Judy Cassab Exhibition - disappointment?

Maybe it was a disappointment, but only in relation to the size of the exhibition and the way it was exhibited and treated. Not enough attention paid by the National Portrait Gallery to this important Australian painter – Judy Cassab. Maybe I am too sensitive, maybe too formal, and maybe still too European? Maybe my special pilgrimage to Canberra to see the exhibition unduly raised my expectations. The fact is that I was disappointed. At the information desk people had to think a bit and check if indeed there is an exhibition of Judy Cassab in the Gallery. There was no catalogue. The Gallery shop did not have any books related to the artist, “ran out of it...”. The exhibition was displayed in two separate and distant rooms. But this is enough of complaints.

It is a small exhibition, 16 portraits in all. But what portraits! Frank Packer’s portrait I liked as a reproduction, in reality is splendid, bigger than I had expected not only in size but in colours and boldness of lines. It had a WOW effect on me.

Still applies?

                                         

Another favourite was the portrait of George Molnar – a cartoonist whose work featured in Sydney Moring Herald and Daily Telegraph for many years. Soon after his arrival to Sydney in 1939 be worked as a government architect in Canberra and later lectured architecture at the University of Sydney.

There is no portrait, at the exhibition, of Desiderius Orban another Hungarian painter whose contribution to Australian culture was significant. I would have loved to see his portrait there. There are two, I know of and this one is from 1985, of course by Judy Cassab.

And this is one of Orbans landscapes from 1952. I love it!

He, Judy Cassab and George Molnar were friends. Judy Cassab writes in her diaries about the three Hungarians being filmed in 1980 at Cosmopolitan, a coffee place which still is an institution in Sydney’s Double Bay with customers mainly of Hungarian and Polish origin. As a Polish saying goes – Pole and Hungarian are like cousins.  Maybe this is the reason for my  special interest in Judy Cassab?