Melbourne Art Journal
Number 6 2003
Contents
Editorial: 'Pyramids to Picasso' and the Reopening of the NGV
Nigel Morgan
Gendered Devotions and Social Rituals: The Aspremont ‘Hours’
in the National Gallery of Victoria and the Image of the Patron in Late Thirteenth
and Early Fourteenth-Century France (The Joseph Burke Lecture 2001)
The Psalter-‘Hours’ made for Joffroy d’Aspremont and his
wife Isabelle de Kievraing, divided between the National Gallery of Victoria,
Melbourne, and the Bodleian Library, Oxford, contains more representations
of its patrons than almost any other medieval illuminated manuscript. This
article examines the ways and contexts in which Joffroy and Isabelle are depicted,
and those of other members of their family and friends in the two manuscripts.
These images give an impression of the courtly culture of the nobility of
east France in the period around 1300, and are discussed in relation to other
French devotional and liturgical manuscripts of the time.
Jennifer Spinks
Education and Entertainment: The Redecoration of Marie-Adélaïde
of Savoy’s Ménagerie at Versailles
In 1698 Louis XIV presented a private zoo, the Ménagerie, in the
grounds of Versailles to Marie-Adélaïde of Savoy, the child bride
of his eldest grandson Louis, Duc de Bourgogne. The centrepiece was a tiny
château, the rooms of which were decorated with paintings by various
artists and with decorative grotesques by Claude III Audran. This article
provides a reading of the images created for one of the rooms that formed
part of the Ménagerie redecoration, and seeks to establish how, in
creating an environment suited to Marie-Adélaïde, Audran drew
on the imagery of playful animal fables. It also contributes to our understanding
of Audran’s contribution to the Ménagerie by identifying one
of his sketches for this room.
David R. Marshall
Carnevale, Conversazione, and Villeggiatura:
Villa Life in the Eighteenth Century. (Joseph Burke Lecture 2002)
This article explores the social life of the Patrizi family associated with
their villa outside the Porta Pia in Rome in the eighteenth century. Employing
the unpublished letters of Cardinal Giovanni Battista Patrizi (1658–1727)
to his brother Mariano (1663–1744), it describes the life led by his
nephew, Patrizio (1684–1747), and his second wife Ottavia Sacchetti
(m.1722) during a long stay with him in Ferrara, where the Cardinal was Papal
Legate. It also looks at the life of the daughter of Patrizio, Virginia Patrizi
(1717–88), and, through her, at the relationship between the Villa Patrizi
and the better-known Villa Albani of Cardinal Alessandro Albani, which faced
it across the intervening vigne.
Susan Russell
Herman van Swanevelt’s Landscape Prints in the Tom Roberts Album at
the Art Gallery of New South Wales
The well-known Australian artist, Tom Roberts (1856–1931), owned an
album of landscape prints by or after European Old Masters, which he bequeathed
to the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney. By far the largest number
are by the Dutch artist, Herman van Swanevelt (c.1600–55). This article
signals their presence in an Australian collection, considers aspects of Swanevelt’s
reputation in the context of his print oeuvre, and discusses what his prints
may have meant to an Anglo-Australian artist at the turn of the twentieth
century.
Ann Galbally
Art, Art Nouveau, and Anti-Art: Charles Conder and the Asthetics of the
1890s (Margaret Manion Lecture 2003)
Born in England, Charles Conder spent six years in Australia from 1886 to
1890 before moving to Paris to further his career. He left Melbourne with
a reputation as a fine plein-air painter but Paris in the 1890s had left realism
behind and he needed to change course to win recognition. The pale palette
of Puvis de Chavannes and the motifs and technique of the later Monet inspired
his paintings of Normany, Dieppe and Algeria, works admired by French and
English critics in the early 1890s. The heightened, slightly artificial aesthetic
of these works linked him with the Anglo-French Decadents—Arthur Symons,
Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley—who also used the artificial to challenge
nineteeth-century certainties of realism, sentiment and morality in art. Conder
became part of this group, publishing work with them in The Yellow Book and
The Savoy and suffering ostracisation with them after the fall of Oscar Wilde
in 1895. An involvement with the first exhibition of art nouveau at Samuel
Bing’s Parisian gallery led to further adverse criticsm as the exhibition
and the new style were deplored by French critics anxious to protect the purity
of the French tradition against the onslaught of internationalism that art
nouveau represented. Although Conder won success in London with his watercolours
on silk from the turn of the century, his reputation did not survive his association
with the avant-garde movements of the 1890s and he was never granted a place
in the historical accounts of English or French art of the period. Australian
art historians have only ever been able to see him within the nationalist
aesthetics of the Heidelberg School, his European career being either ignored
or vilified.
Mark Stocker
Pakeha Praxiteles: The Sculpture of Margaret Butler
The New Zealand-born and trained sculptor Margaret Butler (1883–1947),
spent the period 1923–34 in Europe, principally in Paris, where her
work attracted the admiration of Antoine Bourdelle and Charles Despiau. Although
they never met, probably the greatest influence on her work was Nabi sculptor
Georges Lacombe. After her return to New Zealand in 1934, Butler’s work
was critically praised but she attracted few commissions due to economic reasons
and the low artistic status of sculpture. Her later works are nevertheless
among her most interesting and significant in their fusion of European style
and technique with Maori subject matter.
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