Dr Janine Burke

Background

Janine Burke holds a Monash Fellowship jointly in The Centre for Women’s Studies and Gender Research, School of Social and Political Inquiry, and English, Communications and Performance Studies. She is the award-winning author of sixteen books of art history, biography and fiction. Between 1977-1982, she lectured in art history at the Victorian College of the Arts. Subsequently, she has been a full-time writer and independent scholar. Her books include Australian Women Artists, 1840-1940 (Greenhouse, 1980) and Field of Vision: A Decade of Change, Women’s Art in the Seventies (Viking, 1990). In 1987, she won the Victorian Premier’s Award for fiction for her novel Second Sight (Greenhouse, 1986). Her next novel, Company of Images (Greenhouse, 1989) was shortlisted for The Age Book of the Year award and the Miles Franklin Award.

Janine has written extensively on the Heide circle including The Heart Garden: Sunday Reed and Heide (Knopf, 2004), Australian Gothic: A Life of Albert Tucker (Knopf, 2002), The Eye of the Beholder: Albert Tucker’s Photographs (Heide Museum opf Modern Art, 1998), Joy Hester (Greenhouse, 1983) and she edited Dear Sun:The Letters of Joy Hester and Sunday Reed (William Heinemann, 1995). Her most recent book is The Gods of Freud: Sigmund Freud’s Art Collection (Knopf, 2006) which was shortlisted for the 2007 NSW Premier’s award for non-fiction. She curated “Sigmund Freud’s Collection: An Archaeology of the Mind” for Monash University Museum of Art (2007) and University of Sydney Art Museum (2008).

Research Interests

My research is engaged in cross-disciplinary collaborative cultural projects that are historically framed by modernism and informed by a feminist approach. Chez Muse: Artists, Writers and Place (forthcoming, 2008) explores the fecund role of home and landscape in the work/lives of significant twentieth century international artists/writers including Claude Monet and Blanche Hoschedé-Monet, Karen Blixen, Ernest Hemingway, Georgia O’Keeffe, Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell, Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, and Emily Kame Kngwarreye. Landscape and the home/studio/garden are examined as intimate, inspirational zones that provoke change. By including major indigenous artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye, Chez Muse positions Australian art in an international context. My research on the Heide circle and my involvement, as a trustee of Heide Museum of Modern Art, with the restoration of Heide I, Sunday and John Reed’s home at Bulleen, has made me aware of how the ‘spaces’ of landscape and home can have a pivotal and potent relationship with one another.

My new project, Being Geniuses Together, explores dynamic creative partnerships between Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin, Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann, Thea Proctor and Margaret Preston, and Yoko Ono and John Lennon. It challenges the notion that making art is a solitary occupation, instead focusing on productive relationships that have lead to first rate artworks as well to the development of flourishing cultural milieus. It interrogates the notion of the lone (male) genius, replacing it with an examination of rich and fruitful interactions between individuals, the elective affinities that make artistic breakthroughs possible. Being Geniuses Together explores the subtle, complex, emotional connections on which such relationships depend, and sometimes founder.

Areas of supervision

• Modernist visual and literary studies
• Australian art
• Women and art
• Psychoanalysis and art