2015 art exhibitions from Qianlong Emperor to The Greats

There was plenty to see this year, with variations in quality and coherence.

Tristan’s Ascension by Bill Viola from the Adelaide survey.

The outstanding exhibition of the year, despite its unfortunate title The Greats, is undoubtedly the masterpieces from the National Galleries of Scotland at the Art Gallery of NSW.

I have now seen this exhibition on several occasions — with its curator, Richard Beresford; with Sydney’s most eminent art historians; with a couple of artists; and with a group of art history students — and I keep discovering new things each time, partly in the process of discussing or explaining the pictures to others. It is a rare pleasure to commune with works that have so much to say to us, that speak to the viewer and seem to reveal ever new layers of subtlety and meaning.

Looking further back across 50 columns since January, the diversity of the exhibitions that have been covered is extraordinary: from tribal art to old masters, from painting to film, and from cartoons to contemporary art in all media.

The year began with the Daumier, Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition at Canberra’s National Gallery of Australia — particularly striking for the less familiar work by Daumier — and then, after considering the rehang of the Asian collection at the AGNSW and the curious collection of old master copies at Manly, the first major exhibition of the year was Chuck Close at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, a well-presented and enlightening show that focused on this important contemporary artist’s long engagement with different forms and expressions of printmaking.

Arthur Boyd’s Bride series at the Heide Museum of Modern Art in Victoria was a valuable opportunity to see most of a group of pictures dispersed among many collections and rarely shown together. The Bill Viola exhibition, spread across several spaces in Adelaide, brought together several of his most effective videos, pondering the relations and borderlines between this world and the realm before and after life.

Less successful was the noisy and hysterical work of Matthew Barney in Hobart: as I observed at the time, if Viola leads us to think beyond the limits of the ego, Barney wallows in the sludge of the self.

The James Turrell retrospective at the NGA was interesting, sometimes poetic, but left one feeling that the artist is somewhat overrated and that the dispropor­tion between elaborate means and relatively exiguous aesthetic insight was unsatisfactory.

The David Lynch retrospective at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane was fascinating, although his work as a painter fell far short of the impact of his films: a reminder that art is not made of ideas that can be packaged in an arbitrary form but of intuitions that may be capable of articulation only through a particular medium.

The Photograph in Australia, at the AGNSW, was especially effective in its coverage of the first century of the new technology, and the way it revealed the importance of the medium in a colonial world far from the metropolitan centre. The strongest memory it left was of the melancholy array of tiny pictures of people who were once known and loved but are today long forgotten even by most of their descendants.

One of the most impressive ­exhibitions of the year was the ­National Gallery of Victoria’s A Golden Age of China:Qianlong Emperor, 1736-1795, the portrait of a man who ruled an immense empire, mostly competently, yet who found time to pursue a spiritual life and perhaps above all, although of Manchu origins, aspired to the life of the traditional Chinese scholar-artist.

A month or so later, the NGV used the same exhibition space for the portrait of another great monarch and her collection: Catherine the Great, coincidentally the contemporary of Qianlong, also a foreigner ruling a vast empire and also a passionate collector. The exhibition included many very fine works but was somewhat too big and lacking in focus, and as so often in Australian blockbusters had some great artists represented by secondary or studio examples of their work.

The Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart presented a retrospective of the work of Marina Abramovic, but the format, reconfigured to suit the short attention span of contemporary art audi­ences, did not do justice to the most interesting and demanding aspects of her early performances. In Sydney, meanwhile, Abramovic had set up a series of audience-­involvement activities at Pier 2/3, perhaps well-intentioned but ultimately rather contrived, overly managed and artificial.

At the Museum of Sydney, Ginger Meggs, the comic character who has been reincarnated by several successive artists, provided welcome comic relief, even if his popularity ultimately reveals a nostalgic longing for a childhood world that never grows to maturity. Bunyips and Dragons, at the NGV, also offered interesting insights into the world of childhood, through book illustrations designed to appeal to the imagination of young readers.

A couple of valuable exhibitions added significantly to our knowledge of Australian artists of the colonial period. ST Gill, in his time perhaps the most celebrated artist and illustrator in the country, was presented in an excellent exhibition at the State Library in Melbourne, with satellite shows in Ballarat and elsewhere. William Strutt, the first academically trained painter to come to Australia, was surveyed in an exhibition at the National Library in Canberra that included early works as well as his most famous pictures, and also revealed little-known aspects of his talent.

The NGV had one more substantial exhibition, and that was the survey of Australian surrealism and its enduring influence on later art up to the present. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this exhibition was in revealing the surrealist aspects of artists we don’t usually think of under this category, such as Russell Drysdale; its weakness was in including a certain amount of contemporary work that was not always of the same calibre and distracted from the focus on the original surrealist period.

The AGNSW had one more significant exhibition too, the fine Julia Margaret Cameron survey from London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. On the whole, however, the NGV was much more impressive than the AGNSW in the number of substantial and valuable smaller exhibitions that it mounted from its own holdings: Medieval Moderns, devoted to the Pre-Raphaelites; Gods, Heroes and Clowns; Transmission; Bunyips and Dragons; The Horse ; Hard Edge; and Blue: Alchemy of a Colour, to name some of the most significant.

What makes this remarkable level of activity possible is the breadth of the NGV collection but especially the depth of its curatorial talent. The AGNSW does not have as extensive a collection but also conspicuously lacks the curatorial depth, and has been steadily losing some of its most outstanding curators for several years, from Terence Maloon to Jackie Menzies and now soon Beresford, responsible for the best exhibition of the year.

Instead of focusing on the collection and the curatorial staff, the AGNSW has wasted the past few years dreaming of a colossal extension project that has failed to gain credible support and was recently savaged by Paul Keating.

Let us hope that the newly appointed chairman of trustees, the highly experienced David Gonski, proves willing to act decisively to ­restore the gallery’s sense of ­direction.