The National Gallery of Australia Research Libraryand Archives is the pre-eminent art library in Australia, located in Canberra.
The National Gallery of Australia Research Libraryand Archives is the pre-eminent art library in Australia, located in Canberra.
The second Chief Librarian, Margaret Shaw, was appointed in 1978 about 3 years before the Gallery opened and retired in 2004. [1]
The Research Library has a Reference Service that is available to the public online via the National Gallery website. Since 2020 the Research Library has partnered with Wikimedia Australia to host and support Know My Name edit-a-thons to increase understanding and appreciation of work by Australian women artists.
The Research Library holdings provide a general coverage of art history with particular strengths supporting the Gallery's art collection, these include:
Collection holdings are listed on the national database Libraries Australia [2] or directly, via the Research Library catalogue. [3]
The Research Library has a number of special collections of rare or fragile materials, including:
Supporting this last collection of Paris Salon catalogues, the Research Library has developed an extensive finding aid [4] and research resource to assist researchers.
The Ephemera collection consists of more than 100,000 files, with over 1 million items, containing information on the National Gallery of Australia, Australian art schools and galleries, and on Australian and International artists, museums, collectors and curators.
This is also known as the Documentation Collection, and each individual file can contain press clippings, exhibition flyers, catalogues, receipt books, or price lists preserved in mylar packets and acid-free archival boxes. These materials can be used to establish art chronologies and values. [1]
The Research Library's Archive and Manuscript collection contains personal papers and records Australian visual art history. Notable holdings include the papers of Maximilian Feuerring, the Grieve Family, Fred Williams, Richard Boulez, Frances Burke, Frances Derham, Marcella Hempel, Helene Kirsova, Bernard Hall, Jan Dunn, Paul Taylor, Pat Gilmour, Jasia Reichardt, Barbara Tribe and Neil Roberts; and records of the Print Council of Australia, Gallery A, Art Galleries Association of Australia, Art Museums Association of Australia, Arts Libraries Society/Australia and New Zealand, Sir William Dobell Art Foundation.
The Research Library Audio Visual collection includes published and unpublished documentary audio and video recordings relating to many National Gallery events and interviews with artists. Notable amongst the collection are 98 interviews by the artist James Gleeson conducted in the late 1970s called the James Gleeson Oral History Collection, [5] which has been inscribed into the UNESCO Australian Memory of the World Register 2008 [6] as being of significant Australian cultural heritage.
The National Gallery of Australia (NGA), formerly the Australian National Gallery, is the national art museum of Australia as well as one of the largest art museums in Australia, holding more than 166,000 works of art. Located in Canberra in the Australian Capital Territory, it was established in 1967 by the Australian Government as a national public art museum. As of 2022 it is under the directorship of Nick Mitzevich.
Australian art is a broad spectrum of art created in or about Australia, or by Australians overseas, spanning from prehistoric times to the present day. The art forms include, but are not limited to, Aboriginal, Colonial, Landscape, Atelier, and Contemporary art.
James Timothy Gleeson was an Australian artist. He served on the board of the National Gallery of Australia.
William Francis Robinson AO is an Australian painter and lithographer.
Janet Dawson MBE is an Australian artist who was a pioneer of abstract painting in Australia in the 1960s, having been introduced to abstraction during studies in England while she lived in Europe 1957–1960 She was also an accomplished lithographic printer of her own works as well as those of other renowned Australian artists, a theatre-set and furniture designer. She studied in England and Italy on scholarships before returning to Australia in 1960. She won the Art Gallery of New South Wales Archibald Prize in 1973 with the portrait of her husband, Michael Boddy Reading. She has exhibited across Australia and overseas, and her work is held in major Australian and English collections. In 1977 she was awarded an MBE for services to art.
The Johnstone Gallery was a private gallery located in the suburb of Bowen Hills in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia co-owned by Brian Johnstone and his wife, Marjorie Johnstone. It was the leading Brisbane commercial gallery exhibiting contemporary Australian art from 1950 until 1972.
Derek Kreckler is an Australian visual artist, born in Sydney in 1952. He has worked in a variety of media creating performance, video, sound and photographic art works. His work is concerned with an ongoing examination of the transformation of modes of historical avant-gardism into the present. His "clean, crisp Cibachromes" of refrigerators were exhibited at the 14th Sydney Biennale in 2004.
Bob Jenyns is a prolific Australian artist whose practice, spanning over four decades, has produced countless sculptures, prints, drawings, and paintings. He has participated in many of Australia's most significant art exhibitions including the first Biennale of Sydney (1973), the 1973, 1975 and 1978 Mildura Sculpture Triennials, the 1981 Australian Perspecta, the 2nd Australian Sculpture Biennale, and the 1990 Sculpture Triennial. Jenyns was a finalist in the 2006 Helen Lempriere National Sculpture Award, and in 2007 won the award with his work Pont de l'archeveche. He is represented in many of the country's largest collections, including the National Gallery of Australia, the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Queensland Art Gallery, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Brisbane, and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. Jenyns has also received multiple grants from the Australia Council's Visual Arts Board, has curated exhibitions and has taught at the Tasmanian School of Art as head of the sculpture department (1982–2005).
Peter Sebastian Graham is a contemporary Australian artist, painter, printmaker and sculptor. He was born in 1970 in Sydney, New South Wales. He moved with his family in 1983 to Melbourne, Victoria, where he currently lives and works.
Alun Leach-Jones, was a British-born Australian artist known for his range of work covering painting, drawing, sculpture, linocuts, screenprints and etchings.
The Women’s Art Register is Australia's living archive of women's art practice. It is a national artist-run, not-for-profit community and resource in Melbourne, Australia.
Judy Watson is an Australian Waanyi multi-media artist who works in print-making, painting, video and installation. Her work often examines Indigenous Australian histories, and she has received a number of high-profile commissions for public spaces.
Mark Titmarsh is a contemporary Australian painter. His work involves permutations of painting, sculpture, installation, screen media, performance and writing. In 2017, he published a book called Expanded Painting.
William Frater (1890–1974) was a Scottish-born Australian stained-glass designer and modernist painter who challenged conservative tastes in Australian art.
Anne Wallace is an Australian painter. Her works have appeared in major exhibitions and are held in major collections.
Madonna Pearl Staunton was an artist and poet who lived in Brisbane. She is known for her works on Australian Modernism.
eX De Medici is an Australian artist, whose works include Installation art, painting, photography, and drawing. Her works often deal with concepts of power and violence, and recurring motifs include skulls, helmets, guns and the swastika symbol. She has exhibited widely across Australia and is included in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), Canberra Museum and Gallery, Australian state galleries and in private collections. de Medici was an Artist Fellow at the CSIRO for more than a decade, was awarded a print making fellowship in 2006, and was an official war artist for The Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands. She will be a featured artist in the NGA's major exhibition in 2020-2021, Know My Name, that will feature Australian women artists 1900 to today.
Cristina Asquith Baker (1868–1960) was an Australian artist known for her paintings and lithographs. She studied with Frederick McCubbin, one of the key artists of the Australian impressionist Heidelberg school, but she was independent and did not tie herself to a single school of thought. She twice studied abroad, in Paris and London, gaining expertise in various other forms of artistic expression such as lithography and carpet-making.
The Field was the inaugural exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria’s new premises on St Kilda Road, Melbourne. Launched by the director of London’s Tate gallery, Norman Reid, before an audience of 1,000 invitees, it was held between held 21 August and 28 September 1968. Hailed then, and regarded since as a landmark exhibition in Australian art history, it presented the first comprehensive display of colour field painting and abstract sculpture in the country in a radical presentation, between silver foil–covered walls and under geometric light fittings, of 74 works by 40 artists. All practised hard-edge, geometric, colour and flat abstraction, often in novel media including coloured or transparent plastic, fluorescent acrylic paints, steel and chrome. The art was appropriate to a launch of the new venue itself, designed by architect Roy Grounds, and emphatically rectilinear; cubes nested in a basalt rectangular box amongst the other buildings of the new Arts Centre, each based on a geometric solid. Echoing emerging international stylistic tendencies of the time, The Field sparked immediate controversy and launched the careers of a new generation of Australian artists.
Olive Ashworth was an Australian artist, textile designer and photographer.
