Luke Morgan

Dr Luke Morgan is a Senior Lecturer in Art Theory in the Faculty of Art & Design at Monash University. The University of Pennsylvania Press published his book Nature as Model on the French architect and polymath Salomon de Caus in 2007. He has written essays, articles and reviews for journals, books and exhibition catalogues on a wide range of other topics, from Italian Baroque painting to modern and contemporary art and design. Luke is on the editorial board of the international quarterly Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes and has been an editorial advisor to the Australian Book Review.

Luke Morgan reviews 'Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting' by David Alan Brown et al.

October 2006, no. 285 • 01 October 2006

Some years ago, Robert Hughes bemoaned the capitulation of art museums and galleries to ‘the whole masterpiece-and-treasure syndrome’. Although made in the 1980s, Hughes’s point may still be valid, especially if the number of recent exhibitions with the word ‘master’ in their titles is anything to go by. A quick check reveals that, in Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria is partic ... (read more)

'Bill Henson and the anatomy of melancholy' by Luke Morgan

June–July 2005, no. 272 • 01 May 2005

The late Susan Sontag suggested that the photograph ‘offers a modern counterpart of that characteristically romantic architectural genre, the artificial ruin: the ruin which is created in order to deepen the historical character of a landscape, to make nature suggestive, suggestive of the past’. On viewing the retrospective exhibition Bill Henson: Three Decades of Photography, which was organi ... (read more)

Luke Morgan reviews 'The Garden of Ideas: Four Centuries of Australian Style' by Richard Aitken

March 2011, no. 329 • 19 April 2011

When Bouvard and Pécuchet suddenly become enamoured of landscape design in Flaubert’s novel of 1881, and decide to remodel their own garden, they are bewildered by the ‘infinity of styles’ that are available to them. After much deliberation and research, they decide to install an Etruscan tomb with an inscription, a Rialto, a Chinese pagoda, a mount, and topiary in the shape of peacocks, st ... (read more)