My good friend Bacchus No-Smoke was having a drink with cronies at the Henry Jones Art Hotel on the Hobart waterfront where he heard that Arts Minister Lara Giddings is poised to announce that the second book in the Tasmanian series on outstanding artists, to be published next year, will be about landscape painter Philip Wolfhagen.
The first monograph, published last year, was about furniture designer-maker Patrick Hall. Published by Craftsman House, it was written by the senior curator of Australian decorative arts at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Grace Cochrane – who was the first person to get a PhD at the University of Tasmania’s art school.
Bacchus tells me the Wolfhagen book will be written by author Peter Timms, a recent resident of Hobart, whose last book was What’s Wrong with Contemporary Art?, published by the University of NSW Press. For what it’s worth … Wolfhagen doesn’t crack a mention in the index……
