National Gallery of Victoria

Napoleon came to power as First Consul in 1799 after a coup d’état, having recently returned from invading Egypt, his defeat there by the British spin-doctored into a victory back in Paris. Five years later he had himself made emperor, crowning himself in Notre Dame surrounded with panoply reminiscent of the ancien régime and inspired by fantasies of Roman Antiquity. Bonaparte’s armies occupied much of Western Europe, overthrowing governments, installing his brothers and brothers-in-law as kings, and imposing French laws and taxation. Napoleon’s wars killed three million soldiers, with the death rate on the Russian campaign – mostly of starvation, cold, and exhaustion – among the highest in modern military history. The emperor pillaged the art collections of conquered Europe to create his Musée Napoléon. In 1802 he reversed a decree of the revolutionary government in order to re-establish slavery in the French colonies. The famous Napoleonic Code of laws made women second-class citizens; a woman’s husband, for instance, had legal control of her property. The emperor unceremoniously dumped Joséphine to take a wife who could bear a child and, he dreamed, secure his dynasty. Napoleon’s opponents were imprisoned or driven into exile.

This fabulous-looking fiftieth issue of the National Gallery of Victoria’s more or less annual art journal, with its traffic-stopping Rosalie Gascoigne cover, is a birthday package. This year marks the Gallery’s 150^th anniversary, and the essays in this Art Journal of the National Gallery of Victoria together reveal much about what the institution has been doing since its foundation in 1861. There are twenty-six articles by twenty-seven authors; twenty-two of them current NGV staff members, including the current director and his deputy. It is a great team effort and a beautifully produced volume, with excellent spot-gloss-varnished illustrations throughout, presenting original scholarly research in an enjoyably accessible format.

‘Vienna has little to offer its great while they are alive. But when they have departed, a funeral monument and a place in the museum is arranged for them.’ So wrote the critic Oskar Marus Fontana, with veiled anti-Semitism, in a Munich periodical when the Wiener Wersktätte (WW) closed in 1932. From 1903 this famous Viennese design firm created innovative and finely crafted decorative arts, and fitted out modern interiors in concert with the major aesthetic philosophy shared by Secessionist artists, architects, and designers who worked under its banner in Vienna – the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art). Swimming against tides of cultural, political, and economic change during the later 1920s, the WW was dissolved after its last ‘exhibition’ in 1932 – a large auction sale of more than seven thousand objects, many of which sold below their estimates.

This is the second major retrospective of the art of Eugene von Guérard (1811–1901). In 1980 he was seen as Nature-inspired, like the German Romantics and the Humboldtian visionaries Frederick Church and Thomas Moran (American painters of von Guérard’s own generation). This time, the viewpoint is science.

John Brack (1920–99) is one of the most remarkable of Australian painters, and a salient figure in the generation that included Arthur Boyd, Fred Williams, John Perceval, Leonard French, and John Olsen, of whom only two survive. Many viewers would see him as the imagination that made our suburbs viable as art; others have been in two minds about his clarity and perfectionism. Hard edges can make for tough responses.

This impressive volume surpasses most assumptions about the scope, depth and eloquence of an exhibition catalogue. Curator and editor Terence Lane has gathered together thirteen of Australia’s leading art historians, historians and curators, all recognised experts in their fields.