Albert Namatjira, born Elea Namatjira, was a Western Arrernte-speaking Aboriginal artist from the MacDonnell Ranges in Central Australia. As a pioneer of contemporary Indigenous Australian art, he was the most famous Indigenous Australian of his generation.
John Brack was an Australian painter, and a member of the Antipodeans group. According to one critic, Brack's early works captured the idiosyncrasies of their time "more powerfully and succinctly than any Australian artist before or since. Brack forged the iconography of a decade on canvas as sharply as Barry Humphries did on stage." When Laughing Child was presented for auction in 2020, the artist's daughter said that the biggest insult for her father was "when people bought his paintings for investment only – reducing all his work and thought down to money and nothing else."
Venus Anadyomene is one of the iconic representations of the goddess Venus (Aphrodite), made famous in a much-admired painting by Apelles, now lost, but described in Pliny's Natural History, with the anecdote that the great Apelles employed Campaspe, a mistress of Alexander the Great, for his model. According to Athenaeus, the idea of Aphrodite rising from the sea was inspired by the courtesan Phryne, who, during the time of the festivals of the Eleusinia and Poseidonia, often swam nude in the sea. A scallop shell, often found in Venus Anadyomenes, is a symbol of the female vulva.
John Reinhard Weguelin was an English painter and illustrator, active from 1877 to after 1910. He specialized in figurative paintings with lush backgrounds, typically landscapes or garden scenes. Weguelin emulated the neo-classical style of Edward Poynter and Lawrence Alma-Tadema, painting subjects inspired by classical antiquity and mythology. He depicted scenes of everyday life in ancient Greece and Rome, as well as mythological subjects, with an emphasis on pastoral scenes. Weguelin also drew on folklore for inspiration, and painted numerous images of nymphs and mermaids.
The nude, as a form of visual art that focuses on the unclothed human figure, is an enduring tradition in Western art. It was a preoccupation of Ancient Greek art, and after a semi-dormant period in the Middle Ages returned to a central position with the Renaissance. Unclothed figures often also play a part in other types of art, such as history painting, including allegorical and religious art, portraiture, or the decorative arts.
Grahame King was a master Australian printmaker, who has been called the "patron saint of contemporary Australian printmaking". He was responsible for the revival of print making in Australia in the 1960s. He helped set up the Print Council of Australia, of which he was the first Honorary Secretary and was later President. He taught printmaking at The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) from 1966 to 1988. In 1991, he was awarded an Order of Australia for his services to education. As well as teaching, King produced his own art work, concentrating on lithographs and monotypes. He was also a skilled photographer and used his photography both in his teaching and in his practice.
Franz Kempf AM is an Australian artist.
Collins St., 5 pm is a 1955 painting by Australian artist John Brack. The painting depicts office workers walking along busy Collins Street in Melbourne after finishing work for the day—"Blank-faced office workers hurry by like sleep-walkers, thinking only of the pubs or their homes in the suburbs". Brack conceived the work after reading T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. It is considered a companion piece to Brack's earlier work The Bar.
Constance Stokes was a modernist Australian painter who worked in Victoria. She trained at the National Gallery of Victoria Art School until 1929, winning a scholarship to continue her study at London's Royal Academy of Arts. Although Stokes painted few works in the 1930s, her paintings and drawings were exhibited from the 1940s onwards. She was one of only two women, and two Victorians, included in a major exhibition of twelve Australian artists that travelled to Canada, the United Kingdom and Italy in the early 1950s.
Robin Wallace-Crabbe has been actively involved in the Australian arts scene since the 1960s as a curator of exhibitions, literary reviewer, cartoonist, illustrator, book designer, publisher and a commenter on art. He is best known as a writer and visual artist where he has moved between the two mediums for over fifty years, having had thirteen novels published, five under his own name, and eight under the pseudonym – Robert Wallace, and since the early sixties he has had numerous solo exhibitions in Australian capital cities. Including a Survey Exhibition held at the Australian National University in 1980. And another Survey Exhibition touring Australian Regional galleries across Australia between 1990 and 1991. Sasha Grishin describes him as ‘ … a brilliant draughtsman and colourist, his [pictures] experiment with ideas of levels of perception. The observer and the observed share a common, ambiguous space which opens up an intellectual dimension to the [pictures], where the witty and provocative gestures suggest further levels of interpretation.’
Jan Senbergs is an Australian artist and printmaker of Latvian origin.
Jean Bellette was an Australian artist. Born in Tasmania, she was educated in Hobart and at Julian Ashton's art school in Sydney, where one of her teachers was Thea Proctor. In London she studied under painters Bernard Meninsky and Mark Gertler.
Venus Consoling Love is a painting by François Boucher, from 1751. The painting depicts a mythological scene, where Venus, the goddess of Love, depicted as a charming and supple young woman, is impersonating the French Rococo's beauty ideals. She is about to disarm Cupid, by taking away his arrows, that he uses when shooting at people to make them fall in love.
"In Enlightenment France the dedicated search to define truth engendered a re–evaluation of the natural. The belief that it was right to follow nature, and that the pursuit of pleasure was natural, influenced the prevailing conception of the nude ...
First Daughter is a 1955 Modernist painting by Australian artist John Brack. The painting depicts his daughter Clara as a young girl kneeling on the floor drawing a person on a piece of paper. The subject is seen from above - from the viewpoint of a father.
Peter Bray Gallery was established at 435 Bourke Street, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia in 1951, and closed in 1957. Many of the major names in mid-century Australian contemporary art showed there during its brief, but very busy, lifespan.
The New House is a 1953 painting by Australian artist John Brack. The painting depicts a man and a woman standing in front of their fireplace in a room.
Aida Tomescu is an Australian contemporary artist, who is known for her abstract paintings, drawings and prints. Tomescu is the winner of Dobell Prize for Drawing, the Wynne Prize for Landscape and the Sir John Sulman Prize by the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Andrew John Sibley was an English-born Australian artist. Sibley has been the subject of three books and is commonly listed in histories and encyclopedias of Australian art as a significant figurative painter of the mid and late 20th century.
Nude With Dressing Gown is a 1967 painting by Australian artist John Brack. The painting depicts a nude woman putting on a dressing gown. Unusually for a Brack nude, the painting is a not a formal sitting; instead the subject is "caught ... in a more private moment as she modestly dons a gown".
If his subject was not glowing with an almost fluorescent, irradiated green, this would be one of Brack's most sensual pictures. His model is lithe, adorned with a fashionable 1960s-style bob. She is far from Rubenesque, but the twist of hip is distinctly feminine. ... But any sensuality is counterbalanced by Brack's garish colouration.
Laughing Child is a 1958 Modernist portrait painting by Australian artist John Brack. The painting depicts his daughter Charlotte as a young girl, in a dress and with messy hair, laughing.
