Art Gallery of NSW

They came all the way from St Petersburg, Russia. Art Gallery NSW informed me months ago about it. So, I knew they were coming. I knew how how they were going to stay. What did I do? Waited till the last day of the exhibition to go and see it. Again! Missed my chance of getting the exhibition catalogue because they ran out. Again!

Masters of modern art from the Hermitage exhibition at Art Gallery featured quite a few notable artists such as Monet, Kandinsky, Matisse, Gauguin, Pissarro and Cézanne. It was a completely different set of paintings we didn’t see anywhere else.

My favourite one was Sketch for ‘Composition V’ by Wassily Kandinsky (below).

Here’s a gallery for the other paintings:

After not being able to buy the exhibition catalogue, we headed off to Bodhi to have vegan yum cha. We were lucky as they had a table outside for us even though we didn’t have a booking. And, as usual, the yum cha was delicious. Here’s what we had:

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Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera from the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection at Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Diego on my mind (Self-portrait as Tehuana) 1943

self-portrait with braid

Self-portrait with braid 1941
Frida Kahlo painted Self-portrait with braid shortly after she married Diego Rivera in 1940. She portrays herself covered only by a grapevine, a symbol associated with the Roman god Bacchus and often used by the artist to symbolise everlasting love. The Fantastic braid references a hairstyle worn by young women from the Chinantla region of Oaxaca. Kahlo’s exaggerated version is fashioned into the shape of a lemniscate, the symbol for infinity.

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Self-portrait with monkeys 1943 oil on canvas
In 1943 Frida Kahlo was appointed professor at the National School of Painting, Sculpture and Printmaking. For Kahlo, who had not received any formal art education, this was an exceptionally high honour. In Self-portrait with monkeys the viewer is caught in a stare that is at once proud and all too aware of the irony of her appointment. Her white blouse, a traditional outfit worn by Yalalag women of her mother’s native Oaxaca province, is fastened with tassle of a doctoral cap. This painting is also arguably the earliest manifestation of ‘Fridamania’, with the four adoring monkeys representing a group of students who so admired their teacher that they became known as ‘Los Fridos’.

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