Adrian’s Art and About

Posted by Adrian VanDerkraan on November 15th 2010 | 0 Comments

Tags: Museum

Art & About … Aussie Style:
I have great pride in my association with MWPAI and I’m soon to find that this Utica gem is known and respected by art lovers ‘down under.’

In late September my wife Diane and I found ourselves in Melbourne, the city I regard as Australia’s cultural hub. We set out on our Art & About tour, stopping first at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) to see European Masters: Städel Museum, 19th–Century, a remarkable collection of masterpieces from Frankfurt, Germany.

Staedl Museum Exhibition at the NGV, Melbourne

The exhibition featured nearly 100 magnificent works by 70 European artists from the 19th and 20th centuries, on display for the first time at NGV. Large-scale romantic German paintings, including Johan Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein’s iconic Goethe in the Roman Campagna from 1787 are a major part of the exhibition. We were also treated to superb examples by 19th-century French paintings, realist landscapes by Corot and Courbet to beautiful impressionist and post-impressionist works by Monet, Renoir, Degas, Rousseau, Cézanne and Matisse.

There was a survey of the rarely-seen German painting and sculptures, including 10 pieces by Max Beckmann, the incomparable expressionist.

Staedl Museum Exhibition at the NGV, Melbourne

It’s late afternoon. Chilly winds (September is spring down under) and “peckish” stomachs lured us to a local restaurant where a typical Aussie veggie breakfast is served all day. A savory plate of poached eggs, grilled tomatoes, steamed baby spinach, grilled asparagus, roasted potatoes and thick wheat toast accompanied by a steaming, frothing cup of “strong, flat, white” (coffee with cream in Australia) delighted our palates.

Luckily, our artistic palates were about to be engaged again. Not far from the NGV, we found Federation Square, home to The Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI.) We are surprised and thrilled to discover that we could see an Australian-exclusive exhibition direct from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York: Tim Burton. We are admirers of this diversely talented and artistically prolific man, director of such films as Alice in Wonderland, The Corpse Bride, The Nightmare before Christmas, Beetlejuice, Batman, Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow, Mars Attacks! Big Fish, Edward Scissorhands, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Sweeney Todd.

Tim Burton exhibition at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI.)

We viewed Burton’s career, as director, writer, concept artist / illustrator and photographer, through more than 700 artworks—drawings, paintings, photographs, production storyboards, moving-image works, puppets, models, costumes—that spectacularly illuminate Burton’s creative vision. The show was thematically displayed according to each particular film, and included a wide array of Batman costumes, the Batmobile and, of course, Sweeney Todd’s cut-throat razors! The works are at once comic, wildly imaginative and spectacularly ghoulish, and the influence of Gahan Wilson’s macabre cartoons is evident.

We saw Burton’s student and early non-professional films; his long-unseen television adaptation of Hansel and Gretel (1983); examples of his work for the flash animation internet series The World of Stainboy (2000); a selection of the artist’s oversized Polaroid prints; graphic art and texts for non-film projects, like The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories (1997) and Tim Burton’s Tragic Toys for Girls and Boys (2003) collectible figure series, and art from a number of early unrealized projects. We’re also treated to excerpts from Burton’s unfinished documentary project interview with Vincent Price.

Reluctantly we  had to leave Melbourne’s treasures, travel to Sydney, and then 40 more miles west to the Blue Mountains, to take in the Norman Lindsay Gallery in Faulconbridge. Stay tuned here for the story of this remarkable Australian artist whose life was depicted in the 1994 film Sirens, starring Sam Neill as Lindsay, Hugh Grant as a priest, as well as a number of beautiful women, including Elle McPherson, Kate Fisher, Portia de Rossi and Tara Fitzgerald.