Carmel Oakley

It is an irony that one of the most European of our painters is regarded, in the popular mind, as being the most characteristically Australian. Drysdale, perhaps more so than any other modern Australian painter, depended on European models: his paintings locate themselves not in the outback but in the European modern tradition – beginning with Cézanne and extending through Picasso, Braque, Modi ... (read more)

The best things about this book are the paintings, the photographs, and the paper. The worst thing is the prose. But does this matter, you may well ask, in a book obviously designed to travel rapidly from the coffee table to the wall – with its large size format and convenient disintegration at first read? It’s the pictures we want, not the prose. Well, back in the 1920s and 1930s when Arthur ... (read more)