In January 1965, Fred and Lyn Williams returned from seven months in Europe, where they had pursued an exhausting schedule, absorbing more art than most travellers would see in a lifetime. Williams had won the coveted Helena Rubinstein Travelling Art Scholarship in 1963 and was determined to make the most of the opportunity. Fred and Lyn drove all over Britain looking at Gothic cathedrals, spent three weeks in Paris, and a solid two-and-a-half months in continental art museums.

The trip was a testimony to Williams’s voracious, broadranging appetite for art, even for medieval stained glass or classical sculpture, which bore no apparent relation to his own work. Whereas many artists visit museums looking for an idea they can adapt and use, Williams wanted to see everything, absorbing experiences that might never find their way into one of his pictures. This vast store of visual information makes it difficult to pinpoint influences, as Williams would work intuitively, painting in the landscape but drawing on his recollections of the art he had studied in museums.

In some of Williams’s pictures one may catch glimpses of Cezanne or Courbet, but his primary focus is the landscape itself. A barnstorming tour of Europe had confirmed his belief that Australian scenery represented a new, virtually untouched subject for a painter. Before setting off overseas he had been producing the most original and dynamic works of his career in the You Yangs series. When he got back, he simply picked up where he had left off.

Patrick McCaughey describes the moment in his monograph on Williams: “When he returned home in January 1965 it was as though he picked up the brush the morning after the last paintings of the year before. That says a lot about the nature of his art and the certainty of his direction. He literally carried his vision with him intact, feeding off his own art; one painting stimulating the next, one series provoking its counterpoint.” ^[i]

In the period from 1963 to 1968, Williams would reinvent Australian landscape painting, one innovation following another. The uncanny aspect of his work was the way it felt distinctively Australian, even though he had dispensed with all those recognisable features of the bush that had made artists such as Arthur Streeton and Hans Heysen into national icons. Both were given knighthoods for images that stirred local pride and love of country. They were the best of what a later generation of artists would derisively call “the gumtree school”.

At a time when abstraction appeared to be an unstoppable force, Williams was wary of associating himself with the traditions of nationalistic landscape but equally unwilling to abandon his connections with observable reality. His solution was to paint recognisable landscapes, drawing upon studies made en plein air, creating detail through gestural touches with a spontaneous, abstract appearance.

In pictures painted in the You Yangs, in Upwey and Lysterfield, Williams had dispensed with the last vestiges of the Claudean legacy. No heroic gum trees towered over his flat fields. No endless blue horizons shimmered in the distance. The trees in Williams’s paintings were small and straggly, hardly more than a swipe of the brush topped with a blob of paint. The grounds he preferred were usually brown or ochre, a far cry from those bucolic idylls where sheep grazed in grassy fields.

Williams’s scenes were instantly familiar, in a way that made Streeton and Heysen’s pictures look like stage sets. Williams had captured the flat, disorderly nature of Australian topography, in which trees and scrub fought for moisture under the rays of a burning sun. At first glance this was a harsh, featureless environment, but Williams had learned from his study of the old masters, how to instill a sense of rightness into paintings that flirted with formlessness.

His bestknown procedure was to lay two strands of piano wire across a canvas, dividing the picture plane into four segments. This showed how he should cluster his tiny dabs of paint to create the most subtle of compositions.

One can see this method at work in Pond in Landscape, where one strand of wire would have run diagonally from the top left-hand corner of the painting, just touching on the edge of the pond in the foreground, before exiting on the right-hand side, towards the bottom. The other piece of wire seems to have run from the top right-hand corner and exited towards the bottom on the left, grazing the right edge of the roughly brushed cloud.

There is an empty space where the wires crossed, and the faintest trace of a line that carves up the ground into proportions that echo the classical ratio of the Golden Mean. Indeed, if one were to superimpose the famous diagram of the Fibonacci Spiral over the rectangular plane of the earth, it’s an almost perfect fit, with the pond slotting into the area where the tip of the spiral turns in upon itself.^[ii]

This is one way that Williams was able to impose a near-classical order on the rampant disorder of the bush. Such a precise underlying structure is the reason his paintings have a timeless dimension. The way Williams constructed a picture is not fundamentally different from how an artist of the Renaissance might have mapped out a fresco or an altarpiece. His revelation was that these methods worked just as well in depicting an Australian landscape devoid of the striking, dramatic features that attracted famous Romantics such as J.M.W. Turner or Caspar David Friedrich.

The modernity of Williams’s work asserts itself in the forms of the pond and the cloud, which mirror each other in the top and bottom planes of the picture, providing visual anchors for sky and earth. The artist has made no attempt to reproduce the characteristic textures of cloud or water, painting these features in the manner of an Abstract Expressionist, with crude swirls of pigment and brushstrokes left clearly visible. The cloud is not exactly white, but a dirty pale blue with a tinge of yellow and grey. The pond is a patchwork of blue, white, black, brown, and grey. It is not inserted into the earth but plastered defiantly on top of it.

Williams was not concerned with integrating the features of the landscape into a naturalistic vista. If it were not for the cloud, the sky in the painting would be a void, with none of the features we associate with the sky in a conventional landscape. Constable famously believed the sky to be “the chief organ of sentiment”, but in this picture, Williams has left the sky purposefully blank, as if to avoid symbolic or emotional connotations.

It’s the ground in Pond in Landscape that receives the bulk of his attention. The earth is loosely brushed in, with a thinned-down application of paint that appears darker or lighter in a haphazard manner. The deliberate lack of depth throws the black-and-white spots of paint that represent trees and shrubs into sharp relief. Williams has presented these features as a scattering of calligraphic marks written on the landscape.

One of the most seductive features of the work is the sheer physicality of this mark-making. It’s thrilling to follow the swipes and smears of the brush, the blobs of paint flicked spontaneously onto the canvas. The basic geometric structure of the work consists of nothing more than two rectangles, but the details are electrifying, as if a swarm of angry insects has descended on the dull, brownish expanse of the landscape.

For most artists, this dirty, washy brown would be a colour to avoid, but Williams knew it would serve as a perfect foil for the vivid black-and-white daubs of paint he would apply to the picture. He also knew the surface could be animated even more effectively by including the tiniest flecks of blue and yellow in the black-and-white mix. We don’t know whether this was a matter of calculation or instinct - simply going with something that ‘felt right’ or adding a detail the painting seemed to ‘need’.

With Williams, more than any other Australian artist, it’s impossible to find that point where the head dominates the heart or vice versa. In his recently published Diaries^[iii] he reveals himself to be sceptical of art theory and of art with a political agenda. He comes across as a supremely practical painter, more concerned with the way a painting is made rather than subject matter, relying chiefly on the judgement of the eye in deciding what succeeds and what doesn’t. A theory for Williams was an airy, intangible proposition, but a technique could be tried and tested in the studio. If he stuck doggedly to landscape in an age of abstraction it’s because he believed that centuries of knowledge accumulated by artists should not be thrown away in pursuit of a fashionable new idea. Art may come and go, but the landscape would endure. In paintings such as Pond in Landscape he aspired to transcend art’s perpetual search for sensation and make works that seem as fresh today as they did in the 1960s.

FRED WILLIAMS
(1927-1982)
Pond in Landscape 1965
oil on canvas
96.5 x 106.5 cm
signed lower left: Fred Williams
inscribed verso: POND IN LANDSCAPE

^[i] Patrick McCaughey, Fred Williams 1927 -1982, 2008 revised ed. (orig.1984), Murdoch Books, Sydney, p. 165

^[ii] https://www.elegantthemes.com/blog/design/the-golden-ratio-the-ultimate-guide-to-understanding-and-using-it

^[iii] Patrick Mccaughey (w. John Timlin) ed. The Diaries of Fred Williams 1963-1970, The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2025

If one were to compile a checklist of motifs commonly found in Jeffrey Smart’s paintings, Outside the Ministry would tick almost every box. All it needs is a lorry to compete the set, but it’s easy enough to imagine a long strip of asphalt and a fleet of trucks on the other side of the massive stone wall that dominates the composition. As ever, Smart gives us part of a story and invites us to imagine the rest.

Walls play a prominent role in Smart’s paintings, helping to establish the geometrical frameworks he saw as an essential part of every composition. It hardly needs noting that Outside the Ministry makes precise use of the classical ratio of the Golden Mean in the division of the canvas into two rectangles, and the severe diagonal line of the steps.

Smart’s walls also enable him to excise the middle ground from a picture, a procedure he may have learned from Edward Hopper. By refusing a calm, orderly recession in the manner of a classical landscape, Smart is showing a disinclination to engage with the eternal verities of Nature. A scene by Claude Lorraine allows us to gaze into an infinite horizon, but a typical Smart painting will place a figure in the foreground and a set of buildings in the distance. There is a disconnection between these elements because the centre of the picture is dominated by a fence, a wall, a mound of earth or a road that screens out everything in between.

This creates a subtle sense of dislocation perfectly suited to Smart’s preference for urban settings. If Nature is eternal, then cities are in a constant state of flux, depending on the wealth or ambition of their inhabitants. In a busy metropolis such as Shanghai, for instance, the skyline seems to change from week to week. For Smart, the city and its surrounds provided an endless source of visual stimulation. He had no time for those who interpreted his work as a social critique or a vision of modern alienation, contending that artists shouldn’t style themselves as seers or prophets – although this didn’t prevent him from stacking his work with private jokes and satire.

Smart was unimpressed by those contemporary artists who took themselves more seriously than their art. In the studio, he felt that craftsmanship should be more important than any need to make a political statement. He would have been horrified by today’s widespread belief that the identity of the artist is more important than the quality of the work.

In Outside the Ministry, the only natural element is the sky, with its fluffy white clouds. The wall, which may be concrete or limestone, acts an impregnable barrier against the rest of the world, although there’s a warmth in the yellowish colours Smart has used. When we learn the title of the painting it seems to match the popular impression of most government ministries: entities that would like us to believe they exist only for our benefit, but whose inner workings are secretive and inexplicable. Ministries are fortresses in which decisions are made that shape our lives as citizens, not always for the better.

It was opportune to study this image shortly after viewing Paolo Sorrentino’s film, La Grazia, in which Tony Servillo plays a fictional President of Italy. For Sorrentino, it was the latest in succession of political movies, including scathing portraits of leaders such as Giulio Andreotti and Silvio Berlusconi. The message from all these films is that politics is a game largely played behind closed doors, determined by factors that are revealed to the public only when some new scandal arises.

Smart’s Ministry lives up to this reputation. Aside from the legs of a large statue, all we see are bare, flat surfaces. The bald man in sunglasses could be a politician or a senior bureaucrat, a lobbyist or a businessman. Perhaps he’s a mafioso, carrying a valise stuffed with cash to be handed over to a corrupt public servant. He must have some form of business to transact at the Ministry, otherwise he wouldn’t be found in this barren location, waiting for a car or a contact. Like most characters in Smart’s paintings, his identity and motives are inscrutable, although there are many tantalising clues.

This imposing setting conjures up thoughts of the totalitarian ministries in George Orwell’s 1984 – Ministries of Truth, Love, Peace and Plenty, which stand for their exact opposites. It’s a disturbing fact that the second Trump administration has done an excellent job in turning these fictional departments into reality.

It would be interesting to know if Smart has modelled the bald man, or the two small figures engaged in discussion at the top of the stairs, on any living persons. Faces such as those of Giorgio Morandi or Alma Mahler have made sly appearances in his paintings, although the artist always claimed to use figures in a purely generic manner, as indicators of scale rather than keys to the meaning of a work.

The most famous generic figure in Smart’s œuvre is probably the portly bald man with one arm, in Cahill Expressway (1962). The bald protagonist in Outside the Ministry could be an Italian relation. In both pictures, the anonymous figure stands beneath a public sculpture that seems to have some heroic purpose but appears only in fragmented form. For Smart, all such statues could be the offspring of the ruin in Shelley’s Ozymandias – a monument to human vanity, mocked by time. There is a wry humour in these throwbacks to a classical world inserted into a cosmopolitan landscape being constantly remade by people whose values are forever changing.

One of Donald Trump’s more fanciful ideas is for a garden of American heroes featuring statues of important people, but this would be essentially a gallery of celebrities. The more grandiose monuments such as The Statue of Liberty, (or to use the title bestowed by its creator, Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi: Liberty Enlightening the World), are based on abstractions. This is the kind of statue Smart gently mocks in the form of a leg of a giant allegorical figure protruding from a robe or toga. The obvious disjunction is between the lofty ideals embodied in the sculpture, and the grubby realities of politics and bureaucracy. The statue, in its way, is no less of a barrier against reality than the wall.

We might also consider the two yellow triangles, a no entry sign and the black-and-white striped poles at the top of the steps, to be another kind of artwork. These items bear the same resemblance to modern sculpture as the garden hose Smart would use as a model for The sculptor with work in situ (1984-85). In many of his other paintings, a traffic sign doubles as public art. These parodies of the avant-garde act as a vein of absurdist comedy in Smart’s work, a running gag on the legacy of Duchamp’s readymades.

The obvious architectural reference for Outside the Ministry, is the EUR – the site for the Esposizione Universale Roma of 1942, which was waylaid by the Second World War. Commissioned by Mussolini, the EUR was intended as a showcase of Fascist architecture. Today, after numerous changes, it’s a fashionable business and residential district.

I visited the EUR with Jeffrey Smart as part of a day-long tour of the archtectural highlights of Rome, courtesy of a knowledgeable taxi driver named Francesco, whom Jeffrey had befriended. The EUR was our final stop, its monumental, rationalist design a vision of a future that never eventuated.

The building in the background of the painting, which we assume to be the “ministry” appears to be loosely based on the EUR’s most iconic structure, the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, often referred to as the Square Colosseum. It was intended to encompass Italy’s past, present and future in one design, incorporating a sleek, repetitive façade with a massive flight of steps and a collection of classical-style sculptures, representing aspects of Italian history and culture. The effect is weirdly reminiscent of one of Giorgio di Chirico’s metaphysical paintings.

Smart has drawn on these diverse elements, squaring off the rounded arches on the front of the Palazzo. Although made from concrete, the building is clad in travertine, lending it a creamy appearance Smart borrows for wall and steps. Conceptually, it exposes historical artifice and pretension, disguising a modern building material with a thin layer of stone favoured by the ancient Romans. It tells us that Mussolini’s dream of Italian glory was merely skin-deep.

A readymade movie set, the EUR has appeared in numerous films by a roll call of directors that includes Rossellini, Fellini, Antonioni and Bertolucci. This connection was not lost on Smart, who greatly admired the Italian movies of the 60s and 70s, and counted Bernardo Bertolucci as a friend. The cinematic influence is reflected in Outside the Ministry, which resembles a film still in which a mysterious man in sunglasses acts out a scene from a story we’ll never know, from a movie that only ever existed in the mind of the artist.

JEFFREY SMART
(1921-2013)
Outside the Ministry 1970
oil on canvas
80.0 x 90.0 cm
signed lower right: JEFFREY SMART

When Jeffrey Smart left Australia to make his home in Italy in 1965, he had already fallen out of love with the cutting-edge art of the day. Pop Art, Op Art, hard-edged abstraction were all the rage, but he could never see himself following any of those trends. As he recounts in his autobiography, Not Quite Straight (1996), Smart had found his direction in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, gazing upon the Alexander mosaic retrieved from Pompeii. The mosaic is based on a Hellenistic painting, long since lost, but the artist took heart in confirming that the painters of ancient Greece had been realists.

Smart had no time for Clement Greenberg’s doctrine that art progressed by stages, jettisoning aspects of theatricality until it became an ‘object’ in its own right. He felt that realism was timeless - a manner of making art that recurred throughout the ages, albeit in different guises. He saw the fashionable movements of the 1960s as flimsy and ephemeral, enjoying a burst of celebrity that would be extinguished when some new fad came along.

By 1982, Modernism had sputtered to a conclusion, and the short-lived moment of Postmodernism was fading fast. It seemed as if time’s arrow had missed the target, and all artistic tendencies had to learn to live together.

That was the lesson to be taken from the Venice Biennale of that year, which Artforum saw “at best as disorganised and at worst as a disaster.”^[i] One feature the magazine’s reviewer particularly disliked was “a nightmare of figuration — a warehouselike amalgam of heterogeneous works, primarily realist in persuasion and marked, in general, by bathetic emotional states.”

That ‘nightmarish’ figuration – including work by Lucian Freud, Avigdor Arikha and Antonio López García - may have piqued Smart’s interest, but he would come away from the Biennale feeling disenchanted by the chaotic spectacle of so much incompatible art crying out for attention.

Four Seats, Venice Biennale is his response to that experience. Smart has depicted four ugly seats arranged in pairs in the Giardini enclosure where the national pavilions are located. No artist but Smart might have visited the Biennale and found the most inspiring sight to be a set of park benches chiefly notable for stolid design and drabness of materials.

This is characteristic of the artist’s habit of finding “beauty” or at least something of interest, in scenes most people would barely notice. His paintings of highways, traffic signs, flyovers, lorries, and bare concrete structures invite us to look more closely at things we take for granted, implying that nothing is so utilitarian it doesn’t contain some faint trace of an aesthetic impulse. Smart brings the ‘non-spaces’ of the world to life, reinforcing the idea that one of the functions of art is to add an unexpected new dimension to everyday experience.

Not the least puzzling aspect of these pictures, which may be seen as a diptych, is whether we are looking at two pairs of seats or the same one in a different setting. Although the sign in the top panel is blue, and the one in the bottom yellow, the benches look remarkably similar. The litter in the top panel has been cleaned up in the bottom, while one wooden slat is slightly darker in colour, but it’s possible Smart used only a single pair as a model.

He lists Australia on the blue and yellow signs as a nod to the land of his birth, accompanied by Denmark, Bolivia and Norway. Great Britain appears on the blue sign but is replaced by Finland on the yellow. As Bolivia has never had a pavilion in the Gardini, and was not represented at the 1982 Biennale, one may see this as a gag.

The Russian formalist, Viktor Shklovsky, famously argued that art’s role was to “make strange”, and these seats Smart found at the Biennale certainly fit that category. They give the impression that the designer has tried to create something for the Giardini that resembles modernist sculpture. Henry Moore made figures out of concrete, but these benches seem more closely aligned with Carl Andre’s minimal arrangements of concrete blocks or firebricks.

Rather than isolating the seats as misunderstood objects of beauty, Smart may simply be using them for satirical purposes, as in paintings such as The sculptor with work in situ (1984-85), in which the abstract “sculpture” is modelled on a garden hose; or Playground at Mondragone (1998), which features a bright red climbing frame that resembles a Minimalist public sculpture. This painting, in the collection of the Art Gallery of NSW, served as an unwitting prophecy for for a gigantic milk crate Sydney City Council considered erecting in 2014 as a $2.5 million adornment for Belmore Park. The project would be scrapped in 2016, when costs blew out to $9 million.

The satire may be seen double-edged, as a whimsical comment on a Biennale so lacking in substance that Smart found more to admire in the park benches, and a sly dig at the art (and furniture) displayed in public spaces. In Venice, a city in which much of the architecture dates back to Renaissance times, one glance at these seats makes us suddenly, sadly, aware of the gulf that separates past from present.

JEFFREY SMART
(1921-2013)
Four Seats, Venice Biennale 1983
synthetic polymer paint on fibreglass canvas
71.0 x 46.5 cm; 88.5 x 64.0 cm (framed)
signed lower right: Jeffrey Smart

^[i] Kate Linker, ‘Venice Biennale 1982: No Form, Little Commitment’, Artforum, November 1982, p.84

At the dawn of the Common Era, the Egyptian city of Alexandria boasted the greatest library of the ancient world. Its decline would begin in 30 CE, when Cleopatra had her fatal encounter with the asp and the Romans brought the 3000-year reign of the Pharaohs to an end. In 48 CE the library went up in flames, leaving classical scholars to perpetually mourn its loss.

Today’s Alexandria, home to six million people and an illustrious past, is a shabby beehive of a city, but since 2002 it has had a new library. The Bibliotheca Alexandrina is a steel and granite edifice designed by Norwegian architects that occupies the site of its famous ancestor. Those ancient books are gone forever, but there’s room for eight million recent publications.

The Bibliotheca is an important cultural centre but for literary tourists it may not be the city’s chief attraction. That honour belongs to the Cavafy Museum, a humble apartment in a narrow side street, once called rue Lepsius, now named after the writer who resided here for the last 28 years of his life.

Constantine P. Cavafy (1863-1933), is recognised as the most important Greek poet of the modern era even though he visited Greece on only four occasions. The first was in 1901, at the age of 38; the last in 1932, when being treated for throat cancer. In his last days he complained “But I still have 25 poems to write…”

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Born in Shanghai, but educated in America – at Berkeley, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Northwestern University – Zhu-Nowell is the complete east-west combo, well placed to make connections between China and the United States. Yet this not the limit of her ambitions, she has embarked on a “big research project around the Pacific,” which brings the art of Australia and Polynesia into her plans. She was visiting Brisbane in December for this year’s Asia-Pacific Triennial.

To come looking for artists from the Asia-Pacific to exhibit in Shanghai is breaking new ground. “When it comes to exhibitions,” she admits, “China, like the USA, can be very self-absorbed.”

I’ve referred to Zhu-Nowell as “she”, but I could just as easily have said “they”, as she/they has/have embraced a non-binary identity. To avoid the endless confusion occasioned by plural pronouns, I’m going to acknowledge her non-binary preference but use “she”, as there is little doubt the curator was born and bred female.

Being non-binary, or changing your legal name to “X”, is a mark of Zhu-Nowell’s ultra-contemporary aspirations. She wants us to know she is ready to take on the most broadranging, multi-faceted projects.

Upon completing her studies in the United States, Zhu-Nowell went to work for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, where she helped organise the landmark 2008 survey, Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World. Her Years at the Guggenheim introduced her to the international art world and fired a desire to return to Asia, where she felt there was more energy and opportunity.

She also became a protégé of Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, one of the most internationally connected curators at work today. Christov-Bakargiev, who was artistic director for the Sydney Biennale of 2010, among other projects, recognised Zhu-Nowell’s potential and has helped bring her to wider attention.

The Rockbund is not the biggest museum in Shanghai, but it is one of the most significant. Built in 1932 for the Royal Asiatic Society, this Art Deco building became a contemporary not-for-profit art museum in 2010, under the private ownership of Lynn and Thomas Ou, whose wealth lies in many different enterprises. The inaugural director, Frenchman, Larys Frogier, set an adventurous precedent by showcasing international artists. Zhu-Nowell is aiming to extend the museum’s focus in a series of research-based shows that relate to the history and identity of the region.

Acclaimed British architect, David Chipperfield, undertook the initial renovation of the building, which was completed in 2010, but his firm has been working on the Rockbund precinct for more than 17 years. There are 11 historic buildings and six new ones included in a district that incorporates specialty stores and boutiques, coffee shops, bookshops, and even a street stall that helps dogs find new owners. It’s quite unlike anything to be found anywhere else in China, and the RAM is the central attraction.

Zhu-Nowell is intensely conscious of the unique nature of the site, located at the end of the Bund, between Suzhou Creek and Nanjing East Road. It has all the makings of a sophisticated tourist magnet, with no crushing need to dumb down or play the populist card. In Australia it’s more than likely that a precinct of this kind would be cluttered with franchise shops and fast-food restaurants.

In her second year in the job, Zhu-Nowell’s “big research” around the Pacific will translate into a series of exhibitions and events, involving South-East Asia, Latin America, Australia and Canada. Her first task was “to understand Shanghai”, beginning with a show called Mount Analogue, by Shanghai artist, Hu Yun - a complex, multi-layered presentation spread across the fourth, fifth and sixth floors of the museum. Combining sculptural installation, found objects and photography, the show intertwined the artist’s family history with the greater history of the region, using works produced over the previous decade.

The second floor of the museum is playing host to AUUUUDITORIUM, a program of talks, performances, workshops and parties, guest curated by Singaporean artist, Ming Wong slated to run until February 2026.

The current exhibition, Best Synthetic Answer, by American artist-poet, Rindon Johnson (until 6 April) recreates a virtual voyage across the Pacific from San Francisco to Shanghai in real-time. The artist’s original intention was to make the journey by boat, but soon realised this would have been a voyage to oblivion – albeit an interesting allusion to the Dutch artist, Bas Jan Ader, who disappeared in 1975, after setting out to sail single-handedly across the North-Atlantic. AI has helped create a more vivid experience.

Such a work is unconventional and testing for audiences, which is precisely what Zhu-Nowell wants. In Shanghai she says, she found a city in which people are willing to meet the challenge, turning up in numbers for each new event. The more delicate problem for any museum in China is to ensure your program wins the approval of the government, which demands to know details of all proposed exhibitions.

“People might call it censorship,” she says, “but the rule is that you have to get a permit if you are putting on a show for the public. You give the authorities a disc with all the relevant material, and you’ll usually receive permission within 15 days. They’re very prompt. If they don’t understand something they’ll ask for further clarification. This happened to us in relation to a photo of a library in Armenia, where all the book titles were in Armenian. We needed to send a translation.”

“In China you have avoid drawing undue attention. That’s very important, but it’s not the nightmare you might imagine because the bureaucrats are very open to negotiation. We had a show last year in which there was some nudity involved. We explained it was completely non-sexual nudity and they said that was OK.”

“It’s not so much about what they might personally accept, it’s more what viewers might think, because the last thing they want is a public outcry. A colleague in New York recently told me: ‘I wish we had a system like that because some of the work shown here is very upsetting!’”

The balancing act Zhu-Nowell is undertaking finds her trying to extend public perceptions about art and culture, while not going out of her way to offend. She is attempting to build bridges between China and the rest of the world while putting the local community first. Most crucially, she is presiding over a network in which the visual arts are but one part of a lifestyle project. One might spend an hour in the museum, but an entire day in the Rockbund precinct.

The key for any contemporary gallery director in China may be to treat every limitation as an invitation to find innovative, creative solutions. From an Australian perspective we need to overcome our reservations and recognise that emerging figures such as Zhu-Nowell are re-opening doors for us in China that have been closed in recent years. There’s so much to be gained from a revived cultural exchange with our powerful, problematic neighbour that we need to focus on the positives and seize those opportunities when they arise.

Published in the Australian Financial Review, 17 January 2025

For Jeffrey Smart, a constant ambition was to reconcile the forms of classical and neo-classical art with contemporary subject matter. His method was deadpan rather than didactic – there was no moral to his pictorial stories, no lesson that he needed to impart. The challenge he set himself was to craft a scene of formal beauty from the everyday things that surround us - things that are often ignored, rendered all but invisible by the psychic editing we practice on an instinctive basis.

The Cable Coils is a textbook example of this process. It shows a collection of large coils of industrial-strength cable piled up in a grassy field. A small child sits on the coil in the bottom left of the picture, allowing us to gauge its massive scale. This is a common enough sight in places where construction work is taking place, perhaps the laying out of a new housing development. Judging by the repetitive row of apartment blocks that runs across the horizon line, we shouldn’t expect any architectural marvels.

Smart’s longterm partner, Ermes De Zan, recalls: "The subject of the plastic coils may have been inspired by seeing a road team laying down cables at Posticcia Nuova, but Jeffrey sketched these ones at the builder’s yard at Capannole, a village on the way to Bucine.” ^[i]

It's a curious fact that the owners of this painting are the purchasers of Smart and De Zan’s house in Posticcia Nuova, where the painting was on the wall from 2017-20.

In The Cable Coils, the artist’s conjuring trick is to make something magical out of base materials. He would look hard at things most of us would pass by without a glance and find his subjects in the most unlikely places. When driving, if something caught his eye it wasn’t unusual for him to stop the car and make a quick sketch. It might not have been anything most people would stop for – a car park, perhaps, a garage or a metal bridge, but Smart had an exacting, idiosyncratic eye for beauty. The humdrum structure he sketched by the side of a road would reappear, months later, transformed into a heroic monument to modernity.

Although his near-photographic style may seem antithetical to the major currents of modern art, Smart’s motifs are completely contemporary. The highways, lorries, airports and communication towers that recur throughout his oeuvre could not have been conceived by pre-modern artists. Those masters of an earlier age had rigorous ideas about what an artist should paint, and how it should be painted. The concept of “the picturesque” suggested some scenes were literally ‘fit to be made into a picture’, but it’s unlikely that William Gilpin, who coined the term in 1782^[ii], would have placed the products of industry in that category.

One reads occasionally about ‘the industrial sublime’, in reference to factories spewing smoke into the air or spitting flames from some vast furnace. Such things can seem awesome and terrifying to those who don’t have to work in these places, but ‘the industrial picturesque’ sounds like a contradiction-in-terms. We think of the picturesque in terms of landscape, and of industry as the enemy of nature.

This is not the case for Smart, who brings these opposites together in his work. His landscapes are still and peaceful, almost bucolic, but they are invested with structures of concrete, steel and glass, or criss-crossed with strips of asphalt. In other hands these would be despoiled landscapes, images of nature degraded and polluted by reckless human endeavour. With Smart, we stand and admire concrete silos, container terminals and flyovers, as if they were ideal landscapes by Claude Lorrain.

In terms of composition, Smart’s paintings are no less precise than anything Claude might have painted. Each picture has been worked out with a ruler and set square, using classical measures such as the Golden Mean. The colour, however, is much bolder than any work of the Claudean era. Smart loved using the clear, bright colours employed by many artists of the Italian Renaissance, but also by the Pop Artists. For The Cable Coils he has employed an unusually subdued palette – red, brown, black and grey. The dry grass is a shade of golden-brown, flecked with white highlights; the sky is a murky blueish grey, broken by a flock of white birds. The only significant interruption is the child’s pale blue dress.

The child, the only human element in the picture, plays the vital compositional role of allowing us to recognise the vast scale of the coils. Ermes De Zan, suspects there may be another aspect to the figure.

“Although Jeffrey used local children for scale,” he writes, “there was also that threatening edge created by placing them in a menacing environment. He may have picked that up from Balthus. We saw quite a few of his exhibitions over the years and Jeffrey had met him in Rome. On this occasion, the geometra (surveyor) had turned up with his son and Jeffrey asked the boy sit in that position. He changed the figure into a girl probably because it gave a greater sense of innocence or simply because he liked the shape of the dress.”^[iii]

There is, perhaps, a hint of menace in this child sitting by herself under a leaden sky, but Smart provides us with only the faintest trace of a story. The child could be there for any reason whatsoever. She might be a lonely runaway considering her next move, or simply posing for a family photo. Although she is an important element in the composition, for the artist she is of secondary value to the massive coils.

De Zan says that Smart’s chief interest lay in “the problems of rendering elliptical volume in space.”^[iv] In preparing this painting he made two small studies and a large drawing. He would also produce an etching and acquatint, and a preparatory drawing for the print. Needless, to say, these are only the works he was willing to exhibit. It would have required many drawings and studies to work out how these coils were to be arranged and painted.

Smart’s archivist, Stephen Rogers, argues there is an S-curve in the composition that begins with the seagulls, touches the head of the child – at the intersection of two large coils – and is continued by the line of cable that drops off the coil beneath her feet.^[v] Knowing Smart’s passion for geometry, it’s a very credible suggestion. The coils themselves don’t seem to fit into any obvious geometric configuration, although Smart would have experimented extensively with placement.

It may be that The Cable Coils depicts one of those faux monuments that appear regularly in the artist’s work. We know the gigantic coils are merely waiting to be put to practical use, but for one brief moment – immortalised in a snapshot which is also a painting – they become a public sculpture created by some anonymous abstractionist. This is the same visual joke we find in paintings such as The Oil Drums (1992) and Playground at Mandragone (1998). In an earlier picture, The Sculptor with work in situ (1984-85), the sculpture is a snaking mass of coil, based on a garden hose.

One could trawl over Smart’s work finding further examples, but it would be wrong to think he was only being satirical about the abstract works we erect in public places at vast expense. It’s equally possible to see The Cable Coils as a visual echo of the ruins of the classical past, with those coils lying flat on the ground imitating the bases of lopped-off pillars that once supported the roof of some great public building or temple. I say this, knowing of Smart’s lifelong fascination with the architecture of the Greeks, Romans and Egyptians, a favourite site being Paestum, that wonderfully preserved Greek temple down the coast from Amalfi.

The coils with their severe forms recall the Greek preoccupation with geometry, a subject discussed by all the major philosophers in both scientific and mystical terms. It wasn’t only an appreciation of mathematical utility, but a key to the cosmos. The famous motto written above the door of Plato’s Academy was: “Let no-one ignorant of geometry enter here.”

Smart would have been admitted with no difficulty. He demonstrates his geometrical mastery in The Cable Coils, with those crisp, elliptical shapes scattered across a field, some isolated, others heaped randomly on top. It’s a image of order turning into disorder, as the classical certainties of the past are broken down. If there is a lingering sense of menace about this scene, as De Zan suggests, it may be more than a small child that is being threatened. In his oblique way, Smart is providing us with a melancholy vision of the fate of all great empires. It’s a universal, age-old tale of hubris that never loses its relevance.

Jeffrey Smart, The Cable Coils (2002-01), oil on canvas, 80 X 125 cm

Estimate $650,000 - $850,000

Menzies: Important Australian & International Art, Melbourne, 20 November 2024

^[i] Email correspondence with Stephen Rogers & Ernes De Zan, 28 September 2024

^[ii] In his book, Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales, etc. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; made in the Summer of the Year 1770, (1782)

^[iii] Rogers & De Zan op. cit.

^[iv] Ibid

^[v] Ibid

One morning last year in New York City, a queue formed at the entrance to the David Zwirner Gallery. As the day progressed, the line grew longer and longer, until it extended around the block. The occasion was the opening of a commercial exhibition by Yayoi Kusama, and the chance to spend 30 seconds in a new ‘Infinity Room’, surrounded by mirrors. It was the selfie-magnet of the season.

Kusama has a track record in NYC, but when she was chosen to represent Japan in the 1993 Venice Biennale, she was viewed by some as a has-been, by others as a lunatic self-promoter whom the mandarins of the artworld would never take seriously. Eighteen years later, at the age of 95, she is almost certainly the world’s most popular living artist, and museums are clamouring for shows. She has attracted huge crowds in Asia, the United States and Europe. In December, the National Gallery of Victoria, will be hosting one of her largest-ever surveys.

The NGV’s Curator of Asian Art, Wayne Crothers, promises more than 180 works, encompassing eight decades, the earliest made at the age of nine, the latest created this year, from the mental institution where the artist has resided for more than 40 years.  Nowadays Kusama rarely leaves the clinic, which she entered voluntarily when she felt unable to cope with the pressures of everyday life. It has allowed her to work continuously, with no distractions. For years she has had no time or willingness to do interviews, speaking with only a handful of people, with art dealer, Hidenori Ota, acting as her main conduit to the world.

“She calls every single day,” Ota says, “sometimes many times a day, and I go to the hospital two or three times a week.”

The NGV show has been five years in preparation, and Crothers – whose brief was to be “really ambitious” – can make the rare boast that it was entirely initiated by the gallery.

“We didn’t want to simply show the pumpkins or the Infinity rooms, which are the works everybody knows,” he says. “We thought it was important to tell the human story – her childhood in Matsumoto, her early exhibitions, her obsessive desire for fame, her correspondence with Georgia O’Keeffe… it’s all about modern art, but it’s also an amazing social story, about a Japanese woman from a regional town who went through many different experiences and personality-building trials, and eventually conquered the world.”

There will be no shortage of spectacle in this story of Kusama’s life, with ten immersive installations, the greatest number ever assembled. This includes a reconstruction of her first major environment - Infinity Mirror Room - Phalli’s Field, originally made for a commercial gallery in New York in 1965. A famous photo shows Kusama dressed in a red jumpsuit, spreadeagled on a field of soft white phallic shapes covered in red polka dots, her reflection multiplied by the room’s mirrored walls.

She would not make another mirror room until 1998, and that piece will also be in the NGV exhibition, along with a room dedicated to pumpkins, and a new Infinity Room made specifically for this show. The scale of the exhibition is of particular pride to NGV director Tony Ellwood. “It’ll be the most immersive Kusama exhibition that’s ever been mounted,” Ellwood says. “It’s a hugely ambitious effort, not to mention a logistical feat.”

Kusama’s “human story” starts in Matsumoto, an historic town in Nagano prefecture, nestled at the foot of the Japanese Alps. Today it’s a busy tourist destination, but when Kusama was growing up in the 1940s, it was a conservative, provincial outpost. She held her first important solo exhibition there in 1952, at the age of 23, showing more than 200 pieces. In the late 1960s she would shock the town with her ‘shameful’ behaviour in New York and was allegedly removed from her high-school yearbook.

Nowadays she is Matsumoto’s Number One daughter and greatest drawcard. The City Museum of Art has a massive permanent display of her work, including a huge tulip sculpture in the forecourt and red polka dots plastered on the front of the building.

Conflicts with her mother and father, and the first signs of her chronic mental issues, fuelled Kusama’s desire to get away from the town, and eventually from Japan. Many of her signature motifs were born in Matsumoto, notably the pumpkins, which came to her as a hallucination, and the polka dots that swam in front of her eyes, threatening to “obliterate” reality.

It may have been a symptom of a narcissistic, obsessive-compulsive personality, but few artists of any era could match Kusama’s drive for self-promotion. When she arrived in the United States in 1958, she was determined to become a world-famous artist - a monumental task for a woman, let alone a Japanese woman, at a time when American art was overwhelmingly masculine. She would make her mark with a series of Infinity Net paintings that saw her cover large canvases with repetitive loops of paint, working relentlessly, sometimes for sessions of more than 50 hours. The largest of these paintings was ten metres long.

By 1962 she was toiling just as furiously on her Accumulations – objects such as chairs, tables, and even a rowboat, covered in soft protuberances. She also stage-managed a series of photographs in which she posed naked with the works. The notoreity she acquired would lead to more extreme gestures, notably an epic series of Happenings, in which nude models would perform in public, as a protest against the Vietnam War or other hot-button topics. She hosted gay marriages decades before they would become permitted by law, started her own fashion label and published a magazine.

Although she was a proponent of free love who referred to her happenings and body painting sessions as “orgies”, Kusama herself was famously chaste. She appeared as the mistress of ceremonies fully dressed and spoke often about her fear and hatred of sex. At the same time, she made every effort to exploit her doll-like looks, playing the exotic oriental in a golden kimono.

As the 1970s loomed, Kusama had worn out her welcome in New York, having exhausted audiences, who viewed her as a sensationalist who would do anything for a headline. She returned to Japan, intending to create a series of nude performances, but found it was impossible, and angrily declared her homeland to be “a fourth-class country.”

Nevertheless, by 1973 she was based in Tokyo again, and by 1975 would be hospitalised, as her life-long mental disturbances became crippling. Two years later, she had settled into the clinic permanently, and began to work with renewed vigour, no longer having to worry about the necessities of life.

It was a survey of her work at the Centre for International Contemporary Art in New York in 1989 - drawing attention to the ground-breaking nature of her early work - that sparked her rise to prominence. Ten years later these works were being celebrated by a more prestigious survey, Love Forever: Yayoi Kusama 1958-1968, that travelled to Los Angeles, New York, Minneapolis and Tokyo. When the Venice Biennale set the seal on her newfound celebrity, she had finally achieved the fame she had been seeking her entire life, a fame that continues to grow.

A key figure in Kusama’s revival was Akira Tatehata, who organised the Venice pavilion in 1993, and now serves as Director of both the Yayoi Kusama Foundation and the museum devoted to her work, located across the road from the clinic. Australians may know Tatehata as the prime mover of the landmark Emily Kame Kngwarreye exhibition that travelled to Osaka and Toyko in 2008. He jokes that he is somewhat of a specialist in “old lady genius artists.”

The 77-year-old Tatehata is a poet, curator and an enthusiastic advocate for the artists he admires. He says that when Kusama returned to Japan in the mid-70s, she had a reputation as “the Queen of scandal”, but after visiting a solo show in a very small gallery in Tokyo, he became a convert. “Even though I was still in my twenties and quite unknown,” he recalls, “I decided it was my duty to re-estimate her in Japan and the world. When I became a curator at the National Museum of Art in Osaka, I persuaded all my colleagues to admit she’s a genius.”

Although Tatehata is aware that people see Kusama as “a crazy person”, he thinks she needs to be viewed as “an authentic artist” rather than an outsider.

“She comes out of Japanese culture but doesn’t want to talk about it. For me, she’s an orthodox modernist whose work lies somewhere between Pop Art and Minimalism. She denies the elemental gestures of Abstract Expressionism but has a distinctive touch.”

For Tatehata, the key to Kusama’s art is repetition, her unique ability to return to the same motifs again and again. “It begins with the dot pattern she saw when she was seven or eight years old,” he says. “These dots keep recurring, appearing and disappearing, depending on her state of anxiety. She focuses on her fears in order to overcome them. It’s an instinctive thing, a kind of self-therapy. For the public it comes across as an obsession, and there’s something disarming about that. Obsession feels whole-hearted, it brings people together, making them feel they want to be part of whatever she is doing.”

Along with critical and institutional success, Kusama has become a booming commercial enterprise. In 2022, she was second only to David Hockney for sales of work made after 2000, bringing in US$62 million to his US$75 million. To this one must add revenue from merchandise, such as T-shirts, dolls, toggles and toy pumpkins, and her lucrative collaboration with Louis Vuitton, which has plastered her trademark dots onto handbags, sneakers, overcoats, pyjamas, bikinis, and anything else that can be worn or carried. In 2022 the brand erected giant statues of Kusama applying her dots to Harrods department store in London and the Louis Vuitton flagship in Paris.

While Kusama’s work has been sold by many of the world’s leading art dealers, including David Zwirner and Larry Gagosian, her “mother gallery” is Ota Fine Arts, with branches in Tokyo, Singapore and Shanghai.

Hidenori Ota, who says he likes to stay in the shadows, has been working with Kusama since 1994, when she suggested they go into business together. He met her in 1987, when she was showing at Tokyo’s Fuji TV Gallery, and he was a young assistant to the director. A year-and-a-half later he had left the gallery, she rang and told him she’d had a fight with the Fuji TV people and proposed a partnership.

In the first few years, Ota says they would make an annual loss of US$40,000, with Kusama providing the capital. But she never had any doubts about her eventual success. “She believes she’s always been important,” he says. “She’s not at all surprised at the way she’s regarded today.”

One thinks of an earlier interview with Tatehata, where Kusama says: “The first thing I did in New York was to climb up the Empire State Building and survey the city. I aspired to grab everything that went on in the city and become a star.” 

The relationship between the artist and her dealer has endured and prospered, although it’s not always easy. “She calls every single day,” Ota says, “sometimes many times a day, and I go to the hospital two or three times a week. Last Sunday I was in Beijing and she called me several times. In the first call she said: ‘Ota-san, bring back those paintings you took from me yesterday!’”

“I said, ‘No, no. I wasn’t in Tokyo. I’m overseas.’ But she believes I took many paintings from her to sell and make money. Then she says: ‘You didn’t send me any money for a year,’ and screams at me. But two hours later she calls again, and very gently – like a little girl – says: ‘Ota-san, the next time you come to the hospital please help me find my red dress.’”

Has it always been like this? Almost thankfully, Ota reports that Kusama’s prodigious energy is decreasing with age. “Now there are only small explosions. Ten years ago, there would be big explosions.”

Paranoid, egocentric, supremely self-confident, Kusama – once a pariah in her own country – is now popular with everyone. “All the generations from young to old,’ says Ota, “on every continent.” She insists on her own exceptionalism, not wishing to be pigeon-holed as a representative of any particular style or claimed as a feminist icon. According to the dealer, she will not allow herself to be compared with any other female artist in Japan. She puts herself higher than everyone.”

Or as she once said: “Ota-san, remember, I’m John Lennon. I’m not Yoko.”  

Yayoi Kusama, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne,

15 December 2024 - 21 April 2025

Published in the Australian Financial Review, 12 October 2024

John McDonald flew to Tokyo courtesy of the National Gallery of Victoria