NSW Minister for the Arts Don Harwin today announced the two major summer exhitions coming to Sydney in October as part of the 2018/19 Sydney International Art Series. The Art Gallery of New South Wales will host an exhibition called Modern masters from the Hermitage, which showcases 65 paintings by artists including Matisse, Picasso, Kandinsky, Cézanne and Malevich. Meanwhile, the Museum of Contemporary Art will show a major retrospective by South African photographer David Goldblatt.

Claude Monet, Poppy Fields, c 180. Photograph © The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

Art Gallery of NSW Director Michael Brand, who has been a member of the International Advisory Board of the State Hermitage Musuem in St Petersburg since it was created in 1994, said that highlights of the exhibition from the Hermitage included Cézanne’s Great pine near Aix, Picasso’s Woman with a fan, Gauguin’s Month of Mary, Matisse’s Nymph and Satyr, Kandinsky’s Landscape and Malevich’s Black Square.

“An era of extraordinary change in the early 20th century saw modernists throughout Europe freeing themsleves from tradition and imagining life in new ways. The work of these pioneers still resonates today,” said Dr Brand.

David Goldblatt is the grandson...