Category Archive: ART
Headlong
Bruegel the Elder, Winter Landscape with skaters and bird trap
(by Michael Frayn) What would you do if you were certain that you had discovered a work of art not so much lost as mythical? A painting beyond value which is being used by rich rural idiots to block the fireplace. Horrible, unhinged, feckless Martin Clay makes that decision instantaneously in Michael Frayn’s Headlong. and then dithers about it until the reader wants to cry. This is a marvellous, unusual and comic book with some weaknesses – for one, the reader will learn more than s/he need ever know about Breugels both with and without “h”s, elder and younger and the bitter relationship between the Netherlands…
Continue Reading →To the Hermitage
Musée_de_l'Hermitage (photo by Pierre Andre Leclercq)
July, 2015 If you can’t get to St Petersburg, or decline to chance flying over Russian air-space, this exhibition extract at Melbourne’s NGV is some small consolation. You’d need a few weeks to skim the Hermitage collection; this one can be seen in a couple of hours. It is a very small slice of a gigantic art hoard, one of the greatest collections in the world (celebrating its 250th year). Of the cameos for example, none are from classical antiquity (those remain at home). Here, in Melbourne, is no El Greco; no Gauguin; no Cranach; no Holbein; no Leonardo; no Raphael; no Caravaggio; no Caspar David…
Continue Reading →Samson & Delilah – The Unforgiving Present
(Samson & Delilah, directed by Warwick Thornton) (2009) “The Future is Unforgiving” (Photographic Exhibition by Warwick Thornton, Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne) (July into August, 2015) At the Anna Schwartz Gallery, 185 Flinders Lane, The Varnished Culture saw the exhibition by Warwick Thornton, whom we knew only from his film Samson and Delilah (see thumbnail review below). Born and bred in the Alice, Thornton has possibly observed a thing or two about dysfunctional folks and the impact of the excesses of received culture on indigenous perspectives. Here, in a cavernous, concrete-floored space, there are a small series of interrelated images of aboriginal children. There are three large…
Continue Reading →Egypt and Nubia
(Written by William Brockedon, lithographs by Louis Haghe, from drawings made on the spot by David Roberts RA) (1847) It may not be the most propitious time to visit Egypt or indeed the Sudan. Cheaper and safer to buy this sumptuous single volume Folio edition with the remarkable plates of David Roberts, a Member of the Royal Academy and a high master of in situ painting and (back at the studio, obviously) lithography. and today…
Continue Reading →Wide World of Arts
Velázquez looked down on his sitters
They thought to hold a contest for The grandest forms of portraiture To accommodate the talent-free And cash in on celebrity. So the call to paint was made, A grateful nation’s light and shade Was wielded and the packing crates Swept in as if on roller skates. The problem was, the open field Like an open mind, often concealed Hard work forsworn, the sweat that stings And shows the empty state of things.
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