Nostalgia but more

Easter was a visit to family in Adelaide and no arts except a few hours to fritter at the Art Gallery of SA and a walk through my old university. I was drawn to AGSA for a few special exhibits but the institution is a hugely attractive and moderately sized place and I enjoy my visits immensely. There are some old favourites. Circe, who appears in two guises - a Bertram McKennal bronze that I admired during my university years (this one is diminutive; there's a life-sized take in Melbourne) and a painting by JW Waterhouse (the great grandfather of a friend at university). The real-world body-shape of the Jean Broome-Norton Torso amused me, being just opposite the slender male-envisioned Circe. There was just a thin representation of Greco-Roman sculpture, Renaissance Italian, Flemish, mediaeval, a Pompei fresco, a Pointillist Pissaro landscape (the newest acquisition), several Rodins, some Islamic and Japanese and Chinese art, a wonderful pre-Raphaelite-era decorative arts room with William Morris and Tiffany glass (thanks to a major local collector of the time). Then the other side of the building, decorated in Victorian colours, busy with works from the earlier colonial days through Australian impressionists to modernists and contemporary and indigenous (Boyd, Bunny, Frome, Glover, Heysen, Namatjira, Nolan, Roberts, Smart, Tjapaltjarri, Yunupingu) in all formats with some fabulous early decorative arts. The cafe was a buzz, the exhibition of Piranesi prints of decayed Rome (printed for the Grand Tourists of the 16th Century) was a pleasant nostalgia and a personal journey exhibition of Adelaide-based Magnum photographer Trent Parke demanded more time than I had to give it. AGSA is a great little gallery; visit if you have the chance. To end, here's a pic of the main reading room of the Barr Smith Library at Adelaide University, just another blast from my past.

AGSA

A missing memory

My father was a tailor and my mother is still the fashion star at her Bridge club but I have only recently come to appreciate fashion as a thing of dignity and sociability and creativity. Fashion Icons at the Art Gallery of South Australia was my most recent visit to this omnipresent but unknown world. It's a display of women's fashions (with just one palette of extravagant recent men's fashions) covering the period from the '50s to the present, by decades. It's heavy with French names, starting with a black dress from Christian Dior, but there are others. I enjoyed the outing with Mum, especially as so many of these styles graced her wardrobe as I grew up. I enjoyed the female chatter and absorption with the topic, for the attendees were mostly women. (it's said that women dress for other women). I enjoyed the creativity and the winks at tradition and the humour, not least the metal dress and the videos of how they dressed the model. My favourite was a recent one, a dress in triangular form, all green, blue, aqua with feathers, and a classic bodice above. I'd give you the name of the designer, but the exhibition's website is tragically limited and I didn't take notes. That's disappointing. I'd like to revisit, but the memory is nowhere to be found: no pics; no online catalogue. Very disappointing. So this outing is a blurred memory. A lovely exhibit that takes me back to my visit to its source, the fabulous Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris. But I found it disappointingly lacking in generosity, with its commercially-themed website and the missing catalogue. AGSA, have I just misplaced it? If so, just say the word. In the meantime, the exhibition is easy to recommend but a good memory would be an advantage.

Fashion Icons is a display of French fashion from ~1950s to today on loan from the collection of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris. It's on display at the Art Gallery of South Australia.

Thanks to Wikipedia Commons for the pic: Flying mannequin by Christine Zenino of Chicago, USA.