Considered one of Australia's greatest landscape painters, Hans Heysen reached critical acclaim—as well as knighthood—during his lifetime for his art, particularly his expressive watercolor paintings. This collection discusses the progress of his career as seen through his watercolors as well as the technique he employed in the paintings. A brief biography is also included.
Hahndorf artist Nora Heysen was the first woman to win the Archibald Prize, and Australia's first female painter to be appointed as an official war artist. A portraitist and a flower painter, Nora Heysen's life was defined by an all-consuming drive to draw and paint. In 1989, aged 78, Nora re-emerged on the Australian art scene when the nation's major art institutions restored her position after years of artistic obscurity. Extensively researched, and containing artworks and photographs from the painter's life, this is the first biography of the artist, and it has been enthusiastically embraced by the Heysen family. This authorized biography coincides with a major retrospective of the works of Nora and her father, landscape painter Hans Heysen, to be held at the National Gallery of Victoria in March 2019.
The prominent Australian artist Nora Heysen has been said to have worked in the shadow of her father Hans Heysen, one of Australia's most recognised landscape painters. Letters between the two, however, reveal a different story. In 1934, when Nora first travelled to London to study art, she experienced her first time away from home and the first of many, often exotic places from where she would write home to Hahndorf, South Australia. The correspondence between Nora and Hans continued until his death in 1968. Theirs was a close and affectionate relationship, in which father and daughter shared a lifetime of thoughts about art and life, and a mutual respect and admiration for each other's work. Heysen to Heysen is a showcase of letters between Nora and Hans Heysen from the collection of the National Library of Australia. Accompanied by carefully selected images and text by leading art historian Catherine Speck, the publication lifts the lid on a vista of Australian art.
This book celebrates the work of Hans Heysen and is timed to mark the fortieth anniversary of the artist's death. Enormously popular, Heysen is South Australia's best-known artist. He is also recognized across the country as one of the most influential of Australian artists, one whose work was pivotal to development of Australian art and culture in the twentieth century. In addition to his will-known landscapes, the book reappraises his lesser-known work, tracing its development from his early student days painting in Europe between 1899 and 1903. Heysen was the first artist to use eucalyptus as a persistent motif in his art, celebrating the grandeur of certain species and presenting them as symbols of heroic endurance and includes many other subject areas, such as toilers of the land, quarries, the River Murray, the South Coast and Pewsey Vale, and also portraits and still-lifes.
A dazzlingly original and ambitious book on the history of female self-portraiture by one of today's most well-respected art critics. Her story weaves in and out of time and place. She's Frida Kahlo, Loïs Mailou Jones and Amrita Sher-Gil en route to Mexico City, Paris or Bombay. She's Suzanne Valadon and Gwen John, craving city lights, the sea and solitude; she's Artemisia Gentileschi striding through the streets of Naples and Paula Modersohn-Becker in Worpswede. She's haunting museums in her paint-stained dress, scrutinising how El Greco or Titian or Van Dyck or Cézanne solved the problems that she too is facing. She's railing against her corsets, her chaperones, her husband and her brothers; she's hammering on doors, dreaming in her bedroom, working day and night in her studio. Despite the immense hurdles that have been placed in her way, she sits at her easel, picks up a mirror and paints a self-portrait because, as a subject, she is always available. Until the twentieth century, art history was, in the main, written by white men who tended to write about other white men. The idea that women in the West have always made art was rarely cited as a possibility. Yet they have - and, of course, continue to do so - often against tremendous odds, from laws and religion to the pressures of family and public disapproval. In The Mirror and the Palette, Jennifer Higgie introduces us to a cross-section of women artists who embody the fact that there is more than one way to understand our planet, more than one way to live in it and more than one way to make art about it. Spanning 500 years, biography and cultural history intertwine in a narrative packed with tales of rebellion, adventure, revolution, travel and tragedy enacted by women who turned their back on convention and lived lives of great resilience, creativity and bravery.
Whenever the history of ecological thought has been written the contributions of Australian thinkers have been omitted. Yet Australia as a continent of extreme, rare and complex environments has produced a startling group of ecological pioneers. Across a wide range of human endeavour, Australian thinkers and innovators - whether they have thought of themselves as environmentalists or not - have made some truly original contributions to ecological thought. Ecological Pioneers traces the emergence of ecological understandings in Australia. By constructing a social history with chapters focusing on different fields in the arts, sciences, politics and public life, the authors bring to life the work of significant individuals. Some of the ecological pioneers featured include Joseph Banks, Russell Drysdale, Judith Wright, Myles Dunphy, Philip Crosbie Morrison, Vincent Serventy, Francis Ratcliffe, the Gurindji and Yolngu peoples, Bill Mollison, Jack Mundey, Val Plumwood, Michael Leunig, and many more.
Nora Heysen grew up at The Cedars near the Adelaide Hills town of Hahndorf, and was deeply influenced by her father, Hans Heysen. Nora Heysen: Light and life explores a notable career spanning seven decades, during which the artist painted some of Australia's most outstanding self-portraits, became the country's first female war artist, and was the first woman to win the prestigious Archibald Prize. Curator and author Jane Hylton has written extensively on Australian art and has curated numerous exhibitions. In 2000 she left the position of Curator of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia to become a freelance consultant.
Australian Pastoral is a radical history of the pastoral landscape in Australian painting. As a primary means through which white settlement was described and legitimised, the pastoral was transcendent in European Australian art from the late eighteenth to the middle of the twentieth century. This book shows how pastoralism displaced all in its path, and how the pastoral landscape became a special art form in Australia and the primary means through which 'whiteness' and the taming of Australia was celebrated in painting. The book traces the history of pastoral painting through to the emergence in recent times of a black 'pastoral' landscape painting.
