Displaying a passion for art early on, Ramsay entered the National Gallery School in Melbourne at 16. Spending time in Paris as a young man, he worked from a studio in Montparnasse for much of 1901–02 and had four paintings selected for the New Salon in Paris in 1902, an exceptional feat for an emerging artist.

Ramsay was close to his family and featured them in his work, the most notable being those of his sisters, Jessie, Margaret and Nell. Two of them feature in one of his most accomplished paintings, Two girls in white (or The sisters) 1904. Other paintings in the exhibition have not been shown in a retrospective context before.

Hugh Ramsay Exhibition
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
30 November 2019 – 29 March 2020
www.nga.gov.au

In the early twentieth century Picasso became a colossus of Modern Art. Many of the younger generation of avant-garde artists who had initially been inspired by Matisse and Fauvism turned to Picasso for inspiration. Over the years he explored the seemingly endless stylistic possibilities for art of the modern era. Revered and emulated, for much of his career Picasso appeared like an immovable object that blocked every move forward for art’s pathway. Others could only follow suit. The exception was Matisse.

Matisse & Picasso begins with the young Picasso settling in Paris, where he was determined to make a name for himself. Taking radical steps towards Cubism, Picasso confronted the older Matisse who was then renowned as the radical leader of the Fauves. The exhibition ends with Picasso’s artistic response to Matisse’s death. Mourning the loss of this most significant figure, Picasso acknowledged the immense stylistic influence Matisse had on his own artistic career.

Despite Picasso’s competitive bravado and resistance, Matisse’s creativity enticed, disturbed and ruffled him. The large paintings Matisse made in the first decade of the twentieth century relating to music and dance proved irresistible for Picasso. Enticing and seductive in their brilliant palette, Matisse’s beauty of line and decorative qualities, his blending of forms and their surrounds showed Picasso a way out of the self-imposed confines he had set himself with the tiny brushstrokes, limited palette and static forms of Analytic Cubism. For Picasso, when Matisse was at his most dynamic his art was radical and his talent was dangerous.

This exhibition follows the paths these two artists took over decades as they responded to the other’s work. No one was more watchful of Matisse’s art than Picasso and vice versa. Both explored pictorial issues in unique ways, but always remained on guard while looking over their shoulder at the other. Both Matisse and Picasso felt the absolute necessity to acknowledge and absorb the concept and skill of each other.

Matisse​ & Picasso Exhibition
13 December 2019 – 13 April 2020
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
www.nga.gov.au

The exhibition explores Cartier’s glittering international clientele that included royalty, aristocrats, socialites, and stars of the stage, cinema and music. Highlights include Dame Nellie Melba’s diamond stomacher brooch, the Queen’s “Halo” tiara, worn by Kate Middleton at her wedding to Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, Daisy Fellowes’ Tutti-Frutti Hindu necklace, Barbara Hutton’s imperial jadeite necklace, Princess Grace of Monaco’s 10.48-carat diamond engagement ring, Dame Elizabeth Taylor’s diamond and ruby necklace (a gift from her third husband Mike Todd which also doubles as a tiara) and a selection from the NGA’s exceptional Ballets Russes costumes.

As well as an intriguing array of Cartier jewellery, timepieces and precious objects, the immersive exhibition will include a selection of original preparatory drawings, as well as portraits, historic photographs, film, advertising material, jewellery-making tools and equipment to provide insight into the history of Cartier.

Step into the dazzling world of the Maison Cartier and its clients and discover the age of glamour and icons of style through our program of talks, tours, events and beautifully curated, fully illustrated catalogue.

Cartier: The Exhibition
NGA – Canberra
30 March – 22 July 2018
www.nga.gov.au

Versailles: Treasures from the Palace will be on show in Canberra from 9 December 2016.

More than 130 paintings, intricate tapestries, gilded furniture items, monumental statues and other objects from the royal gardens, and personal items from Louis XIV to Marie Antoinette, will bring to life the reigns of three Kings, their Queens and mistresses in a fascinating and often tumultuous period of French history.

The exhibition will celebrate the lives, loves and passions of the people of Versailles through a full program of activities including music performances, children’s programs and public events.

The exhibition contrasts small personal items, such as the precious golden reliquary which belonged to Louis XIV’s mother, or Marie Antoinette’s hand-crafted chair and harp, with huge works including six-metre tapestries from the most important Gobelins series ever produced for Louis XIV.

Versailles – Treasures from the Palace Exhibition
9 December 2016 – 17 April 2017
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
www.nga.gov.au

Stella was born in 1936 in Malden, outer suburban Boston. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in history from Princeton University in New Jersey in 1958, then moved to New York. ‘I never really wanted to become an artist. But, I did want to make things’, he confessed in a conversation with the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Adam D Weinberg on 7 March 2014, and an interest in contemporary events followed. Like many young artists in immediate postwar America, he was initially smitten with artists associated with Abstract Expressionism. Unlike other young artists, though, he achieved almost instant notoriety soon after graduating when, in 1959, he astonished the art world with the sombre, pure forms of his Black paintings, heralding the arrival of minimalism. Stella’s career, however, followed an unexpected trajectory in his search to validate and renew abstraction, finding new imagery that not only embraces shape, space and colour but also, to the surprise of many, decoration.

In a series of lectures at Harvard in the first half of the 1980s, Stella drew parallels between the ‘tepid’ Renaissance of Nicholas Poussin, which necessarily led to Baroque art, and the crisis of postwar abstraction, which he thought also needed to find a new impetus to retain its pre-eminence in the ever-changing world of modern art. The desire to avoid an art style he likened to a ‘slug of lead’, referring to the High Renaissance artist Poussin, and, instead, find a passion to ‘fill the void’, as Caravaggio had done, took Stella on a journey of remarkable invention. In his search for this new path for abstraction, he experimented with highly dramatic and almost narrative forms from the late 1950s onward.

The survival of abstraction in a viable form was important for Stella, but the divergent extremes of his evolving body of work left many of his early enthusiasts shaking their heads as he travelled from understated geometric forms to a fully blown Baroque style with a suggestive, dramatic expression and an enveloping sense of space. Early on, he had rebelled against the perception that he had been instrumental in introducing a minimalist language, and his career was characterised by a reaction against this unwanted mantle of purity.

Yet, there is consistency in Stella’s work. An underlying ‘spring-loaded’ tension and dynamism has always characterised it, from the early Black paintings of his youth to the more off-the-wall extravaganzas of recent years. His art chronicles a lifetime of experimenting with abstraction, and it is this narrative that was the underlying current of his major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of Art in 2015.

ut some critics still considered his later contributions a total lapse of taste. Ben Davis, in his review for artnet on 3 November 2015, agreed with critics who ‘don’t much like the swollen theatrics of Stella’s late works’. These ‘late monsters’, for Davis, took up far too much space, were too adventurous and far too dramatic, although he also conceded that the casual art viewer might well find them more to their liking. Jason Farago, on the other hand, recognises Stella as an artist who continues to explore new ideas, untrammelled by his earlier success. In his review in the Guardian of 29 October 2015, he writes that it is Stella’s ‘boundless and commendable evolution, rather than some static mastery, that is the mark of Stella’s seriousness’.

The criticism that Stella should have moved to parlour-sized works in a more conventional form failed to appreciate the bravura of an artist still intent on seeking new ways to give life to the art of abstraction. It’s this exploration that the Frank Stella: Saving abstraction exhibition will present for audiences to discover.
Jane Kinsman
Extract from Artonview, issue 87, Spring 2016

Frank Stella – The Kenneth Tyler Print Collection Exhibition
19 November 2016 – July 2017
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
www.nga.gov.au

In common with many of us, Hall sees these as failed states, as ‘a minefield of madness, badness and sadness’ stretching beyond the foreseeable future. Hall’s lifelong passion for the natural environment can be felt intensely in works that respond to our persistent role in its demise, or to the perilous state of various species.

Hall’s seemingly random conjunction of things in a wunderkammer-like installation appeals to our human impulse to make connections, or perhaps a propensity for paranoia born of the deep uncertainty and fear of our times. Yet despite a prevalent darkness, Hall’s exhibition is fundamentally life-affirming, its own vitality in perverse distinction to the subjects it ranges across, which provide rich pickings for Hall’s extraordinary transformation of materials, images and objects.

Fiona Hall – Wrong Way Time Exhibition
22 April – 10 July 2016
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
www.nga.gov.au

This extraordinary exhibition brings together Tom Roberts’ most famous paintings loved by all Australians. Paintings such as Shearing the rams (1888-90) and A break away! (1891) are among the nation’s best known works of art. An exhibition for all Australians, it is not to be missed.

The Tom Roberts exhibition takes place during an exciting period of change at the NGA, including a large-scale rehang of almost every work of art, with Australian art taking pride of place in a new location. Rediscover your NGA!

Tom Roberts Exhibition
4 December 2015 – 28 March 2016
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
www.nga.gov.au

Tom Roberts 30sec TVC from National Gallery of Australia on Vimeo.

During the 1800s Paris had witnessed the remarkable growth of the popular press. The technique of lithography, invented at the turn of the eighteenth century, was adopted by practicing artists as it was a printmaking technique conducive to drawing freely and directly. For publishers of newspapers, lithography allowed for larger print runs compared to earlier printing methods. Newspapers and journals begin to include serialisation of novels by writers like Émile Zola as well as caricatures by artists such as Daumier, which were often satiric and of a contemporary social or political nature. All of these factors helped to sell newspapers and journals to a growing and appreciative audience.

The generation of French artists who followed Daumier in the nineteenth century were inspired by his critical observations, which became an extraordinary reservoir of ideas. Both Degas and then Lautrec were enthusiastic admirers of French caricature, delighting in its animated qualities, stylistic freedoms and contemporary themes. They were particularly enamoured of Daumier’s caricature. Degas held Daumier in high regard, noting: ‘But I am of the opinion … that there have been three great draftsmen in the nineteenth century: Ingres, Delacroix and Daumier’. He was inspired by Daumier’s drawing, his interest in physiognomy, his expressive qualities and modern themes, which the younger artist then adapted. This is evident from Degas’ notebooks of the late 1860s and 70s, which include the artist’s copies of Daumier’s caricature and signature. Daumier’s art came to inform Degas as he looked to more contemporary ideas and left behind those grounded in classical or historical themes during this time.

Degas embraced motifs of modern French life—the ballet, the racecourse, the café-concert and the demi-monde—and played an important role in the rejection of mythological and historical subjects favoured by the more adventurist artists of the time. Many of Degas’ ideas on composition and subjects were drawn from Daumier. The caricaturist’s lithographs were a particular favourite and Degas acquired about 1800 out of almost 4000 prints for his own private collection. Degas was much taken with Daumier’s skill as a draughtsman, and both shared a mutual interest in physiognomy, and the theory that appearance reveals character.

In turn Lautrec adopted Daumier’s penetrating eye and wicked sense of humour. The youngest of the three artists featured in Impressions of Paris, Lautrec also assimilated lessons from Degas, borrowing themes and compositions from his idol. Lautrec admired and emulated Degas, which is evident in his compositions of drinkers at bars, dancers on stage, cabaret scenes and courtesans. All reveal the powerful role that Degas, and by extension Daumier, played in Lautrec’s artistic development. However, in his prolific yet short life, dying before his 37th birthday, Lautrec mapped out an extraordinarily inventive and original style.

These three master draughtsmen captured the spirit of Paris in their prints and posters. Through the examination of this work, we find clues as to why dramatic changes took place in French art over the nineteenth century. They formed part of other generations of artists who admired Daumier and who adapted the caricaturist’s critical lithographic observations. In this way Daumier’s legacy was a brilliant journalistic record of the modern capital and contributed to an era in France ripe for a new art.

Featuring over 150 prints, posters, drawings and monotypes drawn from the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Impressions of Paris: Lautrec, Degas, Daumier examines the role of each artist in the development of nineteenth century art in France—their influence and their originality.

Impressions of Paris Exhibition:Lautrec, Degas, Daumier
Venue: National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Dates:  8 November 2014 – 15 March 2015
www.nga.gov.au