Bertram Mackennal, the first Australian appointed as a member of the Royal Academy and arguably the most successful of this country’s artist expatriates, established a highly successful career as a sculptor in Edwardian England, aided by his Royal patronage under George V (who knighted him in 1921). Although Mackennal’s work has been somewhat eclipsed by painter contemporaries such as Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton over the past half century, his reputation in Britain was without Australian parallel until the advent of Arthur Boyd and Sidney Nolan in the mid-twentieth century.
Influenced primarily by Art Nouveau, Symbolism and later new classicist tendencies, Mackennal established an international reputation in the 1890s as a virtuoso modeller of elegant mythological female nudes and commanding portraits. Although Mackennal returned to Australia only three times, he maintained close links with this country through civic and private commissions and exhibitions, and his status as a cultural hero for a generation of Australian sculptors had a significant impact on the growth and directions of the art in this country.
Touring from the Art Gallery of NSW, this will be the first major retrospective and first comprehensive monograph produced on Bertram Mackennal.
