Janine Burke, c. 1980

Janine Burke (b. 1952) art historian, biographer, novelist and curator, graduated from the University of Melbourne in 1974. That year she co-curated Australian Women Artists: 1840-1940 at the Ewing and George Paton Gallery; the book that evolved from the exhibition remains a standard Australian art text. In 1975, Burke co-founded the Victorian Women’s Art Movement and LIP, a feminist arts journal. From 1977 to 1982, she lectured in art history at the Victorian College of the Arts; she resigned to write full-time and spent the some years living in Italy and France writing fiction. Second Sight won the 1987 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. While a trustee of Heide Museum of Modern Art between 1996 and 2005, she wrote books and curated exhibitions about the Heide modernist circle including Dear Sun (2001), Joy Hester.(2001) and Australian Gothic: A life of Albert Tucker (2003). Recently, she curated Sigmund Freud's Art Collection: An Archaeology of the Mind for Monash University Museum of Art and Nicholson Museum, University of Sydney. In Source: Nature's Healing Role in Art and Writing she examined the transformative effects of nature on Picasso, Virginia Woolf and Monet, among others. Personal View: Photographs 1978-1986, a book of her photographs of the Melbourne artworld, was published by Monash University Publishing in May 2011, coinciding with an exhibition of the photographs at the VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery. Her most recent publications are The Heart Garden (2012), a fourth book about Heide; and Nest: The art of birds (2012).

Collection: National Portrait Gallery
Purchased 2012
© Estate of Robert Rooney