NGV International, Melbourne featuring Alexander Roslin (Swedish 1718-1793) Portrait of Catherine II 1776-1777
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Installation views of room 1 of the exhibition Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great at NGV International, Melbourne featuring in the last three photographs, the Sèvres Cameo Service. Cameo Service 1778-1779. Sevres Porcelain Factory (manufacturer) France, est. 1756. The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Sèvres Cameo Service

The Sèvres Cameo Service (1778-1779) relates to Catherine’s great passion for collecting engraved gemstones. Comprising 797 individual pieces designed to serve dinner, dessert and coffee to sixty people, the Cameo Service was commissioned from the celebrated Sèvres porcelain manufactory outside Paris as a present for Catherine’s court ‘favourite’, Prince Grigory Potemkin. The Empress’s monogram, ‘E II’ (the Russian version of her name being Ekaterina), woven from garlands of flowers and surmounted by a crown, adorned almost every object in the service.

Production of the service was both time consuming and labour-intensive. The exquisite blue element alone – made from separate layers of copper enamel that gradually seeped into the porcelain and set the pure colour – required five firings. In addition to the hundreds of porcelain objects decorated with painted and sculpted cameos and related silverware, the service also included grand central table decorations fashioned from biscuit, or unglazed cream-coloured porcelain, by the sculptor Louis-Simon Boizot. These decorations illustrated tales from Greek mythology, and were presided over by a grand biscuit statue of Catherine the Great as Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom and the arts.

Installation views of room 1 of the exhibition Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great at NGV International, Melbourne
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Exhibition passageway

Installation view of passageway video of the exhibition Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great at NGV International, Melbourne
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Room 2 Italian art

When Catherine the Great began collecting European art, opportunities to acquire fine Italian Old Master paintings were already severely limited. Demand from wealthy collectors was high and the marketplace was saturated with misattributed works, some of which inevitably made their way to the Hermitage and other great collections.

Despite this, Catherine achieved great success collecting sixteenth and seventeenth century paintings, particularly from Venice, including great paintings by Titian, Paris Bordone and the enigmatic Lorenzo Lotto. These are complemented by fine examples of Roman and Florentine paintings, such as the famous Female nude (Donna nuda), by an artist very close to Leonardo da Vinci. This select group of paintings beautifully illustrate developments in figurative art, portraiture and religious art in Italy from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.

In the early years of her reign, Catherine the Great acquired en masse several large collections of drawings representing all the main European schools. This set the foundations for the current Hermitage Museum’s outstanding Cabinet of Drawings. In terms of quality, Catherine’s acquisitions of Italian drawings were of the highest standard. The majority of these date from the mid sixteenth to late eighteenth centuries and include many rare and precious works.

Installation view of room 2 of the exhibition Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great at NGV International, Melbourne featuring Domenico Fetti (Italian 1589-1623) Portrait of an actor 1620s
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Domenico Fetti (Italian, 1589-1623)
Portrait of an actor (installation view)
1620s
Oil on canvas
The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Domenico Fetti was court painter to Gerdinand II Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, when he made this striking portrait of an actor. It is though to be Tristano Martinelli who made his fame working in the commedia dell’arte tradition. It is believe that Marinelli created and popularised the standard roll of the Harlequin in theatre. Fetti himself was involved with the theatre in both Mantua and Venice.

Installation view of room 2 of the exhibition Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great at NGV International, Melbourne featuring Paris Bordone (Italian 1500-1571) Portrait of a lady with a boy Mid 1530s
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Paris Bordone (Italian, 1500-1571)
Portrait of a lady with a boy (installation view)
Mid 1530s
Oil on canvas
97cm (38.1 in) x 77cm (30.3 in)
The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

This work by Venetian artist Paris Bordone is a typical example of formal Renaissance portraiture. Bordone’s main aim was to show the high social standing of the sitters, so he painted their luxurious costumes in great detail. He draws our attention to the sumptuous sleeves of this woman’s dress, the headgear resembling a turban, as well as her opulent jewellery. Bordone was one of Titian’s most talented pupils whose work is characterised by a level of precision not often present in his master’s work. This painting entered the Hermitage as a work by Giorgione.

Paris Bordone (Italian 1500-1571)
Portrait of a lady with a boy
Mid 1530s
Oil on canvas
97cm (38.1 in) x 77cm (30.3 in)
The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg
Public domain

Installation view of room 2 of the exhibition Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great at NGV International, Melbourne featuring to the left, Domenico Capriolo (Italian c. 1494-1528) Portrait of a young man 1512 and to the right, Lorenzo Lotto (Italian c. 1480-1556) The Rest on the Flight into Egypt with Saint Justine 1529-1530
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Portrait of a young man by the Venetian master Domenico Capriolo captures the intellectual values of Renaissance art. Everything that surrounds this youth speaks of his interests, such as the church that indicates his piety; the statue of Venus that reveals his passion for Antiquity; and the folder (containing verses or drawings) that illustrates the richness of his inner world. The painting is dated 1512 and the artist’s name symbolised by a medallion containing a Capreolus, or deer, which is a play on his name. Such allusions were common in Renaissance art and would have been readily understood by his contemporaries.

Lorenzo Lotto (Italian c. 1480-1556)
The Rest on the Flight into Egypt with Saint Justine (installation view)
1529-1530
Oil on canvas
82cm (32.2 in) x 133cm (52.3 in)
The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Lorenzo Lotto is a much admired sixteenth-century Venetian artist. The Rest on the Flight into Egypt with Saint Justine has the typical dynamism of Lotto’s work, achieved not only through the poses, gestures and movement of the foliage, but also through his intense colour palette and the juxtaposition of resonant blues with red and yellow tones. Here, the Holy Family has been joined by Saint Justine of Padua, martyred in 304 AD, identifiable through her attribute of a sword piercing her breast. Justine was a very popular subject for artists of Northern Italy.

Lorenzo Lotto (Italian c. 1480-1556)
The Rest on the Flight into Egypt with Saint Justine
1529-1530
Oil on canvas
82cm (32.2 in) x 133cm (52.3 in)
The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg
Public domain

Installation view of room 2 of the exhibition Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great at NGV International, Melbourne featuring Leonardo da Vinci (school of) Female nude (Donna Nuda) Early 16th century
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Leonardo da Vinci (school of)
Female nude (Donna Nuda) (installation view)
Early 16th century
Oil on canvas
86.5cm (34 in) x 66.5cm (26.1 in)
The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

This painting entered the Hermitage collection as a work by Leonardo da Vinci, but is now widely accepted to be by one of his close followers, possibly his pupil Salai. Perhaps more important is that it may be a close copy of a lost painting by Leonardo. Female nude (Donna Nuda) also shares some of the qualities of the famous Mona Lisa c. 1503-1519, in the Louvre Museum, Paris; namely the repetition of the pose, the position of the hands and the landscape setting seen behind a stone ledge in front of which the figure is set. This is the most refined of numerous variants of this composition in existence.

Leonardo da Vinci (school of)
Female nude (Donna Nuda)
Early 16th century
Oil on canvas
86.5cm (34 in) x 66.5cm (26.1 in)
The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg
Public domain

Room 3 Flemish art

In the seventeenth century, Flanders comprised the Catholic-dominated Southern Netherlands or ‘Spanish’ Austrian Netherlands, an area larger than modern Belgium. Thanks in large part to the talents of artist Peter Paul Rubens, the Flanders or ‘Flemish’ school in this era became very prestigious. While chiefly a painter, Rubens had far-reaching stylistic influence on many visual art forms, from prints to silverware and architecture. Every leading artist of seventeenth-century Flanders studied in, passed through or was connected with Rubens’s studio.

A diplomat and court insider, Rubens operated on an international stage. His art was correspondingly monumental; characterised by large forms modelled with loose brushstrokes in glowing, brilliant colours. Rubens’s pupil Anthony van Dyck and collaborator Cornelis de Vos led the way in bringing new naturalism to portraiture. While they catered to different markets (van Dyck to the nobility and de Vos to a rich merchant class) their mutual influence is apparent.

Flanders was a nation built on trade, and Flemish artists travelled widely, especially to Italy. From Italy they brought back new pictorial trends, such as the theatrical naturalism of Caravaggio. Flemish artists excelled in naturalistic effects, which they applied even to traditionally humble subjects, such as still lifes and animal pictures, seen to brilliant effect in the art of Frans Snyders and David Teniers II.

Installation views of room 3 of the exhibition Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great at NGV International, Melbourne featuring in the centre in the bottom photograph, Peter Paul Rubens and workshop (Flemish 1577-1640) The Adoration of the Magi, c. 1620 at centre
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Rubens painted the subject of the Adoration of the Magi (Matthew 2:1) more often than any other episode from Christ’s life. Rendered at life-sized scale, this painting combines the humility of Christ’s birth with splendid, worldly pageantry. Three Kings from the East are shown crowding into Christ’s stable (portrayed as a cave, in an allusion to Christ’s later interment) wearing gold- embroidered silks and satins, and offering gifts. The eldest king, Caspar, kneels before Christ with gold; behind him is Melchior, with frankincense; and Balthazar with myrrh, used for embalming. With the help of his studio, Rubens produced more than sixty altarpieces during his career.

Installation views of room 3 of the exhibition Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great at NGV International, Melbourne
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Peter Paul Rubens (Flemish 1577-1640)
Roman Charity (Cimon and Pero) (installation view)
c. 1612
Oil on canvas
141cm (55.5 in) x 180cm (70.8 in)
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg
Acquired from the collection of Count Cobenzl, Brussels, 1768
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Roman Charity (Cimon and Pero) depicts a story told by the Roman historian Valerius Maximus in his Factorum ac dictorum memorabilium libri IX (Nine Books of Memorable Deeds and Sayings), written around 30 AD. The story involves Cimon, an old man awaiting execution in prison who was not given food. Cimon’s daughter Pero visited him, and suckled him at her breast like a child. Pero’s nourishing of Cimon was considered an outstanding example of paying honour to one’s parents.

Peter Paul Rubens (Flemish 1577-1640)
Roman Charity (Cimon and Pero)
c. 1612
Oil on canvas
141cm (55.5 in) x 180cm (70.8 in)
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg
Acquired from the collection of Count Cobenzl, Brussels, 1768
Public domain

Room 4 Dutch art

The Hermitage holds the finest collection of Dutch art outside the Netherlands. While Peter the Great (1672-1725) had a passion for Dutch art and acquired some notable masterpieces, Catherine the Great established the depth and breadth of this extraordinary collection, beginning in 1764 with her first acquisitions. In that year Catherine purchased 317 paintings that had been assembled for Frederick II of Prussia by the German merchant Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky. Among this substantial group were more than 100 Dutch paintings by the most notable masters.

In 1769 Catherine purchased the collection of Count Heinrich von Brühl, which included spectacular landscapes by Jacob van Ruisdael, Isaack Jansz. van Ostade and Aert van der Neer, as well as four Rembrandt portraits, including the wonderful Portrait of a scholar, 1631. For the rest of her life Catherine continued to add outstanding Dutch works to her rich collection. Although the paintings and drawings from the Dutch school included here are only a fragment of the extensive and diverse collection assembled by Catherine the Great, they reveal her artistic preferences and taste.

Installation views of room 4 of the exhibition Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great at NGV International, Melbourne with Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn (Dutch 1606-1669) Portrait of a scholar 1631 at centre
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Rembrandt painted Portrait of a scholar shortly after moving from his native Leiden to Amsterdam in 1630. He had already established a growing reputation in Leiden and was enticed to the capital by the art dealer Hendrick van Uylenburgh, father of his future wife Saskia. Once completing the move, Rembrandt rapidly became the city’s leading artist, mainly on account of dazzling portraits such as this early masterpiece. He then secured the most prestigious commissions from wealthy and powerful citizens of Amsterdam.

Room 5 French taste

The Russian aristocracy spoke French and modelled their manners and style on those of the French Court. Catherine followed the vast intellectual strides of the French philosophes with passionate interest. She also embraced the arts, luring French artists, architects and craftsmen to St Petersburg.

Catherine relied on agents and advisors in France and Germany to identify and acquire works of art on her behalf. In this way she acquired the collection of Paris banker Louis Antoine Crozat, Baron de Thiers and other important bodies of work in France. Her holdings of French art came to encompass works by Renaissance masters as well as seventeenth-century landscapes and history paintings.

Catherine also acquired examples of work of her own century by Rococo artists such as Antoine Watteau. The playful, erotic and at times wistful art of Watteau’s generation gave rise to the intimate and worldly art of François Boucher, whose pictures Catherine also purchased. The Empress collected modern masterpieces created in reaction to French courtly and decadent styles. Her paintings by Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin are premier examples of a new, moralising directness in ambitious French art.

Catherine’s buying in France was not limited to French art. Also in this room are paintings by great German, Spanish and Italian masters that were acquired in Paris from prestigious collections under the direction of Catherine’s French advisors.

Installation views of room 5 of the exhibition Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great at NGV International, Melbourne
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Room 6 Catherine and the world

For Catherine the Great, collecting art was part of a wider economic and diplomatic program designed to stimulate economic and cultural activity at home and abroad. At a meeting in December 1762 with the Moscow Senate, Catherine suggested that consuls be stationed in Spain, Holland and England not only to promote maritime trade but also to source luxury goods and works of art as examples for Russian artists and manufacturers to aspire to.

Through Catherine’s consuls and agents, such items began to flow into St Petersburg, steadily elevating that city into a vibrant centre of European culture. While her cultural sympathies were French, Catherine was also very curious about Britain – the economic success story of the age. She informed herself about Britain’s trade, commerce, manufacturing, philosophy and political system, and purchased works by modern British neoclassical masters, such as Joseph Wright of Derby and Joshua Reynolds. Examples of Spanish, Italian and German art were often not sourced in their own countries of origin but acquired as a part of larger collections.

Installation views of room 6 of the exhibition Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great at NGV International, Melbourne with the 1773 sculpture Catherine II by Jean-Antoine Houdon (French 1741-1826) at centre
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Room 7 The Walpole collection

In 1779 Catherine the Great acquired 198 paintings from a celebrated collection formed by Sir Robert Walpole, 1st Earl of Orford, Britain’s first prime minister. They were bought from the family estate, Houghton Hall, and sold by Walpole’s grandson, George Walpole, 3rd Earl of Orford, who approached the Russian ambassador to Britain directly about the sale. At more than £40,000, the price was high, but the transaction was concluded in only two months. Attempts were made to keep this famous collection in Britain, to no avail.

The Walpole collection was outstanding in quality, and significantly enhanced the Hermitage’s range of Flemish and Italian works. The Russian ambassador to Great Britain, Alexey Musin-Pushkin, who organised the valuable purchase, wrote to Catherine the Great: ‘The greater part of the nobility here are displaying general dissatisfaction and regret that these paintings are being allowed out of this country, and are setting in train various projects to keep them here … No little assistance comes from Lord Orford’s zealous desire to unite [the collection for] the gallery of Your Imperial Majesty, rather than to sell it to parliament itself or, least of all, to divide it through sale to different individuals’.

Installation views of room 7 of the exhibition Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great at NGV International, Melbourne with Frans Snyders (Flemish 1579-1657) Concert of birds, 1630-1640 at right and Frans Snyders (Flemish 1579-1657) Jan Boekckhorst (German 1605-1668) Cook at a kitchen table with dead game, c. 1636-1637 second left
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

Frans Snyders (Flemish 1579-1657)
Concert of birds (installation view)
1630-1640
Oil on canvas
137cm (53.9 in) x 240cm (94.4 in)
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg
Acquired from the collection of Sir Robert Walpole, Houghton Hall, 1779
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

An important place in Flemish seventeenth-century painting is occupied by two specific genres: animal painting and the still life. One of the most important animal and still-life painters was Frans Snyders, a very close collaborator of Peter Paul Rubens who often painted still-life details and animals on the master’s canvases. Snyders’s superb skill as a painter of animals is revealed by Concert of birds, based on a subject from Aesop’s Fables. It shows a gathering of feathered creatures screeching and singing under the direction of an owl seated on a dried branch in front of an open music score.

Frans Snyders (Flemish 1579-1657)
Concert of birds
1630-1640
Oil on canvas
137cm (53.9 in) x 240cm (94.4 in)
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg
Acquired from the collection of Sir Robert Walpole, Houghton Hall, 1779
Public domain

Frans Snyders (Flemish 1579-1657)
Concert of birds (installation view detail)
1630-1640
Oil on canvas
137cm (53.9 in) x 240cm (94.4 in)
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg
Acquired from the collection of Sir Robert Walpole, Houghton Hall, 1779
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Frans Snyders (Flemish 1579-1657)
Jan Boekckhorst (German 1605-1668)
Cook at a kitchen table with dead game (installation view detail)
c. 1636-1637
Oil on canvas
The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg
Photo: Marcus Bunyan

Frans Snyders was the son of the owner of one of Antwerp’s largest wine and eating houses. His dramatically realistic still lifes celebrate the exotic variety of rare fowls available at Antwerp’s markets. Images of dead animals being prepared for a banquet were understood in Snyder’s time as lessons in Christian morality. Many Dutch and Flemish still lifes featuring the sacrifice of an animal for the table functioned as allusions to Christ’s Passion and the transience of the flesh.

Frans Snyders (Flemish 1579-1657)
Jan Boekckhorst (German 1605-1668)
Cook at a kitchen table with dead game
c. 1636-1637
Oil on canvas
171cm (67.3 in) x 173cm (68.1 in)
The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg
Public domain

Installation views of room 7 of the exhibition Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great at NGV International, Melbourne with, at left in the bottom image, Anthony van Dyck (Flemish 1599-1641) Portrait of Philadelphia and Elizabeth Wharton, 1640
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

This is one of the most charming portraits of children paint by van Dyck, who had particular talent for such works. It is one of a group of family portraits commissioned from can Dyck by Philip, Lord Wharton in the late 1630s. Van Dyck worked in England for approximately ten ears and brought a new standard of elegance and style to English portraiture. He largely conveyed this through his flair for painting lavish costumes and sumptuous fabrics, a sensibility he carried through to his portraits of children.

Anthony van Dyck (Flemish 1599-1641)
Portrait of Philadelphia and Elizabeth Wharton
1640
Oil on canvas
162cm (63.7 in) x 130cm (51.1 in)
Hermitage Museum
Public domain

Room 8 China

Eighteenth-century Enlightenment fascination with the East, particularly China, is reflected by Catherine the Great’s architectural and landscaping works completed in St Petersburg and at her summer and winter palaces, as well as by her collecting of Oriental curiosities and philosophical texts. Russian interest in China can be traced to the reign of the Romanov tsars in the seventeenth century, when several missions brought back Chinese treasures and goods to the Russian Court. Importantly, in 1689 the first treaty between Russia and China was signed at Nerchinsk, outlining the border between the countries and rules about caravan trade.

Like many educated people of her time, Catherine was fascinated by the concept of the enlightened ruler thought to be found in China, such as the Kangxi Emperor (reigned 1662-1722), Yongzhèng Emperor (reigned 1723-35), and Qianlong Emperor (reigned 1736-95). One of her regular and most influential correspondents was French philosopher Voltaire, who praised the Celestial Kingdom, its monarchs and men of wisdom; only in China, he thought, was a man’s life, honour and property truly protected by law. Such a clear link between Catherine’s desire for justice and order in Russia and general perceptions of good Chinese government, combined with the Enlightenment fashion for curiosities of all kinds, led to great Russian interest in China in the second half of the eighteenth century.

Installation views of room 8 of the exhibition Masterpieces from the Hermitage: The Legacy of Catherine the Great at NGV International, Melbourne
Photos: Marcus Bunyan

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