Jean Arp was a very prominent member of two of Modernism’s most perplexing art movements: Dada and Surrealism. Dada, often also called Dadaism, was less a coherent group of artists than a collective of like-minded and disaffected people whose ideas and art were propelled by an abiding disgus
When William Robinson was awarded the Archibald Prize in 1987, one journalist suggested that the win had succeeded in ending ‘almost 50 years of obscurity’1 for the artist. Patronising as it might have been, the statement carried a ring of truth for a great many followers of Austr
Dampier III painted in 1967 belongs to the early part of Jeffrey Smart’s maturity as an artist and the start of a long period of important and successful paintings. In many respects, the painting illustrates the artist’s position at this point in time as it draws together the variou
Sidney Nolan pursued vigilantly throughout his career the notion of man pitted against the extremities. Nolan was particularly interested in the stories of 19th century explorers including Edward Eyre, Ludwig Leichhardt and Robert O'Hara Burke and William John Wills and their resp
Rural labour with a nationalist ethos has been a dominant theme in Australian art and literature from the mid-nineteenth century on. The art of Frederick McCubbin was at the forefront of these investigations; his fascination with epic narrative paintings of white settlement in Australia prod
Fred Williams was always reluctant to exhibit his work. His modest temperament meant that he felt uncomfortable about baring all of what he always considered to be a private activity, born of personal convictions. One might feel the same about revealing the contents of one’s private diary.
Adagio is one of John Brack's most important and challenging paintings of the 1960s. He was seeking for a metaphor through which to express human relationships, a stage on which a man and a woman could perform. The painting was executed in 1967 and was exhibited in Canberra, Sydney
There is always a hidden visual power in Jeffrey Smart’s paintings. His paintings are never simple scenes that are simply rendered – always there is an organising principle. Behind the visible scene there is the invisible mind that orders. Smart’s paintings are never the record of a scene bu
The heady artistic atmosphere of fin de siècle Paris captivated the young Rupert Bunny, when he moved there in 1886 as a twenty four year old art student. By the late 1880s Bunny’s sociable nature was well known and earned him a place in artistic circles that included some of the cr
Maggie Watson was a leader amongst a group of Warlpiri women artists who began to challenge the dominance of men’s acrylic painting in the central desert region from the mid 1980s. The emergence of these women in Yuendumu and simultaneously in Utopia (amongst Anamtjerre and Alyawarre peoples