aCOMMENT on “Modern Love: The Lives of John and Sunday Reed”
I’m writing this fresh from the book launch at Heide of Modern Love: The Lives of John and Sunday Reed, and yet another familiar roam through the old Heide farmhouse where much of these lives played out and where is now hosted an accompanying exhibition of the same name. This first biography of the Reeds, by Heide curators Lesley Harding and Kendrah Morgan, is the second in a 2015 biographical trilogy that covers four central weavers in the fabric of Australian Modernism: John and...
Read MoreaCOMMENT: on Nancy Underhill’s “Sidney Nolan: a life” – a terrible beauty is born
Dr Nancy Underhill’s new Nolan biography Sidney Nolan: a life is very good. The first biography to really look at his life as a whole1 rather than in segments bearing on a particular theme or exhibition, it will become a classic standard text. And deservedly so. Having regard to Sidney Nolan’s much avowed Irishness, I once worked out that he was just two days old on the first anniversary of Ireland’s 1916 Easter Rising. This new...
Read MoreaCOMMENT: on Patrick McCaughey’s “Strange Country”
Some time ago I knew only so much about Australian art – I might recognise who a painting was by and know a little about the painter. When reading a book like Patrick McCaughey’s new tome Strange Country: why Australian painting matters, I took it as gospel. Today not a lot has changed – except regarding matters discussed on this website. On these I have more detailed knowledge. So when a friend loaned a copy of her newly acquired Strange Country and asked what I...
Read More“Sidney Nolan’s Odyssey”: his life revisited
Sidney Nolan, perhaps this country’s best known painter, was born on 22 April 1917. As his centenary approaches, so are new books making their appearance – beginning in 2014 with Brian Adams’ online Kindle e-book Sidney Nolan’s Odyssey: a life. Although he was written about in countless monographs, catalogue essays, journals and newspaper articles etc, the first Nolan biography as such was published in 1987 only five years before his...
Read Morewith reason, without rhyme: a Max Harris biography
Max Harris was many things to many people: poet, journalist, critic, bookseller, publisher, newspaper columnist, husband, father … and much more. He can be thought of as one of the great catalysts of Australian letters. He sped up the reaction – he made things happen. His footprints are certainly all over the territory covered by this website: Malley, Nolan, Heide and Comment. It was Max to whom Ethel Malley sent her dead brother Ern’s poems; it was Max who in 1945 visited...
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