Dr Leigh Astbury
- MA (Univ. Melb) Dip. Ed (Univ. Melb) PhD (Monash)
- Senior Lecturer
- Contact details
- Full Curriculum Vitae
(PDF)
Background
Leigh Astbury received his MA from the University of Melbourne and his PhD from Monash University. He joined Monash in 1987, having previously taught art history at the University of Melbourne, La Trobe University and the Prahran College of Advanced Education. He is the author of City Bushmen: the Heidelberg School and Rural Mythology, which won the 1986/7 Australian Academy of the Humanities- Esso Award for Outstanding Work on the History of Culture in Australia. His most recent book is on the contemporary Australian artist, Victor Majzner, Earth to Sky: the Art of Victor Majzner (2002).
Research Interests
I have a wide interest in Australian visual culture and have taught courses ranging from early colonial art to postmodernism. Much of my published research engages with the exploration and critique of visual stereotypes of identity. In tracing the trajectory of particular identity types through history, I have studied the dissemination of images across various visual media. I consequently align my research interests with visual culture as a discipline and field of enquiry, as distinct from traditional art history.
My early research on the Heidelberg School led to an interest in urban imagery and in how the experience of modernity structures vision. It also provided the impetus for my concern with the representation of gender in Australian visual culture. From an initial engagement with specific gender topics such as Australian war art, I have developed a more extensive focus on visual masculinities, especially during the contemporary period. The advent of postcolonial art and discourse has been critical to some of my recent research, leading me to combine a longstanding commitment to contemporary Australian art and artists with research into postcolonial revisions of nineteenth-century visual culture.
For over a decade I acted as art consultant to a major Australian corporation and undertook annual picture research in our capital cities. Through this work, I have acquired wide knowledge of public art and picture collections and their histories, important private collections, etc. which has contributed to my scholarly interest in the development of art, patronage and taste in Australia. I have been able to apply the knowledge and expertise gained to supervision of postgraduate theses in the area.
I welcome enquires from prospective postgraduate students with research interests in Australian visual culture.
Selected Publications
City Bushmen: the Heidelberg School and the Rural Mythology (1985) provides a scholarly argument concerning the urban origins of the rural myth in late nineteenth-century Australian art. It reveals that the famous images of the Australian bushman in the paintings of the Heidelberg School have sources in popular imagery and traces the circulation of visual images of the male rural worker across various media in Australia, Britain, France and North America.
Sunlight and Shadow: Australian Impressionist Painters 1880-1900 (1989) is a well illustrated book which aims to widen the standard opus of Australian art history through its focus on an expanded range of subjects and by drawing attention to the work of apparently minor artists. Inseparable from the selection of artists and pictures was the intention to achieve an Australia-wide coverage of art communities, thus consciously breaking with the familiar Melbourne-Sydney nexus in most Australian art histories.
From Earth to Sky: the Art of Victor Majzner (2002) offers a detailed interpretation of the work of one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists, contextualizing his development within larger themes and issues including the migrant experience and identity, modernism and postmodernism, and the encounter between white art and Aboriginal culture.