Festive feast of exhibitions across Australia and around the globe
There’s plenty to feast on across Australia, and even greater choice abroad.
There is the usual variety of exhibitions on in our capital cities over the summer holidays and, as in the programs that the galleries have announced for the coming year, the variety is as striking in quality as in kind. Even if we cull the list to the best, it is fair to say that there are quite a few shows worth visiting on a rainy day, and some deserving a serious visit, but not many worth booking an interstate flight.
The AGNSW’s Masters of Modern Art from the Hermitage is a case in point, certainly worth seeing if you are in town, but not really warranting a special visit to Sydney.
As I observed in my review, it is Vuillard, and also Kandinsky, who shine in this exhibition, while the representation of Matisse and Picasso is much more uneven and would not make it clear to the uninitiated why they are considered so important.
The gallery also has a survey of the work of William Kentridge, including a remarkable video installation that stood out as the high point of the Sydney Biennale of 2008, and a retrospective of the abstract painting of Tony Tuckson. Elsewhere in Sydney there is the comprehensive David Goldblatt survey at the MCA, and visitors will enjoy the newly opened picture galleries at the State Library.
They may also want to take a last look at the Powerhouse before it is sacrificed to political expediency by obtuse politicians, and moved to Parramatta and effective oblivion. The relocation has met with almost universal opposition from the arts and museum community, but objections have been ignored and buried in bureaucratic procedure. Human non Human, what looks like the most promising of several current exhibitions, considers what makes human beings different from other living creatures.
In Melbourne, the NGV has a combined retrospective of Baldessin and Whiteley, as well as a survey of Julian Opie, an exhibition focused on the visual puzzles of MC Escher, and Visions of Paradise, on Indian court painting of the Moghul period. Nearby, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art is showing a newly commissioned work, The Theatre is Lying. Bendigo Art Gallery, meanwhile, has an impressive range of shows: Daughters of the Sun, a survey of the work of Christian Waller and Klytie Pate, Gothic Beauty, and a collection of the photographs of Frida Kahlo.
At the National Gallery in Canberra, Love & Desire is a collection of pre-Raphaelite paintings from the Tate, including some of the most famous examples of the movement: JE Millais’s Ophelia (1851-52), Holman Hunt’s The Awakening Conscience (1853), John William Waterhouse’s The Lady of Shalott (1888), and many others. Altogether the show includes some 40 pictures from the Tate, doubled by another 40 from various British and Australian galleries.
The National Museum has Rome: City and Empire from the British Museum and the National Library Cook and the Pacific, celebrating the 250th anniversary of Cook’s first voyage in 1768, primarily to observe the Transit of Venus, but also to ascertain whether the South Pacific contained another great land mass.
With three exhibitions of this calibre, it would be reasonable to consider a special trip to Canberra.
In the other capitals, the Art Gallery of South Australia has a very fine retrospective — from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney — of John Mawurndjul, a truly notable figure in the frequently over-hyped field of Aboriginal art, as well as Picasso’s Vollard Suite, the remarkable collection of etchings that includes his memorable variations of the figures of the artist and the model and the minotaur as a symbol of sexual passion.
Brisbane has the Asia-Pacific Triennial, perhaps the most successful and significant of these big international surveys — while events such as the NGV Triennial earlier this year or The National in Sydney represent the dreary bogs of fashion, compulsory inclusiveness and pseudo-politics into which such projects usually sink.
Launceston, finally, has an important exhibition first shown at the National Gallery in Canberra. The National Picture: the art of Tasmania’s Black War makes a significant contribution to our understanding both of the art history and the sociopolitical history of early Australia, but that is because it represents a substantial investment in genuine scholarship and is put together by serious art historians, something that is not as common as it should be.
Internationally, the choices are, not surprisingly, greater and the best is of much higher quality. If you want to understand Picasso, Paris is offering two important exhibitions: the first on his Blue and Pink periods, at the Musee d’Orsay, and the second on cubism at the Centre Pompidou. The Grand Palais in Paris also has an exhibition devoted to Joan Miro. The Royal Academy in London has drawings by Klimt and Schiele from the Albertina in Vienna, while the Tate has Sculpture in Britain in the 1950s, as well as Christian Marclay’s The Clock, which coincidentally starts at ACMI in Melbourne at the end of January.
For lovers of the pre-Raphaelites, there is more in London, for while 40 of the Tate’s pictures are in Canberra, the gallery will be devoting an exhibition to one the most significant figures in the movement, Edward Burne-Jones.
The Metropolitan Museum in New York has an important exhibition on Eugene Delacroix, the great romantic painter who was a hero to the later realists and impressionists, and the National Gallery in Washington has Corot: Women, which focuses on a less familiar aspect of the work of the great landscape master, revealing, perhaps unexpectedly, his influence on later artists such as Picasso and Balthus.
The Grand Palais in Paris also has Venice: Europe and the Arts in the 18th Century, which will later travel to Venice. The Louvre is showing A Dream of Italy, which focuses on the immense collection of Italian art and antiquities assembled by the Marquis Campana in the second quarter of the 19th century, dispersed after his sensational trial for corruption in 1857.
In Venice, meanwhile, an important exhibition at the Doge’s Palace and elsewhere celebrates the 500th birthday of Jacopo Tintoretto; it will travel to the National Gallery in Washington in March.
The Renaissance is well represented elsewhere too. The National Gallery in London has Mantegna and Bellini, which will travel to the Gemaeldegalerie in Berlin in March: the relationship between these two great artists is an important one, because Mantegna, one of the most intellectual artists of his time, was largely responsible for bringing the new style of the Renaissance to Venice, where he married the sister of Bellini, himself heir to a family of artists, the dominant figure of his generation in Venice and the master of both Giorgione and Titian.
The National Gallery in London has an important exhibition on the Venetian artist notorious for being a brilliant but eccentric loner, standing outside the mainstream dominated in his time by Titian: Lorenzo Lotto Portraits focuses on the genre for which Lotto was most famous. The figure, so fundamental to the art of the early modern period, is surveyed in The Renaissance Nude at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, before travelling to the Royal Academy in London in March. Finally, both the Louvre and the National Gallery in Washington have exhibitions on the chiaroscuro woodcut, popular especially in the 16th and early 17th centuries.
Antiquity is well served this season too, with the British Museum’s I am Ashurbanipal, an exploration of the world of neo-Assyrian civilisation in the 7th century BC, before its subsequent decline, succeeded first by the brief neo-Babylonian period — the time of Nebuchadnezzar — and then the Persian empire from the mid-6th century. One small part of the complex world of the ancient Middle East, for a long time a buffer state between the Roman and Persian Empires, was Armenia, whose history and culture from the 4th to the 17th centuries are surveyed at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
Mythology is also represented in several significant exhibitions: the Scuderie del Quirinale is celebrating the bi-millennium of Ovid, the Roman poet whose Metamorphoses was the primary mythological source book for Renaissance artists.
Ovid managed to upset Augustus for reasons that are still not quite clear, and his tales of divine philandering still alarm some neurasthenic young women in American universities today; but he was a supreme storyteller whose vivid descriptions could easily be imagined as pictures.
The story of Medea, and Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece, are the subjects of an exhibition at the Liebighaus in Frankfurt, but even if you cannot get to Germany, this exhibition illustrates the way that new web technology can significantly extend a gallery’s reach: the website includes an excellent “digitorial” (digital tutorial) with maps, explanatory texts and outstanding illustrations of the objects in the exhibition.
The other outstanding example of such technology is at the Getty Villa’s exhibition Underworld: Imagining the Afterlife, produced in collaboration with the Archaeological Museum of Naples. The evolution of the afterlife in the Greek imagination is fascinating in itself, but also because its later and more elaborate version provided the basis for the Christian conception of the next world.
The exhibition focuses on the Orphic, Dionysiac and other mystery religions that offered a better alternative to the economy-class version of grey mute ghosts wandering aimlessly in the gloom that Odysseus encounters on his visit to the underworld. And once again a link on the website offers a thorough, though concise, guide to all of these different beliefs, as well as access to a list and thumbnails of all the works in the exhibition.
These exhibitions are models of the principle — gradually becoming evident to more institutions — that museums have nothing to lose by making images and knowledge freely available: if anything, they will only attract more visitors and enhance the reputation of their collections.
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