Sheridan Palmer is an art historian, curator and an Honorary research Fellow at CoVA and the University of Melbourne. She is currently editing the 3rd Edition of Bernard Smith’s European Vision and the South Pacific, to be published by Miegunyah Press & A + A publishing.
Australian Galleries opened in Melbourne in June 1956. One year later, Andy Warhol established Andy Warhol Enterprises in New York. Warhol’s art of making money became an art form in itself, with the artist elaborating that ‘good business is the best art’. Gallerists Anne and Tam Purves would have agreed. This husband-and-wife team took selling art seriously and introduced a professionalism ... (read more)
Old friendships and close collaborations between author and subject can be either a blessing or a curse in biography – a tightrope between discretionary tact and open fire. Both call for intimate but balanced subjectivity, especially where virile egos are concerned. The Boy from Brunswick, a massive tome with sixty chapters and 540 pages, offers a bit of everything.
Jan Senbergs, who knew and a ... (read more)
It’s absurd to pretend that we are or ever have been no more than exiled Europeans … forever condemned to inhabit some irrelevant, Antipodean limbo.’ This statement encapsulates Joan Kerr’s determination to rewrite established codes of Australian art history and to expand the lexicon of its cultural heritage. If an egalitarian consensus of colonial cultural creativity were to be achieved, ... (read more)
A conversation is an interactive exchange usually of a spontaneous nature. Janet Hawley’s essays are a mix of journalistic intention, conversational ruminations, observations, enquiries, and a gentle goading of her subjects about the ‘twin crucibles’ of creativity – the personality of the artist and what occurs in his or her sanctum, the studio. Assuming the role of confessional nursemaid ... (read more)
Revealing the self
Sheridan Palmer
Face: Australian Portraits 1880–1960 by Anne Gray National Gallery of Australia, $39.95 pb, 160 pp, 9780642334152
The Naked Face: Self-portraits by Vivien Gaston National Gallery of Victoria, $49.95 pb, 111 pp, 9780724103348
Roy Porter wrote that ‘the portrait (above all the self-portrait), the diary and the biography (esp ... (read more)
