re: Creation/Re-Creation: the Art of Copying, the 19th & 20th Centuries
Dates:
19 October – 25 November 1989
Artists:
Howard Arkley, Luigi Bardi, Asher Bilu, M. Caire, Jon Cattapan, Isaac Michael Cohen, William Gilbert Collins, Greg Creek, David Davies, Peter Ellis, John Farmer, William Frater, Adrienne Gaha, Clewin Harcourt, Brent Harris, Polly Hurry, Marion Jones, John Longstaff, Geoff Lowe, David Lucas, Stephen Marcus, C. Molony, Howard J. Morgan, Jan Nelson, Gregory Pryor, James Quinn, Hugh Ramsay, Martin Sharp, Nigel Thomson, J.M.W. Turner, David Wadelton, Fred Williams, Eric Wilson, Anne Zahalka
Curator:
Merryn Gates
Location:
Monash University Gallery
Monash University, Clayton Campus
Opened by:
Dr Ann Galbally
About the exhibition
Re: Creation/Re-Creation was a research-driven exhibition that explored the complex and varied role of copying in art across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It examined how artists learn through copying, how attitudes toward the practice have shifted over time, and how copying intersects with ideas of originality and creativity.
Featuring seventy-two works—many rarely seen—drawn from the National Gallery of Victoria and regional collections, curator Merryn Gates structured the exhibition around three categories: the student copy, the mature copy and the copy in contemporary art.
‘The student copy’ section focused on works produced as part of formal training. John Longstaff’s Entombment of Christ, c.1888, a copy of Titian’s painting held in the Louvre, was created while Longstaff was in Paris on the National Gallery of Victoria's first Travelling Scholarship. Also featured was Jon Cattapan’s The Haywagon: Hell (detail) (after Bosch),1978, shown alongside preparatory sketches. These works reveal a young painter analysing compositional structure and, as Gates notes, they foreshadow Cattapan’s later thematic and pictorial affinities with Hieronymus Bosch’s apocalyptic vision grounded in close observation of everyday life.
‘The mature copy’ part of the exhibition examined how established artists revisited copying as an act of homage, study or reinterpretation. Notable examples included Fred Williams’s drawings after Rembrandt, produced in 1977 after receiving Otto Benesch’s Catalogue of Rembrandt’s Drawings as a gift from the National Gallery of Australia director James Mollison. Also featured were works by Clewin Harcourt, who deliberately reproduced his own paintings two decades after their original creation.
In the final section, ‘The copy in contemporary art’, the exhibition featured works by artists such as Geoff Lowe, Martin Sharp and Anne Zahalka, who used copying as a conceptual strategy—quoting the work of others to critically engage with art history and reflect on their own position within it.
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