During the mid-1960s, Fred Williams embarked on a sequence of works that would secure his reputation as Australia’s most accomplished landscape painter in the post-war era. In the Lysterfield paintings of 1965-68, Williams presented an authoritative vision of the Australian landscape...
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Art Reviews
The landscape paintings of William Delafield Cook are distinctive and reasoned. They are complex depictions of rivers and rocky flats, but despite their pinpoint accuracy, the paintings also speak of memory. They are formal takes of the landscape in which neither bird nor personage resides. The...
It seems extraordinary that the music of Johann Sebastian Bach remained in complete obscurity for more than half a century following his death in Leipzig in 1750. Regarded, except by a few specialists, as simply a conservative, mathematical curiosity confined within the demands of his Christian...
Like Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964), who made an epic body of work from a collection of dun-coloured jugs, bottles and vases, Jeffrey Smart returned, repeatedly, to his own familiar set of motifs. Level Crossing is a relatively late painting that acts as kind of anthology – a retrospective...
Tim Storrier’s outback paintings, complete with burning logs and dramatic skies, are among his most admired and sought after works from a long and successful career. At many points he has rung changes to the basic composition, introducing different celestial elements, the size and stage of the...
1964 was an important year for Sidney Nolan. From his home and studio-base in London, Nolan travelled to France, Scotland, Holland, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, the USA, and Antarctica. In this same year, Nolan produced over 140 new works inspired by this extensive travel, and his...
The painting Remembrance brings together three of Shead’s favourite pictorial motifs – the military memorial of the soldier on a pedestal reminiscent of Anzac memorials scattered throughout regional Australia; the anthropomorphic kangaroo, this time bringing a bunch of flowers to lay at...
William Robinson’s art has always been an art of place. He has painted his milieu, whether it has been the domestic spaces of early family life, the bustling chaos of his household farm at Birkdale, or the vast spaces of forest and mountain at Beechmont in the Darlington Mountain Range. This...
In the summer of 2020, almost eleven years after her death at the age of eighty-eight, Sydney’s S.H. Ervin Gallery paid homage to Margaret Olley in an exhibition called Margaret’s Gift.1 The show comprised sixty-five works of art that Olley had donated to Australian public...
Painted in 1959, The Earthquake represents an important transitional phase for Jeffrey Smart. Author Barry Pearce cited this period between 1955 and 1961 as the moment when Smart began to refine himself as the painter now widely recognised.1 Four solo exhibitions at Macquarie...