Category Archive: ART
Amedeo Modigliani
(By Rita Kirkman) I frequently revisit artists who never fail to touch my heart with their unique talent for the creation of timeless beauty and their representations of the worlds in which they lived. Amedeo Modigliani was born in Italy in 1884 to a French mother and a Jewish-Italian father. From the outset, he was plagued by chronic bad health which he endured for the rest of his short life. At age 7 he suffered from typhoid fever, and thereafter tuberculosis. He was very close to his mother. When he was 11, she noted in her diary: “The child’s character…
Continue Reading →More from the Post-Eternal Phase
"Plate pole prop" by Richard Serra - minimalism ad absurdum
Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 17 November 2024 Modern Art is, to an alarmingly increasing degree, pure fraud. It operates on ruthless market principles, clothed in doubletalk, agitprop, and gobbledegook. It has largely abandoned aesthetics and no longer seeks, were it even able, to be evocative. We call it the “Post-Eternal Phase,” because its representative works leave the mind as soon as one turns away, and its work is complete as soon as the cheque is cashed. As Robert Hughes once memorably observed, the role of modern art is to hang on the wall and get more expensive (a gaffer-taped…
Continue Reading →René Magritte
It's raining men ("Golconde", 1953)
(New South Wales Art Gallery, 18 November 2024) René Magritte (21 November 1898 – 15 August 1967) was one of the leading Surrealists, along with Chirico, Meret Oppenheim, and (of course) Dali, who tried to represent the “elusive dream of a private person to which we hold no key.” Magritte’s entire oeuvre “is not copying reality but rather creating a new reality, much as we do in our dreams…painted with meticulous accuracy and exhibited with puzzling titles, [which] are memorable precisely because they are inexplicable.”* Magritte at the NSW Art Gallery in Sydney is described by the curator as “an…
Continue Reading →Quilts: The Fabric of War
(1760-1900) Exhibition at the Roche Museum, 22 February, 2024 / Book and collection by Annette Gero This exhibition of applique and geometric masterpieces, all made from military fabrics, was simply stunning. Dr. Annette Gero, an acknowledged expert on quilt history, has collected these sumptuous pieces, featuring complex, intricate patterns, to mythical and historical narratives. Her book based on this collection is published by The Beagle Press and available through the David Roche Foundation House Museum, Adelaide. We saw a dazzling array of styles and subject-matter. The main image is an English Intarsia Quilt, c. 1870, by Michael Zumpf, a Hungarian,…
Continue Reading →Back to Queensland Art Gallery
Happy as a pig at QAG
(Southbank, Brisbane, December 2023) We had previously visited in 2021, and were keen to return, not merely to beat the heat. We had not been totally impressed with some of the work on offer before, either, but today we ignored the tat and saw some great things new and old. Agitprop can be beautiful too. Anne Wallace’s “Passing the River at Woogaroo Reach” (2015), inspired by survivors of Wolston Park psychiatric hospital, which gave Bedlam a bad name, is a gorgeous rendering, fit to accompany a tale with a mythic theme: We loved Rupert Bunny’s “Bathers” at QAG previously, and…
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