Professor of Art History for SCAD Hong Kong – deadline 20th August 2013

Lecturer in Wall Painting Conservation, Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London – deadline 14th June 2013

Kress Interpretive Fellowship for 2013-2014, Metropolitan Museum of Art – deadline 28th May 2013

Funding

David Saunders Founder’s Grant, SAHANZ to support new research in architectural history and theory – deadline 1st June 2013

National Humanities Center (US) 40 residential fellowships – deadline 1st October 2013

Calls for Papers

The Mediterranean and the Iberian South in the medieval age: Culture, Identity and Heritage (V – XV centuries) – deadline 30th June 2013

Pirosmani and Georgian Culture (Tbilisi, 5-8 Nov 13) – deadline 30th June 2013

2nd international conference on Architecture and Fiction: WRITINGPLACE literary methods in architectural research and design (Delft, November 2013) – deadline 1st July 2013

Palimpsest: The Layered Object (Savannah, 28 Feb-1 Mar 14)- deadline June 15th 2013

New Voices – Art and Decolonization (Leeds, November 2013) – deadline 1st October 2013

Rijksmuseum. Photo credit: Iwan Baan. Image courtesy of Rijksmuseum

In April, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam was reopened to the public, after almost ten years of restoration and rebuilding. What started out in 2004 as a four-year enterprise to liberate the landmark building, built in 1885 by the Dutch Neo-Gothic architect Pierre Cuypers, from its later additions, turned out to be a lengthy and very expensive story of endless delays and complications. This led to heated discussions in the national media on several issues. The Spanish architects of the refurbishment, Cruz y Ortiz, were especially astonished about the debate on the use of the public passage under the museum by cyclists, which complicated the issue of where the entrance to the museum should be located. Although officially the cyclists’ lobby seemed to have won, and the passage is now open to traffic, it remains closed during peak hours when the queues at the entrance block the passage.

In the meantime, the restoration of the building was accompanied by another debate in the Dutch political and museum landscape on the need for a national history museum. This project, initiated by a socialist politician, intended to create an overview of Dutch history especially for school classes; it was intended to increase the knowledge and understanding of important moments of national history, which, according to common opinion, was not given enough attention in primary or secondary school curricula. After the initial political decision to create this historical museum ex novo, debates broke loose over where in the country this new institution should be built, and what kind of presentation it should offer: from old-fashioned chronology to a post-modernist thematic approach. After long deliberations it was decided that this museum cumschool trip-destination should be built in the east of the country, in order to spread museums geographically over the country; subsequently, its construction was delayed by–yet again–financial complications. When the financial crisis led to severe cuts in the cultural sector in 2010, the penultimate Dutch government decided to abolish the project entirely. Already prior to that moment, the Rijksmuseum (along with some other museums in the Netherlands) stated that they, in fact, already represented this ‘national’ historic museum.

Gallery of Honour with Rembrandt's 'The Nightwatch'. Image via Rijskmuseum.

This claim was based on the circumstance that when it was opened in 1885, the Rijksmuseum combined under one roof three museums; one in Amsterdam, which contained the art historical treasures from the Dutch State and the City of Amsterdam, the latter of which had been enriched in 1854 with a gift by the rich banker Adriaan van der Hoop; another museum in nearby Haarlem that had mainly been dedicated to contemporary (thus nineteenth-century) art; and a third museum that was primarily a collection of historical objects in The Hague, the Dutch Museum for History and Art (Nederlandsch Museum voor Geschiedenis en Kunst). To these three museums were added several other, smaller collections, both from private individuals and institutions; for example, a collection of plaster casts after antique statues was relocated to the Rijksmuseum, from various archaeological collections. With this array of rather diverse objects, the new Rijksmuseum set out to combine art and history, even though during its entire existence prior to 2004, the departments of art and of history in the Rijksmuseum had been autonomous, having their respective parts of the building to themselves, and with their own curators and directors. In stating its historical role to combine art and history, the new Rijksmuseum idealised and simplified its own past.

Rijksmuseum Atrium. Photo credit: Pedro Pegenaute. Image courtesy of Rijksmuseum

The restoration of the old building that began in 2004 was intended to be a return to its pristine state, the design by Cuypers. Thus, Cruz y Ortiz and an entire equipe of architects and restorers set out to liberate the original building from later additions, mainly in its interior, opening up the original courtyards which had been built in during the 1960s. Now these courtyards have been given glass roofs–following an architectural trend in the museum world set in by the British Museum. They also uncovered a large part of the late-nineteenth-century decorative schemes in the circulation and exhibition spaces. The latter project was, however, not simply a return to the original situation, but a recreation; for instance, the colours of the majority of wall decorations were toned down, so as not to interfere too much with the paintings. In other spaces, the walls and sometimes ceilings were painted in diverse shades of dark grey, covering the original decorative masonry work of glazed and unglazed brick. Surely, the decision to paint over these elements or to restrict their brightness does not fit Pierre Cuypers’ original intentions. It does, however, make an aesthetically satisfactory solution, although the rather dark shades of grey applied to the walls in the Gallery of Honour (on the first floor, with the most renowned seventeenth-century paintings) and on the ground floor (where the pre-1600 objects are on display) might rather soon become old-fashioned. Moreover, this choice of colours leads to a scheme of lighting intending to spotlight the object in predominantly dark surroundings; this play of contrasts is certainly a trend in the international museum world. Although it does support the palette in most portraits and history scenes, with landscapes it goes less well, creating in some instances an effect of dullness in blue skies and green foliage.

The meeting of Joachim and Anna, Master of Joachim and Anna, c. 1470

But whatever the visitor will think of these aesthetic choices, the main discourse in the Netherlands prior to the reopening was the range of objects on display, and how these objects would illustrate the story of Dutch culture throughout the history of the Netherlands. As this had neither had been the case when the museum opened in 1885, nor had this been realized in the twentieth century (as the departments of Art and History remained separate entities up to 2004), it forced the museum to reinvent itself completely in the process of renovation. The reopening of the museum on April 13 this year was therefore, for many Dutch colleagues from the museum world and academia, an event. How would objects of history and art be combined, and what kind of ‘national’ story would that kind of selection show? The main issues would predictably concern the period before the Golden Age–the sections of medieval and Renaissance–and the modern period, as twentieth-century art had never been acquired by the Rijksmuseum. The curiosity in academic circles was heightened by the fact that internal discussions between historians and art historians occasionally filtered through outside the museum walls. To what extent could and should aesthetic criteria be applied to the choice of historical objects? And, most important, where would the ‘History of the Netherlands’ start, according to the museum’s curators?

Sculpted portable altar from Mechelen or Brussels, around 1540

When entering the new exhibition spaces, the first pleasant surprise is that the Dutch national story is not limited to the geographical confines of the Seven United Provinces, and neither does it confine itself to the territory of present-day Netherlands. The ground floor, dedicated to the period of the Middle Ages to the late sixteenth century, actually crosses the borders to the Germanic regions to the east, and to the Flemish (and occasionally French) provinces to the south, demonstrating the exchange between the various artistic centres. For example, a larger altarpiece by the Master of Joachim and Anna, made in Brabant around 1470 is flanked by a beautiful sculpted portable altar from Mechelen or Brussels, from around 1540, a mid-fourteenth-century stone sculpture of Mary with Christ Child from Normandy, and mostly French ivory work (see images). The accompanying texts, however, focus to a large extent upon the Christian meaning of these works and far less on the issue of style, attribution or geographic identity; it is clear that the display has been made with the average visitor in mind, not with an overall question of Dutch history or identity, or the issue of how to determine the respective styles.

Christ descending into limbo. Anon c. 1460

However, the further one progresses through the ground floor galleries–rather dark now as a result of the ash-grey colour applied to the walls and (comparatively low) vaults–the more that a division is made between ‘Dutch’ and ‘foreign’ art. While the first two corner rooms display Italian and French works–for example, illustrating the International Gothic style, with a wonderful Mary Magdalene by Carlo Crivelli and a superb candlestick by Andrea del Verrocchio of 1468 (see image)–this ‘sandwiching’ of national and international becomes less and less conspicuous. In the last room, dedicated to pre-1600 painting, there are works by Dutch painters who travelled to Italy, but the Italian works themselves are no longer present. The international perspective disappears almost completely on the main (second) floor of the museum, dedicated to the Golden Age. Here, we only find one room with Flemish paintings– mainly Jordaens–and one room with Caravaggisti painters, while in both rooms the message to the visitor is that a lot of inspiration was drawn by Dutch painters from these foreign examples, but no hint of what was actually happening beyond the Netherlands.

Candlestick by Andrea del Verocchio, 1468-9

Historically, this choice to skip non-Dutch art does not surprise as the holdings of non-Dutch art in the Rijksmuseum were traditional small. This notwithstanding, the curator appointed for ‘foreign’ art at the Rijksmuseum some ten years ago, Duncan Bull, did his best to increase this part of the collection, for example, acquiring an seascape by Claude Lorrain to pair with the Dutch Italianate landscape painters such as Both. Now he sees his efforts to increase this part of the collection made largely invisible on the main floor of the museum. What is left there is the wonderful array of paintings from the Dutch Golden Age, sometimes flanked with illustrative objects from its history. For example, the room which contains a set of marine paintings and especially the rather particular pen-paintings of sea vessels by Willem van der Velde the Younger also displays a wonderful model of a war vessel, a portrait of Admiral Michiel de Ruyter by Ferdinand Bol–also admittedly beautiful–and a set of rifles in an Indonesian wooden stand (see image) (however, the accompanying text focuses on Admiral Tromp, and leaves undiscussed the colonial background of this object). All these objects do combine very well, but they do not, in any sense, convey more than a very general story of warfare and victory.

Rifles in an Indonesian wooden box

Apart from the limited additions of foreign and applied art and historical objects, the main floor of the Rijksmuseum offers few surprises to those familiar with the old situation; here we find the Gallery of Honour (see image above) with paintings by the masters of the Golden Age—Vermeer, Jan Steen, Frans Hals and of course Rembrandt—visually culminating in the Nightwatch. Of course, the canon of Dutch art we find here is in some respects different from what was on display twenty years ago, but the inclusion of painters in a more classicizing style like Gerard de Lairesse had already taken place in the late 1990s, not long before the closure of (most of) the museum (see image). Also the first floor, dedicated to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art and culture presents the visitor familiar with the ‘old’ Rijksmuseum with few surprises; a particular but rather unobtrusive shift should be noted from painting to furniture, porcelain and other kinds of objects in the eighteenth-century department. It underlines what has been noted in other reviews of the Rijksmuseum, namely that the production of painting in the Netherlands could not keep up with the international developments, and fell to a regional level. This, however, is an assumption that could be contested with quite a number of wonderful portraits of the museum’s collections that used to be on display in the former study collection. That these are not as grand as the seventeenth-century portraits might be related to the change of style and taste in domestic furnishings and public decorations, but this is not the same as a decrease in artistic quality.

Gerard de Lairesse, Selene and Endymion, c1680

A lot of public attention, however, has been focused on the two sections in the new Rijksmuseum dedicated to the twentieth-century. The museum formerly had (almost) no holdings in this field, and therefore was obliged to acquire new objects or receive loans from other museums in order to create a satisfactory display. There are two main problems with this ‘new’ department in the museum. The first is a design issue. This new department is spread over two separate sets of rooms that are not interconnected. In order to go from the first part to the second, one has to take the stairs to the lower floor, cross the central hall, and go up the stairs again. It leads to two completely different sections, of which the first—pre-1940—only shows the avant-garde artistic movements, but almost nothing of the contextual, historic situation (except for an airplane that illustrates the quest for novelty and modernism in a small part of Dutch society). Furthermore, the visitor here finds a number of works by Mondrian, that cannot match the quality of Mondrian works on show in the Municipal Museum in The Hague, or even the (recently reopened) Stedelijk Museum, which is only 500 meters away from the Rijksmuseum. The second part of the display of twentieth-century Dutch art and culture is more interesting, as here choices have been made that enlighten the visitor more generally about Dutch culture after 1945. The group of Dutch painters belonging to the international CoBrA movement, feminist art of the 1970s, and architectural drawings and graphic designs definitely provide more of an idea how the same kind of modernist urge led to changes in Dutch society and visual culture that also affected the genera culture to a large extent.

The Siege of Rhenen, Master of Rhenen, ca. 1499 - ca. 1525

One very simple but effective choice in the Rijksmuseum is its policy with regard to audiovisual techniques. Most of the moving images on show in the department of twentieth-century art and culture (for example the film I’m too sad to tell you by Bas Jan Ader) have no sound. In general, the visitor is invited to look at the objects and not focus on interactive screens or pay attention to audiovisual information. It is therefore a pity that the texts accompanying the objects often add little to what we can see; or do not relate to the image at all. One example of the latter is a curious painting, The Siege of Rhenen, an attack on the city of Rhenen in 1499 (see image). The text informs the visitor in a few lines about the historic event, but does not elucidate at all what is illustrated in the picture (where we see the inhabitants of the town seeking refuge in the church, in front of a reliquary, it seems) or what kind of function it might have had. This follows a general pattern throughout the museum of the information being at a rather basic level, leaving it to the more knowledgeable visitor to try and construct a cultural and artistic history on a more abstract level.

Notwithstanding the claims of the museum itself, the Rijksmuseum has not really become a place where art, history and culture are shown in a coherent way and with equal attention to their specific meanings. The main choice seems to have been dictated by the aesthetic qualities of each object, made predominantly from an art-historical point of view. The reformulation of the Rijksmuseum in terms of a ‘National treasury of art and history’ has clearly favoured the art historical objects that constitute the main trajectory of the display. Where historical objects have been chosen irrespective of their visual attraction, they have been reduced to mere illustrations to the works of art. There is therefore little attempt to value these historical objects in their own right, or to question what was excluded from view in, for example, official portraiture or cityscapes.

This focus on art leads to a museum that poses no questions about the Dutch past. It represents national pride in historic feats and, to a much greater extent, in its art historical masterpieces. This might fit the historical mission of the museum, but it certainly does not reflect the display from the time of Cuypers when the museum opened in 1885. For the twenty-first century museum visitor, such a historical view might be considered uncritical and old-fashioned. The art historical focus on the object does not elucidate how Dutch culture was part of a wider exchange within the context of Europe or the rest of the world. In contrast to most ‘national’ museums of art such as the Louvre, the National Gallery in London and the Metropolitan Museum, it reduces the Rijksmuseum to a rather monothematic display of Dutch art, while in the context of national history museums, there is a conspicuous lack of critical reflection. In the new Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, one is invited to admire the great painters of the Golden Age, not to understand which international historical issues determined the production of all these works of art, or in which international context Dutch painters came to define a particular style.

©  Arnold Witte, University of Amsterdam, 2013

Website: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/

Free lunch time lecture

Sunbeams and Rocks, 2011 (detail) oil, enamel, pencil and acrylic on linen 180 x 150cm © Viv Miller

The Holmesglen Collection of Contemporary Art includes Viv Miller’s striking painting, Sunbeams and Rocks, 2011. When the artist started making work for the exhibition that included this painting, she acknowledged that the sun was a big subject (metaphorically and literally) to take on. “I was drawn to it because it seemed impossible to create pictures of it. It’s an omnipresent force that you can’t even look at. The most you can do is sneak a glance and feel its assault”. Subsequently, the sun has become a central motif in Miller’s iconography.

The artist draws on a range of source material for her work including romanticism, computer graphics, geometric abstraction, graphic art, illustration and animation. Her work is held in numerous public and private collections and she has exhibited throughout Australia and internationally.

Viv will be talking about her work and career in a free lunch time lecture at the Chadstone campus. Staff and students from all campuses are very welcome.The talk is free but bookings are essential.

Date: 12-1pm,  Wednesday 5th June, 2013

Venue: Holmesglen, Room C1.1.33, Chadstone Campus, Melways ref: 69F1

Bookings: artcollection@holmesglen.edu.au  or 9209 5605

Website http://www.holmesglen.edu.au/showcase/events/art_talks_viv_miller

The Trauma of the Political – or, Catch Me I’m Falling (into the Ambivalent Arms of Law)

Dr Juliet Rogers in conversation with Maria Tumarkin

There is an excitement about falling that betrays itself in images and experiences of the flesh, from Richard Drew’s capture of the Falling Man during September 11, 2001, to climate change activists’ depictions of the psychosis of not believing we will hit the ground, and the suspended nature of the work of William Kentridge.

Art and falling go hand in hand, Rogers suggests, and so too does politics. We can see the current politics of the liberal democratic, in which sovereign aggression is excused by sovereign care. Where law both pushes the subject into the abyss in the interests of its protection, and where flesh is cut, tortured and even killed as a mode of justice. A contemporary democratic politics that embodies such paradox offers a thin space between the air and the ground, and demands the fantasy of endless capture, for some, and the foreclosure of the possibility that flesh may fall and not be caught.

Date: Tuesday 28th May, 6pm for 6:30

Venue: Gertrude Contemporary, Fitzroy

The Gertrude Contemporary – Discipline: Contemporary Art Lecture Series is a collaboration between Melbourne based contemporary art journal Discipline and Gertrude Contemporary. The series presents lectures on key concerns, artists and theories of contemporary art. Throughout 2013 lecturers will speak from the perspective of a variety of different disciplines — including philosophy, cultural studies, art history and literary studies — as well as from academic and non-academic backgrounds.

Dr Juliet Rogers is Faculty Member at the School of Political Sciences, Criminology at the University of Melbourne, and currently an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow undertaking a psychoanalytic examination of the ‘Quality of Remorse’ after periods of political and military conflict. She was formerly a community worker and then a psychotherapist. She has recently been a Visiting Fellow at the European University Institute, Florence, at Yale Law School, Connecticut and at the University of Cape Town Law School, South Africa. Her work is always a melding between psychoanalysis and law, that is, it is always a concern with the limit.

Maria Tumarkin is a Melbourne-based writer and cultural historian. She is the author of three acclaimed books of ideas: Traumascapes, Courage and Otherland. Maria’s essays – tackling our culture’s preoccupations and blindspots – have been included in Best Australian Essays 2011 and 2012. Maria holds a PhD in cultural history from the University of Melbourne. She has taught at universities and writing centres, directed video clips, written radio documentaries, contributed catalogue essays for galleries and museums, and forged ongoing collaborations with artists and psychologists. She is a 2013-14 Sidney Myer Creative Fellow.

This event is free. Bookings are unnecessary.

http://www.gertrude.org.au/programs/public-education/talks-forums-28/

Direct Democracy (Raquelle Ormella, 'Poetic possibilities' 2012)

About the Exhibition

Direct Democracy explores the changing nature of our engagement with the democratic tradition and looks to the emergence of new democratic models. The exhibition reflects contemporary social movements, unrest and the desire for change; modelling key social dynamics and possible futures. In Direct Democracy destruction and resistance are connected with the need to collaborate and rebuild. Recent political shifts such as the Arab Spring, the global financial crisis and movements such as Occupy are considered in relation to earlier struggles for autonomy and self-definition, as well as the interplay of constructive and corrosive dynamics in leadership and governance. The exhibition examines the shifting forms of political agency, in both emerging and foundational democracies.

Direct Democracy continues MUMA’s ongoing series of thematic and discursive exhibitions, such as Networks (Cells & Silos) and Liquid Archive. Curated by MUMA’s Senior Curator Geraldine Barlow, Direct Democracy features the work of a number of international artists together with artists and artist collectives from Australia. An extensive exhibition catalogue will also be produced in combination with the presentation of Direct Democracy.

Exhibition runs until 6th July 2013.

Public Programs

Disobedience: The Monash Labour Club and the Student Struggles of the 1960s and 1970s 

Disobedience will focus on the origins and rise of student activism at Monash University, and the student struggles of the Monash Labor Club in the 1960s and `70s. The discussion will take into account the role of significant radicalising events that occurred throughout the world, within Melbourne and at Monash University during this period.

Bringing together former Monash students and key members of the Monash Labor Club the discussion will explore their unique understanding of Marxism and the application of their praxis to contemporary forms of occupation, Situationism, information technology and knowledge production.

Disobedience contributors will include: Darce Cassidy, Michael Hyde, Jill Jolliffe, Ken Mansell and Dave Nadel.

Venue: Ground Floor, Building F, Monash University, Caulfield Campus 900 Dandenong Road, Caulfield East VIC 3145 Australia

The discussion will be convened by Dr Kate Murphy, a Lecturer in Contemporary History at Monash University.

Kate has recently completed (with co-author Professor Graeme Davison) a history of Monash University, entitled University Unlimited: The Monash Story (Allen and Unwin: 2012). The history spans the founding of Monash, the growing demand for higher education; the student experience and ‘troubles’ of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when it became a symbolic centre for student radicalism in Australia; and from the late 1980s the reforms and expansion of the university. Kate’s current research is on the Australian student movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Disobedience coincides with the inaugural annual sculpture commission in the Ian Potter Sculpture Court, Emily Floyd’s This place will always be open, 2012. Floyd’s sculpture explores the role and legacy of the university campus – and museum – as a site of political potential. Drawing its title and conceptual framework from the experimental student struggles at Monash University during the 1960s and `70s, Floyd’s work serves as a space for social encounter – re-invoking a utopian spirit that is open, inclusive, free, provisional and generative.

To reserve your place please contact MUMA on 03 9905 4217 or via email muma.rsvp@monash.edu

Website for further details http://www.monash.edu.au/muma/events/2013/disobedience.html

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