In 2021, the National Gallery of Victoria will present
She-Oak and Sunlight: Australian Impressionism, a large-scale exhibition of 270 artworks drawn from major public and private collections around Australia including the NGV Collection. Featuring some of the most widely recognisable and celebrated works by Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin, Jane Sutherland, Arthur Streeton, Charles Conder, Clara Southern, John Russell and E Phillips Fox, as well as bringing to light works by Iso Rae, May Vale, Jane Price and Ina Gregory, the exhibition will present these works in new and surprising contexts by exploring the impact of personal relationships, international influences and the importance of place on the trajectory of the movement.
Avant-garde Art
The Origins of the Phrase
Originally, avant-garde was a French military term for what would be called in English the vanguard of an army. However, its first application to art precedes by some decades the emergence of any distinctly avant-garde art movements. The coinage has generally been attributed to the French social theorist Henri de Saint-Simon. In his book
Opinions litteraires, philosophiques et industrielles (
Literary, Philosophical, and Industrial Opinions) (1825), published in the year of his death, Saint-Simon wrote: It is we artists who will serve you as avant-garde . . . the power of the artists is in fact most immediate and most rapid: when we wish to spread ideas among men, we inscribe them on marble or on canvas.What a magnificent destiny for the arts is that of exercising a positive power over society, a true priestly function, and of marching forcefully in the van[guard] of all the intellectual faculties.!
It’s easy to understand why
plein air landscape painting first took off in Rome in the late 18th century. Visiting artists and Grand Tourists alike, keen to escape the sweltering heat, and plagues, in the city, journeyed out to beauty spots in the surrounding hills for fresher air and a spot of ‘scene painting’ – capturing famous views with more or less skill for their travel diaries and sketchbooks (no cameras or iPhones then). Such scenes were often crowded and convivial, attracting painters from every corner of Europe – and not just in summer. Would that we could flock there too, now that the dark days of winter are drawing in, and art classes are closed by Covid restrictions. Many of us have been forced by our own plague to amuse ourselves outdoors in this chilly season – so why not paint