Pompeii’s gold, Magritte’s lovers are highlights of this summer’s exhibitions
A number of Australia’s summer exhibitions leave a lot to be desired, but there are treasures to be found ... including if you’re heading abroad | FULL LIST
It’s relatively slim pickings again in summer exhibitions in Australia, especially as the National Gallery of Victoria has come up with a very disappointing program, dominated by a survey – apparently ‘”curated especially for Australian audiences”, whatever that means – of one of the world’s most determinedly vacuous artists, Yayoi Kusama. For the first time I can recall, there is not a single exhibition in Melbourne that would warrant making a special trip over the summer months. Cats and dogs is said to be better than it sounds, but it runs until July next year.
Even the very few other things worth seeing in Victoria – Noel Counihan’s prints in Geelong and a new exhibition at ACMI – will be on well after the holiday period, March and April respectively. In Sydney on the other hand, where the Art Gallery of NSW has long stagnated under Michael Brand’s directorship, the announcement of his departure has coincided with one of the first substantial exhibitions mounted by the gallery for some time: Magritte, reviewed here on Saturday November 23, offers a comprehensive view of the artist’s career, including the crisis he suffered after living through the Nazi occupation of Belgium. In addition, there is a new work by Angelica Mesiti and a survey of the work of Cao Fei, both of which will be discussed here in due course.
Also in Sydney, the Australian Museum’s Machu Picchu and the Golden Empires of Peru reminds us yet again that the word “gold” will always appear in the title of any archaeological exhibition intended to have mass appeal. The exhibition, which will be reviewed here in the next month or so, does include plenty of gold, but its greatest interest is in the effective way it introduces a central cosmological hero-myth and also the rituals of human sacrifice, ubiquitous in pre-Columbian cultures.
Elsewhere, the State Library has Dunera, which sheds new light on an important episode in the cultural and artistic history of Australia, and the MCA is showing two international contemporary artists, Isaac Julien and Julie Mehretu.
The National Gallery in Canberra continues to limp along under the worst leadership in Australia, but has a couple of surveys of minor but interesting Australian artists, Ethel Carrick and Anne Dangar. The National Portrait Gallery has an exhibition of the portraits of Carol Jerrems, one of the most interesting photographers of the 1970s. The National Library, meanwhile, has what looks like a very interesting exhibition about the experience of the migrants who have made this country what it is today, Hopes and Fears; and the National Museum is presenting a new exhibition about Pompeii, produced by the Parco Archeologico di Pompeii in collaboration with the RMN and the Grand Palais in Paris.
Adelaide has two very different exhibitions – Radical textiles and Re-imagining the Renaissance, both at the Art Gallery of South Australia; Brisbane has the Asia-Pacific Triennial and Birds of Passage, at QAGoMA, and Hobart has two exhibitions discussed in recent columns, Namedropping at MONA and Artists to Ice at TMAG.
Internationally, as usual, there is far more substantial fare, particularly in the serious domains of European and Asian art history and archaeology. Australia could do much better in both fields, and in fact has done so in past decades. But our galleries have lost a lot of curatorial expertise in recent decades, and management seems more interested in following trends than in fostering cultural memory. And of course there is the relentless stream of Indigenous shows, far more than are justified by the proportion of the population represented, the quality of the work, or its significance to the contemporary cultural life of Australia.
It would be in some respects preferable to group these international exhibitions thematically, but it is probably more useful for the reader to discuss them by city. If we start with London, then, there is what looks like a fine exhibition of Renaissance drawings at the King’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace (the royal collection of early modern drawings is one of the best in the world). At the National Gallery, Van Gogh: poets and painters is sold out, unless you want to pay to become a member of the Gallery. There is also a smaller focus exhibition on Parmigianino’s mannerist masterpiece, the Vision of Saint Jerome; and from March the NG will have the beautiful Siena exhibition that is currently at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
The British Museum has what looks like a magnificent exhibition on a fascinating subject: Silk Roads, which focuses on the period from about 500 to 1000 AD and emphasises the complex trade networks – much more than a single path through steppes and deserts – that joined peoples and cultures across the Eurasian continent and helped to spread the great universal religions between nations. As usual, the museum website has valuable resources for those who do not have an opportunity to visit the exhibition. The BM also has a survey of Picasso’s work as a printmaker – a medium in which he was both prolific and endlessly inventive.
The Victoria & Albert Museum’s The Great Mughals: Art, architecture and opulence surveys the golden age of the Mughal Empire in India in the 16th and 17th centuries – a period when these Islamic and Persianate invaders ruled over their mostly non-Islamic Indian subjects in a generally harmonious and religiously tolerant spirit. This was the age of the great emperors Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan, the builder of the Taj Mahal – although the cultural splendour of the Mughals is something that contemporary Hindu nationalists in India would rather forget.
In Paris, the Louvre is devoting an exhibition to the fascinating subject of the fool or jester – like Shakespeare’s Touchstone in As You like it or Feste in Twelfth Night – as he appears in art from the medieval to the romantic periods; a slippery and mercurial figure who is not only allowed but expected to subvert the most serious values and even ridicule the ruler himself. Like the institution of carnival, in which the established order is temporarily turned upside-down, the fool seems not only to represent the need to let off steam, but even the deeper intuition, common to many cultures, that death and temporary disorder are necessary for renewed life and the re-affirmation of order.
The Louvre is also showing a selection of 92 pieces from the vast Torlonia holdings (over 600 works) of Roman antiquities. This collection was assembled from the late 18th century – both from purchases of existing collections and archaeological digs on the family’s extensive lands along the Appian Way – and was on public view from the late 19th until the 1960s; it then remained largely in storage until Prince Alessandro Torlonia established the Fondazione Torlonia in 2013 and a few years later secured funding from Bulgari for restoration work on the collection. The present exhibition, as I understand it, opened in Rome in 2020 and was subsequently shown in Milan.
The Musee d’Orsay is celebrating the 120th anniversary of the death of Gustave Caillebotte, who was both a talented painter and a wealthy patron of many of his impressionist friends, with a pair of exhibitions. One is devoted to the paintings in the Caillebotte bequest – 40 paintings and works on paper by friends including Cezanne, Degas, Manet, Millet, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, and Sisley – and the other to Caillebotte’s own pictures, with the specific theme of Painting men.
The Musee Guimet, Paris’s museum of oriental art, has two significant exhibitions. The first is devoted to one of the great periods in Chinese history, the Tang Dynasty (619-907 AD), and presents 207 objects lent by more than 30 museums in China. The other exhibition, Kazakhstan: Treasures of the Great Steppe, takes us back to the region of the Silk Road, and to a part of Central Asia largely unfamiliar to most museum audiences; once again the exhibition is based on loans from museums in Kazakhstan itself.
Finally in Paris, the Centre Pompidou has an exhibition devoted to Surrealism, marking the centenary of the First Surrealist Manifesto in 1924; as befits a movement that was as much literary as visual, and which loved to claim forerunners in early centuries, the story starts with authors such as the Marquis de Sade, Lewis Carroll and Lautreamont.
The only significant exhibition devoted to the baroque period this year is at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome; Guercino: L’era Ludovisi a Roma focuses on Guercino and the years in which he did his most remarkable work in Rome under the short papacy (1621-23) of his fellow-Bolognese Pope Gregory XV Ludovisi. As well as Guercino, precursors and contemporaries such as Annibale Carracci, Nicolas Poussin, Antony van Dyck and Bernini will be represented. Holders of tickets to this exhibition will also be eligible, for the payment of a supplement, to book a visit to the Casino Ludovisi, usually not open, where they will be able to see Guercino’s famous ceiling fresco of Aurora, the goddess of dawn, in her chariot.
In Washington, and returning to the impressionists, Paris 1874: the Impressionist moment will focus in particular on the first exhibition of this group of painters in 1874, including reflecting on the historical and political circumstances – the aftermath of France’s sudden and humiliating defeat by Prussia in 1870-71 and the disastrous sequel of the Commune – which seem so surprisingly absent from the world of impressionist paintings.
In New York, the Metropolitan Museum has the beautiful survey of painting in Siena in the first half of the 14th century which, as already mentioned, travels to London next. Once again looking closely at a specific part of Asian art history, Mandalas: Mapping the Buddhist Art of Tibet will consider the structures and meanings of these sacred patterns used in spiritual practice and meditation. A contemporary Tibetan-American artist has been commissioned to paint his own interpretation of the mandala tradition in the foyer of the exhibition. Later in summer, the Met will open a survey of the greatest German romantic master of the sublime, with Caspar David Friedrich: The Soul of Nature.
Chicago, finally – since we have to stop somewhere – has Paula Modersohn-Becker: I am me at the Art Institute and a selection of French neoclassical paintings from the most important private collection of these pictures in the US, the Horvitz Collection. One can hardly imagine a greater contrast of style and sensibility than between Modersohn-Becker’s quiet and private images of her intimate experience as a woman and mother, and the overtly public, rhetorical and often histrionically political compositions favoured by the painters of the French Revolution and the Empire.
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