The early 1980s were a time of great change and upheaval for John Olsen on both a personal and professional level. In 1979, Olsen began a relationship with fellow artist, Noela Hjorth, a passionate ‘mid life collision’1 which saw the artist leave his wife and family in Dural
Brett Whiteley’s Westerly with Daisies (View of Lavender Bay) of 1974, was purchased from his Lavender Bay Series exhibition at Australian Galleries in Collingwood, Melbourne; the gallery set up in 1956, the year of the Melbourne Olympics, by the aesthetically disc
Clasp 2006 was made in the last year of Bronwyn Oliver’s life. She was at the height of her powers, creatively and intellectually, yet at her most fragile and difficult personally. Throughout her shorter-than-it-should-have-been career, there was an incredible consistency about her
Arthur Boyd’s painting Death of a Horse of 1981 arose from an emotionally felt experience. A horse called ‘Flame’, owned by a local child, had died after becoming entangled in barbed wire discarded after a flooding of the Shoalhaven River at Bundanon, Boyd’s home, near Nowra in New
The subject of the heroic and knockabout bushranger is one that Sidney Nolan returned to time and again. His interest began in 1945 and 1946-47 with the famous series of 27 Ned Kelly paintings (later bequeathed by Sunday Reed to the National Gallery of Australia) and continued almost up unti
In 1953, the first official survey of contemporary Australian painting was assembled to send to Britain through the support of the Arts Council of Great Britain. The group exhibition was held at the New Burlington Galleries in London. The exhibition was called Twelve Australian
The aesthetic merits of Jeffrey Smart’s elegant Pylon I of 2006 deserve a full chapter. It stands as an artistic high point in his mature reflections on the perennial theme that occupied him for most of his life: the re-imaging of urban life as caught in a series of re-composed ment
In 1968, the National Gallery of Victoria held its inaugural exhibition at its new location in St. Kilda Road, Southbank. The impressive new gallery, designed by the leading architect Roy Grounds (1905-1981), was opened by Sir Henry Bolte (1908-1990) on the evening of Tuesday 20 August 1968.
Fernand Léger’s China Town of 1943 is a rare and singularly accomplished painting that was created during the artist’s longest visit to America. Its visually arresting compositional attributes are distinctively typical of the sixty-two year old artist’s mature oeuvre in the
Tim Storrier’s art has come to be amongst the most sought after of the past three decades in Australia – it is also amongst the most beautiful. Despite being an ‘outsider’, a realist painter making a living as an artist during the height of postmodernism, Storrier’s art has flourished. In fa