Ladies Lounge

This lounge pays homage to an extraordinary woman, my great-grandmother Tootsie. She was the much-loved daughter of my great-great-grandfather, heir to a Swiss watchmaking fortune. The family was one of the five dynastic households of the Republic of Switzerland. Following a scandal within the royal court in the early nineteenth century, my great-great-grandfather relocated the family to Utah, where he applied his business expertise to the creation of an American pickle empire. He bought the first car in the state, built a lavish mansion, and grew notorious for his loose European morals: his debauched lifestyle ran all the way into the town river, polluting its pristine waters with pickle runoff (perhaps that’s why I pay penance by cleaning the River Derwent in Hobart). This sofa pays homage to him. If we could ask Tootsie, she’d say ‘it is a glorious rage against the patriarchy, darling’. Tootsie was amazing.

Tootsie married the wealthiest man in Utah (some things run in the family). Her husband was rich, but it was Tootsie who was powerful. She was a glamour-loving socialite who hosted the most decadent ladies-only high teas at her Beverly Hills estate—always in the grand lounge in the east wing, and always surrounded by priceless artefacts from our family’s collection. Here ladies would enjoy the fanciest delectables, waited on by a fleet of devoted butlers, while they discussed the issues of the day and recited passages from literature with the sexes reversed. She was famed for her extravagance, but legendary for her philanthropy. I think of our 24 Carrot Gardens Project as a perpetuation of her work.

At Mona, surrounded by art, architecture and male hubris, I was inspired to pay tribute to Tootsie by creating this ladies-only lounge—a place of priceless treasures, and a haven of enlightened conversation. So ladies, do as Tootsie would do: straddle the sofa, take in the opulent atmosphere, be smart, generous, and beautiful. And raise a glass—or three! To Tootsie.

—Kirsha Kaechele

Rug
2020
Mink pelt, hand-stitched by furriers to the Kingdom of Denmark
Collection Museum of Old and New Art (Mona)

Women and Fur

By Kirsha Kaechele

2020 was a difficult year for everyone, but none suffered so badly as the farmed mink population of Denmark. The poor creatures caught COVID-19 and had to be euthanised en masse. However, like all tragedies, there was a silver lining.

If there is one truth about women it is that they love fur. The silky touch of mink on bare skin is the epitome of luxury. Most of us don’t wear fur for ethical reasons—in the stylish cities of the world, one can barely step out without being splattered with red paint! But here we enjoy nature’s finest offering, free of guilt.

This rug transforms tragedy into triumph. I commissioned the finest furriers in Denmark (furriers to the Kingdom of Denmark and Princess Mary’s personal furrier) to hand stitch this rug with pelts of mink lost to the pandemic. The furriers’ craftsmanship is so fine you cannot locate a single seam. Its remarkable beauty is a celebration of the precariousness of life; in its splendour we find beauty in sadness. As I say in my book, Eat the Problem, transform a flaw into a feature...

Luxuriate and enjoy.

Leda and Swan
1960
Sidney Nolan (Born 1917, Melbourne, Australia; died 1992, London, England)
Polyvinyl acetate on hardboard
Collection Museum of Old and New Art (Mona)

The myth of Leda
By Jane Clark

Throughout his career Sidney Nolan preferred to work in series, on themes from history or mythology that he transformed as his own: from the Australian bushranger Ned Kelly to explorers Burke and Wills, Mrs Fraser and the convict, to Oedipus and Africa, Antarctica and China. This painting was inspired by the ancient Greek myth of Leda, the Aetolian princess seduced—or raped—by the god Zeus who had turned himself into a great white swan. It is part of a series on the theme, his first real departure from Australian subject matter, which brought him international fame and fortune in the summer of 1960.¹

Nolan had read Robert Graves’s Greek Myths while staying on the island of Hydra in 1955.² The encounter between Zeus and Leda resulted in Helen of Troy, among other hatchlings, and thus, ultimately, the Trojan War; and, in Nolan’s imagination, the Leda myth related closely to the ANZAC campaign—fought centuries later over much the same terrain. However, he was not concerned with simple narrative detail. He knew that artists had treated the theme of Leda since antiquity—perhaps most famously Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo in 16th-century Italy. He also knew the celebrated poem by W. B. Yeats, inspired in turn by a sculpture in the British Museum:

A sudden blow; the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

Both poet and painter imagined the swan’s coupling with Leda as at once violent and metaphysical.³

Nolan returned to the myth of Leda over and over again, in at least twenty large paintings and dozens of smaller works on paper. Translucent pigments are swept over a white ground to luminous effect. As his wife Cynthia recalled, having watched him at work on the series, ‘Sometimes the woman was bloody, the swan very savage. Often the figure was ambiguous, incidental, unidentified, the swan was not’.⁴

Seen all together in that first exhibition, the images must have appeared on the gallery wall almost as stills from a film sequence: one leading to another, the tempo changing, wings beating, breast heaving, the figures entangled or apart. Here the young woman seems at first receptive to the swan’s advance.

1. ‘Sidney Nolan—Leda and the Swan, and other recent work’, Matthiesen Gallery, London, 16 June–16 July 1960: purchasers included the Queen, Agatha Christie, Rod Steiger and the Art Gallery of New South Wales. London’s Queen magazine published a list of current status symbols with ‘ownership of a Sidney Nolan’ near the top. See Jane Clark, Sidney Nolan: Landscapes and Legends, ICCA and Cambridge University Press, 1987, p. 117.

2. Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1955, pp. 206–7.

3. William Butler Yeats, ‘Leda and the Swan’, first published in 1923.

4. Cynthia Nolan, Open Negative—an American Memoir, Macmillan, London, 1967, p. 224.

Visage en gros relief (Face in thick relief)
Pablo Picasso
1959
Ed. 4/100
Round dish, moulded in white earthenware clay, decoration in engobes and ceramic pastel crayons under partial brushed glaze
Collection Museum of Old and New Art (Mona)

Ethnography and fantasy
By Pippa Mott

In 1907, at the age of 26, Pablo Picasso visited the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris. The museum held a vast collection of cultural objects from the colonies. Here, Picasso experienced a revelation that would crucially influence the direction of his artmaking.

‘A smell of mould and neglect caught me by the throat. I was so depressed that I would have chosen to leave immediately. But I forced myself to stay, to examine these masks, all these objects that people had created with a sacred, magical purpose, to serve as intermediaries between them and the unknown, hostile forces surrounding them, attempting in that way to overcome their fears by giving them colour and form. And then I understood what painting really meant. It’s not an aesthetic process; it’s a form of magic that interposes itself between us and the hostile universe, a means of seizing power by imposing a form on our terrors as well as on our desires. The day I understood that, I had found my path.’¹

The artist’s appropriation of so-called ‘primitive’ tribal art has been discussed most robustly in relation to his seminal painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which was painted later that year. Picasso was of course part of a broader European Modernist movement that included many other white folks who were employing compositions and patterns drawn from tribal art and indulging in ‘primitive’ fantasies and fetishisation.

Picasso went on enthusiastically to collect African artefacts. Visage en gros relief (1959), a plate executed in an edition of 100, was created more than 50 years after Picasso first visited the Musée du Trocadéro, and demonstrates the lasting impact of these African ceremonial items on his artistic vocabulary.

1. Quoted by Andrew Meldrum, ‘Stealing Beauty’, The Guardian, 15 March 2006 at https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2006/mar/15/art

Visage (Face)
Pablo Picasso
1960
Ed.93/100
Earthenware clay, slip (engobes) coloured with metal oxides, glaze
Collection Museum of Old and New Art (Mona)

Universal expression
By Jane Clark

Created in 1960, when Picasso was almost 80, this energetic design makes deliberate reference to his own celebrity: to his own famous art history; in particular his interest in African, Iberian and Oceanic tribal art and his invention, with George Braque around 1907–8, of Cubism. Cubism revolutionised the representation of reality, overturning the idea of perspective, fracturing and compressing the two-dimensional picture plane so as to convey three-dimensional space. Picasso’s large square painting, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, completed 1907, arguably changed the course of modern art.
¹

Picasso was fascinated by carved African masks that he first saw in the Trocadero Ethnographic Museum in Paris.² The facial features of this anonymous ceramic Visage are similarly deconstructed, highly stylised and yet vividly alive. As he reputedly said at some point, ‘A head is a matter of eyes, nose, mouth, which can be distributed in any way you like’.³

Clearly, Picasso understood the biologically evolved human capacity for unconscious pattern recognition. He also understood the almost infinite range of art’s expressive possibilities.

1. Now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York (www.moma.org/collection/works/79766).

2. His very first experience of African sculpture was a Vili piece owned by Henri Matisse. At first he denied any influence from African art, claiming ‘L’art nègre? Connais pas!’; to Florent Fels, in ‘Opinions sur l’art nègre’, Action, vol. 1, no. 3, Paris, April 1920, p. 25 (https://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/islandora/object/ui:dada_29405). Later he acknowledged his interest in so-called ‘primitive’ art and he collected many examples himself. For a recent detailed study of the African influence on Picasso, see Suzanne Preston Blier, Picasso’s Demoiselles: The Untold Origins of a Modern Masterpiece, Duke University Press, Durham, 2019

3. Quoted at www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/c/cubism and liberally around the internet, but not that I have yet found, with a source.

Zoomorphic ring
Ghana, West Africa, Akan, 20th century
Cast gold
Collection Museum of Old and New Art (Mona)

A story-telling ring
By Jane Clark

Iconography and oral storytelling are often closely linked in Akan art, even in wearable artworks such as this large finger ring. The Akan people of gold-rich West Africa include the Asante, Baoulé, Fante and other groups spread across a region ranging from the forest and coastal areas of present-day Ghana to the southern Ivory Coast. Gold remains central to Akan culture, embodying sunlight and life’s vital forces as well as royal power.

Early traders and colonists reported the Akan royal courts as among the most splendid in Africa: one of the first Europeans to explore the interior of Africa’s fabled Gold Coast, a British envoy named Thomas Bowdich, found a local chieftain in 1817 so bedecked with gold jewellery that his wrist was ‘supported on the head of a small boy’ (even today there are some 125 chiefdoms, or traditional states, independent of Ghana’s official government). Hands were considered one of the most expressive parts of the body, not only for gesture and dance but also representing power and judgement.

Perhaps this ring illustrates a traditional warning proverb that a hunter may become the hunted: a large baboon, unwarily feasting on something tasty, a grub or perhaps a locust, seems about to fall prey to a man with a gun. However, recent research suggests an alternative story: that the man with the gun is a farmer, protecting a friendly and hungry baboon who is in turn protecting the harvest from insect pests. Mythological references to baboons in this part of Africa probably date back to ancient Egyptian times when the god Thoth, represented as a baboon, was believed to orchestrate sunrise. Firearms are, of course, more recent iconography.

The baboon’s plump body was probably intended to hold herbs, snuff or tobacco. There is a triangular hole cut into the gold on one side, perfectly placed for the wearer to enjoy aromatic substances when he or she brings the hand to the face.

1. There is an Akan gold ornament of a baboon eating a clearly identified grasshopper in the Alfred C. Glassell Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; see Doug Stewart, ‘West African Gold: Out of the Ordinary’, Smithsonian Magazine, December 2005.

2. Thanks to Lindie Ward, former curator at the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences Sydney, who also points out that the gun is an early 18th-century muzzle-loaded, smooth bored flintlock musket (Britain exported 400,000 guns a year to Africa by mid-century). This required two pouches, one for gunpowder, one for shot, which you can see slung over the man’s shoulders: a cumbersome system replaced by the Enfield rifle in 1853. The size of this ring suggests it may be a 20th-century depiction of a much older firearm.

3. Thanks again to Lindie Ward for this suggestion.

Pendant depicting a bat
Modern, in the manner of the Diquís region of Costa Rica, c. 1000–1550
Gold
Collection Museum of Old and New Art (Mona)

Zoomorphic gold
By Jane Clark

Scholars of the ancient Americas believe that metalworking techniques spread from Colombia along the marine corridor of the Pacific Coast to the people of the volcanic landscapes of Southern Costa Rica and Northern Panama.

Some interpretations suggest that zoomorphic figurines, often found in burials, imbued their owners with the power of animals they depict. Predatory animals were common subject matter: bats, crocodiles, sharks, felines, and spiders appear in various guises.

Unfortunately, many burial sites have been looted. The intrinsic value of the gold means many objects have probably been destroyed for sale as bullion; while the value of collectible antiquities means that replicas and fakes have been created for other markets.

Pendant depicting dogs fighting over a bone
Modern, in the manner of Costa Rica (Diquís Region), in the Period V–VI, 500–1550 CE
Gold
Collection Museum of Old and New Art (Mona)

Ancient technique, modern object
By Jane Clark

The art of goldworking in Central America, in the period before the Spanish conquest, extended from Colombia to Costa Rica. The lost wax casting technique was used for jewellery.

One major source of gold was near the Diquís Delta region of southern Pacific Costa Rica: la costa rica is Spanish for ‘rich coast’, the name first applied by Christopher Columbus or an early conquistador. It seems likely that gold was traded along the coast; but, because so much ancient gold from Mesoamerica comes from unrecorded looting, it is rarely possible to link a style securely to a region. The umbrella stylistic description ‘Diquís-Chiriquí-Veraguas’ is sometimes used.

Dogs have probably lived in Central America as long as humans have.¹ However, specialists in the study of Pre-Columbian gold consulted by Mona believe that the canine iconography of this pendant is a modern invention—made in Costa Rican style.

You may have noticed that the disputed bone appears to be a small human foot.

1. Genetic studies confirm that the modern Chihuahua is most definitely descended from Pre-Columbian canines living in Mexico. Xoloitzcuintli, or Mexican hairless dogs, are another ancient breed still kept as pets.

Kantharos
Panticapaeum, Greek, c. 320–250 BCE
Beaten gold
Private collection

Scythian treasure
By Jane Clark

While crops will fail and land can be seized, precious metal is both portable and recyclable. The weight and the gold content of this elegant cup, with its symmetrical handles and rib-patterned bowl, suggests that it was made from 100 Greek coins melted down for re-use: probably worked by Greek craftsmen for a nomadic Scythian client (this notwithstanding the ancient Greek view of Scythians as fierce fighters, easily drunk and fond of blood oaths and hemp-smoking).¹

The Scythians, who at times dominated the steppes and grasslands of Eurasia from what is now western China as far into Europe as the River Danube, had grown especially wealthy during the fourth century BCE by trading grain around the Mediterranean and Black Sea. Possibly also slaves.

Apparently they enjoyed the aesthetic as well as the buying power of their riches. A number of treasure-filled Scythian tumuli or burial chambers have been unearthed since the 1980s on the site of the ancient Greek city of Panticapaeum (Pantikapaion), near Kerch in modern Ukraine and objects from the site are now in The Hermitage and Kerch Museums, as well as the British Museum. This cup was found crumpled in one tomb. Excavations reportedly continue.

1. Athenaeus and Hesychius of Alexandria, citing Herodotus; see Ellen D. Reeder (ed.), Scythian Gold: Treasures from Ancient Ukraine, Harry N. Abrams, New York, 1999, p. 33.

Pendant depicting an eagle with fanned tail
Modern, in the manner of the Chiriquí region of Costa Rica, c. 800–1500 CE
Gold
Collection Museum of Old and New Art (Mona)

Gold—ancient and modern
By Jane Clark

The art of goldworking in Central America, in the period before the Spanish conquest, extended from Colombia to Costa Rica. La costa rica is Spanish for ‘rich coast’, the name first applied by Christopher Columbus or an early conquistador. It seems likely that gold was traded along the coast; but, because so much ancient gold from Mesoamerica comes from unrecorded looting, it is rarely possible to link a style securely to a region.

Beaten gold and the lost wax casting technique, both used for ancient jewellery, are still in use today—by contemporary jewellers as well as those making modern interpretations of Mesoamerican metalwork.

Pendant depicting a shaman wearing an animal mask
Modern, in the manner of the Diquís region of Costa Rica, c. 1000–1550
Gold
Collection Museum of Old and New Art (Mona)

Gold facts—nuggets of information
By Jane Clark

Gold has been a desirable commodity for a very long time: mined for more than 6,000 years according to gold historian Timothy Green. Central and South America remain important sources of gold (Australia is currently third on the list of countries for worldwide gold production).

The way we use gold is changing. From ancient times until recently, it has always been recycled.

Almost all the gold that’s ever been mined still exists in the above-ground stock, circulating among investors, worn on human bodies, in bank vaults, or museums. So, if you own a gold watch, some of the gold it’s made of could have been mined by the Romans or in Costa Rica millennia ago.

The way gold is now used in the technology industries is different. According to the British Geological Survey, around 12% of current world gold production finds its way to this sector, often used in such small quantities in each individual product that it’s not economical to recover, recycle and reuse. In short, they say, gold may be being ‘consumed’ for the first time.¹

1. Ed Prior, ‘How much gold is there in the world?’, BBC News at www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21969100

Amulet of a winged scarab
Egypt, Late Period to Ptolemaic, c. 664–30 BCE
Glazed composition
Collection Museum of Old and New Art (Mona)

As blue as the sky
By Jane Clark

Amulets such as this were stitched into shrouds or linen mummy wrappings to effect magical protection in the Afterlife of the deceased. This image of a scarab beetle with outspread wings, symbolic of resurrection and rebirth, also references depictions of the winged falcon-god Horus and the winged sky goddess Nut offering an airy, feathered sanctuary emblematic of Heaven’s blue canopy.

Hair ornament with decorative bust
Possibly from Egypt, Hellenistic, Ptolemaic Period, 300–100 BCE; with 20th-century chain
additions
Gold
Collection Museum of Old and New Art (Mona)

Hair ornament or box lid?
By Jane Clark

This beautiful gold hair ornament was purchased as a rare piece of ancient Greek jewellery intended to be worn over a bun, made in Egypt during the late third to early second century BCE. Incorporating three-dimensional figurative decoration into personal adornments was a fashion that spread during the centuries following Alexander the Great’s creation of a Greek empire that reached as far as northwestern India. Those Hellenistic conquests also meant the gold supply was much increased.

In fact, it’s been suggested that the central medallion of this piece originally decorated the lid of an ancient Hellenistic pyxis—a cylindrical box to hold cosmetics or trinkets—rather than a woman’s hair. However, experts on ancient gold have concluded that the chain network was added in recent decades. Ancient objects are, unfortunately, quite often ‘improved’ for sale.

It has also been suggested that even the central medallion is modern.

There are related gold ornaments at the Louvre in Paris, the Metropolitan in New York, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and the National and Benaki Museums in Athens. One recent hypothesis is that a number of comparable figurative medallions were made using bronze moulds from the Galjub treasure hoard, found in the ruins of a Hellenistic Egyptian goldsmith’s workshop and now in the Roemer-Pelizaeus Museum in Hildesheim, Germany.¹ Because the archaeological find spots, or provenience, of valuable objects such as this were not often recorded in the past, there’s uncertainty about the origins of examples even in leading museums in Greece and the United States.

Currently, this ornament is catalogued at Mona as an authentic Hellenistic hammered gold central medallion, probably depicting a maenad, with modern gold chain links added. It’s often easier to contest authenticity than to be sure of it. Decisions are usually, in the end, a matter of probability, and can move over time within a wide spectrum of certainty.

1. Michail Yu Treister (ed.), Hammering Techniques in Greek and Roman Jewellery and Toreutics, Colloquia Pontica, vol. 8, Brill, Leiden and Boston, 2001, pp. 253ff.

Covered kohl container
Egypt, probably Late Period, 664–332 BCE
Glazed composition with hieroglyphs incised
Collection Museum of Old and New Art (Mona)

Eye makeup
By Jane Clark

Both men and women in ancient Egypt painted kohl made from ground minerals around their eyes, for health as well as personal adornment. The coloured mineral powders were mixed with fat and applied with a small stick.
Green kohl made from malachite was largely ornamental; but black kohl made from galena helped reflect the sun’s glare and, because of its lead content, actually repelled flies and other pathogen-carrying organisms that could cause disease and blindness.¹

In those days, people didn’t understand infection transmission at all and they usually ascribed illness to malevolent magic. Containers such as this, often inscribed with spells, combined the practical and the magical in the way of much ancient Egyptian art and decoration.

1. James P. Allen and David T. Mininberg, The Art of Medicine in Ancient Egypt, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2005, pp. 19–20.

Pair of lions’ heads
Egypt, perhaps 1069–30 BCE
Carved and gilded wood
Collection Museum of Old and New Art (Mona)

Fancy furniture

By Jane Clark

Having parted from their original context long before they found themselves in a museum, these disembodied lion heads are a bit of a mystery. They’re believed to have been made in ancient Egypt (research into their early provenance has so far proved fruitless) and they were most likely part of a piece of furniture: perhaps the ends of the armrests on a very fancy chair.