AustLit

'This article investigates the first exhibition of Aboriginal art to be shown in a state art gallery, the Art Gallery of Western Australia, in 1957. The curators were anthropologists Ronald and Catherine Berndt. The exhibition was held when there was a growing interest in Aboriginal art, its links to national identity and the need to exhibit it to educate viewers about the art. The legacies of this exhibition are various including that it signalled a museological shift from anthropological modes of curating Aboriginal art to an aesthetic approach, and it began a conversation between curators, anthropologists, and art historians, and more recently with First Nations curators, about which approaches to employ in presenting Aboriginal art.' (Publication abstract)

'Collectors are particular kinds of people; Sir Russell Grimwade (1879–1955) was no exception. For twenty-five years, he carried a handwritten list in his wallet: ‘West Engravings 1813–14 Missing Numbers’, referring to an obscure print series, Absalom West’s Views of Sydney and Surrounds. These are the first landscape engravings produced in the colony of New South Wales in 1813–14. Grimwade’s list (May 1930) is of thirteen of the twenty-four prints, known by number, still to be collected. As each one was acquired, it was crossed off. This small archival fragment gives an insight into how Grimwade, a collector of Australiana, operated. He was Melbourne’s version of Sydney’s famed David Scott Mitchell and William Dixon. Grimwade’s extraordinary collection is of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century books, prints, watercolours, drawings, photographs, maps and other objects amassed between c.1920 and 1955. His wife Mab (Lady Grimwade) added a few contemporary paintings after he died, and in 1973, following Lady Grimwade’s death, their home Miegunyah and its contents were bequeathed to the University of Melbourne. This is what is known as the Grimwade collection. It is vast and includes 100 volumes held in Special Collections and 700 artworks in the University’s Art Collection. Pride of Place: Exploring the Grimwade Collection turns the microscope on selected items in this collection.' (Introduction)

'This book is a lively read about four women who had independent and active careers from the end of the nineteenth century up to the outbreak of the Second World War. Three of four subjects, Dora Ohlfsen, Clarice Zander and Mary Cecil Allen, tend to not feature in the more standard accounts of modern Australian art, while Louise Dyer’s career in the performing arts has similarly been little acknowledged. Each of these modern women headed overseas; all four, we are told, “shared Melba’s international outlook. Art was their ticket to escape from the confining conventions. Their means to join a diaspora of ability that knew no national boundaries” (vii). Their mobility led the authors to draw on international archives and those in Australia to piece together their remarkable lives.' (Introduction)

'The prominent Australian artist Nora Heysen has been said to have worked in the shadow of her father Hans Heysen, one of Australia's most recognised landscape painters. Letters between the two, however, reveal a different story.

'In 1934, when Nora first travelled to London to study art, she experienced her first time away from home and the first of many, often exotic places from where she would write home to Hahndorf, South Australia. The correspondence between Nora and Hans continued until his death in 1968. Theirs was a close and affectionate relationship, in which father and daughter shared a lifetime of thoughts about art and life, and a mutual admiration and respect for each other's work.

'Heysen to Heysen is a showcase of letters between Nora and Hans Heysen from the collection of the National Library of Australia. Accompanied by carefully selected images and text by leading art historian Catherine Speck, the publication lifts the lid on a vista of Australian art.' (From the publisher's website.)