Geraldine Pascall Foundation

In the world or art, reviews have a particularly significant place. Artists list newspaper reviews on their CVs, for they are often the only public record that an exhibition has been seen, noted and evaluated. Nelson never shrinks from the hard tasks of aesthetic and cultural judgement, in the process sometimes toppling a few sacred cows. Yet he also brings a larger perspective to the task of criticism: a sense of the eternal dilemmas faced by painters, sculptors and the like as they grapple with the tasks of representing the world, translating emotions and risking a point-of-view. Robert Nelson relates to the work of artists as a painter himself; he once remarked in an interview: 'Painting is a big deal for me. A lot of what I comment on relates to technique and a kind of speculation which is studio-based. All the art history training in the world doesn't yield the intuitions that a prolonged stint in the studio produces. This goes beyond technique, of course, to the questions and dilemmas of what to do in every respect.
An art historian and teacher at Monash University in Melbourne, Nelson pursues in the mass media, from week to week, a witty, learned, reader-friendly disquisition on his most passionate obsessions: the depiction of the landscape or the human face; art about or by children; the transmutation into images of the elusive properties of eroticism, good and evil, or the ordinary and marvellous everyday. The judges were impressed by the strength and quality of Nelson's writing.

'He has a real voice', one judge commented, 'individual and engaged'. Like past Pascall Prize winners, Robert Nelson draws us, too, into a joyous engagement with the ongoing adventure of art, and a cultural conversation of wide-reaching implications.
Judges 2000
Gay Bilson
Marion Halligan
Adrian Martin
Andrew Riemer
Alan Saunders