This picture is less a portrait of his sister-in-law and hostess than about the ‘treasure’ which caught his eye and stirred his imagination during a recent visit to Spain. (Conder had an interest in Spain before this time. In Scaramouche, one of the sketched figures is a lady with a...
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Art Reviews
By Anonymous
27 Aug 2019
By Anonymous
27 Aug 2019
Conder captures a moment in time by the coast, perhaps Dieppe, with the subtle transition of colour from the distant sky and sea to the elaborate elegant costumes worn by the leisured Edwardian women. All faces are the same. Likenesses would detract from the moment, the freshness of...
By Anonymous
27 Aug 2019
This picture is an outstanding example of ‘aesthetic eclecticism’. Conder painted an imaginative collage which draws upon eternal themes. He created a theatrical setting in which the scurrilous Commedia dell’Arte character, Scaramouche, is clearly up to no good as he observes the...
By Rodney James BA (Hons.), MA
27 Aug 2019
James Clarke Waite’s Melbourne 1888 shows a section of the Yarra River from the south wharf looking east toward the city centre. Like Fred McCubbin’s (1855-1917) better known painting from that year Melbourne in 1888, a work subsequently cut in half, Waite’s picture focuses on the large vessels...
By Anonymous
27 Aug 2019
In July 1981, John Olsen moved to Clarendon in South Australia, where he purchased ‘The Old Rectory’, built in 1850. The building was situated on top of a hill overlooking the village of Clarendon, and Olsen recognised immediately that ‘this environment, characterised by voluptuous rolling hills...
By Caroline Jones BA, MA (Art Admin.)
27 Aug 2019
Andy Warhol had met Mick Jagger in 1963 when the Rolling Stones were not well known in the United States. Warhol had designed the band’s provocative album cover, Sticky Fingers, which caused a stir when it was released however the attention gained for both the band and the artist was...
By Anonymous
27 Aug 2019
This painting was first shown in 5AR: Artists and Architects, a collaborative group exhibition curated by Val Austin, at the University of Melbourne’s George Paton Gallery in June 1986. The stark monochrome palette references its origins in Elizabethan half-timbered architecture, and...
By Gavin Fry
27 Aug 2019
Albert Tucker was of a generation of Australians whose lives were constrained by the great international turmoils of the first half of the twentieth century. Born at the beginning of the First World War, his childhood was overshadowed by the communal loss of a nation that had lost sixty thousand...
By Gavin Fry
27 Aug 2019
The term ‘icon’ has become perhaps the most over-used, and abused, word in the contemporary lexicon, yet in many ways it is hard not to describe Rick Amor’s The Waiter as an iconic work in the artist’s long career. It stands near the mid point, twenty-seven years after his graduation...
By Ken Wach
27 Aug 2019
The soft luminosity and the free spill of earthy tones in Fred Williams’s early work, Purple Landscape of 1958, lead the viewer’s eye to an upper register of loosely applied and scumbled paint that seems to “hang” over the whole scene. The painting has a visual power that is arresting...
