Of death and mythologies

AUSTRALIANS spend a lot of time in galleries during our summer months, although paradoxically much of it is in the great museums of Europe.

AUSTRALIANS spend a lot of time in galleries during our summer months, although paradoxically much of it is in the great museums of Europe, where we can avoid the summer tourists there and the ever-growing queues.

Some of the most important international exhibitions will be mentioned below. But we also visit museums and galleries at home on rainy days, and there will be no shortage of things to see across the country this year.

The most compelling exhibition of all looks like being The First Emperor: China's Entombed Warriors, at the Art Gallery of NSW. Art has an intrinsic connection with death, since one of the deepest motivations for making images is to create something that endures and transcends the wasting of time and mortality. There is something particularly affecting when this crafting of the perennial is used to perpetuate, to protect or simply to accompany those who have died. Hence the fascination of the pyramids as well as of more modest funerary monuments, of grave goods and of epitaphs in verse. And hence the inevitable mystery of an army of men made in the imperishable material of terracotta and buried as the escort of a dead ruler into the next world.

The other exhibition I expect to be of outstanding interest is Gustave Moreau and the Eternal Feminine at the National Gallery of Victoria. Relatively little known to the public, Moreau was in fact one of the most remarkable of the symbolist artists working in Paris at the end of the 19th century. His paintings are exquisitely crafted and filled with mythological subjects that he was rediscovering at the same time as Sigmund Freud and others.

The exhibition is subtitled The Eternal Feminine -- a phrase borrowed from Goethe and derided by Nietzsche -- because of the predominance of feminine figures and even a feminine sensibility in his work; from the Sphinx to Galatea, and from Salome to Sappho, women appear as goddesses, temptresses, protectresses and heroines. It should be a unique opportunity to survey an important artist who has not been rendered unborrowable by mass celebrity status.

Among other exhibitions from overseas, the most important is the Art Gallery of Western Australia's Peggy Guggenheim show, reviewed here recently. It is a selection of paintings and sculptures from the palace in Venice to which Guggenheim retired, now a museum administered by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. With significant works by Picasso, Max Ernst, Giacometti and Jackson Pollock, it is well worth seeing if in Perth, if not quite substantial enough to warrant a special trip.

Showing the work of fashion designers in art galleries is basically a populist marketing strategy, objectionable because it suggests that art is to be appreciated in the same superficial consumerist manner. The National Gallery of Australia's Ballets Russes costumes should be of interest, however, because of the number of modernist artists who were involved in director Diaghilev's famous productions. The show is sure to be popular with the public.

The Naked Face at the NGV will be a survey of the self-portrait, always a complex category, including pictures that may be in varying degrees and combinations documents of self-analysis, demonstrations of proficiency or self-advertisements. Also in the category of portraits, the National Portrait Gallery has a show of enormous photographic heads by Martin Schoeller. Big heads are bad in painting, but even worse in photography; we had an example of this two years ago with Andrew Zuckerman's Wisdom at the State Library of NSW, which made it painfully clear that the microscopic inspection of hairs and pores doesn't bring viewers closer to the sitter's character.

The State Library, incidentally, has an exhibition opening today of the work of Kahlil Gibran, the author who became a new-age cult figure; it will be interesting to see if there is real artistic merit behind the encrustation of kitsch. Later in the summer, the library will show a survey of the late photographer Jeff Carter. The Museum of Contemporary Art has an exhibition of the work of Annie Leibovitz, and the Museum of Sydney a smaller exhibition of the photographs of Arthur Wigram Allen called An Edwardian Summer. Two other photographic exhibitions at the NGV make a neat pair: one, Luminous Cities, devoted to the city, and the other, Stormy Weather, to nature and landscape.

In the field of Australian art, the Euan Macleod retrospective at S. H. Ervin Gallery continues until late this month. The AGNSW will have a monographic exhibition on Justin O'Brien, an artist who was for a long while regarded as rather minor because of his attachment to figuration during the long vogue for abstraction, and on account of his overtly religious subject matter. Justin O'Brien: The Sacred Music of Colour will be a welcome opportunity to reassess a painter who, like his friend Jeffrey Smart, was deeply connected to Italy and Italian art.

The Art Gallery of South Australia has a valuable survey of Robert Dowling, originally shown at the NGA. The exhibition gives us a clearer idea of a figure who is minor yet significant, and the author of several intriguing pictures. AGSA's fine Hans Heysen exhibition, meanwhile, will be at the Newcastle Region Art Gallery over the summer.

The NGV also will have Unnerved, a disappointing exhibition of official contemporary New Zealand art. The gallery's Endless Present is an interesting survey of conceptual art in the 1960s and 70s, including the work of Robert Rooney, while Joseph Kosuth at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne will focus on a well-known member of the conceptualist movement.

In Aboriginal art, there are two significant shows: Art and Soul at the AGNSW, with works shown in the ABC documentary of the same title, and Desert Country at the AGSA, an exhibition drawn from the gallery's collection and surveying four decades of desert painting. Towards the end of February, the NGA will have an exhibition of art from Solomon Islands, following the its impressive Life, Death and Magic in the middle of this year.

Among overseas exhibitions, the National Gallery in London has a survey of Canaletto, the artist who painted crisply memorable vedute of Venice for the grand tourists -- especially the British ones of the 18th century -- but Venice: Canaletto and his Rivals reminds us there were other practitioners of the genre as well.

From February, the National Gallery in London will show an exhibition presently at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York: Man, Myth and Sensual Pleasure: Jan Gossart's Renaissance. Gossart (c. 1478- 1532), who took the name Mabuse from his birthplace Maubeuge, played an important part in bringing elements of the Italian Renaissance to late medieval Flanders. The work is an intriguing, sometimes ungainly but oddly touching hybrid.

The Tate Modern has Gauguin: Maker of Myth until next month, a new approach to the post-impressionist painter based on the study of the myths and stories that fill his paintings from Brittany to Tahiti; the website warns ominously that the show is extremely busy but is now open late on Sundays. In Paris, the greatest blockbuster is undoubtedly the enormous survey of Claude Monet at the Grand Palais, the most important exhibition of his work since 1980.

The Louvre has a series of exhibitions under the collective title The 18th Century at the Louvre. The first is Paper Museums: Antiquity through Books, which looks at publications produced between 1600 and 1800 that document known works of ancient art and reflect the evolution of what we know today as archeology. Antiquity Rediscovered: Innovation and Resistance in the 18th Century, meanwhile, will focus on the many meanings that antiquity could have in the years before and after the French Revolution.

The series will end with something different: a monographic exhibition on Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, the German sculptor who began in the late baroque style, evolved towards neoclassicism -- he executed the bust of Franz Mesmer, the proponent of the concept of animal magnetism who inspired the discovery of hypnotism -- and ended up producing a series of grotesquely expressive heads that seem to reflect his own slide into eccentricity, if not madness.

In Rome, 1861: I Pittori del Risorgimento, reviewed recently, continues at the Scuderie del Quirinale until next month. In Florence, the Uffizi has an exhibition devoted to Caravaggio and the Caravaggesque movement in Florence which, like the great Caravaggio exhibition at the Scuderie, reviewed earlier this year, marks the fourth centenary of the artist's death in 1610. The Palazzo Strozzi has a comprehensive exhibition devoted to Agnolo Bronzino, the pupil of Pontormo and mannerist painter best known as the author of court portraits of the Medici (there is a version of one famous picture of Cosimo I in the AGNSW) and the sinisterly erotic allegory Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time in the London National Gallery.

One of the most interesting overseas exhibitions is Courbet: A Dream of Modern Art at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt. Of course the two greatest of his paintings, the enormous Burial at Ornans (more than 6.5m long) and The Painters Studio (just short of 6m) cannot leave their home at the Musee d'Orsay. But what is included is a wealth of material, including much that will be unfamiliar to most viewers.

There are famous early self-portraits -- such as The Wounded Man, which so eerily anticipates Rimbaud's poem on the same subject -- and other works such as the portraits of Baudelaire from about 1848 and of Berlioz a little later, Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet (1854) and The Young Ladies on the Bank of the Seine (1856-57).

This last picture was essential to the thesis of the exhibition, which is to reconsider the romantic side of Courbet's sensibility, more readily apparent in the absence of the realist manifesto represented by the Ornans picture in particular. It is a useful corrective to the view of the artist as a provocative standard-bearer of realism, and reminds us that period and style labels should always be handled with care.

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SUMMER OF SHOWS
Art Gallery of NSW
Entombed Warriors to March 13
Reed Bequest to January
Heart and Soul to June 13
Justin O'Brien Dec 18 to Feb 27

State Library of NSW
Kahlil Gibran today to Feb 20
Jeff Carter Jan 4 to Feb 20

Museum of Sydney
An Edwardian Summer
Dec 11 to April 26

Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney
Annie Leibovitz to March 27

National Gallery of Victoria
The Naked Face to Feb 27
Gustave Moreau and the Eternal Feminine Friday to April 10
Stormy Weather to March 20
Luminous Cities to March 13
Endless Present to March 27

Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne
Joseph Kosuth Dec 20 to Feb 27

Art Gallery of SA
Robert Dowling to Feb 13
Desert Country to Jan 26

National Gallery of Australia
Ballets Russes Friday to March 20
Art from the Solomon Islands
Feb 26 to May 29

Art Gallery of WA
Peggy Guggenheim to Jan 31

TOP PICKS
The First Emperor: China's Entombed Warriors (AGNSW)
Gustave Moreau and the Eternal Feminine (NGV)
The Naked Face (NGV)
Courbet: A Dream of Modern Art (Frankfurt, Schirn Kunsthalle)
Jan Gossart (New York, Metropolitan, then London, National Gallery)