Some mysterious process

Josef Albers was a student and later a professor at the Bauhaus art school in Germany before it was closed in 1933 under pressure from the Nazi regime. Albers emigrated to the United States in 1933, where he became an influential writer, painter and colour theorist while teaching at Black Mountain College and later at Yale University. He commenced his celebrated Homage to the square series in 1950, using a strict configuration of quadrilateral shapes to investigate perception and the optical effects of colour. Albers would paint more than 2000 iterations of the composition over the next 25 years, continuing until his death in 1976.

Homage to the square: early fusion was acquired from the 1967 touring exhibition Two decades of American painting, along with Morris Louis’s 1958 work Ayin. This influential exhibition was presented at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in association with the International Program of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Richard Hamilton’s art was influenced by popular culture while also offering a critique of its effect on society. Kent State is a screenprint derived from a photograph of a television screen taken during a BBC news program. It depicts a Kent State University student shot and injured in 1970 during a demonstration protesting America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. The print emphasises the many electronic and mechanical procedures images undergo when transmitted for broadcast news. In doing so, it shows how the incremental degradation of information during its journey from incident to audience contributes to societal desensitisation to images of trauma in the media.

Kent State is part of a very large experimental print edition of 5000 that Hamilton made in collaboration with Munich-based dealer Dorothea Leonhart. The Gallery purchased print number 2703 in 1971.

During his short yet innovative artistic career as a pioneer of conceptual and performance art, Yves Klein embraced ideas of space, the void and freedom. He is known in particular for his development of International Klein Blue, a pure ultramarine pigment and binding medium that he employed in numerous works. In 1962 Klein began making body casts of himself and other artists associated with the nouveau réalist movement. Portrait relief PR3 (portrait of Claude Pascal) is a part of this series, left incomplete when Klein died prematurely at age 34.

The blue figure of Pascal, a fellow artist, appears to float in front of the golden ground. Klein had intended to represent himself in a reverse colour scheme but he died before a cast of his body was made. Following instructions, Portrait relief PR3 (portrait of Claude Pascal) was completed by his wife, Rotraut Uecker, after his death. The acquisition of the work was orchestrated in 1990 by then director Edmund Capon and former curator Anthony Bond in order to fill a major gap in our collection of art from the 1960s.

An early exponent of colour field painting, Morris Louis was a prolific artist, though his career was relatively short. Louis was influenced by Helen Frankenthaler’s stain paintings, and commenced working in this style in 1954. He made more than 600 paintings in the following eight years before succumbing to lung cancer in 1962. Ayin, from Louis’s second series of ‘veil’ paintings, was made by pouring a diluted artist’s acrylic paint onto unprimed cotton canvas. Louis folded, stretched and angled the fabric to direct the rivulets of pigment, allowing the washes of luminous colour to merge with the canvas.

Ayin was acquired from the 1967 exhibition Two decades of American painting. A display of post-war paintings by predominantly by New York-based artists, it is regarded as one of the most significant shows to travel to Australia. The exhibition was coordinated by the International Program of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and toured to the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.

In the 1950s and 1960s Robert Rauschenberg developed a unique body of work which he called ‘combines’. These hybrids of painting and sculpture made using found materials helped pave the way for the development of American pop art. This work was created for the influential 1962 exhibition Dylaby: dynamic labyrinth held at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Rauschenberg’s contribution was typical of his use of found materials, but also represents his humorous response to the chaos and confusion of the Stedelijk exhibition.

John Kaldor acquired Dylaby early on in his collecting career, in 1966 from Galerie Ileana Sonnabend in Paris. He subsequently gifted it to the Gallery as part of the John Kaldor Family Collection in 2019.