National Gallery of Victoria

It was the great American Conceptual artist Sol LeWitt who organised Melbourne artist Robert Jacks’s first show in Manhattan. This was held at the New York Cultural Centre in 1971, part of a program where each exhibited artist nominated his successor. Jacks had been enjoying a stellar rise since his début solo exhibition at Gallery A in Melbourne in 1966, when he was twenty-three years old. All twenty-five abstract paintings in that show sold. Each one had a title referencing James Joyce’s Ulysses, such as Mr Bloom with his stick gently vexed (1965). The largest, Timbrel and harp soothe (1965), was bought by the National Gallery of Victoria even before the show opened.

Claude Monet as an emotive artist? Hitherto, I have viewed Monet’s painting – or at least Monet the Impressionist – as sensual but detached. Having seen Monet’s Garden at the National Gallery of Victoria, I am now of the view that the artist’s later painting (the exhibition focuses on the work made at Giverny from 1893 until the artist’s death in 1926) has a subliminal and even expressionist dimension. How else to characterise the elegiac quality of the wonderful water lily series and the late abstract-like garden paintings made with such abandon? Moreover, having learned more about Monet himself at this time, I appreciate that he was far more challenged by life experiences than I had presumed, in spite of the tremendous critical and commercial success he enjoyed in the last decades of his career.

In the art world, the question of who shapes public taste is a perennial favourite. Magazines like to rank the heavyweights. Last year’s ArtReview’s Power 100 included an assortment of global dealers and collectors; Ai Weiwei and Pussy Riot made it too. While such ladders of influence invariably include museum staff and art historians, it is clear that Jenny Holzer’s aphoristic ‘Truism’, Money Creates Taste, was prescient.

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

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

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

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