Lecturer Level A or B in Painting, School of Art, Research School of Humanities and the Arts, ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences – deadline 9th June 2013

Museum Victoria hiring a range of postions including Loans Manager, Image Management Officer etc – see MV website for details

Departmental Lecturer in Classical Art and Archaeology, University of Oxford, Faculty of Classics, Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies – deadline 7th June 2013

Lectureship in Contemporary Art/ Art After 1945, University of Essex -School of Philosophy and Art History – deadline 9th June 2013

Senior Lecturer/Reader in Art Education, Goldsmiths, University of London -Educational Studies – deadline not specified

Funding

Kluge Fellowships, Library of Congress for research in the humanities and social sciences, especially interdisciplinary, cross-cultural or multilingual – deadline July 15th 2013

Bruno Zevi Prize for a historical-critical essay on architecture – deadline 30th June

Malevich Society Grants – deadline 30th September 2013

Calls for Papers

Bringing Art into Being in the Early Modern Period, Fifth Early Modern Symposium (Courtauld, Oct 2013) – deadline 21st June 2013

The Second Annual International Conference in Paragone Studies (Flint, Michigan, Sep 2013) – deadline 19th July 2013

Asia-Pacific Journal of Arts and Cultural Management, open edition – deadline 31st August 2013

Pyrotechnic Sculpture (Leeds, 21 Nov 2013) – deadline 14th Jun 2013

Imaginary Exhibitions (Leeds, 6 Nov 13) – deadline 1st July 2013

Mid-Atlantic Popular & American Culture Association 24th Annual Conference (November 7-9, 2013) – deadline 14th June 2013

Professor Michael Fried, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore

In 2011 the German artist Thomas Demand made a two-minute stop-motion film called “Pacific Sun.”

Michael Fried will show this film and analyse it in detail, with a view to explaining what he regards as its particular significance in and for the present situation in the visual arts.

Michael Fried is a poet, art historian, art critic and literary critic. He is Professor, J. R. Herbert Boone Chair in the Humanities (secondary appointment: Department of the History of Art) at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore. He has written extensively about an array of subjects, spanning abstract painting and sculpture since World War II to French painting and art criticism from the mid-eighteenth century to the advent of Edouard Manet (and beyond).

He has also written about writers and artists Charles Baudelaire, Joseph Conrad, Gustave Caillebotte, Roger Fry, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Jeff Wall, Thomas Struth, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Demand, and other contemporary ‘art’ photographers.

Fried has also written on Caravaggio and the transformation of Italian painting circa 1600, and most recently about the contemporary artists Anri Sala, Charles Ray, Joseph Marioni, and Douglas Gordon. He is currently embarked on a short book on ‘Madame Bovary,’ to be called Flaubert’s Gueuloir.

Date: Wednesday, 5 June 2013 | 6.30pm

Venue: Carrillo Gantner Theatre, Sidney Myer Asia Centre, The University of Melbourne, Parkville

Admission is free but bookings are required as seating is limited. Visit the webpage here to register.

Temple of Ancient Virtue, Stowe

In conjunction with the  exhibition ‘Monet’s Garden’ the National Gallery of Victoria is running a short course on history of garden and landscape design. A series of nine lectures presented by art historians and academics in landscape architecture will explores the art and history of garden design from the Italian Renaissance to today. You can book for the whole course or individual lectures. See th full program below.

Venue: Clemenger BBDO Auditorium, NGV International, St Kilda Rd

Bookings: Ph +61 3 8662 1555 (10am-5pm daily), Event CodeP1341

Cost: $20 adult / $16 members / $18 concession (per lecture) | $170 adult / $125 members / $152 concession (full series)

Website: http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/whats-on/programs/public-programs/short-course-visions-of-paradise-the-art-and-history-of-garden-design

Program

Sat 25 May, 2pm | Nature as model: The Italian Renaissance garden Dr Luke Morgan, Monash University

Sat 1 Jun, 2pm | The spectacle of nature: Italian Baroque gardens and their cultural context Dr Katrina Grant, Independent Scholar

Sat 8 Jun, 2pm | Landscape and power: The seventeenth-century French garden Dr Luke Morgan, Monash University

Sat 15 Jun, 2pm | Hedging your bets: The politics of the Picturesque in eighteenth-century England Dr Katrina Grant, Independent Scholar

Sat 22 Jun, 2pm | ‘Underneath which rivers flow’: Gardens and garden culture in the Islamic world Dr Susan Scollay, Independent Scholar

Sat 29 Jun, 2pm | Brush with design: On traditional Chinese private gardens Assoc Prof Greg Missingham, The University of Melbourne

Sat 6 Jul, 2pm | ‘The moon is everywhere’: The aesthetics of Japanese Gardens Dr Eiichi Tosaki, The University of Melbourne

Sat 13 Jul, 2pm | Monet’s Garden: The exotic garden in Fin-de-Siècle France  Sophie Matthiesson, Curator, International Art, NGV

Sat 20 Jul, 2pm | An Antipodean Giverny? Contemporary garden design in Australia Dr Catherin Bull AM, The University of Melbourne

The editors of EMAJ are now calling for articles to be submitted for EMAJ 7 to be published in November 2013.

EMAJ welcomes monographic articles about specific artists or art collectives as well as thematic or theoretical analyses of art history from any historical period. Established and emerging researchers working within the fields of art history, architectural history, curatorship, politics and aesthetics, visual culture, philosophy, historiography and museum studies are encouraged to submit.

Manuscripts must be submitted by email to emaj.editors@gmail.com, as word documents (.doc) only.

Articles can be between 5000-10000 words in length (if shorter or longer please email the editors to discuss your article before submitting) and accompanied by:

• a 200 word abstract
• a brief biographical statement

For more information see http://emajartjournal.com/submission-guidelines/

ABOUT EMAJ (e-Melbourne Art Journal)

EMAJ is an independent art history journal published annually. It is online and open access. EMAJ provides an international forum for the publication of original academic research in all areas and periods of art history. Topics covered include fine arts, architecture, curatorship, politics and aesthetics, visual culture, philosophy, historiography and museum studies. EMAJ welcomes monographic articles about specific artists or art collectives as well as thematic or theoretical analyses on aspects of art history.

David R. Marshall

Unknown, 'Claude Monet outside his house at Giverny', 1921, Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Monet’s Garden until 8th September 2013, National Gallery of Victoria International.

The latest NGV exhibition is, again, sourced largely from a secondary French museum (the Musée Marmottan Monet, henceforth MMM). Monet exhibitions have traditionally drawn large crowds, and are much loved by gallery directors needing to feed the political machines to which they are beholden that equate numbers with success. But if ‘Monet’ is the brand of brands for art exhibitions, for organisers there is the problem of finding new ways to give a Monet show intellectual credibility and thematic coherence, while marketeers may feel the need to enrich a brand that runs the risk of becoming stale. And, given the economics of international exhibitions in Australia, the bulk of the works need to come from a single source. Hence Monet’s Garden.

‘Monet’s Garden’ is an idea rich in possibilities: it connects cultural tourism (a trip to Giverny) with high-art glorification of artistic genius. While previous NGV exhibitions have emphasised, through videos, places associated with the objects on display (notably the Musée Moreau in the Moreau exhibition and Malmaison with Napoleon), Monet’s Garden takes the place/artwork nexus one step further. I once taught a subject in art history on the history of gardens called Visions of Paradise: Art of the Garden, a title stolen from a picture book by Marina Schinz, and did a week on Monet and Giverny. One of the essay questions was whether Monet was a better gardener than painter. This generated some interesting responses. By asking this question one is forced to look at his Giverny paintings differently: as topographical painting, subordinate to the place represented, rather than a this-is-a-work-of-genius painting. It is quite intriguing, after studying the now well-known colour photos of Monet in his garden nearest the house (e.g. pp. xxiv-xxv of the catalogue) (Fig. 1), to be able to identify what the paintings actually represent. The strength of Impressionism was that it accepted the facts and went from there, so that its underpinning of visual factuality is there if you choose to look. A visit to the waterlily pond at Giverny makes you realise that his Nymphéas paintings are much more realistic than you had thought when you saw them in a gallery (Figs. 3, 14). This helps us to see Monet differently: as the last of the estate topographers, rather than as a wannabee modernist abstractionist.

Fig 3 (L) Waterlilies at Giverny. Photo David Marshall Fig 14 Claude Monet 'Waterlilies', 1903, Musee Marmottan Monet, Paris

Responses to topographical painting generally prioritise subject over rendering, place over art. With Canaletto it is typically ‘love the Venice, hate the handling’. With Monet, by contrast, we expect to find the artist when we stand before his works. (Unless, of course, we are looking for what he failed to represent and what this tells us about French society, the theme of much recent scholarship.) It is therefore interesting to ask whether, even for Monet, place matters more than art-object: whether his Nymphéas are just a way of getting us to Giverny, rather than an end in itself.  Giverny is thus potentially the paradigmatic example of an understudied theme: the symbiosis between place-making and art. How many twentieth-century painters painted their own back yard, even if it was rarely so extensive as Monet’s? It was not so much that the subject didn’t matter (as we are instructed by the trope of Cézanne painting apples because they didn’t move, enabling him to get on with what really matters— ‘painting’—than that the subject was safe, warm and comfortable: it was home. By painting a little, local, corner of the world one could embalm in quasi-permanent form the importance that place has most of us.

Fig 2. Potager at Giverny. Photo David R. Marshall.

In fact such art is less about apples than flowers. Apples are a legacy of seventeenth-century paintings that conveyed the message that the land was bountiful and that the owner had access to lots of food. Flowers, by contrast are a synechdoche for the garden, a symbol of the good life, for aristocrat, bourgeois and peasant alike. It is interesting that in contemporary garden-making the vegetable garden or potager now has more cachet than the flower garden: it is practical, environmentally sound, and can save you money. For Monet and his successors, however it was the ornamental garden that mattered, and Monet transformed his new property, acquired in 1883, from being a clos Normand (comparable to an Italian vigna)—a plot of land with productive trees (in Monet’s case fruit orchards) and tall cypresses (which Monet felled, along with despised box hedges)—into a flower garden, albeit one with the prosaic organisation into beds of a potager (Fig. 2). This was, followed, more adventurously, by a grand waterlily pond, with Japanese bridge, wisteria, and exotic waterlilies (Fig. 3). If artists less prosperous than Monet were not in a position to create a backyard of sufficient pictorial interest to sustain their art (although a weed-encrusted shed could go a long way), they could paint flowers that might have come from one, or seek out a picturesque village (Newlyn, Anticoli Corrado, Heidelberg), take up residence there, and by so doing turn it into their own (cosy) backyard.

So what then is the status of Monet’s Giverny paintings relative to Giverny itself? From Monet’s perspective, in painting his garden he was both recording it and making something ‘permanent’ from what he could only expect to be impermanent. As this exhibition establishes, this did not happen at once: in parallel with the creation of the garden, Monet gradually retreated from expeditions in search of subjects to painting his own garden, and especially the waterlily pond. But this garden was part of his life and fuel for his work, but was not created to be in itself his timeless legacy. In this regard he was an artist first and a gardener second. But circumstances change. While more people will have seen a Monet in an art gallery than have been to Giverny, given the growth of travel and tourism is is not hard to imagine things becoming the other way about—as was always the case with paintings or drawings representing Baroque gardens like Versailles or English landscape gardens like Stowe.

Figs 4 and 5 Tieve Tara, Mt Macedon. Photo David R. Marshall

Or let us put it another way: without Monet the painter, would we bother to visit Giverny? The answer, it seems to me, is: perhaps not; it would be a C destination rather than an A one. The house is not particularly interesting in itself, apart from its association with Monet.  The rose avenue, with its blue-green iron rose pergola and nasturtiums spilling over the path, along with the regular blocks of flower beds on either side, are nice but, in purely gardening terms, only so-so (not least because there is nothing to terminate the perspective when seen from the house). Across the former railway line we enter a more iconic space, the water garden, iconic because any blue-green bridge over water becomes a ‘Monet bridge’, just as any red arched bridge becomes a Chinese one. But this iconicity remains inseparable from the paintings that recorded it; there are no doubt other waterlily gardens just as good that do not attract so much attention.

Fig. 6 View of Giverny. Photo David R. Marshall.

So perhaps the paintings are indeed more important than the garden. They affect our response to the garden not just through associations with the Great Man (as with tours to sites associated with famous authors), but by shaping our perceptions of the garden. This is primarily true of the waterlily garden. When we visit it we see the ripples and shadows on the water in a particular way because of the paintings; perhaps we only see them at all because of the paintings. It is less true of the parts of the garden bearer the house, including the rose path. We have to make an effort to discern these in his paintings, rather than bringing our knowledge of his painting to the rose path itself.

Yet in one respect Monet’s garden offers us something that his paintings do not. Few artists today turn to Monet’s paintings for inspiration other than in indirect ways. The ruthless grip of Modernist teleology, which holds that Art Has Moved Beyond Monet To What We Are Doing Now, means that you don’t find many people out there painting Monetesque images of Albert Park (and if there were the art-critical establishment would ensure they get no airplay). But if you go to Mount Macedon there is a garden called Tieve Tara, which has an rose avenue with blue-green metal arches and climbing roses, and a lake with waterlilies and a blue-green bridge (Figs. 4, 5). The references to Giverny are deliberate and literal (Fig. 6), but are also (I suspect) critically acceptable because they are found in a garden. After all, gardens since Hadrian’a villa have represented or alluded to other places. No-one can claim that it cannot be done at Tieve Tara, because it has been done: it has escaped history, or at least Modernism’s historicist straightjacket. To be sure, it is possible to engage in a discussion of whether or not Giverny-on-Mount-Macedon works as a garden (the eucalypts in the background are resonant in a way that may not be comfortable to some), but it is undoubtedly enriched by the references. But if gardeners can recreate Giverny, why cannot artists recreate Monet? Even more interestingly, why can they not paint Tieve Tara in a Monetesque manner: a double homage to Monet, but also—like Monet’s paintings of Giverny—an ‘artistic’ representation of a created place?

Fig 7. Claude Monet 'Taking a walk near Argenteuil' 1875 oil on canvas 60.0 x 81.0 cm Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris

The Exhibition

But let us return to Monet’s Garden. Here it must be said the excitement of anticipation prompted by the memory of Giverny the place evaporates on entering the exhibition. The first impression is one of a certain monotony. This can often be a problem with an exhibition of a single artist, but is made more acute here by the limited range of chronology and pictorial type type of picture. It is much more like entering an exhibition by a contemporary artist: some works good, some less so, and all dancing to much the same tune. Many came to the Musée Marmottan (now branded the Musée Marmottan Monet) from Monet’s descendants or friends. (Quite a few are unfinished, although ‘sketch’ sounds better.) The tone is set by the work given pride of place on entering, which unlike the masterpiece that occupied this position in the Neo-Impressionism exhibition,  is a kind of poor man’s Poppies at Argenteuil (Musée d’Orsay) (Fig. 7).

Fig. 8 View of 'The Last Day at Giverny'

In any case the prime works produced during the later part of Monet’s life were the Grand Decorations in the Orangerie des Tuileries. These vast works, installed in an oval room, although not not reproduced in the catalogue are evoked by the last room in the exhibition which is a D-shaped multimedia panorama involving 8 or 9 cameras showing a mix of separate images and panoramic ones, accompanied by soothing music (Fig. 8). This is entitled elegiacally ‘The Last Day at Giverny’, which sounds like a Victorian painting about forced departure from a loved place, but which turns out to mean only that it was filmed on the last day (or presumably days) of last year’s public access season. In other words, it is a day at  Giverny in Autumn, where the plants are doing what they are doing in Melbourne gardens at the moment, which is somewhat at odds with Monet’s preoccupation with summery flowers. It is also reminiscent of early modern panoramas, and it struck me how problematic such panoramas must have been. Although intended to provide an immersive experience analogous to being there (3D anyone?), if you position yourself close to the centre of the arc of the D the fact that the image continues out of your field of vision is quite distracting, making you want to turn your head continuously to see what you are missing. I found it more comfortable to stand at the back of the room, near the bar of the D, where the effect was a more comfortable ultra wide-screen view, rather than a panoramic one.

For lovers of Giverny, however, this is all the exhibition seems at first to offer about Giverny the garden. One needs to turn to the catalogue early in the piece to connect painting with place, beginning with the useful biographical introduction ‘Monet at Giverny 1883–1926’ by Marianne Mathieu, followed by the section on ‘the Garden at Giverny: a new motif in painting 1895–1926’, which breaks the later works down into pictorial themes: waterlilies; willows; the Japanese Bridge; the path of roses and irises and other flowers. Because of the comparative illustrations (which include some works which, in an ideal world, ought to have been in the exhibition), and the fact that, dare one say it, some works read better in reproduction than in the flesh means that the catalogue works better visually than the exhibition. The exhibition would have benefited from a stronger didactic component, with fuller wall panels with reproductions of comparative illustrations, including plans of the garden and historical and contempoary photographs locating the viewpoints of key paintings and so forth. Exhibition purism has not served this exhibition well.

Incidentally, there is a curious inversion where catalogue and label are concerned.  Catalogues used to be the place to go to look up information about a particular work, especially while perambulating the exhibition, while the labels gave the basic title, ownership information and other identifying facts. This catalogue, like other recent NGV catalogues, has no individual entries, only essays and label data, while each work in the exhibition has an extended label not found in the publication, although derived from the essays. To be sure, the assumption today is that the catalogue is a souvenir bought in the shop at the end, having the status of a fridge magnet or postcard, so that the fact that the synthetic essays are not digestible within the exhibition does not matter. Yet the paradox is that the catalogue entry has returned in an inferior form as the extended label. I had to surreptitiously photograph these to have the kind of aide-mémoire formerly to be found in the catalogue, in the way that in pre-catalogue days one had to write down label information in a note book. The labels tend to be flowery, and like most extended  labels are physically difficult to read, especially by ageing eyes, and even harder to absorb. The labels addressed to ‘kids’ (i.e. children) are sometimes more useful, because being in plainer language they are digestible in the few moments that is generally devoted to them (even if in them ‘art’ is used as a synonym for ‘work of art’). There is a lot to be said for opening up a catalogue at ‘cat. no. 16’ and reading what the organisers feel one might want to know about the work in question. In fact, not being able to do so inhibits one’s enjoyment of the works.  With a more varied exhibition it might not matter, but with so many similar works one needs to have one’s attention drawn to their differences: the absence of catalogue entries encourages you to see the exhibition as an undifferentiated whole, and so disengage from the individual work.

In any case the catalogue/souvenir cannot be used in the exhibition, or usefully as a scholarly resource, since there is no numbering system. This makes it impossible to find anything in the handlist at the back (try looking up Monet, Waterlilies!). In practice you have to leaf through the captioned illustrations to find the work that attracted your attention (and not be caught out by the works illustrated but not actually in the exhibition.) Apparently Australian audiences can’t cope with scholarly catalogues, although those in London or even St Louis, Missouri, can (to judge for the catalogue of the recent Barocci exhibition, or any number of overseas exhibition catalogues that use the opportunity—and generous funding—of an exhibition to find new things to say and to create an up-do-date synthesis of current knowledge.)

Fig 9. Claude Monet, Rouen Cathedral at the end of the day, 1892, Musee Marmottan Monet, Paris

The synthetic catalogue essays follow a familiar NGV pattern. In addition to the biographical essay by Mathieu, two are devoted to ‘invisible’ aspects of the works (Sophie Matthiesson on politics and Virginia Spate on symbolism, the latter being the only one with much of interest to say about particular works), and one by Elena Taylor establishing the obligatory Australian connection. Another, by Philippe Piguet, deals with Monet’s 1909 exhibition at Durand-Ruel’s where many of the waterlily paintings were first exhibited. The display is broadly chronological, divided between the early rooms, which deal with the landscapes that Monet produced while creating and travelling to and from Giverny, and those depicting the garden at Giverny itself. Each of these has a brief introductory essay in the catalogue (referred to above).

Working through the exhibition, the first works are portraits of the Monets by Renoir and Monet, useful as documents, but it cannot be said that portraiture was either artist’s strong point. Then there are Monet’s paintings beginning in the Seine valley near Giverny and beyond from the 1870s, followed by those of the coast, Norway and London through to 1899.  During this period Monet famously painted a number of series of pictures of the same motif in different lights, one of the most sustained of which series is of Rouen Cathedral, represented by a version in the MMM that cries out to have one of the more extreme variants alongside it (Fig. 9). We do get side-by-side the NGV’s Vetheuil (Fig. 10) and the MMM Vetheuil in the Fog (Fig. 11) (both 1879), though it is hard not believe that the differences between them are not as much qualitative as in choice of lighting and atmosphere: the NGV picture gives you a rich visual experience, whereas Vetheuil in the Fog comes across as tentative. Another interesting comparison is that between the Effet du Soir and Effet Rose (both MMM, 1894), with their almost Elsheimerian interest in the reflection of dark clumps of trees in the water. But these seem scratchy and incomplete.

Fig 10 (L) Claude Monet, 'Vetheuil in the Fog', 1879, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Fig 11 (R) Claude Monet, 'Vetheuil in the Fog', 1879, Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris

The Norway pictures did little for me, but two of the London pictures, the Kerry Stokes’ Waterloo Bridge (Fig. 12) and the MMM Houses of Parliament (Fig. 13) have an interesting pastel-like technique. The Houses of Parliament is rather complicated, or perhaps confused, in the way the pastel-like green strokes begin as the tower and end up like rain on the water, creating a spatial discordance reinforced by the intensity of  the highlights in the water and the spiky perspective of what must be jetties.

Fig 12 (L) Claude Monet, Waterloo Bridge, 1899-1901, Kerry Stokes Collection, Perth Fig 13 (R) Claude Monet 'Houses of Parliament, reflections on the Thames', 1905, Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris

Moving onto the Waterlilies, there are some fine, classic examples, such as MMM inv. 5163 (1903) (Fig. 14). As I have indicated, these are much more realistic than you might think.  Particular interesting is the one from the Houston (1907) (Fig. 15), all greens and greys with touches of carmine in the flowers, which is nicely juxtaposed  with the closely related MMM inv. 5168 (Fig. 16), which has fiery red reflections and no flowers. Virginia Spate’s essay (and the label), pursue connections with symbolism, prompted by an extravagant essay by Octave Mirbeau. Spate argues that ‘there was nothing in the Japanese bridge series to explain the reddened water’ which ‘suggests that Monet may have been unconsciously influenced by Mirbeau’s blood-soaked torture garden.’ (The label distills this point into ‘[a] dramatic but disturbingly ambiguous  portrayal of a sunset, in which the water seems stained with blood.’) But is this really necessary? Conceivably, if uncharacteristically, Monet may have consciously chosen to ramp up the colouring for Symbolistic effect; but would the conscious Monet have permitted his unconscious self to alter, say, the grey of the Houston picture all the way to red? Might it not be simpler to propose that the red was actually there because it was sunset, and that Monet took it from there?

Fig 15 (L) Claude Monet, 'Waterlilies', 1907, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Fig 16 (R) Claude Monet, 'Waterlilies', 1907, Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris

Still, this prompts us to look more closely at the two works. In the Houston version the top section—a patch of grey-mauve sky reflection—has the effect of somehow flowing downwards, while the reflections of the trees seem to grow upwards out of the lower waterlilies. These consitute a background plane, which the strongly perspectival waterliles float in an oblique plane above it and in opposition to it. In the MMM version the top section is aflame, and acts less as a downward-moving funnel than as a turbulent disturbance that spreads across the top of the painting. The reflections of the trees seem now to be properly upside down, while the water, now tinged with pink and yellow, seems to be like a flame rising, although going from yellow to red rather than the other way about. Even more than the Houston work, the MMM picture depends on the contrast between this surface movement and the oblique overlay of the patches of water lilies, and it is in the play between the two that the primary visual interest resides. Rather than being a proto-Abstract Expressionist work (a trope that the labels, but not Spate, sometimes develop), this work recalls the playing-off of mysterious backgrounds against emphatic perspectival foregrounds that one finds in visual-effect intensive sci-fi movies.

Fig 17 Claude Monet, 'Waterlilies', 1907, Saint-Etienne Metropole, Musee(s) Art Moderne Fig 18 (R) Claude Monet, 'Waterlilies', 1916-9, Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris

These works, to my eyes, are much more interesting than the circular canvas (from Musée(s) Art Moderne, Saint-étienne) (Fig. 17), which is almost, but not quite, spatially inert, and has the soft quasi-Rococo colouring, relatively high key and slight sickliness that tends to prompt a perjorative categorisation as ‘like a chocolate box’. Some works in this room verge on the heavy-handed while others, like MMM 5174 (Fig. 18), have an art nouveau decorativeness that is saved from flatness by the play of perspective (the water lilies) against surface pattern (the wisteria fronds).  Further on, in the section on the ‘Japanese’ Bridge, the establishing work—the one we expect to find—is from the Art Institute of Chicago (1900) (Fig. 19), but perhaps the most engaging is MMM 5077 (Fig. 20).  The label’s ‘in the paintings of this scale the act of painting becomes an expression of the body itself’ is code for saying it is a proto-Jackson Pollock, but of course what gives these works their interest is that they are not abstract, nor derived from broad gestures even if such gestures were needed to execute them, are wholly optical. If you could not read this as a representation of bridge, water lilies and hanging wisteria it would be a dull piece, however nice the interweaving of ribbons of pigment.

Fig 19 (L) Claude Monet, 'The bridge over the waterlily pond', 1900 Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois Fig 20 (R) Claude Monet, 'The Japanese Bridge', 1918, Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris

Finally, on the far wall of the last room is a strange group of works, painted when Monet was having problems with cataracts.  The two on the left (MMM 5086 and 5087) (Fig. 21) read from across the room as having real gold backgrounds, a deception that only fades on closer insection, when the effect proves to be done with yellows and red pigments. These are, as their titles (but no visual material in the exhibition), confirm, representations of Monet’s house seen from the Rose Garden. They seem to be almost expressionist, and, like the weeping willow paintings (MMM 5125 and 5081), painted at the end of WW1, and which, it is plausibly argued, are deliberate images of mourning, recall the late Constable’s anguished late works. But Monet was no expressionist, and although one may begin by reading these explosions of gold and red as images of torment, within moments they resolve themselves into representations of places that are not, in fact, at all frightening. In the end they are, more they are anything else, beautiful.

© David R. Marshall 2013

Fig 21 View of MMM 5086, 5087, 5125, 5081

Dr Matthew Martin, Assistant Curator, International Decorative Arts and Antiquities

Antonio David, The Baptism of Prince Charles Edward Stuart in Rome, 1725

The courts of exiled Stuart monarchs James II and James III were distinguished by their rich musical lives and both kings made music an important part of court ceremonial. James II’s court was of great significance in the introduction of a taste for Italian music at the French court, and James III and his musically talented sons influenced opera in Rome. Illustrated with recent musical recordings of period instruments. The lecture will be followed by a free screening of Bonnie Prince Charlie (1948) at 3pm.

Date: Sun 2 Jun, 1.30pm

Venue: Clemenger BBDO Auditorium, NGV International, St Kilda Rd

Bookings: Information & bookings Ph +61 3 8662 1555 10am-5pm daily, $18 Adult / $12 Member / $14 Concession

Please email admin@aaanz.info for an entry form or any enquiries.

We require two copies of the relevant publication with each entry by Thursday 31 July 2013, postal details are on the entry form.

Winners will be announced at the 2013 AAANZ Conference Interdiscipline in Melbourne 7–9 December 2013.

Prize Categories 

Best book ($500 supported by The University of Sydney)

Best anthology ($500 supported by The University of Sydney)

Best large exhibition catalogue ($500 supported by The University of Melbourne)

Best small exhibition catalogue ($100 supported by The University of Western Australia)

Best scholarly article in AAANZ Journal ($500 supported by The University of Sydney)

Best essay/catalogue/book by an Indigenous Australian or New Zealand Mâori (NZ$500 supported by Christchurch Art Museum)

Best artist lead publication, essay/catalogue/book (NZ$500 supported by Massey University)

University Art Museums exhibition catalogue ($1000 supported by the University Art Museums Association)

Lecturer in Asian Art History, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, University of Sydney – deadline 30th June 2013

Lecturer in European Art History, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, University of Sydney – deadline 23rd June 2013

Lecturer in Modern Art (1850-1950), Faculty of Arts and Sciences, University of Sydney – deadline 16th June 2013

Stipendiary Fellowship Scheme, School of Advanced Study, University of London – Institute for the Study of the Americas – deadline 3rd June 2013

Art Collections Manager (link to pdf), University of Canberra – deadline 2nd June 2013

Art Curator/Program Manager, The Royal Melbourne Hospital – deadline 19th May 2013

Mentorship

Meanjin New Media Art Mentorships – deadline 21st June 2013

Calls for Papers

Holy Monsters, Sacred Grotesques (Rice University, Texas, October 25-2, 2013) – deadline 17th May 2013

Prisons of Stone, Word and Flesh (Brown University, Rhode Island, Feb 2014) – deadline 1st November 2013

Histories of Material Culture and Collecting 1700-1950, book series from Ashgate Publishing – no deadline specified

Piedmontese Baroque Architecture Studies Fifty Years On (Turin, June, 2014) – deadline 30th September 2013

Looking at the Looking of Looking (Banff, 17-20 Oct 13) – deadline 4th June 2013

The Making of Architects (Special Issue of Architectural Theory Review) – deadline 19th August 2013

A collapsible nomadic crown (Tillya Tepe), 100 BC - 100 AD Source: National Museum of Afghanistan Photo © Thierry Ollivier / Musée Guimet

Internationally noted archaeologist Iain Shearer introduces the exhibition. A graduate of University College, London, Iain is a Fellow of The Royal Asiatic Society and recent Sackler Scholar for Afghanistan and Iran at the British Museum. His extensive experience while working and researching in Afghanistan will bring this exhibition to life.

An illustrated talk by Susan Scollay will provide a brief overview of some of the outstanding gold jewellery, weapons and other objects excavated from the tomb of an ancient Central Asian nomad warlord and the luxuriously adorned females buried nearby. As well Susan will highlight some of the precious objects that were traded along key branches of the Silk Road that criss-crossed Afghanistan in the 1st century AD.

About the Exhibition

A remarkable exhibition of stunning artefacts revealing Afghanistan’s rich culture. Afghanistan was at the heart of the Silk Road, the trading route travelled by Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan and Marco Polo, linking ancient Iran, Central Asia, India and China, and the more distant cultures of Greece and Rome.

Visiting Australia for the first time, this exhibition, with more than 230 priceless treasures, some thousands of years old, offers a rare opportunity to discover the surprising, untold story of the long and extraordinarily rich culture that is Afghanistan.

For years these artefacts were thought lost or destroyed as war shook the country. In 2003, they were uncovered from vaults in the central bank of the presidential palace, where they had been placed in secrecy by a few courageous staff from the National Museum, Kabul.

Program

1:30 Iain Shearer | 2:15 Susan Scollay | 2.35 – 3.30pm Afternoon Tea | 3.30 – 5.00pm Entrance to the Exhibition

Date: 16th May 1:30-5pm

Venue: Melbourne Museum, 11 Nicholson St, Carlton

Cost: $60.oo per person. Bookings Essential Ph: 03 98226899 Email: info@asatours.com.au

Unknown Claude Monet outside his house at Giverny c.1921 18.0 x 24.0 cm autochrome Musée d'Orsay, Paris © Patrice Schmidt /musée d'Orsay distribution RMN

To celebrate the most extensive exhibition of Monet’s work ever to travel to Australia the NGV is holding a symposium with local and international experts that will explore key themes of the exhibition. The symposium is generously supported by the Australian International Cultural Foundation, an affiliate of Art Exhibitions Australia.

Program

Tony Ellwood, Director, NGV | Welcome

Colta Ives, Curator Emerita, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York | Monet: Impressionist in the garden

Marianne Mathieu, Assistant Director and Curator, Musée Marmottan Monet | Impressionism at the Marmottan

Sophie Matthiesson, Curator, International Art, NGV | Monet’s political garden

Prof Emerita Virginia Spate, University of Sydney | Paint and water

Dr Matthew Martin, Assistant Curator, International Decorative Arts and Antiquities, NGV | Inside Monet’s house at Giverny

Date: Saturday 11th May, 1:30-5pm

Venue: BBDO Clemenger Auditorium, NGV International

Bookings: Ph +61 3 8662 1555 10am-5pm daily | $60 Adult / $50 Member / $55 Concession / Special offer for students at $30 (present student card upon arrival). Excludes exhibition entry, bookings essential, tea/coffee included.