MICHAEL MULLINS’ TINY LETTER

One of my family's treasures that has been passed through the generations is a set of two watercolour miniatures of my progenitors. They were painted by an itinerant artist on the Victorian goldfields soon after their arrival in Australia from Ireland in the 1850s.

I was reminded of these miniatures on Saturday when I visited the Dempsey's People exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra.

The mostly watercolour images of British street people were painted by itinerant artist John Dempsey during the first half of the 19th century. It was the era before photography put itinerant artists out of business.

As the exhibition notes put it, they were 'the real-life models of the proletarian grotesques in Charles Dickens' novels... the kind of people who came to Australia as convicts and as free settlers during the early colonial period'.

It is rare and refreshing to see portraits of people from the 18th and 19th centuries who were not the wealthy and influential celebrities of their day. It seems that it was almost an act of subversion to paint street people in a style that made them look as dignified as the nobles and rich merchants that dominate the National Portrait Gallery in London.

In particular I appreciated the paintings of the Ayrshire hermit, the Durham beggar, 'Little John' the Colchester lunatic, the maniac, and the old soldier from Salisbury. Each of them was painted in a way that made them stand tall, not reflecting the crushed demeanour and self-image that you would expect from their lowly circumstance and class. The stigma of the descriptors, lacking modern day political correctness, was turned on its head.

I was interested to read about 'old soldiers' in the notes about the exhibition. After the final defeat of Napoleon, the troops flooded home to an undeservedly less than rapturous welcome. The Duke of Wellington described them as the 'scum of the earth'. There was little work and few prospects for them in the towns and villages, where the derelict Old Soldier become a familiar figure.

This came home to me yesterday when I was talking to an incapacitated former Australian soldier who had been wounded in Afghanistan. It seems that the scant regard for 'old soldiers' is still a reality in our time. I think this applies generally to the way marginalised and dispossessed people in our community are stigmatised and represented adversely in the portraits painted by our celebrity dominated media, and - consequently - in our own attitudes.

The exhibition Queer British Art 1861-1967 has recently opened at Tate Britain, the original Tate Gallery in London that was renamed to distinguish it from the separate Tate Modern.

I went there on Friday with mixed feelings, sensing that it could be more of an ordeal than a pleasure to see a show designed to highlight acting on same sex attraction when it was a criminal and social taboo.

Sure enough, I was pleased to get out of there when I'd given it the once over.

I saw too much that was either troubling or confusing. There was photographer Wilhelm von Gloeden's turn of the 19th century portraits of naked Sicilian 10-20 year old boys posing as classical athletes. I wasn't sure how this was different from the kind of child pornography that exploits and damages minors and is now a serious offence to possess.

The exhibit's descriptive label refers to a writer who had a packet of van Gloeden's images and 'peeped at it again and again', but then provides context.

'To our eyes, there is a troubling power dynamic between the wealthy von Gloeden and the impoverished Sicilian community, and the uncertain age of some of his models gives an uncomfortable undercurrent to his work'.

If that was a bit edgy for me, the exhibition did include quite a few insights into aspects of social history that were new to me.

There was a painting of social reformer Henry Havelock Ellis, who spent his early adult years in Australia before returning to England to study to become a physician. He was also a writer and his most famous book Sexual Inversion (1897) was an objective study of homosexuality that did not present it as a disease, immoral, or a crime.

Currently Tate Britain also has a major David Hockney exhibition. I chose Queer Art because I'd seen the National Gallery of Victoria's Hockney show in Melbourne last November. But it occurred to me that a visit to the Tate's Hockney instead would have given me a much more grounded and celebratory experience of queer British art that was at the same time not lacking in edge.

A suprise later in the day was The Courtauld Gallery near Australia House in the Strand. I'd never heard of it before, but my sister had recommended it.

The Courtauld has a large collection on four levels, ranging from Medieval and Renaissance to 20th Century Modernist. These included many classics such as Van Gogh's 1889 Self Portrait with a Damaged Ear. A painting with huge appeal to the mainstream that would have once been regarded as quite challenging.

On Wednesday I went to the Turner Contemporary art gallery in the famous seaside town of Margate. My sister and I have plans to visit Margate on Monday, as she has a work commitment there. But I wanted to visit the 'thread art' exhibition which ends on Sunday.

Turner Contemporary is part of a vision to make Margate a cultural hub. Clearly it has a long way to go. For a start, the building's modern architecture does not sit well with the 19th century seaside resort and 'seen better days' ambience of the rest of the town.

That's not to say the gallery does not have a special affinity with Margate. Margate is where the renowned landscape painter J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851) came many times to produce work.

He was drawn by the unique quality of light in this part of Kent, and the skies that he called 'the loveliest in all Europe'. Turner Contemporary is built on the site of the boarding house where he stayed when he visited the town.

I was speaking with a woman who'd come all the way from Devon to see the exhibition. She described the building as a monstrosity. I imagine that impression will change as takes shape as a cultural hub in the coming decades and more modern architecture appears on the landscape.

That is what happened at St Ives, the isolated fishing village in Cornwall I visited last May. It is the site of the Tate St Ives, a satellite gallery of the London Tate, and many other art activities and enterprises.

Turner Contemporary first came to my attention as the gallery from which the 2016 Grayson Perry exhibition at Sydney's Museum of Contemporary Art had come. I had a thought that the current exhibition - Entangled: Threads and Making - might also come to Sydney. But the staff at Turner Contemporary told me that many of the works were too fragile to travel and Sunday would be the end.

For me, the appeal of 'thread art' is that the piece of art I commissioned two years ago to preserve an aspect of my family's history was from that genre. I've come to appreciate it since then, though I was not especially attracted to it beforehand.

A local university historian had given me a hand drawn map of a housing subdivision on our farm that had an interesting story I wanted remembered. I decided it would form the basis for a piece of art. The artist I was put in contact with happened to be a textile artist, and I came to love the form of the work she produced (below).

Entangled is the work of 40 international female artists from the mid 20th century to the present. It includes sculpture, installation, tapestry, textiles and jewellery.

I found it mesmerising. It was easy to lose myself in many of the exhibits. It's difficult to single out any particular work, but what lingered for me were two quotations that were on the wall in one area of the exhibition.

One suggested to me that thread art - and art in general - is akin to meditation: 'Being creative is not so much the desire to do as the listening to that which one wants to be done: the dictation of the materials.' (Anni Albers)

The other presents this style of art as a kind of mental massage: 'A lot of my work is just repetitive activity. I find that calming and free.' (Kiki Smith)

When I return to my house in Sydney on 1st June, I will look at the artwork on my wall with an elevated appreciation of 'thread art'.

During my brief visit to Paris last year, I tried and failed to find my way into the Pompidou Centre, one of the city's most visited tourist attractions. It was not clear how to get into the building, and there were many layers of security. Nothing had changed, but yesterday I was successful, even though I had time to see a only small part of the collection of modernist art it contained.

I had not even been sure of what all the fuss was about. Last year I wondered whether it was really anything more than a shopping mall, as I tried to negotiate my way through the retail outlets that seemed to obscure the major public institutions it houses. These include the huge Public Information Library and the National Museum of Modern Art, which is Europe's largest and the world's second largest after MOMA in New York.

The Pompidou Centre celebrates its 40th anniversary this year and has an interesting story itself. Being inside and riding the tubed escalators to the top is like being inside a piece of modern art. When it opened, an article in Le Figaro declared: 'Paris has its own monster'. The writer clearly did not appreciate the modern beauty of its exposed skeleton of brightly coloured mechanical system tubes.

One of the three architects was the Italian Renzo Piano, who has recently designed the three 'crystal' residential towers of Barangaroo's One Sydney Harbour building, with their elegant skins and highly transparent glass facades designed to highlight harbour's 'constant kaleidoscopic motion of colour and sparkle'.

When you finally get to it, the Pompidou Centre's contents are just as revolutionary as its form. One of the most famous works in the museum's collection is Dadaist Marcel Duchamp's famous urinal artwork Fountain. The first room I visited was devoted to a large artwork celebrating its centenary this year.

In what's called the Fountain Archive, 'post-conceptual' contemporary artist Saâdane Afif collects and archives every single publication in which he finds a reproduction of Duchamp's urinal. The pages are torn out and carefully framed, for the purpose of both preservation and decoration.

All the big names are in the museum, including Picasso, Matisse and Kandinsky. I'd been introduced to them long ago when I bought a season ticket and made repeated visits to the Masterpieces from the Guggenheim exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW 1991.

But the artist that most caught my attention yesterday was one I'd never heard of - František Kupka, one of the pioneers of abstract art in the early 20th century. He sought to capture the 'essence' - or fourth dimension - of the subjects of his artwork. Works such as Plan par couleurs (1910) - below - penetrated their subjects to reveal an extra layer of truth, in a way that drew from technical and scientific advances of the time such as X-ray.

It had me thinking of people claiming psychic powers, whom we perhaps unfairly trivialise and put down. Or animals that have a higher degree of sense perception than humans. It all goes to suggest that reality is far more than meets the eye, and that is the point of iconoclasm and challenging convention. Which is what these art movements of the early 20th century were about, and indeed the architects of the Pompidou Centre.

After an overnight stop in Seoul, my flight arrived in Paris early afternoon yesterday local time. I'm here for three nights on the way to Kent, England, where I will spend most of May staying with my sister.

I came to my airbnb, a tiny maid's room on the top floor of a building near the Luxembourg Gardens on the left bank. Then I went walking for a couple of hours to familiarise myself with the surroundings, as I usually do when I arrive in a new location.

The most interesting attraction I came upon was Autophoto, a new photography exhibition at the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art. It was, as The Guardian put it, about 'how photographers fell in love with cars'. Or, as the Foundation's website says, the car's reshaping our landscape and radically altering our conception of space and time.

It was the most captivating photography exhibition I can recall visiting, perhaps with the exception of the 'selfies' of the American photographer Cindi Sherman in Wellington in January.

I thought of my father, who never showed any interest in art. But he loved cars. In 1923 his family was the first in his north-east Victorian district to acquire a car. We still have the blanket that was bought to insulate the family from its draughtiness.

He would identify periods of his life by the particular car he or his family owned at the time. In a way, I do the same. I am not exactly anti-car, but I got rid of my last car in 2012 and now consider not owning a car as part of my identity. I sometimes wonder what my father would have made of that.

It occurred to me that this would have been the perfect art exhibition for him, although what would have interested me is unlikely to have been a highlight for him.

The exhibit I liked most was a very literal rendering of the exhibition's theme of cars merging with the landscape. It was from the 1990 visit to New Zealand of Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, whose three works appeared to be pieces of dark abstract art, despite my description of them as 'literal'.

Sugimoto explained: 'One day I came across an unusual cluster of things strewn over a beautiful beach. Vaguely familiar looking, they turned out to be hundreds of car parts... Someone must have junked a whole fleet of cars there... The sight of crafted objects rotting away is at once dreadful and beautiful.'

That summed up for me the impact of the car on our society, and Sugimoto's works were a perfect complement to the more photogenic works in the exhibition, which I enjoyed as well.