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Canberra, ACT 2600, Australia
Phone +61 2 6102 7000
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Dementia and the arts
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That principle of equity of access has ever since been a noble aspiration for all public art museums, as it is for us here at the National Portrait Gallery.
Brains trust
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Eminent doctors and scientists have for more than a century consistently caused our nation to punch far above her weight.
20/20 launch speech
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Dr Helen Nugent AO, Chairman, National Portrait Gallery at the opening of 20/20: Celebrating twenty years with twenty new portrait commissions.
Crème Valaze
From lanolin to Balenciaga
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Helena Rubinstein (1872‒1965) was the first self-made millionairess of modern times, and created the first publicly-listed global cosmetics corporation.
Magna Carta
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On this day eight hundred years ago at Runnymede near Windsor, King John signed Magna Carta.
The play’s the thing
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Penelope Grist charts an immersive path through Stuart Spence’s photography.
The Thyssen Art Macabre
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Books seldom make me angry but this one did. At first, I was powerfully struck by the uncanny parallels that existed between the Mellons of Pittsburgh and the Thyssens of the Ruhr through the same period, essentially the last quarter of the nineteenth century.
Of plague and portraits
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Corinna Cullen on the symbolic power of pandemic-related imagery over the ages.
Giving a dam
True south #1
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Ensconced and meditative in crisp Tasmania, Joanna Gilmour pays tribute to passionate green advocate and photographer Olegas Truchanas.
Embrace your inner nerd
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The southern winter has arrived. For people in the northern hemisphere (the majority of humanity) the idea of snow and ice, freezing mist and fog in June, potentially continuing through to August and beyond, encapsulates the topsy-turvidom of our southern continent.
The Viceroyalty of New Spain
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European painters always enjoyed a good deal of latitude in the representation of angels, those asexual, bodiless, celestial regiments of God, so long as they were young and beautiful.
The personal and the historical
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Where do we draw a line between the personal and the historical? Although she died in Melbourne in 1975, when I was not quite eleven years old, I have the vividest memories of my maternal grandmother Helen Borthwick.
Poise and Carats
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I keep going back to Cartier: The Exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia next door, and, within the exhibition, to Princess Marie Louise’s diamond, pearl and sapphire Indian tiara (1923), surely one of the most superb head ornaments ever conceived.
Christmas Island
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This is my last Trumbology before, in a little more than a week from now, I pass to my successor Karen Quinlan the precious baton of the Directorship of the National Portrait Gallery.