A Day in ... Brisbane

Flying in, flying out, transiting, staying over. Brisbane is an easy visit if you just have a day, or part of one.

Catch the Gold Coast Air Train in from the airport and stay on it through the central city, getting off at either South Brisbane or South Bank station. After Park Road the train doesn’t stop more than a couple of times till it reaches the Gold Coast so don’t miss these two stops.

South Bank is a man-made riverside park with enough sun, sand, funpark and water to keep the biggest kid happy. From there you can walk upriver through the South Bank precinct towards the cultural heart of Brisbane, their impressive arts centre. And if you don’t need the wet, playful saturation of South Bank on a sunny day then get off the train at South Brisbane and save yourself the walk.

Once you hit the Performing Arts Centre there is a string of strongly modernist concrete slab buildings, broken by shady walkways, terrace cafes and tingling water features. The Queensland Museum, the Queensland Art Gallery, the Queensland Library and GoMA, the Gallery of Modern Art, all follow one after the other along the river bank, with commanding views across the water to the city centre. It’s a great sight – the building block profile of Brisbane’s high rise centre, the piercing white of the Kurilpa footbridge, the slightly disturbing brown of the river in spring spate, all washed with intensely yellow Aussie sunshine. It’s hard to take a bad photo on days like this.

GoMA is a delight, with a succession of edgy contemporary exhibitions and strong-hearted Aboriginal art. Having seen some of this indigenous work in its local settings in far northern Australia it’s all the more rewarding to see it in this deeply urban setting, where it takes on a significance far beyond it’s village roots. Cafes full of people using tablets and laptops, electric bikes swooshing by, the hum of distant traffic – you could be in any busy first-world city in the world. But the noisy crows cawwing in the trees, the river ferries zipping by, trails of nipping ants on the baking pavements and the bright hot sunshine quickly dispel those cliches. Brisbane is a busy city on the edge of a vast hinterland where the farms can take days to cross, the mining is colossal and the rivers start at one side of the country and end in another.

When you’re finished walk across the Victoria Bridge from the arts precinct to the central city. Wander through Queen Street Mall, along Ann Street or up Adelaide Street and catch the train back to the airport from Roma Street or Central Stations. Hardly Australia in a day, but definitely a good start.

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(C) posted by guest blogger Sue Farley 2012 - NZ Travel Brokers-Nelson – www.travelgallery.co.nz

Visit Museums iPhone App

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This is a great way of finding great Museums, Private Galleries and Art Exhibitions on the go! You can find out what's nearby, add reviews and comments on Museums and Exhibitions you visit. You can download our App here http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/visit-musuems/id536572136

Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement, The Royal Academy, London, United Kingdom, by Larissa Woolf, Arts Editor, www.VisitMuseums.com

Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement, The Royal Academy, London, United Kingdom, by Larissa Woolf, Arts Editor, www.VisitMuseums.com

The Royal Academy in London is hosting an amazing exhibition on the Impressionist painter, Edgar Degas. Born in the late 1880’s Degas was fascinated and obsessed with the world of ballet for over four decades. Almost two thirds of his artistic output was devoted to ballet in some way and his talent and attention to detail were legendary. The focus of this exhibition is on Degas and the notion of movement and stillness in his painting in conjunction with his technical and conceptual skills. It also explores the other mediums that were beginning to emerge during the century such as photography and film and its relation to his painting. In this context we learn how skilfully Degas pushes the boundaries of art and his ability to co-habit two worlds simultaneously: that of art and the world of images. Like his contemporary artists Degas’ focus was on modern life rather than the ancient, classical world of the heroic.

Born into a cultured Parisian family Degas soon immersed himself in art and strove for a kind of vivid realism that was unparalleled. His study of ballerinas was constant and obsessive and he managed to gain backstage access to the dancers at the Opera and inside their practice rooms. He revelled in his ability to suggest plausible movement on stage. In the oil painting “Robert le Diable”, dated 1876, Degas depicts an unusual scene from a play in which dead nuns have arisen from the grave and are dancing with devils. The viewpoint is as if we are sitting in the stalls with the real theatre audience and to this end Degas skilfully incorporates the viewer into the painting. The exhibition portrays that Degas’ ability to blend the dancers’ swirls is a triumph and a skill that the camera simply wouldn’t be able to achieve.

One of my favourite paintings in the exhibition is “2 Dancers on the stage” in which Degas has painted two ballerinas in an apartment with the backdrop of Paris behind them. The scene is both immensely poetic yet also realistic because of its setting; the colours are both fluid and vague. Degas made hundreds of sketches, in pastel and chalk, in preparation for his paintings and many of these are showcased. One sketch which I found particularly skilful is ‘Study of legs’, dated 1873, in black chalk. The detail attests to his draughtsmanship and you get the real sense of a work in progress. Degas would draw and redraw until he got the picture right with a passion and zeal that was to fuel his work. He repeatedly drew the dancers from a different view and angle as if he was circling around them. One of the highlights for me is his pastel and charcoal sketch, entitled “Dancer, Study for L’Attente, dated 1882; a beautiful rendering of a ballerina leaning on bent knee, head down, featuring the the braids in her hair in incredible yet fluid detail. Degas’ style is astonishingly beautiful and poetic yet at the same time staying true to the Impressionist creed of portraying the human body as it is. In ‘The Rehearsal’ we see a group of dancers rehearsing to the accompaniment of a violin. They are in battement 2nd position and Degas skilfully ‘freezes’ the movement of their dance. His many sketches featuring multiple lines that captured movement and his attention to lines and form was at the heart of everything he did. It is no surprise then that when the first camera appeared in 1895 he was an ardent enthusiast. Degas liked to paint dancers because it recalled the movement of the Greeks and there is definitely a sense of the sublime in his work.

The exhibition also showcases many of Degas’ beautiful and delicate bronze sculptures. ’The Little Dancer Aged 14 was one of the largest sculptures he made and interestingly was the only one of his sculptures that was displayed to the public. In the 1870’s he made a series of wide narrow canvases that depicted classrooms; it was an inventive approach to representing modern individuals at work. Here we see he might have been inspired by the special cameras used at the time that recorded paranomic scenes. He returned again and again to the same format whilst his paintings gradually got wider, the colours richer and the brushwork more vigorous.

In later years we see how his painting became more muscular, shown for example in ‘After the Bath, Woman drying her back’, dated 1896. As he got older he would paint from memory and his dynamic strokes of pastel would bring his dance figures to life; as effectively as modern photography could. His beautiful painting ‘Dancers in Blue’ is definitely my favourite oil painting of the exhibition. We see four ballet dancers, in blue dresses, resting back stage. The intimacy between the dancers is palpable and we as an audience are invited to share this private moment between the ballerinas. The orange in the background of the painting implies movement as one’s eye zigzags from the restful blue to the more active orange. Each dancer is gracefully and poetically portrayed.

It is hard not to marvel at the sculptures, drawings and paintings that are portrayed in the exhibition. It is a show that should not be missed and attests to Degas immense and broad talent as a draughtsman, sculptor and artist.

Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement, The Royal Academy, London, United Kingdom, by Larissa Woolf, Arts Editor, www.VisitMuseums.com

The Romanov collection at the Pinacotheque in Paris, France

The Romanov collection, The Pinacotheque de Paris, 26th January to 15th September 2011, 28 place de la Madeleine, 75008, Paris. By Larissa Woolf, Arts Editor, www.visitmuseums.com.

The Pinacotheque museum in Paris is showing at the moment the treasures of the Hermitage Museum from St Petersburg. It is a fantastic exhibition, showcasing more than one hundred works of art from all around Europe and the world and renowned artists that date right back to the fifteenth century. Beginning from the end of the eighteenth century the imperial leaders each began a massive project towards collecting rare and impressive pieces of work from around the world, beginning with Peter the Great in the seventeenth century to Nicholas 1st.

Under Peter the Great Russia saw the beginning of a genuine cultural opening and curiosity towards the Western Europe and foreign lands. The Great Embassy went overseas in 1697-1698 and visited workshops, libraries and museums and literally fell in love with what it saw and so began the history of avid Russian collecting. Once bought they transferred these paintings to St Petersburg which was built according to a model of Amsterdam with canals and Dutch, German, French and Italian architecture.

Peter the Great amassed a collection of 400 paintings, 165 of them were from Holland and Flanders. One example was a Joos de Momper le Jerne (1564-1635)oil painting,’ Monks in a cave’ - a beautiful and luminous landscape scene of monks in a rustic and religious setting. Within the collection is a magnificient Rembrandt, entitled ‘David and Jonathan’, where the two figures are depicted against the background of the city. The luminous colour and the detail of the figures attest to his great skill as a painter.

Catherine II of Russia was also an enlightened leader who, interestingly enough, had an enduring writing relationship with the French philosopher Diderot and spoke to Voltaire, and d’Alembert on a regular basis. It was her idea to buy a whole collection rather than just one piece, for example she bought the Comte von Bruhl’s collection and 4,000 drawings from the Phillip Cobentzel’s collection. One of the paintings that figures in her purchase is Rembrandt’s ‘Portrait of a bearded man with a beret’ which is particularly beautiful; invoking a solemn atmosphere and infused with complex and life like detail such as the wrinkles on his face and his subdued expression. One of the most impressive paintings of the collection is Gabriel Metsu’s ‘The sick person and the doctor’ in which we see a dark, black robed, ominous looking doctor’s exchange with an old lady in her bedchamber. The lady is depicted in a rich, sumptuous gown, fur trimmed with orange silk and is quite clearly dying. The solemn, funeral like atmostphere of the room is clearly depicted.

The biggest buy for the Hermitage was the Crozat collection in 1772 and Catherine had amassed an amazing 4,000 paintings by the end of her reign including works by Nicolas Poussin, Marie Louise le Brun and Claude Joseph Vernet.

The next Russian leader was just as prolific, Alexander I amassed art on a grand scale and felt it was an important aspect to his reign both for cultural posterity and for his standing as a leader. He had an amazing collection of Spanish art and Josephine Bonapart sold him the collection in the chateau de Malmaison. Francisco Ribalto and Diego Velasquez da Silva are some of the artists that were amassed. His successor Nicolas 1st inspired significant changes to the collection from 1825. One of the paintings that he bought was by Sofoniska Anguissola, entitled ‘portrait of a young lady in profile’ figuring a beautiful, rich detailed portrait of a lady holding three flowers wearing a rich green velvet dress lined with pearls. Another stunning piece is the oil painting by Andrea Vaccoro of Marie Magdeleine, the vision of her looking towards the sky in immense sorrow is profoundly moving. Amongst the collection, to name but a few, is Titian, Natale Shiavane and Gabriel Metsu.

The outstanding collection at the Pinacotheque in Paris reveals how enlightened and cultured these great Russian leaders were and how, through their effort, an entire cultural revolution was begun and a legacy left. To experience the magic of the Hermitage museum without having to travel to Russia go to the museum.

The Romanov collection, The Pinacotheque de Paris, 26th January to 15th September 2011, 28 place de la Madeleine, 75008, Paris. By Larissa Woolf, Arts Editor, www.visitmuseums.com.
Recommended Hotels in Paris

Guggenheim Museum New York

The permanent collection at the Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, New York, USA.
For further details see www.VisitMuseums.com. By Larissa Woolf, VisitMuseums.com Arts Editorial Contributor


The Guggenheim Museum is one of the landmark museums that should without a doubt be top of the list for museums to visit in New York. It is a collection of art from the mid nineteenth century to the present day and presents an incredibly rich, in depth and challenging portrayal of modern art whilst also showcasing some of the world’s finest modern and abstract paintings from the likes of masters such as Van Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso and Kandinsky. Opened in 1937 it began with the collection of its founder, Solomon R Guggenheim, which he transformed into a public foundation that would exhibit but also preserve his vast collection of art. Housed in its impressive white, circular unmistakable building the Guggenheim becomes an exploration and celebration of modernism and abstraction.

One of the first paintings on view is Van Gogh’s “Mountains in St Remy” which he painted whilst he was recuperating from his psychiatric problems in an asylum. Its swirling waves and rich, bold colours portray Van Gogh’s enthusiasm for nature, landscapes but also his vivid imagination. More arresting is the emotional emergency of the picture and the feeling that in his painting he is healing himself. Similarly we see Paul Gauguin returning to a state of primitivism in his painting ‘Haeve Mae Tahiti’ and his idyllic vista of island life. His move towards a simpler, more idealised way of life is reflected in his art and style. It was after 1918 however that Guggenheim and his wife collected solely non objective art. Their belief in the spiritual dimensions of pure abstraction and the bringing together of multiple viewpoints simultaneously to create a pure, direct way of looking at art was at the core of their interests and philosophy.

In Pablo Picasso’s painting, ‘Woman Ironing’ we see how Picasso’s bleak colour scheme of blues, whites and greys merge together to form a metaphor for the misfortune of the working poor. Her head hangs heavy, her angular body is unsettling and one can really feel the burden of her body. The iron forms an anchor for her body and the painting and we can see how the space created between her arms and body prefigures cubism and Pablo’s future investigation of space and volume. One of the most striking paintings in the collection is Robert Delauney’s ‘Eiffel Tower’. Tall, imposing we see how he uses angular patches of light and shadow to shatter the tower into fragments; almost as though it was alive. Delauney was fascinated by light and he used the multiple perspectives and fractured surfaces, reminiscent of cubism, to form a grotesque picture of the tower – surely one of the best known icon’s of modernity of its time. In fact as world war one began its rampage through Europe we see its effect on the art of the time as many later works are just a collection of hard to define shapes – a mass of unrecognisable objects and subjects.

For me one of the most beautiful objects in the collection is Constant Brancusi’s bronze sculpture, ‘The Muse’. A smooth, oval, idealised head which has no facial features is balanced by an arm which is resting on a wooden base. Brancusi celebrates the notion that a woman is the muse for aesthetic art and the simplification of form. He reduces the human figure to its essence and thus has created not only an object of aesthetic significance but a sculpture of immense and inspiring beauty.
The Guggenheim museum in New York represents a vital chapter in the history of modern art and its importance as a collection is of supreme, undeniable importance.

For further details and to plan your visit, go to Visitmuseums.com

Joan Miro, “The Ladder of Escape”, Tate Modern Museum, London, UK

Tate Modern Museum Exhibition: Joan Miro, “The Ladder of Escape”London, UK. For further details visit www.VisitMuseums.com. By Larissa Woolf, VisitMuseums.com Arts Editorial Contributor

The Tate Modern in London has assembled a magnificent retrospective exhibition on the work of world renowned artist Joan Miro which runs through to 11 September 2011. The exhibition has brought together paintings and sculptures that span the whole of his career, from his first paintings in 1921 right through to work that he was producing at the end of his life. He produced a vast and amazing collection of work that testify to the creativity of the times and to his own personal and unique talent.

Born in the Catalan capital of Barcelona, Miro wanted to be a painter from an early age. His commitment to his native Catalonia and the family farm at Mont-roig and the influences of rural life can be particularly seen in his early works. His painting, ‘The Farm’ (bought by Hemmingway) which he finished in 1922 shows his amazing attention to detail; the painting is teeming with life as he captures the vitality and earthy sensuality of the Catalan scene. We see how his style evolves into an exploration of the inner world and the relation of reality to his imagination – he would soon be exploring with the ideals of Surrealism. In fact Andre Breton, the leader of the Surrealists in Paris called him ‘the most surreal of us all’ acknowledging Miro’s perpetually inventive imagination. ‘In the Head of a Catalan Peasant’ we see how Miro reduces this archetypal figure to a collection of abstract shapes; the hunter’s head is a triangle, there is a beard and pipe, each part combines together to make up a story against a backdrop of vivid blue. He claimed that Surrealism liberated his art and his mind. Eventually he would become fascinated by the subconscious as an alternative to the rational as he juxtaposed unrelated objects together.

The Barcelona series which he produced in the 1930s is a particularly arresting collection of work as we see 50 lithographs of distorted, often grotesque black and white figures teeming with each other. Miro draws eyes on heads, distorted faces and figures in a macabre ensemble of disquieting, nightmarish landscapes and creatures. We see how affected he and his art was by what was going on in the world around him and how the Spanish civil war which was devastating Spain gave him the real sense that the world was collapsing around him.

Yet Miro shows his artistic dexterity as we see in his most famous and beautiful series, The Constellations which he painted in January 1940. Here again the crescent moons, swirling lines, profusion of stars, eyes and arrows combine together with misshapen creatures. The art is both beautiful and disturbing, peaceful and disquieting, the figures of anxiety teem with symbols of beauty. However way it makes you feel Miro’s art certainly has extraordinary powers to bring out emotion and you cannot view his art without experiencing them. His symbolism became more and more pared down in his later works, seen most prominently in his series of blue triptychs which form perhaps the core of his technique. His later works, such as the Burnt Canvases which he created in late 1973 attest to his continuing energy and his challenging of orthodox ideas.

At the Tate Modern you will not only see some of Miro’s most famous and awe inspiring works but you will be able to learn about him as a man, artist and thinker and gain an understanding of his work. This champion of surrealism is well worth a visit!

Tate Modern Museum Exhibition: Joan Miro, “The Ladder of Escape”London, UK. For further details visit www.VisitMuseums.com.

Frick Museum, New York City

The Frick Museum, New York, USA. For further details visit www.VisitMuseums.com. By Larissa Woolf, VisitMuseums.com Arts Editorial Contributor


The Frick museum is one of my favourite museums in New York. It houses a spectacular collection of Old Masters paintings by major European artists. It includes also some superb eighteenth century furniture and porcelain, Limoges enamels, oriental rugs and other works. Founded by Henry Clay Frick , the Pittsburgh coke and steel industrialist, the collection is vast and eclectic As soon as you walk into its doors there is a feeling of calm and serenity, the oak panelled walls and beautiful courtyard with the sound of the fountain lends to the unique atmosphere of this former residence on 5th Avenue overlooking Central Park. Artists such as Rembrandt, Tiepolo, Ingres, El Greco, Vermeer can be seen, to name but a few.

One of the most attesting paintings at the museum is Giovanni Bellini’s painting, ‘St Francis’. We see St Fancis of Assissi transfixed as he receives Christ’s stigmata and the transcendental light captured by the painter is fabulous. The shepherd and the donkey seem to be oblivious to what is going on which adds to the uniqueness of the piece. It is a painting of incredible spiritual force and the greatest Renaissance painting in the United States and the best preserved.

Of the many works on display is the famous painting by Hans Holbein the Younger of Thomas More. Hans Holbein came to London in 1526 and was introduced to Thomas More by Erasmus. At the time of painting More was Lord Chancellor but he refused the Supremacy of the King and so was beheaded in 1535. We have here an evocation of one man’s mind and character. His resilience and inner convictions shine through and Holbein has painted a portrait with immense detail such as More’s stubble and the velvet sleeves of his robe. One can really feel More’s strength of character shine through the painting.

Likewise Jan Vermeer’s portrait, ‘Mistress and Maid’ is equally riveting. We see the class distinction between mistress and maid and the tension between the two women is almost palpable. The subject matter – that of the maid handing a letter to her mistress – means that the two women become almost equals in the sharing of illicit information. Vermeer was a master of light and the subtle effects of it can be seen in his rendering of the lady and the objects on the table. It is truly a masterpiece.

Another of the highlights in the museum is a superb portrait by Ingres of the Comtesse d’Haussonville. An aristocrat, she was the mother of three children but was also a liberal and published books. The painting took him three years to paint and brilliantly catches the provocative, beguiling expression on the Comtesse’s face and her quiet confidence.

I highly recommend a visit to the Frick museum – it is not be missed! - and leave lots of time to take in the countless masterpieces that are there to be seen.

For further details on visiting museums in New York, USA visit www.VisitMuseums.com