IRMA STERN
Irma Stern is one of South Africa’s best-known artists and one of a few South African painters whose reputation extends beyond the African continent. Born in 1894 and raised in Transvaal, she studied art in Germany, first at the Weimar Academy in 1913, and later briefly at the famed Bauhaus.
MARGARET OLLEY
In November 1970, Margaret Olley suffered the loss of her friend and fellow artist, David Strachan (1919-1970), when he was killed in a car accident at the age of 51. Having met during the 1940s as students of Jean Bellette (1908-1991), Olley and Strachan forged a lifelong friendship.1<
JEFFREY SMART
To understand the paintings of Jeffrey Smart is to enter the world of signs and symbols and to acknowledge a language that is entirely Smart’s own. Jeffrey Smart left Australia in 1963 but it is the period prior to this that forms Smart’s thinking and marks his mature style. By the middle si
BEN QUILTY
This is a large, sprawling country. Without a car, forget it. Distances shrink behind the wheel, but highways never end. If you live in one of the capital cities, you can make a life for yourself with public transport and running shoes, but there are limits. Town planners recognise the probl
JOHN OLSEN
Voyage within you, on the fabled ocean,
And you will find that Southern Continent,
Quiros' vision—his hidalgo heart
And mythical Australia, where reside
All things in their imagined counterpart.
It is your land of similes: the
ARTHUR BOYD
Eltham Dam 1959 is a fresh and generously painted canvas that reinforces Arthur Boyd’s reputation in the late 1950s as Australia’s leading landscape artist. Central to the work is a unique understanding of the Australian bush and a love of secluded semi-rural farms and still-impenet
JEFFREY SMART
Vasari tells us that when Uccello’s wife called to him to bed, he would mutter: ‘Oh what a sweet thing this perspective is!’ and keep working. One can almost imagine Jeffrey Smart emulating the old Florentine in singing the praises of geometry and perspective, but it’s unlikely he would sit
JOHN BRACK
JEFFREY SMART
It would be possible to do an entire exhibition of paintings by Jeffrey Smart featuring buses and trucks. Yet where the back of a truck usually appears as a bold geometric shape – a red square on grey asphalt, the buses are treated more playfully. In The Traveller 1973, a bald-heade