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Luke Morgan

Luke Morgan

Dr Luke Morgan is a Senior Lecturer in Art Theory in the Faculty of Art & Design at Monash University. The University of Pennsylvania Press published his book Nature as Model on the French architect and polymath Salomon de Caus in 2007. He has written essays, articles and reviews for journals, books and exhibition catalogues on a wide range of other topics, from Italian Baroque painting to modern and contemporary art and design. Luke is on the editorial board of the international quarterly Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes and has been an editorial advisor to the Australian Book Review.

Luke Morgan reviews ‘Inside Australia’ by Antony Gormley

March 2006, no. 279 01 March 2006
Imagine turning up in Menzies, 132 kilometres north of Kalgoorlie and 729 east of Perth in Western Australia, and then inviting the town’s inhabitants to take their clothes off. This is exactly what the British artist Antony Gormley did in June 2002. Improbably perhaps, after some coaxing, 131 people in Menzies, and later in Perth, agreed. Inside Australia documents Gormley’s remarkable artist ... (read more)

Luke Morgan reviews 'The Formalesque: A guide to modern art and its history' by Bernard Smith

June 2008, no. 302 01 June 2008
Bernard Smith’s new book, The Formalesque: A Guide to Modern Art and Its History is aimed directly at those school and university students who, he writes, ‘may need an introductory primer to the art history of the 20th century’. Although it offers a lucid and accessible survey of familiar territory, The Formalesque is by no means a straightforward textbook. Smith’s persuasive, even pugnaci ... (read more)

Luke Morgan reviews 'Bridge' by Peter Bishop

December 2008–January 2009, no. 307 01 December 2008
Peter Bishop’s book on bridges is the latest in the Objekt series published by Reaktion. It joins other books on the factory, the aircraft, the motorcycle, the dam and the school. The series focuses on the last hundred years, although Bishop traces the story of the bridge back to the early nineteenth century. Bridge is not, however, a straightforward linear history. Instead, it seeks to examine ... (read more)

Luke Morgan reviews 'Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism' by Hal Foster

May 2006, no. 281 01 May 2006
Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism manages to be simultaneously comprehensive yet skewed, innovative yet inert, and pluralistic yet doctrinaire. As a theoretically sophisticated rewriting of modern art from 1900 to 2003, it is a major achievement and will surely be of central importance in the field for years to come. Its authors are among the leading art historians of their g ... (read more)

Luke Morgan reviews 'Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting' by David Alan Brown et al.

October 2006, no. 285 01 October 2006
Some years ago, Robert Hughes bemoaned the capitulation of art museums and galleries to ‘the whole masterpiece-and-treasure syndrome’. Although made in the 1980s, Hughes’s point may still be valid, especially if the number of recent exhibitions with the word ‘master’ in their titles is anything to go by. A quick check reveals that, in Australia, the National Gallery of Victoria is partic ... (read more)

'Bill Henson and the anatomy of melancholy' by Luke Morgan

June–July 2005, no. 272 01 May 2005
The late Susan Sontag suggested that the photograph ‘offers a modern counterpart of that characteristically romantic architectural genre, the artificial ruin: the ruin which is created in order to deepen the historical character of a landscape, to make nature suggestive, suggestive of the past’. On viewing the retrospective exhibition Bill Henson: Three Decades of Photography, which was organi ... (read more)

Luke Morgan reviews 'The Garden of Ideas: Four Centuries of Australian Style' by Richard Aitken

March 2011, no. 329 19 April 2011
When Bouvard and Pécuchet suddenly become enamoured of landscape design in Flaubert’s novel of 1881, and decide to remodel their own garden, they are bewildered by the ‘infinity of styles’ that are available to them. After much deliberation and research, they decide to install an Etruscan tomb with an inscription, a Rialto, a Chinese pagoda, a mount, and topiary in the shape of peacocks, st ... (read more)