Humanities and Social Sciences

Art History

Staff Directory

Dr Richard Haese

Honorary Associate Room: Humanities 3 107 Tel: (613) 9479 1236 Fax: (613) 9479 1942 Email: R.Haese@latrobe.edu.au Qualifications: DipArtEd South Aust. School of Art, BA(Hons) Adelaide, PhD Monash

Richard Haese joined the Art History Program in 1975. He began his studies in art at the South Australian School of Art, later majoring in history and politics at Adelaide University. He combined these two concerns in his doctorate at Monash University, focussing on the achievements of radical modernist artists against a background of the Depression and the Second World War. His book Rebels and Precursors: The Revolutionary Years of Australian Art won the NSW Premier’s Award for non fiction. Although he has concentrated his research and publication on modernist and postmodernist Australian art, he has travelled extensively throughout Europe and the United States, and has a special interest in modern German and American political and cultural history. Richard is now researching American history and culture.

Richard also teaches collaboratively in the interdisciplinary units, Making America: From Pocahontas to prohibition, a unit dealing with the evolution of American political and social history from 1776 to 1941 via the interrelationship between this history and American visual culture; America since 1945: pop art, politics & popular culture, a unit tracing the evolution of American political and social history from 1945 to the 1980s through the interrelationship between this history and American visual culture (with particular emphasis on the work of Andy Warhol and the Pop artists); and, America’s War in Vietnam: a cultural and military history, a unit that deals with the complex relationship between the experience of the Vietnam War in America and Australia and a range of cultural responses in art, film and literature that remain its cultural legacy. He also contributes to the Art History honours program and supervises at MA and PhD levels.

Research Interests

>>Research Interests

Richard’s research focuses in particular on the histories of modernism and postmodernism in 20th century Australia and America. He has written on the history of modernism in Australia in the 1930s and 1940s. He has also undertaken biographical research into the lives of the art patrons John and Sunday Reed, and researched the continuing story of avant-garde Australian art between 1950 and the 1990s with particular focus on the artist Mike Brown and the evolution of postmodernism in Australia.

>>Research Projects

His current research includes a study of Mike Brown and the evolution of an avant-garde Australian postmodernism, and a dual biography of the Australian art patrons John and Sunday Reed and their circle of artists.

>>Research Publications

Selected Publications
Journal articles and book chapters
2002/3 In press. 'Waiting for Postmodernism' (4000 words, originally published in Art Monthly Australia, April 1995, No. 78, pp. 5-8), included in the anthology Radical Revisionism, ed. by Rex Butler and to be published by Power Publications (Power Institute of Fine Art, Sydney University), Sydney, 2004.
1998: ' "Put it Anywhere!"': The Café Balzac Mural, Colin Lanceley, Mike Brown and Ross Crothall' (3200 words), in Brought to Light: Australian Art 1850-1965. From the Queensland Art Gallery Collection, eds. Lynne Seer and Julie Ewington, Brisbane, 1998, pp. 286-289.
1985 'Images of Loss: the Australian years of Yosl Bergner', introductory essay for Yosl Bergner: a retrospective exhibition, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1985, pp. 9-15.
1983 'Under the sign of the plain and the sky', in Sidney Nolan: The City and the Plain, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1983, pp. 8-31.
1982 'Australian Gothic: the art of Albert Tucker', in Albert Tucker Paintings 1945-1960, Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne, 1982 (introductory essay to exhibition catalogue).

Published lectures
2000 Who's afraid of the avant-garde? Two episodes in the Australian response to modernism: 1915-1945 (5000 words), Annual Rae Alexander Lecture, published by the Department of Art History, La Trobe University, Bundoora, 2000.

Books
1995 Power to the People: The Art of Mike Brown, retrospective exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 1995 (with supplementary essays by Mike Brown and Charles Nodrum).
1981 Rebels and Precursors: The Revolutionary Years of Australian Art, Allen Lane, Melbourne, 1981 (and subsequent editions).