Holiday exhibitions take art lovers out of the frame

THERE are some substantial exhibitions during the holiday period here and overseas.

Shoes (c.1937), silk, leather, metal buckle, diamants, by shoemaker Delman, in Edward Steichen & Art Deco F...

WE all have bad habits that we have to recognise before we can hope to remedy them, and societies, as collective entities, are no different. In a consumer society, we tend to think solutions to any problem come in the form of some additional product to buy and consume, which is one reason we have such difficulty with the crisis of obesity: the option simply to consume less is almost as hard for us to understand as the paradoxes of quantum physics.

The same consumer habits of thinking quantitatively and equating levels of consumption with significance distort our understanding of art. Politicians attach far too much importance to the numbers of people who attend performances or visit exhibitions because it is so much easier for them to understand quantity than quality. And the art establishment in general - dealers, funding bodies, art schools - all consider it axiomatic that more art is better. More exhibitions, more sales, record prices, art fairs and so on are all assumed to be good things.

But they are not reliable indicators of the health of art, any more than the number of television stations is an index of the quality of the material broadcast. It is rather the opposite, and gorging on cultural products is no better for the mind than gorging on food is for the body. But once again this is hard to understand when people unthinkingly subsume aesthetic experience under the category of consumption. To recognise that we do not properly consume art at all is perhaps the first step to engaging with it in a deeper, more selective and sparing manner.

Summer is a good time to get away from the art world and from cultural bulimia in general, but there are also a few substantial exhibitions that readers could visit on days in town or on interstate holidays, and of course a much larger number of important shows on across the world for those who will spend the season in the northern hemisphere.

In Australia, the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra has Gold and the Incas while the National Library is presenting what looks from the catalogue like one of the outstanding exhibitions of the summer season, Mapping our World. Both exhibitions will be reviewed in coming weeks.

In Sydney, the Art Gallery of NSW has America: Painting a Nation as its summer blockbuster, but unfortunately this exhibition, reviewed here two weeks ago, is rather disappointing. At Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art there is a large exhibition devoted to Yoko Ono, which will also be discussed during the summer.

In Melbourne, the National Gallery of Victoria has devoted a great deal of space to Melbourne Now, a collection of exhibitions that has been talked up for many months as the biggest project undertaken by the institution. Hopefully, it will prove to be something more than that.

The NGV does have some other things on, however, including an exhibition of Chinese painting and calligraphy - which will be reviewed here - as well as Edward Steichen & Art Deco Fashion. Outside Melbourne, the TarraWarra Museum of Art has an excellent monographic exhibition of Russell Drysdale's landscapes, the subject of next week's column.

In Adelaide, the Art Gallery of South Australia has the beautifully presented Realms of Wonder, devoted to the arts of India's religions and reviewed a few weeks ago, and in Brisbane the Queensland Art Gallery has an enormous installation by Cai Guo-Qiang. In Perth, the next in a series of loan exhibitions from the Museum of Modern Art in New York, covering contemporary art and titled Stranger than Fiction, unfortunately has been cancelled, apparently because of insufficient ticket sales for the earlier shows. This is a great shame because Stefano Carboni had transformed a sleepy provincial gallery with this initiative, and brought to Perth modern masterpieces that Melbourne or Sydney might envy.

Among the overseas galleries, there is a striking constellation of exhibitions devoted to surrealism this year: the Centre Pompidou in Paris has surrealism and the object, while the Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid has surrealism and the dream, and MoMA in New York a monographic exhibition on Magritte (even the Philadelphia Museum of Art is holding a show of surrealist works from its collection).

Balthus, a painter who has some affinities with surrealism, is also represented in New York with Balthus: Cats and Girls at the Metropolitan Museum, while Paul Klee is at the Tate Modern in London. Early modernism is the subject of several other exhibitions as well, including, in London, the National Gallery's Facing the Modern, which deals with the portrait in Vienna in about 1900, and the monographic Georges Braque is still running at the Grand Palais in Paris until early January.

In Amsterdam, the Stedelijk Museum has Kazimir Malevich and the Russian Avant-Garde. In London, the Dulwich Picture Gallery - the oldest public gallery in England, with an elegant building by the great Regency architect John Soane - has An American in London: Whistler and the Thames. The Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, which is holding the first exhibition of Theodore Gericault in Germany, also has a show devoted to the late work of Philip Guston.

Antiquity is represented by an important exhibition devoted to Octavian, who became Rome's first emperor with the title Augustus; opening at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome, it will move to the Grand Palais in Paris in March.

Many centuries later, the period after the fall of the Roman Empire is represented by Heaven and Earth: Art of Byzantium at the National Gallery in Washington.

The late antique and medieval periods in the Indian subcontinent are the subject of Yoga: The Art of Transformation at the Freer and Sackler Galleries in Washington. This is apparently the first exhibition mounted on the iconography of yoga; building on much new scholarship in recent years, it reveals the history of the discipline as far more complicated, unexpected and, in many respects, different from contemporary international practice than is usually realised.

The Renaissance is the subject of an exhibition at the Louvre in Paris, The Springtime of the Renaissance: Sculpture and the Arts in Florence, 1400-1460. On the Left Bank, the Luxembourg Palace has La Renaissance et le Reve until late in January - echoing a theme dear to surrealism as well, but one whose connotations four or five centuries ago were as much magical and divinatory as psychological.

In Frankfurt, the Staedel will be mounting an ambitious exhibition on the greatest German artist of the Renaissance, Albrecht Durer, supreme master of both woodblock prints and engraving, as well as an outstanding painter - and the author of the most remarkable set of self-portraits before Rembrandt. Veronese: Magnificence in Renaissance Venice, at the National Gallery in London, takes us to the city Durer visited on two important occasions and deals with a painter born in the year of his death.

One of the greatest exponents of the Venetian School after Titian and alongside Tintoretto, Paolo Veronese was, like the latter, a prolific decorator of interiors. He is, however, probably best known for his massive feast pictures such as The Wedding Feast at Cana in the Louvre, which includes a self-portrait and portraits of his two great contemporaries in the guise of a musical ensemble. The National Gallery holds 10 works by the artist and is borrowing almost 40 more for what should be an impressive survey of his oeuvre.

The 17th century - known as a golden age of painting in so many countries - is represented by a couple of significant exhibitions. The Frick Collection in New York is showing Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Hals: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting from the Mauritshuis, until after the middle of January.

As so often, this is an exhibition made possible because the Mauritshuis is closed for renovations (now that the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam is open once again); some of its most precious works, including Vermeer's View of Delft, are on display at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, while about 50, including the same artist's Girl with a Pearl Earring and Rembrandt's little Susanna are touring to the US after a successful visit to Japan earlier this year.

The absolute highlight of the season, however, may well be Velazquez and the Family of Philip IV at the Prado in Madrid until early February. The subject is central to the career of an artist who worked almost exclusively for royal patronage, and central too to the history of Spain at that time. For the great tragedy of Philip IV's life was the loss of his son and heir Baltasar Carlos - painted as a boy on horseback by Velazquez - and the desperate attempt to father another heir, which resulted eventually in the birth of the sickly and inbred Charles II, who reigned, against all expectations, until his death in 1700.

It is the implicit lack of a male heir that is at the heart of Velazquez's masterpiece Las Meninas (1656), emphasised by the prominence of the little princess in the foreground; at the same time, she is the first child of the king's second wife, who bore a short-lived son in the following year, so perhaps for the shadowy figures of the royal couple, glimpsed in the mirror in the background, the princess is proof of the new bride's fecundity and a symbol of hope.

Velazquez was not only one of the greatest painters of the 17th century and a powerful inspiration for modernists such as Edouard Manet, but remains one of the handful of artists across the centuries whose work is masterful as painting and irreducibly mysterious in its distinct vision of the world and of human experience.

At the same time, the Prado is one of the few museums in the world - along with the National Gallery in London, the Louvre, the National Gallery in Washington and the Metropolitan in New York and one or two others - capable of mounting a comprehensive monographic exhibition on an artist of this stature, and here of course the great Spanish museum has a natural advantage in dealing with a Spanish artist.

Looking at the list of loans, you can see great pictures have come from everywhere, including masterpieces from London, Paris, Vienna - the Hapsburgs were a family with an Austrian as well as a Spanish branch - and New York as well as private collections and stately homes. The lot of curators is so often a struggle to obtain significant loans for the exhibitions they are putting together, but in a case like this, the tables are turned: owners positively want their works to be included in an exhibition that becomes part of history.

SUMMER EXHIBITIONS

AUSTRALIA

Canberra: National Gallery of Australia: Gold and the Incas, to April 21.National Library: Mapping Our World, to March 10.

Sydney: Art Gallery of NSW: America: Painting a Nation, to February 9.

Museum of Contemporary Art: Yoko Ono, to February 23.

Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria: Melbourne Now, to March 23.

NGV: Chinese Painting and Calligraphy, to June 9.

NGV: Edward Steichen & Art Deco Fashion, to March 2.

State Library: Piranesi, February 22 to June 22.

TarraWarra Museum, Healesville: Russell Drysdale, to February 9.

Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia: Realms of Wonder, to January 27.

Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery: Cai Guo-Qiang, to May 11.

Perth: Art Gallery of Western Australia: Stranger than Fiction, February 1 to May 5.

INTERNATIONAL

London: National Gallery: Facing the Modern: The Portrait in Vienna 1900, to January 12.

National Gallery: Veronese: Magnificence in Renaissance Venice, March 19 to June 15.

Tate Modern: Paul Klee, to March 9.

Dulwich Picture Gallery: An American in London: Whistler and the Thames, to January 12.

Paris: Louvre: The Springtime of the Renaissance: Sculpture and the Arts in Florence, 1400-1460, to January 6.

Grand Palais: Georges Braque, to January 6.

Luxembourg Palace: La Renaissance et le Reve, to January 26. Centre Pompidou: Le surrealisme et l'objet, to March 3.

Rome: Scuderie del Quirinale: Augustus, to February 9 (then to the Grand Palais in Paris, March 19 to July 13).

Amsterdam: Stedelijk Museum: Kazimir Malevich and the Russian Avant-Garde, to February 2.

Frankfurt: Staedel: Albrecht Durer, to February 2. Schirn Kunsthalle: Theodore Gericault, to January 26; also Philip Guston: Late Works, to February 2.

Madrid: Prado: Velazquez and the Family of Philip IV, to February 9. Thyssen-Bornemisza: Surrealism and the Dream, to January 12.

New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art: Balthus: Cats and Girls, to January 12.

Frick: Masterpieces of Dutch Painting from the Mauritshuis, to January 19. Museum of Modern Art: Magritte: The Mystery of the Ordinary, to January 12.

Washington: National Gallery of Art: Heaven and Earth: Art of Byzantium, to March 2.

Freer and Sackler Galleries (Smithsonian Institution): Yoga: The Art of Transformation, to January 26.