Summer art shows: Australia, London, Paris, Rome, New York
Moral and political groupthink is affecting our art, as can be seen in the season’s big shows, here and overseas.
The range of summer offerings at galleries across Australia and especially the programs so far announced for 2018 are on the whole rather lacklustre, even if a number of individual shows are interesting enough.
Part of the problem seems to be an excessive reliance on the biennale model, in which an inevitably disparate group of contemporary artists is assembled under a usually meaningless title, since the curatorial approach is opportunistic rather than principled. All intellectual justifications are consequently retrospective, a fact carefully camouflaged in the obscurity of the abundant verbiage of the accompanying publication. The Biennale of Sydney has repeated this tried and true formula for years.
In the next six months or so we are going to have not only yet another Sydney Biennale, this time under the wonderfully vacuous label Superposition: art of equilibrium and engagement — but even before that an inaugural National Gallery of Victoria Triennial and an Adelaide Biennial. These shows usually include some artists of merit, but are collectively dispiriting in the way they promote the usual suspects among local artists and the dominant careerists of the international contemporary art market, such as the egregious and eternally self-publicising Ai Weiwei.
Never will one of these exhibitions present anything that either questions the validity of the international art establishment or runs counter to the moral and political groupthink of our time. It is interesting in this regard that the Dark Mofo festival in Hobart next June has announced that it will include a “program of dark and dangerous thoughts”, echoing the title of the now defunct Festival of Dangerous Ideas that used to be held in Sydney.
What are dangerous ideas or, slightly more nebulously, thoughts? We know what really dangerous ideas are: those of the Nazis or the Stalinists or the Maoists, which justified mass murder in the name of creating a supposedly better society; or those of Islamist extremists, who think God approves of killing apostates, infidels and even random strangers. Evil ideas can be profoundly dangerous and they have caused untold suffering in the past 100 years alone.
The word “dangerous” in this case, however, is being used in the trivial way that menus call a chocolate pudding “wicked” or “sinful”. It means that these ideas are supposed to be excitingly provocative. But to whom? Not to those who use the term approvingly and who consequently approve of the ideas too. The real test of whether an idea is considered provocative or disturbing in any sense is whether there are attempts to prevent its expression.
As it turns out, there are no attempts to suppress even the most radical “progressive” ideas today, but there are hysterical efforts to silence anyone who unsettles received thinking, such as Milo Yiannopoulos. And yet is he ever going to be invited to anything billing itself as a festival of dangerous thinking? This doesn’t mean that he is right, and we may well disagree with him, but it certainly shows where hostility to free speech and the impulse to censorship are coming from in the contemporary world.
In the 17th century, England and Holland were the most liberal centres of thinking and expression in Europe, although you could get away with a lot in Rome as long as you didn’t alarm the arch-conservative party, led by the Spanish.
Probably the most interesting summer exhibition is Rembrandt and the Dutch Golden Age: masterpieces from the Rijksmuseum, at the Art Gallery of NSW in Sydney, reviewed here last week. We have too often had historical blockbusters such as this inflated with weak pictures to reach the magic number of 100; here, wisely, the exhibition is smaller and more clearly focused to cover the range of genres in the period. All the works are respectable and some are outstanding.
Also in Sydney are the Mapplethorpe exhibition at the AGNSW, Pipilotti Rist at the Museum of Contemporary Art, a survey of Australian women artists in Paris at the SH Ervin Gallery, and a small but absorbing exhibition at the State Library of NSW devoted to the great botanical artist Ferdinand Bauer (1760-1826), who accompanied Matthew Flinders, associated with an online exhibition and a remarkable scholarly publication.
In Melbourne, apart from the Triennial, the NGV has a remarkable rehang of its 19th-century British art in a dense salon-style display that gives a fascinating view into the imaginative and moral world of our Victorian forebears. The Ian Potter Museum, meanwhile, has an exhibition devoted to contemporary artistic responses to traditional fairytales.
Romancing the Skull, reviewed here recently, continues at the Art Gallery of Ballarat until January 28, and from March the gallery will have what should be a particularly interesting exhibition, Eugene von Guerard: Artist Traveller.
On a lighter note, the Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery has a suitably summery show with a survey of painters who have found inspiration among their coastal landscapes.
The National Gallery of Australia is showing Hyper Real until February 18. This exhibition of painstakingly illusionistic sculptures, including both thoughtful work and sensationalistic and grotesque objects, will be reviewed next week. Otherwise, the most interesting current exhibition at the NGA is a survey of the videos of Angelica Mesiti, whose new work at Artspace was discussed here some months ago. Meanwhile, the National Museum has Songlines to February 25 and the National Portrait Gallery has Starstruck until March 4.
The Art Gallery of South Australia has Tarnanthi, another large group exhibition of Aboriginal art, until February 28. That will be followed by the Adelaide Biennial in March and, starting later in March and running through winter, a loan exhibition of impressionist art from the Musee d’Orsay in Paris.
In Brisbane, the Gallery of Modern Art has a survey of Gerhard Richter, the enigmatic and prolific postwar German artist reviewed here two weeks ago. In Hobart, the Museum of Old and New Art is showing The Museum of Everything, essentially a group show of completely unknown, eccentric, outsider or simply mad artists of the 20th century.
Overseas, there are richer pickings, in fact a remarkable choice of exhibitions for anyone travelling to Britain, Europe or the US, of which only a few can be mentioned here.
London, as usual, offers a particularly diverse range of substantial exhibitions, starting with Van Eyck and the Pre-Raphaelites at the National Gallery to April 2. Also notable is a survey of monochrome painting, which has a long history from the late Middle Ages — think of the outside panels of folding polyptychs — to more recent periods (to February 18). Mantegna and Bellini, to January 27, focuses on the relationship between these two brothers-in-law, responsible for bringing renaissance art to Venice.
At the British Museum, Scythians: warriors of ancient Siberia, to January 14, explores the little-known culture behind a familiar name, and presents the results of new archeological digs in remote parts of the Eurasian continent. Also at the BM is Living with gods, to April 8, which considers the religious instinct and its diverse manifestations in human cultures around the world and throughout history.
Red Star over Russia, at the Tate Modern and based on the enormous private collection of David King, reveals the Soviet manipulation of imagery and falsification of photography for the purposes of propaganda. The very different world of Amedeo Modigliani is represented in a monographic exhibition also at the Tate Modern, until April 2. In Paris, the Louvre has Francois I and Dutch Art, to January 15, looking at an unfamiliar aspect of the art patronage of this great contemporary of Henry VIII. Also at the Louvre are an innovative exhibition, Music: echoes of antiquity, to January 15, dealing with what we know of music in the ancient world, and Drawing in the Open Air, focusing on the practice of drawing from nature in the first half of the 19th century.
The Musee d’Orsay, meanwhile, has an exhibition marking the centenary of Edgar Degas’s death: Degas, Danse, Dessin (to February 25). Its conception and title come from an important essay by Paul Valery, one of the greatest French poets of the 20th century.
And the Centre Pompidou has a survey of Andre Derain, an early modernist who turned his back on modernism but was later rediscovered by the postmodernists (to January 29).
In Rome, the Scuderie del Quirinale has Picasso between cubism and classicism to January 21. In Berlin, Jean Fouquet’s The Melun Diptych, one of the greatest works of French art in the 15th century, is briefly reunited (to January 7): its left panel, featuring the donor Etienne Chevalier, was acquired by the Berlin Gemaeldegalerie in 1896, while the right panel, with the figure of the Virgin, has been in the Royal Museum at Antwerp for two centuries.
There are many other exhibitions in Berlin, but from May there will be a particularly interesting one focused on artists who physically explored the landscape by hiking through it, Wanderlust: Friedrich to Renoir.
In Frankfurt, the Staedel has Rubens: the power of transformation from early February to May, while the Schirn Kunsthalle has Splendour and Misery in the Weimar Republic to February 26, as well as Diorama: inventing illusion to January 22.
Across the Atlantic, in Washington, the National Gallery has Vermeer and the masters of genre painting until January 21, looking at Vermeer in the broader context of contemporaries working in related fields of painting. In New York, the Museum of Modern Art has a comprehensive survey of Stephen Shore (born 1947), among the most significant contemporary photographers in America, as well as another devoted to the surrealist Max Ernst.
The Metropolitan Museum has Leonardo to Matisse, masterpieces of drawing from the museum’s own extensive collections, until January 7; Edvard Munch (in collaboration with the Munch Museum in Oslo) until February 4; and the ambitious Michelangelo: divine draughtsman and designer, which includes 133 drawings as well as marble sculptures and architectural models, until February 12.
This exhibition has been called “the must-see show of the year … an art-historical tour de force” by The New York Times and “the show of the year” by The Observer. And the Met is also presenting a comprehensive retrospective of David Hockney, organised in collaboration with the Tate and the Centre Pompidou, until February 25.
Yet even at the Met the corrosion of intolerance and censorship is being felt. A visitor who was shocked by one of Balthus’s paintings of young girls has started an online petition to have it removed.
Let us hope the museum has the courage to stand its ground and protect the special status of museums, like libraries, as refuges from censorship, places where judgment is not necessarily excluded but at least suspended.
Art Gallery of NSW: Rembrandt and the Dutch Golden Age: masterpieces from the Rijksmuseum, to February 18; Robert Mapplethorpe: the perfect medium, to March 4.
State Library of NSW: Ferdinand Bauer, to January 28.
Museum of Contemporary Art: Pipilotti Rist: Sip My Ocean, to February 18.
SH Ervin: Intrepid women: Australian women artists in Paris 1900-1950, to March 11.
National Gallery of Australia: Hyper Real, to February 18; Angelica Mesiti, to April 2.
National Portrait Gallery: Starstruck: Australian Movie Portraits, to March 4.
National Museum of Australia: Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters, to February 25.
National Gallery of Victoria: Salon Gallery rehang; NGV Triennial, to April 15.
Ian Potter Museum: All the better to see you with: fairy tales transformed, to March 4.
Art Gallery of Ballarat: Romancing the Skull, to January 28.
Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery: Coast: the artists’ retreat, to February 18.
GoMA: Gerhard Richter, to February 4.
Art Gallery of SA: Tarnanthi, to January 28;
Adelaide Biennial, March 3 to June 3; Colours of Impressionism: Masterpieces from the Musee d’Orsay, March 29 to July 29.
MONA: The Museum of Everything, to April 2.
National Gallery: Mantegna and Bellini , to January 27; Monochrome: Painting in Black and White, to February 18; Reflections: Van Eyck and the Pre-Raphaelites, to April 2.
British Museum: Scythians: warriors of ancient Siberia, to January 14; Living with gods: peoples, places and worlds beyond, to April 8.
Tate Modern: Red Star over Russia: a revolution in visual culture 1905-55, to February 18; Modigliani, to April 2.
Scuderie del Quirinale: Picasso between cubism and classicism, to January 21.
Louvre: Francois I and Dutch Art; Music: echoes of antiquity, both to January 15; Drawing in the Open Air, to January 29.
Musee d’Orsay: Degas, Danse, Dessin, to February 25.
Centre Pompidou: Andre Derain, to January 29.
Staatliche Museen zu Berlin: The Melun Diptych, to January 7; Wanderlust: Friedrich to Renoir, May 10 to September 16.
Schirn Kunsthalle: Diorama: inventing illusion, to January 21; Splendour and Misery in the Weimar Republic, to February 26.
Staedel: Rubens: the power of transformation, February 8 to May 21.
National Gallery: Vermeer and the masters of genre painting, to January 21.
Museum of Modern Art: Max Ernst, to January 1; Stephen Shore, to May 28.
Metropolitan Museum: Leonardo to Matisse, to January 7; Edvard Munch, to February 4; Michelangelo: divine draughtsman and designer, to February 12; David Hockney, to February 25.