Aboriginal Art
Wednesday, May 18th, 2005Most of the day was dedicated to the New South Wales Art Gallery. I think it can be roughly considered a very good second-line art museum. This means, it is not in the same line with the top museums I’ve seen (like the european Louvre, British-Museum, Prado or Ufizi); but it can easily compete with every museum in Israel, and certainly outruns many many of them and many others.
The museum itself is a nice building, with three floors (They have here something about three-floor-museums). The lowest hosts Aboriginal art. The middle hosts contemporary art. The uppermost hosts Australian art of the 19th and 20th centuries (classic style paintings with strong english influence, and topics such as australian landscapes and interesting portraits), as well as some classics every big art museum holds (there was the essential Van-Gogh, Monet, Pissaro and Touluz-Lutrec; as well as some European paintings from the 16th up to the 19th century, mainly of English painters). I even found there one Yosl-Bergner - it turned out he lived a few years in Australia, during the 1940’s and 1950’s, before he came to Israel.
I concentrated, of course, in the Aboriginal galleries. Their paintings use very thick lines and dots, strong colors, and they use interesting materials, such as Eucaliptus barks instead of canvas. Their topics are also interesting - some of them describe local legends, and some are just abstract figures.
The museum itself is located in the middle of the Royal Botanic Parks, which are very lovely and I had around an hour walk through them, until the rain started again (I think the storm is about to over, though. In the afternoon there was a rainbow in the sky, and there was noticably less rain today than in the past few days).
At the afternoon I had this headeche evolving, so I went back to my hostel and slept for an hour. I also made some laundry there, and now I will go to the Israeli Evening (free Bar-B-Que) Habad house is holding tonight.
