Still Life – Brett Whiteley
Two years after his death, a tangled web of bitter feuding and intrigue continues to haunt the memory of artist Brett Whiteley.
Read…
Portrait series muses on struggle with mental illness – Peter Wegner & Graeme Doyle
Peter Wegner thought he recognised the features of a Melbourne friend in a grotesque sculpture of the 19th-century novelist, Honore de Balzac, in Paris a few years ago.
Read…
Bana on board for the tempest within
Sue Thomson was impressed. “By god, you have watched this film carefully,” she thought as Eric Bana paused from narrating her documentary in a South Yarra recording studio earlier this year.
Read…
Extolling diversity without peer
Let Zorba give way to more authentic Greek dance, writes Larry Schwartz.
Read…
Sir Sidney plans to come back
TWO almost-empty glasses of Bloody Mary were clearly unwelcome beside a half loaf of bread, butter-smeared knife, bowl of fruit and plate strewn with crumbs and orange peels.
“You better take those away,” Sir Sidney Nolan said.
Read…
The Bidding Wars
‘AT $100,000. ONE HUNDRED and ten. One hundred and twenty on commission. At 130. One hundred and thirty thousand. One forty on commission. At 140 thousand dollars on commission. Anyfurtherbidon?”
Read…
The sensuality of women
JANINE BURKE was sorting through a storeroom in a Queensland art gallery in the mid-1970s when she came upon a “a delicious, little pink, fleshy painting” of a woman in a scanty camisole.
Read…
Honoring the dead
THE LETTER from Shanghai was dated March 31, 1939. Spidery, blue lines on flimsy paper from a man named David Steiner. “Esteemed Mr Silbinger,” it began.
Read…
The day burns down to the sea, and Cats come out to pay
TWILIGHT at Gantheaume Point, six kilometres outside Broome. A big, red sun hovers over Roebuck Bay. Dinosaur footprints can be seen at low tide. But we’re here for another kind of creature.
Read…
Reflecting the history of ancient Jewish civilisations
ALOMA Treister was seven when she sat in the back seat of a black sedan that took her family from home in Baghdad in the early 1950s to the Iranian border.
Read…
Prince among principals
Australian Ballet star Steven Heathcote is still dancing at 42. Larry Schwartz asks how he does it.
Read…
St Kilda, and the Mexican wave
The suburb of St Kilda is an unlikely muse for Mexican artist Roberto Marquez, writes Larry Schwartz.
Read…
Painting the Plenty
JOHN Borrack was in his late teens in the summer of 1954 when he took two painter friends to a Plenty Valley landscape he’d loved since childhood. Read …
Larry Schwartz Writer 