Peter Hill

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.

He painted Kate Moss naked. The Kray twins threatened to cut off his painting hand over bad gambling debts. He was officially recognised as father to fourteen children by numerous partners, but the unofficial tally could be as high as forty (three were born to different mothers within a few months). He is Lucian Freud, grandson of Sigmund Freud, born in Berlin on 8 December 1922. All of his gambling disasters came from using his ‘lucky’ birth number, eight. Fittingly, he died at the age of eighty-eight in 2011.

Throw the name Lucio Fontana into any dinner table discussion about twentieth-century art, and chances are the first comment thrown back will be, ‘He’s the Italian guy who slashed his canvases.’ He certainly was. But there is much more to him than that, as this exquisitely produced and exhaustively researched book by Anthony White shows.

In August 1999 the Melbourne art collective DAMP staged an argument that turned into a glass-smashing fight at an exhibition opening of its work at 200 Gertrude Street. Peter Timms, writing in The Age, described this event, which in former times might have been called a ‘Happening’ and today would be recognised as a ‘Pop-up project’:

This fascinating book tells of the friendship between two Chinese artists: the traditional brush painter Huang Binhong (1865–1955) and the Chinese writer, critic, and translator Fou Lei (1908–66). While the long tail of Modernism swept through the twentieth century, decelerating only during the two world wars, and following reductive tendencies based on the early work of either Picasso or Duchamp, cultural workers in China had to deal with the end of the old imperial order, foreign invasion, the rise of communism, and the imposition of socialist realism, quickly followed by the decade-long Cultural Revolution. Then came Tiananmen Square and its twenty-year aftermath of commercial openness and democratic closure. These were dangerous times, and just as Walter Benjamin in the West committed suicide in the shadow of the rise of totalitarianism in Europe, so too did Fou Lei in 1966, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.

If you were to tell me that a book had been written that covered a century of art in Asia, from 1900 to 2000, and that its geographic range moved from Japan to Pakistan and Indonesia, to Nepal, the Australian outback, and Cambodia, I would initially ask how many volumes it contained. That such a book exists, in a fairly slim volume, is tribute to the skills of its author, Alison Carroll. How has she done it?