Where there's Mueck

Brisbanites flocked to the GOMA this weekend to catch the last two days of the much talked about Ron Mueck exhibition which has been touring Australia. I went along on Saturday morning to check out the hype. There was a long queue outside the venue but it moved quickly in the pleasant sunshine and I was inside admiring Mueck’s work within a half hour of arrival. It didn’t take long to see what the fuss was about. There were only a dozen or so of his works on display but each was intensely enthralling and engaging.

Ron Mueck is a Melbourne-born hyperrealist who seeks extreme verisimilitude with his work. His extraordinary detailed high resolution works had the audience constantly snapping on their cameras and phones. His early career was as a model maker and puppeteer for children's television and films. He then established his own company in London, making photo-realistic props and animatronics for the advertising industry.

Mueck is married to scriptwriter Caroline Willing, the daughter of artist Paula Rego. Rego watched Mueck created a giant sand sculpture of a dragon for his two young daughters on the beach. When she was working on drawings for a show at London's Hayward Gallery, she asked him to draw a Pinocchio. Mueck created a metre-tall, ultra-realist Pinocchio, wearing only undies and an embarrassed expression.

Rego put Mueck in the path of a professional artistic career. Mueck gets incredibly convincing detail through the meticulous use of polyester resins and multiple moulds. His works demand to be seen close-up so people can inspect the hairs, freckles and blemishes and scrutinise the peculiar expressions his subjects have. Whether the look represents fear, shock or yearning they are always drawn with sympathy and extraordinary care.

No more so than the first work in the GOMA exhibition Dead Dad (1996–97), commemorating the death of Mueck's father through a smaller than life-size sculpture. Though diminutive, the touching naked portrait of his own dead dad made of silicone, acrylic paint and his own human hair manages to cast a spell on the crowd it kept for the entire exhibition. It was Dead Dad that first brought Mueck to world attention at the 1997-1998 Sensation exhibition of Young British Artists in London, Berlin and New York (but notably rejected by prudish Australia) which featured the work of Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin among others.

The second GOMA work goes the opposite route to Dead Dad in terms of sex, size and age. This is the five metre long 2006 sculpture “A Girl” of a just-born infant complete with smears of blood and a dangling umbilical cord. If Dead Dad forces us to contemplate the mystery of death it is this intensely over-alive newborn daughter that screams (or is about to) with the possibilities of life.

Wild Man (2005) is also naked, but unlike Dead Dad is very much alive. Wild Man is three metres high and is complete with long hair and unkempt beard. He sits nervously clutching his stool with his feet raised in a slightly fearful expression. His eyes stare off to some unknown danger to the right. Has he been caught out or was he threatened? A similar puzzle confronts us with the two old ladies ("Two Women" 2005) who Mueck portrays gossiping to each other. One looks away from the other towards the audience as if slyly aware of their eavesdropping.

This sense of invading personal space is also keen felt with the giant woman “In Bed” (2005) covered by an enormous white doona with her knees raised under the blanket (picture from Wikipedia above). Her right hand is raised to her face is quiet contemplation perhaps of a missing partner. By contrast the Still Life (2009) of a slaughtered and plucked giant chicken lacks the nuance and therefore interest of his human pieces.

I quickly drifted to Drift (2009) another puzzling human piece though not as intriguing as his earlier works. A man in his thirties or forties lies on a sunbed or inflatable raft his eyes covered by dark sunglasses. He wears board shorts and expensive jewellery but is emotionless and probably asleep. With the raft hanging from the wall, his outstretched hands create the impression of a crucifixion, but it is hard to care why he is drifting. A better recent work is Youth (2009), a black teenager who lifts his bloodied white t-shirt to examine with horror what looks like a deep knife wound to the stomach. The piece is only 65cms high but Mueck takes us into another of his dark, dangerous worlds as we attempt to craft on the backstory.

This perhaps is why Ron Mueck is so successful. Despite his often grand canvasses and hyperrealism, he leaves ample room for the viewers to impose their own imagination on the works. Here is a great original talent who deservedly gains popular acclaim to go with the critical stuff.

APT6 at Brisbane GOMA

I took in the APT6 at the Gallery of Modern Art on a whistlestop visit to Brisbane this weekend. APT6 is shorthand for the sixth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art and having been greatly impressed by the last three triennial incarnations (in my ten years or so living in Brisbane), I was looking forward to seeing the latest version. I was not alone in my excitement. The exhibition has attracted 200,000 visitors in the opening six weeks since it began on 5 December.

This level of patronage is not unprecedented. 1.3 million have visited the six exhibitions but numbers really took off with APT5 in 2006 when it moved into the gleaming new GOMA building on Kurilpa Point. First established in 1993, the APT is the Queensland Art Gallery’s flagship international contemporary art event. It is the only major series of exhibitions in the world to focus exclusively on the contemporary art of Asia, the Pacific and Australia.

The 2009 exhibition shows the work of over 100 artists from 25 countries, including a number of artists and artist collaborations never seen in Australia including works by artists from Tibet, North Korea, Turkey, Iran, Cambodia and Burma. According to Queensland Art Gallery director Tony Ellwood, APT6 looks at a number of thematic links, including “the dynamism of collaboration, the power of popular culture to articulate perspectives on contemporary life, the impact of rapid social change on local communities and cultures, and the practice of drawing”. The exhibition continues until 5 April 2010.

Here are some of my favourites from this year's collection.


I was expecting the North Korean art to be showy in a Stalinist way and while they do promote Dear Leader's Juche they are surprisingly touching and endearing. The work from the Mansudae art studio display a heart and affection for their subjects I simply wasn't expecting.

Chen Qiulin's enormous installation is a poignant reminder of what rural life along the Yangtze River was like before Three Gorges Dam hydro-electric project flooded the entire region. If the house is the ghost of Three Gorges past, his video Garden 2007 is a equally fascinating walk through the towns that now exist in the area.

The Funky Buddhas is a work by London-based Tibetan artist Gonkar Gyatso. This work is supposedly for the kids as you get the chance to place colourful stickers all over the buddhas. But although there were no stickers available to put on the Buddhas when I was there, I still enjoyed the humour of the piece and its fantastic location looking out to the new Kurilpa footbridge.

Ah yes, the elk. Impossible to walk past and deservedly gets a room all to itself. The 2.5m taxidermied elk, or to be precise Pixcell Elk#2 is by Japanese sculptor Kohei Nawa. It is covered in glass, acrylic and crystal baubles of varying sizes which magnify and distort the object’s form in different parts to various degrees.

Called "People Holding Flowers" this installation by Zhu Weibing and Ji Wenyu is the signature piece for APT6. The work is made of synthetic polymer paint on resin; velour, steel wire, dacron, lodestone and cotton. There are 400 figures all holding flowers in a deliberate memory of Mao's short-lived 1950s mantra of "let a hundred flowers bloom". An overwhelming response to the Hundred Flowers Campaign led to serious crackdowns on dissent. Arguably nothing much has changed in 50 years in China.

I loved Rudi Mantofani's collection of unplayable guitars. Mantofani is an Indonesian sculptor and painter whose work transforms ordinary objects into strange or absurd "visual parables". Mantofani's guitar sculptures were inspired by a benefit concert he saw in New York. He said, the gap between American philanthropic rhetoric and the harsh effects of its foreign policies in the Muslim world led him to "create a series of distorted guitars, as a means to express such ethical contradictions." I'm not sure I saw those contradictions in the works but I couldn't help loving the guitars.

Picasso and his collection at Brisbane’s GOMA

Police in Sao Paulo have recovered a Picasso painting stolen two months ago by armed robbers. The 1933 painting "Minotaur, Drinker and Women" was found wrapped in paper in a woods by the side of a highway near Brazil’s largest city. Police say it was abandoned there by thieves who stole another Picasso and two other paintings from the city’s Pinacoteca Museum. All four paintings, with an estimated value of $630,000, have now been recovered.

Nothing quite so dramatic in Brisbane’s art show dedicated to Picasso, but an enjoyable exhibition here nonetheless, at the city’s stunning Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA). “Picasso and his Collection” is an exhibition of his personal art collection showing at the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) from 9 June to 14 September. GoMA is the first venue outside Europe to host the collection. The exhibition features 80 of the artist's own works interspersed with over 100 works from other artists in his extraordinary private collection.

Pablo Picasso is probably one of the greatest painters of the 20th century and certainly one of the most inventive. From the time he moved to Paris in 1900, aged 19 to his death 73 long years later, he explored every imaginable style from realistic to abstract. He worked in many mediums including paintings, drawings, sculptures in stone, bronze, wood, and printmaking. He invented the collage technique, co-founded Cubism and was one of the pioneers of Surrealism.

He was born 1881 in Malaga with the improbable name of Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ruíz y Picasso. Ruiz was his father’s name; Picasso his mother’s. The other names honoured various family members and saints in traditional Spanish fashion. His father José Ruiz y Blasco was a well known painter in his own right and an art teacher who instilled a love of classic art in his son. After studying art in Barcelona, the young Pablo went to Paris, where he was befriended by the poet Max Jacob. The pair shared a tiny apartment, Jacob slept in the single bed by night and Picasso slept by day.

Gradually, Paris transformed Picasso and his painting. Through Jacob he got to know most the great cultural figures of the city and through exhibitions at the salon des independents he got to know most of its art. Picasso would prove to be a great collector of art too and he inherited his father’s love of the old masters, in particular the 19th century realist paintings of Louis Le Nain, Jean-Baptiste Chardin and Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot.

Picasso loved their primitiveness and called their works “pure painting”. He painted “Returning from the Christening (after Le Nain)” in pointillist style in Le Nain’s honour. He acquired Gustave Courbet’s “Head of a Chamois” which turned its subject matter into a minotaur and then recreated the moment in his own visceral 1952 painting “Goats Skull, bottle and candle”. Picasso was also deeply affected by the realist paintings of Henri Rousseau which in turn inspired many in Picasso’s own set. Juan Miro said “it was at Picasso’s place I first saw a Rousseau”.

As well as the realist masters, Picasso loved the works of Gauguin, Degas, Cezanne and Renoir. He saw all their works as they were displayed in Paris. Once again, it was the primitivism of Gauguin that captured Picasso’s imagination. He was also deeply influenced by Gauguin's Tahitian diary Noa Noa. Picasso was no great fan of the impressionists but when Gauguin, Degas and others disassociated themselves from the movement, they were seen as providing the origins of the modernist movement.

This movement was all around Picasso. His poet friend Guillaume Apollinaire decried impressionism and said it was time “for an art that is nobler, bettered ordered and more cultivated”. Picasso himself also admired Cezanne and Renoir as “dissidents of impressionism” and he called himself “the grandson of Cezanne”. Meanwhile Renoir’s fleshy nudes were art in a classical vein free of any dry formalism. These paintings inspired Picasso’s 1920s “large bathers” series.

Picasso first collaborated with George Braque in 1907. Picasso had by then become intrigued by African and Polynesian art forms and was starting to build up his own collection of masks, drums and totems. As well, Cezanne’s later work began to break up the painted surface into small multifaceted areas of paint. Together, Picasso and Braque began to paint objects in broken-up and abstract forms flattened into geometric forms viewed from different angles showing “all sides at once”. Cubism was born. The pair worked on each others paintings and were fascinated by the idea of anonymous art. When Picasso designed the costumes, masks and sets for the 1920 Stravinsky ballet Pulcinella, the masks were modelled on the Mukuyi masks from Gabon in his personal collection.

It was Apollinaire again who coined the term surrealism in 1917 to describe Jean Cocteau's ballet Parade and his own play The Mammaries of Tiresias. Picasso quickly became enamoured of the new word and its possibilities. “I’m interested in a deeper level of resemblance, more real than reality, which reaches the level of surreal,” he said. Picasso participated in the surrealist painters’ first exhibition at the Galerie Pierre in 1925 alongside Max Ernst, Giorgio de Chirico, Joan Miró, Hans Arp and Paul Klee. However he refused to affiliate himself with the movement, always preferring to be, as Victor Brauner put it in 1953, "a great initiator".

Throughout his artistic life, Picasso had a great friendship and rivalry with Henri Matisse. Their meeting in 1906 marked the beginning of a relationship based on reciprocal admiration and a creative rivalry. Gertrude Stein said they both showed “great enthusiasm for the other, without actually liking each other much”. Both men were inspired on to further greatness by the works of the other but neither deigned to copy. As Picasso said “a painter’s studio must be a laboratory. It is not about aping but about invention. Painting is done in the mind”. The GoMA exhibition ends with Picasso’s Le Vieil homme assis (the seated old man) 1970–71, a disguised self-portrait of which the brilliant colours speak in memory of Matisse. As he neared his own death he could confidently state “No-one has ever looked at Matisse’s painting as closely as I have”.

Arrangement in Grey and Black: the metamorphosis of Whistler’s Mother

The work colloquially known as “Whistler’s Mother” is among those few famous paintings such as the Mona Lisa and American Gothic which have transcended art and entered popular culture. The painting was in the news last week, as it always is at this time of year, in celebration of Mothers Day. The Musée d'Orsay painting featured on the first US stamp to commemorate the day in 1934. The woman that did most to make the day a celebration – Anna Jarvis (ironically never a mother herself) – was furious that the US postal service chose the Whistler painting to honour the day without consulting her.

But while Jarvis may have been unhappy, mainstream America was not. There was little doubt in most people’s eyes that the austere portrait of Anna McNeill Whistler by her son James was the quintessential picture of motherhood. What is less well known is the controversy the painting stirred up when it was painted in 1871. And its apparent conservative nature seems a bizarrely uncharacteristic work. Whistler was of one of the 19th century’s most unorthodox painters and was a leading proponent of the bohemian credo “l’art pour l’art” (art for art’s sake) that divorces art from any didactic, moral or utilitarian function.

Much of the controversy raged over the paintings name. While it is commonly now known as “Whistler’s Mother”, the actual title of the painting is “Arrangement in Grey and Black”. When Whistler tried to display the painting in 1872 at London’s 104th Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Art, the art world was horrified. The Victorian guardians of the Royal Academy could not cope with a painting of a person, especially a mother, described as a mere “arrangement”. Threatened with expulsion from the exhibition, Whistler compromised and added a subtitle: “The Artist’s Mother”.

This most American icon has never lived in the US, though it has toured several times. Its life mirrored that of its American creator who spent most of his life in Europe. James Abbott McNeill Whistler was born in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1834, the son of a railway engineer. When his father, George Washington Whistler, moved to St Petersburg to work on the Russian railway, his son enrolled at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts where he learned French. He finished his education at West Point and worked briefly as a coastal surveyor etching maps. But he found American society too restrictive for his worldly sensibilities. He moved to Paris where he finished his art education at the Ecole Impériale et Spéciale de Dessin, before entering the Académie Gleyre.

Whistler was a flamboyant dandyish presence in Paris wearing a straw hat, a white suit, highly polished black patent leather shoes and a monocle. Here he also gained an appreciation of Asian (especially Japanese) art and mixed with prominent artists such as Courbet, Manet and Degas. The circles in which he moved can be gauged from Fantin-Latour's Homage to Delacroix, in which Whistler is portrayed alongside Baudelaire, Manet, and others. Camille Pisarro acknowledged the young man’s talent saying "this American is a great artist.”

But not everyone in Parisian society recognised this immediately. Whistler achieved international notoriety when Symphony No. 1, The White Girl was rejected at both the Royal Academy and the Salon, but it became a major attraction at the famous Salon des Refusés (“exhibition of rejects”) in 1863. The title of his painting also alluded to Whistler’s lifelong habit of calling painting by musical titles such as symphonies, nocturnes and arrangements. Whistler’s explanation was that “as music is the poetry of sound, so is painting the poetry of sight, the subject matter has nothing to do with harmony of sound or colour."

Whistler moved to London in 1859 where he continued his bohemian lifestyle and prolific painting. His etchings of the Thames won him great acclaim. He flouted Victorian conventions and lived with his model Joanna Heffernan. His life was turned upside down in 1863 when he received a letter from his mother Anna in civil war-ravaged America saying she was moving to London to be with her son. James turned his ramshackle apartment upside down to make it respectable and evicted Joanna. Anna would now rule the entire household except for her son’s studio.

Anna did not always approve of her son's relaxed lifestyle, but she took an active interest in his painting. Her appearance in her son’s most famous painting was a happy accident. His original model was ill and unable to show up so James demanded that his mother pose for him. The original plan was for her to stand, but her aged body was unable to cope so they decided to use a chair instead. Whistler’s inspiration was to face his mother away from the viewer’s gaze. In his startlingly bare “arrangement”, Whistler succeeded in conveying his mother’s strong Protestant character in the sombre pose, expression and colouring.

The picture proved to be an immediate sensation at the London exhibition. Viewers might have been shocked at this artist’s daring depiction of his mother as an arrangement but no one could doubt the painting’s power. Whistler kept the painting for several years before selling it to the French state. It was displayed in Paris' Musée du Luxembourg in 1891 and was exhibited in several museums until it found a permanent home in the new Musée d'Orsay in 1986.

It wasn’t until the 20th century that the picture took off as an icon for motherhood, parental affection, and "family values". The picture toured America in 1932 during the height of the depression. Anna McNeill’s Whistler’s stern visage struck a chord with ordinary Americans and her values seemed in tune with the times. Within two years, its status as a maternal symbol saw it recognised in the stamp (though some were outraged at the bowdlerised addition of the bowl of flowers absent from the painting itself.

In modern times, the painting retains a power even if poor old Anna herself has been ridiculed in countless modern situationist adaptations. While her stern visage is seriously dated and no longer an appropriate symbol for all that is good in motherhood, the stark power of Whistler’s art still shines through and is as relevant as ever. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Whistler was not interested in telling a story or in idealising the subjects in his paintings. He considered subject matter less important than colour and composition, and focused on creating a mood in his work. The original title now needs to be reclaimed: it is not Whistler’s mother that is important, it is the arrangement in grey and black.

Warhola: Andy Warhol at Brisbane’s GOMA

According to Brisbane Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA), the Andy Warhol exhibition has been a big success with 36,000 people attending since it opened four weeks ago with big queues every day. The exhibition is Australia’s first Warhol retrospective and is exclusive to Brisbane. It is the largest ever loan of works from the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh and features 300 pieces spanning his career from the 1950s to his death in 1987. Woolly Days joined the queue today to check it out.

Warhol was a great exponent of hype in his lifetime and it was tempting to look at his art in the same light. But that does great disservice to his body of work. Warhol had incredible energy and crammed a great deal into his short 58 years. He was active across many areas of art including paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, photographs, films, videos and installations. The GOMA exhibition celebrates all this with his cow wallpaper thrown in for good measure. Warhol’s understanding of mass culture, semiotics, and the power of the media is brought out brilliantly in this retrospective. His Pop Art celebrates the age of mass production in an unsettling fashion. Warhol’s work was the epitome of postmodernism.

The exhibition is organised chronologically in the main, beginning with his early commercial illustrations which include his extraordinary shoe drawings. It then moves on through his silkscreen works of the 1960s (with his trademark soup cans). We see his wonderful celebrity portraits including Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Onassis. These are part of his decidedly dark “Death and Disaster” series with its forensic examination of car crashes. The cropped images are taken out of a journalistic framework and placed repeatedly into the context Warhol wants for them.

Warhol’s work took some time to recover from the 1968 assassination attempt. The exhibition features his famous paintings of Mao Zedong with their rich overtones of the similarities between consumerism and communism (Warhol was also attracted to Mao’s personality cult). The contrast is also obvious between the iconography and commercialism in the religious pieces such as his Last Supper (his final painting in 1986).

Perhaps the most interesting work in the entire exhibition is the later semiological pieces including the dollar signs, crosses and the hammer and sickle series. Nevertheless the most popular items were his time capsules, thirty years of compulsive and compelling daily hoarding which presented fascinating insights to the man and his times.

Warhol was born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on 6 August 1928. His Byzantine Christian parents Ondrej and Julia were ethnic Rusyns (Ruthenians) from Slovakia who emigrated to work in the mines in Pennsylvania. Aged 8 young Warhola was struck down with chorea (St Vitus Dance) a neurological disorder which led to blotchiness in skin pigmentation. He was a loner and a bedridden child who drew in bed and collected pictures of his favourite movie stars. Warhola studied commercial art at the School of Fine Arts at Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh and then moved to New York in 1949.

His first job was as a commercial illustrator in which he was very successful. He did shoe ad jobs for I. Miller in a stylish blotty line. He also worked as an illustrator for several magazines including Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and The New Yorker. By the end of the fifties, he was one of the most sought after designers in New York. During this period he dropped off the final ‘a’ from his name to become Warhol.

He first exhibited in an art gallery in 1962, when the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles showed his 32 Campbell's Soup Cans, 1961-62. Fascinated by mass production, Warhol tried to duplicate it in his art. In 1963 Warhol founded a studio at East 47th St known as “The Silver Factory” where he employed a cast of fashionable young people to help him work and play.

After Marilyn Monroe died in 1962, Warhol became infatuated by her and drew hundreds of drawings on the subject. During this period, he became associated with the movement known as Pop Art. Pop Art emerged in Britain and the US in the 1950s; its name derived from "popular mass culture". Some critics hated Warhol's open embrace of market culture. But Warhol didn’t care. As he became more successful, he branched out into other art forms, and became a key figure in New York’s underground art and cinema scene. He also brought Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground to world attention.

In 1968, Valerie Solanas, founder and sole member of SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) walked into the Factory, and shot Warhol. Earlier that day, Solanas had been turned away from the Factory after asking for the return of a misplaced script she had given to Warhol. The attack was nearly fatal and Warhol was in surgery for five hours. The attack profoundly impacted his work.

At the beginning of the 1970s, Warhol began publishing Interview magazine and renewed his focus on painting. Works created in this decade include Maos, Skulls, Hammer and Sickles, Torsos and Shadows and many commissioned portraits. By the end of the decade he was firmly established as a major 20th-century artist and international celebrity, and exhibited his work extensively in museums and galleries around the world.


In the 1980s, he created two cable television shows, "Andy Warhol's TV" and "Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes" for MTV in 1986. His paintings in this era include The Last Suppers, Rorschachs and, in a return to his Pop Art theme, a series called Ads. Warhol was admitted to hospital for routine gall bladder surgery but he died from complications a day later on 22 February, 1987. He was buried in Pittsburgh, and more than 2,000 people attended a memorial mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York organised by his friends and associates. The Andy Warhol Museum was opened in Pittsburgh in 1994. It is the largest American art museum dedicated to a single artist, holding more than 12,000 works by the artist himself.

Francisco Goya: a life in art

A New Jersey truck driver pleaded guilty last week to the theft of the Goya painting “Children with a Cart” in November 2006. Steven Lee Olsen faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a fine of $250,000 under the reduced charge of theft of an object of cultural heritage. The painting is worth over a million dollars and is owned by the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio. It was on its way to an exhibition at New York’s Guggenheim Museum when it was stolen from a truck as the drivers stay overnight in a Pennsylvania motel. Olsen was one of the drivers. The painting itself was recovered after Olson told the FBI to say he had found the painting in his basement. It didn’t take long for authorities to conclude it was an inside job.

"Children with a Cart" was considered one of the FBI’s top ten art crimes. Goya painted it in 1778 as a model for a tapestry planned for the bedroom of a Spanish prince. It depicts four colourfully-dressed children and a wooden cart at the base of a dark tree, with a billowing cloud in the background. Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) is considered one of the world's greatest artists and one of the first "modern" painters. But he defies easy categorisation. Robert Hughes said it was the difficulty of pinning Goya down that keeps him alive and fresh.

Goya was born on 30 March 1746 in the village of Fuendetodos near Zaragoza in what was then the kingdom of Aragon. His mother, Gracia Lucientes, came from the lower ranks of the landed gentry - the Spanish hidalgos. The family moved to Zaragoza where she married Goya's father; a member of the Goldsmith's Guild. Aged 13, young Francisco began an apprenticeship to the painter Jose Luzan. He fell under the influence of fellow painters the Bayeu brothers, Ramon and Francisco. He also met their sister Josefa with whom he would fall in love.

Goya’s earliest jobs were religious works for the churches in and around Zaragoza. In 1772 he gained a big commission. This two-year job was to paint a cycle of scenes in oils of the Life of the Virgin Mary on the walls of Carthusian monastery of the Aula Dei near Zaragoza. Though some of this work was later damaged by leakage and seepage. It was then restored by French painters and the seven of the eleven panels that survive are his largest extant work. In 1774, aged 28, he married Josefa Bayeu in Madrid. He joined her brothers at the Royal Academy of Fine Art where they procured him work for the Royal Tapestry Workshop.

Over the next five years, he would paint designs for over forty patterns (including “Children with a Cart”) for the workshop. The tapestries would eventually decorate the royal palaces. And as Goya established himself, Madrid would become his city. Over the next 40 years he would paint its life and make portraits of its royalty and ordinary citizens. In the end he would leave over 130 paintings to Madrid’s magnificent Museo Del Prado.

Back in 1783 Goya was not thinking of the end but he tired of the limiting scope of the tapestries. He eagerly took the commission when the Count of Floridablanca asked him to paint his portrait. This work would prove to be his entry into regal circles. His patrons included the Duke and Duchess of Osuna and eventually King Charles III. In 1788 Charles died and his son Charles IV succeeded him. Young Charles would reign for almost two decades and made Goya his chief court painter. Yet Goya never overly flattered his new patron. The French novelist Theòphile Gautier said of Goya’s true-to-life 1792 painting of the royal family: "It looks as if he has painted the corner baker and his wife after they have won the lottery."

Tragedy struck in 1792. With Goya seemingly at the height of his fame and success he was struck down with fever. The illness was cured but left him permanently deaf. Isolated by his inability to hear, his painting retreated back into himself. They became intense and incredibly dark. Goya became increasingly preoccupied with fantasies of his own imagination and with critical and satirical observations of mankind. He evolved a bold new style that was very close to caricature. The religious frenzy of that style is exemplified by Burial of the Sardine (1816) which was a stark depiction of the Saturnalia of the Ash Wednesday festival in Madrid.

In 1799 he plunged deep into his inner self to produce perhaps his greatest work, Los Caprichos. They were a series of 80 aquatinted etchings that satirised human folly and weakness. Caprichos means caprices or whims, and they are astonishing, fantastical ideas. About 20 are about witchcraft, while another 25 treat the problems of sex and marriage and the miseries of love. The most famous of the series is the nightmarish plate 43 which he called "The sleep of reason produces monsters". While the artist sleeps, his fantasy is no longer controlled by reason and he is exposed to horrific beings that threaten to overcome him. Too satirical and too dark (and dangerously subversive), the series flopped with the public.

But more pressing political problems entered Goya’s life with the rise of Napoleon. Spain initially supported France in their continental blockade of Britain but withdrew in 1805 after the Battle of Trafalgar. Though Spain tried to switch sides again after France defeated Prussia in the Battle of Jena, Napoleon was now distrusting of the Spanish and sent 100,000 troops across the border to signal his intent. In 1808 Charles IV abdicated in favour of his son, but Napoleon installed his brother Joseph as king. The ensuing Peninsular War would lead to Napoleon’s downfall.

The war began when the people of Madrid rebelled in early May 1808. They attacked the French on 2 May and on the next day, the French shot most of the insurgents. These two days would become important in Spanish history. The Spanish would go on use irregular tactics to defeat the French and brought the word ‘guerrilla’ (from Spanish ‘little war’) into existence. The now 62 year old Goya painted his series called “The Disasters of War” that chronicled the battlefield horror of these tumultuous times in the fashion of a vicarious war correspondent.

His two most famous paintings (both 1814) of the era document the symbolic events of initial Madrid uprising. His “The Second of May 1808” also known as The Charge of the Mamelukes depicts the beginning of the uprising when the elite Egyptian Mamelukes of the French Imperial Guard charge and subdue the rioters. The painting is dramatic and chaotic. But for sheer impact, it is dwarfed by his depiction of the events of the following day “The Third of May 1808” when rebels are lined up and shot by the firing squads. This nighttime painting is grand and tragic with the central whiteclad defiant figure reminiscent of the crucifixion. It is Goya’s masterpiece.

In later life, Goya went into semi-retirement when he bought a farmhouse across the river from Madrid named Quinta del Sordo ("Deaf Man's House") named not for him but for its previous owner, also stone deaf. While he no longer worked at court, his passion for painting continued. Goya’s late style is frightening and mysterious. He painted a series of 14 nightmarish paintings known simply as The Black Paintings. Most famous of these was Saturn Devouring His Sons. This scene of the god Saturn consuming a child was a coded reference to Spain's civil conflicts.

In 1824, he left Madrid after 50 years. He could no longer bear the misrule of Spain under the autocratic Ferdinand VII and went into surreptitious exile. He went to a French spa to take the waters before settling in Bordeaux. He died there in 1828 aged 82. He was initially buried in Bordeaux before his remains were exhumed and returned to Spain in 1901. He was moved again in 1928 to his final resting place. This was the church known as Real Ermita de San Antonio de la Florida. It is called Madrid´s Sistine Chapel for its ornate ceilings painting by Goya himself in 1798. The frescoes portray a celebrated miracle by Saint Anthony of Padua. Goya’s remains (minus his stolen head, never recovered) now lie under the beautiful angels he painted. As Robert Hughes aptly puts, Goya was one of those uncommon artists that had the daring to take on the whole of human experience. Few artists before or since have approached his vision and talent.

GoMA Pile

The fifth Asia-Pacific Triennial (APT5) exhibition is the highlight of Brisbane’s newest attraction, the sparkling Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA). There have been more than half a million visitors to Southbank’s Cultural Centre is since the $300m GoMA and the adjacent State Library of Queensland opened on 2 December last year.

Wayne Goss, Chairman of the Queensland Art Gallery Board of Trustees said in a media release that GoMA was a major new contemporary art museum for Australia and the Asia-Pacific region, and a cultural triumph for Brisbane. “With the addition of GoMA, Queensland Art Gallery remains a single institution with two magnificent sites: the celebrated Robin Gibson-designed Gallery, which opened in 1982, and the Architectus-designed Gallery of Modern Art at Kurilpa Point, the last reach of the Brisbane River overlooking the city," he said. The two galleries are only 150m apart.

APT4 drew 220,000 during its 20-week exhibition in the old art gallery in 2002. This year's APT has reached almost half that in its first three weeks. The attendances and the architectural brilliance have been attracting envious glances from other gallery. GoMA director Doug Hall is due to leave his role in April and National Gallery of Victoria acting director Frances Lindsay said that whoever gets the job next would have “big shoes” to fill. National Gallery of New South Wales chief curator Tony Bond said "We can't get anything like that in NSW. Queensland…have managed to build something to die for”.

Although APT5 has been criticised for not having enough local exhibits, it does contain a stunning range of modern art. The beautiful high ceilings and spacious rooms of the gallery with river and city views complement the artwork. One of the first exhibits as you climb to the first floor, and one of the most popular, is a montage of 29 sequences from Jackie Chan movies. Chan leaps operatically at the viewer from all angles on a bank of TV screens, big and small. GoMA's head of cinema Kathryn Weir describes Chan as a "complex local-global phenomenon". She says his presence in APT "explores how someone who is out of Hong Kong is possibly one of the best-known actor-directors today, working in Hollywood but also maintaining a very strong local identity. And also with a strong and complex relationship with a traditional Chinese art form."

Next to the Chan exhibit is a striking picture from Chinese artist Zhang Xiaogang. His oil on canvas picture “Three Comrades” is from his Bloodlines: The Big Family series. His three comrades are deliberately androgynous figures. Born in 1958, Xiaogang grew up during Mao’s Cultural Revolution when the fervour of disowning the past meant that many photos were destroyed or lost. The painting “Three Comrades” is inspired by a rare surviving photo of his mentally-ill mother during younger, happier times. It conjures up the three Chinese ‘big families’ of blood, social and cultural ties.

The Chinese influence on APT5 is massive. Near the river end of the gallery, lie the beautiful porcelain sculptures of Ah Xian and the photographs of Australian born William Yang. Yang tells a poignant story “about my mother” in 24 family photographs. Like Yang, his mother was also born in Australia, in Dimboola in Far North Queensland. She is a Cantonese who marries a Mandarin speaking Hukka. The family grows up speaking English only. The 24 photos show the life of a graceful westernised woman (the christmas dinner was turkey and ham). She dies but not before having to cope with the shock of finding out her artist son William is gay.

There is a queue to see the exhibit of Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. Kusama was responsible for the beautiful “Narcissus Garden” in APT4. This time, her piece is called “Soul under the Moon”. It is a playful installation set in a closed dark room. Kusama uses mirrors, lights, water, plastic, nylon thread, timber, synthetic polymers and paint to create a disconcerting illusion of never-ending space. Its themes are reflection, infinity and repetition.

Also impressive is Jitish Kallat’s “public notice” (2003). Kallat was born in Mumbai in 1974 where he was also trained as an artist. He has gained a reputation for bold figurative paintings. “Public notice” is a five-panelled work using acrylic mirrors. The letters are rubber adhesive cement which are ignited and melted. The text is from the speech delivered by Jawaharlal Nehru at midnight on the occasion of Indian independence from British rule on 15 August 1947. Nehru’s “tryst with destiny” speech remains a important historical milestone for India.

Back on the ground floor the highlight is another Chinese sculpture. It is Wang Wenhai’s “Mao Zedong and Mao Zedong”. These are two giant fibreglass sculptures of Mao; one as the familiar chairman, the other in the guise of emperor Qin Shi Huang who united China in 221 BC. Wenhai is a staff member at the Yan'an Revolutionary Museum in Northwest China's Shaanxi Province. He has been making clay sculptures of Mao for 20 years and believes he has made over 1,000. The two that grace APT5 are imposing as befits one of the 20th century's most successful leaders.

The Asia Pacific Triennial 5 expo continues until 27 May 2007. The Queensland Gallery of Modern Art is at Southbank, a short walk from the city across Victoria Bridge and close to South Brisbane station. It is open 10am to 5pm Monday to Friday and 9am to 5pm Saturday and Sunday. Admission is free.

Norwegian Police recover "The Scream"

Yesterday, Oslo Police announced they have recovered “The Scream” and another stolen masterpiece by Edvard Munch. It happens two years and nine days after gunmen seized the paintings from a museum in the Norwegian capital. The two paintings date from 1893. The Scream, Munch's most famous work, is an icon of existential angst showing a terrified figure against a blood-red sky. The other picture Madonna shows a bare-breasted woman with long black hair. Police say they recovered the paintings yesterday but did not release any details about the recovery operation. Experts at the Munch Museum have examined the pictures and judged them authentic.

Two masked gunmen walked into the Munch Museum in Oslo in broad daylight in August 2004 and yanked the two works from the walls in front of dozens of terrified tourists. They escaped in a car driven by another man. Three men were convicted in May this year of taking part in the theft and were sentenced to up to eight years in jail. The City of Oslo foundation that owns the Munch Museum collection said they hoped the paintings could be put back on display soon.

Munch lived from 1863 to 1944 and was a pioneer of modern expressionism. He is Norway’s most popular artist. The painting “The Scream” was originally called “Despair” and was painted as part of a series titled “The Frieze of Life”. In this series, Munch explored themes of life, love, fear, death and melancholy. These themes recur throughout Munch's work, in paintings such as The Sick Child (1886, portrait of his deceased sister Sophie), Vampire (1893–94), Ashes (1894), and The Bridge. He was born in the village of Ådalsbruk in the eastern coastal province of Hedmark. Munch's convulsed and tortuous art was formed by the misery and conflicts of his time, and, even more important, by his own unhappy life. His mother died of TB when Edvard was just 5 years old and he was raised by his father Christian. Two other siblings, a brother and sister also died young while another sister was mentally ill. Christian Munch instilled a very Protestant deep-rooted fear of hell in his children. He constantly told them that if they sinned, they would be doomed to hell without chance of pardon.

In 1879, Munch went to college to study engineering, but frequent illnesses interrupted his studies. A year later he left to become a painter and enrolled at the Royal School of Art and Design of Kristiania (the old name for Oslo). He went to Paris in 1885 where his work first began to show the influence of the French impressionist and post-impressionist painters. Munch became an overnight celebrity in Germany when the inclusion of his works caused the 1892 Verein Berliner Künstler exhibition to be shut down after a week. His man-destroying Vampire was deemed "objectionable." The infamy secured his reputation and he remained in Germany for many years where he was a major influence on German art. In Berlin he associated with fellow Scandinavian Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg. Between 1892 and 1908, Munch divided his time between Paris and Berlin, where he became known for his etchings, lithographs, and woodcuts.

In the autumn of 1908, his anxiety became acute and he became a patient of Dr. Daniel Jacobsen. Jacobsen’s therapy had a profound effect on Munch’s personality, and he showed more interest in nature subjects when he returned to Norway. His work became more colourful and less pessimistic. In the 1930s and 1940s, the Nazis labelled his work "degenerate art", and removed his work from German museums. This deeply hurt Munch, who thought of Germany as his second homeland. Edvard Munch died near Oslo, on January 23, 1944, about a month after his 80th birthday. He left 1,000 paintings, 15,400 prints, 4,500 drawings and watercolours, and six sculptures to the city of Oslo, which built the Munch Museum at Tøyen in his honour.

In 1893, he produced his seminal expressionist masterwork “Skrik”. The Norwegian word skrik is usually translated as "scream", but is related to the English shriek or screaming-cry. There are several versions of the painting two of which have been stolen. In a diary note Munch described his inspiration for the image "I was walking along a path with two friends – the sun was setting – suddenly the sky turned blood red – I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence – there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city – my friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety – and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature". The scene has been identified as being the view from a road overlooking Oslo from the hill of Ekeberg. Astronomers believe that the intense red sunset is caused by the volcanic eruption of Krakatoa in 1883. In 1994 the National Gallery version was stolen on the opening day of the Winter Olympics in nearby Lillehammer. The painting was recovered after a sting operation involving Norwegian and British Police. The story is told brilliant in Matthew Hart’s lively account of international art thefts “The Irish Game”.

The Munch Museum's Scream was stolen at gunpoint in August 2004. The photograph shows a man escaping from the museum with the canvas. Although three men were convicted of the crime in May this year, none of the suspects could be persuaded to reveal the paintings' whereabouts due to fear of retaliation. The recovered painting will be re-displayed in the Munch Museum which has completed a $6 million security overhaul.