The major exhibition Cubism and Australian Art, curated by Lesley Harding and Sue Cramer, opened at Heide Museum of Modern Art this week. This exhibition, around two years in the planning, occupies the entire area of the Heide exhibition complex. It’s a big show – presenting around 300 works and 80 artists spanning a century from the inception of Cubism to the present day.
The exhibition is accompanied by an important publication of the same name published by Miegunyah Press (an event in its own right), that frames the numerous short expert texts, one for each exhibited work, between informative chronologically ordered context essays. Perhaps unintentionally, the choice of the experts including Kirsty Grant, Ted Gott, Bruce Adams, Kelly Gellatly, Jennifer Phipps, Sasha Grishin, Patrick McCaughey and Christopher Heathcote – each with their varied opinions and ideas, is itself both a metatext and mirror on the (robust) state of art historiography and a snap-frozen cross-section of contemporary critical practices.
