Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.If you’ve been looking for an excuse to immediately fly down to Hobart, look no further. Of all the shows I regret seeing late in the day, and all those that most urgently need to travel to other venues,at David Walsh’s Museum of Old and New Art is top of both lists.
Our public museums seem to believe nowadays that all good things come from contemporary art. The present is seen as progressive, dynamic and enlightened, while the past is stained with misogyny, racism and colonialism. Besides, it’s much easier to strike the right attitude as an apostle of the contemporary rather than a scholar of the past. To venture into art history, one needs to do a good deal of reading and research. Or to give it another name: work.
Previous curators, Sophie Matthiesson and Gordon Morrison are also involved, making the project a kind of reunion for alumni of the National Gallery of Victoria. What comes through strongly is the curators’ passion for their subject, which traces the history of the icon from 1350 to 1900.
The motifs may have remained inviolate for centuries, but this exhibition demonstrates how naive it is to believe the art of the Orthodox Church, often referred to as byzantine, was hieratic, inflexible and unchanging. The earliest icons we have date from the 5th and 6th centuries, long after Emperor Constantine’s conversion to Christianity in AD 312 and the sack of Rome in AD 410. The images seem to have grown out of the naturalistic Fayum funerary portraits from Roman Egypt.