In 1895 the Wynne Prize was proposed as an award for a ‘landscape painting of Australian scenery’. Today it is more likely to be given to an Indigenous artist’s explanation of Country.
- Honorary Senior Fellow, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne
Under the cloud of an election, this year’s Archibald prize is mercifully a politician-free zone. However the artists do have issues …
Over the past half a century, Australian women’s art has gone from the margins to the mainstream. A new book mapping this story is a flawed, colourful kaleidoscope.
Jeffrey Smart is admired for his carefully structured paintings of Tuscany and Rome. This National Gallery of Australia’s centenary celebration of his birth takes the viewer back to Adelaide.
Matisse: Life & Spirit is a celebration of the creativity of the master of colour.
Margel Hinder was responsible for some of Australia’s most significant public sculptures in the 1960s and 70s. A major exhibition now examines the totality of her career.
Claire Roberts new book on Ian Fairweather looks at the influence of China on his art and ideas, and concludes the ‘Australian artist’ was free of any national allegiance.
The once secret paintings of Hilma af Klint are a revelation both for their beauty and for highlighting the impact of spiritualism on how artists see the world.
In its centenary year, the Trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales could not resist the symbolism of awarding the Archibald Prize to Peter Werner’s portrait of the 100 year old Guy Warren.
It’s 100 years since the Art Gallery of NSW first held the Archibald Prize. Though loathed by some critics, it is an annual snapshot of the kind of society we are, and who our heroes might be.
The Archibald Prize celebrates its centenary with a list of finalists that includes plenty of artists’ portraits and some notable change makers.
The Renaissance San Marco convent, now a museum, is where Fra Angelico lived and painted under the patronage of Cosimo de’ Medici. It was also where Savonarola proclaimed the Bonfire of the Vanities.
For many years the British government resisted requests for the UK’s National Gallery to tour its collection, one of the world’s greatest. Now 61 of these works can be seen in Canberra.
Leak will be the first official portrait painter of a former Prime Minister who has not been an Archibald finalist.
50 years ago Art News published Linda Nochlin’s essay, Why have there been no great women artists? It would change how we see art and its institutions, and still reverberates today.
For over 60 years, Daniel Thomas has shaped and extended our understanding of Australian art. Sometimes cheeky, always erudite, Thomas’s writings are collected in a new book.
For many years, almost all the art on public display was by men. The National Gallery of Australia aims to redress that imbalance.
A major new exhibition presents a nuanced view of Arthur Streeton who, in his lifetime, was praised as being the artist ‘who has shown us our land as no one else has done’.
Lindy Lee sees beauty in a moon drop, a speck of dust caught in a beam of light, and fragments of molten bronze. A new exhibition arcs over the entire trajectory of Lee’s career.
For the first time in its 99 year-history, the Archibald Prize has been won by an Indigenous painter. The Wynne and Sulman Prize winners also signal a time of change.
The blasting of giant reproductions with surround sound is an experience that has little to do with the art it purports to honour.
Most years, the Archibald exhibition is worth viewing as an amusing exercise in social history. This year it is worth seeing for the art.
The National Gallery of Australia is facing a 10% reduction in staffing, but will maintain its $16 million acquisitions budget.
Whether you’re home sick or sick of being at home, our 13 experts have picked excellent things you can read, watch, look at or listen to.
Hugh Ramsay’s Two girls in white, was painted just two years before he died at the age of 28 in 1906. It is the central work in the National Gallery of Australia’s survey exhibition.
Contact Joanna for
- General
- Media request
- Speaking request
- Consulting / Advising
- Research collaboration
- Research supervision
What is this? Become a friend.
- Location: Sydney, Australia
- Website
- BlueSky: @oldlillipilli.bsky.social
- X (formerly Twitter): @oldlillipilli
- Article Feed
- ORCID
-
- Joined
