The Creation of Indigenous Collections in Melbourne: How Kenneth Clark, Charles Mountford, and Leonhard Adam Interrogated Australian Indigeneity

My paper will explore three personalities, Kenneth Clark, Charles Mountford and Leonard Adam, and the impact they had on the creation and exhibition of collections of indigenous objects in Australia. Kenneth Clark visited Australia briefly in 1948 and left a dynamic legacy in both Melbourne and Adelaide. During his visit Clark was introduced to aboriginal art by Daryl Lindsay, director of the National Gallery of Victoria, one of the first Australians to show a passion for such things, by his friend Sir Joseph Burke, the first professor of art history at the University of Melbourne, and Charles Mountford, an amateur anthropologist and archaeologist. The most considerable contribution to the study of aboriginal art was made by Leonhard Adam, a German Jewish intellectual, who in his classic book: Primitive Art, espoused the Modernist Ideology of Primitivism. He arrived in Australia in 1942, and created an extraordinary collection for the University of Melbourne, of aboriginal works and what might be described as ‘global’ primitivism

Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration and Convergence

Crossing Cultures: Conflict, Migration and Convergence is a compilation of the conference papers from the 32nd International Congress in the History of Art organised by the International Committee of the History of Art (CIHA), edited by conference convenor Professor Jaynie Anderson. Crossing Cultures is an in-depth examination of the effect of globalism on art and art history. Covering all aspects of art—including traditional media, painting, sculpture, architecture and the crafts, as well as design, film, visual performance and new media—it explores the themes of conflict, migration and convergence in the visual, symbolic and artistic exchanges between cultures throughout history. Edited by Professor Jaynie Anderson

Art history’s history in Melbourne: Franz Philipp in correspondence with Arthur Boyd

The article considers the Austrian born art historian Franz Philipp, who came to Australia and made his career at the University of Melbourne in the years after the Second World War. At Vienna Philipp was one of the last pupils of Julius von Schlossser and he brought to Australia the principles of the Vienna School of Art History. Like other art historians of the diaspora he became entranced with Australian art and wrote the first monograph on Arthur Boyd. His correspondence with Boyd (Archives of the University of Melbourne) shows how European methods of art history allowed Philipp to interpret Boyd’s work in a cross cultural manner

The invention of curatorship in Australia, Review of: Recent Past. Writing Australian Art by Daniel Thomas, edited by Hannah Fink and Steven Miller, Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales/Thames and Hudson, 1 December 2020, pp. 348, 119 col. plates, 14 b. & w. illus., Aus. $. 64.99. ISBN. 9781741741506.

Daniel Thomas’s first volume of collected writings is a small sample from about a thousand articles written over seventy years. From the time Thomas returned to Australia from Oxford to become the first curator of Australian art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1958, he emerged as a leading figure in the Australian art world. Then as the inaugural head of Australian art at the newly established National Gallery, Canberra (1978-1984), and as Director of the Art Gallery of Australia (1984-1990), he developed curatorship as a profession, created national collections with remarkable acquisitions, developed provenance research and much more. This book is essential reading for anyone who writes on Australian art