Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Jane Clark

Jane Clark

Jane Clark was Curator of Major Special Exhibitions and of Australian Art at the National Gallery of Victoria; then Deputy Chairman of Sotheby’s in Australia; and is now Senior Research Curator at MONA, the Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart, Australia’s largest private museum.

'Sidney Nolan: Myth Rider': The evolving themes of one of Australia’s leading twentieth-century artists

ABR Arts 20 December 2021
This is a beautiful, thought-provoking, and timely exhibition about the enduring power and relevance of myth to humanity. In fact, visitors get two exhibitions in one, in the way that TarraWarra Museum of Art does exceptionally well: with contemporary art speaking back to Australian modernism – the original core of the museum’s permanent collection.1 Sidney Nolan: Myth Rider fills the main ga ... (read more)

Jane Clark reviews 'Picturing a Nation: The art and life of A.H. Fullwood' by Gary Werskey

June 2021, no. 432 26 May 2021
Far too few Australian artists have been the subject of comprehensive biographies. Gary Werskey mentions Humphrey McQueen’s 784-page Tom Roberts (1996) as an inspiration. Of course, there are art monographs and retrospective exhibition catalogues, but those are not life stories. With seventy-six colour plates and another fifty-one images in the text, Werskey’s thoroughly researched Picturing a ... (read more)

Jane Clark reviews 'City Bushmen: The Heidelberg School and the rural mythology' by Leigh Astbury

December 1985–January 1986, no. 77 01 December 1985
That Australia’s first national school of painters were ‘city bushmen’ is well documented. Tom Roberts began his career as a photographer in Collingwood, Frederick McCubbin in the family’s West Melbourne bakery and Arthur Streeton as an apprentice lithographer. Stories about their plein air painting excursions to Box Hill, Mentone, and Eaglemont are often told. The useful art historical la ... (read more)

Colony: Australia 1770–1861 / Frontier Wars (National Gallery of Victoria)

ABR Arts 03 April 2018
Although this not-to-be-missed offering from the National Gallery of Victoria has been billed as a ‘two-part exhibition’, it is a much more complex entity than that. In the words of the three lead curators – Cathy Leahy, Judith Ryan, and Susan van Wyck – it ‘explores different perspectives on Australia’s shared history in two complementary exhibitions’. I recommend you stay long enou ... (read more)

Not As the Songs of Other Lands: 19th Century Australian and American Landscape Painting (Ian Potter Museum of Art)

ABR Arts 19 April 2017
Opportunities to see nineteenth-century American art are rare in Australia. This beautiful small exhibition offers fascinating parallels between Australian and American landscape painting of the period, both popularly admired as expressions of a national psyche, revealing comparable interests in territorial expansion, exploration, settlement, displacement of prior inhabitants, transplantation of E ... (read more)

Jane Clark reviews 'Australian Symbolism: The Art of Dreams' by Denise Mimmocchi and 'Van Gogh to Kandinsky: Symbolist Landscape in Europe 1880–1910' by Richard Thomson, Frances Fowle, and Rodolphe Rapetti

September 2012, no. 344 30 August 2012
This year is proving a good one for Symbolism. An international conference entitled ‘Redefining European Symbolism’ was held at the Musée d’Orsay in April, followed shortly afterwards by four days on ‘The Symbolist Movement: Its Origins and Consequences’ at the University of Illinois, in Springfield. A third conference is planned for October at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh ... (read more)

Jane Clark reviews 'Visions Past and Present: Celebrating 40 Years' edited by Christopher Menz

July–August 2012, no. 343 09 July 2012
Reading this book is like taking a stroll through the exhibition with which it was published to coincide, in the wonderful company of its thirty-one expert, articulate, and enthusiastic authors. Visions Past and Present: Celebrating 40 Years – as both book and exhibition – celebrates the University of Melbourne’s art museum: launched as the University Art Gallery in 1972 and known since 1998 ... (read more)

Jane Clark reviews 'Rupert Bunny: Artist in Paris' by Deborah Edwards, with Denise Mimmocchi, David Thomas and Anne Gérard

November 2010, no. 326 01 November 2010
For those who saw the recent Rupert Bunny retrospective in Sydney, Melbourne, or Adelaide, where there were accompanying lecture programs, an informative audio guide, a lively children’s guide, and frilly knickers and parasols afterwards in the gallery shop, Rupert Bunny: Artist in Paris is a fine record of the exhibition. If you missed the show, this book provides a very good ‘virtual tour’ ... (read more)

Jane Clark reviews 'Art Journal of the National Gallery of Victoria, 50th Edition' edited by Isobel Crombie and Judith Ryan

September 2011, no. 334 23 August 2011
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 150th 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. T ... (read more)