Summer at the galleries

There is so much to take in, from the works of the recognised masters to efforts considerably more mundane.

The Cornelia Parker exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

As our museum directors depart for their summer holidays, they leave behind blockbusters or would-be blockbusters of varying quality for our diversion on rainy days. The National Gallery in Canberra has perhaps the most interesting selection, though at the time of writing I have not yet seen the shows. One is Matisse & Picasso, which brings together two of the biggest names in 20th-century art; it only ­remains to be seen whether the quality of the work the gallery has been able to borrow lives up to the resonance of the brands.

Hugh Ramsay’s Miss Nellie Patterson (1903). National Gallery of Australia

The other NGA exhibition is more likely to be satisfactory on its own terms for it is a retrospective of Hugh Ramsay, one of the most precocious talents in Australian painting and yet one who never had the opportunity to develop fully as he died of tuberculosis at the age of 28. This sort of exhibition, which relies chiefly on loans from Australian institutions, can be expected to be ­comprehensive and to be accompanied by a definitive monographic catalogue.

The Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney is showing a retrospective of Ben Quilty, described on its website as “one of Australia’s most ­acclaimed contemporary artists” — where the word “acclaimed” means essentially popular with journalists. The merit of the work is another matter altogether. What the website doesn’t mention is that Quilty is also one of the trustees of the gallery, which is a little surprising even by art world standards.

Takashi Murakami. Picture: Art Gallery of New South Wales.

The AGNSW also has an exhibition devoted to the supernatural in Japanese art — an interesting if slightly niche corner of art history, but unfortunately overshadowed by the commercial schlock of Takashi Murakami, on which the gallery has wasted a fabulous sum of money that might have been used to develop the collection in useful ways. So, altogether, it’s not much of a ­report card for the AGNSW, with fails on both critical judgment and behaviour.

More appealing than either of these exhibitions are the Museum of Contemporary Art’s survey of Cornelia Parker, an artist best known for having blown up her studio and exhibited the fragments suspended in mid-air — though there is more to her work than this would suggest — and John Gollings: The History of the Built World at the ­Museum of Sydney.

Michael Wolf’s Architecture of Density #91 (2006), from the NGV’s Civilization.

The National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, as usual, has a more substantial program, including Civilization, a photographic survey of the overwhelming urban environments in which modern ­humans lead their lives; a retrospective of Roger Kemp, a favourite Melbourne modernist; another survey of Colin McCahon; and an exhibition on two Americans who achieved notoriety in the 1980s, Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. There are also interesting smaller exhibitions, including one on Lucy McRae, recently reviewed in this column, and another devoted to Shirin Neshat, one of the most significant of contemporary Iranian artists.

Lucy McRae’s Biometric mirror (2018).

Victoria’s TarraWarra Museum has a survey of the work of Robert Klippel, one of the most important and inventive Australian sculptors of the 20th century, from his early surrealist period to the monumental late pieces assembled from coloured wooden forms designed as patterns for machine parts.

Overseas there are incomparably richer pickings for world travellers. In London, the National Gallery has a survey of the portraits of Paul Gauguin, as well as Leonardo: Experience a Masterpiece, which has been extended to January 26. This exhibition, based on the London version of the Virgin of the Rocks, is set out over four rooms that use new technologies and exhibition design to introduce the viewer to the imaginative world and technical means of Leonardo da Vinci, culminating in an encounter with the work itself in a reconstructed chapel ­environment.

These exhibitions will be followed in the new year by several other important shows: Durer’s Journeys, from mid-February, and then Titian: Love, Desire, Death from the middle of March; the latter exhibition will bring together all of Titian’s greatest mythological paintings from collections around the world.

Finally, later in the year the National Gallery will present an ambitious survey of the oeuvre of Raphael in the 500th year of his death.

Tobias and the Angel, c.1470, at the The National Gallery, London.

The British Museum has Troy: Myth and Reality, which brings together archaeology and modern art in quest of the truth behind the Homeric epics, as well as Inspired by the East, about the influence of Islamic culture on Western art. The exhibition also will be shown closer to us, at the Islamic Arts Museum Mal­aysia in Kuala Lumpur, from June to October next year.

The Tate Britain has the most comprehensive exhibition in a generation on William Blake; the Tate Modern has a new exhibition by Olafur Eliasson, In Real Life, as well as surveys of Nam June Paik and of the photographic work of Dora Maar, best known as one of Picasso’s lovers but a fine photographer in her own right.

In Paris, the Louvre also has a Leonardo exhibition, indeed a much more comprehensive one than the National Gallery’s focus on a single work, since the Louvre owns several important paintings, besides the Mona Lisa and the other version of the ­Madonna of the Rocks. This exhibition too commemorates a 500-year anniversary, for Leonardo died in 1519, a year before Raphael. After this the Louvre has an exhibition devoted to ­Albrecht Altdorfer from April to August, and then Body and Soul: Sculpture in Italy from Donatello to Michelangelo from May to August.

At the Grand Palais there is an exhibition on El Greco, which as El Greco: Ambition and Defiance will then be shown at the Art Institute in Chicago from March to June; and Toulouse-Lautrec: Resolutely Modern, which attempts to present the artist in a broader historical context than simply the world of Montmartre.

The Musee d’Orsay has an exhibition on Degas at the Opera — which later will travel to the National Gallery in Washington — as well as Huysmans Art Critic, following the developing taste and insight of the author best known to us for having written A rebours (1884; translated as Against Nature or Against the Grain), the novel that played a catalytic role in Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). These exhibitions will be followed by surveys of James Tissot from March to July and Aubrey Beardsley from June to September.

The Centre Pompidou has an ambitious exhibition of the paintings of Francis Bacon, but matched with texts, read aloud by performers in French and English, drawn from great ­authors who inspired the artist and suggested some of his ­imagery: Aeschylus, Nietzsche, Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, ­Joseph Conrad and TS Eliot. There is also a comprehensive ­survey of the work of Christian Boltanski designed by the artist himself.

In Berlin, Raphael at the Gemaeldegalerie is another anniversary exhibition; the Deutsches Historisches Museum has an ­exhibition on the two remarkable brothers, Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt, one a great linguist and the other a giant of natural history whose thinking profoundly affected our own ­Eugene von Guerard.

At the new Barberini Museum in Potsdam, an exhibition is devoted to the still lifes of Vincent van Gogh.

Vincent van Gogh’s Still Life with a Plate of Onions (1889) at the Museum Barberini Potsdam, Germany.

In Frankfurt, Van Gogh: A German Love Story looks at the phenomenon of the artist’s posthumous fame. Contrary to the often repeated story, van Gogh did not paint for years in obscurity: or, rather, he arrived at the style for which he is most highly regarded only two years or less before his death, and he was painting in a remote part of France. His new work in fact began to be ­recognised as soon as it was exhibited, but the process was enormously accelerated by his suicide in 1890. Germany, as it happened, was particularly quick to take up the story and fall in love with the artist and his work. By the outbreak of the Great War there were already about 150 of his pictures in German ­collections, and he had a clear influence on the new German style of expressionism. The exhibition looks at the origins and ­development of the van Gogh legend in Germany, those who promoted and publicised it as well as those who were influenced.

In New York, the economic basis of art is examined in Relative Values: The Cost of Art in the Northern Renaissance at the Metropolitan Museum, and another artist of the late 19th century is revisited in Felix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet. The love of scientific instruments, mechanical novelties and other scientific and technological devices in the early modern period is ­explored in Making Marvels: Science and Splendour at the Courts of Europe.

In Washington, the National Gallery of Art has a monographic exhibition on Andrea del Verrocchio, the distinguished painter and sculptor who was Leonardo’s master. Presumably some of these works will be travelling to Paris later next year for the exhibition mentioned above, which covers the period of Verrocchio’s greatest work. Spanish sculpture of the 16th century, when Renaissance art spread beyond its origins in Italy, is covered in Alonso Berruguete: First Sculptor of Renaissance Spain.

And the National Gallery, too, will acknowledge the 500th ­anniversary of Raphael’s death with a small exhibition of drawings by the master and his friends, as well as prints made after his work, for Raphael was among the first to recognise the potential of the new medium of printmaking which, long before photo­graphy, made it possible to publish paintings and revolutionise the diffusion of artistic movements.

On with the shows

CANBERRA

NGA

Hugh Ramsay to March 29

Matisse & Picasso to April 13

SYDNEY

AGNSW

Japan Supernatural to March 8

50 Years of Kaldor to February 16

Ben Quilty to February 2

MCA

Cornelia Parker to February 16

Museum of Sydney

John Gollings: The History of the Built World to April 26

MELBOURNE

NGV

Civilisation to February 2

Lucy McRae to February 19

Colin McCahon to April

Shirin Neshat to April 19

Roger Kemp to March 15

Keith Haring/JM Basquiat to April 13

TarraWarra

Robert Klippel to February 16

LONDON

National Gallery

Leonardo to January 26

Gauguin’s Portraits to January 26

Durer’s Journeys: Travels of a Renaissance Artist, Feb 13 to May 13

Titian: Love, Desire, Death, March 13 to June 14

Raphael, October 3 to January 24, 2021

British Museum

Inspired by the East to January 26

Troy: Myth and Reality to March 8

Tate Britain

William Blake to February 2

Tate Modern

Olafur Eliasson to January 5

Nam June Paik to February 9

Dora Maar to March 15

NEW YORK

Metropolitan Museum

Relative Values: The Cost of Art in the Northern Renaissance to February 28

Felix Vallotton: Painter of Disquiet to January 26

Making Marvels: Science and Splendour at the Courts of Europe to March 1

PARIS

Louvre

Leonardo da Vinci to February 24

Body and Soul: Sculpture in Italy from Donatello to Michelangelo, May 6 to August 17

Grand Palais

El Greco to February 19

Toulouse-Lautrec to January 27

Musee d’Orsay

Degas at the Opera to January 19

Huysmans Art Critic to March 1

Centre Pompidou

Bacon en toutes lettres to January 20

Christian Boltanski to March 16

BERLIN

Gemaeldegalerie

Raphael in Berlin to April 26

Deutsches Historisches Museum

Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt to April 19

Barberini Museum, Potsdam

Van Gogh Still Lifes to February 2

FRANKFURT

Staedel

Making van Gogh: a German Love Story to February 16

WASHINGTON

National Gallery of Art

Verrocchio: Sculptor and Painter of Renaissance Florence to January 12

Alonso Berruguete: First Sculptor of Renaissance Spain to February 17

Raphael and His Circle, February 16 to June 14

Best (and worst) of 2019

Looking back over the 52 columns I have written this year — or 50 at the time of publication — two or three exhibitions stand out as exceptional, both for the intrinsic quality of the work and for art-historical value. A couple of these were at the National Gallery of Victoria: the joint survey of Hans and Norah Heysen, and some months later the beautiful Alexander Calder show. To these a third could be added: the Pre-Raphaelite exhibition Love and Desire, from the Tate at the National Gallery of Australia.

There were many other fine exhibitions at the NGV, including Escher X nendo, the Terracotta Warriors and the photographic collection Civilisation. Other regional galleries in Victoria and smaller ones in Melbourne also produced exhibitions of quality: Tudors to Windsors at Bendigo Art Gallery, Bill Henson at Monash Gallery of Art, Robert Klippel at TarraWarra Museum of Art. In Canberra, there was Maori Markings at the NGA, but not a lot else of note. In Brisbane, the Gallery of Modern Art’s Margaret Olley was intelligently curated.

In Sydney, the Art Gallery of New South Wales managed one significant exhibition with The Essential Duchamp, but most of the other interesting shows there have been small and in some cases almost improvised, like the Jeffrey Smart or Dora Ohlfsen or even
Walking With Gods displays. Despite its desperate
and misguided attempts to be taken seriously as a contemporary art museum, the Gallery has been completely outgunned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, whose David Goldblatt, Shaun Gladwell and Cornelia Parker have all been substantial and serious exhibitions.

Among the wooden spoons, the NGV’s Julian Opie and the AGNSW’s Heaven and Earth in Chinese Art: Treasures from the National Palace Museum, Taipei, were respectively dull and underwhelming. Real duds included the pretentious but disappointing Shapes of Knowledge at Monash University Museum of Art, Queensland Art Gallery’s Jon Molvig, the surprisingly bad Monet: Impression Sunrise at the NGA — filled with pictures Monet would never have dreamed of exhibiting — and Japan Supernatural at the AGNSW, overshadowed by the dreadful commercial kitsch of Takashi Murakami. The NGV’s current Haring and Basquiat, not yet reviewed, sells out critical perspective to art market hype.

At least we were spared the Biennale and similar exhibitions this year, although we had the Asia-Pacific Triennial, which is by far the best of the category.
Next year we can look forward to both the Biennale
of Sydney and the Adelaide Biennial, with the usual vacuous titles and subtitles and tortured attempts to impose unwieldy themes on a disparate collection of work.