When best-dressed is undressed

Who says Australia’s a cultural backwater? Rafael Bonachela and the Sydney Dance Company’s Sydney Festival show last month was a world first: nude dancers in front of nude paintings before a nude audience. Strangely enough, the nude-audience shows sold out faster than the clothed shows.

http://www.sydneyfestival.org.au/2017/nude-live/?q=bonachela

Modern Love – The Lives of John and Sunday Reed

Have you got a Caravaggio in your barn? Or even an Erpenbeck?

Artists you’ve never heard of: Sophonisba Anguissola 1532-1625

  

Three cheers for womankind with the victory of Michelle Payne, the first woman to win Australia’s most famous horse race, the Melbourne Cup, and even more cheers for Michelle’s post-race comment

Van Gogh

               

No one did colour more blatantly and more unexpectedly than Van Gogh. Its blatancy gives his pictures their roaring charm.  Colour, he seems to be saying: you haven’t seen colour before, look at this deep blue, this yellow, this black; watch me put them screechingly side by side. Colour for Van Gogh was a  kind of noise.

Julian Barnes in the LRB vol 37 no 15, 30 July 2015 p.7