Patrick McCaughey

Patrick McCaughey reviews 'John Olsen: An Artist's Life' by Darleen Bungey

March 2015, no. 369 • 02 March 2015

Eight years ago Darleen Bungey published a revelatory biography of Arthur Boyd. She cast shadows across the ‘idyllic’ Open Country years where the extended Boyd family lived in suburban Murrumbeena and unflinchingly detailed his declining, alcoholic years at Bundanon. Bungey’s compelling new biography of John Olsen has its share of revelations. Olsen’s weak and inadequate father wound up d ... (read more)

Amsterdam Phoenix

March 2014, no. 359 • 28 February 2014

The Rijksmuseum used to be the dullest of the major European collections. It looked as though Ursula Hoff had painted all the pictures. An air of dowdiness hung over the massive building and crowded collections where the good and the great indiscriminately mixed in with the mediocre in warren-like galleries with an over-supply of the decorative arts. ... (read more)

Patrick McCaughey reviews 'Picasso and Truth' by T.J. Clark

September 2013, no. 354 • 27 August 2013

Picasso at twenty-five was famous in Paris, comfortably off by 1914, wealthy and internationally recognised six years later. He married a leading ballerina, Olga Khokhlova, in Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. It turned out badly. Two of his mistresses, Fernande Olivier and FranÇoise Gilot, wrote tell-all memoirs, which he did his best, unsuccessfully, to repress. At least two other mistresses, ... (read more)

Patrick McCaughey reviews 'Self-Portrait as a Young Man' by Roy Strong

July–August 2013, no. 353 • 26 June 2013

Roy Strong was appointed director of the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in 1967 at the age of thirty-two. Today it would be astonishing to head one of the United Kingdom’s national collections at that age; five decades ago it was outrageous. Only Kenneth Clark at thirty was younger when he became director of the National Gallery. Strong’s ascent to the NPG has stayed in his mind as the fulcru ... (read more)

Cézanne – a chaotic self

March 2013, no. 349 • 08 March 2013

The lives of artists have formed a staple of art history from Vasari in the sixteenth century to Alex Danchev in the twenty-first. Current styles of art history may frown on biographies of artists. They smack too much of the hero artist and side-step the social construction of art. Yet the genre shows no sign of wilting. In our time we have such masterly works as John Richardson’s multi-volume L ... (read more)

'Wordly riches at the Barnes: From musty Merion to a new home in Philadelphia' by Patrick McCaughey

July–August 2012, no. 343 • 10 July 2012

In mid-May the Barnes Foundation opened at its new location in the cultural corridor of downtown Philadelphia. A cloud of controversy followed it to the end. The new building, handsome if flawed, from the gifted New York studio of Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, has attracted its share of criticism. The entrance, initially hard to find, is at the back of the building facing towards the car park and ... (read more)

Patrick McCaughey reviews 'The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde' edited by Janet Bishop, Cécile Debray, and Rebecca Rabinow

June 2012, no. 342 • 24 May 2012

Despite its unrewarding title, The Steins Collect, both exhibition and catalogue, tells the most captivating story of early modern art and its patronage. The cast of characters ranges from the downright difficult (Leo) and the overweeningly self-important (Gertrude) to sunny Californian idealists (Sarah and Michael). Gertrude and her brother Leo set up their joint ménage at 27 rue de Fleurus, clo ... (read more)

Patrick McCaughey reviews 'The Donald Friend Diaries: Chronicles & Confessions of an Australian Artist' by Ian Britain

November 2010, no. 326 • 16 November 2011

For some sixty years Donald Friend kept a diary, making his final entry just days before his death in 1989 at the age of seventy-four. The National Library of Australia published them in four massive volumes between 2001 and 2006. They were intractable. You needed an axe to cut through the stream of consciousness which flowed from an uncensoring pen. ... (read more)

'The paradoxical neglect of Australian art abroad' by Patrick McCaughey

June 2011, no. 332 • 24 May 2011

Twenty years ago, when I was at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, I heard of an Arthur Boyd exhibition in SoHo. Recklessly, without seeing the show, I urged my American friends to see one of Australia’s foremost contemporary painters. The gallery, unknown to me, turned out to be small and unimpressive. There were five or six late paintings, including one of those large, multi-figured bathers, ... (read more)