Media release
for immediate release
Drama, passion, beauty, desire…on a grand scale
The Art Gallery of South Australia’s grand touring exhibition Love & Death: Art in the Age of
Queen Victoria opens in Adelaide on 7 December before travelling through Australia and to New
Zealand throughout 2002.
Love & Death gathers together some of the grandest, most dramatic paintings from late
nineteenth-century Britain - when Britannia ruled the waves, Queen Victoria had reigned for more
than fifty years, and British industry and society were rushing headlong towards the tumultuous
twentieth century.
The works in this exhibition are big and bold. They depict popular stories that fascinated Victorian
artists and audiences - the death of lovers like Shakespeare's Juliet and the legendary Queen
Cleopatra of Egypt; the myth of the adulterer Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman in the
ancient world; or the tale of the sorceress Circe, who, mad with envy, turned a rival into a hideous
sea monster. These paintings are rich in elaborate detail, sumptuous colour and texture. They are
extravagantly emotional, endowing subjects drawn from the remote past with the passions and
emotions of real people in the present: love and death, fear and longing, beauty and desire.
Popular and acclaimed in its own time, Victorian art commanded high prices in England and in the
colonies. But with the arrival of Modern Art in the early twentieth-century Modernism, Victorian
paintings were held up to ridicule. Some museums consigned them to basements and
warehouses. Some were sold for a song. Others less fortunate were tossed down mineshafts.
Today, one hundred years after the death of Queen Victoria, we are witnessing a worldwide revival
of interest in the art that flourished in her reign, not least in Australia and New Zealand. The
enormous scale, technical brilliance and seductive subject matter of many Victorian paintings make
them both alluring and provocative to today’s public, and tremendously popular, particularly among
young people.
Love & Death comprises 67 large paintings (of between 1m and 5m in length) and is a
comprehensive exhibition of the best existing examples of high Victorian art drawn from the best of
Australian and New Zealand collections across eleven galleries. The exhibition will also include
works loaned by one of the great collectors of Victorian art in the world today John Schaeffer, of
Sydney, who since the early 1990s has assembled one of the most extensive and important private
collections of the period.
Three years in the planning and curated by the Art Gallery of South Australia, the exhibition is one
of the largest most complex and important touring exhibitions to be mounted by the Gallery in
recent times. Following the Exhibition’s premiere in Adelaide Love & Death will tour to Sydney,
Brisbane and Auckland.
For further details, interview or images please contact
Kate Jordan-Moore
Art Gallery of SA
Neil Ward
Neil Ward Publicity
08 8207 7021 or 0419 803 507
08 8361-3577
Love & Death: Art in the Age of Queen Victoria
7 December 2001 - 3 February 2002
NORTH TERRACE ADELAIDE SOUTH AUSTRALIA 5000 TELEPHONE (08) 8207 7000 FACSIMILE (08) 8207 7070