Michael Rockefeller / Jackson Pollock / Margaret Vine / Big Jim Bowditch
A storage bin containing a run of l980s American art magazines that once belonged to the late Australian art and history researcher , pottery and textile collector, feminist, editor , Margaret Vine , of Magnetic Island ,Queensland , has brought to light many features and dazzling advertisements of interest .
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Of particular notice is an article about the opening of the new Michael C. Rockefeller Wing in the Metropolitan Museum of Art . containing more than 1500 art objects from Africa, Pacific Islands and Pre-Columbian and native America . It was named after the son of Nelson Rockefeller,a former American Vice -President and New York Governor , who disappeared in 1961 on an anthropological collecting expedition ,covered in Little Darwin , among the Asmat people of Dutch New Guinea
It just so happens that Michael Rockefeller's disappearance was mentioned in Darwin in late June at the launch of Big Jim, biography of the crusading editor of the Northern Territory News , James Frederick Bowditch.
Bowditch had planned to parachute into the area to see if he could find Rockefeller. At the book launch it was suggested the incredible proposal by Bowditch would be included in a proposed Northern Territory Media Museum .(More later.)
Margaret Vine often underlined text and added margin comments in books and magazines.. Though now faint due to the passage of time , a December 1981 article on the stormy marriage of Lee Kasner and Jackson Pollock ,by New York Times reporter Grace Glueck , received her close attention
Aspects of Pollock's development and style are underlined , his heavy drinking . In respect of Krasner's artistic career , underlined is the statement that she had been held back by the misogonyny of the New York School and the fact that in 1984 she was to be given a rare restrospective for a woman by the Museum of Modern Art
A 1982 report from London about an exhibition by English painter Richard Sickert was obviously closely read by Margaret, one paragraph awarded an exclamation mark . He is described as having been a rather pathetic old terror in a bold check suit who wrote attention seeking letters to The Times and painted as if he did not give a damn, blatantly cribbing from newspaper photographs and Punch cartoons ; he also managed to squeeze in three wives.
More items of interest from the magazines are likely to be run in Little Darwin at some stage.
Architecture was another subject which interested Margaret Vine , early Brisbane architecture one aspect . However, this blog recently found a worn l969 book, A history of Architecture in France, by T. W. West, University of London Press, displaying her distinctive underlining of text and margin notes in ink.
