Patrick McCaughey

Patrick McCaughey is former Director of the National Gallery of Victoria, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford Connecticut, and the Yale Center for British Art. His most recent book is Strange Country: Why Australian Painting Matters (2014). His other works include Voyage and Landfall: The Art of Jan Senbergs (2006). He writes regularly for the Times Literary Supplement and Australian Book Review. He lives and works on the banks of the Quinnipiac River in New Haven, and has recently finished editing Fred Williams: Diaries 1963–1970 for the Miegunyah Press.

Patrick McCaughey reviews ‘A Life of Picasso: The minotaur years, 1933–1943’ by John Richardson

May 2022, no. 442 • 29 April 2022

Sir John Richardson published the first volume of his monumental A Life of Picasso: The prodigy, 1881–1906, in 1991. The second volume, The painter of modern life, 1907–1917 illuminating the Cubist years, followed in 1996. The next volume, The triumphant years, 1917–1932, appeared eleven years later and gave rise to speculation as to how Richardson, then seventy-three, could complete his amb ... (read more)

Patrick McCaughey reviews 'Cy Twombly: Making past present' edited by Christine Kondoleon with Kate Nesin

April 2021, no. 430 • 29 March 2021

If you were fortunate enough to take Franz Philipp’s course in Medieval and Renaissance Art at the University of Melbourne in the 1960s – the old Fine Arts B – you would have quickly encountered Erwin Panofsky’s masterpiece, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (1960). It set forth authoritatively the argument that from the Carolingian revival in the eighth century through the Ottoni ... (read more)

Patrick McCaughey reviews 'Australian Art' by Andrew Sayers

May 2001, no. 230 • 01 May 2001

Andrew Sayers has one large and important idea that distinguishes his account of Australian art from all others: the story must include equal attention to Aboriginal art and to the art of white European settlement. However commanding and commendatory the idea, it will not, I suspect, be a popular one. There will be lamentation heard from Balmain to Port Melbourne when Sayers’s book is scanned a ... (read more)

Assembled: The Art of Robert Klippel (TarraWarra Museum of Art)

ABR Arts • 10 March 2020

TarraWarra Museum of Art’s (TWMA) summer exhibition Assembled: The Art of Robert Klippel can only reinforce his reputation as Australia’s foremost modern sculptor. Yet he lacks the public reputation of his contemporary painters – John Olsen, Fred Williams, John Brack, and so on. Klippel (1920–2001) is known largely, if not exclusively, to the world of art. This exhibition may right that hi ... (read more)

Manet and Modern Beauty (Getty Center)

ABR Arts • 23 September 2019

Five years ago, the J. Paul Getty Museum acquired Édouard Manet’s Jeanne (Spring), 1882, for US$61 million – a record for the artist. It was a bold acquisition, for later Manet – he died in 1883 – has never enjoyed the critical esteem of the earlier. Absurdly so, if you recall that the incomparable Bar at the Folies Bergère was the Salon companion to Jeanne. According to Scott Allan, Jea ... (read more)

Patrick McCaughey reviews 'Man in the Glass House: Philip Johnson, architect of the modern century' by Mark Lamster

September 2019, no. 414 • 27 August 2019

Philip Johnson – lagging well behind the founding fathers – may not be the most profound architect of the twentieth century. Nor does he have the resonance of Louis Kahn or the form-changing genius of Frank Gehry, among his contemporaries. Yet the pattern of twentieth-century architecture cannot be fully understood without him. Mark Lamster’s biography lodges him vividly in that pattern. A c ... (read more)

The Golden Age on St Kilda Road

ABR Arts • 16 May 2019

A shift in the European mind is taking hold. The stable democracies of Germany and the Netherlands contrast sharply with an unstable France and a demagogic Italy. The northern tier has an increasing authority, politically and culturally. Art historically, the Amsterdam–Berlin axis challenges the hegemony of the Paris–Rome accord. The reopening of the Rijksmuseum in 2013 after ten years of clos ... (read more)

Andy Warhol — From A to B and Back Again (Whitney Museum of American Art)

ABR Arts • 13 December 2018

Some time ago I appeared on a morning radio program with a prominent guru of Australian culture who roundly declared that Andy Warhol was ‘a one trick pony’. Neither remonstration nor persuasion could help the guru out of his imperturbable complacency. He had summed up Warhol in a sentence – what more need be said? ... (read more)

Patrick McCaughey reviews 'Modernists and Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney and the London Painters' by Martin Gayford

October 2018, no. 405 • 26 September 2018

The geography of art post 1945 has a boringly settled look and needs disturbing. This engaging and readable book makes a useful starting point. The standard view begins with the switch of the centre from Paris to New York, and so it remained for the next fifty years or so until the shoals of post-minimalism washed up on the stony beach of postmodernism. ... (read more)

Patrick McCaughey reviews 'Reason and Lovelessness: Essays, encounters, reviews 1980–2017' by Barry Hill

May 2018, no. 401 • 24 April 2018

Barry Hill’s collection of essays from the last four decades is commanding and impressive. Few could match his range of subjects: from Tagore to John Berger, Lucian Freud to Christina Stead – all, for the most part, carried off with aplomb. He catches the ‘raw’ edge of Freud’s studio – ‘worksite’ as Hill calls it – ‘the sea of bare boards that rise into so many paintings, the t ... (read more)