Art + Australia


Art + Australia is a biannual magazine, and the country's longest-running art journal. It succeeded Art in Australia in 1963 as Art and Australia, and changed from Art & Australia to its current name in 2015. In August 2022 the magazine became a digital-only publication.
WWW artandaustralia.com

History

1960s

The magazine was first published by Sam Ure Smith in May 1963 as Art and Australia. It followed Sam's father Sydney Ure Smith's publication Art in Australia, which was in print from 1916 until 1942, when war restrictions caused its demise. Ian Burn has noted that between the cessation of Art in Australia in 1942, and 1963 when Art ''and Australia commenced publication, no regular art periodicals circulated nationally, except for the Contemporary Art Society's broadsheet and that an "art boom" in the 1960s presented "an opportune time" to launch Art and Australia. Its second issue was hailed by the Canberra Times:
Humphrey McQueen identifies Art and Australia'' as one of the first to exploit advances in offset colour printing on quality stock in Australia. However, Donald Brook, taking issue with the "too expensive" 1964 cover price concludes that:

1970s–1980s

From 1963 to 1983, Mervyn Horton was the magazine's founding editor when it faced competition from of Artlink in Adelaide and Art & Text in Melbourne, both in 1981, and Praxis X in Perth, in 1983. International artists visiting and exhibiting in Australia were given coverage in such articles as Daniel Thomas's consideration of performance art in 'Moorman and Paik in Australia' in the September 1976 issue, while attention was paid to Australian artists' activities overseas, as when Ian Burn, in ‘Conceptual Art as Art’, published in Art and Australia in September 1970, examined another avant-garde movement through the example of Robert Jacks.

1990s

After Horton's death in 1983 Elwyn Lynn became editor, followed by Jennifer Phipps and Leon Paroissien, Dinah Dysart, Hannah Fink and Laura Murray Cree. As Anderson notes, under Dysart's editorship the winter issue of 1993 examined contributions to Australian art made by European as artists and architects, art historians and dealers. In 1993, Art and Australia included ART and AsiaPacific as a supplement, then as a stand-alone quarterly publication from November 1993. That year, Sam Ure Smith, then 71, sold the magazine and his company, Fine Arts Press to Switzerland-based American publisher Martin Gordon founder of Gordon and Breach, who also secured art book publisher Craftsman House for, equivalent to in, also 21C: The Magazine of Culture, Technology And Science, and started Art AsiaPacific, before illness and financial problems necessitated his selling both companies, for a nominal sum, to associate Rhonda Fitzsimmons who after divesting of liabilities retained Art & Australia for its advertising revenue.

2000s

In 2003, Parson's School-trained artist and art collector Latvian-born Eleonora Triguboff, wife of investment manager Michael Triguboff, became owner, editor and publisher. Proclaiming that "as a sculptor I always wanted to be involved in a magazine," her ambition was to increase circulation of the magazine beyond its then 10,000. Her purchase of the most lucrative asset of Fine Art Publishing meant the sale of the less profitable Art AsiaPacific to Chinese businessman-artist, Xhao Gang in New York, and of the 21-year-old book publishing arm Craftsman House, to Thames & Hudson.
Since 2006, winners of the Art & Australia/ANZ Bank ''Private Banking Contemporary Art Award – awarded to Australian and New Zealand emerging artists – have appeared on the magazine's back cover. In 2008, the magazine, with Dott Publishing in Paddington, New South Wales, released the survey Current: contemporary art from Australia and New Zealand.
In August 2013, the print magazine celebrated fifty years, was rebadged as ARTAND Australia, and the 201st issue – volume 51, number 1 in August 2013 – featured a redesign by Melbourne-based design firm Fabio Ongarato Design. In 2014, ARTAND Australia migrated the magazine to a fully online presence to focus on art book publication with Dott Publishing, its imprint. In 2015, Triguboff donated Art & Australia, rebadged Art + Australia, to the Victorian College of Arts, before it was relaunched in October 2020. In the period between 2015 and 2021, Art + Australia published biannual, thematic issues that charted the geopolitical conditions of contemporary artistic practice.
In 2022, Art + Australia'' became a digital-only publication, with discussions, criticism and reflections on contemporary artistic practice from Australia and abroad, releasing contributions by Peta Clancy, Jahkarli Romanis and Kirsten Garner Lyttle, Lisa Liebetrau, Thomas Moran, Loqui Paatsch, Aimee Dodds and Tim Burns, Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris, Caitlin Hughes, Jacqui Shelton and Roberta Joy Rich, Jane O’Sullivan, Elly Kent, Stephanie Siu, Zoe Theodore, Natasha Bullock, and Erica Tarquinio in the two-part issue 'The Fever' in May 2025.

Online archive

The Art + Australia website, hosted at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne and supported by the bequest of Western Australian dermatologist, art collector, and philanthropist Harold Schenberg, is a platform to share the magazine archive of over fifty years and daily news. Past issues of the magazine from 1963 to the present were scanned in entirety in two levels of resolution and made openly available online in 2024.

Reception

Green and Barker in 2025 place Art and Australia of the 1970s amongst "coffee-table-friendly, glossy" art magazines that promoted the "status quo" against a growing competition starting with Other Voices, a journal of art criticism edited by Terry Smith and Paul McGillick, who intended to offer an alternative to Art and Australia, still "the only Australian art magazine professionally and continuously published at the time", by presenting "serious writing about the newest art". Indeed, in September 1967 the magazine devoted a special issue to the retrospective exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW honouring Australian painter Sidney Nolan's 50th year. Nevertheless Wilson highlights the magazine's prescience, amongst the international journals also read by local artists – Art International, Artforum and ARTnews – even before the 1968 seminal exhibition The Field was staged at the new campus of the National Gallery of Victoria:
Mendelssohn writing in 2014, considered Art & Australia "the most significant continuing publication on Australian art. It has often been the first published source of information and research on Australian artists, and has a long-standing practice of reviewing books on Australian art and major exhibitions".

Editorial Advisers

The magazine has involved distinguished editorial advisers.

Current ()

Past

Selected contributors

Selected cover artists

Book publications

Art & Australia Pty Ltd was the publishing house that printed Art & Australia and which, with Dott Publishing, produced art books and artist collaborative books including:
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