Category Archive: ART
National Portrait Gallery
(Canberra, August 2017) Having breasted the paint-stripping wind blowing down the mountain and off Lake Burley Griffin, we wondered if this monument would rise to emblematise a great reference of images, or just amount to a pantheon of nonentities crowding Our Island Story? Actually, the galleries are small, but occasionally choice, and sometimes a laugh riot. Little hordes of schoolchildren swept through on the hour (Canberra’s array of free stuff means almost every week there’s opportunity for a teaching free day or two) and little lessons were delivered by earnest folks who knew not what they were saying. Fortunately, P was…
Continue Reading →“Porcellino”
We rubbed this boar’s nose recently and popped some coins in the slot. This rococo sculpture was donated to Sydney Hospital by Clarissa Torrigani to commemorate her doctor father and brother who had worked there – it is described as the Wild Boar Fountain of Good Luck. It’s just down Macquarie Street from another cute little artwork: Matthew Flinders’ cat, outside the State Library.
Continue Reading →Face Off
Our winner
NSW Art Gallery (August 2017) The Varnished Culture has previously waxed acidic about the Archibald Prize, so it was with twitching, skeptical smiles that we traversed the crowded rooms of daubs of slebs. Wisely, the curators had again combined this well-known but somewhat debased portraiture competition with those for landscape painting or figurative sculpture (the Wynne Prize) and for subject, genre or mural painting (the Sulman Prize). So we could admire something other than the mugs of B-listers, such as this very busy Australian copse by Nicholas Harding… or this taste of Corot: or this nice slice of magic realism: Of…
Continue Reading →Genius Indigenous Design
One does not have to be immersed in the Dreaming to appreciate the intricate and splendid decorative arts of Australian indigenous artists. By “decorative,” we mean glorious designs that lift the spirit rather than wallpaper: the designs, devoid of mythic meaning, can be enjoyed by all (as in, say, beautiful Islamic decorative art). At the recent Wynne Prize exhibition (see our Archibald et al review), there were some outstanding examples: the best of which was the deserving winner, Ngayuku mamaku ngura (my father’s country), minyma mingkiri tjuta (small desert female mice) by Wawiriya Burton (below):
Continue Reading →Death of Marat
Jacques-Louis David's rather heroic treatment
13 July 1793: Jean-Paul Marat dies at 50 after Charlotte Corday goes all Norman Bates on him. Although Marat thereby became seen as a hero for the sans-culottes and a martyr to the revolutionary cause, in fact he was a bloodthirsty little cuss, with a legendary hatred of Girondins and a disregard for what we might nowadays call ‘due process.’ Carlyle, in his brilliant, excoriating book on the French Revolution (1837), described his assassination in the following pitiless and sneering manner, redolent of Virgil but with added acrimony: “It is yellow July evening, we say, the thirteenth of the month – eve of the Bastille…
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